Surviving Paradise (9 page)

Other words were simply bizarre:

rabwij:
to warm one's bottom by the fire

pektaan:
habitually defecate on the ground

kiddik:
memories of those little things we used to do

jeja:
make a sound of pleasure while sleeping because of good dreams

This one I merely found amusing:

palemoron:
favorite of a chief

I suppose there was hope for me after all.

Other curiosities of the Marshallese language were the many expressions that referred to the throat. In the Western world, the heart
was the metaphorical seat of emotion, but in these islands it was the throat. When I thought about it, both were equally sensible, or nonsensical. Hence these idioms:

utiej boro:
“high throat,” proud

etta boro:
“low throat,” humble

erreo boro:
“clean throat,” honest

pen boro:
“hard throat,” stingy

boro-kadu:
“short throat,” short-tempered

boro-lap:
“big throat,” wasteful

boro-pejpej:
“shallow throat,” fickle

Marshallese spelling was a mess: a new system designed by linguists overlying an old system devised by missionaries coexisting with a transcription scheme used in the dictionary. The first was consistent but riddled with arcane accents that would drive the most determined user of Microsoft Word to despair. The second was simpler but vexingly inconsistent. The third was flawless except for the fact that it required a doctorate in linguistics to understand. Among expats, Marshallese was infamous for the three distinct
n
sounds, the two
l
sounds, the two
m
sounds, the two subtly different rolled
r
sounds, and the bestiary of freakish vowels, several of which sounded like distressed moans. I had a bachelor's degree in linguistics and a habit of pondering comparative phonology just for fun; nonetheless I could never fully explain the sound system of the language, the alphabet, or how the language could be properly spelled.

As much as I grew to love the Marshallese language, I couldn't bring myself to call it beautiful. Marshallese wasn't like any language I had heard. It was closely related to a few neighboring tongues—Kiribati, Kosraean, and Chuukese, if you happen to speak those—but only distantly related to more familiar languages like Hawaiian, Samoan, and Malay. It was vaguely nasal, strung together with vowels that were disturbingly halfway between their familiar cousins, and did not invite comparison to gently flowing water or passionate arias. It lacked the simple vowels and short syllables of Hawaiian or the pleasing lilt of Italian. I did, however, find a gem in the dictionary. The phrase for “tears” was
dannin komjaalal:
“the liquid of sorrowful gazing.” That's downright poetic. And I found it pleasant that a single
phrase,
yokwe eok
, could mean “hello,” “goodbye,” “I love you,” or “I'm sorry for you.” The following dialogue could be real:

PERSON A:
Iaar ba, “Yokwe eok. Ij yokwe eok,” ak lio eaar ba, “Yokwe eok.”

PERSON B:
Yokwe eok.

It would mean:

PERSON A:
I said, “Hello. I love you,” but she said, “Goodbye.”

PERSON B:
I'm sorry.

WHEN I WAS EXHAUSTED WITH THE TASK OF SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE,
thankfully there was a less verbal way of interacting. Fredlee, Joja, and a large percentage of the village men were avid ping-pong players, and their skills with the racket were intimidating. I should not have been surprised; a life spent mastering the arts of fishing, husking, and building had given them uncanny aim and coordination. Even so, I had not expected the list of the remote islanders' skills to include a mean game of table tennis.

This was not, however, the ping-pong of my childhood. The table was a limp piece of waterlogged plywood, more or less rectangular but significantly smaller than code and riddled with grooves and holes. It was balanced between a gas canister and a barrel of different heights, and the sloping ground didn't quite rectify the tilt. The whole contraption was dismantled after every session and reassembled the next day, presumably so that its parts could be used for other purposes in the meantime. Somehow, the men had gotten their hands on two rackets, a dozen balls, and an almost intact net.

The rules were as funky as the table. It was winner-stay-in, without exception. Serving was erratic: the player who served at the beginning of one rally was whichever person had happened to pick up the ball after the last rally. The next man up for play announced the score of the current round, and he was required to do it in a deliberately confusing way: if the score had been
juon aolep
(“one all”) and then
had become two to one, the announcer would simply say
ruo
(“two”), not
ruo juon
(“two one”). When a player reached the score of six, the announcer would start counting over from zero, so that
ruo
(“two”) could mean either “two” or “eight,” depending on the context. If the ball bounced off a groove in the table or fell through a hole, the point still counted.

The strangest Marshallese twist on this game was the
ajimaj
, a word that seemed to have no use outside of table tennis. Saying this word doubled the odds of any smash—if you won with that hit, you gained two points, and if you lost with that hit, your opponent gained two points. How did they invent this rule? Where did the word
ajimaj
come from? Was it Marshallese, was it American, was it both, or was it neither? I had the same question about the entire society.

So it was an odd game, punctuated with shouts of “
Ajimaj!
” and “
Orror!
” (“damn it!”), delayed by searches for the ball among banana trees and rotting leaf piles, and with the audience sitting on coco-nuts—but it was still, more or less, ping-pong.

I enjoyed entering the fray, but not in hopes of winning. Fredlee had the habit of staying in until he grew tired of demolishing his opponents with effortless smashes and well-timed cries of “
Ajimaj!
” “You will be waves, dashing yourselves against the rock that is me”—that is what his eyes said, in the universal language of intimidation. But it was always lighthearted, and the other men and I shared in the pride of the underdogs.

In the company of these men, learning Marshallese lore, getting a handle on the language and a ping-pong racket, I started to seem and to feel less like a stranger. I became comfortable with a combination of solitude and native
bwebwenato
. I was surprised to find myself crossing out loneliness on my list of difficulties.

Here was another unexpected pleasure. Building myself up from the level of a child, a paltry social success counted as a major accomplishment. Coming to Ujae had been an experiment in self-deprivation, and discovering that I could survive under those circumstances gave me a powerful feeling. It was a time to see what was necessary and what was not.

 

 

 

 

“BRING LOTS OF LONG BOOKS.” THAT WAS THE SUGGESTION I TYPICALLY
received when I told my friends in America that I was going to spend a year in the Micronesian equivalent of a Kansas farm town. But I was skeptical. The islanders spent sixty-five times as long in this backwater, and I doubted that they passed that lifetime in a state of soul-draining ennui.

Almost a month into my new life on Ujae, experience had proved me right: I overcame boredom almost immediately. Here I took a lesson from the children: there is always something to do. Some of the youngsters had never left Ujae, yet none of them complained of boredom. (The one exception to this was during my English classes, as I would find out in a few days when school started.) One would be more likely to find a child at loose ends in the First World, where every imaginable pastime lay at his fingertips.

I came to the conclusion that boredom has little to do with the number of available activities and much to do with how well one is integrated into one's environment. I would hazard the opinion that no indigenous society suffers from a lack of entertainment, no matter how isolated or austere its homeland. There are always possibilities for recreation, and people have had thousands of years to find them. If the options are limited, that only means that the locals will be incredibly skilled at the few things they do.

I once watched a nine-year-old boy skipping stones on the beach at Ariraen. Each stone would jump once, twice, then five times more, until each hop became so small that the rock appeared to glide over the surface of the lagoon. At last it would sink, fifty yards from where it had been thrown. If young American rock skippers had seen this, they would despair. Farther down the beach, a girl was flying a kite one hundred feet in the air, and the children were trying to peg it with rocks. They were never more than ten feet off. Then Tamlino appeared with an ingenious toy: a blowpipe made from a single plant. The weapon was the long, hollow stem, and the ammunition was the tiny green fruits. His aim was impeccable. He succeeded in annoying his older brother.

The happiest I had felt in four weeks on Ujae was joining the youngsters in their beach games. I discovered their charm and inventiveness, and I realized they could be a joy when I did not demand peace or solitude. They played all sorts of games on the beach. The girls would sit and pat the sand in front of them into a little semicircle. Then they would look for discarded objects—a plastic shard, an old battery, a bit of driftwood—and carefully arrange them in their canvas of sand. They might spend half an hour in that spot, perfecting their little world: arranging, rearranging, adding, subtracting, and always patting down any stray bits of sand to maintain a firm background. The items did not appear to stand for anything. It was not a game of house with a seashell representing the mother and a rock representing the father. It was just a solo act of abstract expression.

Next to these girls, a boy might be playing another solitary game, holding out the tips of his index, middle, and ring fingers in a little equilateral triangle and using this printing press to poke patterns of
holes in the sand. He would challenge himself to see how fast he could draw a perfect pyramid of dots in this way. Next to him, a group of young teenagers would be playing dodgeball-meets-monkey-in-the-middle: the unlucky middleman had to dodge a ball thrown back and forth between two other players. It would end, invariably, with three sand-covered children collapsed in giggles on the beach. There were sleight-of-hand games, too, played with a rock and three coconut half-shells.

The children often invented new games on the spot. In the West, a caretaker would be watching the youngsters' every move, and any play with a dangerous object would last all of five seconds before the horrified adult put a stop to it. Here, the children were free to play with what they pleased, and they rose to the occasion by doing so safely. One day, I saw two ten-year-olds discover an old wooden board with the sharp end of a nail sticking out of it. They gathered four or five embryonic coconuts, about the size of tennis balls, and buried them in shallow holes on the beach. Then they took turns whacking the sand with the nail end of the board. If they happened to hit a coconut, impale it, and retrieve it from the sand, then that counted as one
ek
(“fish”). They played to see who was the best fisherman. I suggested that the game be called
Joda Woda
(“bad fisherman, good fisherman”) and the children approved.

Realizing their love for playing in the sand, I wondered if they knew tic-tac-toe. I was thrilled, in a wow-this-really-is-the-middle-of-nowhere kind of way, to discover that they had never heard of it. Of course I couldn't resist the urge to teach it to them. Thus I spent a little bit of the precious, finite, and depleting resource that is “bits of Western culture that have not yet reached them.” The next volunteer would therefore have one less bit of quaint isolation to be charmed by. Tic-tac-toe was a hit: none of the children forgot how to play it or say its whimsical name.