The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  A key factor, for Lino, was the government—he thought it had become too intrusive and people had, in turn, become too dependent on it.

  The people and the government “are into this together, but I have a system,” he said. “Let me work it through. If I cannot, I’ll call on you. But the way you’re doing it . . . you’re not helping us look back into how we survive on this grain of sand in the middle of the ocean over ages. Help us look back into that as we fit into modern time. Modern time is coming whether we want it or not. That’s my personal opinion. Stay back there for a little while. I’ll call on you.”

  At the same time, Lino hoped for more government support to help maintain key cultural traditions. The local Indigenous Affairs Office and Carolinian Affairs Office, he said, “can really play a big role if our leadership truly wanted to protect our language and our culture . . .” But he wasn’t optimistic about the chances of this actually happening. In elections, he said, “they’ll talk about ‘We must protect our language’ and this and that. But when it’s over, they’re not gonna fund any of that.”

  THE CNMI’s founding document, which set the groundwork for its relationship with the United States, was called the Covenant. It was intentionally not called a treaty, said Angelo, whose father was instrumental in writing it. “A covenant is a sacred agreement,” Angelo told me. “I don’t have proof of this, but I think the word was chosen because of the strong Catholic presence in the country.” Like many people, here and in every territory, he used the words country and nation to describe both the territory and the USA interchangeably.

  The framers of the Covenant—which would become the basis for the local constitution—had a pointed lack of trust in the American federal government. In some ways, the Covenant emulated American Samoa’s cultural protections, including a provision—which would become Article 12 of the CNMI Constitution—stating that land could only be owned by persons of Chamorro or Carolinian ancestry (though others could lease it for fifty years, hence the high-rise hotels like the one next to Lino’s house).

  The key predecessor, though, was Puerto Rico, which had gotten off the UN’s “colony” list in 1953, after its affiliation with the United States changed in the process of becoming a commonwealth rather than a territory. It’s a nuanced, nebulous difference.‡

  Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia all call themselves commonwealths, as did the Philippines, which was never a happy, status-quo-loving territory, and after much petitioning and fighting was granted commonwealth status in 1934, as a transition period before gaining independence in 1946. In that case, “commonwealth” meant, This place is on the path toward independence. But none of these are the same sort of commonwealth that applies to Puerto Rico or the CNMI.

  Here is the official, current United States government definition of a commonwealth:

  The term “Commonwealth” does not describe or provide for any specific political status or relationship. It has, for example, been applied to both states and territories. When used in connection with areas under U.S. sovereignty that are not states [that is, Puerto Rico and later the CNMI], the term broadly describes an area that is self-governing under a constitution of its adoption and whose right of self-government will not be unilaterally withdrawn by Congress.

  This version of commonwealth was dreamed up by Puerto Rican leaders, as the island’s political status debate raged in the early 1950s. It offered—on paper, anyway—an upgrade from territory by providing more autonomy, enough to please the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, which considers the American territories to be colonies (the USVI, American Samoa, and Guam) but says the commonwealths (Puerto Rico and the CNMI) are not. This new designation allowed the United States to hold its power while showing the world it was a kinder, gentler, with-the-times sort of empire.

  The Northern Mariana Islands’ Covenant was put to a referendum in 1975 and passed with more than 78 percent the vote. On March 24, 1976, after congressional approval, the Northern Mariana Islands became a commonwealth of the United States of America. In the states, this went all but unnoticed. There was no collective discussion about the meaning and use of empire. It did not become a presidential campaign issue. There were no long articles and blaring headlines in the national media about the CNMI. In fact, the commonwealth status wasn’t even fully official—and CNMI residents weren’t American citizens—until 1986, when the Trust Territory was formally dissolved, with the authorization of the United Nations.

  But even in this era of greater autonomy for the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, this time when the territories seemed to be catching a bit of a break, the Insular Cases were still casting their long shadow. In the 1980 case Harris v. Rosario, the Supreme Court ruled that, even though the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program provided lower reimbursements in Puerto Rico than in the states, this was permissible—Congress, the court decided, “may treat [the territories] differently from States so long as there is a rational basis for its actions.” In other words: Congress can do what it wants in the territories, even if it seems unfair, as long there’s a good-enough reason for it. The autonomy that came with the commonwealth label was, apparently, not quite as strong as originally advertised.

  THE COGNITIVE dissonance of Saipan showed no signs of abating: warm welcomes, burned-out landscapes, stories of shady goings-on.

  At a beachside café called Snack Shack, a cheery, laid-back place specializing in crepes, I struck up a conversation with the thirty-something proprietor, Glen Hunter, who turned out to be an anti-corruption crusader; the discussion quickly veered away from tourist small talk.

  On a side street near the island’s cockfighting stadium, I walked around an old Japanese jail, where thick trees had overgrown the walls and cells. It felt a bit eerie, though not sinister like Banzai Cliffs or Tinian, until Walt told me, while we sipped smoothies at a nearby health-food store, that according to one theory about Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated trip to Howland, she crashed in the Marshall Islands, where she was captured by the Japanese, who brought her to this jail.

  One day, I got back to my hotel to discover that I’d lost my new hat, the one from the world’s largest Kmart. I hate losing things. I never lose things. And now, since the aitu in American Samoa, two different hats had disappeared. I checked my email and found a note from John Wasko telling me that the hat I’d lost on Aunu’u had just appeared in his pickup cab. He added, I’m not touching it.

  Even Saipan’s innovations were unnerving. All around the island was a business model I’d never seen before: a combination Laundromat and poker room, open 24/7. My first instinct was to laugh—Ha ha, maybe I’ll wash some clothes and play a hand of Texas hold ’em at three a.m.!—but this was chased by the realization that this wasn’t Monaco. There are no tuxedoed dealers, just rows of poker machines and a miasma of misery and aching hopes for quick success and all the trappings of the American Dream on the next hand or maybe . . .

  Each day, I awoke with a gambler’s optimism: Today will be my lucky day! My goal was simply a flicker of uplift, evidence that Saipan didn’t suck. There were countless small moments, enough to keep me going, but I never seemed to hit the jackpot until I got an invitation from a friend of Angelo’s, a lawyer and politician named Cinta Kaipat, to attend a small family party. It took some doing to find her house, since buildings on Saipan have no address numbers. (Until recently, many streets didn’t even have names, aside from the two main drags, Beach Road and Middle Road; you can guess where they are.) But after several U-turns, I arrived at a small white house with black trim and lots of plumeria flowers. I walked around back, where several picnic tables were set up on a covered concrete slab; about twenty people were sitting around chatting and drinking Fanta and Bud Light.

  They might not have recognized me, but I was fairly certain they had an idea of who I was: the Writer from the States, a latter-day Margaret Mead come to observe them. Saipan residents are well aware that various scribes h
ave written not-so-flattering reports about their island. I gave a shy wave. A lithe middle-aged woman waved back, beaming. “You’re in the right place!” She introduced herself as Emma. She had sandy hair and a necklace made of chunky, colorful disks cut from seashells.

  Another woman emerged from the house. “Hi, Doug!” she called. This was Cinta, a head shorter than me, with a broad, beaming face framed by dark brown hair. She embraced me in a firm hug, then pointed me to an empty spot at a picnic table, next to a balding, mustachioed man named Desi. “He helped write our constitution!” Cinta said, and so it was that I had a Fanta with a Founding Father. Soon it was time for prayer, and we all gathered around a table covered with platters of food. After “Amen,” the room stayed quiet and no one moved. Everyone stared at me. My mind raced: Am I supposed to give a speech? Is my fly down?

  Desi stepped to my side and said, in a low voice, “You’re the guest. They’re not going to get in line until you’re at the head.” I grabbed a plate and mounded it with barbecued ribs, fried chicken, octopus, rice, and an extra-large serving of chicken kelaguen.

  I met aunts and uncles and sons and daughters; an old woman, the family matriarch, clasped my hand with a bony, kindly shake. At times, I struggled to understand the web of family. “I’m Cinta’s sister,” Emma told me, although she meant it in the local way—they didn’t have the same parents, but here, those closest to you are your siblings, no matter what bloodlines say. Emma was Chamorro—“part of the first Chamorro team to swim the English Channel,” she said. Cinta was Carolinian, originally from the remote island of Pagan, near the north end of the Marianas, which was evacuated in 1981 when Mount Pagan erupted. She attended law school at the University of Minnesota, in the very building where Maren worked. We compared notes on Minneapolis winters. Cinta had loved the snow.

  Cinta’s brother, Gus, pulled out a ukulele and started noodling. He wore a red T-shirt and glasses, and he was a beefy guy, the instrument cartoonishly small in his hands. His son, Kyle—who wore a thick necklace like Emma’s, a trademark of Pagan, where the shells showed off the bravery of the men who dove deeply to collect them from the ocean floor—picked up another ukulele and balanced his own toddler son on his knee.

  Gus’s playing streamlined into a distinct melody and he started singing, with Cinta harmonizing on the chorus, their voices crisp and balanced. They sang a traditional song from Pagan and then an original composition called “Two Lovers Point,” telling the story of the site on Guam, and performed in honor of me and my distant wife. I felt a pang of homesickness, followed by a rush of gratitude for the hospitality. When they finished, Cinta said, “Now we’re going to do ‘Marianas,’” which she’d written when she was in Minneapolis, missing her home; it was a love song for the islands. Nearly everyone in the room harmonized, dulcet and warm. The fluorescent lights above us seemed to delineate all the known world, as everything else faded away.

  Just before I left, I met another relative, a middle-aged woman in a black blouse. She said, in a tone that was at once friendly and wary, “I hope you got all you wanted here.” It was the only time anyone directly acknowledged that I was here to write about them.

  I assured her I’d had a lovely evening. I meant it.

  Cinta walked me out to my car, accompanied by a young girl, perhaps seven years old, of unknown relation. Cinta gave me a big hug and then another, and the girl silently handed me a can of Fanta for the road.

  YET EVEN at Cinta’s house, in the course of a delicious meal and rousing conversation, the underlying problems came up again and again. I asked Desi and Emma about local political issues, and Desi said, “There are none! . . . Well, politicians don’t talk about them.” A typical political campaign speech, he said, goes something like this: “My name is ———. My parents are ———. My grandparents are ———. Vote for me!” In this newest of territories, Laurie Peterka had told me, there’s a “village mentality now with this other structure”—the American government system—“laid on top of it.”

  Each territory has close-knit communities, rich in what the sociologists call social capital, a strong network of friends and families and acquaintances, but within each territory there’s also a strong sense of disparate and often competing communities. In the CNMI, cultural identity is so split that there’s no broadly used word for someone from Saipan or from the CNMI. Anyone from Guam is Guamanian, but in the CNMI you’re Chamorro or Carolinian or Filipino or Chinese or white (or haole). Local politics, multiple people told me, were dominated by a few families, mostly Chamorro; everyone else was struggling to make their voice heard, as Lino had said.

  There’s no getting around Saipan’s problems, even beyond what I could see with my own eyes or what directly affected the people I met. “You know, Breaking Bad could’ve been filmed on Saipan. Meth is bad,” Angelo said, adding that in the local government—the territory’s largest employer—nepotism was common and generally considered no big deal, and what most statesiders might see as corruption was considered here simply patronage. Of course, there was still outright corruption, some of it genuinely jaw-dropping in its brazenness and absurdity, like the 2013 incident that caused then-Governor Benigno Fitial to be impeached and subsequently resign: his crime was illegally releasing a federal prisoner who happened to be his personal masseuse.

  “The territories are like laboratories for the United States,” one Chamorro man on Guam had told me. His words echoed the bromide that the states are laboratories for democracy—meaning local experimentation will lead the way toward a more perfect union—but his statement was less optimistic. He meant that the United States sees the territories as a place to mess around, mix elements indiscriminately, and experiment just to see what happens, without regard for what might blow up. And as I drove back to Garapan from Cinta’s house, I passed one of the most damning case studies, the reason former United States Speaker of the House Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, once called Saipan “my Galapagos Island”: a hulking, sprawling garment factory, now shut down, with broken windows and an ominous air.

  AS THE CNMI officially joined the United States, the experimentation began in earnest.

  Among the Covenant’s special provisions were one that the commonwealth would regulate its own immigration and another that it would be exempt from federal minimum-wage laws. (In 1979, federal minimum wage was $2.90; in the CNMI, it was $1.35. By 1998, federal minimum wage was $5.15 and in the CNMI it was $3.05.) In practical terms, these two provisions meant that employers could easily import workers who would be willing to toil for low wages.

  Imagine that you used a Club Med brochure and Atlas Shrugged as your manuals for constructing a new economy in a place with a long history of insularity and colonialism. What’s the worst that could happen in this laissez-faire Shangri-la?

  There were early, significant dividends, including a tourism boom. Japan Airways built hotels and malls, including La Fiesta, which opened in 1990, and hired Greg Norman to design a golf course, Lao Lao Bay. And then there were the garment factories. The first opened in 1983; at their peak in the late 1990s, thirty-six operated on Saipan, with nearly a billion dollars in annual exports. They employed between 20,000 and 35,000 workers (estimates vary widely), most of them young women from China. In 1983, the population of the CNMI was 24,308. By 1998, a congressional report estimated the island’s population at 70,000, of whom 42,000 were foreign workers, largely in the garment factories and tourism industries.

  Since the factories were on American soil, they could avoid import tariffs and sew “Made in USA” labels on the clothes, helping mainland consumers feel better about their purchases, never mind the fact that, since Saipan was not quite full-fledged American soil, the pay and factory conditions were also not quite up to mainland standards. Saipan’s garment industry made clothes for brands including Ralph Lauren, the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Champion, High Sierra, the Dress Barn, Gymboree, J. Crew, Oshkosh B’Go
sh, Cutter & Buck, Nordstrom, Sears Roebuck, JCPenney, Lane Bryant, the Limited, Levi’s, Talbots, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Brooks Brothers. If you wore clothes from any of those brands between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, it’s possible they were made on Saipan.§

  WALT TOOK ME to a neighborhood dense with onetime garment factories, all corrugated metal roofs, broken windows, and tall chain-link fences. As we passed one, windowless and yellow and with a broken-down minivan out front, Walt said, “This is one of the places where Chun worked.”

  Walt befriended Chun Yu Wang shortly after he moved to Saipan. She was from Wuxi in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province and came to Saipan in 2000, when she was twenty-five. She recounts her experiences in her memoir Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin, which she wrote with Walt. The title comes from a Chinese idiom; it’s “the rubbish left when cooking a chicken. . . . Being worthless, they attract little attention.” Chun still lived on Saipan and she said she’d be willing to talk to me. The three of us went to American Memorial Park, where we sat on a low wall at the edge of an amphitheater. Chun had black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a professional outfit: maroon blouse, thin gold necklace, black slacks. As I started to ask her questions, she fidgeted and offered only short answers.

  Chun had worked in garment factories in China, but she’d heard that on Saipan “in three years, I could make almost thirty thousand dollars . . . It might take me ten or twenty years to make that much money in China.” To get a placement, she had to talk to a recruiter in Jiangsu, take a test, do an interview, and pay about $3,500, which she borrowed from friends and family.