RobOnGuam.com

Chamorro Village

The Everything Island Place

The weekly Wednesday night market at Chamorro Village is the place to be on island. There you can see Pacific native dancing, buy a sarong, get the loudest aloha shirt imaginable, eat Chamorro carry-out, and jostle up against military personnel, Japanese tourists, and elderly Guamanians dancing to the oldies (read: ’70s soft rock) in the Village pavilion. One-stop shopping indeed!

Chamorro Village was conceived in the late 80s, I believe, as the place to showcase traditional island culture, though it’s obvious that’s not quite how it developed. You can get traditional stuff there—Chamorro metalsmithing, knives and tools and such, for example—and there a couple retail places that sell Indonesian wood furniture. But I don’t think that chocolate is a particularly Pacific product, so I don’t quite understand the presence of the Village chocolatier, and a number of the tropical gift shops sells tacky Guam keychains and coffee mugs festooned with dolphins and hibiscus and such. In its present conception, Chamorro Village is a combination “festival marketplace” and flea market, which isn’t a bad thing; it’s just not quite what I think its originators intended.

The physical plant itself is great. There are hibiscus and bougainvillea bushes interspersed with palm trees galore, with little walkways winding around lots of Spanish-style huts with terra-cotta tile roofs. The architecture is so nice that one wonders why it isn’t replicated elsewhere on island, where most buildings look kind of, well, like concrete pillboxes. The Village backs up onto the Paseo, the island’s little baseball stadium that has a winding runwalk track encircling it, always full of nice Filipina ladies in their Reeboks out for their evening aerobic strolls.

Wandering around the stores and stalls is great fun. Which of the outdoor vendors will have the tackiest aloha shirt this week? The competition is fierce and last Wednesday the shirt with antique jalopy with surfboards in the back seat in electric blue print won by a country mile. What new silly souvenir will the impulse gift store have this week? Why, big seashells inscribed with "Guam"! On the assumption that you won’t mistake them for the seashells you collect from Nebraska, perhaps? . . . what odd concoction will be at Mt. Lam Lam, the ice cream store? Lately it’s halo halo (“hol-lo hol-lo,” not “hay-lo hay-lo”), a Filipino dessert that involves fruit syrup, condensed milk, and shaved ice, often in sort of peculiar colors. It’s very good when it’s made well, and very bad when it’s not. And finally there is lots and lots of Asian tat: Powerpuff Girl ripoffs that have faintly Asian features (Buttercup, Bento, and Bamboo, perhaps), cheap electronic games, flip flops and slippers galore, jewelry, and everything you can conceviably make out of shells, with the possible exception of kitchen appliances.

There are a set of regulars that I see every week that I go, and I’ve gone fairly regularly since the summer: Viki, selling her watercolors; Tim, the lawyer on island that I know from the pool, who has gone to the market faithfully every Wednesday for the past thirteen years; Carlos, who owns the Teak Gallery that sells teak furniture; Mark, owner of Treasure Hut, a gift store that also stocks wonderful Indonesian stuff (but isn’t in Chamorro Village, so don’t go looking for it—he just frequents the market); a number of my students, often with their kids and/or spouses; sometimes my Senators; and everybody else on island. Chamorro Village is designed for you to see and be seen.

The center pavilion is always filled with dancing Pacific Islanders of the 50 years-plus variety. Social dancing is very big on the islands, to its great credit—the mainland could take a good cue from us—and there’s usually a small live band playing covers of soft rock hits circa 1978, all behind the sweet Chamorro and Filipino couples gently swaying their geriatric hips to the beat.

Then, finally are the food vendors, which are everywhere. They hawk what you’d expect: barbeque and lots of it. Five bucks will get you a skewer of barbequed beef, two scoops of rice, the ubiquitous Guam side, a little finadenne (the local hot pepper soy sauce), a whole pile of pancit, and some kind of salad, often marinated cucumbers. Even better is marinated cucumbers with pickled papaya, which is delicious. (Incidentally, two scoops of rice come with everything. Even McDonald’s breakfast meal comes with two scoops of rice unless you specify that you want hash browns. If you move out here and are not a rice eater, you will become one.) Many people I know come every Wednesday night to have dinner, and why not? It’s cheap, good, and filling.

There’s a small stage at the Village where the Natibu Dancers perform for the crowds.  Natibu is the local troupe that has preserved (or, more likely, reconstructed) Chamorro dance—the Mariana Islands equivalent of the Hawai‘ian hula. The troupe is mostly very young people, high school on down, and they are often very good. I don’t know how authentic the dances are, and the costuming is sort of Hafa Adai Island meets Off-Broadway Road Show, but the Japanese tourists love it; you can tell because their video cameras start whirring away whenever the dancers start up. And heck, the enthusiasm makes up for a lot.

Incidentally, dancing for young people is also extremely big on island: not just traditional stuff, but jazz and hip-hop, ballroom dancing, you name it. I don’t know if there is something in the water in metro Manila that makes folks just move in rhythm, but young Filipinos are just very good and often great dancers. Can anybody shed light on this?

Hiking Hawai'i

On Sunday, the conference was over, and I met with my friend Flynn to go hiking. I had met Flynn on Guam a few months previous to my trip, as he works for the federal government in the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, and travels throughout the big blue Pacific on business. He and his wife and two sons lived for six years on American Samoa, and now live in Pearl City just north of Pearl Harbor. Flynn knows O‘ahu and its hiking trails well. There are a lot of them on this very green and lush island.

We drove to a trailhead north of Pearl City and through Pacific Palisades, a suburb that looked exactly like the one in the old show The Brady Bunch, except that the suburbanites had mango trees in their front yards. (The name of the city should clue you in that it’s very suburban, as would, for example, Pineapple Vista Heights or Coconut Grove Estates.) I don’t know why I didn’t expect Honolulu to have suburban-looking suburbs—I assumed that everybody lived in a little plantation-style bungalow climbing the hills surrounding the city, apparently—but this was obviously not the case. Prices were maybe lower than those in central Honolulu but not by much; Flynn mentioned what his home in Pearl City was appraised for, pointing out that it’s doubled in value in only two years, and my eyeteeth nearly dropped out.

That said, the trailhead was at the end of the suburb, and we had been climbing steadily throughout the suburb. By the time we got the top of the city, as it were, all of Pearl Harbor was spread out to our south, and more suburbs spreading out to the mountains in the north. It didn’t look a lot like paradise. Actually, it looked like Phoenix.

I was struck at how much the trail initially reminded me of a trail in Michigan. The trees were of course very different, but they arched over the trail like a hardwood forest would back in the Midwest and the climate was mild as a May morning. The ironwood trees in particular look like pine trees, though of course they’re tropical; they have kind of needlish-looking leaves, and their wood is extremely hard and durable, which is how they got their name. They are all over Guam.

There were a few other hikers on the trail. First was a nice Korean couple. Koreans are the world champions of hiking, and even if a Korean were to go up a small hill on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas, he would set out with the gear that one would normally take to ascend the Matterhorn. Certainly they are the most stylish of hikers; there are hiking equipment stores in Seoul in the way that there are Starbucks in Seattle. Then there was a Filipino couple, I think, with a great gaggle of kids who were surprisingly well behaved and polite. “Did you make it to the bottom?” Flynn asked, and they had.

We were hiking to the bottom of the river valley several hundred feet down in a forest of really lush greenness. It started out pretty easy and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The slope down was a serious slope. I mean serious. I’m guessing a 75 degree incline, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is when you’re hiking it. It made going down very difficult at times, as there was nothing to keep you from slipping unless you grabbed onto a tree branch and hope that it didn’t break and send you slipping down down down until a tree broke your fall, or so you’d hope. Fortunately, many of the tree branches ran sort of perpendicular to the actual trunk—that is to say, they grew naturally across the steep slope rather than up and down it to hold the soil and formed “steps” so that you could carefully descend the staircase of gnarled tree roots. It wasn’t easy, nor was the little muddy stretch that you had to go through and get your shoes sopped and really dirty, nor the stretch that was so precariously steep that previous hikers have thoughtfully provided a rope tied to a sturdy tree with which you can work your way down like a mountain climber. I did pretty it clumsily but well, feeling totally Vin Deisel as I did so, and it was fun. I’m amazed at what a wuss I’ve become, living such an urban life.

For the most part the trail just kept going down down down, and then it stopped. And then you see the little stream that you’ve been hearing in the distance, and all of a sudden you’re on it: you’re standing in a little tiny tropical valley with two waterfalls and wading pools, all plashing about and hung over with ferny things and deep shadows from the late afternoon sun. It was just glorious. By this time the sun had set and it was chilly so we opted not to go wading in the little pool, but just seeing this little slice of hidden paradise was enough for me.

Going back up was even more strenuous but oddly easier. Because you were climbing a hill, you had better far traction than going down it, something I hadn’t really thought about the next day when my very sore ankles made me think about it. It took a longer time to go back up, and I was surprised to discover that the hike down was maybe a mile or so. So our two-mile hike took about two hours—not an impressive pace.

Following our hike, Flynn and I drank beer on the shores of Pearl Harbor in a small public park, the only public land on the harbor. All of Pearl Harbor is owned by the military, and you get the sense that if you are to so much as dip a toe into it, a Navy gunboat will rush up to collect you and deposit you in the nearest jail. Following that, we rewarded ourselves with a Vietnamese dinner. A fine, fine day in metro Honolulu.

Conference, Part 2

What made the conference work was of the course the networking, which is the primary reason for a conference, presentations notwithstanding. I met people who do what I do—teach mostly, research some, and carry out all the professional duties that academics carry out. It was fun to compare notes and institutions, and I must admit that coming from the University of Guam gave me a certain cachet—that and the fact that I didn’t have to go out and buy myself an aloha shirt to attend the conference in.

Incidentally, most male academics started out the conference in the usual long-sleeved, open collared shirt and often a jacket, as if they were unaware that they were on Waikiki. One would’ve thought that the large ocean-like object due south fifty paces would’ve clued them in. But by Saturday morning of the conference, aloha shirts, shorts, and Tevas were the order of the day. The women for the part dressed for the climate, and it is one of the pleasures of the tropics that women can actually dress more sensibly than men here. 

The most successful sessions at the conference were the panels, in which a session was organized around a topic rather than a disparate set of papers that didn’t tie together. (See previous entry.) I attended two terrific sessions. One was on integrating library instruction into composition courses and run by two women from the University of South Dakota who have, to a greater extent than anybody else I’ve met, Figured It Out. The second was on multiculturalism in the classroom, which was a really fun workshop in which we all essentially compared notes and strategies, again run by two very cool women, this time from Central Connecticut State. I again had a lot of unintentional cachet, teaching at a school that 80% Pacific Islanders and where multiculturalism is pretty much a given. But the interesting thing that came up is how multicult plays out elsewhere: one woman from western Massachusetts reported that economic diversity was the issue in her school, where most of the student body is seriously working class, and another reported on how the issue isn’t really even framed and how she, as a woman scholar, is sort of ignored on the issue in the United Arab Emirates, where she teaches. It was just plain fascinating, and the participants in the group were among the most interesting I’ve met—people I would love to have as colleagues.

I’d never attended a poster session before, and I really like the whole concept. In a poster session, an individual sets up her presentation in a visual form on a tri-fold poster (hence the name) and meets with wandering scholars individually, who mill about the tables in the big ballroom. It’s a lot like elementary school science fair, though the topics are considerably more esoteric. Poster sessions are fun because you talk to folks up close and personal and you have their undivided attention, unlike in a present-your-paper session, where other people can ask off-the-mark and occasionally stupid questions that don’t get at the scholarship at all.

A lot of the presentations looked awfully boring—interesting as scholars and their topics may be, visuals matter in a poster session, a point lost on many of the presenters—but then I met the woman dealing with female cross-dressing in early modern England, a sub-sub-subfield I know nothing about, being neither a woman nor a cross-dresser. (Early modern England I know a few things about.) Even more fun was all the stuff from Jacobean material print culture featuring, you guessed it, cross-dressing women: women pirates, actors (-resses?), soldiers. I’ll be darned. To sum it up fast, generally women cross-dressed in order to gain access to power the culture only afforded men. This didn’t come as a great surprise to me, but I simply had no context for this, or even a context to think about this. I’d better read Marjorie Garber’s study Vested Interests, and if you want to talk to me about this, you better too!