by | 19 December 2005 · 8:08 pm

Paul ‘Scrooge’ Theroux on Aid to Africa

The New York Times on 15 December carried an op-ed on African aid by Hawai‘i’s resident literary Scrooge, Paul Theroux.

It seems to have been Africa’s fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help – not to mention celebrities and charity concerts – is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children’s Village. I am speaking of the “more money” platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for – and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60’s, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960’s, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi’s university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi’s minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa’s problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Although I gave up on Theroux’s travel writing after his bitchy, self-absorbed The Happy Isles of Oceania, I think he has a valid point here.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 18 December 2005 · 7:22 pm

Rodriguez on Hispanic and Asian Americans

When I was twelve years old, my father said he wished his children had Chinese friends–so polite, so serious are Chinese children in my father’s estimation. The Spanish word he used was formal.

I didn’t have any Chinese friends. My father did. Seventh and I Street was my father’s Orient. My father made false teeth for several Chinese dentists downtown. When a Chinese family tried to move in a few blocks away from our house, I heard a friend’s father boast that the neighbors had banded together to “keep out the Japs.”…

With one breath people today speak of Hispanics and Asians–the new Americans. Between the two, Asians are the more admired–the model minority–more protestant than Protestants; so hardworking, self-driven; so bright. But the Asian remains more unsettling to American complacence, because the Asian is culturally more foreign.

Hispanics may be reluctant or pushy or light or dark, but Hispanics are recognizably European. They speak a European tongue. They worship or reject a European God. The shape of the meat they eat is identifiable. But the Asian?

Asians rounded the world for me. I was a Mexican teenager in America who had become an Irish Catholic. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard Americans describing their nation as simply bipartate: black and white. When black and white America argued, I felt I was overhearing some family quarrel that didn’t include me. Korean and Chinese and Japanese faces in Sacramento rescued me from the simplicities of black and white America.

I was in high school when my uncle from India died, my Uncle Raj, the dentist. After Raj died, we went to a succession of Chinese dentists, the first Asian names I connected with recognizable faces; the first Asian hands….

No belief is more cherished by Americans, no belief is more typical of America, than the belief that one can choose to be free of American culture. One can pick and choose. Learn Spanish. Study Buddhism…. My Mexican father was never so American as when he wished his children might cultivate Chinese friends.

SOURCE: Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, by Richard Rodriguez (Penguin, 1992), pp. 160, 166, 171

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by | 18 December 2005 · 4:14 pm

Coffee, Tea, or Treason? My Lovelife as a CIA Spy

In the aftermath of September 11, I should have felt motivated to be a better case officer. But the actions, or lack thereof, of the CIA had caused me to lose faith altogether. The attacks in New York and Washington had sent everyone at Headquarters into a tailspin: to view 9-11 as anything but a massive intelligence failure, we all knew, was sheer denial. Everybody at the Agency was wondering where we had gone wrong, and what the hell we were supposed to do now.

I could no longer perceive the value of the “intel” we received from the likes of Jasna the dour Bosniak, or Ahmet and his network of pesky Albanians, or Dimé and Tony and their circle of chauvinistic [Macedonian] clowns. I argued to [my supervisor] Scott, and also in cables back to Headquarters, that these cases ought to be terminated; that in light of the events of September 11, we should cut loose our less productive agents–to include my own–and focus on developing a network of terrorist-related targets. But it seemed that my arguments–as well as, I was sure, those of other similarly concerned case officers–fell on a conspiracy of deaf ears back at Langley.

“It’s a good experience for you,” Scott said when I balked about traveling again to meet Jasna, who I knew would have nothing of import to say.

“But she’s useless,” I said. “And we pay her a ton of money–for what?!”

“Headquarters wants you to keep running the case.” Scott frequently blamed management back home.

And so I would continue to run Jasna, I realized, and a number of other second- and third-rate assets, because someone at the CIA thought it was good for my career. Privately, I conjectured what anybody who had lost a loved one in a terrorist attack would think of these pointless exercises. I felt that now, in addition to shortchanging myself, I was failing everyone else. The CIA, on the other hand, viewed me as one of their most promising junior officers.

One day, I was walking through Skopje when I got caught in the imaginary cross fire of a dozen young boys armed with plastic guns and rifles. They were playing “Macedonians and Albanians” like American boys used to play Cowboys and Indians. The boys ambushed one another from behind parked cars with a kind of maniacal zeal, and I thought, I am someone who is caught in a game. A little boys’ game that men continue to play as adults.

September 11 had upset the CIA, I realized, because it meant someone was not playing by the rules of the game. If ever there were a chilling indication that the Cold War was over, and that the traditional spy-versus-spy tactics were not going to work anymore, it should have been then.

But the CIA was, and still is, made up of men who are loath to give up playing their game.

SOURCE: Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran (Berkley Books, 2005), pp. 273-275

This is the second-crappiest* CIA memoir that I’ve read. Nearly 300 pages of narcissistic drivel and only one passage worth excerpting on this blog. The book it most reminded me of was one I read decades ago, Coffee, Tea, or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses.

Better subtitles for this CIA memoir would be: The Lousy Spook Dating Scene, How the Company Ruined My Lovelife, My Life as a CIA Narcissist, or My Life as a Jetsetting CIA Rockclimber. This was a national bestseller? Bah, humbug! What a waste.

Moran’s book seems to have made a similar impression on Amazon reviewer Raja “Punjeeb”.

*The crappiest CIA memoir I’ve read so far is Robert Baer’s Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (Three Rivers, 2004). Baer’s book needs further disclosures after the title, something along the lines of “As spoken into Intercontinental hotel bar taperecorders across the Middle East” and “How to ruin your credibility even with readers not hostile to your thesis.”

Amazon book reviewer Alejandro Contreras is pretty much on the mark about Baer, but still overrates him:

As one reads this book, one gets the impression that Baer became convinced of the Saudis’ double game, and wrote this book without fully structuring his thoughts and without bullet-proofing rationally his arguments.

What we get, then, is a somehow salad mix of anecdotes from Baer’s experience at the CIA and afterwards. These stories are almost randomly mixed with stories Baer heard and with some (possibly true and proved) historic facts.

Maybe I’ll post a few examples if I can find the time and patience.

UPDATE: Yikes. Read Daniel Drezner’s blogpost, entitled Worst Tradecraft Ever, about the CIA’s unbelievable bungling in Italy.

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by | 17 December 2005 · 5:51 pm

Selling Baseball to the Anglosphere, 1888

In 1888, an American baseball player and businessman set out to promote baseball across the Anglosphere.

The Spalding Tour was the event which brought baseball to Australia. It introduced the nation to the game that seemed forever destined to live in the shadow of cricket. It was big and brash, expensive and lavish – the Spalding Tour was all of the things that other nations expected of Americans. Albert Spalding (1850-1915) had been a successful baseball player during the formative years of the sport. By the time of his famous tour, he was a team owner, a baseball entrepreneur and a sporting goods businessman. According to the English-born baseball journalist, Henry Chadwick, the Spalding Tour of 1888 was the “great event in the modern history of athletic sports”

As a leading player and later, manager, Spalding was so convinced that the world would turn to baseball that he took the entire Boston team to England in 1874. He gained some support there for the sport, even a match at Lord’s. This baseball tour also had the distinction of beating a top rated cricket team at cricket. The English were polite but reserved in their enthusiasm for the new American game.

This Spalding tour did not yield any profits but it did introduce the game overseas. Spalding remained committed to encourage future tours. He later reflected upon the England Tour of 1874 in his Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide of 1890. Here he noted that attempt to introduce baseball to England was a failure. Several years later, after the Spalding Tour had visited England in March 1889, this view was still accurate. Indeed, the British press made this dubious assessment of baseball:

“The pitcher seems to have it all his own way … there is an extraordinary amount of “work” on the ball. The result is that the unfortunate batsman, be he ever so skilful, makes but a lame and feeble display … the odds against him are so great that our English love of fair play is offended … For this reason, baseball will never be popular in England.”

Spalding always denied he was trying to displace cricket in Britain and Australia. He only wanted to make it “one of the kindred field sports of the country. The reader cannot help but think that Spalding was showing his true feelings when he noted: “Baseball is a sport for the masses, cricket for the leisure classes. Baseball takes 2-3 hours, cricket takes 2-3 days. Spalding also was concerned that, with the development of team sports, there seemed to be few sports in common between the major English speaking countries such as Canada, America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

SOURCE: Time and Game: The History of Australian Baseball, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), online edition, chapter 1

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by | 17 December 2005 · 8:22 am

Penal Colony Self-government

Laurence Jarvik notes that “Felix Kulov, the current Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, a former Mayor of Bishkek and KGB officer, was sent to a Soviet-style penal colony by the country’s former ruler, Askar Akayev.” Here’s a short excerpt on self-government in Kulov’s penal colony from an interview with him on Ferghana.ru.

What is a penal colony? A territory fenced in, with watchtowers and soldiers on them, with people living inside that territory. It is absolutely deserted by night. Just two men somewhere on the tower, warrant officers on duty. They are unarmed, but have a radio to make their reports. A Soviet system, you know. A penal colony, not prison. In Western movies all cells open simultaneously, prisoners take their daily walk, and get herded back in later on. That’s probably how things are done there, I do not know. It is different in our penal colonies. You get in, there is not one other prisoner around, you are on your own. Decades of the Soviet regime and this penitentiary system resulted in appearance of certain rules.

Say, a prisoner is not supposed to carry a knife openly. No fights are permitted. Whoever has to settle some issue in that manner, they have to go to the so called forbidden zone beyond the barbed wire. The survivor comes back. That’s logical, or there will be endless fights. Sure, they occur too, but they always incur a punishment. A prisoner who got drunk should not show it because not everyone has access to booze. Prisoners do get drunk, but they are supposed to behave themselves. They’d have killed each other in no time at all otherwise. They are all “heroes” there, you know. Shortly speaking, it took many generations of prisoners literally decades to work out all these rules.

Some men become thieves by statute which elevates them to the highest status of the underworld hierarchy. It is they who see to it that these rules are observed and enforce them whenever necessary. Here is one of the rules. Whenever someone puts someone else on drugs, makes this someone else a needle-freak, then this man is in real trouble. He’ll be beaten to the inch of his life, until he wishes he did not do it. Whenever it is done in that other life, beyond the barbed wire and fence, it’s all right. In a penal colony it is forbidden.

The first principle of self-government in a penal colony is to govern yourself very carefully. LaurenceJarvikOnline posts a longer excerpt.

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by | 16 December 2005 · 6:02 pm

Foreign Workers in Kobe Shipyards, 1944

We [young men drafted from Korea] worked on a huge military ship, camouflaging it from the American planes. When they took it off dry dock we finished the top and the inside. This work had to be done deep in the bottom of the ship. The workers banged away with rivets and machinery, making huge noises that reverberated inside the ship. Those workers went down in the morning and came out late at night. They never saw the sun. The black dust flew around in there and covered them with soot, so they were all black–their whole bodies, all black.

The officer on board ship chose me to be his deputy and ordered me to take refreshments to the other officers and guards. Because of that, I didn’t suffer too badly. Part of my job was to deliver lunches to the Japanese guards. In their box lunch they had white rice and other tasty things, but even so, these bosses were so spoiled that they complained about the quality of their food. They yelled, “This is not fit for human consumption. Not even pigs would eat this!” They actually tossed it to me, and yelled, “Here, you eat this.”

When they did that, I shared it with my friends because they were really starving. The rest I stashed away, dried it, hid it, so I could take it with me when I got ready to escape. I did this for several months.

Prisoners of war worked there also, mixed in with us. These prisoners were mostly British, captured in Singapore. You could tell they had been starved–they were just skin and bones. They looked so emaciated that even we, who were hungry, thought they looked starved. They were brought to the ship in shackles, then the shackles were taken off. They scrounged in the garbage cans for any scraps of food.

I felt so sorry for them that I shared cigarettes in secret. They said to me, thank you, thank you, so many times that I felt embarrassed for the little I could do. If I had been caught, of course, my own life would be in danger. Although we couldn’t really communicate, whenever they saw me they smiled, laughed, and called out. There is no question that some things that one human being should never do to another had been done by those Japanese.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), p. 125

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by | 15 December 2005 · 8:54 pm

Topsy-turvy Chaos of Liberation, Korea, 1945

Life for the Japanese changed overnight [after the liberation of Korea in 1945]. In our Chongju area, our people policed themselves, and treated the Japanese well. The Japanese went to live in shelters or schools, and went out during the day to find jobs. We ourselves hired a Japanese woman as our maid.

One man who had been the middle-school principal was reduced to living at the shelter and going out during the day to seek work. One day two boys saw him and they thought he looked familiar. When they got close and recognized their former principal, old habits took over. They automatically stopped and gave him their respectful bow, even though he now dressed as a rag picker. He returned their bow, and right there shed tears, to think that the boys still respected who he was, not what he had become.

As for me, one day, walking toward Toktal village to visit Grandmother, I noticed a Japanese family trudging dejectedly along the road in the opposite way, toward Chongju city. I gasped when I recognized the school principal and his family from Chonch’on where we had lived earlier. They had been our friends. I didn’t know what to do. I hung my head and pretended I didn’t see them. To this day I am ashamed that I couldn’t even greet them.

In our north part of the country, when the Japanese packed up to leave, no one really knew how to rule in their place. People tried to police themselves and in some areas it worked better than others. Where we lived, in Chongju, it was calm and orderly. Much later I learned that terrible things happened in some places, especially in Hamgyong Province to the northeast near the Russian border. Anti-Japanese nationalists let out all their frustrations, and also the Korean communists, who had been biding their time, became militant. Cruel guerrilla attacks made everyone nervous. Nobody really knew who was in charge.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 143-144

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by | 15 December 2005 · 8:15 pm

Friends and Neighbors in Defeat, Korea, 1945

CHIN MYONGHUI, (f) b. 1932, housewife, South Hamgyong Province:
My father had lived in both Russia and Japan. When he returned to Korea, he got a job teaching in Wonsan, South Hamgyong Province, and became principal, which was very unusual for a Korean. Almost always, school principals were Japanese.

Because of Father’s high position, we lived in a Japanese neighborhood and my best friends were Japanese. I did not know or use any Korean language at all, not speaking or reading or writing.

After liberation, the Koreans said my father was pro-Japanese, a running dog, because he was so high up. They almost lynched him. Then the Russian army came, and they wanted someone who could speak Russian to help them out. Father said no. So because of these two events, he fled to south Korea, leaving the rest of the family in the north. Later we made our own way to the south.

KIM P. [ANONYMOUS], (f) b. 1931, housewife:
When the war ended, everyone stopped using Japanese and started speaking Korean again. I was young, and I had never spoken Korean in my entire life. Since I didn’t know a single word of Korean, I repeated the sixth grade just to learn to speak my own native language.

YU TOKHUI, (f) b. 1931, housewife, South Ch’ungch’ong Province:
I noticed that the Second World War upset the entire social order of our village. My uncle had many servants and they all knew their places, but when the war required the young men to be drafted into the Japanese army, every young man was taken, servants and yangban, all went together, and it blurred the hierarchy. Everybody’s fate was the same, so they all became equal. Because of that, after the war, many of the servants moved out of Uncle’s house and moved to other cities. The old order crumbled.

PAK SONGP’IL, (m) b. 1917, fisherman, South Kyongsang Province:
On August 15, I finished ferrying doctors out to the troop ship in the Pusan harbor, docked my boat, and went upstairs in the office building. I had no idea what had happened. I saw the Japanese workers in the office wailing, banging on the desks, banging the floor. I can see them today in my mind. These very ones who had been so sure they were invincible. The next thing they did was drink themselves into a stupor. They went crazy. It was the tragedy of a nation in defeat.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 145-146

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by | 14 December 2005 · 5:51 pm

Sacred Texts and Talismans in the Digital Age

Michael Hyatt, a religious publisher with a blog, is convinced e-books are the wave of the future, just as soon as the right very, very booklike reading device comes along.

The blogpost compares iPod vs. hardware platforms for distributing music, but the extension of this model to the distribution of books doesn’t seem quite parallel. Some of the comments to his post are pretty interesting, but I’d like to focus on the implications of sacred texts as talismans in the digital age.

Electronic editions seem best for periodicals and reference works, but not for novels, and not for bath or toilet reading. Religious publications seem to be expanding in both print and electronic media. A lot of people have bought Bible-concordance software packages in addition to the more talismanlike print edition. Concordance software is a powerful tool, especially for matching translations with originals, but it’s harder to make the transition to treating a CD or an e-book as a sacred talisman.

Two problems for e-Bibles:

1. “Do you swear, on this electronic device, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

2. When I was a kid, Baptist Sunday schools classes sometimes used to have “sword drills”–competitions to unsheathe our Bible “swords” and find the page on which a particular book, chapter, and verse was located before anyone else did. I don’t know how that would work if Bibles were handheld electronic devices. I suppose the competition could be to input the best combination of search terms to make the shortest possible list of search results to choose from.

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by | 12 December 2005 · 5:27 pm

Saipan After World War II

On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan in 1944, former Peace Corps Volunteer P.F. Kluge spoke to a group of veterans and residents on the island. The text of his speech appears in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (Project Muse subscription required). Here are a couple of excerpts.

Saipan in the 1960s

In launching a large Micronesia program, the Peace Corps had advertised, only half ironically, that it was going to paradise. The result was an ambitious, overextended, and controversial program involving hundreds of volunteers. We joked that if the same ratio of volunteers to locals prevailed in, say, India, there would be no young people left in the United States.

The Saipan we came to was no paradise, that was clear. Almost a quarter century had passed since the shooting had stopped, and yet the place was still shaped, defined, by the battle that had been fought here. Long after the combat stopped, long after the naval administration walked away from its camps and Quonsets and airfields, the island was … well … haunted. It was like a theater that had been abandoned by actors and by audience, a place still littered with costumes and props, ticket stubs and programs in the aisles. Have you ever, driving around America, gone past an old outdoor drive-in theater, the big screen still standing, weeds in the parking lot, long semicircular rows of those little parking-meter-like poles evenly spaced, and the ruins of a rickety, graffiti-marked projection booth in the middle of it all? That was what Saipan felt like.

It had a kind of sullen magic. Scarred, handsome, and in its way, beautiful. It invited exploring. It made you think. And it was all about the past; it was about some of you who gather here now. It was about you, this sighting out from the invasion beach at landing craft and tanks impaled on the reef. It was about you, when I went swimming off the rusting breakwaters and half-sunken barges at Charley Dock. It was about you, traveling in and off the islands, waiting at little Kobler Field for a DC-3. You were there, your spirit lingered at Isley Field, with overgrown bunkers and revetments, all the giant footsteps of another time. Saipan then was one of those rare, dear places where you could confront history without a ticket, a tape-recorded spiel, a forced march through a museum, and a sign warning you about all the things you weren’t supposed to do. In the villages–­Garapan, Susupe, Chalan Kanoa–­it was about you, in the remnants and ruins of destroyed Japanese buildings, bullet-pocked walls and cisterns, overgrown gardens; about you as well in the scrap metal and lumber taken from the emptied internment camps, hammered into houses, and collected and rehammered after typhoons, when people came back from bunkers and old Japanese buildings where they had taken shelter during the storms. You were on the roads, in surplus jeeps the Saipanese had purchased at $1 each. You were in the roads themselves, those roads that, more than anything else, made Saipan special: it was the only Trust Territory island west of Majuro where you could spend more than a minute in third gear….

Saipan Today

Now, in an island vastly transformed since becoming part of America, there remains cause for celebration and concern. What I love, maybe more now than before, is the wild-card vitality, the buzz and hurly-burly, the characters who land­in some cases, wash up­here, searchers, dreamers, tax-dodgers, flimflam men, the hits just keep coming. What characters, what schemes, especially in the early years: an X-rated Doonesbury cartoon. This was let’s-make-a-deal time, the coming of disco, duty-free karaoke, poker machines, etc, etc. A time in which opportunity shaded into opportunism. The world discovered Saipan; Saipan discovered the world. Things got complicated and still are. The Saipan tourist industry is at the mercy of ups and downs in Japan, the wanderlust of mainland Chinese, the health of airlines, the outbreak of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], the risk of terrorism. The garment industry thrives in the shadow of regulations, soon to go into effect, that will permit Chinese garments made in China into the US market. Will Chinese need to come to Saipan to sew? In its moment of greatest strength, Saipan is singularly vulnerable to outside forces beyond its control. All this is another way of saying it has ceased in an important way to be an island at all. Forget your images of island life: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Fantasy Island, Napoleon on St. Helena. Forget the familiar island adjectives: remote, isolated, lonely, insular, self-sufficient. They don’t apply. Saipan’s not an island anymore. It’s all connected.

The island’s main export may be irony. I saw the first Japanese tourists in the late sixties: decorous, dark-suited, camera-toting groups, middle-aged and older. I attended the opening of the first hotel, the Royal Taga. First and last, I thought. Was I wrong! Who could have guessed that a World War II battleground would turn into a Japanese Florida? Or that its transformation would mimic the 1944 campaign, first taking the invasion beaches, then heading north toward Marpi, duty-free shopping, souvenir and convenience stores and gaming emporia shooting galleries following along behind? And, among these nearly 500,000 visitors per year, there are fewer and fewer who come for the reasons that unite us today. They walk past pillboxes and monuments on their way to the beach. Was there a battle here? Well, that was then and this is now. A famous victory? Never mind: sunburn lotion is their armor. Against this tide of indifference and forgetting, the memories we share and renew may amount to more than history. They may offer guidance in times ahead.

Talk about garment industries, talk about hotels and realize that they have one thing in common: a reliance on outside capital and outside labor. The Saipanese are agents, middlemen­not bosses, and rarely employees. Where are the Saipanese? The most enthusiastic celebrants of the US Commonwealth–­and there is much to celebrate: hospitals, businesses, a likeable junior college–­turn quiet when I inquire. The Saipanese are outnumbered, nearly two-to-one, on their own island, that’s for sure, outnumbered by those waves of foreign workers, garment makers, security guards, barbers and beauticians, hostesses and maids, farmers and hard-hats who have come to do the island’s heavy lifting. There were around 11,000 people in the Northern Marianas in 1967, mostly local, and now there are 75,000, mostly alien. Be careful what you wish for. Saipanese are a minority on their own islands­–an elite minority, to be sure, and determined to stay that way, but a minority nonetheless. What, then, are they up to? What is their work, job, occupation, trade, calling? Their purpose or their passion? This is something that they may still be discovering. It’s taking time. For the moment, most island citizens who work are employed by local and commonwealth government. That is cause for wonder. It will take a few trips to know whether the situation I’ve described can last: an entrenched government contending with outside money, transient workers. I will not predict the worst: the island has a way of dodging bullets, pulling through. It has some magic. But if I predicted happy endings, we’d have to define terms.

No island is an island anymore.

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