A Vantage Point Shaped by Thirty-One Years

The interview began with a steaming bowl of Taiwanese beef noodle soup.

David was only passing through Seattle, visiting his son, who had recently begun working there, but the restaurant was his territory. Before we sat down, he was already calling out orders. “Want to try a bowl of beef noodles?” The broth was dark and braised in the Taiwanese style. He warned us, “If the noodles sit in the broth too long, they won’t taste good anymore.” Then he turned to me. “Does the young lady want scallions?”

He maintained this hospitality throughout the interview, urging us to eat as he moved easily among nuclear testing, business, customary authority, healing, and family life. Only near the end did he glance at the table and say, “Let’s hurry up and finish—the young lady’s hungry.” The gestures belonged to the Taiwan he had left more than three decades earlier, carried intact into a life spent near the equator.

The man sitting across from me was Mr. Chan; everyone called him David. He was fifty-eight, with graying hair, dressed simply. He was speaking in a crisp, no-nonsense manner, carrying the straight-shooting openness of an old soldier. “If you want to hear more, I’ll tell you.” In 1994, at twenty-seven, he left the Taiwanese military and followed his sister to the Marshall Islands, where she needed help with her business. He expected a temporary job. Instead, he remained for thirty-one years.

Over time, the former “soldier boy” became a “Marshall Islands know-it-all.” He could recite wages, food prices, automobile margins, land titles, and stories about traditional healers. Yet when I asked what he understood of Marshallese culture, he spread his hands. “I just live there.” The answer understated his involvement while also marking a boundary he continued to recognize. He had participated in the country’s economic life for decades, but he did not claim the authority of someone born into its land, clans, and language.

David spoke differently from many of the Marshallese people I had interviewed. He was fast, funny, opinionated, and willing to turn every observation into a judgment. His account should therefore be read neither as a neutral survey of Marshallese society nor as the final word of a fully detached outsider. It is the perspective of a long-term resident whose businesses placed him inside the country’s daily exchanges but whose Taiwanese upbringing continued to shape what he noticed and how he interpreted it. Medical care, for him, was not an abstract policy question but the memory of trying to get a sick child to Hawaii. Customary authority was not an anthropological system but the power he had watched chiefs exercise over land, elections, and disputes.

David had imported building materials, sold cars, operated stores, and employed Marshallese and migrant workers. He had helped construct parts of Majuro while remaining outside the customary land relationships upon which the city stood. That position—participant, employer, neighbor, and foreigner—gave him access to several faces of the country.

David’s business history followed Majuro’s physical expansion. He began with drainage, sewage, and electrical work, digging trenches and laying lines. Later, he began dealing in hardware, ran a building materials company, and secured dealership rights for Toyota, Hyundai, and China Motor. He now also runs a small supermarket. “Our company currently has over 200 permanent employees,” he said.

He carried a thick ledger in his head. He remembered the minimum wage moving from roughly two dollars an hour to four and a half, how nuclear radiation compensation dropped from over $3,000 to $1,200, and a packet of crisps rising from cents to dollars. Inflation was never an index in his telling. It was something visible on a shelf, a payroll, or a receipt. The way he introduced me to the Marshall Islands was by converting everything into prices, into numbers.

Even his jokes arrived as calculations. His employees were paid every two weeks. “If you paid monthly, you’d starve their whole family to death,” he said, exaggerating to make a point about how quickly wages disappeared into household expenses. Even workplace frustration became a calculation of lost time. “In one hour, he runs off to buy cigarettes three times, five to ten minutes each trip; an hour only has sixty minutes, and just like that, thirty minutes are gone.”

He used the same arithmetic when discussing large families and government assistance. “I told my wife, ten kids in one family will help the parents own a more than $30,000 subsidy a month, just from that alone—what a life.” Once again, David reduced everyday life to a calculation of monthly income.

He calculated his own future in much the same way. At sixty-five, he could return to Taiwan, purchase land, and grow potatoes and peanuts. Education for his two children also entered the ledger, especially his daughter’s degree. “I didn’t spend a single penny on my daughter’s college; the school even gave her monthly pocket money.”

David explained that the Marshall Islands has three institutions of higher education: the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI), University of the South Pacific (USP), and Marshall Islands Campus of the University of Guam. USP was the most sought-after by students, but admission slots were limited. CMI, as the only local community college, received substantial U.S. funding for years. His daughter had considered a university in Boston, but she didn’t like the cold climate up north; she remained in Majuro, where scholarship support covered much of her study at CMI. David described her field as maritime law, a subject he regarded as practical in a country whose economy and jurisdiction extend across a vast ocean. “Fishing companies are eager to hire lawyers specializing in maritime law,” he remarked.

Her decision pleased him, although he still believed that the Marshall Islands offered “too small a horizon.” The phrase referred not only to employment but also, in his teasing account, to marriage and experience. “You can’t meet good...there,” he said. His son had studied at the University of Hawai‘i and found work at a Seattle hospital. His daughter remained less willing to tolerate Seattle’s colder climate. David sighed, “Okay, let her be.”

For many young Marshallese, overseas study provides opportunity while also creating the possibility of permanent departure. David said some recipients of government scholarships signed agreements requiring them to return for public service, yet “many young people, once they get out, would rather breach the contract and pay the penalty than come back.” Education expands a student’s options abroad faster than the domestic economy expands opportunities at home.

Military enlistment offered another route outward. Under the Compact of Free Association, Marshallese citizens may serve in the United States armed forces, where pay, training, housing support, and medical benefits can exceed what many jobs at home provide. David described enlistment bluntly as a way to “get off the atoll.” He estimated that “At least fifteen percent of Marshall Islands high schoolers choose to join the U.S. military.”¹

When the conversation turned to soldiers, David’s thoughts shifted from the Marshall Islands to his own military service in Taiwan, and his tone darkened. “Back then, we busted our asses defending there for the government, and when we got out, we were treated like we were worth nothing.” His anger over how veterans were treated shaped his view of Marshallese enlistment in the U.S. military. “In peacetime, the benefits are excellent—the U.S. military even gives housing to privates,” he said. Enlistment could offer a way forward, but war changed that calculation: “our Marshallese who went to join the army, they’re just cannon fodder.” During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, service members from American Samoa and the Marshall Islands died at disproportionately high rates relative to their small populations. David respected those who served, but his own experience had left him unwilling to romanticize either war or military sacrifice.²

In David’s eyes, the Marshall Islands had two faces.

One was an “island paradise.” He remembered the lagoon turning dense blue and the sunset moving from orange to purple as the wind crossed the atoll. He described Marshallese people as “optimistic,” then contrasted their attitudes toward money with his own: “They don’t save for a rainy day like we Chinese do. They don’t have that concept.”

The other face was an economy in which transportation magnified the price of almost everything. “Goods shipped to the main island, prices go up two or three times; then loaded onto boats to the outer islands, maybe seven times what you’d pay in Taiwan.” Minimum wage at four and a half dollars an hour, a bag of chips at three dollars, vegetables routinely ten dollars a pound.

Against those prices stood a narrow labor market. “Government jobs are the most popular,” David said, because they provided greater stability and benefits than much private employment. But he also said that the better positions were still held by people with connections.

David’s car dealership line was something he had built from nothing. And it was through his own hands that “Majuro’s vehicle density ranks first in all of Micronesia,” he said. Yet as he kept talking, this “prosperity” revealed another face.

“A two-thousand-dollar car breaks down on the side of a Majuro road. The owner doesn’t even bother fixing it—pulls out a phone and calls someone to tow it away.” Imported parts and skilled repairs could approach the value of an aging vehicle. His summary of the market was characteristically unsentimental: “you buy it and drive it on the road, don’t worry about scratches, and when it breaks down, call someone to tow it.” A street filled with cars could therefore represent mobility and fragility at once.

David also pointed to industries rooted more directly in the atolls. “The outer islanders are not suffering unduly—the government sends boats to the outer islands to collect dried copra regularly; a few islands raise a kind of giant clam called Tridacna, and the U.S. buys them at a protected price—twenty-five dollars a piece.” He proceeded to say, “On Majuro itself, there’s a coconut oil factory, and the byproduct is made into noni soap.” Copra remains one of the few products connecting household labor on outer atolls to a national market, although shipping schedules and administered prices shape whether that work can sustain a family.

But these activities contribute only modestly to the national economy. Far more important are three external sources of income. U.S. grants under COFA finance a substantial share of government operations and public services. The Marshall Islands’ international ship registry, one of the world’s largest, provides another major stream of revenue. Fisheries income comes primarily from access fees paid by foreign fleets, while domestic fishing and processing remain limited. Together, these arrangements sustain public spending and employment, but they also leave the Marshallese economy with a narrow productive base and highly dependent on decisions made abroad.³

David returned from national accounts to the labor beneath them. Workers, he said, needed biweekly pay because “the money’s gone before the month’s out.” Formal employment practices were uneven. “Technically you’re supposed to write one contract up, but generally they don’t sign them.” He connected this to educational disadvantage: “Out of fifty-some workers at the building materials company, six can’t even write their own names; their signatures are drawn out stroke by stroke.” Such cases reflected the lasting effects of interrupted schooling and unequal access to education, especially for people raised on outer atolls.

David drew a sharp distinction between workers who wanted to learn and those who avoided responsibility. “30% are seriously trying to learn something, 70% are very good at slacking off.” He delivered the judgment without much outrage, adding, “That’s fine—the world’s always been like that.” What frustrated him more was losing two workers he had selected, trained as foremen, and rewarded with higher salaries. Once they began earning more, both left for the United States with their brothers. The brothers eventually returned, finding the pace of work there too demanding, but the foremen remained abroad.

At the same time, the $4.50-an-hour jobs that struggled to retain Marshallese workers continued to attract migrants from the Philippines. “Filipinos love coming to work for us, because our wages are higher than in the Philippines.” Workers moved through this unequal labor market in stages—from the Philippines to the Marshall Islands and from the Marshall Islands to the United States—each following the possibility of better pay.

David did not attribute poor work habits to character alone. In his view, some households could survive through a combination of compensation payments, public assistance, and remittances from relatives in the United States, while local wages offered little prospect of advancement. These alternatives loosened the pressure of “having to work.” When diligence brought little improvement, and unemployment did not mean starvation, “being serious” about a low-paid job could feel less like a necessity than a choice.

The institution in the Marshalls that most impressed David was customary leadership. “If you go by the constitution, the constitution is of course supreme; but if you go by the chief system, the chief’s power is higher than the president’s.” He said that when a high chief speaks, even the president doesn’t dare disobey; he also believed that “the high chief’s wealth is greater than the president’s wealth.” These statements described his experience of two systems of authority operating at once.

Marshallese land tenure distributes rights among several customary roles. David broke this system down for me: the Iroij exercises chiefly authority; the Alap represents the senior lineage and supervises land; and the Dri Jerbal or Rijerbal holds working rights and responsibilities. Currently, the Marshall Islands has over a dozen high chiefs. These interests overlap on the same weto, or land parcel, and cannot be reduced neatly to Western ideas of a single owner.⁴

Because nearly every project requires land, customary consent affects government construction, foreign investment, leases, and private homes. Disputes involving titles or land rights may pass through family and chiefly channels as well as the courts. The Constitution itself recognizes customary law and establishes the Council of Iroij, giving traditional authority a place within the modern state.⁵

David saw customary authority extending into electoral politics. “The president is chosen from among thirty-three senators (Nitijela), and then the president picks ten of those senators to be ministers. But to get elected as a senator, you usually need to already hold the title of Alap.” His description joined the formal structure of government to the influence of land, kinship, and customary rank. David recalled one president who “was in office for only about ten days before being kicked out” because “he didn’t seek the chief’s help.” At the same time, he saw change. “The current foreign minister isn’t from a noble family, and the previous president was also a commoner, elected from a small island because he was well-educated.”

David believed that chiefly authority also preserved Marshallese culture and the obligations embedded within it. He recalled a high chief once saying, “They are my people, whatever they need, I have to give it, I can’t refuse.” Customary leadership and constitutional government therefore overlapped, joining authority to reciprocal responsibility.

David encountered the Marshalls’ “matrilineal society” not as a textbook definition but through the authority of older women and the movement of land across generations. “We foreign men, we have to be respectful to those older ladies; we don’t dare speak loudly to them.” He described its consequences for family and property: “children belong to the mother, property belongs to the maternal family, and if a man leaves the family, he can only leave with nothing—walk out clean.”

Marshallese society is matrilineal, meaning that clan identity and land rights generally pass through the mother’s line. Matrilineal does not mean that every woman automatically possesses greater political power than every man, or that fathers are unimportant. Rather, it locates a person within a bwij, the lineage through which enduring claims to land and kinship are transmitted. This helps explain why grandmothers and maternal relatives hold particular authority in family decisions.⁶

David traced the inheritance sequence aloud: “Generally, women hold power, and inheritance passes to daughters, not sons. When there are no more daughters to pass to, the sons and daughters of the last daughter both have the right to inherit, and after that it goes back to the earliest daughter’s line to start passing again.” It took me a while to sort out this inheritance logic. Simply put, power and land pass through the maternal lineage, although both women and men within that lineage may inherit them. Only when the maternal lineage dies out can inheritance pass through a man to his children for one generation; from there, succession returns to the maternal line.

He also described women as politically active, and noticed women in public office. At the time of the interview, he counted “four or five female mayors, and female ministers too”—the Marshall Islands has twenty-nine atolls and five single islands, but twenty-four local governments, roughly one for every inhabited atoll or island.

David described marriage and child-rearing as taking many forms. He had attended elaborate weddings that combined Marshallese and Western traditions, but he also knew couples who lived together without marrying and relationships without permanent or exclusive commitments. Alongside them were couples who remained together for life—“one dad, one mom”—and embodied the kind of lifelong commitment he also recognized. In David’s experience, no single family arrangement defined the islands.

Marshallese law provides a civil procedure for divorce. David, however, described a social world in which many relationships end outside the courtroom. Couples separate, form new households, and rely on family elders or the Iroij to settle the practical consequences. In such cases, separation itself functions as divorce, whether or not the marriage has been formally dissolved. Because children belong to the mother’s lineage, the maternal family remains intact even as partnerships change. David described households in which siblings had several different fathers. “In one family, five or six different fathers,” he said. “Every single one has a different father.” The enduring unit is the maternal lineage rather than the married couple.

More children meant a larger lineage and, in David’s view, greater collective strength. Children were therefore welcomed not only by their parents but by the extended family. “Once the daughter has a baby, the grandmother says, ‘I’ll raise it’ and takes the baby over; brothers like to swap raising each other’s offspring.” He described the reciprocity simply: “Your son I’ll help you raise, my daughter I’ll give to you to raise.” He added that “chiefs also exchange children with each other,” which in effect allows fosterage to strengthen alliances between families.

David speculated that these practices “might be because they realized early on the problem of inbreeding, ‘wanting some outside blood.’” He also understood them as a way of drawing families closer: “when the children grow up, they’ll be even closer through marriage.”

The value placed on children was accompanied by early parenthood. “Many people are already parents by sixteen or eighteen,” David said. He recalled seeing “A sophomore in high school shows up holding a baby, asking the teacher for leave saying, ‘my child is sick today’—not herself sick, but her own child is sick.”

When I asked why parenthood began so early, David’s answer moved from the enduring logic of kinship into the Marshall Islands’ history of the nuclear tests.

David interpreted “having children early” through a survival theory. He believed people exposed to radiation feared shortened lives and therefore had children sooner. To explain, he reached for an agricultural analogy from Taiwan: “It’s the same in biology. In Taiwan, if you want a wax apple tree to bear fruit quickly, you cover it with black cloth, make it feel like it’s dying, and it will bloom and fruit very quickly. People are the same.”

David had a second layman’s theory about the duration of nuclear radiation, which he called “dilution.” The first generation directly exposed, he said, had largely died: “Impossible to live that long.” He believed visible illness marked the next generation. “They grow flesh tumors on their faces, their noses are all pockmarked, like lunar surface skin, some even have deformed facial features. You can still occasionally see these people on the streets of Majuro, but fewer and fewer.” By the third and fourth generations, he thought “the nuclear radiation genes are much fewer.” “The genes have been diluted, half each time, half each time, 50%,” he concluded.

New life carries hope in any society. Here it also carried the weight of collective survival. In David’s account, having children meant refusing disappearance: rebuilding families, extending maternal lines, and carrying the Marshallese people beyond the damage of the tests.

Alongside this homespun theory were darker stories David had heard from people he knew. One friend had returned to Bikini Island. “He saw the lobsters there were deformed, grown huge, and even if they gave them to you, you wouldn’t dare eat them.” The waters around Bikini, David said, were still left unfished.

As for diseases caused by nuclear radiation, David said, “The U.S. has a clear commitment—once cancer is confirmed to be caused by nuclear radiation, the U.S. government will unconditionally fly the person to the U.S. for treatment.” He knew people who had traveled for care. “The people I knew who went, they still died.”

The word “unconditional” was overly optimistic. U.S.-supported programs have served defined groups under particular eligibility rules, including surviving members of the Rongelap and Utrik populations exposed during Castle Bravo. They have provided screening, specialist referrals, treatment, and travel support, but they do not guarantee every Marshallese person diagnosed with cancer an automatic flight to the United States. Other compensation and health programs operate under different rules. What families sometimes describe as “free treatment” can therefore involve eligibility limits, referrals, incomplete services at home, and the practical burdens of travel. Recent World Bank data place life expectancy in the RMI at roughly sixty-seven years, reflecting a broad burden of noncommunicable disease and limited access to specialized care.⁷

David also connected the country’s health problems to suicide. “Marshallese people may look carefree, but the suicide rate isn’t low—many people are psychologically fragile.” He recalled a couple who argued one night; the husband died by suicide the following day. In David’s view, the isolation of island life could intensify emotional distress, while mental health remained difficult to name and even harder to discuss. With few familiar paths toward professional help, pain stayed inside families and individuals, accumulating in silence.

David gathered disease, early parenthood, emigration, and suicide into a story of survival after the nuclear tests. Radiation had entered not only bodies and land but memory: as fear, uncertainty, and grief carried from one generation to the next.

Falling ill in the Marshall Islands could feel like a gamble.

When David first arrived, he said, medical care “was terrible.” He was so uneasy about the available services that he arranged for both of his children to be born in Hawaii. The hospital itself reflected a patchwork of international assistance: Japan helped build it, the United States supplied equipment and medicine, and Taiwan sent doctors on rotation. The Taiwanese doctors joked to him, “We’re so jealous of you guys—you get to use original American-brand medicine.”

Yet branded medicine could not prevent human error. David’s brother once went to the hospital with a toothache. The doctor took an X-ray “of the left side but interpreted it as the right side.” The pain was on the left, but the doctor nearly extracted a tooth from the right. Terrified, his brother fled before the procedure could begin.

When the hospital failed to inspire confidence, people turned to an older path of healing—plants, inherited knowledge, and therapeutic chants.

One such remedy was noni fruit, which David called the “god-fruit.” His faith in it bordered on the religious. “I’ve gotten neurotoxin poisoning from eating fish at least seven times, at least seven times. Every time I got poisoned, I’d drive myself to the ER for an IV drip, then come back and drink noni juice continuously for two weeks to detox.”

He credited the fruit with powers extending far beyond fish poisoning. “That thing, men drink it and it boosts virility, women drink it and their skin gets better.” His most dramatic story concerned a fishing-boat crewman who smoked and drank heavily before developing throat cancer. After the man began drinking noni juice, David said, “he actually cured the disease.”

Whatever its powers, noni demanded courage from the person drinking it. “After it ferments, it tastes like stinky socks, but once you drink it, your whole spirit gets better.” David held his hands apart to indicate the proper amount. “Pour a glass this much, and when you drink it you have to gulp it down in one go, then immediately drink water; if the water doesn’t follow right away, that taste will make you want to vomit.”

Noni (Morinda citrifolia) has a long history in Pacific traditional medicine. Human research remains limited, and noni has not been shown to treat any health condition, including cancer. Several cases of liver injury have been reported after the consumption of noni products, although a direct causal relationship remains uncertain. Noni is also high in potassium and may interact with some medications.⁸

Beyond noni fruit, the Marshall Islands also harbored traditional healers. David emphasized that they were not theatrical figures dancing around fires, but specialists in plants, wounds, chants, and illnesses that resisted ordinary treatment. He told me two stories.

The first began when he fell near the lagoon and badly injured his leg. It was “completely scraped, bleeding nonstop.” A local healer climbed a tree without saying a word, cut down two aerial roots, crushed them with a stone, murmured a chant, and pressed the pulp directly onto the wound. “It hurt so bad I peed myself, it really hurt,” David recalled. “But as soon as he applied it, the wound really scabbed over.”

The second story concerned his son. Before the boy turned one, the skin on his face repeatedly broke open and oozed pus. Doctors and ointments brought no lasting relief. David eventually took him to a healer, who examined the child, provided an herbal preparation, and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine by his first birthday.” His first birthday was the following day. That night, his face was still oozing. The next morning, David said, the sores had disappeared. Decades later, he still could not explain what had happened.

These healers occupied a precise place in David’s map of care. “Only when the hospital can’t solve a difficult or strange illness do people go to shamans.” Traditional shamans (jolok) were once part of the tribal order, with herbal knowledge, ritual therapies, and spiritual diagnoses all passed down through oral transmission. As the older generation of shamans passes away one by one, few young people are willing to inherit the practice; the number of shamans is rapidly declining, and now they only remain scattered in remote outer island villages.⁹

Noni fruit, herbal preparations, chants, IV drips, imported medicine, and flights to Hawai‘i—these were resources that families combined while trying to obtain care in a system with limited specialists and frequent referrals abroad.

Food gave David another way to measure thirty-one years of change. When he arrived, he remembered Marshallese people as physically robust. “In the old days, their people were all very strong, as strong as Maori people.” More recently, he thought that “Marshallese people are getting thinner and smaller,” “because the things they eat have no nutrition.”

A local senator once offered him a history of that transformation. “Because you foreigners came in and brought delicious rice, beef, and mutton, they had never eaten it before, thought it was delicious, and ate it like crazy.” The older diet had drawn heavily from the land and lagoon: fish, coconut, breadfruit, and taro. Japanese and American rule brought rice, imported meat, canned goods, seasonings, and packaged snacks. Gradually, these new tastes moved from novelty to staple.

David was particularly struck by the appetite for chips. He held his hands close together to indicate the size of a Doritos bag. “Just potato chips, a bag this small, sells for seventy-five cents over there, and they eat two or three bags at a time.” Instant noodles came with an entire packet of seasoning and coloring, producing what he called “eating very heavily-flavored.” Some people, he said, would even “take juice powder, color powder, add a ton of salt, and eat it as a snack like that.”

I met David a few times in Seattle and saw the history of island food prices in his smallest habits. He was intensely frugal, even packing up leftover Starbucks snacks to take home. Food had been too expensive in the Marshall Islands to waste. When we ordered a meal, he reached for the vegetables first.

Vegetables, on the islands, were more than food. They were a luxury. When David arrived thirty-one years earlier, he said, the available fresh vegetables amounted to cabbage, carrots, and potatoes, with the occasional head of Chinese cabbage. Three ordinary vegetables had to sustain the produce shelves of an entire country. “Fresh vegetables?” David sighed. “Ten dollars a pound. The price of a plate of vegetables on our side could buy several times that amount of meat.”

Packaged food was cheap, filling, and readily available; fresh greens were scarce and expensive. “So the locals don’t eat many vegetables—they can’t afford them.” Diet changed not only because imported food tasted new, but because the market made some choices easy and others nearly impossible. A nation’s health problems could begin in the grocery aisle, long before anyone entered a clinic.

The altered body did not take a single form. David noticed some people becoming thinner and smaller; across the country, obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure had also become common. These different conditions belonged to the same nutritional upheaval: a food system once anchored in the reef, the coconut tree, and cultivated land had become increasingly dependent on ships, imported goods, and prices set elsewhere.

Over thirty-one years, David watched appetites, bodies, and memories change together. Yet what troubled him most was the cultural transformation unfolding around them. Western influence, he believed, had reached far beyond food. “The locals are very seriously learning from the West.”

This left him pessimistic about what would survive. “Ancient culture will very likely be forgotten one day,” he said. Once a year, a cultural festival revived skills such as fire-making by friction and weaving. David always went to watch, although he knew that he remained a bystander, “cheering from the sidelines.”

At the end of our conversations, David’s thoughts returned to his own future. At sixty-five, he planned to “save money to buy land in Taiwan, get ready to retire to my hometown, grow potatoes and peanuts, live the life of a farmer.”

He had built a business and a dense web of relationships in the Marshall Islands, yet everything he had made over half a lifetime rested on rented land. What he wanted in retirement was something modest: a piece of ground that belonged to him.

David spoke of returning home to grow potatoes and peanuts with the casual certainty of someone discussing tomorrow’s weather. But thirty-one years was long enough for a man and an island to enter each other’s habits.

Leaving an island is harder than setting foot on one.

David had watched a generation be born, go to school, and decide whether to leave or stay. He had watched the number of supermarkets grow from three to seven and the cars change from vehicles “so broken the roof was falling off” to Toyotas filling the streets. Through prices and wages, chiefs and healers, noni fruit and takeout containers, he had told me the story of a country. Yet he still described himself in the language of a bystander: “I just live there.”

Before parting, I asked him one last question. “After thirty-one years in the Marshall Islands, what do you miss most?”

Outside the Seattle window, fresh snow lay beneath a gray-white sky. David gazed through the glass for a moment before answering.

“The sunset every day,” he said. “The Marshall Islands sunset burns the entire sky orange. Once you’ve seen it, every dusk after that, you'll unconsciously think of it.”