Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould Page B

have?” He readied his hand and said, “Well, let’s see. There’s little Tairina.” He counted off one on his fingers. “Then there’s Tona, and Jela, and Bobson.” He kept counting. “And then I have two children in Ebeye.” He read off his fingers. “That’s six, I think.”
    Did he not know the number offhand? It seemed absurd, but anything was possible here. Later I would witness a lengthy debate about whether the radio operator had sixteen children or only twelve, and when I asked an old woman how many grandchildren she had, she just looked at me impassively. “ Bwijin ,” she answered (“many”).
    I began to notice and adopt Fredlee and Joja’s native body language. Raising the eyebrows meant “yes.” Furrowing the face into an exaggerated frown meant “no.” Grimacing by pulling the face musclesback until the tendons showed alarmingly on the neck meant nothing more menacing than “I don’t know.” When they told big-fish tales, they always reported the size of the animal by karate-chopping the left forearm with the right hand and measuring the distance between the right hand and the tips of the left fingers.
    If the women had a monopoly on outrageous public humor, the men held their own in the category of dirty jokes. “American men have big penises,” declared Joja, putting his two fists end to end. “Much bigger than Marshallese penises,” and he stuck his index finger out limply. Agreeing and disagreeing both seemed in poor taste. Fredlee was also fond of espousing the theory that the United States funded the Peace Corps not as charity but as a ploy to spread the Yankee seed, leaving half-American babies across the globe.
    There was another joke that Fredlee and Joja never got tired of. Thousands of Marshallese immigrants had settled in Hawaii, California, Washington, Utah, and, of all places, Arkansas. In Springdale, Arkansas, Marshallese transplants—most of whom worked at a local chicken processing factory—were so numerous that one of the ethnicities that could be checked on official forms was “Marshallese.” So it was conceivable that I would run into a Marshall Islander when I returned home. Wouldn’t he be surprised when this white American spoke Marshallese to him? Wouldn’t he be perplexed when he heard a Marshallese word, looked around and saw only nonchalant Caucasian faces? So the jokes ran freely: see a Marshallese man, yell yokwe when his back was turned, and then casually blend into the crowd while the man looks around in bewilderment. Or better yet, suggested Joja, shout kijo bwiro (“give me some preserved breadfruit”) and see his reaction to that .
    Talking was still challenging, but I found that I enjoyed the directness and unpretentiousness that resulted when communication was not automatic. The difficulty of conversation meant that even a rudimentary exchange of information qualified as an accomplishment. This was a new concept. Back in my own country, a conversation was successful only if it was witty and fluent and devoid of any awkward pauses. It was a hefty task. This new kind of talking was much easier.
    Conversation here was often a sort of scripted recital. My conversation partner and I would default to familiar, unoffensive formulasto avoid the embarrassment of silence or incomprehension. I learned to expect and correctly answer questions such as “Do you like eating breadfruit?” (correct answer: “yes—it is tasty”) and “Do you like eating pandanus?” (correct answer: “yes—it is tasty”) and “Do you like Ujae?” (correct answer: “yes, it is really good, because we eat breadfruit and pandanus, and they are tasty”). Paradoxically, my inarticulateness made me a natural comedian. If humor depends on surprise, then I no longer needed to rely on the surprise of an offbeat