Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  I have come back to Peri on this, my fourth trip to Manus, to witness and record the end of an epoch. The new forms of local self-government, supported by an insistent and originally rebellious leadership, all are legalized. Paliau, the head of what the government once regarded as a subversive movement, now holds elective office and is immersed in work that will shape the future of the Territory of Papua New Guinea. On a small scale this handful of people living on the coast of an isolated archipelago have enacted the whole drama of moving from the narrow independence of a little warring tribe to participation in the development of an emerging nation.

  During the last two months I have been aware of all the different stages of change, as they can be seen simultaneously. On weekdays I see men and women passing by, stripped bare to the waist and holding pandanus hoods over their heads to keep off the rain. On holidays some of the younger women dress in fashionable shifts, bright with splashed flower designs. The oldest men and women, people I have known since 1928, were born into a completely primitive world, ruled over by ghosts, dominated by the fear of disease and death and endlessly preoccupied by the grinding work entailed in meeting their obligations and making the exchanges of shell money and dogs’ teeth for oil and turtles, grass skirts and pots. The middle-aged grew up in the period when warfare was ending; as young men they still practiced throwing and dodging the spears they would never use as weapons of war. The next-younger group, in whose childhood the first Christian mission came, lived through the Japanese occupation and reached manhood when the people of the whole south coast were uniting in a small, decisive social revolution. And the youngest group, adolescents and children, are growing up in a world of school and clinic talk. Before them lies the prospect of career choice and the establishment of a new university, the University of Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. These are the first-comers to a new epoch.

  Yet, in spite of everything, the Manus have preserved their identity as a people and their integrity as individuals. The shy little boys I knew in the past have grown up into shy, quiet men. The boastfully brash still are brash. The alert-minded are keen and aware. It is as if the changes from savagery to civilization were new colors that had been laid on over the hard, clear outlines of their distinct personalities. At the same time, where once the Manus feared and plotted war, they now hear only echoes of distant battlefields in places of which formerly they were totally unaware. Where once they suffered hunger when storms kept the fishermen at home, they now can buy food for money in the village shops. Where once flight to live precariously among strangers was the outcome of a quarrel, now it is proud ambition that takes the Manus abroad.

  One outcome of the chance that brought me to their village to do field work in 1928 is that their history has been chronicled. Unlike most simpler peoples of the world, the Manus can bridge past and present. Here in my house I hang up photographs of all the “big-fellow men belong before,” who would otherwise be no more than half-remembered names. Seen from the vantage point of the present, pictures taken ten years ago and thirty-seven years ago have a continuity that overcomes strangeness. Instead of being ashamed of the life that has been abandoned, young people can be proud of an ancestral mode of life that is being preserved for others to know about and is mentioned in speeches made by visitors from the United Nations. Then old pride and new pride merge and the old men, nodding agreement, say: “After all, the Manus people started in Peri.”

  Each day I go about the ordinary business of field work. I accept the presents of fresh fish and accede to small requests for tobacco, matches, a postage stamp or perhaps four thumbtacks. Whatever I am working at, I listen to the sounds of the village, ready to go quickly to the scene of wailing or shouting or some child’s uncharacteristic cry. As I type notes I also watch the passers-by to catch the one person who can answer a question, such as: “Is it really true that the same two women first married Talikat and then later married Ponowan?” Or word comes that two turtles, necessary for the coming feast, have been brought in, and I hurriedly take my camera out of its vacuum case and rush to record the event.

  At the same time I think about field work itself. For an anthropologist’s life is keyed to field work. Even at home, occupied with other activities, writing up field notes and preparing for the next field trip keeps your mind focused on this aspect of your life. In the past, actual field work has meant living with and studying a primitive people in some remote part of the world. The remoteness has been inevitable, for the peoples anthropologists have studied were primitive because they lived far from the centers of civilization—in the tropics or in the Arctic, in a mountain fastness or on an isolated atoll. Remoteness also has set the style of field work. Cut off from everything else, your attention is wholly concentrated on the lives of the people you are working with, and the effort draws on all your capacities, strength and experience. Now, as the most remote places become known, the conditions of field work are changing. But the need to see and respond as a whole does not change.

  I am especially aware of the conditions of fieldwork on this trip because for the first time since my original field trip to Samoa forty years ago I am working alone, without any collaborators in the same or a nearby village. This and the fact that I am using only one camera, a notebook and a pencil—instead of all the complex paraphernalia of the modern field team—throws me back to the very core of field work: one person, all alone, face-to-face with a whole community. Equipped principally with a way of looking at things, the fieldworker is expected somehow to seize on all the essentials of a strange way of life and to bring back a record that will make this comprehensible as a whole to others who very likely never will see this people in their living reality. The role of the fieldworker and the recognition that every people has a culture, the smallest part of which is significant and indicative of the whole, go together. Once the two were matched, our field work helped us to learn more about culture and to train a new generation of anthropologists to make better field studies.

  Nevertheless, as I sit here with the light of my pressure lamp casting long shadows on the dark, quiet square, wondering what may happen in the next few hours, I also reflect that field work is one of the most extraordinary tasks we set for young people. Even today it means a special kind of solitude among a people whose every word and gesture is, initially, unexpected and perhaps unintelligible. But beyond this, the fieldworker is required to do consciously something that the young child, filled with boundless energy and curiosity, does without conscious purpose—that is, learn about a whole world. But whereas the child learns as part of growing up and becomes what he learns, the anthropologist must learn the culture without embodying it, in order to become its accurate chronicler.

  Whether one learns to receive a gift in both hands or with the right hand only, to touch the gift to one’s forehead or to refuse it three times before accepting it, the task is always a double one. One must learn to do something correctly and not to become absorbed in the doing. One must learn what makes people angry but one must not feel insulted oneself. One must live all day in a maze of relationships without being caught in the maze. And above all, one must wait for events to reveal much that must be learned. A storm, an earthquake, a fire, a famine—these are extraordinary conditions that sharply reveal certain aspects of a people’s conceptions of life and the universe. But the daily and the recurrent events that subtly shape people’s lives are the ones on which the anthropologist must concentrate without being able to foresee what he can learn from them or when any particular event may occur. Equipped as well as possible with his growing knowledge of names and relationships, his experience of expectations and probable outcomes, the fieldworker records, learns—and waits. But it is always an active waiting, a readiness in which all his senses are alert to whatever may happen, expected or unexpected, in the next five minutes—or in an hour, a week, a month from now. The anthropological fieldworker must take a whole community, with all its transmitted tradition, into his mind and, to the ext
ent that he is a whole person, see it whole.

  And then my mind turns back to Manus. What is happening here is a kind of paradigm of something that is happening all over the world: grandparents and parents settle for the parts they themselves can play and what must be left to the comprehension of the children. The Manus have taken a direction no one could have foreseen thirty-seven years ago. Yet in the midst of change they are recognizably themselves. Field work provides us with a record of the experiments mankind has made in creating and handing on tradition. Over time it also provides a record of what men can do and become.

  EMILY HAHN

  (1905–)

  If the quality of travel experience is measured in the taking of risks, few travelers compare with Emily Hahn. With the spirit of Box-Car Bertha and Maud Parrish and the audacity of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hahn is a true renegade. She was the first woman to graduate with a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin, worked with the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo, as a courier in Santa Fe, a mining engineer in St. Louis, and an instructor at Hunter College in New York City. In Europe and North Africa she served as a newspaper correspondent; in China she taught English and writing and was the New Yorker’s regional correspondent; she also has written fifty-seven books—stories, novels, children’s books, and works of social history. During the Second World War she lived in Hong Kong, where her lover, Charles Boxer, an English intelligence officer, was captured by the Japanese. When the war was over, she and Boxer were reunited in the United States. She now lives in New York.

  from TIMES AND PLACES

  THE BIG SMOKE

  Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium ambition dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too—the greatest expert on ghosts, the world’s best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

  Helen kept saying that she would go home to California, where her husband was waiting, as soon as she’d seen Japan, but as the time for her departure drew near she grew reluctant and looked around for a good excuse to prolong the tour. As she pointed out to me, China was awfully close by and we knew that an old friend was living in Shanghai. It would be such a waste to let the chance slip. Why shouldn’t we go over and take just one look, for a weekend? I was quite amenable, especially as, for my part, I didn’t have to go back to America. My intention was to move on south in leisurely fashion, after Helen had gone home, and land someday in the Belgian Congo, where I planned to find a job. All this wasn’t going to have to be done with speed, because I still had enough money to live on for a while. My sister accepted these plans as natural, for she knew that a man had thrown me over. Officially, as it were, I was going to the Congo to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances. My attitude toward her was equally easy going. If she didn’t want to go home just yet, I felt it was none of my business. So when she suggested China I said, “Sure, why not?”

  We went. We loved Shanghai. Helen shut up her conscience for another two months, staying on and cramming in a tremendous variety of activities—parties, temples, curio shops, having dresses made to order overnight, a trip to Peiping, embassy receptions, races. I didn’t try to keep up with her. It had become clear to me from the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time. Without a struggle, I shelved the Congo and hired a language teacher, and before Helen left I had found a job teaching English at a Chinese college. It was quite a while before I recollected that old ambition to be an opium smoker.

  As a newcomer, I couldn’t have known that a lot of the drug was being used here, there, and everywhere in town. I had no way of recognizing the smell, though it pervaded the poorer districts. I assumed that the odor, something like burning caramel or those herbal cigarettes smoked by asthmatics, was just part of the mysterious effluvia produced in Chinese cookhouses. Walking happily through side streets and alleys, pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by, I would sniff and move one, unaware that someone close at hand was indulging in what the books called that vile, accursed drug. Naturally I never saw a culprit, since even in permissive Shanghai opium smoking was supposed to be illegal.

  It was through a Chinese friend, Pan Heh-ven, that I learned at last what the smell denoted. I had been at a dinner party in a restaurant with him, and had met a number of his friends who were poets and teachers. Parties at restaurants in China used to end when the last dish and the rice were cold and the guests had drunk their farewell cup of tea at a clean table. That night, though, the group still had a lot to say after that—they always did—and we stood around on the pavement outside carrying on a discussion of modern literature that had started at table. We were in that part of town called the Chinese city, across Soochow Creek, outside the boundaries of the foreign concessions. It was hot. A crumpled old paper made a scraping little sound like autumn leaves along the gutter, and the skirts of the men’s long gowns stirred in the same wind. During dinner, they had spoken English out of courtesy, but now, in their excitement, they had long since switched to the Chinese language, and I stood there waiting for somebody to remember me and help me find a taxi, until Heh-ven said, “Oh, excuse us for forgetting our foreign guest. We are all going now to my house. Will you come?”

  Of course I would. I’d been curious about his domestic life, which he seldom mentioned. So we all moved off and walked to the house—an old one of Victorian style, with more grounds than I was used to seeing around city houses in America. I say Victorian, but that was only from the outside, where gables and a roughcast front made it look like the kind of building I knew. Indoors was very different. It was bare, as one could see at a glance because the doors stood open between rooms—no carpets, no wallpaper, very little funiture. Such chairs and sofas and tables as stood around the bare floor seemed as impersonal as lost articles in a vacant shop. Yet the house wasn’t deserted. A few people were there in the room—a man who lounged, as if defiantly, on the unyielding curve of a sofa, four or five children scampering and giggling in whispers, an old woman in the blue blouse and trousers of a servant, and a young woman in a a plain dark dress.

  This last, it appeared, was Heh-ven’s wife, and at least some of the children were theirs. I was embarrassed because the whole household gawked at me; one small boy who looked like a miniature Heh-ven said something that made the others giggle louder. Heh-ven spoke briefly to his family and told us to follow him upstairs, where we emerged on a cozier scene. Here the rooms were papered, and though everything still seemed stark to my Western eyes, there was more furniture around. We trooped into a bedroom where two hard, flat couches had been pushed together, heads against a wall and a heap of small pillows on each. In the center of the square expanse of white sheet that covered them was a tray that held several unfamiliar objects—a little silver oil lamp with a shade like an inverted glass tumbler, small boxes, and a number of other small things I didn’t recognize. I sat on a stiff, spindly chair, and the men disposed themselves here and there in the room, very much at home as they chattered away, picked up books and riffled through them, and paid no attention to what was going on on the double couch. I found the proceedings there very odd, however, and stared in fascination.

  Heh-ven had lain down on his left side, alongside the tray and facing it. He lit the lamp. One of his friends, a plump little man named Huaching, lay on his right side on the other side of the tray, facing Heh-ven, each with head and shoulders propped on the pilows. Heh-ven never stopped conversing, but his hands were busy and his eyes were fixed on what he was doing—knitting, I thought at first, wondering why nobody had ever mentioned that this craft was practiced by Chinese men. Then I saw that what I had taken for yarn between the two needles he manipulated was actually a kind of gummy stuff, dark and thick. As he rotated the needle ends about each oth
er, the stuff behaved like taffy in the act of setting; it changed color, too, slowly evolving from its earlier dark brown to tan. At a certain moment, just as it seemed about to stiffen, he wrapped the whole wad around one needle end and picked up a pottery object about as big around as a teacup. It looked rather like a cup, except that it was closed across the top, with a rimmed hole in the middle of this fixed lid. Heh-ven plunged the wadded needle into this hole, withdrew it, leaving the wad sticking up from the hole, and modelled the rapidly hardening stuff so that it sat on the cup like a tiny volcano. He then picked up a piece of polished bamboo that had a large hole near one end, edged with a band of chased sliver. Into this he fixed the cup, put the opposite end of the bamboo into his mouth, held the cup with the tiny cone suspended above the lamp flame, and inhaled deeply. The stuff bubbled and evaporated as he did so, until nothing of it was left. A blue smoke rose from his mouth, and the air was suddenly full of that smell I had encountered in the streets of Shanghai. Truth lit up in my mind.

  “You’re smoking opium!” I cried. Everybody jumped, for they had forgotten I was there.

  Heh-ven said, “Yes, of course I am. Haven’t you ever seen it done before?”