The View Homeward: A Young Marshallese Technician in Seattle

The early spring rain had just stopped in Seattle. Cherry blossoms lined the streets, their petals scattered by the damp, cool wind. It was eight in the morning. Traffic was gathering elsewhere, but the side street remained quiet. In a corner café, an interview delayed many times was finally about to begin.

Danji worked nights in a hospital laboratory, and his reversed schedule had repeatedly thrown our plans out of alignment. We finally met on our last morning in Seattle. He was twenty-seven and had come directly from work, his long black hair parted in the middle and falling to his shoulders. A beard softened his features, while dark-rimmed glasses did little to conceal the fatigue beneath his eyes.

He settled onto a white sofa beside the window. The croissant on the plate before him and the coffee steaming in his hands were breakfast at the end of his working day. He ate quietly and spoke with the measured calm of someone who had been awake all night. Yet when the conversation turned to the Marshall Islands, his voice quickened and the exhaustion briefly receded.

Among the dozen or so Marshallese immigrants we interviewed in Seattle, Danji stood apart in one crucial respect. Many spoke of building their futures abroad. Danji spoke consistently of returning. With a university degree in medical laboratory science and experience across the full workflow of a modern laboratory, he had secured a stable hospital position in the United States. Yet his long-term plan was to take those skills home and work in the under-resourced public hospital laboratory of the Marshall Islands.

Like a reef beneath a changing tide, his attachment to the islands held firm. “I can see the best of the culture,” he said.

Danji belongs to Molavliej, historically one of the chiefly lineages of the Ralik Chain. Across generations, migration and marriage dispersed its members among several atolls. Danji himself was born and raised on Majuro, where he lived with his family until leaving for university.¹

He spoke little about his childhood. What he offered came in fragments: running along the beach, wandering the shores of Majuro’s lagoon, resting beneath coconut palms, and accompanying elders on visits to the outer islands.

Danji’s first journey abroad led to Taiwan. Many Marshallese students enter the workforce after high school, while others enlist in the military or seek further education. “If family finances allow, parents may send their children to the College of the Marshall Islands in Majuro for a two-year program,” Danji explained. “But it’s competitive, and so most of them would just be like, ‘Stuff it,’ and it’s already like—get into the universities of Hawaii or in the states.”

Taiwan offered another route. When I asked whether he had deliberately sought it out, Danji answered candidly: “It just popped up out of nowhere, an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” A Taiwanese government scholarship turned that unexpected opening into four years of study abroad.

During his studies, he chose medical laboratory science as his major. His interest had grown from witnessing the limitations of health care in the Marshall Islands: aging equipment, restricted testing capacity, and diagnoses that often came too late. In a country burdened by cancer, chronic illness, and continuing anxiety over the health effects of the nuclear legacy, laboratory work offered him a practical way to help detect disease earlier.

After graduation, however, his path divided once again. He could return home immediately or continue building experience abroad. His older brother, already established in Seattle with a steady job and a home, encouraged him to come to the United States and look for work in his field. Danji arrived in Seattle in 2022. By the time we met, he had lived there for nearly four years.

When I asked whether he intended to remain in the United States, he leaned back against the sofa. “Unknown? Well, I’m still probably here for like another three years.”

For the moment, returning to Majuro meant visiting perhaps once a year. When I asked why he did not go more often, he smiled wryly and joked about his own finances: “There is a poor kid.” Round-trip airfare placed home beyond the reach of an impulsive visit. The distance between Seattle and Majuro was measured not only in miles but in what he could afford.

His expression changed when he began talking about work. “The lab. There are three there.” He was referring to the laboratory at the public hospital in Majuro. A friend had told him that a position might become available, and the possibility made return suddenly concrete. If he could secure the job, he said, he would seriously consider going home.

When I asked the hospital’s formal name, Danji scratched his head. “I don’t know, it’s just seen as any hospital.” He apologized with a smile and explained that everyone simply called it the public hospital; its official name rarely entered ordinary conversation.

His parents still lived on Majuro. He video-called them whenever the internet connection allowed, although the signal often froze or disappeared. Nonetheless, even a broken connection was enough to let him hear their voices. Then he took out his phone and showed me a photograph of his mother drying fish in the yard. Majuro’s sunlight glared white across the image, and the fish lay in neat rows on bamboo racks. “That’s her best recipe,” he said.

For a moment, the distance between Seattle and Majuro narrowed to the width of his phone screen.

In Seattle, Danji’s contact with the wider Marshallese community was intermittent. He lived with his brother, but familiar faces rarely appeared in his daily routine. He encountered other Marshallese mainly at organized gatherings, including Pacific-wide sporting events. “The only time that I would see them is like there’s an actual event happening.” For a few hours, the event drew everyone together; afterward, they dispersed across the city and returned to separate lives.

He said this was completely different from Majuro. There, proximity made other people’s lives part of one’s own. News of a birth or an elder’s illness traveled quickly. Neighbors visited without appointments, and food waited in the living room for whoever happened to arrive. “Everyone knows each other, as far as next door to each other. So, everyone just talks to each other. That family thing was a big thing.” In the United States, distance reorganized that closeness around individual households. “Because everyone’s like more spread out all over the place, it’s much more like the community is smaller, like a specific family. Other families have their own thing.”

The shift in language is also stark. Among the younger Marshallese Danji encountered in the United States, English often dominated. “They speak more English and barely Marshallese. So, it’s like rare.” Full conversations in Marshallese became less common, while island expressions, colloquialisms, and proverbs were harder to carry into another generation. However, during his time in Taiwan, the small group of Marshallese students there made a conscious effort to speak their language with one another. Away from home, Marshallese became the language through which they created a temporary island community of their own.

Living abroad consequently sharpened Danji’s awareness of his identity. He said that whenever community events are held, Marshallese scattered across different places can quickly recognize each other—“there’s an event and they would identify us.” That unspoken understanding made him feel that, even across the Pacific, the blood of his people still flows.

“What does it mean to be Marshallese?” I asked.

Danji lifted his coffee, then set it down again. He remained silent for several moments.

“That is a hard question.”

He frowned before answering slowly: “Retaining our culture, the language.” After another pause, he added, “and probably the fishing ocean life.”

His finger traced a circle across the table. “Our identity is pretty much tied with the ocean.”

For Danji, the ocean was more than a national symbol. It was the setting of everyday knowledge: fishing, food, travel between islands, stories, memory, and belonging. To retain Marshallese identity was therefore to preserve not only a language but a way of understanding life through the sea.

When I asked what made him feel part of a community, he returned to the idea of safety. “Community is where individuals are free to express themselves, and we [feel safe] around other people in their communities.” Then he repeated the elements that mattered most: “Feeling safe, being able to express, working together, going together.”

Danji carried these ideas into the hospital laboratory. He spoke Marshallese whenever he could and taught his American colleagues simple words and phrases. “Everyone in the lab and it was a good [way to] click.” The words he teaches most are greetings and numbers, because his colleagues often see them on test requisition forms. He sees this as a small but tangible way to spread his language. Even if just one American learns to say “hello” and “thank you,” it moves Marshallese beyond private memory and into the shared life of his workplace.

Food was harder to reproduce. Danji tried to cook Marshallese dishes, but finding the right ingredients in the United States was difficult. “That was hard.” Asian supermarkets sometimes carried breadfruit, taro, or coconut products, yet the taste never quite matched what he remembered from Majuro.

Music and dance were even less present. “Islander music is not that often.” He kept several old Marshallese songs on his phone, however, and when he missed home, he put on his headphones and listened.

Danji learned what it meant to be Marshallese not from his family alone, but from the dense communal life of Majuro. Cultural Week lessons, neighborhood gatherings, and the oral traditions of elders shaped his understanding of who he was. At school, teachers introduced students to Marshallese history, legends, and customary taboos. After school, elders gathered beneath the trees while children sat nearby and listened. Stories of voyaging, fishing, and genealogy passed from one generation to the next through these ordinary afternoons. Danji understood himself as both a beneficiary of those stories and one of the people responsible for carrying them forward.

He believed that transoceanic migration now posed the greatest challenge to this chain of transmission. Marshallese culture was “losing it slowly, especially the newer generation,” he said. “They grow up and don’t want to learn much about the language or anything else.” For children raised abroad, the loss extended beyond language. They were separated from the places and daily relationships that gave words their meaning. Culture rarely disappeared through a single decisive break. It thinned through accumulated absences: a word forgotten, a song no longer sung, a story with no child nearby to hear it.

Distance, however, could also draw people together. During his four years in Taiwan, Danji formed friendships with students from across the world and learned to live independently in an unfamiliar country. Only a handful of Marshallese and Micronesian students attended his university, and there was no formal Pacific Islander cultural association. The students therefore organized gatherings of their own. “They did their own events and community stuff,” Danji recalled. Because there were so few of them, they looked after one another closely. They spoke their own languages, shared traditional food, and celebrated holidays together. Dormitory kitchens and student rooms became temporary island spaces within Taipei. The Marshallese community he encountered in Taiwan felt more cohesive than the one he later found in Seattle, he said.

I asked whether Danji thought living abroad weakened or deepened a person’s ethnic identity. “50:50,” he replied.

He explained that some Marshallese abroad worked deliberately to sustain their culture. They posted language lessons online, wore traditional clothing at community events, and displayed Marshallese crafts at school festivals. Others gradually adopted the habits and language of the society around them. “Others just fade away,” he said.

But for him, he remarked, “I can see the best of the culture.” Practices that had once seemed ordinary because they surrounded him every day acquired greater significance after he left. From abroad, he could see more clearly what the islands had given him—and what might be lost.

Two years before our interview, Danji returned to the Marshall Islands. When he stepped off the plane, the familiar sea air struck him, and he drew a deep breath. People at home were still working to preserve their traditions, he said. “People are keeping it together.” Community organizations were also supporting cultural activities. The foundation remained strong—although, he admitted, culture no longer seemed woven into daily life with the same intensity he remembered from childhood.

His greatest fear was that younger Marshallese would lose the language through which they understood themselves. “Them, forgetting everything about themselves, the culture, Marshallese culture, right? It’s probably gonna be gone. No one speaks the language anymore. It’s gone.”

Even as he imagined that possibility, he resisted accepting it as inevitable. “I’m sure there are people that are actually trying to keep it. So, it’s not gonna just die out. It’s still gonna be there.” As long as people continued to speak the language, prepare the food, tell the stories, and teach one another, Marshallese culture could continue.

He believed that the best way to reverse these trends of cultural decline is to establish dedicated Marshallese cultural centers overseas. “An actual cultural center, like an actual building here in Seattle or anywhere in the U.S. would be nice,” he said. Marshallese gatherings in the United States were scattered and temporary. A permanent center could offer regular language classes, traditional cooking workshops, craft demonstrations, and programs devoted to fishing, navigation, and other forms of ocean knowledge. It could give younger Marshallese a place to encounter their culture as part of everyday life rather than only during occasional celebrations.

When I asked whether the Marshall Islands could persuade more young people to remain, Danji turned from culture to the physical future of the islands. Rising seas were reducing the space available for homes and development, making it “harder to grow.” During his most recent visit, he returned to a beach he remembered well and found that the shoreline had retreated. At high tide, the water now reached the place where he had once parked his bicycle. He had also heard reports of small, uninhabited islets disappearing beneath the water.

For Danji, preserving Marshallese life could no longer depend entirely upon keeping people within the islands. It would also require building strong communities wherever Marshallese people settled—communities capable of carrying their language, knowledge, and relationships across the ocean.

“There is nothing wrong with going somewhere new,” he said. “But it’s always good to retain it and then teach others about it, keeping it alive.”

Beneath Danji’s concern about rising seas lay an older wound. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, displacing communities and leaving parts of the archipelago contaminated.²

Danji first encountered this history in Marshallese language and culture classes. Each year, Manit Week, or Culture Week, brought a more sustained examination of the country’s past. Lessons traced the Marshall Islands through colonial rule, World War II, nuclear testing, and the eventual achievement of self-government.

The history also circulated beyond the classroom. “They want to spread the awareness,” Danji said of people back home. Elders sometimes spoke about the testing years at family gatherings. Their accounts were restrained, carrying the insistence that younger generations remember: “You need to know where we come from.”

In the Marshall Islands, that history remained embedded in schools, families, and national commemorations. Abroad, it depended upon deliberate transmission. “The problem is we’re spreading it when we go back home, but we’re not really [doing so] outside,” Danji explained. Marshallese children raised in the United States might encounter the nuclear tests only at an occasional cultural event. Without those spaces, the history could become a sealed chapter in a textbook, detached from the families and islands that continued to live with its consequences.

Of the many facts he had learned, one comparison remained especially vivid. Castle Bravo, the thermonuclear device detonated at Bikini Atoll in 1954, was, as Danji remembered it, “stronger than the Hiroshima bombing like 1,000 times.” Its fallout spread far beyond the test site, exposing communities on neighboring atolls.

He recounted this history at a measured pace, as though repeating a story he had heard many times. His fingers, however, continued rubbing the rim of his coffee cup.

The story was also part of his own family. According to the history passed down to him, his grandparents were relocated by U.S. authorities and assured that their new home lay beyond the reach of the test. “They got relocated because of the bombing,” he said. “But the problem is the government thought the blast wouldn’t reach them, but, you know, the fallout still did. Miscalculation, I would say.” After the fallout reached them, his grandparents moved again, eventually settling in Majuro.

Danji also understood its medical consequences as delayed and intergenerational. “People are still getting cancer? Well, I mean it doesn’t really happen right away, but it happens down the line generations later.”

Radiation exposure can increase an exposed person’s lifetime risk of cancer, with disease sometimes developing years or decades later. Current evidence has not established a corresponding increase in cancer among unexposed descendants because of a parent’s or grandparent’s radiation exposure. Danji’s words express the intergenerational uncertainty through which many Marshallese families understand the nuclear legacy.³

The nuclear legacy had also strengthened a shared Marshallese consciousness. Danji believed that the experience had “made it stronger in a way,” as “people are trying to spread awareness of it.” Through education, testimony, and advocacy, Marshallese people had transformed a history imposed upon them into a collective memory they could carry and communicate. Remembering did more than preserve the record of suffering; it gave people a language through which to identify responsibility and demand recognition.

When I asked how he assessed the American government’s compensation and assistance, Danji answered, “It’s okay, but they can do better.” He first pointed to the mobility provisions of the Compact of Free Association, which allow Marshallese citizens to enter, reside, and work in the United States. For families seeking employment or specialized medical treatment, that access could be indispensable. His assessment of the nuclear response itself was harsher. Bikini remained contaminated and unavailable for permanent resettlement. “They can’t do anything about it, or they don’t really want to do much. They do only cleanup or anything so that area’s off limits,” Danji remarked.

The memory of that history was unevenly distributed across generations. “People are still angry about the U.S. back home, especially the old generation,” Danji observed. Those who had experienced displacement and fallout carried the grievance as lived memory. Many younger Marshallese raised in the United States, by contrast, felt more distant from it and rarely discussed the nuclear legacy.

That widening distance troubled him. The contamination could remain long after the anger had faded. In another generation or two, the homeland might still bear the physical consequences of nuclear testing even as fewer people remembered how they came to be there.

In the Marshall Islands, distance can become a medical condition. The country’s twenty-nine atolls and five coral islands are scattered across nearly two million square kilometers of the North Pacific. Most lie far from the urban centers of Majuro and Ebeye, and travel between them depends upon limited flights and inter-island ships whose schedules can be disrupted by weather, mechanical problems, and unsafe docking conditions.⁴

The national health system attempts to bridge those distances through two hospitals—one in Majuro and one on Ebeye—and fifty-nine health centers distributed across the outer islands. Both hospitals provide primary and secondary care but only limited tertiary treatment; patients with more complex needs may still require referral overseas. The outer-island centers, staffed by health assistants, provide preventive care and essential clinical services. The range of treatment available, however, narrows sharply with distance from Majuro.⁵

“Definitely,” Danji said repeatedly when I asked whether outer-island communities faced the greatest shortages. There were “less resources in those areas, and it’s harder to travel.”

When someone on an outer island became seriously ill, treatment began with communication and waiting. A health assistant first had to reach Majuro by telephone or radio. The patient then waited for a ship or plane, for weather that allowed it to travel, and for a place aboard. Conditions requiring surgery or specialist care could turn the ocean between an outer island and Majuro into another stage of the emergency. Even after reaching the capital, the patient still depended upon the hospital having an available bed, functioning equipment, and the appropriate medical personnel. “If they can’t really do much about it,” Danji said, ending the sentence with a shrug.

On a remote island, the health center might be no more than a small dispensary staffed by one health assistant. Danji said that on some islands, even this position was not full-time: the worker also farmed and fished. The assistant treated fevers, infections, and minor injuries, provided preventive care, and determined when a patient needed referral.⁶

For anything beyond that limited capacity, the instruction was simple: go to Majuro. Following it was not. The journey required transportation, food, and accommodation in the capital—costs many families could not afford. Some patients therefore waited until the pain became unbearable or the illness impossible to ignore. By the time they reached the hospital, the period in which treatment might have been simpler had already passed.

Majuro Hospital was the center of this referral system, but it faced shortages of its own. During Danji’s most recent visit, he saw patients crowding its corridors. He estimated that foreign contract workers made up between 70 and 80 percent of the professional staff he encountered, including doctors, nurses, and laboratory personnel, many of them from the Philippines and Taiwan.

Their work was indispensable to the hospital. Reliance upon rotating contracts, however, made continuity difficult. When one clinician or technician left, the experience accumulated during that contract could leave as well. The Marshall Islands trained nurses domestically and sent medical students abroad, but the small number of graduates could not supply every specialty the country required. Each vacancy reopened a gap that another overseas worker had to fill.

For laboratory medicine, the shortage extended beyond personnel. Every instrument depended upon a long chain of technical support that did not exist within the country. “If you have a problem with the instruments or anything, you would need to get technicians from the actual company to come in,” Danji explained. “But there’s none back home; they’re all overseas.” A replacement part had to be ordered and shipped across the Pacific. If the repair required an engineer, the hospital then had to pay for that person to fly to Majuro. “That would take longer,” he said. “Maintenance was a problem, too.” During the delay, the instrument remained idle and the tests it performed became unavailable. He had seen machines abandoned because repairing them cost nearly as much as replacing them.

His decision to study medical laboratory science had emerged from this geography of scarcity. When I asked whether the conditions in the Marshall Islands had shaped his choice, his answer was immediate: “Yeah, definitely.”

Then he continued to count what he could do for the Marshall Islands: early cancer screening, testing radiation-related blood markers, and establishing more standardized lab procedures. With stronger testing capacity, Danji said, medical workers could “catch stuff early.”

That was what he did in Seattle. Working through patient samples each night, he sometimes found abnormalities that led clinicians to investigate for cancer. “I usually catch cancer if it happens,” he said. Laboratory findings alone do not confirm most cancers, but they can provide the first indication that further imaging, pathology, or biopsy is needed. Danji occupied that early point in the diagnostic chain—the moment when an illness might first become visible.

“Especially in cancer treatment, because, you know, the same things we could borrow,” he said of the methods he had learned abroad. “So, it is good to find out and then treat it right away.” For a moment, his exhaustion receded. He spoke with the concentration of a technician who could see both the problem and the work required to address it. “It’s a great thing back home,” he added.

Danji planned to remain in the United States for approximately three more years, using that time to deepen his practical experience. Seattle offered him a stable position, reliable equipment, and a network of friends and relatives. It gave him every practical reason to stay. Still, he returned repeatedly to the possibility of taking a position at Majuro Hospital.

He spoke about returning without presenting it as a sacrifice or a heroic mission. He wanted to learn as much as he could from a laboratory with abundant resources and then carry that knowledge to one with too few. For Danji, going home meant doing the same work in the place where it could matter most.

The Marshall Islands is a young country in demographic terms: more than half its population is under twenty-five, and its adolescent birth rate remains among the highest in the Pacific.⁷

Danji described children as a shared source of wealth for the extended family and community. Three or four children in one household seemed ordinary to him; five or six attracted little surprise. “Main reason. Stuck on an island: boredom happens,” he said half-jokingly. “Nothing else to do besides swimming, fishing, working.”

Behind the joke lay a more serious concern about early parenthood. Danji said he knew of pregnancies among girls as young as twelve, particularly on remote islands. Pregnancy at that age was not simply an extreme version of starting a family early; it raised questions of child protection, access to reproductive healthcare, and whether a girl could remain in school.

The first year of a child’s life carried particular cultural significance. A kemem brings relatives, neighbors, and church members together to celebrate a baby’s first birthday through food, song, prayer, and gift-giving. The tradition predates the American nuclear-testing period, with roots in an earlier time of high infant mortality, when reaching the age of one was itself an achievement worthy of communal recognition.⁸

In Danji’s understanding, the nuclear legacy had added another layer to that meaning. Marshallese accounts of the testing years carried memories of miscarriages, infants who did not survive, and babies born with severe abnormalities. “It pretty much ties to the nuclear testing… many babies couldn’t live past their first year,” he explained. “That’s why kemem is so sacred to us; it’s a celebration of survival.”

This communal understanding of childhood belonged to a matrilineal social order. Land rights and traditional rank generally pass through the mother’s line, placing women at the center of genealogy and inheritance.⁹ “The woman is pretty much the higher hierarchy compared to the male in society in general,” Danji explained.

Under manit, he said, harming or insulting a woman could bring a response from her entire clan. Modern statutory law did not reproduce that traditional structure of authority. “Not like the current law,” he added. He said the current legal system is mixed with American influence and some of the traditional chiefly powers have been weakened; women do not have substantially more legal protection than men.

A child’s prospects also depended heavily upon where that child grew up. Danji described outer-island schools in which one or two teachers might cover several grade levels. Books and other materials arrived from Majuro by ship, making the classroom vulnerable to the same delays that affected medicine, food, and equipment. “Less resources are likely in those areas,” he said, returning to the phrase he had used about healthcare.

Schools on remote islands also had limited access to electricity, internet service, and continued teacher training. Attendance requirements existed, but distance and family circumstances made them difficult to enforce. “That’s how you would see a lot of kids outside on the street,” Danji said. “No one’s going to school.” He remembered seeing children gathered along the beaches during school hours. Some helped their families with fishing, farming, or household work. Others lived far from a functioning school or saw little connection between the classroom and the employment available to them afterward.

For young people who completed school, stable employment remained scarce. Danji said frankly that personal connections often carried more weight than qualifications, particularly in government and the public sector. “Most of us in a position, like, if you know someone, then you can work on it,” he said. Family relationships could sometimes be read directly from the names appearing throughout an office: “You can easily tell just when people and then last names, family members.”

Danji saw a generational division in how different generations viewed health, environment, and migration. Older people were more likely to remain attached to the islands because “they just wanna keep the culture.” Younger people, by contrast, wanted movement and novelty. “The current generation would love migration,” he said, “like going out, go somewhere new, see more things so that they don’t want to be stuck on that island.” In a country with such a small population, each departure remained visible. When departures continued across an entire generation, the institutions expected to sustain island life had fewer people through whom to do so.

I then asked, “What worries you most about the future of Marshallese youth?” and he replied, “Forgetting everything about themselves, the culture, Marshallese culture.” He had already seen how quickly English could replace Marshallese abroad and how easily cultural knowledge could become confined to occasional celebrations. “It’s probably gonna be gone, gone and then. No one speaks the language. It’s gone.”

Still, he believed continuity remained possible. “I’m sure there’s people that actually trying to keep it. So, it’s not… going to die out, right? Still gonna be there. Just gotta look at the right areas.”

Life in the United States introduced a different uncertainty. When I asked how intensified immigration enforcement had affected Marshallese communities, Danji frowned. “It causes fear,” he said. Under the Compact of Free Association, eligible Marshallese citizens may live and work indefinitely in the United States without a visa. That admission does not itself make them U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Danji described this position as “a fine line between there.”

He also mentioned that many worry the United States might reduce assistance to the Marshall Islands or restrict benefits available to Marshallese migrants. “It’s been like the ongoing concerns since,” he said.

Giving me a wry smile, he continued: “There’s a limit where the amount they can help, which is kind of funny, because there’s no limit for a nuclear fallout back home.”

When the interview ended, Danji stood and stretched. He needed to return to his apartment and sleep, he said, although he would have to collect a report from the laboratory later that afternoon. His apartment was only two blocks from the café. He shared it with a close friend he had grown up with in Majuro. Their schedules rarely aligned during the week, but on some weekends they cooked together.

“Just like on the island,” he said.

Danji was our final interviewee in Seattle and the only young Marshallese we met who described returning as a concrete plan. When I asked what gave him hope for the Marshall Islands, he answered simply, “Yeah, everyone.”

His own life embodied that hope. Majuro had given him his language and identity; Taiwan, his education; and Seattle, the experience of working in a modern hospital laboratory. He intended to remain for another three years before taking what he had learned home. His pride in being Marshallese was not merely an expression of belonging. It had given direction to his career.

Outside, cherry blossoms drifted across the damp street. Danji pushed open the café door and turned back to wave before disappearing around the corner. His long black hair lifted in the breeze.

For now, he was heading back to his apartment to sleep after his night shift. Majuro—and the laboratory where he hoped to work next—lay an ocean away.