Seventy Thousand Dollars and a Generator Named Gerald

Phone call, April 21, 2026. Four days after Saipan's all-clear.¹ Connection quality: intermittent. Background: a generator she has named Gerald, wet concrete being scraped, and the particular silence of a beach road with no trees left on it.²

"Tasi" is Chamorro for "sea." Her parents either had a gift for prophecy or a talent for cruelty. We invented her from the documented wreckage of real small businesses on a real island that most Americans couldn't find on a map with both hands and a flashlight.³

You rode out Sinlaku inside the bar?

Tasi: No. God, no. My cousin's place in Capitol Hill. Concrete. Interior bathroom. You could still hear it through all of that. Fifty hours.⁴ People say freight train, and I understand why, but a freight train passes. You know when you hold a shell to your ear? It was that, except the shell was your whole house and the ocean was actually coming in. Three miles an hour, that's how fast the storm moved.⁵ My cousin's kid rides his bike faster than that. But it wouldn't leave. You'd think OK, the eye, we're through it, and then it would just sit there. Like it was deciding something.

I slept maybe four hours total. Not in a row.

When did you first see the bar?

Tasi: Day after the all-clear. I walked down Beach Road, which. There's no Beach Road right now. There's a road with things on it that used to be other things. Every ironwood tree gone or stripped naked.² Power poles down like someone kicked them over. And then you get to my place and the tin roof over the outdoor seating is in the lagoon. Or somewhere. I haven't found all of it.

The concrete part held. Concrete always holds. But inside? Office, kitchen, dining area, flooded. All of it.⁶

What does a flooded commercial kitchen smell like on day four with no power?

Tasi: [Long pause.]

It smells like money leaving. You open the walk-in and everything in there is finished. The shrimp, the pork, all of it. Four days, no refrigeration, ninety-something degrees inside that box.⁷ Sweet and wrong. Like fruit that went past fruit into something else. And underneath that there's the water, lagoon water and rain and whatever was on the road, and it leaves this film on everything. Mold starts on day two.⁸

Gerald got here yesterday. My cousin's husband drove him over from Kagman. So now I have fans and lights, which means I can see exactly how bad it is. Almost worse.

I want to ask about the money.

Tasi: Yeah. Everyone wants to ask about the money. Hold on.

[Paper rustling. Gerald surges, settles.]

OK. I've been writing it down. This is the optimistic list. I'm still finding things:

That's $70,000 to $95,000. I told someone the other day it was maybe ten thousand.⁶ That was the number I could say out loud. The real number is the one I write on a napkin at 2 AM and fold up and put in my pocket so I don't have to look at it.

What does insurance cover?

Tasi: [A sound that might be a laugh.] You're funny.

I'm asking seriously.

Tasi: So am I. You know when the CNMI held its first Insurance Awareness Day? Last year. March 2025. First one ever.¹⁰ That should tell you everything you need to know about the insurance situation here.

I have a policy. It has a deductible that's a percentage of insured value, not a flat number, and after a typhoon that percentage becomes the whole conversation. I'll file. They'll send someone from Honolulu. That person will look at my building for forty-five minutes and then I'll get a letter in eight weeks explaining, very politely, that the flooding was "storm surge" and not "wind-driven rain" or whatever distinction makes their number smaller.

You rebuilt after Yutu too.

Tasi: After Yutu I rebuilt the whole thing. 2018.¹¹ I'd owned the place for one year. One. I was still figuring out the fryer timer. Then Yutu comes through, six thousand homes gone, power out for months, tourism drops eighty-eight percent.¹² You know what a beachfront bar does when there are no tourists?

It sits there being a beachfront.

Then COVID took 2020 and most of 2021. Mawar in '23, people on the mainland keep bringing that up like it was our disaster. Mawar hit Guam. We got the edge.¹³ Some trees, some roof patches. The big ones for us are Yutu and now Sinlaku. Eight years apart, with a pandemic in between. I've had maybe four normal operating years in nine years of ownership.

Why stay?

[Seventeen seconds. Gerald fills the silence.]

Tasi: Because it's mine.

Because. OK. It's the only beachfront restaurant on the island. The only one. People come here for sunsets. They've been coming for sunsets since before I bought it, since before the last owner. It's a place. On Tuesday nights we do trivia. The week before Sinlaku we had thirty-two people arguing about whether a tomato is a fruit. Thirty-two people with cold beers watching the sun drop into the lagoon.

What do you want people on the mainland to know?

Tasi: I want them to know we can't vote for the person who decides whether FEMA gets funded.¹⁴ I want them to know this typhoon hit two months before the season even starts.¹⁵ I want them to — actually, I don't want them to know anything. I want them to come here and drink a beer and watch the sunset and leave a big tip.

But we don't have power yet. So the beer's not cold. So.

When do you reopen?

Tasi: When Gerald stops being the only thing between me and the dark ages. When CUC gets the grid back. When I find my roof. When the insurance letter comes and I finish crying about whatever number is on it. When I mop this floor one more time. When the tourists come back. When someone on the mainland remembers we exist.

October, maybe.

[She laughs. It is not entirely a joke.]

Conditions in this interview are drawn from field reporting by RNZ Pacific, the Associated Press, Grist, and CNMI journalists following Super Typhoon Sinlaku's landfall on April 14, 2026. Tasi Reyes is fictional. Gerald is, regrettably, also fictional. The $70,000–$95,000 is not.

Footnotes

1. CNMI Governor's Office, "Typhoon Sinlaku – Bulletin #4," April 17, 2026. All-clear declared at 2:00 PM for Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. https://governor.cnmi.gov/jic/typhoon-sinlaku-bulletin-4/ ↩

2. Marianas Variety, field reporting and photo documentation, April 19, 2026. Ironwood and flame trees along Beach Road stripped or destroyed by Sinlaku's winds. https://www.mvariety.com/news/local/local-news-super-typhoon-sinlaku-devastates-saipan/ ↩ ↩²

3. The CNMI is a U.S. territory in the western Pacific. Population of Saipan: approximately 43,285. Residents are U.S. citizens who cannot vote for president and hold only non-voting representation in Congress. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/a-super-typhoon-sinlaku-just-devastated-the-mariana-islands-months-before-peak-storm-season/ ↩

4. Hawaii News Now, April 17, 2026. Journalist Thomas Manglona reported enduring fierce winds and heavy rains for approximately 50 hours on Saipan. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2026/04/17/thousands-without-power-water-northern-marianas-guam-after-super-typhoon-sinlaku/ ↩

5. NWS meteorologist Marcus Landon Aydlett, via St. Thomas Source, April 19, 2026: "This storm was moving three to five miles per hour… prolonging typhoon force winds for over 24 hours." https://stthomassource.com/content/2026/04/19/ ↩

6. RNZ Pacific, April 20, 2026. Oleai Beach Bar & Grille owner Akiko Kamegai reported: "We got some tin roofs blown away and everywhere flooded. Office, kitchen, dining, everywhere flooded." Estimated cost: "Maybe like $10,000, about." https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/592850/ ↩ ↩²

7. American Red Cross and NPR, April 2026. Power and water expected unavailable for weeks across hard-hit areas of the CNMI. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/news/2026/super-typhoon-threatens-guam--mariana-islands.html ↩

8. FEMA Typhoon Yutu (DR-4404) recovery guidance warned specifically about preventing post-typhoon mold in households and commercial establishments. https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4404 ↩

9. Isla Public / KPRG News, April 20, 2026. Saipan print shop owner Michael Temperante: "Normal operations really depend on how quickly power is restored. It could take about two months." https://www.islapublic.org/news/2026-04-20/print-shop-owner-impact-is-huge-after-typhoon-sinlaku ↩

10. Marianas Variety, March 31, 2025. Northern Marianas Insurance Association hosted the CNMI's first-ever Insurance Awareness Day. https://www.mvariety.com/business/business_news/nmia-hosts-first-insurance-awareness-day-in-cnmi/ ↩

11. Super Typhoon Yutu struck Saipan and Tinian in October 2018, destroying up to 6,000 homes and toppling 962 power poles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Yutu ↩

12. Marianas Visitors Authority data via Grist, April 2019. Tourism arrivals to the CNMI dropped 88% in the month following Super Typhoon Yutu. https://grist.org/article/this-u-s-commonwealth-is-still-rebuilding-6-months-after-super-typhoon-yutu-made-landfall/ ↩

13. NWS Guam, Typhoon Mawar Impact Narratives, May 2023. Saipan and Tinian experienced only tropical storm-force winds at Mawar's outer edge; significant damage was confined to Guam. https://www.weather.gov/media/gum/TropicalEventSummary/PSHGUM_2023WP02_Mawar_ImpactNarratives.pdf ↩

14. Grist, April 17, 2026. CNMI residents cannot vote in presidential elections, have no Senate representation, and their House delegate is non-voting. At the time of Sinlaku, FEMA disaster relief funding was at risk due to a congressional stalemate over DHS appropriations. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/a-super-typhoon-sinlaku-just-devastated-the-mariana-islands-months-before-peak-storm-season/ ↩

15. Former CNMI legislator Ed Propst, via Grist, April 2026: Sinlaku struck "at least two months before typhoon season usually starts." It was one of only a handful of Category 5 typhoons known to have occurred so early in the year. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/a-super-typhoon-sinlaku-just-devastated-the-mariana-islands-months-before-peak-storm-season/ ↩