Surviving Paradise Read Online Free PDF

where I was going. Kwoj etal nan ia? Kwoj etal nan ia? Kwoj etal nan ia? This was charming only the first two thousand times. I would be ten feet from the lagoon beach, walking toward it, wearing a swimsuit, swimming flippers, and a snorkel mask, when a ten-year-old would ask, “Where are you going?” Or a quartet of toddlers would spy me walking down the road and begin their chorus of attempts to get my attention. Today, my name might be ribelle (white person) or belle , the toddlers’ version of the same word. Or they might say “Pedge-er-ick,” their attempt at saying “Patrick,” the name of last year’s volunteer (who I must be because, after all, my skin is white). Or, if I was lucky, today they would call me “Peter,” but with the r alarmingly rolled for half the duration of the word, or the whole thing somehow rendered as “Pee-tar.” My back was already turned to them, but that made no difference; I was required to acknowledge each of them. They wouldn’t let me wave to them with my back turned or acknowledge them en masse. If I wanted these children to leave, I had to stop walking, turn around, look each kid in the eye, and wave and say “hello” to each one in turn.
    I established a few ground rules. First, I would not turn my head more than ninety degrees to acknowledge a child’s greeting. If I had already passed him and would need to crane my head backward to say hello, then he had missed his chance—better luck next time. Second, I would not respond to “Patrick” unless absolutely necessary. Third, under no circumstances would I respond to Marshallese equivalents of “white boy” or “whitey.”
    I once conducted an experiment. If I passed a group of children without acknowledging their existence in any way, how many timeswould each one say my name before giving up? The answer was twelve.
    Another day I saw Erik and Tamlino rooting through my trash after I dumped it on the De Brums’ garbage pile.
    I was learning what it is like to be famous. I was fed an intoxicating sense of importance, but I also lost all privacy. Being a big fish in a small pond also meant being a big fish in a small fishbowl. It had not occurred to me that what I might crave more than anything on this far-flung islet was solitude. For the first time in my life, I understood that anonymity was a luxury. It was a godsend to be ignored. All the honking cars and rushing bodies of a typical American street began to seem transcendentally relaxing compared to this place where everyone knew everything I did.
    Even in the center of a crowd—especially there—I was attacked by horrific loneliness. Not the least of my problems was that I couldn’t speak. I had landed on Ujae with a miniscule Marshallese vocabulary and a handful of stock phrases of the “hello,” “thank you,” and “are there any sharks over there?” variety. If the conversation involved anything other than greeting, thanking, and carnivorous fish, I was at a loss.
    A sad verbal dance began whenever an adult approached me for conversation. The islander would speak. I would listen, but not understand, and then not be able to say that I didn’t understand. The islander would repeat the statement more slowly, and I would still not understand. Then I would have to consider my options. Should I let on that I still don’t understand, thus increasing the awkwardness to an excruciating level? Should I attempt to read the context and hazard a desperate guess? Or should I simply say emman (“good”) and hope that the person hadn’t said, “My aunt died of diabetes last week”? I learned to play the odds. I developed the statistical intuition of a blackjack player, giving the response that yielded the highest probability of success. In the end, I was gambling, not communicating.
    What did this inability to speak do to me? Did it lock