Surviving Paradise (14 page)

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 entire 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.

The issue was more than just symbolic. Even under a democratic government, the chiefs remained the ultimate owners of every last piece of land in the Marshall Islands. Not one square foot of the country was public property. Ujae's chief also owned land in Lae, Wotho, and Kwajalein Atolls, and although families were allowed to live and collect food on their
wato
, the supreme owner was nonetheless the chief. This led to certain problems and inequities. A chief or even a subordinate landowner might deny access to a land tract that had always housed a school, and until the landowner and the government could hammer out an agreement, the children sat at home untaught. A landowner could invite the government to build a school on her land, and then renege once it was finished so that she could use the new building as her house. These scenarios had occurred, and, conceivably, even the land on which the capital building sat could be closed. At the Kwajalein military base, the millions of dollars of rent that the United States annually paid went directly to the landowners, to be redistributed among others only according to their whims.

This was not the chief's proper role. He was the village's steward, not its master. He collected tribute, but was expected to redistribute it when his people were in need. He owned the land, but granted its use to deserving families. The commoners told him what to do as often as vice-versa. Many islanders felt this ideal had been lost. Nowadays, chiefs remembered their privileges but not their responsibilities. They horded their tribute instead of redistributing it. A few chiefs were now wealthy even by American standards.

The more progressive party promised to rectify this situation. They could invoke eminent domain, a law that allowed the government to
seize private property for public works. By taking land into government hands, schools would remain open regardless of the landlords' whims.

But the pull of tradition was strong. Many islanders remained loyal to their chiefs because they were a link to the Marshallese past, even if they no longer filled their traditional role. Meanwhile, land rights were so closely guarded that a few people suggested, only half joking, that invoking eminent domain would start a civil war. Making private property into public property could be a slippery slope that ended with people losing their land, the basis of all life on these islands. Although poorer communities like Ujae could benefit the most from a redistribution of the country's resources, these communities were also the ones whose livelihoods depended most immediately on their real estate. With money alone, they would go hungry; with their land, they could survive.

So this was an important election. Ujae's senate seat was up for grabs now that the old senator had transferred to Kwajalein Atoll. Anyone who lived on the island or claimed ancestry here could vote for Ujae's new senator. That increased the constituency to a whopping six hundred people.

None of Ujae's candidates lived on the atoll that they hoped to represent, but all of them arrived in person to campaign. Tani Herong had been demoted from his job as the school's principal, for reasons I will not go into, and now he made the dubious career choice of seeking an even higher office. Fred Muller focused his political efforts on making dozens if not hundreds of stickers with the words “FRED MULLER—UJAE” on them. I got my hands on one, cut and pasted it so that it said “FREE UJAE,” and stuck it on the cover of my journal. That was the extent of my interaction with the man.

Alee Alik was a garrulous fellow who dominated every conversation and had any audience in stitches within half a minute. The multiple voices of the men's daily conversation-coffee had become one: his. If the meek shall inherit the earth, this man had been written out of the will. Alee was better educated than the vast majority of the islanders—he had attended college in the United States—and perhaps this was why his platform focused on the inevitability of change. He encouraged the people of Ujae to embrace their country's growing
cash economy. He also addressed a future threat that no other islander cared to discuss. “The Marshall Islands will be inundated,” Alee said ominously. He was referring to global warming.

I didn't want to think about global warming then. Most of the time, I successfully managed not to. But, every once in a while I would remember the facts. I knew scientists had predicted that climate change, caused by industrial emissions, would melt the polar icecaps, raising the world's sea level. I knew low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands were particularly vulnerable to this. I knew that the rising saltwater could seep into the ground and ruin crops and drinking water, that increasingly violent storms could flood and even sweep away entire islands. I knew that warming oceans might kill coral reefs, decimating the islanders' protein supply and eliminating a natural defense against extreme weather. I knew that, by the end of the century, coral atolls might be not only uninhabitable but nonexistent. If the ocean rose too quickly, the coral would be unable to keep pace. Hope remained: if the world got its act together, climate change might slow to the point where adaptation was possible. But I also reminded myself that if these islands were doomed, then it was all the more appropriate to experience them now.

I admired Alee for broaching a subject both islanders and foreigners preferred not to think about. But Alee's obsession with change also blinded him to the absurdity of some of his ambitions. “We should get lawnmowers for this island,” he opined. “We'll use them to get rid of all the underbrush in the jungle, so that we can see straight from the lagoon side to the ocean side. Ujae would be beautiful that way—it would look like Hawaii or a golf course.
Then
we could get tourism here.” I found it difficult to argue with this only because I didn't know where to start.

The last candidate was auspiciously named Caios Lucky. (His brother's name was Lucky Lucky.) But his assets were not limited to his promising surname. He was gentle and kind, and his nervous earnestness during his campaign speech, so far from Alee's cocky electioneering, endeared him to me. He became my friend, and he would hold long conversations with me in Marshallese even though he spoke excellent English. He had made campaign T-shirts in Majuro and distributed them for free on Ujae. They said “Caios for Senator—
Ujae Atoll.” Mind you, it said “
Caios
” for senator, not “Caios Lucky.” This was a country where one could run for national office using no more names than a pop diva.

Instead of selling flashy plans for progress, Caios vowed to protect what Ujae already had. His campaign speech focused on the here and now: maintaining tradition, defending land rights, and ensuring an adequate food supply. But even in his present focus, he found it necessary to make reference to something that had happened fifty years earlier in another part of the country: the nuclear testing at Bikini and Eniwetok.