"On Yap the culture is the land. You speak for the land."
Back row: My brother, Theo, my younger nephew, and me (with hair)
Front row: Antonia and my sister-in-law
So yeah, on Saturday I drove to Tacoma, picked up our Yapese friends, Theo and Antonia, and drove them to my brother's house in Corvallis. Theo lost his latest job a while back and hasn't been able to find another one, so he's planning to return to Yap in March. Antonia will stay behind to help take care of the grandchildren. This was our last chance to talk to Theo for who knows how long. On Sunday my sister came down from Salem to have dinner with us. Other than that, we sat around the house and "talked stories," as Theo calls it.
Theo is a great story-teller, and he kept me entertained on the five-hour drives in both directions and kept my brother and me entertained the rest of the time. (Antonia mostly stayed silent in the car, chewing betelnut and throwing in the occasional comment or answering Theo's questions when he asked her something in Yapese. She and my sister-in-law went out for pedicures on Sunday.) It was just like old times, out on Yap, or other times we've visited with them either here in Washington or one other time when I drove them to my brother's place.
We covered so much material, I couldn't even begin to relate what all we talked about. One general comment is that whenever we get together with Theo and Antonia, the talk is very Pacific. Micronesia, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, West Coast America. (This time we talked about Chile, too, because my sister is looking to teach ESL there for a few months.) Mostly the talk is about Yap, of course. Memories, history, legends, stories, gossip, thoughts about the future, economics, politics, culture.
I don't know. It would take a special effort to convey the potency of the conversation for me. One tidbit is that Theo and Antonia had just spoken with a Yapese guy who remembered me as a classmate from Alaw, which was the second school I went to out there in the '60s. Most Yapese don't remember me, because I was just a little kid, and I had started to develop a minor complex about it. Even Theo says he doesn't remember me from the '60s, but remembers my dad and my brother instead. Sometimes I feel that Yap has made a tremendous imprint on me, but I have made absolutely no imprint on Yap. Which is actually probably true. Why would it be any different?
But that's another thing. Theo and I talked at one point about small towns and how insular they can be. "It's the same on Yap," he said. "We are distrustful of outsiders." Suddenly all my feelings that I don't really belong there, despite my strong feelings of attachment, were reconfigured.
This morning was a long discourse on naming, mostly because my brother was asking how names are chosen for children. It's an incredibly complex topic, because names of people are also the names of property. You are named for a piece of land, and that's where the quote in my subjectline comes from. You represent that piece of land, and when the property and name are assigned to you, it comes with some well-defined responsibilities to the village, which are in turn connected to a complex caste system. It really is the heart of traditional Yapese society, which has been heavily disrupted by the intrusion of a series of other cultures for over a century now -- first the Spanish, then the Germans, then the Japanese, then the Americans. The old way of life is almost completely gone now, but everybody still has their own taro patch, connected to a piece of land from which they take their Yapese name.
I think the biggest sense of wonder moment of the weekend for me was when my brother, Theo, I were looking at Yap on Google Earth. Lonnie had to go start the barbecue, so I drove Google Earth while Theo asked me to look at the ocean next to the island, trying to understand the currents to the east. And suddenly I saw it. I knew that Yap was a tiny chip (under fifty square miles) of raised continental plate, and I knew it was near the deepest point on Earth, called the Mariana Trench, or, near Yap, the Yap Trench. What I hadn't really seen before was the configuration of the continental plates. Yap is part of a small one that Theo thought was called the Philippine Plate. It's between the Asia Plate and the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate is subducting under the Philippine Plate, creating the Mariana Trench. It's pushing the Philippine Plate up, creating not only the island of Yap but also other Micronesian islands, including Belau, Guam, and the Northern Marianas. All these islands are the result of plate tectonics, as opposed to many other Micronesian islands that are atolls on the tips of submerged mountains on the Pacific Plate. Theo said he had read that in fifty million years, as the Philippine Plate is pushed up further and further, Yap will become as big as Japan. Which is utterly fucking mindblowing.
And that's just the tip of it. Just a tiny chunk of the submerged plate of the two-day conversation. I mean, here's another: Yapese legend has it that there was a powerful group of warlocks (Yapese magic is famous throughout the Pacific Islands) who upon the advent of the white men went to an island called Sipin north of Yap and pulled it under the sea to escape the disaster visited on the rest of their countrymen. I joked to Theo, "In fifty million years, Sipin is going to be pushed back above the sea." But is that a joke? Maybe the Yapese will have outlasted the invaders by that point. Theo gave me a look, but he didn't reply. Maybe he has his own thoughts on the topic.