The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “Maybe you talk to Mr Mo’ungaloa,” Afu said. She did most of the talking. Even after many years in America, Salesi was uncomfortable speaking English. Perhaps that was a result of the occupational hazard of his work. Do not speak to the driver while the bus is moving, another of his signs had said.

  “Who is Mr Mo’ungaloa?”

  “The King’s secretary.”

  “Putt dee no workeen now,” Mrs Vahu said. “Dee haveen lanch.”

  We were traveling at fifteen miles an hour along Taufa’ahau Road, the main thoroughfare of Nuku’alofa (“Abode of Love”). From the airport to the capital we passed twenty-seven Mormon churches – some of the villages had two of them. This was Polynesia for sure. The road was riddled with pot-holes, which accounted for our slow speed. No one drove fast anywhere in Tonga. The roads were appalling. The buildings were grim, too. You would look at this royal capital and probably sum up its stricken look by guessing, Severe shortages.

  But this was not so. The place was unattended to and beneath notice. Islanders on Tongatapu were personally neat and tidy, though of a dour temperament, and they lived in a state of continuous disorder. Certainly, Nuku’alofa was in greater disrepair than any island capital I had seen since Honiara, back in the Solomons. Not long ago, perhaps at the time of King Tupou’s coronation in 1967, this might have seemed a charming place, with its crumbling stucco churches, its wooden shops, its wooden Royal Palace – the only wooden palace on earth. It had lost whatever charm it had had. It seemed simply neglected, but like many neglected backwaters in the world it had the great virtue of very little traffic.

  Nuku’alofa had no visible industry. It looked dusty and down-at-heel. Even its singular building the Royal Palace resembled nothing so much as a Christian church, wooden and white, with a bulky steeple and a prospect of the sea – indeed, Christianity came into full flower with the approval of the monarchy. Nothing locally made was for sale in Nuku’alofa except postage stamps. What money it had came from the remittances of Tongans in Meganesia – Auckland in particular – and in America, mainly Hawaii, where Tongans were employed as domestics, gardeners, car-washers and tree-trimmers. Pretty stamps and family remittances were the standbys of other destitute countries in Oceania, such as the Philippines and Samoa, which produced immigrants.

  Another source of revenue in Tonga – a bizarre one – has been the sale of Tongan passports. This was the brainchild of a Hong Kong Chinese man, one Mr George Chen, who was asked by the Tongan King for advice on how to raise revenue. “Sell passports,” Mr Chen said, knowing that many would be sought after by Hong Kongers who watched with horror the approach of the People’s Republic takeover of the colony in 1997. For $10,000, someone who was otherwise stateless could become a Tongan Protected Person (TPP) and carry a Tonga passport, which conferred the freedom to travel to any country in the world except Tonga, where a TPP was forbidden to settle.

  When some countries considered these passports invalid, the King was informed and a new model Tongan passport went on sale for $20,000 (or $35,000 for a family of four). This gave the holder Tongan nationality and a right to settle. South Africans and Libyans, as well as hundreds of Hong Kong Chinese, were quick to snap up these passports. Imelda Marcos bought one, and in the process became a Tongan citizen. In the past seven years this has produced $30 million for Tonga as well as a constitutional crisis – angry Tongans demonstrating their opposition to the sale of Tongan nationality, calling for the limitation of the King’s powers (because His Majesty approved the whole thing) and demanding to know what happened to the money.

  And another source of wealth was the returning Tongans, like Afu and Salesi, who had made a few dollars overseas, and who had come back to retire and sit under the trees and raise pigs.

  “That is Queen Salote’s grave,” Afu said, pointing across a weedy field to what looked like a war memorial surrounded by a large iron fence.

  Queen Salote (Tongan for Charlotte) had more or less upstaged Queen Elizabeth at her own coronation in 1953 It rained hard that day. Tongan custom insists that in order to show respect you must demonstrate humility, and you cannot imitate the person you are honoring. At the first sign of rain, Queen Elizabeth’s footmen put the hood on her carriage as it rolled towards Westminster Abbey. Hoods were raised on the rest of the carriages in the procession – all but one, that of the Queen of Tonga. She sat, vast and saturated and majestic, her hair streaming with rain, in a carriage that was awash; and from that moment she earned the love and affection of every person in Britain.

  Only one person mocked the Queen of what had once been cannibal islands – Noël Coward. Queen Salote sat in the carriage with a tiny retainer. “Who is that person with the Queen of Tonga?” someone asked and Coward quipped, “Her lunch.”

  “But what shall I tell Mr Mo’ungaloa?”

  “Tell him who you are,” Afu said. “He wishes to check your background.”

  “What does he want to find in my background?”

  “Nice tings,” Mrs Vahu said.

  Salesi chuckled in a wheezing way at the thought of this. Did he know something? He was big and slow, and when he uttered a word, he was soft-spoken. He was fat and fifty-eight. As we wobbled through the holes in the road, the car jounced and the mat around his waist made crunching noises, like a cow chewing hay. I found the crunching of his waist mat oddly satisfying. Sometimes it sounded like a cookie being crumbled.

  We went to a small red-roofed building in another weedy field. This was outside the high fence of the Royal Palace and was the Secretary’s Office. We all entered the building together, and they were like parents on my first day at school. There was an open room with some desks and perhaps ten fat men in skirts sitting and bantering with each other in Tongan. You could almost determine a person’s social status from his obesity – these chunky men were all nobles. They also wore layers of fraying mats around their midriff.

  Though they hardly knew me, Afu and Salesi and Mrs Vahu energetically testified to my fine character, and at last Mr Mo’ungaloa agreed to see me.

  “Yes?”

  Mr Mo’ungaloa was a small bespectacled man in a cramped side office. It was an unprepossessing cubicle for the royal secretary, but perhaps no stranger than the outer office with its hooting fatties.

  “You wish to see the King?”

  “Very much,” I said. And I went on to say that about fifteen years before I had met Crown Prince Tupou’toa in London. He was about my age. He had been to the Military Academy at Sandhurst. He played the piano. He had formed his own jazz combo called The Straight Bananas.

  “Prince Tupou’toa is now the foreign minister,” Mr Mo’ungaloa said. He had winced at my innocent mention of The Straight Bananas.

  The prince was unmarried and it was said that he could often be found in one of Nuku’alofa’s clubs, an easy task to find him therefore, since there were not more than two clubs. His family was still pestering him for an heir.

  A photograph of the prince showed him to be wearing a much larger size uniform than in his London days. There were also photographs of Queen Salote, and old Tongan kings – including the first Christian king, George Tupou I (baptized in 1831), and of the British Royal Family. A framed letter from the President of the All-Japan Karate-Do, stated in English and Japanese that King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV had been created an “Honorary 7th Dan” in Karate. There were other obsequious letters, and a friendly one from Betty herself, the Queen of England, in which she was described as Queen of the Realm and Defender of the Faith, and addressed to His Majesty.

  “Sendeth Greeting! Our Good Friend!” this one began, which interested me as a salutation – so this was how one amiable monarch wrote to another. In this letter she was introducing the British High Commissioner, praising his accomplishments, and wishing him well, and she signed off with a formula to the effect that it was 1970 in the 19th Year of Our Reign and ended, Your Good Friend, Elizabeth R.

  Why frame that letter and not all the others she must h
ave sent? But I didn’t ask Mr Mo’ungaloa. I was busily trying to impress him with my seriousness.

  I wrote books, I said. I was traveling in the Pacific. Had he ever read the National Geographic Magazine? I sometimes appeared in those pages. I was very interested in the peoples of Oceania – in their voyages (Mr Mo’ungaloa stifled a yawn), and their arts and crafts. I had once been a university professor. Mr Mo’ungaloa’s eyes were glazing over. I had recently been to Fiji, I said, and before that, the Solomons.

  “Which university do you teach at?”

  “Used to teach,” I said. “Oh, several.”

  “And you are presently working for?”

  “I am unemployed at the moment,” I said. “I mean, I write for a living, but I don’t have a job. One with a salary, that is. This sounds much worse than it actually, is.

  But I thought: an unemployed middle-aged foreigner in a sun-faded shirt shows up unannounced, claiming to be a writer, and asks to see the King. If I had been the secretary I would have sent me away.

  Incredibly, he said that the King would see me. What did I wish to discuss with His Majesty?

  “Nuclear policy in the Pacific? Polynesian migration? The future of tourism?”

  Mr Mo’ungaloa seemed satisfied.

  “The King will talk freely,” he said, with confidence, and we settled on a date and time for my royal audience.

  After they vouched for me at short notice, saying how well they knew me and what a splendid person I was, it seemed only right that we give some reality to this sudden fiction. I made an effort to know the Veikunes and Mrs Vahu better. They told me that although they had spent many years in the United States they had always intended to return to Tonga.

  Afu said, “We came back because Tonga is our home.”

  They showed me a picture of an Eskimo. He was dark, his cheeks gleamed, he was squinting out of a fur hood, he was wearing a thick parka, and snow and ice was crusted to the fence-post just behind him. Was this Jerry Amlaqachapuk, an Inuit? No it was not.

  “This is our son. He lives in Alaska,” Afu said. “Ketchikan.”

  Salesi whispered, “It is very cold there. I no like.”

  Mrs Vahu, who was only in her middle thirties, and was chubby and very cheerful, had six children, ranging in age from three to fourteen. All the children had been born in the United States, and had American passports, and yet Mrs Vahu had decided to head home.

  “I came here because I want my children to know Faka tonga, the Tonga way. It is more expensive, and very little work. But it is better for them.”

  They were not unusual in their having returned. It was a proven fact that of all the islanders in the Pacific, Tongans found it hardest to adapt to other cultures – to the work, the stress, the deadlines, the moods and way of life – and a very high proportion returned to Tonga. They told horror stories about New Zealand and Australia and America to their relatives who had wisely stayed on the islands. Tonga was simply Tongans. Tonga had never been colonized or conquered, except in the profoundly ambiguous way that Christian missionaries managed. This involved preaching against evil and nakedness, and solemnly convincing people that they were sinners, their bodies were shameful, and generally encouraging the intense and rather joyous hypocrisy that you find among God-fearing people.

  Tongans did not know the world, nor did the world know them. Even their King, one of the last absolute monarchs on earth, was known only as a very fat man – his weight was given whenever his name was mentioned. This made about as much sense as regarding the British queen’s small stature as important: “Five foot two inches high Queen Elizabeth,” such a sentence might begin. There were few expatriates and hardly any tourists in these islands. The tourists that did visit saw that Nuku’alofa, the royal capital, was a backwater, just a small seedy town, and became visibly depressed. And seldom have I felt more unwelcome at a hotel than when checking into what is regarded as Nuku’alofa’s best hotel, the International Date-line. (The smaller grubby places were full.) I carried my own bags, including my boat, although the lobby was thronged by able-bodied Tongan hotel staff. And when I asked for someone to show me to my room, the desk clerk snorted and pointed and said, “Up dey! Too-oh-tree! Turd flo!” as though to an imbecile. When I remarked on this to people who knew the place I was told that Tongans were renowned for their unhelpfulness, unless they knew you, in which case they made you one of the family. Yet one of the family was a condition I had no wish to enter into, here or anywhere.

  There was little understanding of – and no interest in – the outer world, apart from the worst of its popular culture, rock music and violent videos (there was as yet no television in Tonga). Tongans regarded non-Tongans with a kind of pity and disdain, as though they were all sinners and suckers, and people who foolishly worked their heads off. Tongans had a reputation for thievery that exceeded even that of the light-fingered Samoans, but only in Tonga did I suffer serious theft – a rather nice pen, my Walkman, my 300-dollar cowboy belt with the silver buckle. Towards each other Tongans seemed to have more complex attitudes – different from anything I had seen so far. Quite early on in my travels in Tonga I found that Tongans regarded each other with a certain amount of envy and suspicion, and these were the only islands in Oceania where I discerned an attitude that I could describe as haughty.

  “Honolulu was nice,” Afu said. “Good work, good money. Plenty of Tongans there.”

  That seemed consistent: Tongans could not live or operate in a place where there were no other Tongans.

  “But California,” Mrs Vahu said, heaving a sigh. “

  You didn’t like it?” I asked.

  “Well, Los Angeles, sorry to say, is full of colored people,” Mrs Vahu said. “They just sitteen around. Watcheen you. Hey, you can get scared of them! You see them standeen. So many colored people!”

  I guessed that the snobberies, the racial confusion and suspicion I detected in Tonga might have arisen because of the Tongan class system in which there was a king and nobles and an aristocracy at the top and landless peasants at the bottom. And when I inquired, Afu said that there was indeed a strict class system and each class had its own language. Royalty had its own language, and a Tongan fortunate enough to speak to the King had to use an archaic tongue, which was totally dissimilar from the language spoken by all Tongan commoners. In between, the nobles had their own language, which bore no resemblance to either of the other two languages.

  “But can you tell a noble people when you see them?”

  “We know them,” Afu said. “And we also know their children. And when they have girlfriends, and those friends has children, we know who they are.”

  Afu went on to say that Tonga was full of noble – and in some cases royal – bastards. Some of the Tongan kings had had mistresses who had borne them children, and so there was an illegitimate line, much as there was in Europe, but unlike Europe these secret nobles occasionally became useful. If a nobleman had one child, a daughter, who was rather hopelessly single and there was a danger of the line dying out with her childlessness, one of these royal bastards would be rustled up – everyone would know that though his mother was common his antecedents were regal – and a marriage would be arranged. His children would inherit his father-in-law, the nobleman’s title, because this bastard’s blood was noble enough – and everyone knew it. This was, after all, a small group of islands, with a total population of less than 100,000. Being noble could be a meal ticket. Among other things it could get you a seat in the King’s rubber-stamp Legislative Assembly, half of which was noble and non-elective, chosen by other nobles.

  The commoners tended to emigrate or else become Mormons, though this often amounted to the same thing.

  “They think if they become Mormons they will go to America,” a Tongan told me.

  And it was true; many are sent to Salt Lake City to delve deeper into the sanctities of Mormonism. But the Mormons also looked after their flocks in Tonga and they took up a lot of social slack, buil
t clinics and schools, as well as their interminable Latter Day Saints’ churches, all of which looked like Dairy Queen franchises.

  My audience with the King was still almost a week off, and so I tried to make the most of being in Nuku’alofa. It was the sleepiest, the dustiest, the slowest, and one of the poorest of the Pacific ports. Honiara was uglier, Port Moresby much more dangerous, Papeete tackier, and Apia more sluttish and decrepit, but there was something extraordinary and unmoveable about Tongan torpor – it was both regal and lazy. Some Tongans were friendly, but few were cooperative, and it was maddeningly difficult to make onward plans. Phones didn’t work, offices were empty or locked when they should have been open, and in some places I was simply waved away – too much trouble, it seemed. It was a society that was used to dealing with beachcombers, who had all the time in the world.

  I was trying to make arrangements to travel to Vava’u, a large archipelago about a hundred and seventy miles north of this island Tongatapu. There were fifty islands in the Vava’u group and many of them, I had been assured, were uninhabited. A boat left Nuku’alofa once a week for Vava’u.

  “It is better you take plane,” Salesi said.

  “I want to catch the boat.”

  “Plane is better.”

  “I prefer the boat,” I said.

  “Boats make you seasick,” Salesi said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I get sick every time.”