By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Filial piety is not dead in Our Honolulu, but it has moved from the rice fields to the country club. The descendants of an impoverished field hand in the rice paddies of south China will celebrate the hundredth birthdays of their departed parents with a big dinner at the Wai'alae Country Club tonight.

Some of the biggest Chinese names in Hawai'i will attend, but it may be confusing. Take the Wo family, for example. They really aren't Wos; they are Chings.

Let me explain. In China, your family name comes first and the names your parents gave you come last. One of the Ching boys, Ching Sing Wo, started a furniture store. C. S. Wo became such a popular name in Hawai'i that the family adopted Wo as their last name.

Then there is the person whose birthday will be celebrated, known to all his haole friends as Tuck Yee Yap. He was not a Yap at all, but a Yee. Yap was his father's first, or given, name. Yee Yap was so popular that everybody called him Yap, so his son got stuck with the name.

The reason the Wos will be there is because they are really Chings, and a Ching married Tuck Yee Yap, who was really a Yee.

Now that you have all that straight, we can go back to the first generation, Yee Yap, who left China at 16 to try his luck in the California gold fields.

From there he came to Hawai'i and worked for seven years at $10 a month on O'ahu's first sugar plantation, at Kualoa, where you can still see the remains of the old mill along the highway. On the plantation, he sold Chinese foods like rice, saltfish and duck to fellow laborers.

By the time Chinatown was being rebuilt after the big fire in 1900, Yee Yap had a nest egg. He invested in a grocery and general merchandise store across Nu'uanu Stream near the railroad station.

The store became famous for giving Chinese plantation hands a free meal after they came clear across the island to shop. Clerks wrote letters home for illiterate field hands, and Yee Yap sent their money to their parents, acting as their banker. The Chinese workers trusted him more than haole banks.

The son, Tuck Yee, known as Tuck Yee Yap, inherited his father's flair for business. Tuck Yee opened the first supermarket in Hawai'i in the 1920s. It was located in Kaimuki at the end of the street car line, where the cars turned around. So everybody shopped there.

You can still see a cement plaque signed by Mayor Charles Crane and Tuck Yee Yap where the Kaimuki Super Market burned down in 1937 and was rebuilt.

Tuck Yee married Lily Young, whose father founded the O'ahu Market in Chinatown that's still going today. It's a direct descendant of the old fish markets that were started by Chinese in Honolulu probably before the 1820s. Hawaiians traded fish for taro with their relatives, but it was the Chinese who started produce markets.

The descendants of Lily and Tuck Yee celebrate their 100th birthdays.