staying the path

I just accidently deleted a post I was working on all morning. Darnit!

I haven't blogged in a while because I was studying, had the second practice test, received my scores and then had a bout of self-doubt and depression. My score went up four points but, overall, it's still very low.

Last week, I was going to change my blog name to something that, at the time, I felt was more representative of my "reality" of low lsat scores, and therefore, bleak law school future. Something like "Dreams don't come true" or "I wish I were a butterfly."

It happened the day before the second practice test. I went to the bathroom during class break and talked with many of my women classmates. The four women I spoke to all had 150s on their first practice test. The lsat ranges with 120 as the lowest score and 180 as the highest score. You want a score in the early 170s or late 160s to go to a top school. My first practice test score was in the late 130s. You can't go to ANY law school with such a score. I felt so down when my classmates told me that they made the 150s on their very first practice test. That's when the self doubt started setting in.

I took the second practice test on Sunday and increased my score by four points but it's still a very low score. We have seven weeks to study before the actual test in June. But if I'm not ready, I will have to take the September test in order to get a higher score.

I was really down and feeling that my goals are futile. I have great intentions but they will not come true.

I went to volunteer at the community acupuncture clinic. I started a conversation with another volunteer. She asked about my lsat prep classes and I told her that I'm frustrated,

overwhelmed and that I feel that this is such an uphill battle. She told me to relax and to focus for a moment. She instructed me to talk about why I want to go to law school. I burst out talking about working with prisoners and my journey to gather effective tools to become a stronger community organizer. She stopped me after a couple of minutes and asked me questions that helped me to realize that I was so excited about talking about law school. She asked me to locate the part of my body that lights up when I talk about going to law school. I stopped and thought about this and realized that my chest was warm and was pulsating with energy. I think she pointed out that it was the fourth chakra. I pointed to my chest. She told me to say one word about the feeling in my chest at that moment. I said, "passionate."

She nodded her head and agreed, "Take that passion and let it guide you in your studies to do well on the test. Let it guide you when you're discouraged. Trust yourself." I thanked her for her healing and I thought to myself, "I'll remember my passion, my commitment, but right now, I still feel lousy." It is only now while writing this that I remember her words and appreciate them.

I was hanging out with Fui and Niko before going to class on Tuesday. We were hanging out at Shattuck and we passed the public library. There was a man who was lying on the ground near the library's tall glass windows. He was laughing loudly and boldly, then he stopped for a minute, then laughed hysterically again. I watched him for a couple of minutes. I thought of this man and I thought about my fears about law school and I started chuckling. Thank you brother for the laughter. This man illustrated a great tool for me, laugh at my seriousness. I still can see this man in my mind, and I remember to laugh at myself and everything around me.

Later that night, during my class break, I took a fifteen minute walk around Telegraph. As I became lost among the traffic of Cal students, street vendors and dread-locked white kids asking for spare change, I felt that I was in my element. I breathed in the evening air and saw myself as the ordinary woman I am, on an lsat prep class break. Wow! I'm finally taking the lsat prep class that I dreamed of taking when I first thought about going to law school!!! I am living in Berkeley, California among flowers!

Instead of bitching about all the barely twenty-year old undergrads in my lsat prep class, I thought, "Wow, I'm taking a class with kids who just turned twenty and I'm totally struggling with issues of age and I love the opportunity to have this struggle!" Wow, I'm finally here, struggling the good struggle! I dreamt of this since I was a high school student at Timpview High School in Provo, Utah. I didn't know what I really wanted when I was in high school but I was extremely passionate about engaging with the world. And I knew that that meant so many things that I didn't understand but I wanted to take it on.

And here it is man, in the palms of my hand. I have so many opportunities right now to meet new people and experience things that I couldn't even imagine.

I went back to my classroom and started conversations with the barely twenty-year old students that I like in my class. No wonder I like them, we all want to do social justice legal work when we become attorneys. Yay!! They also talked about how hard the weekend was for them. They experienced so much self-doubt and depression after taking the second practice test. I planned with one of my classmates to go drinking after class next week and talk about law schools.

As class reconvened after break, my lsat prep class started feeling different. I was no longer nervous and stressed out. I came to accept my role in the classroom as just another ordinary student who has a lot of anxieties about the test and is doing her best everyday. I felt so relieved that I no longer need to pressure myself into feeling like the "special" older student who has all the odds stacked up against her. I mean, the odds ARE real, they're not all imagined. And that's exactly what I'm relieved about! I now have the courage to look at the odds, face to face, and accept them and accept myself. Instead of running away because it's too hard and too painful. I am here to stay the course, which really, I have been doing all along throughout my life.

When I first spoke out loud about pursuing law school to myself, I was standing in the front gates of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was fall 2006. I was asking a Geography Phd student who lived in Worcester for four years about any lawyer connections she had in town. I told her that I was interested in interning at a law office to see if becoming an attorney was for me. This was the first semester of my International Development and Social Change grad. program.

The Phd student, Susan, contacted a past Phd student, Sarah, who was working at Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts (LACCM). Sarah emailed me and invited me to visit her office. Sarah was incredibly kind to me and introduced me to her colleagues. However, I was bombarded with my first semester class load and student organizing in my department, and I couldn't spare time to volunteer at LACCM.

I had also focused my attention on a local member-run organization called EPOCA, Ex-prisoners and prisoners organizing for community advancement. Anyone can be a member of EPOCA and when you become a member, you can be mentored and trained to be a community organizer. I chose to be a community organizer. Although I had been an organizer and an activist since I was a high school student, I really didn't know the ins and outs of community organizing until I worked with EPOCA's director Steve and members like Emma, Becky, Jenna, Terry, Anthony, Sarah, Delia, Carlos, and so many other folks. In working with formerly incarcerated women and men, I learned to take myself seriously as a leader and to accept the gifts I have been given from the ancestors to work honestly and kindly with people.

I was scared as hell when I first joined EPOCA. I mean fcking scared as hell. I was scared because I met very attractive people who were radically political, very loving, full of enthusiasm, carrying a lot of pain in their bodies, who were vulnerable with each other. I saw my own reflection in them and that unsettled me.

I forced myself to attend their meetings. They were my teachers, they helped me to understand my path. I intuitively knew that my freedom was directly connected to the freedom of the members I was working side by side with.

Now I can name what I was afraid of and I continue to be afraid of. It is the great shame that I carry from experiences where my freedom was taken away by the systems that promised to protect me, like the state/the church/the family.

When I meet incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, we talk to each other from and out of the shame we hold in our bodies. When I converse with people who have been incarcerated, we are both so well versed in the pain of life, that we cut the bull shit of small talk and get to what needs to be said. We are comfortable together in silence. Every conversation, every moment together, is working out the shame that our fragile, good lil' bodies carry.

In working with EPOCA we lobbied senators and legislators to change criminal offender record information laws and to change practices by employers and landlords that discriminate against people with convictions. We organized and coordinated direct actions, meetings, workshops, university and community events. We worked with the local city workforce program to implement employment training for formerly incarcerated people. We lobbied employers to pledge to hire formerly incarcerated applicants. In 2007, I had the great opportunity to attend the 1st U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia with four other EPOCA women. My great sisters: Emma, an African American woman from Roxbury; Jenna, a white woman from Central Mass.; Becky, a Boricua woman from Worcester, and Iye, an Indonesian woman from Sumatra. This experience strengthened our sisterhood and led us all to make a commitment to be close supporters of each other for the rest of our lives. This experience also led to the early stages of creating a women's group for EPOCA women.

My work with EPOCA provided me with opportunities to work with other organizations in Massachusetts and nationwide, like Critical Resistance, a national organization that is committed to ending the prison industrial complex (PIC), based in Oakland, California. EPOCA is also housed in an artist/activist collective home called Stone Soup. The committed people at Stone Soup supported me in countless ways in being an organizer. Craig and Jocelyn, who were the caretakers of Stone Soup in 2007, took Niko in with their own boys, Ben and Johnny, while I tended to my work load. I couldn't have made it through school or work full-time without the individuals and families at Stone Soup who made sure Niko was safe, fed him, helped him to put together his first bicycle, taught him to ride a bike, helped him to improve his reading skills, encouraged him to take a main role in a play, shared their lives with his. My survival in Worcester as a student and a single parent was contingent on the community of people around me. We didn't have any family around us or a Pacific Island community so we became engaged with our neighborhood of Main South and became part of other families.

It was incredible work that we did together in EPOCA!

By the end of my first year in my 2-year graduate program, I decided that I wanted to become an attorney. I asked anyone I knew about local attorneys who do social justice work. I interned for Worcester's most popular immigrant lawyer for two months. Randy was a very kind man who always invited me to sit in on his interviews with his clients. At this time, very similar to right now, I had absolutely no clue about what happens in a law firm.

I then called Sarah back at LACCM to secure an internship for the next school year and she told me to apply for an Americorps legal internship at their office because it offered a small stipend. The money was important to me because I needed a wage to supplement my school money. I did not receive child support and money was tight after the rent was paid.

I applied for the Americorps legal internship and got it. It was tough to work the 40 hour/week load because I was working on my master's paper, classes, student organizing and looking out for Niko, who was struggling with school at the time. The scant Americorps wage made us feel rich! We bought a used car off another student, which I needed for work, and still had a couple dollars left over for Niko's pepperoni pizza.

I had no clue about law offices and legal assistance when I went to work at LACCM. This internship provided me with access to the legal world in which I had no access to before.

Like the formerly incarcerated people I worked together with in EPOCA, the only thing I knew intimately about the law was from being on the other side of it. My father going to jail in Tonga, my brother being convicted to prison in Utah, the dogs that I loved dearly were ordered to be killed by the courts because they bit a person, the countless times that my family, friends and I were racially profiled by the police at gun point, thrown against walls and side walks and being jailed on bogus charges. Being arrested and dragged to buses in the Nevada desert for protesting nuclear testing on native lands. Going to the SLC jail, that use to be at the basement of the new library, for being part of a peaceful protest in support of the Zapatista uprising in 1994.

When I was 17 years old, I accused a white police officer of racially profiling my family and being disrespectful to my dad. I defended myself because I didn't have a lawyer. I realized quickly, as I was standing in front of the entire court, that it's not against the law for a white man of authority to treat my father like an idiot child. I felt so powerless that I couldn't speak so I wept. I took in a lot of shame from that experience. I later called the courts to ask about what happened with the case and the officer's attorney answered the phone. This conservative white attorney asked me on the phone, "What were you thinking when you accused Officer __ of being a racist? That wasn't true." I explained and gave him examples of how the officer racially profiled me and my family. Surprisingly, the attorney listened to what I had to say, because, he was shocked that I spoke in English and that I had an articulate opinion.

These are the kinds of experiences I had with the law before I worked the AmeriCorps legal internship.

In my internship, we were required to write monthly reports about what we did on the job.

Here's a small part of a report I turned in. This explains the transition I felt from feeling powerless under the law when I was younger to feeling empowered when I had access to institutional power as a legal advocate with LACCM:

My new healthier relationship with the legal system resonated with me when I went...to the new Worcester Court House. (The attorneys I accompanied) were representing a group of low-income families and individuals who are trying to hold on to their current housing. It was the first time I set foot in a court house as a legal advocate for others.

We passed the check-in lines and were about to ascend the staircase. I looked around me at the ethereal colors and architecture and the many people standing and sitting, awaiting for their trials to begin. I stood for a moment and felt very humble and very grateful for the opportunity I have to be an AmeriCorps intern at LACCM. I felt so happy that I have made it to this point in my life where I don't have to constantly fear and fight against the legal system. I felt so happy and relieved that I now see the legal system as a construct that I can take part in building, reconfiguring and disassembling. I am very grateful that I am a part of this amazing learning opportunity that fuels me to continue my life's journey to be a skilled and strong advocate for myself and for the lives of others.

My Americorps legal internship was only for one year. It was a valuable experience and a great blessing to have worked among attorneys, paralegals, volunteers and to go to court everyday as a legal advocate.

Now my journey brings me to Berkeley to an lsat prep class. It's now time to sleep.

Manifesto for Healing

A lot of this blog is concerned with healing myself. I would not have been able to realize becoming a lawyer and working with prisoners and their families if I didn't begin the serious journey of healing myself.  

One of the ways that I heal myself is by traveling to meet people in my sleep. This is called astral traveling. During the hours when I am unconscious, as a spirit, I visit people and animals who have passed away or who are still alive. I visit places that I love and places that I have forgotten. It is a good way to meet with a spirit who is still alive because all the restrictions we have while we're awake are softened and melt away.  

Last night, in my sleep, I visited a colleague who I won't be able to see for a while. I was able to visit his home and meet his mates and we enjoyed each other's company. It's very difficult for him to communicate what he personally wants. I remember taking the bus to his house in my sleep because he asked me to. Now that we said goodbye last night, we can live lighter, with less anxiety and pain during our conscious waking hours. 

You can also make amends with enemies at this time. You can give and accept forgiveness. 

It is a time that you can use your creative powers to make and strengthen relationships that will heal your pain when you're awake. 

My sister taught me how to understand this tool that everyone has access to and that we all experience throughout our lives. 

It is important to understand its power and to use it to heal instead of using it to fortify fences of pain that we wake up to in the morning. This tool is to help mend and alleviate the broken heart that comes with being alive. 

The world is not as constrained and limiting as we have been raised to believe under Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy. Look at these systems of incarceration we have built to shackle ourselves and our children. 

Who could survive this prison we have constructed? 

We are taught the first rule of order in the US, scarcity, know it well, there is not enough to go around. There just isn't enough for everyone in your community.

As third world people, who were not raised in this philosophy, but have witnessed first-hand the consequences of converting our economies into dependency on aid from the colonial powers, we have internalized scarcity as if it was an ancient teaching from the ancestors.

Scarcity is when Tongans in positions of institutional power refuse to share information about educational scholarships, NGO and non-profit awards and grants, sports and community funding, etc. with other Tongans because they believe there's not enough to go around, only enough for my family, my church, my group, my children's future.  

Arundahti Roy, Indian writer and activist, reminds her country folk, as the Indian government and corporations build for war and corporate privatization, that India's greatest treasure and export to the world is civil disobedience. Civil disobedience led by Gandhi and supported by millions of ordinary Indian people.  I thought of being Tongan and the most important teaching that I carried with me from Tonga when my family and I immigrated to the U.S.

Tonga's greatest treasure and export to the world is 'ofa, love. It is a treasure of the people of Oceania. The Samoans call it 'alofa, the Kanaka Maoli call it aloha and so on. 

There is nothing sentimental about 'ofa, a gift of knowing from the ancestors, who are flora and fauna, land and water and sky. 'Ofa is our greatest gift to the world, because it is a tool that we have created ourselves, it is our self-love. When everything falls apart around us, and it did, and it does, and it will, we will not deny the great love we have. We have found, in our tumultuous experiences for survival in the West, that 'ofa is the most precious gift we have.  'Ofa is a knowing for all Tongans: half castes, queers, baby mamas,  lifers, live-ins, deportees, overstayers and especially for Tongans, who have not stepped foot on the homeland nor speak the mother tongue...you are Tongan, follow your heart. 

Tongan love is no joke. Collectively as Tongans, it has carried us through the destruction and eradication of our knowledges of our bodies, sexualities, our easiness we once had together as a people.  For the majority of us, enjoyment and acceptance is only reserved for Tongans in our tight-knitted-in circles. We have become very exclusive and too rigidly cautious of other Tongans who are not exactly like us. In our fear, we act cruelly and rudely to one another. While busy securing our comfort borders, we assure ourselves, "There is not enough of me to be open to them." We criminalize and demonize the realities that so many of us Tongans live today. Many of us who now have access to institutional power,  have forgotten so quickly that our own journeys in this new country had humble beginnings of poverty, lack of education, inadequateness and shame. We are all Tongans. Our paths may have diverted in material ways but our spirits yearn for 'ofa we provide each other.   

 

'Ofa looks at the face of scarcity, and says, "Well, we have to work together."  

In the diversity of the lives we live in 2009 as Tongans, an act of 'ofa is revolutionary. 

I have to tell you sisters and brothers, I think the most revolutionary act of  'ofa we can create, as my sister Fui told me several years ago, is to begin our individual journeys of healing. When you genuinely make the choice to change your individual life, all your ancestors and the gods will accompany your journey. You are never alone. 

The majority of Tongans are Christian. There are tools that Christianity provides that has helped and continues to help Tongans to heal. Christianity especially provides the great healing tool of congregating to praise together. 

When the news about Chris Brown and Rihanna hit the media, I was very disappointed that this young black pop star beat his girlfriend. I am a big fan and supporter of young brothas making it. Hitting your girlfriend means that, although you're selling a million records,  you need to slow down young brother and reevaluate your path. I'm only talking about Chris Brown because I wasn't a Rihanna music fan.

I loved listening to Chris Brown and Jordin Sparks blasted from down the street while Boricua mothers cleaned their living rooms in my Worcester neighborhood. And drinking to Chris Brown in every club in Tonga in Sep. 08. Chris Brown had an appeal and image that many Tongan boys emulated because it wasn't too fancy our outlandish, it was just the boy-next-door, who can dance. 

When the news first broke out, Chris immediately responded that he was going to take a break and get back to things that were important in life. He was going to visit his mother and he was receiving counseling from his minister at his church. 

When I heard that he was getting counseling at his church, my heart sank. My intuition as a girl who grew up Wesleyan and Mormon knows that church DO give you lots of counseling, but the kind of counseling that will help Chris think deeply about why he should not beat a woman, is, beyond the services provided by churches. Christian church must not be the only way to seek and receive healing.   

When we are serious about our healing, we must explore further than the institutions of power that were automatically handed to us by our parents, like the Christian church. 

My friend Shaimaa has a saying that she attaches to all her emails. It reads, "To discover new oceans you need the courage to lose sight of the shore." This is an appropriate saying for us when we decide that we want to learn more about how to heal ourselves. 

Tongan people, before the Christian church, there were ways that we loved and healed individually and collectively. Re-claiming those ways by using different knowledges that we have access to, including christianity, will give us back our individual powers to heal ourselves and each other. 

Healing can start with seeing a counselor. For many of us who have government subsidized insurance, counselors are available. There are community healing groups in many neighborhoods. They comprise of neighbors coming together to talk about their lives. Alternative medicine like acupuncture and massage are also ways to heal the body and the soul. Join meditation groups and ask people in the room about information on other ways to heal. Start a journal and talk honestly to yourself about how you feel and your goals for your life.

But these places and these people are all white and Asians and there are no Tongans or Pacific Islanders, you say.  Stay courageous, this is the reality about the world as soon as you step out of your Tongan church and that tight-knitted-in circle I mentioned earlier.  

There are healing groups for women and men of color, for gays and lesbians of color, for ex-prisoners. Remember the promise, when you are serious about your own healing, the entire universe will give you everything you need to make it happen. 

As I write this, my grandmother Sauliloa sits by my my side. She is serious about healing. Being together also helps both of us to heal. 

I still need to go back and write the story about my father. My grandmother really wants to be part of writing that story because she wants to tell my father "Kepa, sorry," and let him know that, "I love him so much." 

  

    

  

   

 

 

  

 

studying at the public library, my father

I am at the Berkeley Public Library blogging. Taking a break from the logical questions. It's been 5 hours, I can blog now until closing time. 

In my last post, I included some of 'Ana Castillo's poem, "Daddy with the Chesterfields Rolled up in a Sleeve." The speaker in the poem is an adult woman who,  throughout the poem, talks about the difficulties of being female, for herself, her mother and grandmother, in the family and culture she grew up in. Particularly of being Chicana and working class in Chicago in 60s. The last lines of the poem are: 

Daddy with the Chesterfields rolled up in a sleeve,

you got a woman for a son. 

It is only at this moment, sitting among various homeless men in the public library, listening to intimate conversations between dear friends, "Where were you Silas, I saved you your favorite sandwich, I was praying you were ok," or the annoying guy behind me looking at porn on his lap top, "Yes! You're a wicked bitch!," that this poem helps me to dare to think deeper about my relationship with my father.

In Tongan culture, it is taboo to talk about your father in any other way but to praise him as the head of your household and the patriarchal stronghold of the family.    

In my very first post on this blog, in beginning to explore why I want to go to law school, I started to tell a story about my father when he was a child in 1949. It is a telling that was too hard for me because I don't know many of the details, except between my dad and I, we still feel the pain and loss as if it was just yesterday, lodged and framed tightly in this story that needs to be free.    

i'll finish this post later, the library is closing.

 

  

UPCOMING POSTS

Some upcoming posts this month. These are recent experiences I had that helped me to envision going to law school.

"Why do I want to go to Harvard Law School?"

The international development department that I recently graduated from, went to Washington DC in the spring of 2007. We went to meet with representatives from the institutions of development. Of course we went to the World Bank. So my friends and I are women of color from third world countries and third world neighborhoods in the U.S. and sitting nicely at the World Bank, like good grad students, just didn't seem right to us. This is what we did.  

How I met EPOCA (Ex-prisoners and prisoners organizing for community advancement) and learned about community organizing. 

   

What I learned from being part of the Women of Color Collective and institutionalizing dialogues about race. 

I will post an interview I did with Samoan writer Sia Figiel in 2002(?). We discussed her award winning novel Where We Once Belonged. 

birds

the last stanzas from the Tongan poet, Konai Helu's poem "Take Off"

when was 

the first time

birds learnt to fly?

i know it was when I began

to write

It has been so difficult for me to write this week. I have so much anxiety and doubts if my life is ok. But I am going to take a starting point here and trust myself and take off

  

I went to the Berkeley pier this morning. The pier is what we call in Tonga, uafu, or wharf. The Berkeley pier is as wide as a neighborhood street and extends a mile into the ocean. People fish on its sides and folks take walks along its concrete floor. Bicycles and vehicles are prohibited.

At the pier, there is a panoramic view of the rusty red Golden Gate Bridge in front of you and

the  silver Bay Bridge, extending from San Francisco's nest of squished tall buildings, towards Oakland on your left hand side. Behind you are Berkeley and Oakland's neighborhoods, climbing up hills towards the sky.

The promise that the pier offers, is that these points of interest can be seen, but they are far away. There is no need to reach them.  Instead, the pier offers you to flirt with the fisherpeople, laugh hysterically at your lonliness, follow the ducks on the waves and enjoy the company of seagulls. 

When I first moved to Berkeley in November 2008, I loved seeing, smelling and touching, lightly, the flowers I walked by. They were beautiful! Camellia, calla lily, rose, lehua, daffodil, fuschia, freesia, gardenia, magnolia, rosemary, clover, shameless yellow dandelion, cactus, lemon.  

November turned to January and I still couldn't find a job. I missed my friends and the independent life I lived in Massachusetts. We moved to Berkeley because Niko wanted to live closer to family. I missed the joy of having my own apartment where I could lie on the couch for an entire afternoon and hang out by myself. I didn't know anyone in this new town, all the people I met were my sister's friends and colleagues. I was tired of feeling that I was starting all over again.

By February, I didn't care to notice the flowers anymore. I was tired of their beauty at the time of my personal misery. I wasn't interested in admiring their colors and textures. I walked by them and quietly said, "Shut up you stupid flowers." These flowers meant nothing anymore to me. I vowed to myself, "When I finally get the hell out of Berkeley, I will go to a new place and make new flower friends and enjoy and love those flowers. Fuck you spoiled rotten, we-get-sunshine-all-year-round flowers."  

Then I remembered. When I was in Tonga in the mid-90s, returning after immigrating to the U.S. with my family in 1981, it was very difficult. I had returned by myself and, at the time, I had forgotten how to speak Tongan.  I saw myself as a young, radical feminist political activist, an identity that, like in the U.S., annoyed and repulsed people in Tonga. giggles. As hard as I tried, nobody talked to me except the white Peace Corps kids from the U.S. (hehe, very funny memories) I take full responsibility for my countless identities that frustrated the Tongan people. giggles. Nevertheless, I was extremely lonely and dreamed of having a friend. I remembered breathing in the laukau po'uli, a flower that exudes a musky perfume at night, and cursed my loneliness. 

At that time, I wrote on a small table that I placed on the fale tolo, porch, under the gigantic tamaline, tamarind tree. When I wasn't working, volunteering, washing clothes or clearing the leaves under the mei, breadfruit trees, I sat at this table, drinking instant coffee, and worked hard to write poems. That's where my first batch of poems come from. 

I tipped back the wooden chair I was seated on and talked to a hibiscus bush that entangled itself around a porch post. Its large scarlet buds loved to listen to me read Ana Castillo's poem, "Daddy with Chesterfields in a Rolled Up Sleeve."

This is a long poem, but the hibiscus especially enjoyed the last stanzas:

i speak English with a crooked smile,

say "man," smoke cigarettes,

drink tequila, grab your eyes that dart

from me to tell you of my 

trips to Mexico,

(on hearing the word "MEXXIIKOH or MEHIKOH" the hibiscus blossoms swooned, they loved the word MEXICO and loved a place like MEHIKOH) 

i play down the elegant fingers,

hair that falls over an eye,

the silk dress accentuating breasts-

and fit the street jargon to my full lips,

try to catch those evasive eyes,

tell you of jive artists

where we heard hot salsa

at a local dive.

And so, i exist...

(on hearing "EXXIIISSST," the hibiscus screamed in delight!)

...Men try to catch my eye. i talk to them

of politics, religion, the ghosts i've seen,

the king of timbales, Mexico and Chicago

(SHHEEKAAGO! Represent!!! yell the hibiscus.)

And they go away. 

But women stay. Women like stories.

They like thin arms around their shoulders,

the smell of perfumed hair,

a flamboyant scarf around the neck

the reassuring voice that confirms their

cynicism about politics, religion and the glorious

history that slaughtered thousands of slaves.

(the hibiscus stood still for this stanza)

Because of the seductive aroma of mole

in my kitchen, and the mysterious preparation

of herbs, women tolerate my cigarette

and cognac breath, unmade bed,

and my inability to keep a budget-

in exchange for a promise,

an exotic trip,

a tango lesson,

an anecdote of the gypsy who stole

me away in Madrid.

( they held their breath)

Oh Daddy, with the Chesterfields

rolled up in a sleeve,

you got a woman for a son.

(And sighed.)

I love that poem too! I use to change "Daddy" to "Tonga" and said something like, "Tonga, with your head high up your ass, you got women for a son." I was specifically thinking about the twenty-something neighbor woman whose mother cut her hair because she stayed out late Friday night. The same daughter, who rushed to prepare food for her brother, a fourteen-year-old boy, who finally came home to his parent's relief on Monday morning. This poem is also my story of growing up as a second sister in a family that disregarded the 3 eldest daughters but was obsessed with loving the only son. 

The apricot colored felila, bougainvillea, across the street, stretched its blossoms to hear these new English poems that deviated from Wordsworth and Revelations. 

In the evenings, I gathered poetry books and went to the Kolomotu'a foreshore to read to the ocean and toa trees. 

On the evening before I left Tonga for the U.S., after almost 4 years,  I went to the foreshore to say goodbye to reef, sea, wind and trees. I began reading one of Konai's poems out loud but a restlessness started around me. I began reading again. Then a cool breeze gently touched me and said, "Loa, it is now time for you to read us poems that you have written in your own voice." The tides around me lapped in agreement and fiddler crabs danced around my feet. 

i am coming into myself more each day as i live here in berkeley. i really am not the same person who lived in mass just last summer. so much has changed and i have grown and changed too. i do talk kindly to the flowers now and i have separated them from myself. they are their own flowers, not mine. i don't have to touch, smell or stare at them anymore. i just let them be flowers and smile at them as I walk by.