Of course, I wasn’t the only foreigner who had trouble understanding chiefly ways in Fiji. Sylvia’s boss, Rex, had once recounted the story of a freshly arrived diplomat from England.
“She had arrived at a kava ceremony for a chief taking a new title, a very important ceremony,” Rex told us. “Well, this English diplomat is talking and talking to the other diplomats, and she sees this bure—a ceremonial meeting hall—with sides that hang nearly to the ground. She sees all these shoes on the outside, so she takes her shoes off, and as she steps inside she sees in front of the chief a big bowl of what looks like muddy water.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yes. The kava. She walks up to it, dips her feet into it, and begins to wash her feet in the kava. A week later, she was reassigned to another country.”
Fijians, as I had already learned, do not have a sense of humor when it comes to their chiefs.
“Yes, we have chiefs here,” Bill continued. “Ratus.”
“What if you have a bad chief?” I asked. “Can the people do anything about it?”
“It is not the Fijian way.”
Which, in my humble opinion, is a problem. George Speight had been a mere front man, the public face of the coup. No commoner in Fiji could topple a democratically elected government without the consent of a few powerful chiefs.
“The problem,” Bill said, looking me in the eye, “is Western influence.”
Oh, well then. Bill was frisky. And which Western influences would those be? Democracy? As a Westerner, I will take the blame for global warming, third-world debt, rising sea levels, war—the big ones, in any case—and Britney Spears. But I don’t think that’s what Bill had in mind. It raised my hackles. But then I thought about it for a moment, and I had to concede that to a certain degree he was right. The chiefly system that exists today is in fact a legacy of colonial English rule. It was the colonists who created the Great Council of Chiefs to further English power. Today, it is often referred to as the Great Council of Thieves. The chiefly system in Fiji was, at worst, a rapacious kleptocracy and, at best, a stubborn, ill-serving adherence to a colonial era that has long since vanished.
And yet, though colonialism and modernity had changed Fiji, the chiefs still fought the battles of yore. There are three traditional chiefly confederations in Fiji, and the coup can best be understood as a battle among the confederations for preeminence. Racial tensions were not so much a cause of the coup as a weapon the chiefs could use to further their ends. George Speight found himself isolated on Nukulau Island not because he overthrew an Indian-led government but because his actions had forced the resignation of Fiji’s president, Ratu Mara, a preeminent chief. Speight would not have survived a day if he had been placed inside the Suva Prison. The Fijian prisoners who were loyal to Ratu Mara would have killed him in an instant.
I asked Bill what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.
“No problem,” he said. “It was very quiet.”
SAVUSAVU WAS A PLACE to disappear. It was far away. It was uncrowded. It was lush and beautiful. It even smelled nice, with the scent of bougainvillea and hibiscus wafting through the sea air. The town itself wasn’t much to look at. It was merely a length of simple shops that catered to the needs of its inhabitants. But the setting was extraordinary, and it attracted escapists from around the world.
The following evening, after I had spent the afternoon cautiously paddling a rented kayak around Savusavu Bay, I stopped by the Planter’s Club. I had been told that this was where the mixed-race people drank. Outside of Suva, I was learning, Fiji was a remarkably race-obsessed country. There were indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, of course, and there were kaivalangis like myself, and there were a good number of Fijians with a dollop of Gilbertese or Tongan or Scottish blood coursing through their veins, enough to ensure that they too were barred from owning land. The shape of your nose and the amount of melatonin in your skin determined the course of your life in Fiji.
“This is for members only,” said the security guard outside the appealing wooden archway.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, do you think I can go in anyway?”
“Yes, no problem.”
Inside, I felt as if I had stepped into a honky-tonk tavern somewhere in Kentucky. There was even country music. I had never before been much of a fan of country music, but after my ears had been subject to months of nothing but the harsh warble of Indian pop music, I was ready to line dance with a possum. In a corner, a group of men played darts and drank beer. I sidled up to the bar, next to a couple speaking German. I drank a beer with the hopeful expectation that someone would talk to me, but after one Fiji Bitter passed and I was well on my way through another without anyone’s acknowledging my existence, I went ahead and barged into my neighbor’s conversation.
“Du bist Deutsche?” I said, asking the obvious. When I have to speak German, I simply speak Dutch with a German accent in the hope that my listener will soon catch on that I don’t really speak German, and then we’ll both happily move on to English.
“Fiji is shit,” the woman said after we’d established that her English was better than my German. “A big shit.”
This seemed a little negative to me. I could understand a disparaging comment or two directed toward Suva. But—provided, of course, that one ignored the politics on Vanua Levu, and the recent strife, and the despondent Indians, and the corrupt chiefs—well, Savusavu seemed pretty wunderbar to me.
“Eight years I have lived here. And I have had enough. Enough! I am going back to Germany. Savusavu is a shit. Fiji is a shit.”
“What’s wrong with Savusavu?” I asked.
“Everything. The electricity doesn’t work. The telephones don’t work. And if you don’t have freehold land, then everything is a big shit. I want to build another house. I fill out papers and nothing happens. I fill out more papers and nothing happens. I drink kava with the fucking chief and finally, okay, I can build. And so I hire the Fijians to clear the bush. I give them money. And nothing happens. So I drink more kava with the fucking chief. He says okay, he’ll send the men. And then nothing. Fiji is a big shit. I have had enough.”
And with that she stormed out without so much as an auf Wiedersehen, her mute companion trailing after her. I felt for her. It was a lamentation often expressed by those from northern climes who had moved to the islands expecting palm trees and beaches and strumming ukuleles. All that exists, of course, but it doesn’t take long to become jaded by one’s surroundings, and what remains, then, is nothing more than day-to-day life. She had moved to Savusavu, I suspected, because it offered paradise at a good price. But what she had regarded as paradise—the unspoiled land, the pace of life, the depth of the island culture—was what made day-to-day life so exasperating for her. Plus, she was German.
I moved on to Savusavu’s other drinking establishment. There were only two: the Planter’s Club and the Copra Shed Marina, which was the preserve of the yachties. These were no dilettantes, fluttering their sails on weekends as they stood at the wheel with a rakish captain’s cap on their head and a gin and tonic in their hand. In fact, a surprising number of the yachties here were families who had anchored their boats in the safe confines of Savusavu harbor to ride out the cyclone season. In the mornings, they home-schooled, or boat-schooled, their kids. In the afternoon, the children, who ranged from the ages of about five up to thirteen, were free to race one another up and down the harbor in dinghies. This was deeply unfair, I thought, recalling that when I was a youngster in Canada, I’d had to get up well before dawn to deliver newspapers by sled through the cold, cold darkness.
The bar looked out over the harbor, and as I watched the yachtie kids playing with the Fijian kids—a little tableau of multiracial harmony—I was suddenly seized with a deep pang of longing for my little one. How excellent it must be, sailing across the expanse of the Pacific with your family, spending a few months or a few years on an island and moving on as whim determined. “Not with this wife,
” Sylvia had said when I’d expressed my longing for a life at sea back in Port Vila. A fantasy, then, it would likely remain.
“Hey, man,” said one of the patrons. “You’re Steve, right? You play the trombone.”
“No, sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.”
“You’re not Steve?” he said, giving me a bleary-eyed look. “Well, who are you, man?”
It was like meeting the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now. He called himself John.
“It’s about the solitude, man,” he replied when I asked him about his boat. “If you can deal with solitude, you can deal with anything. You don’t need no $200-an-hour psychoanalyst, man. Just sail a boat for forty days and forty nights and you deal with all kinds of shit. HA HA HA.”
It had been a long, strange trip for John.
“Yeah, I was in Vietnam, man. How could you tell? HA HA HA. It’s ’cause we’re all fucked up, right? I did underwater demolitions, but I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t want to talk about that, man. HA HA.”
John had been sailing for eight years. I couldn’t imagine how he’d endured it. He was a bundle of loose nerves, trembling in a way that suggested a man off his meds. Most of the yachties I had met were calm and cerebral, the kind of people who happily spend an entire day methodically sanding an oar so that it moves through the water with perfect efficiency. John just twitched. He was a lone sailor. It had taken him forty days to sail from Panama to the Marquesas.
“Solitude, man. It makes you stronger. I spent three years in Alaska, man. I lived in the fucking woods. Only went into town once a month. HA HA.”
I asked him where he’d been in the Pacific.
“Everywhere, man. Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cooks. They charge $15 a day to dock in the Cooks, man. I was out of there in nine days.”
I wondered how he lived. “Do you do charters?” I asked. For cash, many of the yachties chartered their boats.
“Charters,” John sputtered. “Oh, no. Then you got to take care of them, give them drinks, have a license. HA HA. No.”
The sun had set, leaving a blue twilight.
“I got married, man,” John said. “Fijian woman. Having a baby. HA HA.”
“So are you settling in Savusavu?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Yeah, sure. Who fucking cares? You might say I’ve dropped out of society.”
I had a sense that John would keep moving, that he would keep looking for something, unsure of what precisely he was looking for. I understood the feeling. It wasn’t long ago that I too had felt the twitching restlessness. Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but somehow you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.
IT’S FUNNY HOW TIME PASSES WHEN YOU HAVE A CHILD. Before Lukas arrived, I had always been able to press the pause button on life. I’d find a nice place somewhere between jobs and rest there for a while, a still life in a moving picture. But there was no pausing with Lukas. Just as I’d grown accustomed to his ability to sit upright on his own, he went ahead and started crawling. Once Lukas was mobile, life became a chase, and just as we thought we had caught up to him, we’d find him standing, tentatively perched on wobbly legs, holding on to a chair, first with two hands and then one, contemplating whether to let go and take those first steps. No, there was no pausing now.
Sylvia and I had decided it was time to stop looking for paradise. It would always be just out of reach, a shimmering mirage on the horizon. There was only one place where one might find paradise: home. We didn’t quite know where home was, but we thought we’d look for it in America.
“Are we crazy?” Sylvia asked.
“Very possibly,” I said.
Our friends in the U.S. certainly thought so. America had embarked on an endless war, and the world had begun to turn its back on it. The U.S. was a different place now, we were told. Well, we thought. So was Fiji. The villages were being emptied of men, lured by the dollars to be found working for U.S. military contractors in Kuwait and Iraq. More than a few had already returned to Fiji in body bags. It struck me as just a trifle presumptuous to start a war and then hire villagers from Fiji to fight it. Escapism, clearly, was futile. Who could know where the world was headed? The best we could do, we figured, was to ensure that Lukas had as many nationalities as he could, so that, no matter what, he’d always have a place to go. Within his first year alone, he had acquired Dutch, Canadian, and American passports. Should events warrant, he could pick up a Fijian one too. It made us feel like good parents, knowing that if the world went to hell, he’d have options.
In the meantime, however, we thought it might be nice to raise him in the same hemisphere as the rest of his family. Clearly, our priorities had changed. Distressed to see pictures of her grandson wearing nothing more than a diaper and a tank top, my mother had begun to send packages of fluffy baby garb from Ralph Lauren. Someone in her family was going to wear Polo, and Lukas was her last hope. It seemed cruel to deny her, and moving to a climate where we could fulfill my mother’s sartorial preferences seemed like the right thing to do. Sylvia and I were hardwired for change, for hopping on airplanes every two years and beginning anew. But this was going to be a different kind of change, and this time it would take us away from Oceania.
In Fiji, as in Vanuatu, we were expatriates. This is different from being a mere foreigner. When we’d lived in Kiribati, the islanders regarded us as curiosities—a little peculiar, perhaps, often in need of guidance, and certainly foreign. But it wasn’t long before we were seen as locals. We ate the same fish, sang the same songs—or at least the one song we knew the words to—and exchanged the same parasites. We experienced the island much as the I-Kiribati did. Partly, of course, this was because there was no other way to experience it. The isolation was absolute, the deprivation universal. Living on an atoll was like living on a boat. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, native or foreign. You rolled with the same waves.
The expatriate life was different, however. It could certainly be seductive. Our dollars went far in Fiji, and on many weekends we still found ourselves at lushly landscaped island resorts, where we’d linger in the warm shallows of the South Pacific as Lukas splashed gleefully about. We could afford a car, a nice house with a view, though not, apparently, a backyard, and when we needed to see a doctor, we went to the same doctors who attended to the ratus. But living as an expatriate can warp you. Every Friday, I picked up a week’s worth of International Herald Tribunes from Bill, an American expatriate who had lived in Fiji for twenty years. He was an accountant for an international aid organization, and while there was no shortage of accountants in Fiji, he had managed to linger on with an expat’s tax-free salary and benefits. Most afternoons, he could be found on the golf course, his membership charged to a child-nutrition program. The IHT, which was obscenely expensive in Fiji, was paid for by a disaster-training project. While we didn’t think it likely that we’d ever end up as ethically challenged as Bill—though who can say for sure?—we nevertheless regarded him as a cautionary tale about the perils of the expatriate life. His kids were lost souls, born on the islands but not of the islands. As the children of expatriates, they didn’t fit into the complex social milieu of Fiji. Nor, having grown up on the islands, did they move comfortably in America. The oldest had returned to Fiji after attending a community college in Hawaii for three months. It was “too stressful,” he said. The only reason Bill subscribed to the International Herald Tribune was so that he could check the box scores for his favorite baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, which I found a little sad.
We didn’t want Lukas to be unduly stressed should fate lead him toward a community college in Hawaii. Indeed, if he didn’t realize that he was very, very lucky to have parents who would send him to community college in Hawaii, then we would have failed in our parental obligations. Our first priority, c
learly, was to provide him with a home, and while most of our friends couldn’t quite comprehend our decision to leave Fiji for a country that had evidently lost its mind, geopolitically speaking, the parents among them did.
As we began packing we discovered that we now had stuff. There was a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair, the beginnings of a household. The rest of our belongings were scooped up by friends in Suva. After much discussion, we decided that we would return to Washington, where we had a concentration of friends and family. It would be different this time, we thought. We weren’t so foolish, however, as to make such a move without first stopping over in Hawaii, where we hoped to ease our transition back to the United States, and possibly check out the community colleges, just in case.
Before we left, Anna invited us to her village for a traditional lovo, a feast cooked in a freshly dug earth oven. Though close to Suva, the village of Wailoko was another world. Inside this hamlet, surrounded by steep, verdant hills, the bustle of Suva seemed distant. Upon our arrival, we were garlanded with flowers. Even Lukas found himself bedecked in a floral necklace. Soon he was being passed from villager to villager, hailed as Ratu Lukas.
“I wonder if he’ll get this kind of attention in the U.S.,” Sylvia mused. “Look, even the ten-year-old boys want to play with him.”
Inside the pit, Anna’s sons had lit a fire, and as the wood burned they added stones to the blaze. A pig had been slaughtered, and when the stones were sufficiently hot, the pork, as well as taro and pumpkin, were wrapped in banana leaves and placed on the rocks. Then dirt was shoveled onto the meal, and as dinner cooked we sat on mats inside Anna’s modest two-room home. On her walls, there were pictures, many of them faded, of all the children she had helped raise over the years.
“You know that money you gave me for Christmas?” Anna said. “I used it to start a business.”
“Really,” I said, feeling very pleased.
“Yes. I bought a sty, and now I make the grog and sell it.”
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