Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  In the restroom, I saw my reflection in the mirror for the first time since I had been in that same restroom before. I was shocked to see what I had become. I was bearded, and my brown hair had become long and streaked with bleached blond from sun and saltwater. I had turned into a hippie without meaning to. I was even more shocked to see what I had always been: Caucasian. I had never noticed that before.

  White people now looked very peculiar: sickly, bleached. Their hair was unnaturally light, and the highlights of their complexion were too reddish. I could see the blood glowing pink right under their skin. Caucasian children looked like ghosts.

  There was a delay at the Kwajalein airport. The plane to Majuro was going to fill up with passengers from Ebeye, and the airport staff informed me that I would have to be transferred to a flight the next day. Oh, how little they knew: Senator Lucky was on the plane with me, and he would not stand for me, his beloved American volunteer, to be delayed. Exercising some sort of clout that I didn’t know was possessed by a man who represented only six hundred people, he swiftly transferred me back to the correct flight. I had a senator in my pocket, and I hadn’t spent a dime for the privilege.

  Back in the sky, we followed the curved edge of Kwajalein Atoll with its dot-dash of uninhabited islands. Kwajalein was easily the largest atoll in the country—the seventy-mile-long lagoon was like an ocean, and even the formidable military presence had left most of the hundred-odd islets untouched.

  The flight from Kwajalein to Majuro went smoothly, except for the plane being struck by lightning. The pilots switched on a light that illuminated the wings, and it seemed they were checking them for damage. But there was none, and the flight went on. This was a good thing, since we were in the air at the time. I recalled the time I had been on a 747, thirty thousand feet above Nebraska, when I heard a loud crackling boom. The pilot switched on the intercom and offered the following unconvincing reassurance: “Yes, as you may have suspected, we were just struck by lightning. But, well, a plane is exactly where you want to be when that happens.”

  After that, there was only dark ocean for two hours. Then I saw it: the universal code of civilization, a constellation of electric lights. I had become country folk; small-town Majuro was now the Big City, a bustling hub of activity at the center of the universe.

  I felt like the Count of Monte Cristo, newly escaped from the Château d’If, albeit without the fabulous wealth or lust for cold, calculated revenge. I counted myself a king of infinite space. It was a joy to be back with the other volunteers. Half of them had been on the outer islands, and six had been solo volunteers like myself. We shared joys and frustrations. In the joy category was one literary-minded volunteer’s mosquito netting, which she immortalized in this ode:

  O! Diaphanous cloud envelop me,

  By day keep the flies at bay,

  By lantern light in the darkest night,

  Keep the creatures I fear away.

  Because of your gossamer strength,

  I do not wake with roaches on my face.

  No feeble bug repellant,

  Your gentle caress shall ever replace.

  So now I lay me down to sleep,

  In your womb of golden filigree.

  Catch my dreams like schools of fishes,

  When daylight comes, set them free.

  In the frustration category was everything I had experienced and more. I hadn’t had a problem with underwear thieves on my island; unfortunately, the same could not be said for several of the female volunteers. I had toilet paper, while one volunteer said she had to make do with rocks. I didn’t grasp exactly how this worked, and I didn’t ask.

  We ate food with far too much enthusiasm. We referred to ourselves as ribelles. We peppered ordinary conversation with those Marshallese words we wished existed in English. “Hey,” we would say. “We should meet and bwebwenato [talk] and kakkije [relax]. Maybe jambo [walk around] and get some mona [food]. But it’s really am wot pepe [up to you].” Majuro was “the Madge.” Ujae was “the Oodge.” We mused about how the course of history would have changed if the United States had tested the H-bomb on Eniwetok Atoll instead of Bikini. Would beach-going women wear eniwetoks? Would there be a movie called “Eniwetok Car Wash”? Only a historian could say.

  If I haven’t mentioned Marshallese Kurijmoj (Christmas), it is for a reason. I didn’t attend it. Undoubtedly it is a fascinating ceremony that blends native sensibilities with foreign influences, the analysis of which would have enriched my understanding of Marshallese society. But I didn’t attend it, because I didn’t care. After four months steeped in local culture and starved for my own, I wouldn’t have stepped outside to be granted personal audience with the chief himself. My Christmas was spent with a fellow American watching Sex and the City on DVD indoors with the lights on and the air-conditioning set to high while eating Mexican quesadillas with extra cheese and salsa. It was the best Christmas I can remember.

  I had forgotten what a real conversation was. I had become so accustomed to perpetual confusion, to being able to observe but not understand, that I was startled to realize that anything else was possible. It was like when a white surface becomes dirtier and dirtier over time, and turns gray or brown, and has been this color for so long that you have forgotten that it was ever white, or even think that this dingy color is white, that the world never gets brighter and cleaner than this. And then one day you take a sponge to it, wipe off the layer of grime, and are dazzled by the brightness and cleanness of what had been covered. The impossible was once again occurring: thoughts became words and words became thoughts instantly and effortlessly.

  Now I was with my own people, the tribe known as the middle-class left-leaning Westerners. Together we spoke our own exotic language, performed our own curious rituals, followed our own inscrutable values, shared our own stories in our traditional huts of metal and concrete. I was a member of a group.

  Through this, I came to terms with two facts. The first was that I was Western. I had always fancied that I wasn’t, that I had somehow escaped the influence of my upbringing and emerged free-thinking and unburdened by cultural baggage. How wrong I was. I was Western—deeply and terminally so. I carried my civilization with me at every moment: my nervous efficiency, my emotional openness, my sense of individual entitlement, my war against the status quo. How ludicrous it would have seemed to the people of Ujae if I had told them that I wasn’t truly Western, when they could see so plainly that I was. Living in another country had finally made me realize how much I was a product of my own country.

  The second realization was that I loved it. I loved my culture. For the first time in my life, after finding so much fault with my native society, I could finally see what made it great. It wasn’t the West’s wealth or power. It was the fact that friends hugged each other; that men and women freely interacted; that children were openly treasured; that both intimacy and anonymity were possible; that a person could determine his own path in life.

  IT WAS DURING THIS TIME AWAY FROM UJAE THAT I GOT TO KNOW THAT curious Marshallese character: Majuro, the capital city. It was certainly not beautiful. In a year, I heard no one, white or brown, even suggest such a thing. Its streets were treeless and far from clean. Its architecture was generic and decaying. Its lagoon beach was unswimmable because of pollution, and its ocean beach was littered with rusting war relics. Its children sipped Coke instead of coconuts. It was, somehow, both poor and expensive.

  Its layout was as ridiculous as it was unique. Built on a long, narrow islet, the city was not a grid but a line. It was three hundred feet wide and ten miles long, a thread of habitation with the sea visible on both sides. Arriving in Majuro for the first time five months before, I remembered the odd sensation of landing on this ribbon of land. The plane was very low. I could see individual waves, and the islands in the distance had flattened into green lines on the horizon. But on the left and right, I could see only water. Suddenly the plane made contact with land—a strip of island so narrow t
hat it could accommodate only the runway and a barely two-lane road. It was so thin that the body of the plane had blocked my view of it until the moment of touchdown, and the builders had needed to use landfill to achieve even this meager width.

  Mathematically speaking, this ribbon shape was the least efficient possible arrangement of a city. The shortest distance between two points was indeed a line, but a very long one at that. Any journey, no matter how short, gave one an involuntary tour of much of the town.

  But the layout also lent the town a unique charm. For one thing, it made it unlikely that any given property would not be oceanfront. For another, it gave the town a refreshing simplicity. All those involuntary tours quickly made the city familiar. With only two directions to choose between, it was impossible to get lost. Running into your friends was inevitable—there was, one might calculate, a 50 percent chance that you and the person you were looking for were currently on a collision course. There were no street names because there was only one street, and there were no addresses because there was no mail service other than boxes at the one post office. Taxis were a snap—stand on the appropriate side of the street, flag down one of the six cabs that arrived every minute, and then sit in the cool dryness of the air-conditioning and enjoy the ride. No need to tell the driver your destination: since there was only one road to speak of, you could simply tell him when to stop. With you in the cab were other people heading the same way; the vehicle was halfway between public and private transit. Craving a cold one for the road? Just let the driver know, and he and all of his passengers will wait, without a hint of irritation or impatience, for however long it takes you to patronize a roadside kiosk. (Feel no guilt at delaying them thus: they will do the same to you.) When you get out, pay the man fifty cents, no matter how far you have traveled within the city center, and receive a cheerful kommool (thank you) in response. In Majuro I came to associate taxis with ease, affability, and affordability, something I could scarcely imagine beforehand.

  Majuro was the hub of a delightfully small world. In a country whose entire population was that of a single American town, the social network was a dense thicket. I opened the newspaper and perused it like a high school yearbook: I know him, I know her, I was there, I participated in that, and hey look—it’s me! Three degrees of separation may have been the maximum. The owner of the land where a fellow volunteer worked was the uncle of the man who came to Ujae to build the community garden. The taxi driver’s wife was from Ujae, and her sister was the mother of one of my seventh graders. It was an entire country up close, no appointment necessary. Its capital building and government ministries were open to casual walk-ins. Senators were ordinary people—Wotho Atoll’s representative had a constituency of less than two hundred souls—and the president was only a minor celebrity. But in accessing this world I did have an advantage, and it was a large one: I spoke Marshallese.

  The power of this cannot be overstated. Many adults in Majuro spoke functional English and happily used it with visitors. Needless to say, they were not surprised that the ribelle spoke no Marshallese. But if you did speak their language, even if much more poorly than they spoke yours, it had palpable emotional power. Their faces would melt into smiles. Their formality would drop. Any hint of unease would disappear. Where before they had been cordial, now they were downright motherly. They would shake your hand and ask you how you had come to learn their tongue. Your question of where one might procure ping-pong rackets transformed into their personal quest, which they would sooner die than leave uncompleted.

  I felt almost guilty about how many favors I could garner this way. One day I waltzed into the capital building in my flip-flops, on an uninvited mission to meet the president. I was confronted by two polite but suspicious security guards. I introduced myself in Marshallese, and their skepticism vanished. They chatted with me for several minutes before directing me to the president’s office. President Kessai Note was referred to as His Excellency, but apparently I was worthy to meet him. I repeated my linguistic performance with the president’s secretary, and she promised to try to squeeze me into his schedule when he returned from a conference in the neighboring country of Kiribati. When he came back, he was too busy, but I came tantalizingly close to receiving a private audience with His Excellency himself, for no other reason than that I spoke the language.

  This was a country in which you would run into the chief justice while grocery shopping, in which the minister of justice might pick you up while you were hitchhiking, and in which the president himself could show up at a fishing tournament—where Miss Micronesia was posing next to a marlin larger than herself—in his beat-up pickup truck and attract no more attention than the occasional glance from a curious expat.

  If it was easy to meet Marshall Islanders, it was even easier to meet expatriates. Every native wanted to meet me because I was a foreigner, and every foreigner wanted to meet me because, well, I was a foreigner.

  The expats were a colorful crew. “I have a theory,” one fellow volunteer ventured. “You only come to the Marshall Islands if you have issues.” I had to agree that the instant fame of foreignness could be a tempting solution to certain insecurities. The big-fish-in-a-small-pond phenomenon definitely applied, and we foreign volunteers couldn’t pretend we were innocent of that motivation. You were somebody here. On Ujae, I was an American celebrity—the American celebrity, because there was no other Americans. To succeed as a volunteer in the Marshalls, one only needed to do better than horrible. One only needed to teach more than teachers who taught nothing, to learn more Marshallese than tourists who spoke none, to attain a higher level of spearfishing expertise than the average American. I wondered, too, if the expatriate lifestyle attracted more than its share of misfits because in a foreign country, one was not just allowed but expected not to fit in. Playing the oddball became one’s persona and shtick, and eventually one’s identity.

  One expatriate had been managing a clam farm for nine years. A few ran the national newspaper, and a small horde taught at the local community college. Preachers were as numerous as teachers. The Mormon missionaries were immediately recognizable as such: they were all men, always traveled in pairs, and were even younger than I was. Their dress code—a tucked-in white shirt with nametag, black slacks, and black shoes—was woefully inappropriate for the climate. But somehow, no matter how rural their post and how hot the day, the shirt remained spotless, the slacks well ironed, and the shoes sparkling. I prejudged them as uptight and out of touch, but when I talked to them they were anything but. They were more likely to swap cultural anecdotes than to proselytize, and their fluency in Marshallese put most English teachers to shame.

  One American lived a hermit’s life on a deserted islet of Ailinglaplap Atoll. A chief had given him permission to live there, and he had dwelled there on and off for the last thirty-seven years. He had come to the country as a Peace Corps volunteer but dropped out after the first year before returning to spend most of the last four decades there. The island he lived on was taboo land—only chiefs and special guests were allowed to set foot on it, and women were almost always forbidden—but this man didn’t seem to mind. “What do you do out there?” I asked when I met him in Majuro.

  “I think,” he answered with a chuckle.

  There were Chinese immigrants, reviled by every Marshall Islander I asked. Natives never talked to them. If a Chinese person entered a taxi, the Marshallese passengers turned stiff and fell silent. A sign on the front door of the immigration office said “Immigration Office—Please Keep the Door Closed.” This was a pretty good summary of popular sentiment on the issue after the government had sold about two thousand passports to Chinese people and then discovered you can’t deport a citizen. But I couldn’t sympathize much with the hostility. Natives resented the fact that Chinese stores had driven local stores out of business, but the Chinese stores had won out precisely because everyone shopped there. I wondered how some of these establishments stayed afloat—such as a gas statio
n convenience store that sold junk food and electric keyboards. (Why would anyone buy an electric keyboard there? Would they go to the gas station to look for one? Would they buy it on impulse after coming in for some Cheetos?) But these hated newcomers were obviously playing a useful role in the country. Being alienated from Marshallese society also meant being free from its mandatory nepotism, and that allowed the immigrants to run successful businesses. Marshall Islanders were voting with their wallets, and it was a landslide victory in favor of immigration.

  There were foreign dignitaries: the affable Taiwanese ambassador, lawyers at the Nuclear Claims Tribunal who still grappled with the legacy of Bikini, and a mysterious Japanese man whose previous placements had been the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia and the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso. He would divulge only that he worked for a “large multinational organization,” which of course described the United Nations and international crime syndicates equally well. I secretly wondered if he was a spy.

  There were sundry foreigners: the Sri Lankan physician, the Nepalese doctor, the Fijian education worker, and a transsexual Thai barber named Popcorn Delicious.

  Topping it off was the American diplomatic presence. The US embassy had once been a nondescript building, but a mandatory post-9/11 upgrade had cured that forever. The front of the building was separated from the street by a fence whose bars had been replaced, no doubt at great expense, to be more narrowly spaced. This was to prevent (and I am not making this up) missiles from being shot through the gaps into the compound from handheld rocket launchers. (Such precautions reminded me of the Marshall Islands High School handbook, which specifically prohibited such unlikely items as grenade launchers, machine guns, and landmines.) The far side of the embassy grounds, which had previously opened onto lovely ocean views, was now protected against amphibious assault by a concrete wall. The palm trees that dotted the property had been stripped of their fruit so that no diplomat would be killed in a coconut-falling accident (or maybe, just maybe, a coconut-falling terrorist plot).