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Anyan's Story: A New Guinea Woman in Two Worlds, by Virginia Drew Watson. A McLellan book. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. ISBN 0-295-97604-7 (paper), xiv + 193 pages, map, photographs, glossary, epilogue, notes, supplementary readings, index. Cloth, us$45; paper, us$25.
"When I was born my father had four wives. My mother was number three. She was young and this was her first marriage. Before I was weaned, she died giving birth to my brother. My father's first wife, who recently lost her baby, was my wet nurse. She is the only one of my father's wives I call 'Mother'. I have always called his other wives by their first names" (3, i ). Thus begin both the Introduction and the first chapter of Anyan's Story, the life story of a Tairora woman who was born sometime in the early 1920s, a few years before Westerners and their culture began to filter into the eastern New Guinea highlands. When she was weaned, Anyan moved to Abiera village where a maternal uncle and his five wives raised her and their other children. Anyan proved to be an adventurous and strong-willed individual, often roaming far from home in haunted, enemy-filled woods and tall-grass country, visiting the government station in Kainantu for the first time when she was about eleven years old, and successfully resisting consummating a first marriage to a man she barely knew and didn't want for a husband when she had not yet menstruated. A young woman in 1943, Anyan distinguished herself from the majority of her peers-male and female-by moving to wartime Kainantu, marrying a man from the coast who cooked for a white doctor, and learning Pidgin. Subsequently, Anyan acted as interpreter for the doctor, the local kiap (government official), her own people, and eventually Virginia Drew Watson. With the exception of her first child-born...