At the Tide’s Mercy

About the book

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. Decades later, the Republic of the Marshall Islands confronts contaminated homelands, scarce healthcare, rising seas—and a population increasingly dispersed across the Pacific and the United States.

Drawing on ten months of fieldwork, 145 surveys, and nineteen in-depth interviews, At the Tide’s Mercy follows ten lives beyond the familiar images of mushroom clouds and sinking islands: a 911 dispatcher sending every paycheck home for her mother’s medical care; a construction worker planning the outrigger canoe he will build with his own hands; a descendant of Bikini who has never seen the lagoon her family cannot return to.

These are not stories of people simply exchanging one country for another. They are stories of transmigrants whose lives remain organized across borders: wages earned in Seattle pay expenses in Majuro; relatives abroad receive elders seeking treatment and young people pursuing education; language, food, knowledge, and obligation travel continually between households. In this transnational world, migration is not the abandonment of home but its continuation by other means. Across the Marshallese diaspora, home is sustained, translated, and remade through the daily work of care.

The Marshallese experience is singular, but its question reaches everywhere people are being separated from the places to which they belong: when history narrows the choices, what does it mean to leave, to remain, and to still carry home with you?