RobOnGuam.com

Korea

Bound for Seoul

I'm off to Korea!

I couldn’t afford two vacations off island this summer, but I can manage one. Bali is off the calendar—maybe at Christmas—but in the meantime my friend Chul has asked me to come visit him in Seoul, and I’m going. I ordered my ticket earlier this week, found and confirmed a room at a guesthouse recommended by someone I met here on Guam (a Canadian educator and media specialist who now lives there), and now I will be gone for my first real trip to Asia. Watch this space for reports between August 7 and 14.

Chul is a lawyer and friend of my friend David in metro Detroit. They met in upstate New York, where Chul was in law school at the University of Rochester and David was an organ scholar at the Eastman School of Music. (Chul is also a violinist, by the way.) Chul goes back to the States each year where he has many friends and some family, but his friends don’t return the favor and go to Korea because of the distance. But I’m in the neighborhood, sort of, and Korean Air has regular flights back and forth, so . . .

This will be interesting. I’ve been abroad, but never anywhere quite this foreign. (Gaum excepted, at least at times.) I bought the Lonely Planet Korea volume a while ago, and borrowed the Seoul volume from the public library, so I've been doing some research. Incidentally, the Lonely Planet series may be the best of the bunch of travel guides series: authoritative, opinionated, well researched, and well written. Excellent maps. I’m also partial to the Moon guides, which are harder to find and don’t cover as many places. Anyway, I’ll post on my plans as they shape up this coming week, though my guess is that I will go with no agenda other than to wander around, get lost, and eat lots of kimchi. Stay tuned.

Catholic

The Rome-Guam Connection

To say that the island is Catholic is like saying that the Pope is . . . well, you get the idea. About 85% of the island’s population is Catholic, an overwhelming number of people for such a small place. Those seventeenth-century Spanish traders and missionaries did their work but good.

As you might imagine, the demise of John Paul II was followed avidly, and I mean avidly by the Archdiocese of Agana. (Yes, we’re an entire archdiocese out here, with a tidy little Cathedral and everything.) Though not terribly large, the Cathedral is the center of Catholicism on island, though every village has its own parish as well. The Cathedral also has an extremely well-stocked book and gift shop—it stocks an enormous number of  Catholic animated videos for children, for example, a niche market that I was unaware existed—and a statue of John Paul out front that theoretically rotates once every 24 hours, though it hasn’t worked since I’ve been on island. It is said to be the world’s largest revolving Pope statue. This is not the sort of claim whose veracity I would immediately question.

Catholicism permeates all kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect it to. It is customary to have food blessed whenever it’s present, even at University functions—the functions of a public University, I might add. Blessings are invoked for all sorts of things here that would have the ACLU tearing its collective hair out stateside, but on Guam the lines between Church and state here are exceedingly blurred. For example, the Feast of Our Lady of Camarin, the patron saint og Guam, is a public holiday. All government employees, which include University staff, have the day off, and there are no classes. All government offices are closed.

A short aside. In case you’re wondering what Our Lady of Camarin is, there is a legend behind it. This is as near as I can piece it together from my students, as they all seemed a bit fuzzy on the exact details: The feast commemorates a statue of the Virgin Mary brought to Guam on—you might want to sit down for this—the back of a large crab, flanked by sea turtles who were bearing candles. Why was a statue of Mary being brought to Guam? What or who is Camarin? I do not know, and frankly I never get beyond the total weirdness of the crab/sea turtle aspect of the story. Anyway, this statue arrival-by-sea was hailed as a miracle (well, I should say so) so that, by some kind of weird Pacific logic, government employees get a day off. There’s a big procession at the Cathedral with a big statue of Mary carried aloft by the faithful. Pacific Catholicism is big on processions. Big on Mary too.

Novenas are another island tradition that I haven’t seen elsewhere, or rather, seen in quite the same way. Here, it’s very traditional for a family to gather together, either at a parish or at home, to say a rosary for the recently deceased. This I am familiar with; I remember doing this myself when my Catholic Grandma Sherman died. On Guam, rosaries go on for nine consecutive nights, and they are very nearly mandatory. I had a number of students missing entire weeks of my evening class last fall because they had to attend rosaries. The last night is a big party, which Guamanians, bless ’em, love to organize at the drop of a hat. Rosaries are also celebrated on the anniversary of a deceased family member’s death, and these are advertised in the newspaper, two or three pages every day. I have never seen this anywhere, and when I pointed this out to my students, they thought I was crazy. It is What Is Done here, but it’s still a tad, shall we say, unusual if you’re not used to the practice. I would guess that the Pacific Daily News makes a very tidy sum off advertising rosaries. You often see little signs by the side of the road to guide novena-goers (?) that read like “Manibusan Rosary Tonight.” The first time I saw one of these, I nearly ran off the road, trying to figure out what it meant.

And there’s a culture of Catholicism here that can be hard to explain. Political issues, for example, are often framed in terms of Catholic moral theology. Guam, for example, is very strongly anti-abortion and, I suspect, very strongly anti-euthanasia as well. The debate last year over the ballot initiative on casino gambling was cast in moral terms, for the most part. Candidates for the territorial Senate name their home parish (and high school, if it was a Catholic one), in all their official election brochures. And there are some strange legalities out here as well. I was not aware, for example, that in the Northern Mariana Islands, abortion was actually illegal, so for those of you who thought that abortion was legal everywhere in the United States, you now stand corrected. (The NMI is a U.S.commonwealth, and is even more Catholic than Guam.) That means that if you live on Tinian and have to get an abortion, you must travel off-island to Guam. It’s like being in Ireland in the 1980s.

Definesia

A Map of the Neighborhood

Someone back Stateside pointed out to me that he couldn’t find Guam on a map. You have to look closely—the island is so small that it will likely be covered by the “G” of the word “Guam” on the map—but it might be helpful if you had a sense of the Pacific neighborhood, as it were. Therefore, welcome to geography class! The things you will learn today!

First, find Sydney, which is located on the southeast coast of the large landmass that has “Australia” printed across it. (Incidentally, I don’t believe that Australia is really orange, the way it is in the atlas, though I could be wrong.) Now go up to the top of Australia. See the northernmost point, to the east of the Gulf of Carpentaria? Trace your finger due north from that point. Pass through Papua New Guinea and you’re in open ocean. You will come close to Guam, though just a little bit west of it. If you hit Japan, you have gone too far. (Tokyo is almost directly north of Guam.) Back down to between 10 and 20 degrees latitude. Guam is at 13 degrees north. You should’ve passed over a set of microdots labeled the Mariana Islands, laid out like a trail of breadcrumbs over the Philippine Sea? Guam is the southernmost of them. It’s a little blip. Well, actually, they all are.

So then. The Pacific Ocean contains three groups of islands: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. When I say this, I mean “groups” in a very broad sense: these groups don’t necessarily mean islands that are all that close together, though some of them are. Nevertheless, islands are grouped, sort of, on geographic proximity, “proximity” being a very relative term. There aren’t necessarily cultural or ethnic ties that determine why islands get grouped together, far as I know. Think of these groupings, then, as a short-hand way to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue out here.

Guam is part of Micronesia, which means “little islands,” and collectively that’s what these islands are. Not that there are any big islands out here, really; the total land area of all the Pacific islands is obviously very small, as you can see by consulting a globe. Nevertheless, the Micronesian islands are the little microdots of the Pacific, sometimes no more than an atoll that’s maybe ten to fifteen feet above sea level. If you think global warming is an issue where you live, imagine what the threat of rising ocean levels would mean on an island like that, so stop using all that gas already. Micronesia is found in the west Pacific, both north and south of the equator. When we use the term “South Pacific,” we mean either literally south of the equator or the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but Micronesia is not the South Pacific. It’s more like the West Pacific. It includes the American territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and some other independent nations: the Federated States of Micronesia (obviously), Palau, the Marshall Islands to the east, Nauru to the southeast, and Kiribati even farther east. Generally, if it’s a microdot of an island, it’s Micronesia.

Melanesia means “dark islands,” and it refers to the islands whose inhabitants have generally very dark skin tones. Melanesian skin tones are comparable to African skin tones, for point of reference, and the Melanesian Islands tend to straddle the equator, both north and south—hence the skin tones, no? Generally, Melanesia lies south of Micronesia. It includes Papua New Guinea, which is a large landmass, the western half of which is Indonesia; the Solomon Islands to its east; Vanuatu and New Caledonia to its south, and Fiji to the east of those islands.

Polynesia means “many islands,” and it covers the most ground, er, water out here, encompassing a huge triangle swath of the Pacific: the Hawai‘ian Islands at its northern point, Easter Island way to the southeast (it’s under the jurisdiction of Chile in South America, which claims it as a territory), and New Zealand to the southwest. That’s about a million miles of earth‘s surface, almost all of it water. And within it are plenty of little island groups, including most of what we call the South Pacific: French Polynesia, Tuvalu, Samoa (both regular and American), Tonga, Niue, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, and everything else in the large triangle.

Many of these islands were colonies of the European powers, and following World War II, Japan claimed some of them as well, including most of the Marianas, which is why there was such intensely fierce fighting over them in World War II. (Did you know that in the nineteenth century even Germany claimed islands out here? Neither did I.) Many of these little nations received their independence in the past few decades, and the current political map is made up of nations that you’ve likely never heard of: the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati (pronounced “keer-ee-bahss”), Palau (“Puh-low,” that is, rhymes with “bough” and not “slow”), and so on. These nations show up for the Olympics with very small national teams in specific sports. Kiribati, for example, doesn’t field a bobsled team, even if Jamaica does, but it did send a lone runner and a lone wrestler to the Athens Games in 2004. Incidentally, Guam fields its own Olympic team, for some reason—another way in which we exist on the United States’ far periphery, sort of in the nation but not of the nation.

Incidentally, a very good resource for reading up on this part of the world is Pacific magazine, which covers this huge area from a primarily, though not exclusively, political and economic standpoint and includes the real power brokers: Australia, Taiwan, China, Japan, and New Zealand. Cultural coverage is a bit less strong, but not bad. You might have a hard time finding this, unless you have access to a research library. Don’t expect it on the shelf at Borders, unless you have a maniacally thorough one, as some of them are.

Summer Reading

More Things to Read While Lying in a Hammock

As if you don’t have enough to do already, what with gardening and putzing around the lawn and bike riding, here are more book recommendations of things that I’m reading/have read for pleasure in the last few months:

Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods. Riverhead, 1998.

Bryson is a traveling Garrison Keillor, though a little more vulgar (in a good way) and every bit as funny. His previous travelogues include Neither Here not There (traveling around Europe), The Lost Continent (around small-town America; this one is seriously funny), and In a Sunburned Country (around Australia), among others. They combine insightful commentary, lots of local and social history, lacerating wit, and a surprisingly appealing middle-aged-guy-who’s-still-at-heart-a-frat-boy attitude. In this one, he walks the Appalachian Trail. That the AT exists at all in franchised, suburbanized, Wal-Marted America is something of a miracle. Really funny; read ’em all, like I did.

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Random House, 2004.

I’m still reading this astonishing story. Nafisi was a literature professor in Tehran who quit her university position when the Revolution came. The enormously repressive politics of the university when it had been brought under government control made it morally impossible to stay. (That alone is pretty amazing; how many of us would leave a job with no safety net on moral grounds?) Instead, she secretly met with a group of young women students at her home to run a kind of literary “salon” in which they read books banned by the government, which pretty much included everything. Her students lived a lot of their lives through this salon, given how awful it must’ve been to be a young woman in revolutionary Iran. Thus far, it’s just terrific. If you’ve ever doubted the power of printed word, this is the book to read.

I can't remember the author just now, but there's also a wonderful graphic novel about growing up as a little girl in revolutionary Iran called Persepolis; the author is an artist now living in Paris. It covers her life from about the age of 7 or 8 until her parents send her overseas, alone, for schooling (and to get her out of a country that's gone mad). It's well worth reading, and it now has a sequel: Persepolis II, which covers the author's return to Iran as an adult.

Howard Cruse, Stuck Rubber Baby. Paradox Press, 1995.

I really need to put a plug in for this great novel; I gave a paper on it at the Popular Culture Association conference in the spring. Howard’s a cartoonist, and this is his first graphic novel (that is, novel in comic book form). Don’t let that put you off, if you’re thinking something along the lines of The Family Circus; instead, this is a gay coming-out story set in the turbulent civil-rights era South, where Howard grew up. Friends of mine have cried as they read this, so don’t expect a “comic book.” Brilliant. Incidentally, I've been writing to Howard about his novel, which is a real boon for me. It's nice to go to a conference, have someone argue a point of interpretation, and calmly explain that you have the author's authority. Anyway, if you're wondering about this first-name basis thing, we are actually on a first-name basis. Howard is really, really cool.

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen. Grove Press, 1988. Translated by Megan Backus.

I’m working on a paper on this that I want to give in Honolulu. This little novel was critically acclaimed and a runaway bestseller when it was originally published in Japan. It tells the story of Mikage and her tumultuous emotional life following the death of her grandmother, her only living relative. Impulsively, she moves in with her friend Yuishi and his mother (a transsexual—don’t ask) and cooks, for them, eventually going to cooking school and falling in love with Yuishi. Sort of. Her favorite place to be is in the kitchen. Got all that? If this sounds a bit precious and/or weird, well, I might use the word “whimsical.” It's a novel about kitchens, the meaning food has in our lives, and how we find "rooms of our own," to borrow Virginia Woolf's excellent phrase. This is a very moving, thoroughly delightful novel.

Michael Zadoorian, Second Hand. Norton, 2000.

And I’m working on a paper on this, too. This may well be the great Detroit novel, as it's set in Hazel Park (I think, as the actual city where most of the action takes place is never identified), Hamtramck, Detroit, and points all around the metro area. It concerns Richard, who just kind of drifts along, and his secondhand store Satori Junk. The plot is driven by his relationships with his sister, mother, and budding girlfriend Theresa. In addition, it’s a very smart meditation on the appeal of junk, detritus, and retro secondhand stuff: how stuff connects us to our past and the people we love. You don’t even have to be a hipster to fall in love with this novel, though you might be one by the time you finish it and be thus moved to go out and find a 1960s cocktail shaker or a set of Groovie Goolies action figurines. Zadoorian is a graduate of Wayne State and, as far as I know, lives in Hamtramck. My Detroit readers must read this.

Robert Kirby, Curbside. Hobnob Press, 1998.

More gay comics! This time from Minneapolitan Robert Kirby, who turns his life into a hilarious, ongoing serial strip involving his boyfriend and an assortment of other funny, sexy, sometimes loutish characters. And the drawings are funny besides, full of in-jokes and smartass comments in the margins. Kirby really has his zeitgeist plugged into ’90s I-just-graduated-from-college-now-what-do-I-do culture. If you’re wondering what it’s all about, and think that Friends did this culture well, you really should read this instead; it will make Friends look anemic and forced, which it was. The book's sequel Curbside Boys picks up where this left off, with some of the same characters and plotlines. Why don’t you just get them both?

Flotsam and Jetsam

Random Notes from a Small Island

A new set of casual observations that belong here because they don’t warrant entries in and of themselves.

T-Shirts

Guam is the world capital of salacious t-shirts, and they are mostly worn by my students. I am truly no prude, as those who know me well can attest, but even I am embarrassed by some of the things I have seen emblazoned across my students’ chests. Some of them are sort of innocuous: “FBI (Female Body Inspector)” is not exactly politically correct, but OK, I can deal with it. But this is mild; the vast majority of them are just plain vulgar. Too vulgar even for me to repeat them here, though if you would like one, I am sure that I could ask my students to tell me where to get them. I am proud of the fact that I have no idea.

Media Star

I am becoming one! When members of my parish, St. John the Divine, made our appearance at the annual Relay for Life to support those living with and having survived breast cancer (half the island was there, in fact), I made it on TV as there was a cameraman catching footage of walkers. Why I got on TV I don’t know, as we were all there, but there it is. People came up to me for two weeks following, saying that they had seen me, which might give you an idea of how small this place is. Then a week ago, someone from KUAM, the island’s NBC affiliate, thrust a microphone into my face outside of my grocery store and asked my opinion about something. The fact that I don’t even remember what the question was would suggest that this experience did not serve to crown me with any glory, but, hey, friends saw me. One commented that she liked the shirt I was wearing, which I suppose says it all.

Interesting Tropical Fruits

. . . are coming into season, though “season” is kind of a relative term on island. I had yellow watermelon yesterday for the first time. Like its name suggests, its inner fruit is yellow, and it’s firmer than the red ones I’m used to. And tasty! My neighbor’s starfruit tree is beginning to produce again too—it did about six months ago, too—and he will probably bring me some. I did not know they grew on trees, but there they are, hanging all over the tree and looking kind of like Easter eggs that Michiganians hang from the bare branches of their trees in March. I’ve also been eating something called a pomelo (spelling?), which is like a big grapefruit, except it's way better and firmer. And the mangos here! Oh my goodness, they’re so good. Did you know you can make salsa out of them? Me neither, but try it if you can, it's great. It’s rather fun to go to the market and buy something the likes of which you’ve never seen. Waht the heck is this? Do you peel it? Eat it raw? Serve it with ginger? Boil it? Hang it on the Christmas tree?

Aloha Shirt Revisited

I’ve noticed a new kind of aloha shirt: the corporate logo one. A corporate logo will be worked into the print, and you might not notice it until you look closely. I think that I should collect them, if only because nobody else is loopy enough to have done so already, but even I don’t want to be seen in a tropical print shirt which is actually advertising Miller Lite, with little beer bottles nestled among the swaying palm trees. The Shell Oil, Pay-Less Supermarket, and Bank of Hawai‘i corporate logo aloha shirts are actually quite nice, though.

Beer

Speaking of beer, Guam is the world’s capital of “lite” beer. Per capita, more of it is drunk here than anywhere else on the globe. Even I can’t comment on that depressing thought. Please, somebody, ship me some Moosehead from Nova Scotia!

Spam

We also lead the world in Spam consumption. Makes you proud to be here, doesn’t it? Spam is actually incredibly popular all over the Pacific. Once you’ve been through a typhoon, it’s easy to see why: it keeps forever, so everybody has some in their emergency “typhoon” pantry. When your power has been out for a few weeks, Spam probably starts looking pretty good. It’s on menus all over the place, too; chicken kelaguen is the usual Guam specialty, but you see it made with Spam, too; Denny’s and Pojo’s (an island Denny’s, kind of) both do a big business in their Spam ’n’ eggs breakfasts. In fact, Hormel makes a special Guam Spam that’s sold only here. It has Tabasco in it, the third product we lead the world in per capita consumption! For true weirdness, however, nothing beats the special edition Liberation Day Spam (in a special commemorative tin—I am not making this up) that I saw last year. I hope and pray it’s offered again this year, and if it is, everybody Stateside will get a truly unique Christmas present. You will undoubtedly be the only one on your block . . .