J. Maarten Troost - The Sex Lives of Cannibals

There was, it seemed to me, considerable dissonance between the health care concerns of westerners and the realities of the Pacific. Diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, for instance, killed nearly 10 percent of children under the age of five. But glamorous people don’t die of diarrhea. Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t hold fund-raisers for people with the runs. And so the money goes to AIDS, and not childhood diarrhea. So be it. If donors want to give money to fight AIDS rather than diarrhea or malaria, by far the greater killers in the developing world, I certainly won’t emit a peep of protest. I thought that the wisest thing one could do to prevent AIDS in Kiribati would be to take one banana and one condom to the Marine Training School, where I-Kiribati men are taught how to crew freighters, and explain that when in port you really shouldn’t visit prostitutes, but if you must, use a condom because otherwise you will die. Here’s a condom. Here’s a banana. Here’s how it works. Total cost of program? Approximately $1. Lives saved? Innumerable.

Foreign aid donors think differently, however. Instead of pursuing a simple prevention program, three-quarters of the country’s doctors and most of the senior nurses were sent to Perth, Australia, where they attended a five-week-long conference on AIDS counseling—not prevention, not treatment, but counseling. Total cost? $100,000. Lives saved? None. I could only imagine a doctor talking to an I-Kiribati woman infected with AIDS by a husband returning from his tour at sea. How’s your self-esteem?

The I-Kiribati, however, were largely indifferent to the presence of foreigners in Kiribati and the work they did. The only way consultants could get anyone to show up for a workshop in which they would explain the proper way to live on an atoll was to pay what were euphemistically called “sitting fees,” or bribes. On the outer islands, the volunteers were generally thought of as the village pets, amusing diversions that entertained the villagers with their strange ways. On Tarawa, the I-Matang presence was still sparse enough that people would gawk and giggle whenever one was sighted. Or perhaps it was just me that they gawked and giggled at. Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that the presence of a few foreigners in their midst was hardly a concern for the I-Kiribati. Until the Chinese arrived, that is.

Seemingly out of the blue, a new Chinese Embassy was constructed. It was white with a red tiled roof and impenetrable reflecting windows. It looked like an ungainly cross between a Beverly Hills mansion and a Taco Bell franchise. In front there was a glass-enclosed display featuring a tableau of industrial images under the peculiar headline “China: Friend of the Environment.” The embassy was constructed entirely by workers flown in from the People’s Republic of China, using tons of rock taken from the shoreline, which is actually not so environmentally friendly, as it furthers erosion, and erosion is no laughing matter on an atoll.

Soon the library on Tarawa—a one-room building I sometimes visited to peruse their collection of vintage National Geographics , a remnant, as was the rest of their modest collection, of the colonial era—began to display with suspicious prominence the latest issues of China Today, Beijing Review, China Pictorial , and China’s Tibet .

I wondered what the Chinese were interested in. What on earth would compel them to open an embassy in Kiribati of all places? No one builds embassies on Tarawa. Even the two countries that did have embassies barely filled them with staff. Australia had four diplomats. New Zealand only one, and he was also assigned to several other countries.

The government of Kiribati soon announced that it had agreed to buy an airplane, the Y-12, from China. Every aviation specialist in the Pacific thought Kiribati should buy a Twin Otter, which are reliable and safe. The entire region was flying Twin Otters, ensuring a nearby supply of spare parts. Instead, the government bought a Chinese airplane for what was universally regarded as a wildly inflated price. Clearly, there was some funny business going on, but what? Selling one airplane to an impoverished nation hardly struck me as worthy of a new embassy.

The government then announced a plan to send I-Kiribati girls to Hong Kong, where they would work as servants for $400 a month, minus rent and meal costs. Who knew that China was suffering from a labor shortage? The prospective employer could choose the girl of his choice after viewing his options on videotape. As details of the contract emerged, which stipulated that the girls would have no recourse should they be unhappy with their employers, popular disgust with the plan forced the government to abandon it.

Still, procuring unwilling prostitutes, which was among the Red Army’s more financially rewarding sidelines, did not strike me as an activity necessitating an embassy. It was only when the government announced that it had agreed to lease land to China so that they could construct a satellite tracking station that it began to make sense. The Chinese Embassy declared that the tracking station would only be for civilian-use satellites, but many found this hard to believe. Why did the Chinese prevent customs officials from examining the shipping containers they brought in to build their satellite tracking station? Why would the government of Kiribati allow them to get away with it?

Once the Chinese began construction of the station in an isolated grove in Temaiku, the rumors flew. The Chinese were bringing in guns. A boy had seen a Chinese man board a bus with a gun. The embassy had an armory. A submarine had emerged just beyond the reef in Temaiku on a moonless night and supplied the tracking station with mysterious goods, presumably guns. It did not help that the Chinese, and sometimes there were dozens of them, kept completely to themselves.

“I am scared of the Chinese,” Tiabo told me. “They are bad people. They have guns.”

“I don’t like the Chinese,” Bwenawa said. “They don’t believe in God. They do not care about the I-Kiribati people. And they have guns.”

Even Radio Kiribati felt obliged to comment. Rumors that the Chinese are bringing in guns are false, it declared. To prove it, several unimane would be allowed to tour both the embassy and the satellite tracking station.

The unimane declined. We do not know anything about such things, they said. We want the I-Matang to go inside. The Chinese, however, would not allow I-Matangs inside their embassy and tracking station. Only elderly I-Kiribati men were welcome.

“I am very worried,” Bwenawa said. “We know that China has enemies, and I am scared of what would happen to Tarawa if China goes to war. Will those countries attack Tarawa? It has happened before.”

China’s enemy, or strategic partner depending on the week, happened to be quite busy nearby. On Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the United States was preparing to test its new missile defense program. An intercontinental ballistic missile would be fired from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Shortly thereafter, an interceptor would be fired from Kwajalein. As the date approached, more and more Chinese arrived, and from their curt bearing, I assumed they were from the Red Army. Once the test was conducted, they left again. Clearly, the tracking station in Temaiku was a spy station.

Sylvia and I decided this needed investigating. We approached the tracking station by bicycle, stealthlike. Just in front of the building, on the beach, were massive piles of discarded Styrofoam, deposited there by the Chinese as they finished the construction of the station. In the days that followed, the Styrofoam would travel down the atoll, befouling it, until the ocean took it forever. China: Friend of the Environment .