These same children had invented ingenious games out of the limited materials of their island, and yet, at school, they rebelled against thought itself. In my classroom, where thinking was encouraged, why did this rebellion persist? I had a feeling it was because I was an authority figure—though unwillingly—and every other authority figure had proven so hostile to young creativity that even my encouragements in the opposite direction met with failure. I tried to change this. I made a large poster that said:
Emman lomnak.
Thinking is good.
Enana anok.
Copying is bad.
I hung it prominently in front of the class. The effect was small but noticeable.
IN SOME WAYS, THE TEACHING CONDITIONS WERE IDEAL. I HAD SMALL classes, ranging from nine to seventeen students, and typically only three-quarters of them would show up. I tried to crack down on truancy until I realized I would never succeed and might as well enjoy the ever lowering student-to-teacher ratio. The hours weren’t bad: eight fifteen to two, plus a period for preparation. Better still, I was the unelected autocrat of a tiny empire known as my curriculum. No bureaucrats were breathing down my neck, and the parents never complained about the teaching because they didn’t care. If I decided that the kids would learn prepositions, that’s what they would learn. If I wanted to organize a field trip, I didn’t need permission slips (although I quickly discovered that taking the children out of the classroom was begging for anarchy). If I wanted to bring my guitar to school and take pedagogical advantage of the annoying tendency of songs to get stuck in one’s head, no one could say no.
By the same token, I was given no guidance whatsoever. The other teachers were friendly to me, but they could not coach me through my classroom troubles. I had never been impressed with their teaching. Most seemed to be running more of a daycare than a school. A science lesson consisted of the students memorizing how to spell “gravity.” A social studies lesson consisted of the children reciting English phrases from their textbook such as “But life for our ancestors was not all work,” of which they understood not a word.
Nor did I agree with many of the country’s educational policies. The Ministry of Education, for all of its good efforts, persisted in handing down some questionable diktats. The teachers were required to conduct their classes in English, but they spoke the language only passably well, and the students spoke it not at all. Thus, a policy intended to bolster English fluency ended up undermining every other subject. Health was a subject unto itself; it took up as much time as math, science, social studies, English, or Marshallese. The result was that the children knew how to say “overweight” in English but not “food.” The English textbooks, which the ministry had handpicked and shipped to every school, were intended for American children learning to read in English, not for foreign children learning English itself. “Splish splash,” a story might declare. “Jane got soaked by the hose.” In one sentence the book had managed to combine a pseudo-word (“splish”), an irregular past tense (“got”), a passive construction (“got soaked by”) for speakers of a language in which there was no such thing, and three words that should not be at the top of a basic vocabulary list (“splash,” “soaked,” and “hose”), one of which (“hose”) referred to an object that didn’t exist in this world. This was supposed to be appropriate reading for second graders, merely because the words were easy to sound out—and this at a school where, on a very good day, my second graders were working on the grammatical complexities of the sentence “I walk.” I could use the textbooks only by selecting the most suitable stories and rewriting the words entirely. Another policy dictated that the children learn the Marshallese and English alphabets simultaneously starting in first grade. They frequently confused the two, and I couldn’t blame them. Even college graduates could be baffled by the relationship between the two writing systems.
Another challenge, which will come as a surprise to no one, begs mentioning. Materials were less than abundant. The Ministry of Education could send school materials only on the occasional supply ship, and their choices were suspect. Those shiny new textbooks sat unused in the library while the stock of pencils and paper dwindled.
Everything had to be rationed. I gave out pencils only to students who didn’t already have one. In response, the children learned to hide their pencils or intentionally lose them in order to get a new one. Then they would hold those beautiful brand-new pencils in their nostrils, to free up their hands. It was a dark day indeed when a student found my secret stash of one hundred pencils. He maintained that my embargo on writing implements was causing an artificial scarcity. I said I was merely conserving a scarce resource. I did have to admit that the teachers constituted a sort of OPEC of school supplies.
Paper was the same story. Writing was done on half sheets, vocabulary on quarter sheets, and I made students use even dirty and wrinkled pieces of paper. The children were not fond of this. I could not fathom how these kids, living as they did in a place where there was rarely more than just enough, could take it upon themselves to reject (with a look of disgust) a slightly crinkled paper or vaguely misshapen pencil—but they did.
Pencil sharpeners were nonexistent. Someone at the ministry apparently did not grasp the concept that pencils are unusable unless sharpened. As another outer island volunteer later told me, “After teaching here, you see the complaints of American teachers in a new light. If they say, ‘We don’t have good materials in our school,’ I’ll just say, ‘Hey—my students are sharpening their pencils with shards of glass.’” In my classroom, the students preferred walls and rocks, but the spirit was the same. Ingenious, yes, but it didn’t do any favors for the already abused walls. I had the volunteer director send several pencil sharpeners to the island (via air mail, for there was no other kind), but this only led to the discovery that the school’s pencils were made in some country where pencils are for decoration only, because they would not sharpen. Twenty minutes might pass as a student sharpened one of these pencils, saw it break, sharpened it again, saw it break again, dozens of times in a row, while several other students jockeyed loudly for their turn at the useless contraption. They switched back to walls and rocks.
The classroom itself supplied its share of grief. The door was little more than board, with no doorknob on either side. I would close it from the inside by gripping it by the edge, pulling it inward and quickly removing my arm so that the door wouldn’t slam shut on my hand. The padlock, newly replaced after being hammered to oblivion, could not be locked from the inside, but it could be locked from the outside, even without a key. This meant that, while I was in the classroom, any child could either enter the room or lock me in it. I still marvel that no student ever decided to take advantage of that second possibility, although a seventh grader once achieved the same effect by sticking a rock in place of the padlock.
The ceiling also had a defect—namely that it didn’t exist. The building had a roof but no ceiling, if you can imagine that. It was possible to throw things into the classroom from the outside by aiming up the awnings of the tin roof. Children could even climb inside that way. Naturally, my students enjoyed exploiting this weakness. Even I did it once. I had to return a book to the classroom, but I was feeling lazy and I didn’t want to unlock and open the door, so I tried to toss the book over the wall, under the roof, and into the classroom. I heard it land all too early on top of the wall. For all I know it’s still there, part of my legacy in that far corner of the world.
The windows were the worst nightmare of all, and a recurring one at that. Twenty bodies in a cement tomb in a tropical country did not create what one might call fresh air. But if I opened either set of windows, children from other classes—where were their teachers?—would poke their heads into the room and disrupt class by any means necessary. I nailed the wooden windows shut: cross-ventilation was by now a dream long since abandoned. Then I sat and brainstormed ways of covering the lower half of the other windows so that light and breeze but not
little heads could enter the room. After a series of horrible failures, I cut up my sleeping sheet into crude curtains. They lasted for one ecstatic month before succumbing to the pulling of students.
After school, finally alone in my concrete cell of a classroom, I would reserve an hour for cursing the impossibility of the situation and another hour or two for planning the next day’s lesson.
8
The Scent of New Things
I SETTLED INTO A DAILY ROUTINE AT SCHOOL. IT WAS A BALLOON THAT filled with more and more air, a time bomb that ticked steadily down to zero. But for all its tension, the most maddening thing was that it never snapped. It kept its pressure high and its countdown always a millisecond from detonation, and it stayed that way. It was always on the breaking point and yet it never broke.
That was how life was during every difficult time on Ujae. If a desperately harsh job could become routine, then so could anything: the cultural isolation, the conversational famine, the lack of land in any direction. A large percentage of my waking hours were spent in silent rebellion against all things exasperating in my new world. But the belief that something had to change became just another static thought, proving itself false by remaining the same day after day. If things were intolerable, I tolerated that intolerability. In an odd way, I had adjusted to my new life.
The island’s tropical heat no longer fazed me, partly because there was never a moment of coolness to remind me that such a sensation existed. Not at any time of day, not in any weather, and not in any season did the air turn cold or dry. This was the corollary to the land’s intimacy with the sea. Engulfed in an ocean that dwarfed it in size, a few feet above the water and always next to it, the country set its temperature according to the constant warmth of the tropical sea. The yearly temperature chart was as flat as the country itself: a perpetual low-to-mid eighties. (The coldest day in recorded Marshallese history was a bone-chilling seventy degrees Fahrenheit.) There was no need for a weatherman in the Marshall Islands, because tomorrow would always be hot, humid, and partly cloudy, with a chance of rain.
I grew accustomed to the island’s isolation and found that I enjoyed the lack of newspapers. I liked being out of touch. I no longer felt obligated to mourn every tragedy in every far-off corner of the globe, to feel guilty that X was disappearing and Y was being destroyed and I was doing nothing to stop it. Perhaps this was a healthier way to live. After all, I could do little to stop insurgents in Iraq, deforestation in Brazil, or oppression in Myanmar. But I could do something about my immediate surroundings. I could focus on the English skills of a hundred Marshallese children and ignore the plight of the Angolan peasant and the urgent need to save the bumblebee bat. My moral energy was no longer sapped by the scaremongers and guilt-trippers—the thousand media outlets giving me daily updates on what I ought to be terrified of and outraged by.
Half of my dreams now took place on Ujae. I dreamt in Marshallese almost every night, although my grasp of the language was just as hesitant and imperfect in my dreams as it was in reality. Coral reefs became a subconscious obsession that played out every night in my sleep state. The dreams presented reefs as places of inconceivable vastness, mystery, and beauty. Every physical detail was exaggerated to a level commensurate with how it made me feel. The coral was hyper-colorful, the fish wildly exotic, the water unfathomably deep, the visibility infinite, the waves fifty feet high or entirely absent, leaving the water’s surface as still and transparent as a window. These dreams continued until a year after I returned home. Even when I dreamt of my native California, it had tropical waters and brown-skinned inhabitants, and tiny breakers or mighty tidal waves mounted a perpetual assault on the shore. Ujae had penetrated deeply into my psyche.
Against my will, I no longer felt the remoteness of where I was, the alluring farawayness that had drawn me to this place. Ujae was mundane reality, and now it was my old life that was the dream image.
Nonetheless, sometimes I would glimpse a bit of that old world, and it would suddenly occur to me where I was, what I had given up, what I had forgotten I yearned for. On a rare windless day, the lagoon was finally still, and, for the first time in three months, I saw land reflected in water. Walking where the lagoon blended into the ocean, I saw fine sand saturated with water, forming the little curves and twists and elegant patterns that I had last seen on the beaches of California.
Another day I came upon a clearing in the jungle, a bit of land open to the sky. I had forgotten that the universe could contain such a thing. I saw a tree: not the bushy-haired pandanus, not the long-necked palm, not the sprawling breadfruit, but an ordinary tree with a familiar pattern of limbs.
Another time, a white Mormon missionary, en route to Lae Atoll, climbed out of the plane for five minutes before boarding again, and I saw that he was pink-skinned, yellow-haired, red-lipped, blue-eyed—a cornucopia of human colors that I had forgotten were part of the body’s repertoire.
These were bits of my old life, members of that original bundle of sensations that had now been entirely replaced. Flat horizons, a perpetual warmth, an air made of moisture, brown skin and black hair and dark eyes, blazing green foliage, dark coral lacquered by many-colored waters—these things were now my world. But in those moments—the white man stepping off the plane, the lagoon water making a reflection, the sand swirling like mud, the shock of an ordinary tree—I could feel my old life.
Then it came swooping back all at once. On Airplane Tuesday in mid-October, two Americans stepped off the plane and onto Ujae. They were my mother and father. I had known about their visit for months, but the thought was an abstract one until that moment. I hugged them. The men and women at the airport shack seemed to blush—if dark skin can blush—at the open display of affection. The children were riveted. For the youngest among them, the spectacle must have been an instructive one. The white man had a mother and father, and they were white, too. At home, in the land of the pale, this mutant was normal.
My parents were to stay for two weeks. I played the tour guide and the interpreter, and in the process I remembered all of things I knew about this island that I had forgotten I knew. When my father told me how surreal it was to hear his son speaking an Austronesian language, I realized how odd it was that this no longer seemed odd to me. My parents reminded me how familiar I had become with this life, but simultaneously they made that life seem strange again by seeing the island, and myself, with foreign eyes.
A week before, my accomplishments in this place had fallen short of an imagined ideal. Now I was swollen with pride. One of the great joys of being visited after long isolation in a foreign culture is the realization that, as clueless as you still are in this foreign home, you are not as clueless as they are. My mother and father represented me, arriving for the first time in all my enthusiastic ignorance, and now I saw just how far I had progressed. As my real parents struggled to open a coconut, my Marshallese parents watched with the same amused fascination with which we would watch a Kalahari bushman struggling to open a Coke can.
If the community had seemed indifferent to my arrival two months earlier, they made up for it now. The village organized no fewer than three welcome parties for my parents. The largest of them took place on the school grounds, with at least 150 people in attendance. Steven the schoolteacher was brandishing a machete and chopping off the tops of coconuts, to be handed out as beverages, while talking to one of my fourth graders. “In the United States,” said my father, “if a teacher were talking to a student while waving a giant knife in the air, he’d be fired and jailed in half an hour.”
With the food and drink distributed, the villagers presented my mother and father with what appeared to be every shell collected on Ujae within the previous decade. There were thousands of tiny cowries in glass jars, hundreds of larger limpets and scallops, and two gargantuan whelk shells more flawless than any I had seen—and dozens of necklaces and pandanus-leaf wall hangings to boot. My parents’ luggage was now weighed down with the island’s ent
ire handicraft industry. One of two things was going to happen when my parents boarded the plane: either the pilot would tell them that they couldn’t bring so many heavy bags, or the plane would crash.
The two weeks drifted by. My parents stayed in the little room next to mine, which the De Brums usually used to store bags of rice—Alfred called it the Ariraen Hotel, Room B. I got used to talking in a language I actually spoke. I ate the food my parents had brought: I have never experienced anything more pleasurable than the plain cheese sandwich they made for me when they first arrived. My mother taught arts and crafts in my class, and we didn’t bother pretending that the children had learned any English that day. My father graciously endured the children’s new favorite game, which was to ask him to say words in Marshallese, and then collapse in laughter when he did.
The visit came to an end. It was Airplane Tuesday again. Knowing how hard I often found life here, my father offered to send a satellite phone to Ujae. But there was a problem: an occasional call home would do little to relieve my day-to-day troubles, and much to deflate my pride in testing myself to the extreme. That pride was the one pleasure that Ujae couldn’t take away from me; it was the one satisfaction that was not only immune to new difficulties, but in fact was intensified by them. By coming to this island I had chosen the hard path, and now, bravely or stubbornly, I chose it again. I declined my father’s offer.
We walked to the airstrip. I hugged my parents again; the islanders blushed again; the children stared again. As the plane took off, the complex emotions of their visit simplified into nostalgia. I was alone again, surrounded by people.
WITH VISITORS FROM HOME CAME ONE OTHER BIT OF FAMILIARITY. IT was election time on Ujae. Democracy was one Western import that thrived in the Marshall Islands, even though hereditary chiefs, or irooj, still commanded respect on traditional islands like Ujae. While a parliament and president determined national policy, chiefs supervised many local affairs. The balance of hereditary versus elected power was in fact one of the central political issues at stake in that year’s election. One party defended the traditional power of chiefs, but it was suspicious that many of this party’s candidates were themselves royalty. The other party favored more democratic rule. The first ideology had dominated after the Marshall Islands achieved independence in 1986, and the country’s first two presidents, Amata Kabua and Imata Kabua, were both irooj. Since then, public sentiment had shifted, and the country’s president of the last four years, Kessai Note, had been a commoner.
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