The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The Hawaiian Islands are the most remote – the farthest from any mainland – on earth, and this remoteness made their living things unique. Hawaii’s only land mammal was a small bat, and in its waters the monk seal. Both precariously still exist. The islands’ birds and plants, which existed nowhere else, have not been so lucky. The impact of humans on Hawaii was catastrophic – Hawaii has lost more indigenous species of birds and plants, driven more creatures into extinction, than any other single place on the planet.

  “The tragedy of the oceanic islands lies in their uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the species they have developed by the slow process of the ages,” Rachel Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us, thirty years ago. “In a reasonable world, men would have treated these islands as precious possessions, as natural museums filled with beautiful and curious works of creation, valuable beyond price, because nowhere in the world are they duplicated.”

  It would have been difficult even with foresight to preserve these fragile ecosystems, but who could have predicted the destruction that followed? For some of the smaller Hawaiian islands, Doomsday happened quite a while ago – the islands of Lanai and Niihau, for example, do not even physically resemble the islands they once were, having been plowed, planted, over-grazed, and generally blighted, the haunt of immigrant animals and restless humans. The once-pretty uninhabited (and sacred to Hawaiians) island of Kahoolawe, just off Maui, has for fifty years been a target for bombing practice by the US military; although bombing has now ended the island is off limits because of the danger of unexploded bombs lying all over. One end of Johnston Island in the Hawaiian chain is a depot for toxic waste, the other end is radioactive because of a nuclear accident.

  Most people go to Waikiki. One in ten of them is a victim of crime, according to a statistic released by the Honolulu Police Department. The sidewalks in Waikiki are heaving with prostitutes and their pimps. In the middle of Waikiki, smack on the beach, is the ugliest and most pointless American army installation imaginable – Fort DeRussy, an eyesore the Defense Department refuses to remove. Much of the sand on Waikiki is trucked in from elsewhere and dumped. Dangerously high bacteria levels exist at the eastern end of Waikiki, near the zoo, because of monkey shit being flushed directly into the sea.

  Three of America’s billionaires, and numerous millionaires, live in Honolulu, but even the wealthiest people have to contend with Honolulu’s plagues – rats and cockroaches. No house is free of them – you hear the rats squeaking and quarreling just below the windows, or sometimes nimbly flashing up the trunk of a tree – and it is one of the realities of Honolulu life that once a month Rat Patrol will visit and set out bait and remove corpses. Pest control is one of Honolulu’s growth industries and, because of the fastidious nature of the city’s inhabitants, includes exterminating unwanted birds and bees.

  Now and then, in the belief that the artist Christo is at work in Hawaii, tourists excitedly point to a large house, or a church or a tall building entirely swaddled in a billowing blue tent – these dwellings under great soft buntings are among the strangest sights on the island. But no, they are not the wrapped-up creations of Christo, it is only the fumigator at work, his last desperate measure, zipping up and tenting the house in order to kill every live thing.

  The same fastidiousness extends to the city’s attitude towards strip clubs and prostitutes. In the Narcotics and Vice Division of the Honolulu Police Department there is something called Morals Detail. Essentially, this is a posse of undercover policemen, who work at night either in Chinatown or in the streets around Waikiki, the male cops hoping to be propositioned by hookers, the female cops hoping to be importuned by a so-called john. There is no law against loitering, and under the city’s new “John Law” a person cannot be arrested unless a deal has been made – but both the man and the woman can be collared.

  It all sounded very strict to me until one night I went to Waikiki and examined the matter first-hand. Except for a glimpse I had had of whores braying at passing cars from the sidewalks of King’s Cross in Sydney, and Meestah Boll, you wanna gull? at night in the Trobriands, this was my first experience of vice in Oceania. Kuhio Avenue was busy in the early evening, but towards midnight there were about equal numbers of tourists, prostitutes and policemen, each category in an unmistakable uniform, whether it was an aloha shirt, a tight skirt and high heels, or a blue suit. And here and there, up and down the avenue, all three were sharing the same slab of sidewalk.

  Even without the tight skirts the prostitutes would have been highly visible. There is something in their alertness, the way their gaze travels from man to man, and their over-busy walk.

  “They walk like they’re not going anywhere,” Bill said.

  “That’s what Lieutenant Lum told me.”

  I had arranged to meet Bill in Waikiki. He was writing an article about prostitution for Honolulu magazine and had interviewed a woman who had been arrested for soliciting. He had gone to her trial ($100 for the first offense, $500 for the second). He knew about an older woman, a Baptist preacher they called “The Condom Lady,” who had made it her mission to hand out free contraceptives to the streetwalkers. He had made friends with some of the people on Morals Detail.

  We watched the prostitutes, who usually seemed to travel in twos, strutting and twitching like herons. They took no notice of us, we were invisible to them, and every now and then they would stiffen and make a beeline for the men behind us – Japanese. On Koa Street, where many girls lurked, a pair of girls pushed past us and pounced on two Japanese, and if you happened to be of a sensitive turn of mind you could find something awfully depressing about the girls ignoring us in favor of two callow sauntering youths in baggy shorts and T-shirts.

  After a while, Bill spoke with a girl in a tiny orange skirt, but it was a brief conversation. The girl hurried away from him.

  “I told her I was from Honolulu magazine and she just took off,” he said.

  “I don’t think these girls want to get their names in your magazine.”

  “Sometimes saying you’re a reporter opens a lot of doors,” Bill said.

  “Not whorehouse doors.” “I guess not.”

  Walking past me a skinny girl in a skin-tight dress said, “You want a date?”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred dollars.”

  “I’m not Japanese, you know.”

  The girl laughed – and all her youth was in her laugh; she could hardly have been more than sixteen.

  “If you were Japanese I’d charge you double that!”

  “So I give you a hundred bucks, and then what happens?”

  “We go to my hotel. It’s the Holiday Surf, just down there. And you have a great time –”

  But the instant she saw me vacillating she walked away. Hustling was the perfect word for this activity.

  “There’s one wearing a beeper,” Bill said. “That’s for escort calls, a hotel job. The pimps have beepers, too.”

  The pimps were much in evidence. The beeper was only one point of identification. Pimps were also stylishly dressed, and they carried leather handbags in which, you gathered, a lot of money was stuffed. Most of the pimps were young black men who walked with a kind of menacing confidence.

  “When I started, I wanted this to be a real upbeat American story about free enterprise,” Bill said. “But it’s depressing. These pimps meet girls in Canada or wherever and say they love them. The typical girl is a runaway. She’s been sexually abused as a child. The pimp says he loves her. They come to Honolulu. Then after a week he puts her on the street. It’s exploitation, coercion, abuse and disappointment. I’m real unhappy about that.”

  In the absence of a heavy mob in Honolulu, rackets like gambling and prostitution are a free-for-all. The Japanese mob, the Yakuza, are involved in other long-term investments, like real estate and building contracts. This leaves vice somewhat unorganized and even amateurish, and the pimps are very obvious dudes – all olopops are, in Honolulu – as though they rat
her like playing the role of superfly, bobbing between the pair of whores they are currently running.

  A pale girl, standing by a lighted doorway, handed us a bilingual (English–Japanese) leaflet reading Foxy Lady! Girls! Girls! Girls! and invited us upstairs.

  “What have you got for us?” Bill asked.

  “Naked girls who love to party.”

  “Will they sit with us?” Bill asked. He was trying to find out the varieties of sexual experience, for his article. What would they do? How far would they go? What would it cost?

  The girl in the doorway began to frown.

  “Wanna tip?” she said. “Wanna get laid?”

  Bill was smiling through his big beard.

  “Crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait,” the girl said, turning her back on him. “You’ll get laid.”

  “What are you writing?” Bill asked me, but he knew. “My magazine won’t print that. I can’t put it in my piece. Rats.”

  “Then I’ll put it in mine,” I said.

  We went to Chinatown, in a corner of Downtown; what had seemed amateurish and depressing in Waikiki looked dirty and dangerous here. “That there’s a safe bar,” a prostitute called out to us, pointing to a doorway. She accurately saw that we were simply passing through. “The rest of them are bad.” There were no cars. Lining the streets were ragged, muttering men and bad-tempered women. The only people smiling were the mahus, obvious transvestites, who regard Hotel Street and Mauna Kea Street in Chinatown as their natural habitat. They walk the streets, not going anywhere, waiting for a passing car to pick them up – and they might well be politicians or tycoons living their secret lives. Many scandalous stories originate in Honolulu’s Chinatown – and that includes Maugham’s story of Sadie Thompson, who began her career here and ended up in Samoa.

  “This was going to be a great story,” Bill said, surveying the dereliction of Chinatown. “Maybe even funny. But it’s not. A whore got stabbed to death in that parking lot last week by a soldier. It’s depressing.”

  On another night, still in search of Honolulu, I went to clubs and I remembered what Bill had said of the hookers – you expect hilarity, you look around, you end up depressed.

  There are Japanese clubs, very sedate, where each patron keeps a bottle of Chivas Regal with his name on it behind the bar, the carry-over of a practice common in Japan. At these clubs, which are no more than dimly lit rooms, neatly dressed Japanese hostesses join rowdy Japanese men and smile and act submissive while the men, becoming drunker, grope them. It is all chilly and sexless and over-priced, but the massive number of new Japanese have made it a booming business. So much for the Club Torno, and Mugen, and the others.

  Apart from the Club Mirage, which was empty – perhaps this name was a deliberate joke? – the other clubs were a little livelier. Club Cheri had one naked girl doing knee-bends on a table. In Club Top-Gun three overdressed Japanese men screamed songs into a karaoke mike in front of a television set, and in Club Hachi Hachi one man was doing that. In the Butterfly Lounge young soldiers heckled a fattish dancer, and in Exotic Nights and Club Turtle naked dusky girls posed on a small stage for sweaty men in baseball hats, who were encouraged to buy beer at five dollars a bottle.

  Saigon Passion had a successful theme: the last days of the Vietnam War. It was soldiers from Schofield and Vietnamese hostesses, dressed casually, in jeans and T-shirts, and lots of army memorabilia. It was one of the few clubs that held my attention, because the music and the faces made it seem such an atmospheric time warp. A young girl sat with me – Ruby, from Saigon, lived with her mother in Waipahu, about twenty or so. I began asking her questions until finally she fell silent. Then I prodded her.

  “You undercover?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m not a policeman.”

  “I think you undercover.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Questions. Questions.”

  I went to the Carnation Lounge, to the Misty II Lounge, Kita Lounge, Les Girls, Club Rose and Club Femme Nue. There were twenty within a three-block area. Some were run by Vietnamese women, most were run by Korean women – because of this generic name in Honolulu was “Korean bars.”

  At one time they had been famous for the tricks women performed in them – one club was put on the map because a woman in it picked up coins with the skillful manipulation of her vulva, another boasted a woman who inserted a cigar between her labia and puffed it (men crowded near to see the tip of the cigar brighten), and that same woman could play a clarinet in a similar way. There was a club where a woman stood behind a transparent shower curtain while men groped her (introducing another sort of club in Honolulu, the “feelie bar”), and there was one on Keeaumoku (known as “Korea-Moku,” because of the nationality of the proprietors) where an agile woman came on stage, leaned back, parted her legs, and expelled ping-pong balls from the depths of her vaginal cavern – and the balls, still warm and damp, were fought over and clutched by grateful men.

  This last example of conjuring had been popular at a club called the Stop-Light, but the place had since changed hands, it was now called the Rock-Za, and in its way it was typical: loud music, expensive drinks, naked girls. The bouncer, John – an enormous Samoan from Pago Pago – said it was a gold mine. It was his job to prevent patrons from touching girls.

  “They get one warning, and the next time out they go,” John said.

  But he was ambivalent about the honor of the performers. He said the girls were spoiled and overpaid. Now and then a Japanese tour bus would stop and sixty or eighty tourists would pile into the bar – aged men, old crones, couples, honeymooners – and they would sit, have a few expensive drinks, and would marvel at the big white women displaying themselves stark naked at very close range.

  Men – all sorts – sat on low stools, with their elbows on a twenty-foot table. The young women, posturing more than dancing, struck poses and squatted. I sat a while, watching everything. And what seemed at first like a fantasy realized, a centrefold coming to life, turned into a raucous gynecology class, in which proximity was everything. There was a certain amount of comedy in that.

  People say, You have to see this, and they think you’ll see exactly what they do. I went, trying to be open-minded, but my reaction to these clubs. (after I had a little time to reflect on it) was quite different. The clubs were so ritualized I came to see them as temples in a pagan rite, in which the women were priestesses, like the women in ancient Babylon who whored in the temple of the goddess Ishtar.

  There was something undeniably strange and solemn and even somewhat religious in the fervor of the men who sat like intense votaries waiting for a woman to come near. The man’s patience, the woman’s confident movements, edging nearer and nearer on the altar-like table, squatting, opening her legs very wide, her thighs enclosing the man’s head, and the man staring hard in a frenzy of concentration as though a mystery were being revealed to him that he must memorize. It was public, and yet highly personal – only the chosen man could see clearly. There was as much veneration in this man’s goggling at a woman’s everted private parts as you would find in most church services. The man slipped a dollar or more into the woman’s garter, and she lingered, and the man stared straight on, serious and unsmiling in his own private vision. From this sort of ardent behavior, it was a very short step to the Hindu worship of lingams and yonis, cr to the cultism of the Komari, the vulvas carved in stone all over Rapa Nui.

  Still, it was easy to forget in the flux of Honolulu that I was in Oceania. Sometimes Oahu seemed an offshore island of America, sometimes of Asia. Yet it was the only real crossroads in the Pacific, the junction of every air route, and in many senses the heart of Polynesia. This was noticeable in trivial ways – when Disney World in Florida looked for performers for their “Polynesian Luau Revue” (“One-year contracts with relocation will be offered …”), they auditioned in Honolulu; whenever a serious piece of Pacific scholarship was undertaken, it was invariably under the auspices of the Bis
hop Museum or the University of Hawaii or the East-West Center, or more significantly the Mormon Church, passionate about converting the whole of Polynesia to Mormonism, and which had its Pacific headquarters, as well as its banks, on Oahu.

  Whenever I inquired about an archeological ruin in Polynesia I was told that it had been catalogued, or studied, or excavated, or written about by one man, Professor Yosihiko Sinoto, the Senior Anthropologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and one of the world’s authorities on the Eastern Pacific cultures. Ask Sinoto, was the reply I got to most of my Polynesia questions.

  The professor was diminutive but muscular, and from his strong accent and his bearing obviously not local. Clearly an academic, but with the restlessness and vigor of someone used to working outdoors, he inhabited a small, cluttered office at the back of the museum. On the walls of his office were charts and photos of sites, stacks of files and artifacts – bone fish-hooks, stone implements.

  I went to see him one afternoon, simply to put my Ask Sinoto questions to him. He said he had been to the Marquesas recently and we chatted about the ludicrous necessity of having to drink imported mineral water on these islands of waterfalls and freshwater lakes.

  “It is the case all over French Polynesia,” Professor Sinoto said. “I was working on a dig in Huahine. While I was there, the mayor of Huahine got a grant of money. He used this money to pave one road, he built a television station, he put street lights in the town. But he did not spend any money at all to provide drinking-water. Can you imagine?”

  I asked him about the great number of bouldery ruins I had seen in the Marquesas.

  “Every valley in the Marquesas is full of sites,” the professor said. “Yet when the first surface-survey was done in 1918-19 they thought there was nothing left – no wooden implements, nothing but stones. They thought that the weather was so hot and the climate so difficult and damp that only stone structures could survive … Real excavations were carried out by Robert Suggs in 1956 and ’57. I disagreed with his conclusions. I went with Thor Heyerdahl’s group in 1963.”