I have been to Hanalei several times and have looked around for anything that might once have been the famous lotus pond or lily pond. However, I had no real chance, because I didn’t actually know any of the relatives who once lived there and knew exactly where it was.
That all changed this year. In August 2022, I got an email from Susan Chun, who introduced herself as one of my long-lost cousins. She had found this website by Googling for how to write the ideogram for Chock. She was surprised to find the site and so much information about the Chinese pedigree, and used the contact info to email me.
She is the granddaughter of my Dad’s half-sister, Ardith Annie. Ardith’s only child, Jo-Ann, raised little Susan on stories of old Hanalei, and they spent many wonderful summers there at the homestead with Kauai Apo (Chun Shee).
Susan told me the address of the house, and offered general directions to the site of where Chock Chin’s restaurant, store, and lily pond were. As Susan explained, no one really knew the address of the house where they grew up. Hanalei was so tiny, everyone just knew where everyone lived. So it took some doing to find the house when she and her brother Kimo went back to visit. Here’s how Susan described it:
“In the 1980s, some time after Hurricane Iwa devastated the island of Kauai, my brother and I visited Hanalei. My mother and grandmother refused to visit, saying that they didn’t want to see the changes to Hanalei that we were hearing about—lots of new buildings, many old homes and structures destroyed.
“We went to the spot where the old house was, and—sure enough—a new house had been put up on the property, though it didn’t appear to be that different in size or shape than the old one. We had a nice chat with the residents, who had used insurance money to rebuild, and they talked about what a shame it was that in many cases folks had used their settlements to build two houses on a single plot of land. We took some pictures.
“When we got back, we wanted to send copies of the pictures to the people we had met, but realized that we didn’t have the address. We followed Grandma’s instructions and stuck them in an envelope addressed to (something like): “The second house from the corner of the beach road and the highway (on the Princeville side),” which is how we navigated to the property. We assumed that the post office would manage to deliver our letter, and were a little shocked when it was returned to us as undeliverable.
“Grandma was shocked too, but couldn’t provide the name of the street she had grown up on. When my great-grandmother was alive, plenty of care packages were sent from Honolulu, but they were collected by Kauai Apo—my great-grandmother [Chun Shee] or one of the “houseboys”—at the post office.
“Anyway, all this is to say that the last time I thought about the address of the house, the store, or the saloon, Google Maps didn’t exist. Since it does now, it was easy to answer your question. The main house was at 4464 Malolo Road. Here’s the screenshot from Google Maps:
Rebuilt version of Chock Chin home in Hanalei. 4464 Malolo Rd
“Google doesn’t display diacritics, so I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing that there should be a macron over the “a” and that the road is named for our excellent flying fish. I don’t know exactly where the second living quarters were—they were gone/sold by the time my mother and uncles were visiting in the summertime.
“We think that the store and restaurant were on the Kuhio Highway at roughly the location in the second screenshot. Mom thinks that the lily pond was to the right as you look at the screenshot (or if you navigate it in Google Maps), but I think it may have been to the left. Anyway, it’s not there now insofar as I know.”
Gladys’ house at the former location of the Chock Chin store, lily pond, and restaurant
We arranged to meet Susan and her husband in Honolulu on our upcoming trip to Hawaii in October.
We spent the first part of our trip in Kauai, and tried to find the family sites. The house was findable, since we had the address. The house was pretty well wrecked in Hurricane Iwa, and rebuilt as Susan described.
Then it was completely blown down in Hurricane Iniki —the most powerful hurricane to hit the Hawaiian islands in recorded history, which hit Kauai on September 11, 1992, and pulverized Hanalei. But they rebuilt the house both times in the same floorplan and footprint, so the house that is standing there today is a very good representation of how it looked and was situated on the property when my family lived there. (Except it is yellow, not that trademark dark green it used to be.)
Now, I’m not sure what it cost when Chock Chin built it, but I am pretty sure his abacus would have melted in his hands if someone had told him that in December of 2021, someone would pay $3 million USD for his 1,098 square foot, 3-bedroom, 2 bath frame house and double lot. (Complete with a random black cat that apparently comes with the house in every generation.) But that is what happens when a sleepy little village on a remote island suddenly starts to look like the best place on earth for a tech billionaire to find peace.
There is much about the current decade that would have fascinated, astonished, and horrified him, but I daresay this one data point might have been enormously gratifying to this savvy businessman. (Then again, he may well have understood what that implied about inflation and the value of the dollar in our day, and trembled for us. He was, after all, raised in the savage economic catastrophe of 19th-century China.)
We got to poke around in it — the renters had left, and the new owners had not yet arrived to begin their remodel. The renters stopped by to chat, and told us the stories about the longan tree, the mysterious cats, and the tradition of hospitality that seems to have imbued itself into that place. We asked who might know where the lily pond could be. They told us to check with the oldest neighbors.
We came back after Church on Sunday, and discovered that all the oldest neighbors were just the children of the ones who would have remembered the old days. About two blocks away from Chock Chin’s house (across the main Kuhio Road) there was one little green house across the highway. It looked like a little shuttered place of business, but we thought we heard someone talking in there. We knocked more than once (Ric can be a very persistent knocker) and finally the door opened and a tiny Asian woman appeared.
Gladys’s house next to Chock Chins store and lily pond.
I introduced myself as the granddaughter of Chock Chin who had lived over where the yellow house is, and asked how long she had lived in this house. She said, “87 years. My father built this house 87 years ago. Right next to the Chock Chin lily pond, restaurant, and store.”
Gladys Shinai Gasaka and Susan Chock Salgy – October 2022
Finally! We had found someone who knew precisely where the lily pond was, because she herself had lived right beside it all her life. She walked me out to the front of her yard and pointed.
To the right of her house was the lily pond — now dried up and partially filled in with the remains of plants and other detritus that lodged there over the years.
She walked us left across her yard, and pointed at the little lane where Malolo Road continues across Kuhio Road next to her house. That, she said, was the road where the C. Akeoni Store and Restaurant were located. Chock Chin and his family could walk there in 5 minutes from their front porch. Perfect!
In this picture, the green house is Gladys’ home. Turn right on the little road just before her house, and that is Malolo Road and the restaurant and store. Drive just past her house, and there is all that is left (a hollow, weedy hole) of the wonderful Lotus Pond.
Lotus/Lily pond area — now dried up and filling in
I said did you know my grandfather? She shook her head. “Not really. He sold the lot to my father before I was born — kind of as a favor. It was all part of Chock Chin’s property and rice fields, but my father needed a little piece of land to build a house on, and your grandfather was kind enough to sell him this very nice piece.”
She gestures out across Kuhio road over the neighborhoods where the Chock Chin house still stands. “None of this was houses,” she said. “All of it was your grandfather’s rice fields. This was all his. It all looked so different then.”
Did you know my grandmother, and my father, George? “Not George – he was already gone away to school when I was old enough to remember. But I knew your grandmother very well!” (Chun Shee).
“When I was a young girl, her daughter Janet was so nice to us — she was our favorite. She always took us kids swimming, to the ball park, and other places with her. And your grandmother taught me how to cook! She taught me to make Chinese noodles and dumplings and all kinds of dim sum. It really worked out well – I spent 36 years in food services because of what she taught me.”
I asked if she knew the story of how Chun Shee had been picked to be the Chock Chin’s wife when she was a young teenager serving as a maidservant in Chock Chin’s family compound in China. He chose her because she didn’t have bound feet — he had seen how hard life was for my grandmother, Hee Shee, who struggled to manage life in the islands on 4-inch bound feet. “Oh yes,” said Gladys, “she told that story a lot. She was really proud of it.”
She looked over at the yellow house. “I can still remember her standing there on her front porch and hollering, “The food is ready! Come and get the food! The Chow Mein is ready!” I asked if that was how she called her kids for lunch and dinner every day. “Oh no,” she said. “Anyone who heard her could come and eat. She would feed anyone who came. So when we heard her, we always ran as fast as we could to get there while there was still food left.”