Four ways to say masturbation in Pohnpeian:

Suk uh ngehi – means to pound yourself. It is similar to sukusuk, which is to pound sakau root. It is even more similar to sukumahi which is to pound breadfruit. In fact, if you are ever pounding breadfruit it’s best not to discuss it.

Fingerlynn – Roughly all Pohnpeian women’s names end in “lynn” (pronounced “lean”) Jaylynn, Ailynn, Beautylynn, Goodlynn, Badlynn – so if you can’t find yourself a real “lynn” then you have to rely on Fingerlynn.

Kumutina and Kendipina are also proper names. Kumutina is a feminized form of kumu which refers to the palm of your hand. Kendip means to “spit,” so Kendipina refers (for those who need it spelled out) to the spit one might desire to put on one’s kumu were one a man who desired to suk uh ngehi. There is no direct translation for these names, though I would like to suggest “Palmolive” as a possibility.

Sinking into my slow sakau-induced reverie, I contemplate the angelic face of Sweety (well, Sweetylynn, but we just call her Sweety). She’s a young Pohnpeian mother of two with enormous eyes and a face that could adorn the walls of some ancient Egyptian temple built for a god of peace. She isn’t drinking sakau, just sitting on a rock covered with a piece of cardboard in the corner of the market. This is a perfectly comfortable seat to any Pohnpeian, but years of pampering with couch cushions have left me handicapped and unable to sit on rocks. What’s she doing there? Perhaps she’s keeping an eye on her husband who is sitting across the market ignoring her with every fiber of his being.

I note that Sweety is wearing pants. Beware of Pohnpeian women in pants; they are looking for a fight. A common, much feared, move in a fight is to attempt to lift your opponent’s skirt and show the world her underwear. Therefore, a well prepared Pohnpeian woman wears pants for fighting.

The sakau market faces the road, for entertainment’s sake. Most of the sakau markets in Kitti, the chiefdom where I live in Pohnpei, face the road. The road, or at least the pavement, is new and interesting to us. Other chiefdoms prefer to contemplate the jungle or the ocean, but here in Kitti we prefer the fascination of the road. For instance, a large woman in a bright red muumuu is now slowly shuffling the overgrown blacktop. She is as solid as an oak. Her steady, slow, bobbing walk reminds me of a sailboat far away at sea.

A wiry farmer, Soum, begins to teach me about types of bananas. Soum is not his name, it’s his traditional title. I’m not sure what his name is, but he is one of many Soums that I know. He writes puhl maht or “boiling banana.” in my notebook and tells me to pronounce it over and over again. He wants me to ask our sakau server for some. I hate boiling banana. Boiling bananas taste like chalk and are quite distinct from the more familiar “edible banana.” The thing is that you have to boil them before you can even entertain the notion of masticating them. Still, I like to entertain Soum, so I ask for some. The sakau market server, a high school girl, looks like she wants to scratch my eyes out when I ask her for boiling banana. Then she cracks up. When I say puhl maht, you see, it sounds like wuhl maht or “stinky dick.” I just asked for a plate of stinky dick. Hilarious. I instruct Soum that “What’s up bouncy bouncy?” is a formal American greeting.

Can any observer be impartial? Does the very act of observing change the behavior of the observed? Was Margaret Mead projecting her own repressed sexual fantasies onto those she thought to be primitive others or are the Samoans she made famous really free-loving partner-swapping sexual adventurers?

The woman in the red muumuu sails near us. She smiles at us. Her teeth are a vivid mix of gold caps and red betel-nut stains. Without warning, Sweety leaps from her rock and jumps on the woman. She scratches her face. The woman screams and topples over into the tall grass with a painful thud. Viewed through a sakau-haze, the fight is abstract and bizarrely distant.

It occurs to me that I ought to do something. Then it occurs to me that this is not my culture. When it serves my needs, I try to play the Not My Culture card. I have lived here for ten years, married here, had children here, killed pigs here, grown yams here… the name I am known by, Souwel, is a title from the clan that lives in a gorgeous piece of swamp and jungle and mountain called Pwudoi… but when the fighting starts, I want to become an Outsider.

There are no more screams, but a lot of labored grunts and whacks. The wailing keyboard music stops. None of us in the sakau market jumps up to aid the fat middle-aged lady in the red muumuu who is about to have her underwear exposed to the world and who is likely permanently scarred by Sweety’s sharp nails. I glance around, waiting for someone to take charge, hoping not to get involved. Soum stands up and yells at the two grown women tussling in the grass. He’s a high-titled person, leader of a kousop or clan. The fact that he is here witnessing this is suddenly very embarrassing for the younger men, especially Sweety’s brothers. They walk over to the fight and pull Sweety off the larger woman. Sweety does not resist. Apparently, she’s made her point.

The bloody and shaking woman begins to yell at Sweety. Luckily I have my dirty dictionary, so I catch a lot of the great invective being spewed. Mostly it has to do with the size and cleanliness of Sweety’s genitalia. I learn a new word that means, roughly, “the state of being fixated on someone’s underwear.”

“Sweety did the right thing,” Soum whispers to me, when things have quieted down a bit.

Sweety’s father, who is well into his Viagra years, has been running around with the big lady in the red muumuu. They were seen driving down the road together in his pick-up, in broad daylight, with her sitting in the passenger’s seat as if she belonged there instead of his current wife, Sweety’s mother. The problem is not that he’s having an affair, but that he is doing it wrong. He’s not sneaking around as he should be. It’s insulting. People are talking. So Sweety put on pants, sharpened her nails, and did the moral thing. Her attack is a way of telling her father, without confronting him, to give his affairs a semblance of secrecy.

The fight has scared away my relaxed sakau feeling. I am seeing things far too clearly and crave the fuzzy, distant feeling of being sakau-drunk. My little blue journal of useful words is inadequate armor to keep Pohnpei at a distance. I have no missionary zeal or anthropological interest to carry me through this night, no agenda to comfort me: I’m here to collect data or I’m here to bring the Good Word.

I’ve literally ingested this place, drank its dirt, gone as far as I could into into its culture. Scratches and skirt pulling my new normal. Two grown women fighting on the side of the road has become the moral thing, the right thing. My former self, with its strange, foreign notions of right and wrong, has slunk away like an eel into the swamp. I am Souwel. And I have built Souwel out of the words of a dirty dictionary. Those lurid scribbles are who I am now. Rather than an agenda or an armor to protect my old self, the words are a destructive force; they have shattered the distance between observer and observed.

“Souwel,” calls Soum. “Have a slap with me.”

“Slap” is slang for a shot of cheap rum. A slap is the perfect thing to put us right.

“I need more than a slap, I need a punch,” I say. Everyone laughs.

I buy a bottle of Tanduay “rhum” from the Phillipines and pour two shots into plastic cups.

I hold the glass up and toast: “Get on top of me!” Soum taught me that toast. It’s not a real toast, it’s just something Soum thinks is funny.

The keyboard player launches into the next high-pitched song. I like this song. It’s the one about the tree in the mangrove swamp that looks fine on the outside but is rotting on the inside. It’s about being in love with an unattainable woman or maybe it’s about being afflicted with tuberculosis. I can’t quite translate it. Still, it’s the perfect song.

I am privately celebrating, because I was finally the reason we got picked up, which is normally my girlfriend’s trump card when we hitchhike.

Four hours and two car rides after arriving at the exit ramp in Berlin, we are back in Hamburg. The mother/daughter combo lets us off at a train stop near the university, gives a fleeting wink and wave, and drives off.

The more I hitchhike, the more I realize how much I misunderstood hitchhiking before. It’s not reserved exclusively for the road warriors and ex-cons. The whole process is incredibly easy, and relatively safe (depending on where you are). Why don’t more people do this?

Well, the inherent danger of getting rides from strangers is the major deterrent.

“One friend did it every day for months between San Francisco and Berkeley,” said Matt, a UC Berkeley graduate I managed to connect with about his experiences hitchhiking. “She’s an anarchist and knows self-defense and so she usually doesn’t mind taking rides from lone men, but scopes them out, and has asked to be let out before. Thank goodness nothing bad’s ever happened.”

Hitchhiking can be risky, but there are methods for mitigating that risk. According to Veit Kühne, founder the Hospitality Club travel network, the best way to find a secure ride is to ask people directly. Don’t stand on the side of the road. Talk to people at gas stations and rest stops. Ask them where they’re going. Then you have an idea of who the person is before you get in their car.

There will always be some level of risk, but most hitchhikers will tell you that if you have any common sense your biggest danger is getting in a car accident.

In my case, the prowling cougar that gave my girlfriend and me a ride was about the scariest predator I’ve encountered.

All dangers aside, there are plenty of other good reasons hitchhiking is not the preferred method of transportation. There are different laws in every country, state, and county, making you prone to police harassment if you don’t know your rights. There are no planned departure and arrival times, nor a guarantee that you will get the place you want to go.

To get the short distance from Hamburg to Berlin, there are a number of more reliable possibilities that cost €15 or less. With the many hang-ups hitching presents, one would think only the poorest of the poor would choose to do so. Surprisingly, many of the people I have talked to rarely see hitchhiking in terms of expense.

“I primarily do it is because it’s really lovely to meet strangers,” said Matt. “I’ve found it very easy to talk to people, even if they’re from disparate backgrounds.  I got picked up by a truck driver (off-duty, he said he’d never risk his job doing it with a company truck), who told me a fascinating story about why he beat his ex-wife, very soberly, you know, his side of the story, although he of course admitted he regretted it.”

I create a vivid memory every time I step into someone else’s car. On one trip my girlfriend and I rode with a guy that we were both convinced was a member of the former Eastern German Secret Police (Stasi). He adamantly defended the governmental agency, saying that all the stuff they tell you at the Stasi Museum is biased and inaccurate. He also had a curious amount of information about the secret bunkers along the autobahn where they used to spy on civilians. At the end of the trip, we were happy to get away from him, but we will never forget the experience.

Perhaps that is why Kühne differentiates between those that “just wanna get cheaply from A to B,” and those that “love to meet other people, love the stories, the interaction, and the freedom.”

There is certainly a difference, but the two groups are not mutually exclusive, and I don’t think that hitchhiking is the only way to achieve the latter.

On a trip to the Ukraine last March, a friend and I began with our thumbs, but found much more of our adventure took place on a train: the army guy who picked us up at the highway exit talked on his phone the entire way. The only thing I learned about him was that he was selling a car. On the train from Berlin to Warsaw, however, we shared our cabin with a timid Polish man who could speak a little German and no English. By the end of the trip, he had shared his thermos of coffee, given us his phone number, and invited us to come visit him in his hometown of Poznan.

The idea that hitchhiking is always the most enlightening form of transportation is a misguided yet pervasive notion.

The American-based hitchhiking website Digihitch completely over-romanticizes this basic concept. In the Digihitch forums, one finds questions like, “What was it that drove you to go out into the world with nothing but yourself, a pack, and your thumb?”

In response came equally passé answers. “I wasn’t able to really understand my life. Had to get out of my own way, see things from another perspective. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees — and it seems to me that there are a lot out there who can’t either… I’m traveling, moving and my reason is that I have to.”

These comments aren’t helpful or informative. They are the inklings of twenty year olds wishing they lived in a time they don’t understand or adults clinging to the dissipating nostalgia of their debunked youth. Getting in a car with a stranger isn’t going to help you fix your crumbling life any more than you’ll find enlightenment on a fingernail-sized piece of blotter paper. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this, and he was bathing in the shit.

In the end, people take drugs to get fucked up, and people hitchhike because they either want to get from point A or get to point B. Why so many have decided to contrive a higher purpose behind this actions is beyond me. All it does is push hitching toward the cultural periphery, making it inaccessible to the mainstream.

Hitchhiking doesn’t have to be relegated to the community of Jack Kerouac wannabes, ex-cons, and vagrants. There are plenty of very practical opportunities to try it.

Matt said he has picked up a ride simply because his bike broke down and he needed to get to a repair shop before it closed.

Kühne says, “You’ll learn some skills that will help you throughout your life.”

I do it because it’s cheap and has the potential to be culturally interesting. Because of that, I would encourage everyone to try it (although safely), but I also don’t want to glorify it as something it’s not.

I asked my uncle about hitchhiking, and his response surprised me. Ultimately, I think his perspective embodies what hitchhiking should be.

“When I was a kid, I lived about nine miles from town. Walking wasn’t very fun, so sometimes I would just stick out my thumb. I didn’t really think anything of it. I just didn’t like walking alone.”

Sakau is a mildly narcotic pepper root. The root is mashed, soaked and squeezed through hibiscus bark. It seeps through the soft, wet bark in long, brown, viscous snots. The sacred gloop is caught in coconut-shell cups and passed around at feasts with great ceremony and solemn ritual. Since sakau first floated to Pohnpei from the neighboring island of Kosrae hidden in a goddess’ vagina, the drug has been a central feature of Pohnpeian culture. The sakau we are drinking tonight, however, is not the stuff of legend but commercial sakau. A local fisherman, Limwasahsah, needs gas money for his boat, so he’s opened his sakau market tonight. This sakau is squeezed into a plastic funnel, caught in an old gallon-bleach jug, and sold for a dollar a glass. A glass consists of two level servings from a can of Vienna mini-sausages.

The nearly toothless, always shirtless, pot-bellied fisherman named Limwasahsah sits in the corner of his market, dangling a cigarette from his cracked lips, which is the only thing about him that is remotely like a young Robert Mitchum. He is one of the happiest people I have ever met. His googly eyes dance with mischief as he sits in a dark corner of the market and laughs the night away. It’s comforting to know that nothing could possible happen to me that wouldn’t be inherently funny to Limwasahsah.

Fingerlynn and I usually retire to Try Me First market after work. We sit on cracked plastic chairs around an enormous upended spool used for telephone wire (a cousin works for the electric company). The market is built next to the road. The structure itself consists of a few logs of swamp wood nailed to a tin roof and attached to Limwasahsah’s family’s small store, which has a full supply of Vienna mini-sausages and lollipops to munch/suck on while you drink your sakau.

Fingerlynn and I gulp down sakau, rinse with soda, spit, and watch the traffic. We know the cars, the people in the cars, and the gossip about the people in the cars; the cars that have thick, dark tint on all of the windows, including the windshield, are those of cheating spouses. The police stop by in their pickup truck, three of them standing on the rusty truck bed, in order to get some take-out sakau in rinsed out bottles of Filipino rum. The village can expect an extremely calm, slow response to any emergency tonight. The Seventh-Day Adventist kids, teen-aged American teacher-volunteers, whiz by in their distinctive yellow Chinese firetruck. The ambulance speeds by at 20 MPH, headed down the winding jungle road to the moldy hospital. We can tell by the cars following the ambulance who is sick. People honk and call to us. To each car we call “come drink, come drink…” like the goblins tempting their prey with forbidden fruit in Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Most cars slow down and call back to us, “We’ll be back in a minute.” They won’t really be back, but it’s impolite to say “no.” Every night, we sit and call to the cars. We are fixtures. There’s Fingerlynn and Jonathan, where they always are, every night, getting buzzed and watching traffic. It’s our version of sitting on the couch with a beer and channel surfing, only the couch is on the side of the road and the beer looks and tastes like mud.

Fingerlynn believes that oral sex is a foreign invention, brought to Pohnpei by Westerners in the 19th century along with “pain, suffering, and Christmas.” In a way, she is a cock-sucking, pussy-licking creationist: she believes that oral sex appeared on Pohnpei through the not-so-divine intervention of European sailors.

I, however, have more of an evolutionary take on the issue. My logic is that any human group surrounded both by banana trees and edible clams cannot help but make the simple logical leap to oral sex. Besides that, there is the fact that cultural memes travel lightning-fast on Pohnpei. After a shipload of cheap red hair dye arrived on the island, some kids on the north side of the island began putting a red stripe in their hair, and within two weeks, nearly every man, woman, and child on Pohnpei had a red stripe in their hair. At the turn of the millennium, a beautiful girl was known as a “butts 2000″; this lasted about a month before we all gave it up. For a while we screamed the English word “budget” to anyone who answered a question with a plain yes.

“Are you drinking sakau?”

“Yes.”

“Budget!!!” (Maniacal laugher.)

I have no explanation for this behavior or why it’s funny. Neither does anyone else, really. It just happened. “Budget!” took hold for a few months and then disappeared. It might have had something to do with prostitution or something to do with the woefully inept government of the neighboring island of Chuuk, where the “budget” game was said to have originated.

Logic, reason, science: all of these gifts of the Enlightenment carry little weight with Fingerlynn. Oral sex came from mehnwai (foreigners) because it is a mehnwai thing to do. Like budgets, head colds, AIDS, and customer service, oral sex is one of those sneaky mehnwai phenomena that the forthright and moral people of Pohnpei could never invent. It seems horribly important to Fingerlynn that oral sex not be a spontaneous human invention enjoyed by every culture and instead must be a virus spread by craven, sex-obsessed Westerners. To suggest anything different is to question the very core of what it means to be Pohnpeian.

The sakau wanders aimlessly in my bloodstream and caresses my brain into a pleasant fog. I can’t feel my legs. Or more like my legs aren’t talking to my brain at the moment. After about two hours of banter, we have downed three cups (six sausage-cans worth) of sakau. Fingerlynn and I are passing into a euphoric haze that only exacerbates our argument, which must now navigate the mazy way from its inception in some deadened synapse to actual vocalization on my lips.

“Consider the home-made porn movies,” I say.

Horrific porn movies are being passed around the island. One, involving a large lady with skin fungus that is remarkably similar to the tinted windows of adulterer’s cars, is the sort of thing that makes me want to pull an Oedipus and skewer my eyes. My argument: any culture where cheap video cameras are available will spontaneously begin recording sex. Her argument: the idea of porn and the cameras are mehnwai inventions and Micronesians who use the cameras to record their trysts are more mehnwai than Micronesian. They have been corrupted.

All Pohnpeian men will tell you that sakau enhances their virility. All Pohnpeian men are lying. If the muscle-relaxing effects of sakau weren’t enough to kill any remaining sexual function, Fingerlynn’s final gambit in our argument inevitably does. She mentions a cousin (it’s always a cousin, because everyone is everyone else’s cousin on Pohnpei) who is currently dying in bed. Local medicine and magic cannot save him. His malady? His wife or someone was riding him in the coconut-grating position when she pulled the trick that all Pohnpeian women know: she broke his dick. I now desire sex with a Pohnpeian woman about as much as sex with a female praying mantis, which is to say a lot, even though I know the outcome cannot be good. So there lies this poor cousin, bent over in pain, dying of a broken wiener all because of the wiles, prowess, and anatomical knowledge of the Pohnpeian female. This is the end of the argument.

I will gladly keep the secrets of oral sex to myself, as a mehnwai, if Fingerlynn keeps the secrets of murder by broken dick to herself, as a Pohnpeian.

It is dark now and the cars are infrequent. The market is lit by one weak light bulb, covered with a red plastic bucket. Light and sound are difficult concepts for the sakau drunkard, best kept at an arm’s length. Limwahsahsah has been sitting in a corner of the market and laughing at us all evening. His wife made us some boiled banana to munch on. I don’t miss the opportunity to mispronounce the Pohnpeian name of this dish as “stinky penis.” The jovial gossip and argument portion of the evening is over as we sink in our plastic chairs and drift like tired, overstuffed eels inside our minds. Limwahsahsah turns up the volume on a locally produced CD of Casio-keyboard caterwauling. The tune is a cover of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song; “Lodi” off of the Green River album, I think. I want to protest, but the music has a physical presence, like a blanket made of humid air, that stifles speech. My body is on vacation and my mind is working overtime. The CCR tune re-appropriated for Pohnpeian screech-song seems to be the last piece of the argument I need. It seems terribly important. If I could just impart this last piece of the puzzle. Cultural cross-pollination something something something — it all briefly makes sense.

Fingerlynn and I are now completely drunk on sakau. We grunt, spit, and half-heartedly punch at one another. I really want to leave the sakau market, or at least stumble to the side of the road and pee, but I can’t seem to move. This intense need to leave is perfectly balanced with an equally intense desire to stretch out this time with my friend. I want the evening to last forever and in a way, it is lasting forever. Perhaps there is a sakau-induced quantum shift of some sort. Or maybe there is, like, a quantum snapshot that stuck the DNA of that very moment in time like the dinosaur DNA stuck in amber from Jurassic Park (these are the thoughts that sakau will bring you). I am still, even now, at that sakau market ingesting the dirty nothingness in the coconut-shell cup. The three of us are there under the thin tin roof of the open-air market, having the same argument each night, never reaching a conclusion, laughing at the same jokes, watching the traffic, going nowhere slow.

The afternoon was filled with excursions through the back streets of Kaseong to its “monuments” from the Goreyo dynasty, faded wooden structures staffed by women in “traditional garb” brandishing megaphones with no English explanation forthcoming, except at a tiny stone bridge in a rather sad, flooded park next to a long road where, apparently, the blood of the last Goreyo hero still stains the rocks from where he was murdered by the first emperor of the future Joseon dynasty 700 years ago. At each location, we were carefully kept from any opportunities to see the local populace, but the buses had to traverse the roads, and along the roads were the real people.

A walled-off residential area near a designated tourist site in central Kaesong.

The men and women we passed by wore formless shirts and pants or dresses — navy, gray, beige, white. Once in a while, the younger men would wave at us when we waved, but never when a guard was watching. Women never waved, turning away as soon as they saw us. Children, though, often wore bright shirts with commercial logos on them — donated, most likely, from charities in the South. They would often break into broad smiles whenever the guards weren’t around, pointing and waving at us. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, settling for the intense stare I’d seen the kids give to me in the windows downtown. It seemed the best way to convey a sense of interest without turning a blind eye to the fact that we were in an air-conditioned bus a world away.

Once off of the bus, I had more pressing concerns: principally, I was now in possession of serious contraband in the form of more than three “undesirable” photos. I had prepared for the possibility, but the word “sabotage” fluttered through the back of my head. My heartbeat sped up. If I was caught, I’d have no excuse.

In the pocket of my coat lay a simple case for my digital camera with no incriminating-looking pouches to draw attention to it, and wedged carefully into the base of that case was a second memory card. The trick would be finding a place to switch the two without drawing attention to myself, and switch back in the event that I managed to take more forbidden pictures. Several of the locales had utterly horrifying Chinese-style squat toilets with no running water and a stench that could kill several horses, but none of the “stalls” had locks or any method of ensuring privacy. I managed to switch out the “incriminating” card on the bus, with my friend, the Obama guide, gone. But the question of how to switch it back if I needed to still lingered, along with the more dangerous question of how to get it past the metal detectors and scanners at the border.

As we drove to the final location, the Goreyo Museum, children began to fill the streets, dressed in uniforms, carrying flowers, all headed in the same direction.

“School’s out,” murmured Josh.

“It’s Saturday,” I said.

“That means nothing here,” he said. “I wonder what all the flowers are for.”

“Maybe it’s Mother’s Day,” I replied, arching my eyebrows.

As if on cue, Seokjin piped up in the front. “You see the children with the flowers?”

We craned our necks dutifully.

“They are going to lay them at the feet of the Kim Il-Sung statue in the center of town. The whole city does it in shifts every Saturday.”

“Oh,” I said. “Kim Il-Sung Day.”

“Every day is Kim Il-Sung Day!” said a woman sitting across from us.

The central courtyard of the Goreyo Museum. Cranes loom in the distance.

The Goreyo Museum complex was a modest palace with a small rear garden. As I walked along, trying to stay ahead of the meandering line of South Koreans, I noticed a pair of rusty cranes towering over some sort of construction project behind the main complex. I snapped a photo, careful to compose it such that it looked like I was taking a picture of the museum itself, but didn’t think much of my chances of seeing more.

The museum’s contents were woefully preserved and under-lit, not to mention only featuring Korean captions, so I soon grew tired with the fanciful depictions of raiding Mongols and rusted arrowheads and walked out into the parking lot. A small path snaked off to the rear gardens.

A sample of an exhibit at the Goreyo Museum, featuring invaders from what I assume are the Mongols/early Yuan Dynasty.

“Can I go that way?” I asked a blue-shirted Hyundai assistant.

“Yes,” he said, “no problem.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

The rear garden had a few ninth-century Goreyo stone monuments, which were surprisingly well-kept, but they weren’t what drew my attention. Across from a small gulch stood the construction site, riddled with red flags and populated by North Korean men at work. They wore tattered but surprisingly varied clothes, though some had no shirts at all. None had any protective gear from what I could see — they were laborers, pure and simple.

The construction site behind the Goreyo Museum, as seen from the garden.

The garden featured two parallel dirt paths through it, separated by a hedge, with a North Korean patrolling each one. Taking pictures would require three distinct operations: replacing the safe memory card with the incriminating one, taking the photos, and hiding the incriminating card again. I stepped out onto the path where the guard was walking away from me, opened my camera, and slammed my hand into my pocket.

Without withdrawing it, I eased the incriminating memory card out from its hiding place with one hand while trying to wriggle the safe card out of my camera in the other, using only my thumb. The catch gave. I drew the incriminating card out of my pocket. It slipped from my fingers. I stumbled after it as it landed, diode-side up, in a small puddle under the gray sky. I was too nervous to curse. I palmed it and wrapped the wet side in the denim on the thigh of my jeans, patting frantically, hoping and praying that I hadn’t irrevocably damaged it. I checked on the guard. No turn as of yet. I pulled the safe card out and jammed the incriminating card, still slightly damp, into the socket, shutting the camera and tossing the other card into my coat pocket as quickly as possible.

I’d never sighed harder. All the pictures were still there. The men on the construction site were too distant to see me, I hoped, or else just too concentrated in their work. Rather than return toward me, the guard swerved right and walked behind the hedge, setting out along the same path as the other guard. I couldn’t risk sticking my head out to check where the second, closer guard was on his patrol, but I figured I had maybe a minute to myself.

I raised the camera and snapped three quick photos of the site, then let it fall to my side. For good measure, I took a few quick blind shots of the surrounding statuary, then rounded the corner and ambled as freely as I could toward the bathrooms near the front gate.

True to form, they stank like nothing else, but no North Koreans were inside, only a traveler at the gulch that doubled for a urinal. Three stalls presented themselves to me, and I entered the middle one, shutting the door and leaning against it. I pulled out my camera and undid the latch, then, like an idiot, realized I hadn’t even bothered to look around. Above the squat toilet was a circular hole cut into the ceiling. There was no way to risk a second glance up to find out whether it was a simple vent or something more sinister: acting suspicious rat me out instantly. I pretended to examine the camera.

“What’s wrong with this thing?” I muttered, pressing the memory card in and out.

I’d win no awards for acting. Finally, I shut the latch, let out a long sigh, and hawked a gob of spit into the toilet to complete the illusion.

I left the stall and glanced up as carefully as I could at its neighbor on the right. No holes. I dove in as another Korean entered the room — a Southerner, fortunately, but I was taking no chances. I leaned once again against the door, let out an exasperated noise, and coughed and sniffled as I switched the memory cards. I hawked another gob of spit into the grimy toilet, made sure the incriminating card was fully secured in the pocket of the case, and walked out.

In the dusty courtyard of the Goreyo museum, under a thousand-year old tree, a North Korean security officer sat smoking with a precocious woman from New Zealand. He smiled nervously and took a drag on one of her cigarettes. She talked to him in patient tones.

“Smoke,” he said, waving his cigarette. “Very good.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I like it, too. Addictive.” She knew he had no shot at understanding the word, but laughed to herself anyway. “Is this your job?”

“Hmm?” said the guard, his nervous smile broadening. He chuckled a little, too, imitating her, but she had the conversation by the throat.

“Your job. Me, I’m a teacher. I teach. Teaching,” she repeated, miming the motion of writing on a blackboard. “Learning. Yes?”

“Ah,” said the security man. “Teach. Ah. Okay.”

“So what is your job?” she asked, moving her hand towards him again.

“Here,” he said.

“I guessed that,” she said, laughing a second time without letting the teacher’s interrogative drop from her tone, “but what else do you do? Another job?”

He was now trying to smile as wide as humanly possible, looking up at his colleague who stood nearby as if in desperate need of a wingman at a bar.

I stepped in. “Can I have a picture of you two?”

His head snapped towards me, the universal sign of relief on his face.

“Picture? OK!”

North Korean guard and New Zealand woman with friend, chatting over cigarettes.

I steadied my hands and took the shot. It was my last picture from North Korea: nicotine, bringing people together.

My camera case sat deeply-nestled in the white plastic bag I’d used to pack up my books from Unification Restaurant. We were standing in line to exit back into the DMZ, but not before the North checked our cameras. Noticing that the guards didn’t ask for the souvenir bags to be x-rayed, I took my chances. The lines thinned until I realized I’d chosen terribly wrong — I would be the last one out of North Korea. Alone, I stood in front of the guard on the other side of the metal detector, camera in hand. He took it from me and turned it on, but couldn’t figure out how to scroll through the photos. I helpfully guided him, trying to smile, and he made what I hoped was an appreciative grunt as my safe photos flashed before him. Were there enough? Had I erred in not realizing that I would really need to switch cards until after Bakyeon Waterfall? Would he recognize them as purposefully innocuous?

He reached the end and looked up at me, then down at the camera. He grunted, and thrust it back into my hands.

I stepped out of customs and back on to the bus, and we took off through the DMZ once again.

“Did they take anything from you?” asked Josh.

“Not what mattered,” I said.

I tried to put my thoughts in order as we re-entered the South. The DMZ is the most militarized place on the planet, but also one of the most empty, so devoid of human contact that tigers are rumored to have repopulated its forests. Yet it’s possible to imagine the minesweepers coming through the eerie trees and quiet rolling hills, knocking down the bunkers and opening the roads. Maybe, I thought, in ten or twenty years, the best of all possible futures would render the images I smuggled out of Kaesong a cautionary tale, nothing more. Even now, the most pressing emotion is the sickly flash of optimism that sprung up in the back of my throat when I saw children in donated South Korean clothes wave at us, rare flashes of color.

We passed through Southern customs without incident, and I added to my list of blessings the fact that my brother hadn’t joined me — a heat sensor watched for signs of fever in returning travelers, since malaria is still endemic in the North. The passengers stayed quiet as we drove away from the DMZ, barely even showing one another the trinkets they’d collected. I leaned my head against the window of the bus and stared out at the landscape as small flashes of modern life began to creep back into the countryside. Satellite dishes on houses. Gleaming industrial harvesters outside farms. Cars alongside us on the highway. My eyes closed.

“Hey,” said Josh, lightly shaking me awake as the bus stopped in Seoul. “Were back.”

I stretched, yawned, shook his hand, then Seojkin’s, and walked out into the light of the late afternoon sun as it burned off the last of the day’s cloud cover. I spent a few minutes standing at the subway exit, watching the crush of brightly-clothed Koreans make their way into the narrow alleys surrounding Hongjik University, shouting and laughing with one another. Finally, I clutched my plastic bag of Northern books and impermissible photos to my chest and slipped into the crowd.

The bread section of a large grocery store will be mobbed around 6 p.m. Bread is baked on-site and sold out of wooden bins that each contain a different kind that all taste sort of the same — bland and a bit doughy. The popular pan batido, a fluffy white bread that could be easily ripped into quarters, is piled in a bin next to hallulla, a round roll that was often dense and spongy; pan amasado, similar to hallulla but less dense; pan doblada, triangular folded bread with a crunchy crust, and the least desirable, pan de molde, sliced bread. The warm rolls steam up the flimsy plastic bags that shoppers rip off a roll like Americans do in the produce department. If the bread bins are empty, people linger around them, waiting for the rolls to tumble into the bins from a slot that leads to the kitchen.

On Christmas, the wait for the fresh bread was the longest I’d ever experienced. Most stores had closed for the holiday, which left a horde of people that had waited until the last minute to buy bread wandering around Valparaíso looking for an open bakery. My friend Katie and I were among them, and we had all discovered the same tiny bakery.

It was located in a part of the city that was usually bustling, the sidewalks overflowing with people and produce stands. As soon as the bakeries and pocket-sized markets opened their gates in the morning, shoppers flocked to them like bees on blooming flowers. Normally shoppers would divide themselves evenly between the stores, lingering while they bought a cut of steak wrapped in white paper at one, then walking deliberately past a slew of identical stores to stop at another that seemed no different than the rest, where they would buy avocados. But today everything was closed, except for the bakery.

Outside a line had formed — remarkable in itself. I had found that Chileans initially formed lines, but quickly abandoned them in favor of elbowing and pushing to get what they wanted — the attention of a bartender, a seat on the bus, or admission to a club. The only orderly lines I had seen were in government buildings or post offices, where stone-faced people waited with their arms crossed, documents in hand, shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

I peeked over the heads of the people in front of me. Inside, no one was moving. Elegant pastries and cakes were displayed in the window at the front of the bakery, but everyone seemed to be keeping an eye on the bread bins at the back of the tiny shop. I knew that the bakers had dumped fresh bread into the bins when the line lurched forward, like we were all passengers on a stalled subway that suddenly began to move. Six or seven pairs of greedy hands quickly emptied the bins as soon as they were filled, leaving everyone else to wait for another ten minutes or so. The victorious shoppers hustled out of the bakery, holding their bread bags protectively.

After two rounds of this we had only just made it inside the door. A man behind me turned to face the person behind him, shouting to no one in particular and gesturing wildly. “This is ridiculous! It is unjust to have to wait this long for bread on Christmas! I cannot believe there are no other bakeries open today!” He slapped the doorframe for emphasis, and Katie and I jumped.

I was also frustrated by the wait, and would have deserted the line if I had stood there much longer. But no one else seemed to be budging, preferring to stand and wait for up to 30 minutes for a baggie filled with warm rolls. In the United States, I doubt anyone would have waited that long for bread, especially on Christmas.

But Chileans eat bread, in one form or another, at almost every meal. I experienced its ubiquity while living with a host family during a study abroad program. In the morning I awoke to find last night’s bread, just beginning to harden, covered with a cloth in a basket on the dining room table. Beside it, an oddly shaped block of white cheese and thin slices of ham were arranged on small plates. When I arrived home from my classes in the afternoon, the table had been cleaned and re-set the exact same way. This time a bowl of mashed up, salted avocados accompanied the now fresh bread, meat, and cheese. If I had been home for lunch, I could have eaten more bread with pebre, a mild, watery salsa.

Many travelers lament bread’s starring role in the Chilean diet. An Englishman I met at a hostel grumbled as we sat down to a breakfast nearly identical to the one I ate every day at my host family’s. “Oh wow, bread,” he grumbled, reaching past the basket of hallulla for the Nescafe instant coffee, another Chilean favorite. “What a surprise.”

Chilean’s reliance on bread can create chaos if it is suddenly absent from the table. An empty bread basket means a giant, bread-shaped hole in the universe has temporarily opened and must be filled before mealtime by a last-minute run to the store.

People on an eleventh-hour bread run don’t want to barge into bakery after bakery only to discover the bread bin is empty. Sympathetic (or savvy) shop owners, understanding the urgency of the bread run, frequently put up signs in their windows to let consumers know when bread is available; indeed, the hand-lettered HAY PAN (THERE IS BREAD) sign is nearly as ubiquitous as bread itself. The plethora of bread signage once led a sarcastic American traveler to comment, “Oh, great! There is bread! Because I was worried we’d run out.”

But on Christmas 2007, the impossible happened—there was no bread.

At least not for a while. After half an hour of waiting punctuated by frantic shuffles toward the store, Katie and I filled our own baggie with pan batido. As walked up the hill to our hostel, we were passed by some of the other last-minute bread-buyers. I tried to acknowledge them as they passed, but they blew by us, walking fiercely home.

“You coming?” I asked.

“No.” He rolled over.

We were silent for a bit as I adjusted to being up before the dawn. “I’m sorry you’re sick,” I finally said.

“Me too,” he murmured, already drifting back off.

I washed up, pulled on my jeans, and left my cell phone by his bunk. “Listen!” I hissed, shaking him awake. “Get some sleep, but remember: If I’m not back by 9 p.m., you call the U.S. embassy and tell them where I went. Then call the family.”

Approaching the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

At 5:50 I found the bus waiting, as promised, outside Exit 1 of the Hongik University subway station. As I clambered aboard, I was struck by the American accents. In reaching Seoul by crossing Europe and Asia, Americans had been a rarity. Here at least twenty murmured in their seats.

“My first impression of North Korea?” said a swelteringly obese Texan taking up two seats in the back row. “Lotta’ Westerners.”

Our guide for the day was Seokjin Park, a sturdy young South Korean man with an airy, clipped manner of speaking English. Seokjin alternated between a beaming smile and a zoned-out look of intense fatigue. I later learned he conducted almost every tour his company ran, and handled the bureaucracy for trips to the North personally.

“Good morning!” he said as the door swung shut. “I know the North controls what you can and can’t see. But let me promise you: this will be everything you were hoping for.”

He flashed a quick grin. “And probably more.”

The process of getting through the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea has been streamlined in a corporate way by Hyundai, under the auspices of the South’s Ministry of Unification. Their deal with the North permitted the conglomerate to build a light industrial factory in the border city of Kaesong in exchange for restricted civilian visits to the city. Allowing the North to train light industrial workers, the South reasoned, would wean them from their black-market staples of weapons and counterfeit currency, and the ability for the Southerners to visit their northern cousins fanned the fading hope of unification, or at least reconciliation.

But corporate gloss or no, crossing the DMZ is traversing the single most militarized border on the planet. As we prepared to enter the zone itself, the South Korean guard that searched our bus threw us a quick salute, smiling behind his wraparound shades, and tried his best to pretend he wasn’t carrying a wicked-looking submachine gun as he walked up and down the aisle, poking under the seats.

A long stretch of no man’s land, complete with a pristine concrete road adorned with lampposts depicting a united Korea, waits between the southern and northern customs control offices. After “checking out” in the South, our passports ominously stamped with an exit notice and the notation “→Kaesong” in place of a date, we were informed that the North, in an attempt to get the South to replace a few cross-border cables, would delay us for an hour.

Waiting for the go-ahead in the DMZ.

“They like inconveniencing us in the hopes that someone complains to the South’s government,” said Seokjin. “Take 40 minutes and walk around.”

“Walking around” the dour parking lot and cavernous, empty hallway for 40 minutes was not anybody’s idea of a good time, but I met the other travelers: the grizzled older man with Cold War stories aplenty, the 40-something black woman from Atlanta who’d traveled to Japan on business ten years ago and decided to stay in the East forever (and said she’d worn a Knicks jersey that day as a “sign of cultural exchange,” with a wry grin), and a strange pair of Canadians who would go onto surprise our hosts in ways I never anticipated.

Finally, our buses were given the go-ahead. We were the eighth of ten in a tightly controlled convoy. All the others were loaded with South Koreans, mostly chattering away happily. But a few older men, walking with canes, their wispy hair under hats, stared out at the quiet hills of the border zone. They were the veterans, I thought, the ones old enough to remember one Korea, or at least the war that split them. Maybe they were going to where their families or they themselves were born.

“We’re on the North’s side of the zone, now,” said Seokjin at around 9:10. “Wave hi to the bunkers up there.”

We did. Ahead of the bus was a barbed gate. Two guards in faded olive uniforms swung it aside.

“You can wave to them, too, if you’d like,” said Seokjin.

I looked down as we passed, my hand at the ready.

The guard was a woman, her rifle slung onto her back, but I’ve forgotten everything else about her except her face. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin pale, and she stared at us with wide eyes. I felt my hand curl and my breath catch in my throat. In the cloudy light, she seemed almost feral, looking at me as if the bus was the only thing stopping her from tearing out my throat.

“Remember, no pictures,” said Seokjin as we passed through, “but capture this image in your mind: There are two signs on either side of this road ahead. The sign on the left says, ‘We will do whatever it takes for our Dear Leader,’ and the sign on the right says, ‘We will obliterate our greatest enemy, the United States.’”

The gate swung shut.

Kaesong is the second largest city in the North, and the former capital of the Goreyo dynasty, which controlled most of the Korean peninsula a millennium earlier. It’s also the only city to change hands as a result of the Korean War. The passage closed on December 1, 2008. As of today, resumption of travel is still under negotiation.

The North Korean rules were simple.

1. No pictures from the bus. No pictures of men or women in uniform. No pictures of “the cityscape.” No pictures of “citizens,” except guides/staff with prior permission. Cameras will be checked at North Korean Customs before departure. Violations: $30 for the first offense. $50 for the second. $100 for the third. Following that, a “determination” would be made, likely involving your detention.

2. The pass around your neck is a visa. Don’t lose it. Don’t mangle it. Don’t get it wet. If you do, you might not get out.

3. You will see rocks and statues with inscriptions by Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung. Do not touch, lean on, or point at these monuments.

4. Under no circumstances will you bring mobile phones, mp3 players, digital cameras with a zoom greater than 10x, analog cameras, laptops, communications devices, or extra batteries for any item previously mentioned of any kind into the country.

5. Smoke only in designated areas.

North Korean guides (in blue and white) talk with a South Korean visitor.

We passed through a perfunctory scan while men with rifles watched on a balcony above us. Northern customs control stamped the piece of paper hanging from the lanyards around our neck and we re-boarded our buses, which had been inspected by yet more of the North’s men with rifles. This time, three men joined us — two at the front of the bus, wearing white polo shirts adorned with Kim-Il Sung pins and walkie-talkies strapped to holsters around their waists, and one in a simple brown shirt at the back, also wearing the pin. These were our “guides,” Seokjin said. He handed the microphone over to one of the men in white.

“Introduce yourself!” he said, repeating it in Korean.

The man looked puzzled. The rest of the bus looked mortified. Getting a kick out of North Korean confusion seconds after arriving didn’t seem like any way of being good guests.

“Hello,” snapped the man into the microphone, passing it back to Seokjin and sitting down. A few nervous giggles trickled out from various corners of the bus.

The sites chosen for us by our gracious hosts were staged, to say the least — worn reconstructions of temples, tired exhibitions with small Korean-language plaques, and grim little monuments wedged onto cracked streets with no drainage. Seokjin knew the breaks, however, keeping the commentary to a minimum and pointing out that the sooner we looked at what they wanted us to look at, the longer we could actually look at (though never photograph) the city and its residents.

For their own parts, the North’s guides weren’t stupid, and they watched us angrily as we traipsed past their “cultural artifacts,” nodded, and proceeded to wave at the crowds that would gather across streets to gawk at us until the secret police arrived to disperse them. To the guides, it looked as if the Westerners treated the people, not the sites, as the tourist attractions, and if you’ve ever been pointed at in the streets before, you might recall the sense of umbrage you felt at being looked at as a novelty.

The North’s agents on our bus had been hand-picked because they spoke almost no English and therefore couldn’t get to know us any better. The brown-shirted guide in the rear stared straight ahead, wedged between the obese Texan and the short Canadian girl. Her traveling partner Josh, a Korean by birth but a Canadian citizen by passport, sat next to me a row further forward, wearing a black t-shirt and a silver cross on a chain. The guide’s gaze drifted toward him as we drove. Finally, he stole glances first at a sheet of paper in his lap, then up at Josh.

“Where,” he began, haltingly, “are you from?”

We looked at each other to see if he was talking to us. He jutted his chin towards Josh and leaned a little closer, making an interrogative grunt to clarify.

“Canada,” said Josh.

The man’s face remained blank.

“Ca-na-da,” he said, slower.

The guide’s eyes dropped down to a piece of paper he held in his hands.

“Do you speak any English?” asked the Texan. “English?”

The guide shook his head.

“Anything else, then?”

The guide looked up for a moment before returning to scanning the page.

“Rossiya (Russian),” he said.

“Anyone speak Russian?” yelled the Texan.

I winced.

“Uh,” I said to him, trying to knock the conversation down into a quieter register, “Spasiba (thank you), puzhalsta (please), that’s about it.”

The guide’s eyes darted up to me. He spoke a quick burst of Russian.

“Pros`tite (sorry),” I said, wincing again in what I hoped looked like an apologetic manner. “I can’t. No Russian.”

He grunted again and returned to his paper.

“Where you from?” asked the Texan, smiling. “You from Pyongyaaaang?” The long A drawled out across the back of the bus. “Eh? You know Pyongyaaaang?”

The guide ignored the Texan, still concentrating on his piece of paper, his lips moving faintly. I took a sidelong glance at it. Beneath were a few simple phrases in English along with what I assumed were Korean transliterations of all of our information. He wanted to know who he was talking with, I realized.

He spoke a sentence in Korean to Josh.

“I don’t speak it,” he replied. “Not really. A few words.”

“No?” said the guard. A slightly perplexed look came over his face.

The Canadian girl laughed nervously. The guide turned to her.

“You?” he said.

“Canada,” said the girl. Then she dropped the bombshell. “We’re married,” she said, gesturing to Josh. “Married,” she repeated.

Josh blurted out something in Korean. “I said ‘wife,’” he explained. “I don’t know the word for ‘married.’”

The guard’s eyes widened. I stared at them too — they were too young to be married, I thought to myself, but the large cross around Josh’s neck was a plausible explanation. The guide, though, was still having trouble believing it.

“You?” he said, jutting his head forward at Josh.

“Uh-huh,” said Josh, looking bashful under the stare of the guard.

Slowly, the North Korean turned his head back towards the front of the bus.

“Huh,” he whispered.

Bakyeon Waterfall.

At Bakyeon Waterfall, the “third most beautiful in all Korea” and far removed from the city itself, I bought some North Korean snack food, which the attendant said were “poppies,” for two dollars. The waterfall itself was surrounded by stones bearing huge red characters, along with dates before and after Juche (the birthday of Kim Il-Sung) with their Gregorian equivalents in parentheses. After aimless wandering and polite nodding, we were soon on our way again, convoying back towards Kaesong proper for lunch.

The “poppies” in question were sugary, starchy, deep-fried pastries of some kind. I ate one, grimaced, then turned around to look at the eternally stoic guide in the back with us. I took a deep breath and offered up the plastic tray they’d come in.

“Sir?” I said, feeling stupid. He looked ahead, oblivious. “Sir?” I repeated, making my best effort at being polite but not insistent.

The guide looked at the slimy globules, then at me, his face trapped between perplexity and disgust. “No,” he barked, slamming his hand out and nearly sending the tray scattering up the bus’s aisle. I yanked it back.

Josh, sitting beside me, was a quick thinker. “I’ll have one,” he said.

I paused for a moment, then realized what he was getting at.

“Yeah,” I said, “go ahead. Anyone else? North Korean snack food?”

The guide watched us munch away. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, careful not to do anything else that might offend him. But Josh had the right idea: in offering the food around, it made the case that I was being polite rather than treating him both as an enemy and a tourist attraction in offering to exchange food for conversation.

“Where are you from?” the guide asked me, as I finished dispensing the fried, starchy material. I looked over at his list, still close to his chest.

“The States,” I said, rattling off synonyms. “America. The U.S.”

“Oh,” said the guide. I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t think of any way to make polite conversation, and so we sat in silence for a few minutes, eyeing one another when we thought the other wasn’t looking.

Finally, he asked the question. “Obama?”

I blinked and shook my head. “What?”

“Obama,” repeated the guide. The others started to pay attention.

“Obama? John-mac-ain?” The guide moved his hands like a scale, and I understood.

“Oh!” I said, too loudly. “Uh. Wow. Obama? Yeah. Obama.” I made the thumbs-up motion, then realized that he probably didn’t understand the thumbs-up motion and instead moved my hand, palm-upward, towards the roof. “Obama,” I repeated. “Yeah.”

“Hell, yes!” bellowed the obese Texan, cutting into the conversation.

“Obama, yes. Noooo Bush. Nooooo.”

Before long, the entire back of the bus was filled with English voices, vouching for Barack Obama in the middle of North Korea.

“Oh,” said the guide, nodding, looking around at the suddenly animated crowd without emotion. He seemed to have nothing more to say on the subject.

“You?” I made the motion he’d made, imitating a scale. “Obama? McCain?”

His eyes widened again, and this time the sneer was gone. I kept eye contact and put on an encouraging smile. Finally, he turned his gaze downward, putting both hands palm-forward like a police officer stopping traffic. He spoke in Korean, but the phrase was similar enough to Chinese that I got it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and for the first time, he smiled.

The front facade of Unification Restaurant (closed to visitors).

Unification restaurant, our lunch stop in downtown Kaesong, had no power, but the gray light that filtered in from the windows reflected off the painted white walls of the main dining hall. Every single table, regardless of how many people actually showed up on the tour, was decked out with the food. The message was obvious: We have plenty to eat here. Rumors of famine are exaggerated. Everything is fine. Ignore the fact that your sumptuous meal is lit “naturally.”

As this would be our only chance to actually see downtown Kaesong up-close, however, most of us scarfed down our meals and excused ourselves. I stopped in the small bookstore on the way out.

“Don’t, you can’t buy any books,” said Seokjin wearily as I walked in. “Well, you can, but the South will just seize them when you return. So don’t.”

“I’m just looking,” I said.

He sighed.

The bookstore at Unification Restaurant.

Along the rear wall were hundreds of North Korean books in English, ranging from Distortion of U.S. Provocation of Korean War to The Leadership Philosophy of Kim Jong-Il. A series of brilliant red hardcovers caught my eye: The Benevolent Sun, the multi-volume biography of Kim Il-Sung, the “Great Leader” and father of North Korea, named its Eternal President (despite having died in 1994) by his son, Kim Jong-Il. “The rays of Juche spread all over the world!”, bellowed their dust jackets. The title stuck in my mind as I bought a few books against Seokjin’s guidance and stepped out into downtown Kaesong.

Downtown Kaesong.

“Downtown” is perhaps a misnomer — Kaesong has one large main road, on which no cars travel, save the newly donated buses from Hyundai. The bombed-out apartment buildings that seem to predate the Korean War lining either side of the road serve as its sentinels, eclipsing even the bronze statue of Kim Il-Sung at the top of the city’s central hill. Apparently, the companion of the Namdaemun Gate of Seoul, a UNESCO World Heritage monument destroyed by arson in early 2008, sits in a quiet traffic roundabout in Kaesong, rotting, but we were cautioned to avoid even trying to catch a glimpse of it. Hyundai’s own team of young minders kept us on the city block where the restaurant stood, and formed a cordon at the point leading up to the massive Kim Il-Sung statue — we were warned that if we walked any closer, the North would demand we bow to it.

Seokjin wandered up next to me as I reached the end of the “allowable zone” furthest from the statue, next to a shuttered building with a strange obelisk in front of it — the department store, Seokjin said.

“I see a lot of slogans that begin with ‘21,’ Seokjin,” I said. “What are they saying?”

“They say ‘Kim Jong-Il is the greatest leader of the 21st century,’” replied Seokjin. “I wish he’d open up the store.”

“Is it ever open?” I asked.

“They tell us it’s open from 3 to 4 p.m.,” said Seokjin. “But we’ll never know because we’re never allowed to be here then.”

The Kaesong Department Store.

A squat apartment block flanked the restaurant on the other side of a narrow, grimy canal at the bottom of the hill, across from the department store. Once Seokjin departed, I ducked down the embankment, losing my minders for a few brief moments. In the windows, children poked their heads out at me, pointing, freezing whenever I looked in their direction. Older siblings and mothers held the younger ones close as I waved, looks of total incomprehension on their faces. It crossed my mind that since this was only the fifth tour that had included Seokjin’s Western contingent, I might’ve been the first white person they’d seen in the flesh.

North Korean citizens along the back streets of downtown Kaesong.

I knew I’d be in incredible trouble, and the ethics of it weighed on me: the extent to which I was a voyeur into their misery only grew as I kept waving to no avail. Finally, I pulled out my camera. The kids dove for cover. A few stayed in place, either doubting I’d actually take the picture or thinking I’d never make it out with it intact. The shutter snapped. I did a quick pivot and took pictures along the back road, catching glimpses of the citizens in the distance. My hands shook. I dropped to one knee like a tourist at the Eiffel Tower, steadied my aim, got a few clear images, and bolted. When I got back to the bus, the guide who’d asked me about Obama had vanished.

Read Part II of “The Benevolent Sun.”

“You want to say ‘his pig’? Americans say ‘his pig,’” Deon chuckles. “In Pohnpei, if his pig is alive you use nah. Nah pwihk. His pig alive. And if his pig is dead you use ah. Ah pwihk. His pig dead. If he has pig on his plate for eating we say kene pwihk. His eating pig. Live pig. Dead pig. Eating pig.”

My classmate, Christina, groans. Christina is an Australian by way of England, approaching a sun-dried late middle age with a stiffness and resignation that is broken only by an occasional beleaguered moan. Today, Pohnpeian grammar agrees with her about as much undercooked eating pig.

“Kenei pwihk is your pig for eating. Water, house, car all take different ‘my’ words. Maybe you should memorize them.”

“So if I want to say ‘my beer’, I say ngehi beero?” I ask.

Deon hates questions. He chuckles.

“Nime beero. See, because that is beer. Beer is not the same as pig. See? Maybe for you beer and pig are the same thing. I don’t know. That’s American culture.”

Christina and I have reached a grammatical complexity that can only be simplified with gin and tonics. Our ritual is this: we throw worksheets from a Betty Azar ESL grammar book (dubbed the “Black Betty”) at unsuspecting Micronesian students, sputter from school to town in Christina’s Mazda Familia, sit in the Deon’s Pohnpeian class with one other hopeful Pohnpeian language learner, and, finally, retreat to Christina’s house for gin and tonics.

Tantalized by visions of those gin and tonics (mixed very precisely by Christina with an eye dropper of Angostura bitters), we sit impatiently in Deon’s classroom. Lacking the language skills to understand Pohnpeian pronouns, I focus on Deon’s belly. It is held in check by a tight white t-shirt and cascades over an enormous gold belt buckle. Christina is next to me in her usual uniform, a revealing short dress, probably better suited to a much younger woman. The matter-of-factness with which she presents her body to the world has something to do with her entirely reasonable approach to life — of course she looks twenty years younger than her hard-of-hearing husband of the same age. She takes care of herself. She orders her life. For many years, she has lived on remote islands and done it with a kind of “mad dogs and Englishmen” tenacity. She retains a sense of order in the face of an illogical world that is bent on upsetting her plans.

Symbolic of this approach to life are her tomatoes. Tomatoes being nearly impossible to grow on rainy Pohnpei, she decided she must grow them — and she did, though she guarded them with such vigor that I was never allowed to know where they were or when they might be ready. Every once in a while we got a salted slice of tomato with our gin and tonic. She produced it on its own sacred, special plate, like a priest at communion. I half expected her to feed it to me — “This is my body and my blood…” I never admitted that I didn’t really care for a salted raw tomato slice with my gin and tonic. But I understood that the delicate interior architecture of the tomato represented order, culture, and sanity.

“How would I say, ‘Will you dance with me?’” I ask, pen and notebook at the ready. I am always on the lookout for useful phrases, whereas Deon seems to want to impress us with the impossibility of ever learning Pohnpeian. I am thinking of the weekend when I will go to the local disco. I want to know how to say “What’s your name?”, “Will you dance with me?”, and “Would you like to come to my tin shack and visit my bottle of tequila?”

Deon, however, does not like questions. Ask him too many and he will invariably launch into a monologue concerning China O’Brien, a cheap martial arts flick made in 1990 and set in Beaver Creek, Utah. It stars Cynthia Rothrock whose body, in the film, is “the ultimate weapon.” This is Deon’s favorite movie and, in his opinion, a very important cultural artifact from the West that explains quite a bit about the cultural differences between America and Micronesia. Having never seen the movie or its sequel, I take his word for it. As if to punish me for what I thought was a very pragmatic question, he segues from China O’Brien to Pohnpeian counting systems.

“In Pohnpeian, there are thirty ways to count. Americans say ‘one, two, three.’ ‘One beer.’ ‘One pig’ For you, pigs and beer are the same thing. This is funny. Maybe you should think about this.”

We look at him quizzically. How can there be 30 ways to count?

“Pwihk ehu. One pig dead. Pwihk emen. One pig alive.”

Christina groans. Deon glares at our class for effect.

There is a way to count cigarettes, sodas, and other oblong objects; a way to count limbs, hands, and fingers which is also the way to count a school of fish; a way to count leaves that is different from the way to count trees or bundles of wood; a way to count piles of shit, bushes, nights, yams and bananas…

Christina and I stare at Deon in utter confusion and disbelief. He has won. We are ready to give up and go home. We want nothing more than to count gin and tonics, watch the sunset, and shout at Jeffrey, her husband.

How can there be 30 ways to say the number one?

Understanding this conundrum seems to be a key to understanding the Pohnpeian outlook. Imagine a typical Pohnpeian scene: bundles of wood and breadfruit, majestic trees, leaves and flowers of all shapes and colors, an open-air wooden thatched hut, hibiscus bark being stripped in preparation for squeezing sakau, stones and coconut shells set out for pounding and drinking sakau, monstrous pigs jammed in small cages near a creek, women washing and beating clothes in the creek, recently caught fish being fried, banana plants with their drooping phallic red shoots heavy with even more phallic yellow fruit. Now imagine that each of these has a different number one, two, three, and so on.

To “think like a Pohnpeian,” if such a thing is possible, means allowing my numbers to lose their abstraction and sink into the scene. There is a difference between one leaf and one tree, one live pig and one dead pig, one day of a ten-day funeral and one day of a week. Yes, these are different things, but how can they take different numbers? Pohnpeian counting systems hang like a many faceted diamond in my imagination: beautiful, extraordinary, yet somehow beyond the powers of my imagination to fully grasp. And therefore, the inner life of Pohnpeians will always remain one maddening leap of imagination away from my understanding.

In my first years on Pohnpei, I thought I could learn the language and understand Pohnpeians the way that I understood any topic: reading and memorization. So I dutifully took Deon’s worksheet to that evening’s gin-session and set about memorizing counting systems.

“Why is a car counted with the same number system as a can of soda and a cigarette?” I asked Christina.

Jeffrey, who was a supervisor for the electric company, took this an opening to say something.

“We went up the river to work on a line today. And did you know that the river has a different name there from the name here? Here the name is something like ‘prepare my salad’ and up the river it’s called ‘lemming sing’ or something. Yes, ‘lemming sing’. But I wonder, do lemmings sing? You see?” Jeffrey said, laughing.

Christina looked at me and groaned. It was a look that cemented our friendship as fellow travelers. It said, “Here I am, the last bit of sanity and reasonableness in a crazy world.” I returned her glance to acknowledge her predicament. We had a symbiotic relationship for many years: she fed me drinks, and I sympathized with her.

When it felt like time to stumble home and leave Jeffrey and Christina to pleasantly bicker away the evening, I would announce, “I’m crossing over to the other side.” It was my attempt at a witticism: the walk home took me past the Last Stop Store and over the little bridge across the bay.

After a few years, Christina and Jeffrey left to go back to Australia. They missed Pohnpei, but Christina thought it was the kind of place that was “better in retrospect.” She wanted to be closer to non-rat-infested hospitals for her sickly husband. So it was a cruel twist, which I imagine Christina met with a groan, when she found out she had a malignant brain tumor. About a month before she died, I wrote to her that I was “crossing over to the other side” about a trip to America I was preparing for. She responded:

…with the failure of my latest treatment, I query what you mean by “the other side.” If one night in your cozy house a strange light appears through a window, just get out a bottle of gin and that may serve to calm my troubled spirit and I will then stop disturbing you.

Christina, I know that gin would just excite you and encourage you to linger. When you come to trouble me, I will place a slice of tomato on a little dish, salt it, and pretend to like it. This will show you all is right with the world and you need not trouble us.

One friend alive. One friend dead. I can almost grasp how one can be two entirely different numbers.

One of the first stops on my brief trip was Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. After too little sleep in a hot, smelly Munich hostel the night before, I was ready to get away from the typical Eurobackpacking scene. Following an eight-hour train ride, I got to Ljubljana and met my host, Andrej, who at this point had hosted over 100 couchsurfers (I was #137, I think). With him was a fellow couchsurfer, Arto, of Finland. Andrej had to go to work, so Arto and I set out for the castle overlooking the city. Arto has the distinction of being the second Finn I’ve ever met, and I enjoyed the chance to converse a bit. On the way up the hill to the castle, I started to understand that this couchsurfing business was about more than just freeloading.

Obviously, I was in it for freeloading. Sure, I wanted the “local experience” and to meet people. It all sounded very “authentic.” But really, I was sick of hostels and especially sick of paying for them. But as Arto described his lifestyle of travel (biking from Finland to Turkey, then all over India, etc.), his dedication to some kind of free software that I didn’t remotely understand, and his love of hitchhiking, I began to really see the ideological component to couchsurfing. More than a network of freeloaders, CouchSurfing.org has elevated crashing on someone’s sofa to a lifestyle and subculture. It is a lifestyle apparently all about “trusting people,” “spreading kindness,” “sharing,” and so on. And of course, not actually having to pay for stuff. It seemed like a world made up of all the people I would normally avoid.

After we’d seen the castle, we headed back to the station to meet Andrej, and found that he had picked up more travelers. With him were a couple of French-Canadians and four Danish kids on their gap year after high school. So we piled into a van and headed to Andrej’s house, which was not that big, to drop off our stuff, and get cleaned up before heading out on a tour of Ljubljana given by Andrej. The Danes were what you’d expect — looking for a little fun before college. The Canadians were more interesting. They were hitchhiking their way to Istanbul; Laurent had just joined Brigitte, who had been at it for months. They were basically professional vagabonds, working just long enough to save for another trip, which apparently cost them little, since they hitchhiked almost everywhere and couchsurfed or camped out almost every night. They invited me to hitchhike with them, in fact, to Sarajevo. Since I didn’t want to hitchhike in an area where I could get blown up by a land mine, I politely declined.

Ljubljana is a lovely city of culture and history. Unfortunately, I learned almost nothing about it. Andrej is a great guy who loves his city — or more precisely, he really loves the architectural achievements of Slovenian architect, Jože Plečnik. So now I know all about Plečnik’s Ljubljana. We topped it off with a dinner at an interesting restaurant on a boat that served only meat — much to the chagrin of the vegetarian Canadians.

When we got back to Andrej’s, the Canadians suggested that the next day, rather than enjoy the city like normal people, we should spend some time organizing a strange display of the kind of naïve optimism and zealous enthusiasm for life that characterizes couchsurfers. The Danes, whose goal was to party it up in other countries, wanted nothing to do with it. Arto was totally on board, being a true couchsurfer in worldview, who loves things that require him to “trust others by instinct.” The activity, of course, was a Free Hug event, for which they blocked out about two hours the next day.

Now, I generally like to be supportive of people who are trying to do good in the world. That said, I had no desire to 1) make a sign that says free hugs in various languages, especially Slovenian, 2) actually stand in the center of Ljubljana holding said sign, and 3) follow through with those who, improbably, would take me up on the offer. I told them I’d “try to make it,” which of course meant that I wouldn’t.

The next day I got a late start, headed into the city, walked around, and basically played the part of the tourist. It was a decent day. I planned to show up at the free-hug-a-thon late, pretending to be really disappointed that I missed it. So at six o’clock, when Arto, Andrej, Laurent, and Brigitte were supposed to be wrapping things up, I strolled over to the Triple Bridge (designed by none other than Plečnik) to ask them how it went. But they were just getting started. Somehow I failed to realize that people who live for months at a time by crashing on couches, hitchhiking, and camping by the side of the road don’t typically keep to the schedules that they set. Also, it had begun raining about 30 minutes earlier.

So there they were, under a kind of long arcade by the river (also designed by Plečnik), making posterboard signs with colored markers, like arts and crafts in elementary school or Vacation Bible School. In a kind of willful regression into their own notions of an innocent childhood past, they were making colorful signs to hold up to the passersby who were dashing along to get out of the rain, hoping to convince them that what they really needed on this dreary day was not to get dry, but to be hugged. It all seemed stupidly idealistic, and, above all, deeply lame.

Unfortunately, even when I’d like to, I usually can’t bring myself to rain on someone’s parade.

So I picked up a marker, made a fairly uncreative sign with free hugs written in Slovenian and English on it, and held it up. My lack of enthusiasm must have showed on my face and through my body language, because people basically scurried away from me as they would from a creepy guy in a trench coat and sunglasses. But then, they did that to all of us. Some literally ran away. So much for spreading warm feelings. Finally a few people came around who were open to being touched intimately by foreigners. We gave some hugs, then we packed it all up.

I got out of town the next day and headed for the Dalmatian coast, where I could soak up the sun, swim in the ocean, and not hug anybody.

I did these things for a number of reasons. There were some bragging rights involved — I wanted to be able to list off all my romantic adventures like I just did. But I also wanted to learn more about the “real” Chile, not the one presented to me by my professors. After the first two weeks of classes I decided that I could learn about the country and improve my Spanish more at the bar than in the classroom.

In the beginning, I thought I could become friends with Chilean women by chatting with them at bars, but they intimidated me too much to even try. They traveled in small, tight packs that seemed impenetrable. Even when I caught one ordering a drink alone, they seemed oblivious to me. Men, on the other hand, seemed overly interested in my gringa friends and me. They approached us alone or in small groups, first staring from across the crowded, smoky room and then sidling up to us and leaning in close to ask us to dance.

I always tried to turn these flirtations into a conversation about where these men came from, their views on politics, their families, etc. They were my unofficial professors and participants in the anthropological research that is “studying abroad.” In my head, I made lists of topics to cover on our dates — educational reform, machismo, and natural resources, for example. When I first met these men, I tried to judge what they could teach me. One guy I dated for a few weeks racked up points early on because he studied psychology, was born Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the country, and had ancestors from Germany who settled in Chile in the 1800s. I decided he was intelligent and could teach me about a region I’d never been to, Chilean colonial history, and current affairs. Another studied agronomy and knew all the city’s best bars, so I learned a lot about viticulture and holes in the wall.

These men were an educational resource, but more important, they provided me with a sense of belonging. When I am somewhere new, I become overwhelmed by the desire to intimately know that place and feel like I belong. I hated not knowing my way around Valparaíso; I was tired of having to constantly question bus drivers and fellow passengers about where I was headed. When I stopped people to ask for directions, they often asked where I was from before responding. I never understood the puns in the newspaper that my host-family chuckled at, and I was sick of constantly calculating how much something cost in dollars to know what it was worth. On a previous trip to New Zealand I had discovered the warm, smug feeling of belonging, and now I was addicted to it. The need to feel this way was so strong that it consumed me, and I became desperate to be accompanied by someone, anyone, who fit in.

In exchange for the sense of belonging that they granted me, I provided these men with companionship and intimacy. And while I never slept with any of them, I understood that physicality was supposed to be part of the deal. Many Chilean men like to date gringas because we have money and an exotic appeal. They also assume that we’ll “put out” more easily than Chilean women and that we’ll be leaving the country in a few months, freeing them of any real commitment. I like to think that some of them may have actually been attracted to me, not just my stereotype, but I’m not sure. After all, what interested me most about the men I dated was what they could teach me, not who they were.

Usually these relationships were short-lived. The first one began when I wrote my phone number on a napkin for a waiter at a pizza place. On our first date, we met at a club and left together, alone and drunk. He assured my friends I would be fine and took me home in a cab. I didn’t know where I was when we got out, and I had to depend on him to walk me down the dark streets to my house. That night it felt exciting to be escorted home, but the next morning I shivered when I thought about what could have happened.

We met up once more, this time in a café during the day, and I realized he wasn’t as smart or as attractive as I thought. When he texted me later that week I said I wasn’t interested anymore. Weeks later I ran into him at a fish market; he reeked of liquor and his eyes were narrowed and blood-shot. We circled awkwardly around each other as he lurched toward me, telling me how he wanted to see me again, and I backed away. I told him off sharply and disappeared into the crowd, nervously looking over my back the whole way home.

I wish that this risky behavior was an isolated incident, but more often than not I put myself in sketchy situations just to feel like I belonged. A few weeks later, I met up at a bar for drinks with a guy I had met the night before and invited myself back to his apartment. I did these things because I felt that my judgment was impeccable, and therefore that the risks were minor and worth taking. But I also acted boldly with the men I met, because I wanted to be worth keeping.

I like to think that my forwardness was attractive and differentiated me from other women, but I wonder if it only confirmed the stereotype that American women are easy. My longing to accompany them and feel like I belonged led me to be more aggressive than I would have liked, but I felt like there was no other way to keep them interested. I wasn’t confident that my personality alone would keep them around, and I wanted a Chilean guy to spend time with. I wanted to meet up with someone at night for drinks and lean across the table to kiss; I wanted to wake up in someone’s apartment on Sundays and take the microbus home like all the other Chilean girlfriends.

The desire for others to think I belonged was all tangled up with my own longing to feel this way. On those rare occasions when I did walk down a busy street holding hands with a Chilean guy or huddled with one at a table in a crowded bar, I always wondered what we looked like to others. Did they think I was as legitimate as I felt? Did they even notice us?

Or worse, did they know it was an act?

I often found myself wondering this when I saw American women out with Chilean men. Once, a pretty American girl with a blond pony tail and lots of mascara sat down at the table next to me in the sunny outdoor patio of a café where I was reading the newspaper. Nothing identifies you as an American more than speaking English with another one in public, so I ignored her. Soon a greasy Chilean guy with gelled hair and acne scars showed up and, to my surprise, pecked her on the lips before sitting down across from her and resting his hand on her leg. I was shocked, and immediately questioned why someone as good-looking as her would be dating such an unattractive guy. Then I paused, and wondered if she was in it for the same reasons I was: to trick herself and anyone who was watching into thinking she belonged.

In 1997, the journey to Pohnpei from Honolulu required four stops. The first stop, Johnston Atoll, has now been decommissioned and apparently left to the turtles and birds that inhabited it before the U.S. military. Very little separates landing on Johnston Atoll and a water landing — a few feet of coral atoll and a bit of man-made extension. The island is exactly as long as the runway. Our landing is so precise that the nose of the airplane, when we come to the famous “complete stop,” juts out over the ocean with a kind of upper-class condescension toward the water, as if to say, “Ha, you won’t get me today!” To this, the gently rocking ocean replies, “Just wait, I’ve got time.”

As the plane turns around on the tarmac, we get a grand view of a factory belching black smoke into the air. The atoll is made up of these things: the runway, a factory, and a collection of neat, yellow tin dwellings.

The books in the Philadelphia Free Library were mum on the existence of Johnston Atoll. Yet there it was, spurting thick globs of black something-or-other into the sky. Kurt Vonnegut called Ohio the “asshole of America,” and I can’t disagree with him. However, if there was an offshore, secret asshole of America, it was surely Johnston Atoll. Here, the U.S. military destroyed chemical weapons (or so they say — what happens on Johnston stays on Johnston). Day after day, the smoke gushed out of one of the most desolate islands in the world, a thousand miles from any other piece of land. It stood with its hulking factory in the middle of an endless ocean looking like an existentialist’s wet-dream of meaninglessness.

The only people who deplane here are large, sullen looking ladies, presumably military or military wives, burdened with overflowing shopping bags from the Ala Moana mall in Honolulu. They balance the weight of the bags to add some equilibrium as they waddle forth onto the tiny atoll. What will they do to stave off madness on this inhospitable lump of coral and hardened bird shit, its factory belching god-knows-what into the endless blue sky, secreting god-knows-what into the endless blue ocean? Maybe play bridge, or eat each other.

As we leave Johnston, the plane lifts above the ocean just as it runs out of atoll. We are headed for the less dire destination of Majuro, Marshall Islands. There is a bit more runway on this atoll, though the width of it leaves little room for pilot error. The runway appears to be below sea level. Haphazard piles of rock on either side of the plane keep the ocean at bay.

On Majuro I get my first breath of Micronesian air. It tastes hot and salty, like an suspiciously flavored ramen bowl. I wander out of the small airport, across a cracked little street, to the ocean. The reality of my departure from all that I had known seeps into my bones with each gentle wave and warm, caressing wind. Perched on a pile of rocks between the runway and the ocean, I strain my eyes to see Lauren Bacall. Lauren Bacall, or simply “Laura”, is a beach on the far end of the atoll. I wondered if Lauren Bacall had ever been to the beach named after her by horny WWII Navy officers. What would happen if you swam in yourself? Lost in my contemplation, I might have missed the plane but for an enormous man who introduced himself as “Mr. Bunglick.” He told me I ought to get back in my seat.

Back in the cement hut that was the departure terminal, passengers were haggling over various shell-based souvenirs, some gorgeous woven purses, and traditional Marshallese star charts, used by the locals of ages past to navigate vast stretches of ocean. The airport was a bustle of colorfully muumuu-adorned women hawking wares and the aforementioned chubby guys on government tickets laconically grazing on local fruit. The spastic SDA kids excitedly wondered where the hell they were, but had little time to figure it out before we were off again.

The next stop was another Marshallese atoll, Kwajelein. We were not allowed to de-plane here as “Kwaj” is a U.S. military base. The atoll is more spacious than Johnston Atoll, but just as incongruous. If Johnston looks like an American industrial corridor plopped into the ocean, Kwaj looks like an American suburb suddenly sprouted out of the coral. There is a golf course alongside the runway and a few ranch-style houses. There are also large geodesic domes that are presumably part of the satellite-tracking and missile-launching capabilities of Kwaj.

Thick-muscled women grab their duffles with military precision and march off the plane, followed by a few Marshallese travelers, including Mr. Bunglick. In all likelihood, he lives on Ebeye, an 80-acre island that is a short boat ride from Kwaj. 12,000 people live in Ebeye’s 80 acres of ramshackle houses and raw sewage, while across a little channel U.S. military contractors practice their golf swings. Each day Marshalese ferry over to Kwaj to work in service jobs, then ferry back to their overcrowded pit known as the “slum of the Pacific.”

Our next stop, Kosrae, is all the more beautiful for having spent the last ten hours flying over unbroken ocean interspersed with tiny atolls, none of which rise higher than ten feet above sea level. It’s a shock to see something that is so clearly habitable, lush, and alive after the cramped atolls of the Marshalls. As a Midwesterner, I can only liken the feeling to stumbling upon Chicago after hours of driving through flat Indiana scrub land (the taint of America). Kosrae is a high island, which means it looks like you expect an island to look. It announces itself in as many shades of green as are imaginable, and then adds a few more for good measure. Its mountains rise in sheer rocky splendor. The shape of the mountains are called the “Sleeping Lady.” Sure enough, if you squint your eyes you will notice a prone female form in the mountains. Her proportions and outline are reminiscent of a Lauren Bacall pin-up.

Besides seeing naked ladies in the rocks, Kosraens mostly go to church and eat oranges. The bag of oranges I buy in the small, open-sided airport are fantastic. The green skin peels easily in one motion, the fruit inside packs the flavor of an entire cart-full of supermarket oranges — they are the apotheosis of orange-ness, beyond which there can be nothing better.

Kosrae is the first stop in the Federated States of Micronesia, the country in which I have come to work. I have one more stop to go: Pohnpei. My excitement has turned to fatigue during the long plane journey. Even the giggly young SDAs are muted in their reaction to the lush mountains of Kosrae. One sits holding a teddy bear and staring at the luggage being unloaded from our plane. We all feel the dread of journey’s end, when the plane will leave us behind in a strange and alien culture.

So we board the plane for the last time without the exuberance with which we began. We are lost in our private thoughts (except for the Micronesians who are happy to doze and gossip). I’m wondering if any one will meet me on Pohnpei. I have no phone number to call or hotel to go to. I’m tired. I am burdened with books and clothes and a laptop that will last about ten minutes in the jungle humidity.

When at last we screech to a stop on the tiny spit of land created for Pohnpei International Airport, I am exhausted from anticipation. The airplane door sighs as it opens, and we are greeted with a blast of humidity that hardly seems breathable. As I step onto the tarmac, the full force of this heat drenches me in the sheer otherness of the place. I sweat profusely and immediately. The calm air is moldy, stagnant. The short walk across the tarmac is unrelenting. The foreigners trudge towards the small terminal, unsure if this new planet is habitable or if we will all soon be writhing on the ground gasping for air.

I want to go home. I have an overwhelming feeling that I should turn back. The whole trip seems surreal, and yet — how exciting to have an adventure to an unknown island before me! How I love to be the sort of guy that goes on adventures. Here I am: a fellow who will hop a plane to unknown climes without a care in the world. How cool I am!

But who’s around to appreciate it? What’s the point of an adventure unshared? How very lonely to be swimming in the humid air toward a little stone building where not one person could possibly know me.

The airport has none of the comfortable regularity of most modern airports — no glass, no air-con, no walls, no fast food, no rental cars, no hotel attached. I’m wondering what I will do if nobody greets me. I move on toward a booth where a Pohnpeian woman is stamping passports. I am already beaten by this intense and aggressively green island where mountains rise thousands of feet in the middle and spill down towards a fringe of mangrove swamp — it’s the life that really gets to me, it’s the teeming life that hits me in my first breath of Pohnpeian air. The island seems to sweat and breathe and just grow and grow and grow endlessly. And suddenly I am in it, a tiny speck of mold in a vast petri dish. And the island gets me. It starts to grow in me and on me even after one breath.

The plump brown woman at the counter is wearing a bright orange and blue muumuu. She has incredibly long, black, greasy hair knotted up into a fancy bun. With her wide eyes she looks like a sinister butterfly. I am suddenly horrified by what I am doing. How much better to have this all ahead of me, in the future, the cool new thing that I’m doing. Now, sweating, fishing for my passport in my sticky leather bag, I am suddenly forced to face consequences that I never clearly thought through. Where will I live? Does the college even know I’m coming? They seemed so vague and mellow on the phone. It’s 1997, but there is no reliable internet connection on Pohnpei. I have none of the e-mail confirmation that we require before travel today. I feel utterly alone, lost, disoriented.

“Oh hi, Jonathan. You’re teaching at the college? I went there. My cousin is a teacher too,” says the butterfly lady.

I am so baffled by the sound of my name that I can’t answer.

“My other cousin works at public affairs, so I picked up your work visa from there.”

She staples a little visa to a page in my passport.

“Jonathan, I think you’re staying at my auntie’s place, right?” she asks.

I can hardly stammer out an “I don’t know” before she sends me along to collect my baggage.

I’ve never been so comforted by the sound of my own name. The feeling must be like what babies feel when they first learn their names. It calls them into existence as this particular thing, this Jonathan or Lauren or Bunglick. And around that name a whole personality, a whole life forms like a sturdy, colorful coral. The sound of my name — even if it’s pronounced with a “t” sound instead of a “th” sound in the middle by a large, brightly colored Pohnpeian woman in a hot airport — means that I am known. My apprehension fades. I step out of the small terminal and into a new life.