Here’s the set up: It’s August 2003, and Peter Rudiak-Gould, 21, has volunteered at WorldTeach, a nonprofit organization that places teachers in schools throughout the world. He’s selected one of the hardest duties – solo teaching duty on a remote island called Ujae, which is part of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia.
Ujae is as teensy as it is remote: population 450, land mass: one-third of a square mile. Rudiak-Gould picked it because he, like so many, romanticized the remote. He was seduced by the promise of a simpler life, and of exoticism and natural beauty.
Well, the natural beauty part met its promise, but the rest proved to be…shall we say, more nuanced? He finishes exploring the island, circumnavigating it in 45 minutes, so it’s sort of boring, and he can’t communicate with anyone at first, and he’s lonely. The sun is omnipresent, the heat malevolent, and the food is bland. The people shout, and treat their children harshly, these children shriek in a kind of nasal Conehead-esque alarm as a way of communicating displeasure. Plus – and this would definitely rule me out – you wake up some mornings covered in flying cockroaches. The school is a mess, the culture doesn’t support education, and plus, everyone seems to idolizes the last volunteer who was there and constantly compares our hero to his predecessor unfavorably.
But Rudiak-Gould isn’t the sort to let his senses get obscured by sulking. He appreciates and admires the resourcefulness of people who live without any possibility of shopping – for instance he learns to fix a flip-flop by fashioning string out of a torn sheet, and attaching it with the help of a sharp rock and a pencil. He enjoys the island’s conception of time, particularly for the men who were freed from the work of subsistence hunting by government food subsidies, and have elevated the art of coffee klatch into a leisurely art form. And, he sheepishly admits, he enjoys being the local celebrity, as the one white guy/foreigner on the island.
Surviving Paradise is an account of the year that Rudiak-Gould spends in the Marshall Islands. While the book is roughly chronological, it’s hard to classify in form – it’s not a travel journal and it’s also not a unified narrative. It’s more of a collection of well- knitted sketches that as a whole amount to a portrait of a lifestyle — what life is like in Ujae at this particular moment in history, as its people blending their traditional ways and attitudes with the influences of the 21st century and the developed world.
Rudiak-Gould is particularly adept at showing how tradition and outside values intersect and interact, providing deft description of traditional Marshallese fishing techniques, say, while at the same time allowing us to see Ujae kids making gang signs and wearing t-shirts that say “I –Heart- Being a Princess”, and interjecting their games with quotes from movies that they watch on video, like “drop the gun motherfucker”.
At the same time, the book also does a good job of capturing the startling change in self-conception that happen when you are in a self-imposed temporary exile. For instance, about midway through the book, he takes Christmas break in Majuro, the biggest city on the Marshall Islands, where he sees white people — including his own reflection in the mirror — for the first time in months:
“I was shocked to see what I had become. I was bearded, and my brown hair had become long and streaked with bleached blond from sun and saltwater…I was even more shocked to see what I had always been: Caucasian. I had never noticed that before.
White people now looked very peculiar: sickly, bleached. Their hair was unnaturally light, and the high lists of their complexion were too reddish. I could see the blood glowing pink right under their skin. Caucasian children looked like ghosts.”
But here’s what I find the most interesting about Surviving Paradise: while it’s a portrait of a lifestyle, and of its participant-observer, it’s not really about particular people. We don’t really learn that much about what makes any individual on the island tick – Rudiak-Gould included. He observes his surroundings, and himself in those surroundings, with a clinical but compassionate gaze. His tone is amused but restrained – in fact, I got to thinking he was British and was startled when he reminded me midway through the book that he’s from California. (Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noted this, as I just spotted on his website.)
We don’t know what, besides obvious things like air conditioning, he misses about California. (And I didn’t know until I visited his website that he’s from Berkeley — he doesn’t say in the book whether he was from a city, the suburbs, a farm, or what.) We don’t know what his life was like growing up, what his romantic inclinations or attachments are, what music he likes. Towards the end, he mentions two people who he refers to as his closest friends on the island, but we never see that friendship unfold. He refers to letters and packages from home that were sustaining, but we don’t know who they’re from or what the substance of that sustenance is for him.
I actually liked this restraint — I originally wrote lack of histrionics – since I think most stories of this type stray into needless, seemingly endless, self-disclosure but it would have been interesting to have had, say, an understanding of what his experience of childhood was, for instance, given that he describes the Ujae way of childhood in great detail. In any event it’s certainly not a surprise to learn that he’s studying anthropology, since that’s clearly his natural stance.
But for whatever Surviving Paradise lacks in strong characters, it more than makes up for in its portrait of evolving intellectual understanding of a place, from confusion into insight. One of the brooding questions he has about Ujae is about its treatment of children: they’re basically on their own after age four. He moves from a position of disgusted judgment to understanding, and something just short of acceptance, which seems just about right to me. It’s a process that I’ve experienced myself, albeit in a different environment – rural Alaska – and it’s one that’s rarely well-depicted in travel writing of any length.
Oh, I should add that Surviving Paradise has more urgency because the low-lying Marshall Islands are in imminent danger because of rising ocean waters thanks to global warming – besides which, this place should dwell more on our American minds, considering that we used a part of it – the Bikini Atoll – as a nuclear proving ground at the end of World War II, the horrifying aftermath of which exists to this very day. But those are additional justifications for buying the book, the story itself only briefly touches on either subject.