HAWAI'I WAYS, HAWAI'I DAYS
Grandfather fed child love, knowledge

By Marilee C. Lin

One of my earliest memories of Goong Goong is during one of our family's summertime visits to 2632 Manoa Road, far from the maples and manicured lawn and tidy shrubbery of our Mainland home.

I must have been about 6, and I remember being out back with my grandfather, known to the world as Wah Chan Thom, peering up into a tree ripe with figs as he deftly reached for the fruit with a long-poled picker. He'd pull his catch from the basket and tear open the soft skin, showing me how to bite the sweet, seedy insides right then and there — a small miracle to a young girl whose concept of fruit involved a grocery check-out line, or at least a cursory rinse under the kitchen faucet.

I think I was less impressed with the taste of the fig or the sheer decadence of eating it in the moment than with Goong Goong's knowledge of picking fruit from trees, the certainty and yet gentleness of his hands as he went about what for him was probably a mundane task but felt to me as conferring knowledge, the kind of grace that always made me especially observant and respectful.

That scene, however fuzzily remembered, reminds me, some 30 years later, of how early I must have sensed his intelligence, not just of mind, but of physical gesture, realizing even then that I'd better pay attention or I'd miss something important.

It's no coincidence, either, that my early memories of Goong Goong involve the enjoyment of food. Goong Goong loved to eat, and I am sure that my own noteworthy appetite is inherited from him. From the first meal of the day, life at 2632 was an exotic culinary adventure for a kid accustomed to boxed cereal for breakfast. My sister and brother and I would wake up to a colorful array of Portuguese sweet bread, glistening slices of mango or halved papayas, the occasional pot of Goong Goong's warmed leftover wintermelon or oxtail soup, and most remarkably and dependably, red — not pink— but deep red — hot dogs, unlike any I'd ever seen at home.

Goong Goong's presence was a constant in the kitchen, and though Popo would appear on the scene to help or hover, it struck us that this was his domain. After all, it was Goong Goong who, we were told, made the multiple jars of mango chutney, lined up in the basement fridge, their wax-paper collars and mysterious liquid contents a far cry from tempting to a child.

It was Goong Goong who showed us how to make malasadas from dough popped from a Pillsbury Crescent roll tube, deep fried and rolled in sugar. It was Goong Goong who could mesmerize me with the sharp but sure staccato of his cleaver as he chopped whatever meat or greens or assorted ingredients he had gathered for our next meal, peering over his glasses in concentration, coming so menacingly close to his own fingertips but all the while, of course, in perfect control. It was Goong Goong who made the women (even his tomboyish granddaughters) in the household his "blood-strengthening" soup, which in its own homely, marrow-bone humility now strikes me as a gift of pure love and thoughtfulness.

In later years, as he approached 100 and we visited Goong Goong in the strange solitariness of his life without Popo, it was this gusto for good food that reassured me of his health and well-being, even as he grew more frail.

I can still see, in my mind's eye, the familiar sight of his hands serving food onto the plates of others, the smooth, slender fingers maneuvering a dumpling with chopsticks as beautifully as he guided brush to paper. No longer such a force in the kitchen, he was still fully himself at the table, particularly when surrounded by family and friends of hearty appetite, sharing the amazing variety of dishes that characterizes the most casual of Honolulu get-togethers — good company enjoying good food — a fact of his life that was never more apparent than at his spectacular 100th-birthday banquet.

We often joke in my family that apart from my simply inheriting Goong Goong's fondness for a big meal, I inherited the ugly underbelly, shall we say, of that appetite: that is, when I'm hungry, I'm grumpy; anyone who knew Goong Goong knew they'd better not cross him when he had an empty stomach.

But as I reflect on the times I spent with him and observed his ways, full of that same mixture of admiration and reverence and adoration that I felt as that little girl picking figs with her Goong Goong in his back yard, I also hope that I get from him and perhaps pass on to my own two small sons his quiet grace and authority, his strong, sometimes stern sense of what is right and good, and his devotion to home and family. That indeed would be the most precious yield of his fruitful life.

Chinese community leader Wah-Chan Thom, founder of Honolulu's Narcissus Festival, died Jan. 29 at age 102. Marilee C. Lin, Wah Chan Thom's granddaughter, is a freelance writer. She lives in Boston.