Half-assedness comes to Tonga as imports as well. China has a reputation for exporting the shoddiest manufactured goods. The palangi know it, the Tongans know it. ‘Uta told us that the Chinese computers break down in six months. Before we left the United States, Maikolo advised us to ship our American-made bicycles; the Chinese bicycles sold in Tonga fall apart in six months. That was hard for me to believe. How can one screw up something as simple as a bicycle? Nevertheless, we shipped our bicycles. Then we got to Tonga and saw the Chinese idea of a corkscrew. Yes, they screwed up something as simple as a corkscrew. One design was so bad that nearly all of Narattam’s stock was broken in its original packaging. But their “Freedom” plates don’t break; the Chinese break freedom in their own country before exporting the plates. Perhaps Chinese companies figure that they can sell half-assed products here in Tonga, and, as with Hamlet’s madness in England, ‘twill not be noticed.
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It really irritates me when I hear a pig squealing and I look around to find that dogs are harassing it for their idle sport. This happened on campus one day, right outside the classroom, while Melelini was in the middle of teaching a class. I stepped to the threshold and issued one short but very loud bark; a half-dozen dogs froze in their tracks and stared at me. What the hell is this human saying to us? Other humans don’t talk to us in our language! I then bayed at them like a huge hound, and all but one of them turned and fled. The one standing his ground continued to stare at me, and I stared back. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you!” I said, pointing my finger at him. I took him to be the sentinel of the pack. After a few seconds, he turned and walked away in an unhurried gait, thereby demonstrating to any of his fellows who might be looking on that he was unafraid of me.
Meanwhile, my international relations class kept expanding; now ‘Ana wanted to add the class. A grand total of four students wouldn’t appear to be a challenge to teach, but I needed to ponder how to handle teaching three levels of students--100, 300, and 400--In the same classroom; ‘Atenisi functions rather like the old one-room schoolhouse. Actually, we have three rooms, but you get the idea. Two more students joined the class. One was ‘Ofa the grad student, not to be confused with ‘Ofa the undergrad who had been the first to add my class. Rather than asking to join my class, as all of the others had, ‘Ofa the grad student just showed up one day and announced that he was in my class. That was news to me. Muna, on the other hand, asked my permission, which I gave gladly; she was an obviously Westernized, smartly-dressed young woman, sporting painted fingernails and lots of rings, who claimed that her email address was
As I had more of an opportunity to look over the course material that I had inherited from Marcus, the previous international relations instructor, two things struck me. To begin with, the first assigned reading, a 1998 Foreign Policy article by Stephen Walt, presented a remarkably detailed overview of the world of IR theory, naming dozens of other authors in the field, with many of whom I was familiar; however, the other readings in the course reflected the work of very few of these authors. Also, the course as it was currently structured spent a lot of time on Kant, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and cripes, all the way back to Thucydides; excellent historical background in the field of international relations, to be sure, but the planet has taken a few laps around the sun since these guys. I wanted to get some of the latest stuff by some of the best-known theorists into my students’ hands. The problem was that I didn’t have the resources for doing this that would be available to any run of the mill university instructor; I didn’t have access to a four-story library that subscribed to all of the important journals, or that subscribed to the online journal article repositories such as JSTOR, EBSCO, and Ingenta. I explained my situation to Sanjoy Banerjee at San Francisco State University, under whom I had studied international relations theory at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and within a couple of hours he began emailing me the latest journal articles that he was using in his IR theory classes. When I informed my class on Tuesday that the download was in progress, they fairly cheered. As ‘Ofa the undergrad explained to me after class, the students didn’t want to dwell on Thucydides and Machiavelli and Hobbes and Kant and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points; they wanted to read the latest stuff, they wanted to understand what was going on in the world today.
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One morning I rose from bed and walked into the living room to find a roach moving across the floor at an unusually slow pace. On the other hand, its speed was quite remarkable considering that it was on its back… and quite dead. Its pallbearers were a contingent of myrmidons. This was one time that I wasn’t going to spray them with window cleaner; I was quite happy to see them performing this service for the roach… and for me. They carried the roach out the front door, at which point I lost track of them. I suppose that they had to chop-shop the roach to take it inside their colony.
I might also mention, while commenting on the wildlife in our domicile, that the lizards emit a loud chirping sound, usually a rapid sequence of five to seven. We assumed at first that we were hearing birds; then we triangulated on the chirps, which seemed to come from inside the house. We had long become used to the sight of lizards on the walls and on the ceilings, but it took some time to associate the lizards with the chirping. It’s fascinating to hear birdlike sounds coming from lizards, but then, both have a dinosaur in the woodpile; a taste of Jurassic Park in the comfort of our own home. I imagine that the lizards feast on life-forms that Melelini and I would prefer not to have in the house, such as the myrmidons; thus, both for their utilitarian and for their aesthetic values, they are welcome in our house.
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The weather was not the best that week of 14 March, and perhaps that explains the absence of the dogs. Cyclone Tomas (I love that name) had organised about a thousand kilometres north of Tongatapu, initially headed west, then turned southwest to hit Fiji’s main island dead on. Tomas then turned south, passing to the west of Tongatapu, and veered gradually southeast, describing an arc around us, all the while sending us blustery weather as well as occasional heavy downpours. (By now we were on the Australian High Commission's email list, so we got regular warnings of impending natural disasters, complete with images.) Even the edges of a cyclone were enough to bring down the Internet for brief periods, and also the electrical power. Not to complain, however, for at last it was blessedly cool. By Thursday, it was calm again, the rain was gone, there were patches of blue sky, and still the temperature was pleasant, although warmer. Summer was coming to and end. Maikolo had warned us that because there was nothing between us and Antarctica, we could expect winter in Tonga to get quite cold, all the way down to the 50s Fahrenheit; in other words, like summers in San Francisco. I should prepare myself for that god-awful 19th Avenue weather that San Francisco State students and faculty must endure.
Whenever the Internet on campus is cranky, or when Melelini and I just want to enjoy a good meal in air conditioning, we hang out at the Café Escape downtown on Taufa’ahau Road. We haven’t gone through the entire menu yet, but so far we’ve been quite happy. The bagel and lox is outstanding, as is the smoked salmon and cream cheese toasted sandwich. The hamburger sandwich is at least a large as an American would expect. (In my brief travels along the Australian east coast in 1984, there was not a hamburger to be seen; the meat pie was the fast food.) The samosa is not authentically Indian, being more of a spicier than normal mini meat pie, but enjoyable nonetheless. (I imagine that the nearest authentic samosa might be found in Fiji, where Hindustani has become one of the official languages.)
The milk shake, however, is nothing that an American would recognise as such. I have only two data points, Café Escape in Nuku’alofa and some place in Sydney 26 years ago, so it would be risky to extrapolate from these and to state that there is such a thing as a South Pacific milk shake that is distinct from the American one; nevertheless, I’ll refer to the South Pacific milk shake as a general concept, both for the ease of narrative and so as to avoid affixing blame for this atrocity on any one national culture. To state the problem plainly, the South Pacific milk shake seems to be genuinely a milk shake, i.e. shaken milk. Apparently, one mixes some flavouring into the milk, froths it up in a blender, and there you have it: a milk shake. What could be more straightforward, more self-evident? But the American asks, “Where’s the ice cream? It has to be thick enough that trying to suck it through a straw is a painful exercise in futility.” Well, you didn’t call for a bloody ice cream shake, did you mate! So, based on what I encountered in Sydney, I wasn’t entirely surprised at what Café Escape offered up; on the other hand, Café Escape’s clientele are mostly palangi, and most of the palangi are Americans, so why doesn’t the place make American shakes? They have ice cream on the menu! If you ask me, what passes in the South Pacific is no great shakes. It may be whole milk, but it’s half-assed.
As I write this, we have just had our first Tongan earthquake. Nothing to write home to California about, but I’m doing so anyway. That scene in Steve Martin’s L.A. Story in which the locals continue to calmly order their decaf non-fat double mochas while the planet shakes apart isn’t much of a stretch; Californians are jaded when it comes to earthquakes, as we are about many other things. In October 1987, I sat in my office at Los Angeles Air Force Base (actually in El Segundo), and I looked up to observe the dust shaking down from the acoustic tile ceiling. Another captain opened the door with an air of urgency, stuck his head inside the office, and yelled for everyone to get out of the building. I continued to lean back in my chair. “Five point nine, maybe six,” I replied. That was the Whittier Narrows quake. Tonga stands on a ridge, and just east of that ridge is a trench where the Australian tectonic plate is moving north against the Pacific Plate. Today’s tremor in Tonga was perhaps a 4.5, if the epicentre were fairly nearby… no great shakes. But, if the epicentre were hundreds of kilometres away, that would mean that it had been a stronger quake, and a tsunami would be a concern. I turned on the radio, listened for a half-hour, but heard nothing remarkable.
About the quake, that is. Several times, the announcer attempted to build up audience excitement about a traffic report for Nuku’alofa in the Australian/New Zealander format coming up in a few minutes. Being a veteran of several thousand combat missions on the thoroughfares of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area, I could barely contain my anticipation. I only gave the traffic report a half-listen, not least because Tai came to the door just before it started, but I did hear the remote reporter with the crackling voice, I don’t know, pretending to be in a helicopter, for I can’t imagine that a local radio station could afford the expense of a real helicopter. I suppose it was an attempt at radio theatre in a news format, like an invasion from Mars. In a Kiwi accent, the reporter described the traffic snarls at the major intersections, which are all roundabouts (there isn’t single a traffic light in the Kingdom), so naturally there are traffic snarls getting into downtown Nuku’alofa in the mornings. A few dozen vehicles are enough to jam them up. The Kiwi did a passably professional job, until he blurted, “… whatever the real name of that street is supposed to be.” In my judgment, the traffic report was more in the New Zealander than in the Australian style, and not simply due to the reporter’s accent; an Aussie would have referred to “that bloody street.”
Half-assed.
Thomas Gangale's Tales of Tonga
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