Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island

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Overview

Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren.

At first blush, Surviving Paradise is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould’s efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, ...

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More About This Book

Overview

Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren.

At first blush, Surviving Paradise is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould’s efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the Marshall Islands. Most poignant are his observations of the noticeable effect of global warming on these tiny, low-lying islands and the threat rising water levels pose to their already precarious existence.

An Eat, Pray, Love as written by Paul Theroux, Surviving Paradise is a disarmingly lighthearted narrative with a substantive emotional undercurrent.

 

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Thousands of miles from home and in a culture equally distant from his own, Rudiak-Gould's first night on the island of Ujae made him lonely “to the point of physical pain.” Yet after only a few weeks in the farthest outreaches of the Marshall Islands, the author “overcame boredom almost immediately,” bringing the reader along on an equally gripping journey of one year in one of the most remote, fascinating places on Earth. Rudiak-Gould, a volunteer English teacher, came to Ujae knowing little about the Marshallese language and even less about its culture. Yet as he became more familiar with his surroundings and the native tongue, he found a community that eventually saw him as one of their own. Nearly every aspect of Ujae is dissected, from its horrific educational standards to the drastic differences in their respective social systems and the eclectic array of Marshallese food (Rudiak-Gould describes one dish as “liquid flatulence”). Rudiak-Gould also lets the reader in on his own personal struggles in dealing with children (and their parents) in a place where corporal punishment is encouraged. At the same time, he becomes adept at Marshallese activities like spearfishing, allowing him to contribute to a “culture based on survival.” Alternatively hilarious, emotional and thought provoking (Rudiak-Gould analyzes the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming on the low-lying area), the book is an eye-opening look into a beautiful yet harsh paradise far from the reaches of tourism. (Nov.)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781402766640
  • Publisher: Union Square Press
  • Publication date: 11/3/2009
  • Pages: 256
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Peter Rudiak-Gould is currently pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at Oxford, focusing on Marshallese understandings of global warming and sea level rise. In the summer of 2007, he interviewed the President of the Marshall Islands regarding the effects of climate change. Proficient in Marshallese, the native language of the Marshall Islands, he is the author of the language textbook used by the WorldTeach volunteer organization as its official language manual for the Marshall Islands program.

 

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Sort by: Showing all of 4 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 24, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    9780767921992 9780767915304 9780767903868

    Great Summer Read

    Wonderful account about the author's time spent teaching English in the Marshall Islands. The author's experiences are heartfelt and humorous. The insights into Marshallese culture are fascinating.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted January 8, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Marshall Island Memoir

    Peter Rudiak-Gould is twenty one years old, fresh from teacher's college, when he decides to be a volunteer English teacher for a year on Ujae. Ujae is part of the Marshall Islands - a very tiny part - 1/3 of a square mile to be exact. And the school - officially one of the worst in the Pacific.

    "...an idea that there was a place so far from everything, so tiny and little known, where men still fished with spears and women still healed with jungle medicine. It was a place unknown and therefore, maybe, perfect...I wanted Ujae to be my far-off paradise."

    When Peter steps foot on the atoll, his dream collides with reality. He is not greeted with a welcoming committee as he had imagined. As he settles in for his first night with his host family - "I considered my situation. I was already lonely to the point of physical pain. I had been ignored and welcomed, avoided and stared at, indulged and deprived. All I had learned was that I knew nothing."

    I think I really enjoyed this book because of Rudiak-Gould's complete honesty in writing it. Having exposed his naivete in the first two chapters he goes on to candidly document both his observations, feelings and emotions for the remainder of his year. (Yes he lasts the entire year!)

    Marshallese society is much different than the North American version Peter grew up with. Children are pretty much on their own from age 4 on. Schooling is not given great importance - this is quite frustrating to Peter. Interaction between child and parent is limited. Indeed, Peter is the only adult who plays with the children. Elders are revered. Peter is being treated well by the Ujae people, but because it differs from his North American expectations, it takes him a bit to figure out the social nuances of social interaction.

    "Living in another country had finally made me realize how much I was a product of my own country."

    He perseveres and participates in fishing expeditions, festivals, makes friends and learns to speak and write the Marshallese language. (He has since written a Marshallese language textbook)

    As for the subtitle? Ujae atoll is in danger of being swamped by the raising ocean levels. Indeed global warming is a threat to much of the Marshall Islands. Rudiak-Gould is currently working on his doctoral thesis, studying indigenous reactions to the threat of climate change.

    Surviving Paradise is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, educational, but above all eye opening. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted January 4, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Paradise Lost & Found!

    When Peter Rudiak-Gould decamps to Ujae Island, of the Marshall Islands, South Pacific, to teach English for a year he learns the limits and the bounties of residing on a remote island "paradise." According to the author, Ujae is a third of a square mile in size and populated by approximately 450 citizens.

    In Surviving Paradise Rudiak-Gould summarizes the book as:

    "My portrait of one Marshall Island at the turn of the twenty-first century, and how it felt to live alone in this alien culture on a remote speck of land at a rather tender age - how it was just like a rocky first romance, complete with infatuation and disillusionment."

    Still later Rudiak-Gould confesses, "I wanted Ujae to be my far-off paradise. Ujae wanted me to be its English teacher. So we married and we met, in that order."

    It soon becomes clear to the author that Ujae is no Fantasy Island. While the author notes that he found great pleasure in "the unrushed friendliness, the fishing and chatting and lore, but many of the values and practices . . . [upset him] with unrelenting intensity. The pains of children, always and everywhere seen, but never addressed; the school's black hole of apathy; the tacit neglect of what appeared to [be] . . . obvious and fixable problems . . . ."

    Surviving Paradise is a thoughtful account of a Westerner living the reality of life on a remote tropical island.



    Publisher: Union Square Press; 1 edition (November 3, 2009), 256 pages.
    Advance Review Copy Provided Courtesy of the Publisher.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted May 22, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

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