Surviving Paradise (37 page)

These values flowed from one spring, the necessity of survival in a confined, dangerous space, but that is not to say that they were free from inconsistency. Survival mandated kindness, but encouraged harshness toward children. It required appeasement, but prevented disputes from being openly resolved. It necessitated togetherness, but strictly separated men from women, and children from adults. It discouraged provoking others, but also gave no one the privacy of their own thoughts. These were contradictions, but they stemmed from the contradictions of survival itself.

I WOULD LIKE TO POINT TO ONE MORE MARSHALLESE QUALITY. THIS
quality was forgiveness, and I have mentioned it last for a reason. I never made mental peace with life on Ujae. I never accepted the values of my hosts. My mind screamed intolerance throughout the year.

The extraordinary thing was that they forgave me for this betrayal. They forgave me for what must have been a mountain of cultural misdemeanors and worse. I must have seemed to them coldly reclusive, childishly indiscreet, wantonly ungenerous, sappily sentimental toward children, and insultingly uncomfortable with the status quo. My behavior, certainly, must have struck them as even more foreign and questionable than theirs seemed to me. But they called me Marshallese, and Lisson asked me to stay. Me? The uncalm rebellious possessive white man, the antithesis of all Marshallese values? He wanted me to stay?

Somehow he did, and this said as much as anything about Marshallese culture. If the islanders hadn't wanted to welcome me, they would have had ample reason for it. But instead they let me be both as American and as Marshallese as I wanted, and for that I was grateful. The same values that I found so hard to accept allowed them to accept me.

And in all of my cultural critiques, I was reminded of a rather withering story recounted to me by another solo outer-island teacher. Frustrated with the community's treatment of women and its neglect of the school, the American volunteer stayed up deep into the night hurling a litany of cross-cultural vexations at her Marshallese boyfriend. For four hours, he sat silently and listened. Then, for the first time since she had met him, his face betrayed annoyance. He simply said, “One day, you will understand Marshallese culture.”

I realized, too, that my understanding of their lifestyle revealed as much about my own culture as theirs. It wasn't about their world, but rather the interaction of my world and theirs—like this book. What I spent so many long hours on the beach mulling over was what stood out to me, and what stood out to me spoke volumes about my own country, my own unlikely time and place to be born. My surprise at their concept of time said as much about the prepare-for-winter survival codes of temperate Western civilization as it did about the every-day-is-the-same attitude of tropical peoples.

Entirely by chance, I was born in one of the rare countries that had been rich and safe and mobile for a long enough time that survival now felt ensured. In most of the rest of the world, the Marshalls
being just one example, it didn't. What was exotic to me may have in fact been the world's, and history's, norm. The greatest insights I had gained were into my own culture; the only true realization was that, as inscrutable as they were to me, I was just as strange, if not stranger, to them. Discarding my binoculars in favor of a mirror, it occurred to me that my own culture was just as brilliant, exasperating, delightful, and paradoxical as theirs.

I had achieved the beginning of understanding, if not acceptance, and now I was scheduled to leave in a month. It was within my power to stay. I could extend my service for a year. If I chose, I could remain on Ujae until my dying day. But the understanding of this culture that I had gained was also an understanding of its fundamental incompatibility with my heart. If my hosts intended their compliment literally, then they were mistaken: I was not Marshallese, nor could I ever be, nor did I want to be. I was at peace with my Westernness.

Once upon a time, Western do-gooders were expected to come back from their travels with the following story: we went there, and we saved them. Nowadays, audiences craved a different myth: we went there, and they saved us. Neither story fit my experiences on this island. I hadn't saved them and they hadn't saved me, and being surprised by this would be as foolish as expecting a marriage to alter the fundamental temperaments of the spouses. For Ujae and for me, the result of this time together was not transformation, but memory making—and that is how it should have been.

I decided to leave, but not without a certain fondness. As with a person, I had to overcome infatuation before I could achieve love. This was impossible until I recognized Ujae as flawed but well intentioned. Even as it tried my sanity, it also tried its best. I came to love the island—not in spite of the hardships, not because of them, but simply beyond them. I came to care for it like the spouse you fight with or the relative whose visits you dread, because if you share your life long enough with anything, even if you hate it, you must also love it.

 

 

 

 

IN LATE MAY, I WAS ACUTELY AWARE THAT MY TIME ON UJAE WAS
coming to a close. The beginning had been about firsts, but now my thoughts were on lasts—the last visit to the uninhabited islands, the last time I spearfished, the last time I taught class. Some lasts were like little deaths; other lasts left me feeling reborn.

The last day of school fell squarely into the second category. As I shooed the last child out of my classroom and locked the door for the final time, I felt more than relieved. I felt resurrected. On my first day of teaching, my life had been taken away from me. Now I had gotten it back, and, with it, my future.

But after the nadir of December, I had managed to find some intermittent pleasure in my job. I had achieved a few good hours, a few good days, even a few good weeks. I had found one or two educational allies in the community, the occasional adult who believed in
the value of education and appreciated my efforts on its behalf. I felt like a mediocre teacher instead of an abysmal one.

I hadn't learned to ignore the bad kids, but I had learned to adore the good kids, and I surprised myself by coming to care deeply about them. Preparing my eighth graders for the high school entrance test became a labor of love. The day of the exam was the climax of a mountain of effort: a yearlong mission to feel that some good, at least, had come from this exasperating job. The students emerged from the four-hour crucible with dazed smiles, but I wouldn't hear the results for another month or longer, and I was afraid that their low starting point (coupled perhaps with the general incompetence of their English teacher) had doomed them all to fail the test.

Now I had to somehow say goodbye to the people and the island that had been my entire world for a year. The Marshallese language had a perfect word,
kojjemlok
, which meant literally “to bring to an end.” But it just as easily meant “to spend one's last moments with someone before leaving.” It is the only word I can use to describe what I did.

A few
kojjemlok
ing parties capped the year. The first was the school's honor assembly. I was astounded to see parents patting their children on the back, hugging them, and sometimes even kissing them as they walked to the front of the room to receive their rewards. What had happened to the cold indifference, the harsh discipline? Had the parents felt pride and affection toward their children this whole time? Why were they allowed to express it only in this one circumstance, a ceremony to honor educational achievement at a school that none of them had ever supported? I realized how ignorant I still was.

A party was held in my honor at Ariraen, and I was again astounded at the open affection, this time toward me. As each parent presented me with a handicraft, many of them shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder, or hugged me. One old woman even kissed me on the cheek. Meanwhile, the children, even those who had expressed nothing but spite toward me in class, told me how sad they were that I was leaving and how much they liked being in my class. Senator Lucky thanked me on behalf of everyone for my work as a teacher. This was insane. This was touching. This was exactly what I had been craving since I arrived on the island. A year of feeling resented by so many of the children
and emotionally starved by the adults had ended in a tear-jerking barrage of affection. I knew so little, so little.

Perhaps they were willing to show their emotions in this situation because this was a farewell—and farewells held a special gravitas in a country of widely scattered islands separated by treacherous seas. Goodbye could be forever, and I felt that this one would almost certainly be.

I gave a speech to the congregation. I liked to think it would still be remembered years later as the
iban bar
(“never again will I”) speech. With nostalgia I listed the quintessential bits of Ujae life that I would never again experience. Never again would I
kope
, drink coffee and socialize with the guys. Never again would I spearfish in
naam en an Joalon
, Joalon's pool, where the lagoon dipped down and fish thrived. Never again would I hear stories of Letao, the legendary Marshallese trickster. Never again would I sail on
Limama
, the yellow-and-green outrigger canoe. Never again would I eat
bwiro
. Never again would I use a coconut as a pillow. The audience roared its approval of my knowledge of these things, and, for the next week, until the day I left, they could not stop quoting all the
iban bar
s. It was beautifully clear that my efforts to fit in had more than canceled out my cultural blunders.

I had come a long way. Ten months before, I had attended a small gathering on the same property, with the same people. No one had talked to me, and I had talked to no one. I had understood nothing of their speeches. Now I knew everyone, and everyone knew me. I was giving a speech of my own, in their language, and I was the one being honored.

During my last few days, I walked through the village and spent time with every last human being on the island. What I was doing was
etetal momonana
, which means “walking around, eating again and again.” It referred to the fact that guests could eat at anyone's house, and therefore might be fed several meals in one morning or evening. No matter if I was already full—satisfying the stomach wasn't the point, and I knew the danger of saying no. So eating more than my fill was a virtual certainty if I was going to stroll around the village near mealtime. By the end of my first morning of
etetal momonana
, I had eaten five breakfasts.

Food was not the only parting offer I received. People still hoped I would marry a local woman and take her to America with me, and they wanted to know specifically why I kept declining the offer. The young women had finally overcome their shyness just in time for me to leave, but I didn't consider that sufficient justification to spend the rest of my life with any of them. Nor was I swayed by the handful of letters I had received from Tonicca, via Emily, over the last several months. I had to admire the girl's effort—she could neither read nor write, but she had recruited a friend to act as scribe. She didn't speak a word of English, but someone, apparently, had managed to write, “When I first saw you, I saw love.” I responded with friendly but unaffectionate letters. The last one said that I was leaving the country and unfortunately could not take her with me. She would, I was sure, find another
ribelle
to love.

As I
kojjemlok
ed on Ujae, I was also offered various animals to take back to my country and raise. One was a furry white fledgling of a
kalo
bird (the brown booby). I was even offered a baby sea turtle, which they said I could bring to America, fatten up, and eat. I wasn't keen on being arrested for trafficking in threatened species, nor was there room in my luggage for a large aquatic reptile. The other problem was that the offerers did not actually possess said baby sea turtle. It was less an actual sea turtle, more a theoretical sea turtle. But as with
etetal momonana
, the act of offering was more important than the thing being offered. In the same vein, Lisson and Elina finally took pity on my paltry fishing skills, and decided to reassure me that I wasn't utterly hopeless as a provider. Instead of throwing away my last catch of fish, as they had done with all of my previous ones, they fried the small, undesirable specimens and served them to me as one of my last dinners. The taste was not great, but the gesture was touching.