Whatever. I soon learned that the greatest beneficiaries of I-Matang aid were the I-Matangs themselves, and I was excited to finally get a piece of the pie myself. It had been an awfully long time since a dollar had come my way. In some alternate universe, I had credit card debts and student loan payments, but that universe was a long, long way from Tarawa. No one was calling me here to remind me that a payment was due. I had vanished from that world and I gave it no further thought.
Still, even though we had absolutely no need whatsoever for extra dollars pride compelled me to, at least now and then, bring in a paycheck. I did what I could to help Sylvia with her job. Indeed, on Tarawa I was known as the FSP husband. But here and there I enjoyed the sight of a check with my name on it. And so I edited.
This gave me an interesting perch from which to observe the foreign aid industry in Kiribati. To this day, I remain baffled by the UN. I could never figure out what they did. Every few months, Air Nauru would deposit another batch of fashionably dressed UN staffers, who would then spend most of their time on the atoll bitching about the I-Kiribati. “The people are so dirty,” said a Nigerian woman, tossing a Hermès scarf around her shoulders. She was on Tarawa to improve the plight of women in Kiribati. “How could you possibly live here?” asked the Frenchman with the tasseled loafers, after he was told that no, he could not have a club sandwich. He was in Kiribati to help the children.
Watching the parade of consultants that descended on Tarawa became the equivalent of watching the evening news for us. We knew what the chattering class back home was talking about simply by noting what causes the consultants represented. One day, for instance, a team of antismoking specialists arrived in Kiribati. I had the good fortune to spy upon them in the bar of the Otintaii Hotel, where they were meeting with officials from the Ministry of Health, grim-faced men who nodded politely as they were told of the tobacco industry’s evil designs for Kiribati and who, the moment these sullen but healthy Western people departed, opened up their tins of Irish tobacco and rolled their cigarettes with pandanus leaves and had a good laugh as they began an evening of serious drinking. They were aware, no doubt, of the 1996 figures on causes of morbidity in Kiribati, which included 99,000 cases of influenza (which killed close to 2 percent of the population in 1983), 15,000 cases of diarrhea that were serious enough to be reported (including 4,500 cases of dysentery, primarily among children), and 44 new cases of leprosy. There were no statistics on smoking-related diseases and deaths. There was no reason to collect such data. No one lived long enough to be mortally embraced by lung cancer and emphysema.
There was, it seemed to me, considerable dissonance between the health care concerns of westerners and the realities of the Pacific. Diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, for instance, killed nearly 10 percent of children under the age of five. But glamorous people don’t die of diarrhea. Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t hold fund-raisers for people with the runs. And so the money goes to AIDS, and not childhood diarrhea. So be it. If donors want to give money to fight AIDS rather than diarrhea or malaria, by far the greater killers in the developing world, I certainly won’t emit a peep of protest. I thought that the wisest thing one could do to prevent AIDS in Kiribati would be to take one banana and one condom to the Marine Training School, where I-Kiribati men are taught how to crew freighters, and explain that when in port you really shouldn’t visit prostitutes, but if you must, use a condom because otherwise you will die. Here’s a condom. Here’s a banana. Here’s how it works. Total cost of program? Approximately $1. Lives saved? Innumerable.
Foreign aid donors think differently, however. Instead of pursuing a simple prevention program, three-quarters of the country’s doctors and most of the senior nurses were sent to Perth, Australia, where they attended a five-week-long conference on AIDS counseling—not prevention, not treatment, but counseling. Total cost? $100,000. Lives saved? None. I could only imagine a doctor talking to an I-Kiribati woman infected with AIDS by a husband returning from his tour at sea. How’s your self-esteem?
The I-Kiribati, however, were largely indifferent to the presence of foreigners in Kiribati and the work they did. The only way consultants could get anyone to show up for a workshop in which they would explain the proper way to live on an atoll was to pay what were euphemistically called “sitting fees,” or bribes. On the outer islands, the volunteers were generally thought of as the village pets, amusing diversions that entertained the villagers with their strange ways. On Tarawa, the I-Matang presence was still sparse enough that people would gawk and giggle whenever one was sighted. Or perhaps it was just me that they gawked and giggled at. Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that the presence of a few foreigners in their midst was hardly a concern for the I-Kiribati. Until the Chinese arrived, that is.
Seemingly out of the blue, a new Chinese Embassy was constructed. It was white with a red tiled roof and impenetrable reflecting windows. It looked like an ungainly cross between a Beverly Hills mansion and a Taco Bell franchise. In front there was a glass-enclosed display featuring a tableau of industrial images under the peculiar headline “China: Friend of the Environment.” The embassy was constructed entirely by workers flown in from the People’s Republic of China, using tons of rock taken from the shoreline, which is actually not so environmentally friendly, as it furthers erosion, and erosion is no laughing matter on an atoll.
Soon the library on Tarawa—a one-room building I sometimes visited to peruse their collection of vintage National Geographics, a remnant, as was the rest of their modest collection, of the colonial era—began to display with suspicious prominence the latest issues of China Today, Beijing Review, China Pictorial, and China’s Tibet.
I wondered what the Chinese were interested in. What on earth would compel them to open an embassy in Kiribati of all places? No one builds embassies on Tarawa. Even the two countries that did have embassies barely filled them with staff. Australia had four diplomats. New Zealand only one, and he was also assigned to several other countries.
The government of Kiribati soon announced that it had agreed to buy an airplane, the Y-12, from China. Every aviation specialist in the Pacific thought Kiribati should buy a Twin Otter, which are reliable and safe. The entire region was flying Twin Otters, ensuring a nearby supply of spare parts. Instead, the government bought a Chinese airplane for what was universally regarded as a wildly inflated price. Clearly, there was some funny business going on, but what? Selling one airplane to an impoverished nation hardly struck me as worthy of a new embassy.
The government then announced a plan to send I-Kiribati girls to Hong Kong, where they would work as servants for $400 a month, minus rent and meal costs. Who knew that China was suffering from a labor shortage? The prospective employer could choose the girl of his choice after viewing his options on videotape. As details of the contract emerged, which stipulated that the girls would have no recourse should they be unhappy with their employers, popular disgust with the plan forced the government to abandon it.
Still, procuring unwilling prostitutes, which was among the Red Army’s more financially rewarding sidelines, did not strike me as an activity necessitating an embassy. It was only when the government announced that it had agreed to lease land to China so that they could construct a satellite tracking station that it began to make sense. The Chinese Embassy declared that the tracking station would only be for civilian-use satellites, but many found this hard to believe. Why did the Chinese prevent customs officials from examining the shipping containers they brought in to build their satellite tracking station? Why would the government of Kiribati allow them to get away with it?
Once the Chinese began construction of the station in an isolated grove in Temaiku, the rumors flew. The Chinese were bringing in guns. A boy had seen a Chinese man board a bus with a gun. The embassy had an armory. A submarine had emerged just beyond the reef in Temaiku on a moonless night and supplied the tracking station with mysterious goods, presumably guns. It did not help that the Chinese,
and sometimes there were dozens of them, kept completely to themselves.
“I am scared of the Chinese,” Tiabo told me. “They are bad people. They have guns.”
“I don’t like the Chinese,” Bwenawa said. “They don’t believe in God. They do not care about the I-Kiribati people. And they have guns.”
Even Radio Kiribati felt obliged to comment. Rumors that the Chinese are bringing in guns are false, it declared. To prove it, several unimane would be allowed to tour both the embassy and the satellite tracking station.
The unimane declined. We do not know anything about such things, they said. We want the I-Matang to go inside. The Chinese, however, would not allow I-Matangs inside their embassy and tracking station. Only elderly I-Kiribati men were welcome.
“I am very worried,” Bwenawa said. “We know that China has enemies, and I am scared of what would happen to Tarawa if China goes to war. Will those countries attack Tarawa? It has happened before.”
China’s enemy, or strategic partner depending on the week, happened to be quite busy nearby. On Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the United States was preparing to test its new missile defense program. An intercontinental ballistic missile would be fired from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Shortly thereafter, an interceptor would be fired from Kwajalein. As the date approached, more and more Chinese arrived, and from their curt bearing, I assumed they were from the Red Army. Once the test was conducted, they left again. Clearly, the tracking station in Temaiku was a spy station.
Sylvia and I decided this needed investigating. We approached the tracking station by bicycle, stealthlike. Just in front of the building, on the beach, were massive piles of discarded Styrofoam, deposited there by the Chinese as they finished the construction of the station. In the days that followed, the Styrofoam would travel down the atoll, befouling it, until the ocean took it forever. China: Friend of the Environment.
The station itself was nothing much to look at. It looked like a rural school with single-story buildings and tin roofs. The most striking feature was the massive satellite dishes. The complex was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Just outside the gate, we got off our bicycles.
I looked at Sylvia.
“I think we should,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes. We must.”
“You’re right. It’s necessary.”
“Free Tibet now!” we shouted.
And then we pedaled like hell before they shot us.
SHORTLY THEREAFTER, Sylvia was dispatched to the Federated States of Micronesia, where she would donate the hospital equipment that the government of Kiribati had declined to accept. With Sylvia traveling—and oh, how I envied her—I decided to have my fish and rice at the Otintaii Hotel, which offered a deceptively impressive menu, though in fact it could rarely scrounge up anything more than fish and rice. There, I discovered a veritable Chinatown. I passed the time guessing who represented Chinese officialdom and who was there to buy I-Kiribati passports, a lucrative sideline for the government of Kiribati, particularly in the months leading up to Hong Kong’s absorption by China. The Hong Kong Chinese were easy to spot. The men display flash, and the women, unaware of local cultural mores, display flesh. The differences between a Shanghai merchant and a Beijing lackey were more subtle, but the shoes gave everything away. The bureaucrats wore plastic sandals; the merchants genuine imitation leather.
I was sitting by myself when a young Chinese man asked if he could join me. There were no other seats available. He sat down, and though his English was halting and my Chinese nonexistent, we got to talking. He was an engineer, a recent graduate from Beijing University, and he was on Tarawa to help finish the Chinese Embassy. “I want to build the most beautiful building in Kiribati,” he said. He was affable. I found it curious that he got his degree at Beijing University. Only the country’s elite studied there, the children of the Communist Party’s leaders. I asked him about the demonstrations in 1989, when thousands of students, particularly from Beijing University, demanded reform.
“They were misguided,” he said. “China is a very great country.”
He looked deeply uncomfortable.
“What about the massacre in Tiananmen Square?” I asked.
Before he could respond, an older Chinese man, clearly someone of authority, walked over from the next table and pointedly put out his cigarette in the ashtray in front of me, all the while staring at the young engineer.
“Excuse me,” the engineer said. “I have found another seat.”
I spent the rest of the evening alone.
When Sylvia returned, I told her about the incident. Obviously, the Chinese smoker was a political officer. I also updated her on the latest rumors. There was a second submarine. More guns had been spotted.
“Oh good. More information to pass on,” she said.
“Pass on to whom?” I asked.
“The American ambassador to the Marshall Islands.”
“Excuse me? You’re informing the Americans about the Chinese on Tarawa?”
“Uh-huh. I met with her in Majuro and told her everything I knew.”
“Not knew. Heard, as in rumored.”
“Whatever. She wrote it all down, and asked me to keep her updated.”
This was an interesting project for Sylvia to pursue. Of all the guidebooks to the Pacific, only one mentioned Kiribati. And in that guidebook, FSP was described as a CIA front. This had outraged Sylvia.
“I thought you were going to send a letter to that guidebook,” I said.
“I am.”
“But now you’re spying for the U.S. government.”
“Yes. But it’s a secret.”
Some months later, when the American ambassador arrived on Tarawa to attend Independence Day celebrations—had another year passed already?—Sylvia offered her the latest intelligence on Chinese activities in Kiribati. More submarines. Where the Secret Room was in the embassy. The strength of their defenses around the tracking station. The payoffs to the government to keep quiet. The spike in Chinese activities whenever the Americans tested their missile defense system. Sylvia was thorough. She was also undeterred when the source of the rumors regarding the submarines and the guns turned out to be an I-Matang prankster.
“So what?” she said. “You agree that the Chinese are using the satellite tracking station to spy on what’s happening on Kwajalein?”
“I do.”
“And you agree that the Chinese are corrupting the government?”
“I do.”
“And you agree that the Chinese are the biggest polluters on Tarawa?”
“I do, though I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” she said. “And if I can make their lives a little more difficult, then I’m happy to do it.”
Beware the wrath of the roused environmentalist. Which is perhaps why not long after we left Tarawa, four American F-16s did a few low-level flyovers above the satellite tracking station. Which may have led to the Chinese taking down an American spy plane off the southern coast of China. I’m not saying these events are connected. But I’m not saying they’re not.
CHAPTER 21
In which the Author shares some thoughts on what it means to Dissipate, to Wither Away, Dissolute-like, and how one becomes perversely Emboldened by the inevitability of decay, the sure knowledge that today, possibly tomorrow, the Body will be unwell, which leads to Recklessness, Stupidity even, in the conduct of Everyday Life.
I am not sure when it happened, but at some point during my time on Tarawa I stopped wearing a seat belt. I saw nothing unusual in having the pickup truck filled with gas from a pump that was smoking, delivered by an attendant who himself was smoking. The sight of three-year-olds piled precariously on speeding mopeds no longer filled me with wonder. Body boarding in bone-crushing surf was an activity to be savored. Digging flies out of ever-deepening cuts became a thoughtless little habit. Four-d
ay-old tuna? How ’bout sashimi? Six cans of Victoria Bitter? Why not? And hey, smoke ’em if you got ’em.
I’d become immune to disease, not physically, but psychologically. Nothing fazed me. “Do you remember that consultant from New Zealand?” Sylvia asked. “The one who was here to train the police force? Well, his office just sent a fax. Apparently, he’s in the hospital with cholera and leptospirosis. They thought we should know.”
“What’s leptospirosis?”
“Something to do with rat urine.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have had the rat urine… Hey, I found some fresh sea worms for dinner.”
I took it all in stride. Cholera, leptospirosis, hepatitis, leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery, hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, mysterious viral diseases, septic infections, there were so many diseases to contend with on Tarawa that it was best to ignore them altogether. Beyond boiling drinking water, there wasn’t much that could be done. What happens happens, I thought. It could always be worse. That’s what I told Sylvia when she was felled by dengue fever.
“I feel like I’m dying,” she said. “Every bone in my body hurts.”
“You’re not dying,” I contended. “Unless its hemorrhagic dengue fever.”
“There’s no cure for that.”
“No there isn’t. But at least it’s not Ebola. Just relax. You’ll probably feel better in about two weeks.”
And she did.
On Onotoa, in the far southern Gilbert Islands, it seemed perfectly normal to have a meal of salt fish in a maneaba where fifty-odd shark fins were drying in the rafters. Afterward, I went swimming. When I did come across a shark in the shallows above the reef, I just smacked the palm of my hand hard on the surface of the water, and off it swam. Sharks had become an irritant, nothing more.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals Page 24
