Free Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould

had given them uncanny aim and coordination. Even so, I had not expected the list of the remote islanders’ skills to include a mean game of table tennis.
    This was not, however, the ping-pong of my childhood. The table was a limp piece of waterlogged plywood, more or less rectangular but significantly smaller than code and riddled with grooves and holes. It was balanced between a gas canister and a barrel of different heights, and the sloping ground didn’t quite rectify the tilt. The whole contraption was dismantled after every session and reassembled the next day, presumably so that its parts could be used for other purposes in the meantime. Somehow, the men had gotten their hands on two rackets, a dozen balls, and an almost intact net.
    The rules were as funky as the table. It was winner-stay-in, without exception. Serving was erratic: the player who served at the beginning of one rally was whichever person had happened to pick up the ball after the last rally. The next man up for play announced the score of the current round, and he was required to do it in a deliberately confusing way: if the score had been juon aolep (“one all”) and thenhad become two to one, the announcer would simply say ruo (“two”), not ruo juon (“two one”). When a player reached the score of six, the announcer would start counting over from zero, so that ruo (“two”) could mean either “two” or “eight,” depending on the context. If the ball bounced off a groove in the table or fell through a hole, the point still counted.
    The strangest Marshallese twist on this game was the ajimaj , a word that seemed to have no use outside of table tennis. Saying this word doubled the odds of any smash—if you won with that hit, you gained two points, and if you lost with that hit, your opponent gained two points. How did they invent this rule? Where did the word ajimaj come from? Was it Marshallese, was it American, was it both, or was it neither? I had the same question about the entire society.
    So it was an odd game, punctuated with shouts of “ Ajimaj! ” and “ Orror! ” (“damn it!”), delayed by searches for the ball among banana trees and rotting leaf piles, and with the audience sitting on coco-nuts—but it was still, more or less, ping-pong.
    I enjoyed entering the fray, but not in hopes of winning. Fredlee had the habit of staying in until he grew tired of demolishing his opponents with effortless smashes and well-timed cries of “ Ajimaj! ” “You will be waves, dashing yourselves against the rock that is me”—that is what his eyes said, in the universal language of intimidation. But it was always lighthearted, and the other men and I shared in the pride of the underdogs.
    In the company of these men, learning Marshallese lore, getting a handle on the language and a ping-pong racket, I started to seem and to feel less like a stranger. I became comfortable with a combination of solitude and native bwebwenato . I was surprised to find myself crossing out loneliness on my list of difficulties.
    Here was another unexpected pleasure. Building myself up from the level of a child, a paltry social success counted as a major accomplishment. Coming to Ujae had been an experiment in self-deprivation, and discovering that I could survive under those circumstances gave me a powerful feeling. It was a time to see what was necessary and what was not.

6
Underwater Coralhead Cinderblock
Soccer Wrestling

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    â€œBRING LOTS OF LONG BOOKS.” THAT WAS THE SUGGESTION I TYPICALLY received when I told my friends in America that I was going to spend a year in the Micronesian equivalent of a Kansas farm town. But I was skeptical. The islanders spent sixty-five times as long in this backwater, and I doubted that they passed that lifetime in a state of soul-draining ennui.
    Almost a month into my new life on Ujae, experience had