Surviving Paradise (10 page)

Another beach activity was collecting shells. The children had already honed their skills by delivering shells to their parents, who would make them into necklaces and ship them to the urban centers to be sold. I had become a shell enthusiast as of the first time I walked on Ujae's beach. When word of this got out, the children began to search for shells to give to me, handing them to me in person or
leaving them on my windowsill. The youngsters also delivered the worn-down spines of dead sea urchins. They were as light as balsa wood and made a pleasant high-pitched sound when they hit into each other—ideal material for a windchime.

The colors of the seashells were more than just interesting—they were artistic. One gift from the children was a checkered spiral of red and white. Another was bright yellow stars on a night sky. Yet another was a geometric study in subtle browns. The reef fish, with their blended pastels or bold primary colors, impressed me in the same way. If I had been a painter, I would have begun a series of abstract pieces called “In the Style of the Squirrelfish,” “In the Style of the Tiger Cowrie,” and so on.

The hermit crabs had already claimed the best shells as their mobile homes. I was jealous of their beautiful possessions, but I could never bring myself to steal one. I asked the children to follow the same rule when they collected shells for me, and they agreed. Even so, I soon had far too many specimens to keep. I had to make secret journeys to the ocean beach, with my pockets full to bursting with cowries, in order to discard the less-than-perfect ones without hurting anyone's feelings.

I saw now that the children, for all their invasiveness and insensitivity, wanted to please me. I was exotic. I was easily the most interesting thing on the island. Not only that, I was the only adult who they could call a friend. A Marshallese man who joined the children in a rousing game of hide-the-pandanus would be dubbed an eccentric or worse. But the villagers knew that Americans were different. Among the weird habits of
ribelle
s—such as daily showers, obsessive reading, and swimming just for fun—was their willingness to play with youngsters.

There were impromptu games of baseball, in which a dry, sucked-out pandanus kernel was an acceptable substitute for a ball, and the bat was whatever stick or board they might find lying around. They played these games on the road, but they never had to scurry away from oncoming traffic, because there was none. I had initially been disturbed by what I interpreted as parental neglect, but I could now see one of the reasons behind this hands-off approach to caretaking: on Ujae, the children had little to fear. There were no strangers to
kidnap them or cars to run them over, and it was impossible to get lost. How overprotective, how coddling and yet distrustful American parents would have seemed to the people of Ujae.

I joined the kids on their adventures in an inflatable raft. So many naked children crowded onboard that it was hard to tell which brown limb belonged to which brown head. In America, the number of passengers would have exceeded the safety limit. On Ujae, there was no safety limit, because all the kids were expert swimmers. In America, the parents might have been less than pleased to see a soon-to-be-schoolteacher playing with naked children. Here, the parents didn't mind in the slightest.

Many of the pastimes resembled my own childhood games, and probably the games of children everywhere. But there were others that could have been played nowhere else but here. One of these I dubbed Underwater Coralhead Cinderblock Soccer Wrestling.

It reminded me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Hobbes pitches a snowball to Calvin. Calvin hits it with a bat, jumps on a sled, and slides down a hill while Hobbes tries to tag him out with more snowballs. Declares Calvin: “I love a good game of speed sled base snow ball!”

In case the game's title does not give you a clear picture of the activity, I will spell it out. A pair of children swim to a spot in the lagoon where two coral outcrops grow ten feet from each other. One of the contestants dives down and retrieves a heavy cinderblock that is lying on the sea floor. Each child stands on one of the coralheads, and then they both jump in the water. (Their eyes are wide open, completely accustomed to the salt water that made my eyes burn.) The child holding the cinderblock quickly sinks to the bottom, then tries to move the concrete slab toward the other coralhead, while the other child does everything possible to stop him. It is a test of wrestling skill, swimming strength, and, above all, lung capacity.

It was through these games that I came to know the children as something other than an invasive mob. They were less like neighborhood playmates and more like a single enormous family, two hundred strong, presumably the result of an over-successful fertility experiment. Most had known one another their entire lives, making them de facto siblings. This didn't guarantee harmony, of course—they had their insults and hurt feelings and occasional fistfights, and they would
taunt each other with the inexplicable English refrain, “ Yo yeah, King Kong, monkey!” But none of the children was consistently popular or unpopular, included or left out, flattered or teased. The boy who had been born with a square face, dry yellowish skin, and a fused neck that could not be moved independently of his torso had as many friends as anyone else. It was an egalitarian system, even if that sometimes meant equal mistreatment. (The children also showed one other family resemblance: two of them had eleven fingers. In both cases, the extra digit sprouted from the middle of the thumb, small and inoperable but complete with its own fingernail. The first time I noticed this, the individual in question had all eleven of his fingernails painted bright orange. He even used that extra thumb to count on.)

The minimal parenting the children received had only reinforced their bond. By the age of four, these children were beyond the age of parental attention. Since that time, they had raised each other. Their worlds were intimately tied to one another and to the island they lived on. All of the adults had set foot on Majuro or Ebeye, the country's two urban centers, at least once. A few had been to Honolulu for medical treatment or to the US mainland to perform their traditional dance at an arts festival. But none of the children had been outside of the Marshall Islands. Many of them had never been outside of Ujae Atoll. Some had never been off Ujae Island.

Their whole lives had unfolded in this tiny arena. They had never seen a mountain, felt a cold breeze, or eaten in a restaurant. This bit of geological exotica—a tiny, flat islet of a coral atoll—was all they had ever known.

This could explain some of the questions they asked me:

CHILD:	 So, America is really big, right?
ME:	 Yes, it's very big. Much bigger than Ujae.
CHILD:	 So, in America, how far is it from the ocean side to the lagoon side?

Or:

CHILD:	 I heard that some Marshallese people go to America, and live in a place called Arkansas.
ME:	 That's true.
CHILD:	 So how are the beaches in Arkansas?

Or:

CHILD:	Where in America do you come from?
ME:	 California.
CHILD:	 What about Patrick?
ME:	Colorado.
CHILD:	How far is it from California to Colorado?
ME:	Pretty far. It takes two hours to fly there.
CHILD:	How long would it take in a boat?

They betrayed the same ignorance when I showed them photos from home. When they saw a body of water, the question was always this: “Is that the lagoon?” When I said that it was not, they concluded that they had merely mistaken the ocean side for the lagoon side, and the lagoon (which
must
exist) was simply not visible in that particular picture. It was clear that these children conceived of America as an archipelago of fifty coral atolls called “California,” “Colorado,” and so forth. I could tell them that, in addition to warm weather and beaches, my country had cold air and mountains as tall as five hundred palm trees, but that only made them picture a hilly, chilly
island
. There was no other possibility for them. Even their language reinforced this. The word for “land,”
ane
, also meant “island,” and the word for “country,”
aelon
, also meant “coral atoll.” How could I tell them that America was land but not an island, that it was a country but not an atoll? I received truly baffled looks when I told the children that America was not an island.

It eventually struck me that it was perhaps I who was confused. My home, like every other, was surrounded by water—walk in any direction and you will find it, even if you have to travel to the tip of South America to do so. The Americas are just an enormous island divided into two regions called “continents” and referred to as “mainland” only because of their size. One could even say it is an atoll with a filled-in lagoon and a single islet stretching along its eight-thousand-mile length. In my failed attempts to convince the children that the world was not made of islets and atolls, I ended up realizing that they had been right all along. Their mental geography was just an opposite look at the same phenomenon, and their nomenclature was as logical as my own. Everything is an island, everything is an atoll—it's the truth.

This still left the question of cultural awareness. How did they think that people lived in other countries? Again it was their questions that shed light on the issue:

CHILD:

Why do you have only two siblings?

Or:

CHILD:

When you're in America, do you talk to your family in Marshallese?

Or:

CHILD:	Are there ribelle s in Hawaii?
ME:	Yes, there are a lot of them.
CHILD:	What are their names?

Or:

CHILD:

What do you eat in America? Rice, and what else?

Or:

CHILD:

So, your skin is white. Is your poop also white?

The first question was as reasonable as my question, “Why do Marshall Islanders have so many children?” And the last question, I readily admit, has a kind of logic to it. All things considered, however, it was clear that the children thought the entire human race lived in small Marshallese villages. In the same vein, they were amused by the hair on my arms and legs, although there was not particularly much of it, and by my pointy nose, although I believe that if there is a global database of nose pointinesses, mine would come in at around average.

They had, after all, seen little of the outside world. The crude explanations from the rare volunteer like myself were the majority of the information they had received. The rest came from the movies they watched. These films were not educational documentaries about life in other countries. They were movies such as the following, which reveal more about the random things that end up on remote islands than they reveal about life in the outside world:
The Thin Red Line
,
Babe
,
The Passion of the Christ
,
Leave It to Beaver
(the movie),
Rapa Nui
,
The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists
,
Robinson Crusoe
, and
Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin
. (They must have also seen
Rambo
, because they once asked me what state he was from, and
RoboCop
, because one boy was fond of adopting a robotic voice and saying, “Drop the gun, motherfucker.”)

They would watch these films on afternoons when someone had decided to sacrifice gasoline for entertainment, fire up their aging generator, and let their empty living room host as many children as it could fit. It was a tribute to the youngsters' attention span that they could sit through these movies, which I don't need to tell you were not subtitled in Marshallese. They didn't understand a word of the dialogue and laughed only at the occasional pratfall, but even
The Passion of the Christ
, not generally noted for its slapstick humor, witnessed few walkouts.

It might have been through these occasional films that the children acquired one of their more unexpected habits. They knew gang signs. Yes—straight from the ghetto, still recognizable after their journey through unknown channels across five thousand miles of ocean. “West side” and “east side” were both part of their repertoire. If they had known the meanings, these gestures would have been perfect for indicating one's allegiance in the half-serious rivalry that existed between the two halves of the island. They could even have indicated whether one lived in the Ralik (west) or Ratak (east) chain of atolls in the country, with their slightly different dialects and histories. But the children had no idea what these hand signals meant, and they chose to proudly flash them at the one time when I couldn't pretend they didn't exist: while taking their photograph. So there I was, on a remote island of an obscure Pacific country, taking pictures of the picturesque native children, and they were throwing gang signs at me.