Surviving Paradise (38 page)

A common question during my parting conversations was whether there would be another American volunteer the next year. I said probably, and the questioners were pleased. Then they asked if it would be a man or a woman. I offered that wonderfully evasive Marshallese phrase
ejanin alikkar
—“it's not yet clear.” They said they were tired of male volunteers and wanted a woman. Both men and women said this, but obviously for different reasons. I said I would try to pull some strings.

I felt now that I had lived up to the volunteer who had come before me. The islanders still mercilessly compared the two of us, but it was as often in my favor as in his. I wondered if my successor on Ujae would feel the same thing I had. In my absence, would I acquire the same mystique as my forerunner? Would my thousand faux pas and deficiencies and that time I threw a baseball so far off its mark that it pegged Senator Lucky have been forgotten? Would
I
now be the marvelous
ribelle
that the new arrival could not possibly equal? There was a certain satisfaction in that, the same one-upmanship that spurned globetrotters to compare achievements—who had set foot in the remotest spot, undergone the greatest hardships, earned the greatest adoration from the most exotic villagers?

These
kojjemlok
ing sessions were the first time I had spoken to some of the villagers. There were still so many conversations to have, so many things to learn, even jungle paths that I had not yet followed. Was this sad or was this comforting? After a year on a third-of-a-square-mile island, I felt I was only beginning.

My fellow volunteers must have felt the same way. No one had succumbed to Early Termination. A few were staying for another year. And during radio check-in, I heard an impressive number of them planning to take a living piece of the country home with them: a dog, a boyfriend, a student. Next it would be an entire islet, packed in a crate and shipped to the USA.

The last day arrived. I sat on the gravel at Ariraen and sipped coffee with my host family. I didn't know what to say, or if I was supposed to say anything at all. Alfred, Tior, and Lisson accompanied me to the airport. As I walked through the village for the last time, passing by plywood and thatch cookhouses, watching men in T-shirts and shorts knocking down coconuts from thirty feet above, I took stock of this place.

The people of Ujae ate instant ramen, but opened the package with a machete. They used the English phrase “good night,” but started as early as noon. They served Kool-Aid, but treated it like Perrier; ate Spam, but savored it like filet mignon. They sipped their morning coffee, but sweetened it as often as not with coconut sap. Some of the islanders could recite the medicinal properties of native plants and the hit singles of the Backstreet Boys with equal ease.
They worshipped Jesus but believed in demons and love spells; they preached a Christian work ethic but lived on island time. They divided their allegiance between chief and senator, cracked open giant crabs with old batteries, and fished with spears made of fiberglass.

It would have been surreal to live as a middle-class Westerner among Stone Age animists, but it had been even more surreal to live here, with a people who were in equal parts hunter-gatherers and yuppies, in a place exactly halfway between jungle camp and New York City—a place where a man might spear fish for subsistence in the morning and play half-court basketball in the evening, a place where the same person who shared with you the ancient meaning of the colored lines on the back of a crab could also recite Snoop Dogg lyrics.

This place was the accidental offspring of a long, rocky marriage between my country and theirs. And now, in a small way, so was I. I was still Western, but I could never look at a fish quite the same way. I belonged to the West, but I wanted to find there the same intimacy with my surroundings that I had experienced here. I yearned for the company of Westerners, but I hoped we might adopt the Marshallese idea that one should never be too busy to chat.

And there were other things that I didn't want to bring back.

At the airport, a large portion of the village had assembled, and many people were still giving me necklaces, wall hangings, and shells. My chest turned hot with pumping blood as the plane landed—this vessel that was to carry me away forever from this place that had become, in spite of myself, my yearlong home.

I shook many hands, said many goodbyes. “Thank you, come again,” said one young man in English, as if bidding a customer farewell at a convenience store. That was it. That was the last strangely transplanted, humorously incongruous, unexpectedly adapted bit of America that had found an ironic home in this place. And this too was the last moment in which I, another bit of transplanted and adapted America, would call this place home.

I stepped onto the plane, my skin a little less pale than a year before, my hair bleached by saltwater and sun, native necklaces hanging around my neck, bidding farewell to the islanders in their language. One moment the flying machine was on the ground, coconut and breadfruit trees streaming by as it accelerated. And the next moment
it was in the air, and the entire world that was this island spread out in front of my eyes. For a few ecstatic seconds, I could see it all, from lagoon to ocean, from windward to leeward, an entire continent with all its trees and houses and people in one exquisite glance. It was then that I saw that if my romance with Ujae was a meeting of opposites, then so was Ujae itself: half rough ocean, half smooth lagoon; a romance between old and new, foreign and native, gentle generosity and harsh restriction, paradise and survival, for me and for them—but I survived it, and now it was gone, and I could see only the blue edge of the atoll, and then only ocean.

 

 

 

 

I HAD BEEN IN AMERICA FOR A MONTH WHEN I RECEIVED THE NEWS:
two of my eighth graders had passed the high school entrance test. They had been among my favorite students, children who possessed not only the intelligence but also the kindness to do something valuable with their education. The year had meant something. My work had achieved something.

That parting gift was my final interaction with Ujae, and, with it, the experience began to fade. They say that the shock of returning home is more traumatic than that of going abroad. They are crazy. I had spent a month decompressing in the middle depths that were Majuro, to avoid the cultural bends, and the precaution had succeeded.

Nonetheless, for a few days, my mind screamed “the Marshall Islands!” while the world screamed “America!” For a few days, I mentally inhabited one country while physically inhabiting another, the same feeling I had felt on Ujae for opposite reasons. For a few days,
I saw the United States with Marshallese eyes. It was an empire of ostentation. Money dripped from every supermarket and automobile and cell phone. Children were scarce; the air was dry. There was land in the sky! Mountains were a perverse geological anomaly, a glorious geological miracle. Extroversion was the norm, but unfriendliness was common. The locals were nervously protective of their time and childishly indiscreet with their emotions; a fifteen-minute delay in the arrival of a bus was grounds for a shouted argument with the driver. “Bikini” no longer referred to an irradiated coral atoll, but a scandalously revealing type of swimwear. At the beach, immodest light-skinned women openly wore these microscopic uniforms, seeking the dark complexion that tropical peoples were born with. The taxi driver had no interest in talking to me, and the fare was significantly more than fifty cents.

It was as if I had fallen asleep for a year, or perhaps only a day. Precious little had changed to mark that lost time—Iraqi insurgents, Super Bowl scandal, widespread wireless Internet, a host of new household words: blog, Netflix, iPod. I discovered that my state had elected the Governator without consulting me first.

But quickly, too quickly, all of this felt normal. The woven bracelet that another volunteer had given me—which had been my constant companion, surviving a year of heat, humidity, and daily saltwater immersion—finally broke and fell off my wrist. Good food, hot showers, cool air, instant information, and on-demand entertainment were now necessities, no longer luxuries. I found myself wishing that the brief window of reverse culture shock would last longer, because that was the only time when I could look at my own culture with fresh eyes.

A certain kinship with the island lingered. I was perusing a book of Hawaiian fish, pleased to see many familiar species from Ujae. When I spotted a kind that was common in Ujae's lagoon, I said, “We had those on Ujae.” I did not say, “
They
had those on Ujae.” By accident, I revealed that I considered myself an inhabitant of the island, as the islanders themselves had sometimes considered me.

Photographs triggered the same feeling. The background image on my computer was the same as before: an aerial view of a coral atoll, its land-studded reef tracing a circle in the ocean. A year ago, it
had enticed me, but only as so many idyllic islands. It was exoticness that allured me then, so different from the affinity I now felt. Now I registered the pattern of sand, rock, water, and reef, and knew I could envision the islet in exactitude—imagine stepping along the hot sand of the lagoon shore, gazing out to where the rocky shallows dropped into lush coral depths, with distant islands flattened between the behemoths of ocean and sky.

I had done it—touched that object of desire—and it had been beautiful and disillusioning. And still, the same wanderlust coursed through my veins, the same primal attraction to all places distant and unknown and therefore, perchance, perfect. I had sought to exorcise that demon and had failed, and part of me was glad for it. I was still in love with the romance of romance, the romance of paradise; the dream image held fast, tarnished but still golden. Nothing could destroy it, and no one knew if that was heartening or tragic. I could think only of where I would travel next, what mysterious and seductive place—and how, next time, I would do it better, do it more wisely, edge a little closer to paradise.

 

 

 

 

I AM STANDING AGAIN ON UJAE'S BEACH, IN THE PLACE CALLED
kapin anin
—“the bottom of the island,” where lagoon and ocean meet. It is a familiar place, but something has changed. A palm tree used to lean curiously low, almost horizontally, over this bit of sea. Now that unmistakable giant has fallen into the shallows. Around it, for hundreds of feet in either direction, waves have carved an alcove in the three-foot coastal bluffs. Circling the island, I count scores of fallen trees and long stretches of eroded shore and exposed roots.

I do not remember seeing this before.

The first time I arrived here, I called Ujae the ends of the earth; now the phrase seems depressingly apt.

Three years have passed. It is July 2007, and I am, improbably, back in the Marshall Islands for a three-month stay. Everything is the same and everything is different. The people of Ujae have more stuff: more lights, new gadgets, and little DVD players that bring
Spider-Man
,
Lord of the Rings,
and kickboxing matches that Lisson and I watch in a collective masculine trance. The ruined medical dispensary has been refurbished into something that locals actually use. Some of my former students can converse in English, thanks to a series of volunteers far better than myself. The children have new tales of
ribelle
s doing amazing and bizarre and embarrassing things; my parents are still among those remembered ones. But Ujae's daily activities are identical. The pace of life is unchanged.

I am the same and different too. Now I am an anthropology student in need of fieldwork experience, making the idea of returning to Ujae seem almost well advised. My job this time is to understand things as they are, not to imagine them as they should be. Annoyances are converted into
material
. My erstwhile pupils forget to challenge me because I am no longer an authority to be challenged. Instead they greet my return with shocked smiles that I find touching. Little Easter has graduated from the threatening threes to the somewhat saner sixes, and, as a result, has two tantrums per day instead of per minute. As a final blessing, the island has become inexplicably cockroach-free. For a week or two, I achieve an almost sustainable happiness on Ujae—until I slip into that familiar malaise, the emptiness of being everyone's friend and nobody's intimate.