Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [75]
“YOU WANT GOOD TIME?”
Her English was halting, and I sensed that what she did speak had been learned from watching Vietnam War movies. Before she had a chance to inform me that she’d love me for a long time, however, I asked her where she was from.
“I from China.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Gwaidongha.”
“Where?”
“Xiangoyzh.”
I couldn’t say I had heard of it.
“You know where North Korea is? On the border.”
A long way from home, I thought. I asked where the other girls were from.
“All from same place.”
“And have you been here long?”
“Seven months,” she said. “I have a one-year work permit.”
What a considerate government, I thought.
“So what you say? You want good time?”
I didn’t want a good time. After twenty-four hours in Fiji, what I really wanted was a shower.
IF THERE IS ONE MUSEUM THAT MUSEUM DIRECTORS FROM around the world should be obliged to visit, it is the Fiji Museum in Suva. It is exactly what a national museum ought to be. Generally, when I am abroad, I no longer visit these places. Too often, I have been awakened with a start by a concerned security guard insistently poking at my slumbering form, trying to rouse me from the spot where I have wilted in boredom in front of a display of a walking stick, circa 1815. Stepping into the Fiji Museum, however, I knew immediately that I was going to like it.
Sylvia had finally arrived in Suva, and we were still getting to know the city. On that day, we had had no intention of going to the museum. But, as happened with some regularity in Suva, we found ourselves caught in a sudden downpour, and we scampered toward the nearest shelter, which happened to be the museum. For a repository of a country’s history, it is rather small and compact, which immediately left me feeling well disposed toward it. There is something about standing in front of a monumental museum, such as the Louvre, that instantly leaves me with wobbly legs. “Okay, we’ve seen that pyramid thing in the courtyard. Can we go now?” Three hours later, I’d find myself trailing puddles of drool until, finally, in front of a glass display case containing a gilded cane, Louis XIV, circa 1770, I’d collapse and fall asleep.
Stepping up to the Fiji Museum, we noticed a sign on the wall informing us that the museum had been officially opened in 1999 by the governor-general of New Zealand, a Sir Michael Hardie Boys. This was like being told that the Louvre had been opened by Tintin. Inside, the exhibition room was dominated by an enormous drua, a wooden catamaran used on the open ocean by the Fijians of yore. I stood admiring the boat for a while, until Sylvia brought to my attention a curious display case. It contained a Bible said to be the ordination Bible used by Reverend Thomas Baker, a Methodist missionary who arrived in Fiji in the 1860s with the aim of converting the tribes living in Viti Levu’s remote Nausori highlands. Well, ho-hum, I thought. What’s next, his school report card? Not quite. Instead, there was a small wooden bowl—Dish in which some of Mr. Baker’s flesh was presented to one of the highland chiefs, read the description. I had never regarded a wooden bowl in a museum with quite the same level of fascination as I did this one. Alongside it was the wooden fork used for eating Mr. Baker’s flesh. And the most compelling item, the remains of Mr. Baker’s shoe. This was history come alive, I thought. It appeared that the Reverend Baker had made a fatal faux pas. Perturbed to find that the highland chief had borrowed his comb, Baker snatched it back. Alas for him, the chief was storing the comb in his hair, and in Fijian culture, yanking something out of a chief’s hair is a big no-no. Soon all that remained of the Reverend Baker was the sole of his boot.
It didn’t take much, I learned, to get yourself killed in Fiji. While the cannibalism in Vanuatu had left me bewildered, the scale of the bloodshed that colored traditional life in Fiji left me