Surviving Paradise (22 page)

Mathematically speaking, this ribbon shape was the least efficient possible arrangement of a city. The shortest distance between two points was indeed a line, but a very long one at that. Any journey, no matter how short, gave one an involuntary tour of much of the town.

But the layout also lent the town a unique charm. For one thing, it made it unlikely that any given property would
not
be oceanfront. For another, it gave the town a refreshing simplicity. All those involuntary tours quickly made the city familiar. With only two directions to choose between, it was impossible to get lost. Running into your friends was inevitable—there was, one might calculate, a 50 percent
chance that you and the person you were looking for were currently on a collision course. There were no street names because there was only one street, and there were no addresses because there was no mail service other than boxes at the one post office. Taxis were a snap—stand on the appropriate side of the street, flag down one of the six cabs that arrived every minute, and then sit in the cool dryness of the air-conditioning and enjoy the ride. No need to tell the driver your destination: since there was only one road to speak of, you could simply tell him when to stop. With you in the cab were other people heading the same way; the vehicle was halfway between public and private transit. Craving a cold one for the road? Just let the driver know, and he and all of his passengers will wait, without a hint of irritation or impatience, for however long it takes you to patronize a roadside kiosk. (Feel no guilt at delaying them thus: they will do the same to you.) When you get out, pay the man fifty cents, no matter how far you have traveled within the city center, and receive a cheerful
kommool
(thank you) in response. In Majuro I came to associate taxis with ease, affability, and affordability, something I could scarcely imagine beforehand.

Majuro was the hub of a delightfully small world. In a country whose entire population was that of a single American town, the social network was a dense thicket. I opened the newspaper and perused it like a high school yearbook: I know him, I know her, I was there, I participated in that, and hey look—it's me! Three degrees of separation may have been the maximum. The owner of the land where a fellow volunteer worked was the uncle of the man who came to Ujae to build the community garden. The taxi driver's wife was from Ujae, and her sister was the mother of one of my seventh graders. It was an entire country up close, no appointment necessary. Its capital building and government ministries were open to casual walk-ins. Senators were ordinary people—Wotho Atoll's representative had a constituency of less than two hundred souls—and the president was only a minor celebrity. But in accessing this world I did have an advantage, and it was a large one: I spoke Marshallese.

The power of this cannot be overstated. Many adults in Majuro spoke functional English and happily used it with visitors. Needless to say, they were not surprised that the
ribelle
spoke no Marshallese. But
if you did speak their language, even if much more poorly than they spoke yours, it had palpable emotional power. Their faces would melt into smiles. Their formality would drop. Any hint of unease would disappear. Where before they had been cordial, now they were downright motherly. They would shake your hand and ask you how you had come to learn their tongue. Your question of where one might procure ping-pong rackets transformed into their personal quest, which they would sooner die than leave uncompleted.

I felt almost guilty about how many favors I could garner this way. One day I waltzed into the capital building in my flip-flops, on an uninvited mission to meet the president. I was confronted by two polite but suspicious security guards. I introduced myself in Marshallese, and their skepticism vanished. They chatted with me for several minutes before directing me to the president's office. President Kessai Note was referred to as His Excellency, but apparently I was worthy to meet him. I repeated my linguistic performance with the president's secretary, and she promised to try to squeeze me into his schedule when he returned from a conference in the neighboring country of Kiribati. When he came back, he was too busy, but I came tantalizingly close to receiving a private audience with His Excellency himself, for no other reason than that I spoke the language.

This was a country in which you would run into the chief justice while grocery shopping, in which the minister of justice might pick you up while you were hitchhiking, and in which the president himself could show up at a fishing tournament—where Miss Micronesia was posing next to a marlin larger than herself—in his beat-up pickup truck and attract no more attention than the occasional glance from a curious expat.

If it was easy to meet Marshall Islanders, it was even easier to meet expatriates. Every native wanted to meet me because I was a foreigner, and every foreigner wanted to meet me because, well, I was a foreigner.

The expats were a colorful crew. “I have a theory,” one fellow volunteer ventured. “You only come to the Marshall Islands if you have issues.” I had to agree that the instant fame of foreignness could be a tempting solution to certain insecurities. The big-fish-in-a-small-pond phenomenon definitely applied, and we foreign volunteers couldn't
pretend we were innocent of that motivation. You were somebody here. On Ujae, I was an American celebrity—
the
American celebrity, because there was no other Americans. To succeed as a volunteer in the Marshalls, one only needed to do better than horrible. One only needed to teach more than teachers who taught nothing, to learn more Marshallese than tourists who spoke none, to attain a higher level of spearfishing expertise than the average American. I wondered, too, if the expatriate lifestyle attracted more than its share of misfits because in a foreign country, one was not just allowed but
expected
not to fit in. Playing the oddball became one's persona and shtick, and eventually one's identity.

One expatriate had been managing a clam farm for nine years. A few ran the national newspaper, and a small horde taught at the local community college. Preachers were as numerous as teachers. The Mormon missionaries were immediately recognizable as such: they were all men, always traveled in pairs, and were even younger than I was. Their dress code—a tucked-in white shirt with nametag, black slacks, and black shoes—was woefully inappropriate for the climate. But somehow, no matter how rural their post and how hot the day, the shirt remained spotless, the slacks well ironed, and the shoes sparkling. I prejudged them as uptight and out of touch, but when I talked to them they were anything but. They were more likely to swap cultural anecdotes than to proselytize, and their fluency in Marshallese put most English teachers to shame.

One American lived a hermit's life on a deserted islet of Ailinglaplap Atoll. A chief had given him permission to live there, and he had dwelled there on and off for the last thirty-seven years. He had come to the country as a Peace Corps volunteer but dropped out after the first year before returning to spend most of the last four decades there. The island he lived on was taboo land—only chiefs and special guests were allowed to set foot on it, and women were almost always forbidden—but this man didn't seem to mind. “What do you do out there?” I asked when I met him in Majuro.

“I think,” he answered with a chuckle.

There were Chinese immigrants, reviled by every Marshall Islander I asked. Natives never talked to them. If a Chinese person entered a taxi, the Marshallese passengers turned stiff and fell silent. A sign on
the front door of the immigration office said “Immigration Office—Please Keep the Door Closed.” This was a pretty good summary of popular sentiment on the issue after the government had sold about two thousand passports to Chinese people and then discovered you can't deport a citizen. But I couldn't sympathize much with the hostility. Natives resented the fact that Chinese stores had driven local stores out of business, but the Chinese stores had won out precisely because everyone shopped there. I wondered how some of these establishments stayed afloat—such as a gas station convenience store that sold junk food and electric keyboards. (Why would anyone buy an electric keyboard there? Would they go to the gas station to look for one? Would they buy it on impulse after coming in for some Cheetos?) But these hated newcomers were obviously playing a useful role in the country. Being alienated from Marshallese society also meant being free from its mandatory nepotism, and that allowed the immigrants to run successful businesses. Marshall Islanders were voting with their wallets, and it was a landslide victory in favor of immigration.

There were foreign dignitaries: the affable Taiwanese ambassador, lawyers at the Nuclear Claims Tribunal who still grappled with the legacy of Bikini, and a mysterious Japanese man whose previous placements had been the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia and the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso. He would divulge only that he worked for a “large multinational organization,” which of course described the United Nations and international crime syndicates equally well. I secretly wondered if he was a spy.

There were sundry foreigners: the Sri Lankan physician, the Nepalese doctor, the Fijian education worker, and a transsexual Thai barber named Popcorn Delicious.

Topping it off was the American diplomatic presence. The US embassy had once been a nondescript building, but a mandatory post-9/11 upgrade had cured that forever. The front of the building was separated from the street by a fence whose bars had been replaced, no doubt at great expense, to be more narrowly spaced. This was to prevent (and I am not making this up) missiles from being shot through the gaps into the compound from handheld rocket launchers. (Such precautions reminded me of the Marshall Islands High School
handbook, which specifically prohibited such unlikely items as grenade launchers, machine guns, and landmines.) The far side of the embassy grounds, which had previously opened onto lovely ocean views, was now protected against amphibious assault by a concrete wall. The palm trees that dotted the property had been stripped of their fruit so that no diplomat would be killed in a coconut-falling accident (or maybe, just maybe, a coconut-falling terrorist plot).

The best example of overkill was the two-ton bathroom door. One room in the embassy needed to be a bunker, capable of withstanding missile attacks or restive outer islanders brandishing fishing spears until a helicopter from Kwajalein could rescue the besieged dignitaries. So the restroom was upgraded with a two-foot-thick solid-metal door, which looked more than ready to survive nuclear war. It was probably the most heavily fortified lavatory in the world. Why they chose the bathroom for this purpose, and how the staff dealt with the inconvenience, I can't imagine.

What was sad about these counterterrorism measures wasn't their excessiveness (the total cost had run well into the millions) or their moot value (the chance of terrorism in the Marshalls was vanishingly small). It was the fact that they failed even at their stated mission. The embassy had a metal detector but the international airport didn't. The ocean-side wall extended eighteen feet underground but only ten feet above ground. The fence prevented rockets from being shot through the bars but not over the bars.

Across from the embassy was the ambassador's house, where the hippieish volunteers were invited to a Christmas dinner with the conservative American ambassador. (She was a Bush appointee who had thanked the Bikinians in a recent speech for their “sacrifice for America.”) Thankfully, the meeting went more smoothly than that introduction would suggest. The ambassador's living room was divided into four quadrants, with no walls in between. Each of them alone would count as luxurious even by First World standards. “You have such a nice house,” I remarked.

“Well thank you,” replied the ambassador. “But it's not really mine. It's
the American people's
house.”

“Great!” I was tempted to say. “Can I crash here later?” Instead I replied with something pleasantly meaningless. Then she brought up
the topic of separatism in Indonesia, and I tried to sound intelligent by rehashing something I had read about it in
The Economist
.

We sat down to dinner, waited on by two Filipino servants. The diplomat, ever diplomatic, spoke a nondenominational grace. The only question I had about the food was this: was it three orders of magnitude better than what I had been eating for the last four months on Ujae, or just two?

If Ujae blurred the line between native and foreign, Majuro did so twice as eagerly. Jungle medicine had poked its head into the commercial sphere; the juice of the
nin
fruit was touted as the “miracle healer of the Pacific,” curing everything from diabetes to cancer. McDonaldization and the Marshallese no-rush philosophy had reached a compromise in a kiosk called Taco Bill's Almost Fast Food. (I once dined there, and the advertising was not false: it was indeed almost fast.) If the signs on a few trucks could be trusted, coconut oil was being tested as an alternative auto fuel. Radios piped in rap songs in Papua New Guinean pidgin English and pop offerings that declared: “I love Pacific girls! Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian—I love them all!” A poster advertised the “New sound in town! . . . Hottest Teen Group: The Marshall Islands' WEST SIDE BOYS,” whose just-released album featured such tracks as “Found You
Girl
,” “Disco,” “New Boy,” “Pump It Up,” and “Li-jera” (“my girlfriend”), and whose six members looked creepily identical in their sunglasses and white wife-beaters. Marshallese urbanites, still operating under the hunger mentality of rural life, prepared for an imaginary famine by piling food absurdly high on their plates at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Teams of two forklifts were used to tow broken-down cars. Quasi-traditional handicrafts—ranging from stunningly intricate woven ornaments to tacky heart-shaped wall hangings—hung in shops for the occasional tourist to buy. Kiosks sold husked coconuts for fifty cents apiece—but they looked wrong to me, sitting and waiting to be sold instead of coming fresh and free from the top of a tree.