Surviving Paradise (4 page)

A few days passed, and I was sure I had absorbed the rhythm. Then there was a bump. Sunday changed the rules, and Alfred and Tior took their new American charge to share in the festivities.

That morning witnessed grand preparations. Whereas the day before the men might have been spearfishing on a coral reef, sailing on outrigger canoes, or hunting crabs on a far-off islet, now their hair was slicked back with coconut oil and they were sporting clean Hawaiian shirts and slacks, or even suits. The day before, the women might have been preserving breadfruit in a salty tide pool or weaving pandanus-leaf mats, but today their hair was arranged and decorated, their dresses bright and spotless. And the children, who yesterday had been rolling in the sand, splashing in the lagoon, and clambering through the forest, were now impeccably presentable.

The clang of the makeshift church bell—an old scuba tank sounded with a hammer—was audible throughout the island. Soon everyone was ambling to church, a sort of leisurely parade with no audience. They were carrying Marshallese Bibles and hymnals—the only books, I was quite sure, that most of them owned. We arrived at the white-walled church, whose twenty-five-foot steeple was the tallest man-made structure on the island. The congregation seated itself on sagging wooden pews. Men sat on the left side of the central aisle, women on the right. There were no exceptions.

The minister approached the podium. He was a rotund, charismatic man with a piano-keys smile. He began with a song, a missionary hymn rendered in Marshallese. The women were shrill sopranos, entering a range previously reserved for cartoon chipmunks. The men heaved out their voice at the beginning of every musical phrase, producing a sound almost like a grunt. Each individual started and stopped singing when he pleased, and the chaos of these multiple whims created a rich texture. The minister then preached, thrusting his body forward with each emphasized phrase. Then everyone recited the Lord's Prayer in mumbled Marshallese.

The service continued: song, sermon, prayer, repeat. A curious mix of formality and informality prevailed throughout. Men put their arms
up on the backs of their seats and balanced their feet on the pews in front of them. The women fanned themselves with old brown breadfruit leaves. No one paid any attention to the children running amok in the aisles or the crying babies who refused to be calmed.

The congregation sang a final song while the collection plate made its rounds. A quarter or two seemed to be standard, while a dollar was generous. I hadn't brought money with me, but Alfred bailed me out. He discreetly stuck two quarters in my hand, and I made the donation in his stead.

The service concluded. The congregation strolled back home, even more leisurely than before. For the rest of the day there was only rest, conversation, and sleep. But tomorrow the rhythm of work would return.

 

 

 

 

I WASN'T SURE I LIKED THIS PLACE.

My fantasy was of gentle, prosaic islanders drifting through life in quaint isolation. They would give me an all-access pass to a cultural amusement park. They would entertain me with colorful festivals and noble traditions, and I would emerge wiser, calmer, kinder.

The reality was different. The islanders wore T-shirts and drank coffee. They attended church on Sunday. They played basketball and ping-pong. They listened to the world news on the radio. One was a police officer, another an airline agent. How different were they, really, from my friends back home?

I was disappointed. I wanted more fire and less electricity, more thatch and less concrete, more ignorance and less knowledge. I wanted them to know nothing of the outside world—to have no conception of baseball or Britney Spears, to be startled when I flipped on a flashlight or clicked a camera. I wanted them to be charmingly oblivious
to all outside things, exotic in every step, breath, and word. They were not.

Nor were they particularly unmaterialistic. I would not learn from them the virtues of the simple life. A few days after arriving, I was sitting by the road when I heard the sound of an engine emanating from the jungle. I had already learned that, on Ujae, the din of machinery always indicated important events. (If it wasn't an airplane, then it was a motorboat expedition or a generator being put to rare use for a party.) The source of the noise was revealed when a man came speeding out of the jungle on a moped. He drove onto the main footpath and followed it east, coolly unappreciative of the absurdity of the scene. What on earth was this man doing with this toy on a mile-long, fuel-scarce island?

“What a bike,” I heard a boy say in English. He looked at me, and pointed again at the ridiculous vehicle as it sputtered into the distance. “What a bike!” he repeated, more emphatically. What a bike indeed, I thought, but how had this child failed to learn to say “thank you” in English and yet managed to idiomatically praise a motorcycle in the same language? It wasn't until several months later that I learned the Marshallese word for motorcycle:
watabaik
.

The anonymous man's moped was merely an extreme example of an island-wide habit. In the lengths they would go to in order to acquire modern technology, they showed themselves to be even more addicted to it than Westerners. I was invited one evening to
mupi
—watch a movie—which, after three days on Ujae, already seemed like technological wizardry from another planet. I stepped into my neighbors' house and found it bare save for a TV/VCR, a stack of videos, and an alarming proliferation of small children. There was no television reception on this island, but the villagers had made up for that with home movie systems, often at the expense of such things as furniture. I was given the seat of honor, the only chair in the house, and my hosts started screening the ultraviolent war epic
The Thin Red Line
to an audience of entranced toddlers. The adults fast-forwarded through the sex scenes but left the horrific bloodshed intact.

The day after, I stumbled upon a man playing Super Nintendo. His hands, strong and calloused from a life of physical labor, took the
controls of this foreign artifact with ease. He was as adept at shooting enemy spacecraft in Gradius III as he was at husking coconuts.

Even Alfred thought nothing of shattering the early morning tranquility with an overloud radio broadcast, ruining the stargazing with the too-bright electric light, or breaking the solemnity of a church gathering with the village amplifier.

I realized that there was no back-to-nature cult in a village still living in it. There was no anti-television movement on an island with no TV reception. Technology was fun and useful, and they wanted it. Once they had it, they used it as much as they could, and the prestige and novelty of these items outweighed any irritations.

Then again, maybe they turned their radios so high because they had all gone partially deaf. The din on Ujae was intense and constant. I had noticed from day one that there was a bit of a noise issue at my host family's house. But “noise issue” was an insult to its creators. Its more accurate name was “noise
opera
.” This opera required the utmost of its performers: a warm-up at dawn, dedicated playing until midnight, and a grueling schedule of 365 performances per year. The score called for a full complement of barking dogs, a generous allotment of snorting pigs, a trio of roosters, a buzzing radio, and a percussion section of tin roofs, sounded with falling coconuts.

But these were merely the orchestral backup to the stars of the show. There was Elina, who must have studied at Juilliard. When scolding the children, her vocal range, from a rasping baritone to a screeching soprano, was extraordinary. There was baby Nakwol, a musician of unusual maturity for his age. With startling vigor and confidence, his cries of “bababababa!” sounded throughout the venue. Then there was two-year-old Easter. The projection! The emotion! Her every note invited—nay, forced—the audience to pay attention.

At daybreak, the prelude would begin: the baby's cries and the toddler's shrieks, combining in avant-garde harmonies. Then Elina would begin her imposing recitative, returning always to four refrains—
kob-webwe
(“you're stupid”),
jab jan
(“don't cry”),
na iton man eok
(“I'm going to hit you”), and
kwoj jab ron ke?
(“are you deaf?”). Tamlino and Erik would enter with their own chorus of
aluo
(“damn you”). For the rest of the day, this theme would be developed and recapitulated,
until at midnight there was again only the sound of the baby's plaintive aria, and finally silence.

I had not expected any of this. No one would have expected any of this. This was a tropical island, a distant haven, a world of nature—preindustrial, pristine. There were no jackhammers, leaf blowers, or subwoofers booming from passing cars. It seemed safe to assume that this would be a tranquil place, accompanied only by the subtle sounds of nature. Loneliness, boredom, cultural confusion—these things I could expect. But not noise. Not an ambient soundtrack, played every minute of every day, as soothing as heavy construction.

But that's how it was. If you want to take me back to that year, do not play for me the sound of the Pacific trade wind rustling wistfully through an outstretched palm frond; do not play for me the sound of gentle lagoon waves caressing the sand; do not play for me the deep roar of ocean breakers, the clicking-tweeting of a gecko, or an animated conversation in Marshallese. Play for me instead a mix tape of crying babies, screaming toddlers, and parents yelling at their children.

I soon yearned for the comparative serenity of an American metropolis.

But I was not just aggravated—I was disturbed. The noise was bad, but what caused it was worse. Marshallese parenting seemed to me both overbearing and unprotective. Every woman in the village had as many offspring as reproductive biology would allow her, but not out of any particular fondness for kids. Parents never talked
to
their children, only
at
them. Elina barked so quickly and angrily at her offspring that I wondered how many years I would have to live here before I could understand what she was saying. It would be the final exam in an advanced Marshallese language class—could you understand the women when they yell at their kids? Meanwhile, Alfred's grandparenting of Erik appeared to consist entirely of Alfred irritably ordering Erik to do something and Erik indignantly responding that he already had.

The younger children were given the bare minimum of care needed for survival. The older children, when they weren't being shouted at and ordered around, were ignored completely. Their limbs, scarred and discolored over every inch, showed that their accidental injuries
had never been treated. It was no wonder that they had so many cuts and scrapes, considering the objects strewn around the house grounds. In this place where babies crawled and toddlers played, I found discarded lighters, open safety pins, broken glass, old batteries, rusty nails, splintered wood, cigarette butts, and the jagged tops of aluminum cans.

The one exception to this harsh parenting was for the very young. Elina treated one-year-old Nakwol with tenderness and warmth. She played with him, laughed with him, comforted him, and apparently saw no contradiction between this and her treatment of the older children. I had already come to love this baby, the only person on the island who didn't notice or care what color my skin was—and the only child around whose treatment didn't disturb me. He and I had something in common, too: we both spoke minimal Marshallese and communicated mostly through gestures and babbling. He never failed to make me smile. But I also looked at him with a certain sadness, knowing that by his fourth or fifth birthday he would be no different from any other child: a feckless servant, a household pest, a mouth to feed.

As often as not, it was the older siblings, not the parents, who looked after the young children. They proved to be even harsher caretakers than their mothers and fathers. A ten-year-old, all smiles, would thrust his two-year-old charge into the white man's face, causing her to break out in hysterical crying.

Things like this were impossible to ignore because they happened in plain view. On this island, everything was exposed. The stigmatized emotions were hidden, but family relations—to my eyes, not always a pretty sight—were displayed in high-definition wide-screen view with surround sound. My own society might shock me just as much if its private parts were laid so bare—if people lived in see-through houses, broadcasting their dysfunctions to any passerby.

I worried about the well-being of the women as well. The men seemed jovial and relaxed as they nursed their coffee, chitchatted, and planned their next fishing expedition, but the women did not. Elina—who was thirty-five but looked closer to fifty after raising her brood of six—worked with grim determination for a hundred hours a week, cooking, washing, cleaning, cooking, washing, cleaning. She might find two minutes of leisure on an average day; she spent it
fanning herself with a rag, looking nowhere with nothingness in her eyes. Even Sunday was no respite. It was a day when no labor was allowed—except, of course, necessary tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare, which were women's work.