Surviving Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 itfanning 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.
    Modern changes had rid the men of their most onerous responsibilities—canoe building, sea voyaging, warfare—but they had done little to reduce women’s work. If anything, modernity had created more work for them: hand washing all those T-shirts had not been necessary in a time when everyone went topless, and taking care of six youngsters was unlikely when many children died in infancy and any offspring past the third was killed as a population control measure.
    The next-door neighbors often left their four-year-old by himself, and he would howl horribly for his mother. There were two problems with this. The first was that it was a heart-wrenching spectacle, this child crying himself hoarse for an absent parent. The second problem was that it occurred right outside my house, and the noise wasn’t doing wonders for my state of mind. I didn’t want to go out there. It wasn’t my responsibility to comfort him, and I knew that if I did it once, I would have to do it a hundred times. Eventually, auditory exhaustion and a guilty conscience forced me to take action. I played catch with the boy until he cheered up. How had this become my job, I wondered? Just as I suspected, he attached himself to me. He clung to me in that way that emotionally starved children do to adults who show them affection. I had to ignore him for weeks, doing the same cruel thing his parents had done to him, before he stopped thinking of me as his caretaker.
    This was one of the many ways in which, on Ujae, I was an asshole. If I wanted privacy, I had to snub people. If I wanted control over my property, I had to be secretive and stingy. If I wanted autonomy, I had to make myself insensitive to the sobs of toddlers. I was not happy with myself, morally, in this place. I often wondered if the islanders felt the same way about me.
    Of course, I could escape all of this—the yelling, the crying, the moral angst—by leaving the De Brums’ property and taking a soothing stroll through the village. But wait. That symphony of cries was being performed everywhere. Walking along the path, I could hear each household conducting its own version of that pandemonium.Away from the De Brums’ plot, it was even worse, because these children weren’t used to me yet. So they swarmed to me—five, ten, fifteen at a time. There was no shortage of them. Every family had an infant, a toddler, a youngster, a preteen, and an adolescent. These neighborhood children were a broken record that even Elina might envy: Kwoj etal nan ia? (“Where are you going?”), Kwoj itok jan ia? (“Where are you coming from?”), Kwoj ta? (“What are you doing?”). These were questions I had learned during orientation in Majuro. Now I wished I hadn’t.
    The first question was especially popular. On this pint-sized islet there was nowhere at all to go, but still they asked me