by Laura Fraser
I’m not, but my friend is. She is still basically the same person, different pronoun—except with highlights and happier with herself. She hasn’t lost her sense of humor: when she pulls out the hormone pills she’s taking, she says, “This one makes you cry at movies and want to be in a relationship, and this one makes you hate professional wrestling and the Three Stooges.” She has a new softness about her that is more than physical. Talking about it, she says she also has an unexpected new sense of vulnerability that came along with her new vagina. I am amazed that after forty-two years of being male she feels that physical sense of vulnerability so strongly—maybe because it’s so new—but that fear of violation is, for women, built into the anatomy.
We were roommates in New York City for a while, twenty years ago; at the time he always liked me, he said, because I was “a feminist who could still wear pink socks.” We started a little romance that fizzled out after an awkward sexual encounter. For years I thought it was my fault—I was young and inexperienced and worried I wasn’t sexy enough or doing things right. Finding out that he was a she, all those years later, was, selfishly, a relief—and a Note to Self that when things don’t work out with a man, you can’t always blame yourself. So that was all good. Going shopping with her, on the other hand, was annoying as hell, since everything fit her perfectly—she’s a biological male after all—while everything was too tight on my curves, proving that designers have a warped and probably misogynistic sense of the female form.
In any case, after a year, I almost forget that she was ever a he. When the editor calls with the Samoa assignment, I can hardly claim to be an expert in the topic of the social-versus-biological construction of gender, but having dug around in that territory, I am fascinated. I even have a third cousin who is married to a Samoan, so I have a place to start—though being fundamentalist Christians, my cousins are a little confused when I call them asking if they know any Samoan drag queens. But they’re helpful, and I’m as excited as the young Margaret Mead to be heading off to Samoa.
AT THE AIRPORT in Upolu, I glance around, and, in their similar dress, it’s hard to tell Samoan men and women apart—especially since the women have big biceps encircled with tattoo armbands and the men have luxurious long black hair and gold-hooped ears. Samoans of both genders are big-boned, hearty types, evolved from people who were strong enough to paddle from island to island to survive, who were quick enough to escape rival tribes, and who fed on the starchy breadfruit and taro roots that grow everywhere on the islands. They’re like tropical flowers—big, bright, and meaty, with a humid, amorphous sexuality.
I find a battered lime green taxi, shell necklaces dangling from the rearview mirror, greet the driver—“Talofa!”—and set off with a squeal. We whiz by thatched huts on stilts near the beach, nut brown children laughing and playing in bright blue waves. The villages are tidy, with a profusion of bougainvillea, red ginger, pink hibiscus, and exotic flowers I’ve never seen. The place exudes relaxation, as if the vibrant colors are soaking up all the available intensity.
We arrive in Apia, where modern offices stand next to palm-thatched houses, rickety food stands, and open-air markets. Near the center of town, across the street from the harbor, we pull up at Aggie Grey’s, an incongruously stately, rambling, white colonial hotel with bellhops in red uniforms out front. This place, the oldest hotel in town, was built decades ago, when adventurers wanted a civilized respite between their forays into the savage wilds and World War II GIs needed a real hamburger for a change. After the war, it became a chic getaway for the Hollywood set, farther even than Tahiti, where stars like Gary Cooper, William Holden, and Marlon Brando could sit by the pool and know that no one could possibly know who they were, except that they were rich.
I’ve arranged lunch with a famous Samoan fa’afafine. An anthropologist gave me her name, along with some background about the fa’afafine, which means “in the way of a woman.” Men who openly dress as women are an accepted part of life in Samoa, are treated as women, and play the same roles in Samoan culture as genetic women: caretakers, teachers, Bible school leaders. They’re also entertainers, able to get away with doing some of the things women used to do in Samoa that have been frowned on since Christian missionaries came around 1830, such as dancing provocatively for visiting guests. Samoans are a little huffy when talking about sex and gender, saying that people have been making a lot of assumptions about Samoa ever since the young and gullible Margaret Mead solemnly recorded every joking story told to her about the supposed promiscuity on the islands in 1928. Today fa’afafine are treated like ladies—except that men are more likely to banter and make bawdy jokes with them.
At the hotel, Sonia is sitting by the pool, under an umbrella, wearing a tight flowered tank top, miniskirt, and heels. She has beautiful dancer’s legs and an erect posture. Only the extra layer of makeup shows her sixtyish age, and nothing reveals her biology.
I greet her, and she kisses me and gestures to the stage. “I used to dance here, from the time I was nine.” She gazes at the stage, the canopy of painted bark cloth, the pots of tropical flowers and ferns. “I was the star of the show. I was the best.”
“I’m sure you still are,” I say, and Sonia waves away those bygone years with her long coral nails. A waiter comes by with drinks. He says, “Excuse me,” to Sonia, and they both snicker. After he leaves, she explains that the way he said “Excuse me” doubles in Samoan for “Suck me.” Fa’afafine are famous for their sexual double entendres and teasing, she says, and waiters know they can get away with it. I make a note never to say “excuse me” in Samoa.
We sip our mai tais as Sonia relates her history. There were always “aunties” in her family. Her father was a high chief in the village—a matai—and from a young age, she liked to play the role of the princess, serving drinks in the kava ceremony. She loved to dance, hopping up on stage as early as three to perform for the village families, twirling around in a little skirt as people laughed when they could see what was underneath. “Deep inside, I’ve always known myself to be a woman.”
Sonia started having sex with other boys when she was nine or ten. Back in those days—contrary to what Margaret Mead wrote—most girls wouldn’t have sex with boys before marriage. Fa’afafine were another story. “We filled in the gaps,” Sonia says. These days, of course, more girls sleep with men before marriage—especially the young tourist palagis from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—but boys still “practice” with fa’afafine. That doesn’t make them gay or bisexual, Sonia explains, because fa’afafine are considered women. “Gay men are only interested in sleeping with other gay men, they’re fully male.” A fa’afafine would never sleep with another fa’afafine, because it would be considered lesbian and therefore taboo.
I try to keep track of all this and scan the restaurant, considering that many of the men here, as well as the macho, muscular, tattooed men I saw walking around Apia earlier, have had sex with other men, with fa’afafine, and considered it straight sex. The women are still pressured by the church to wait until marriage. All in all, it’s a pretty good deal for the men.
Sonia sips her drink and glances back to the stage. “Marlon Brando!” She lifts up her feet and points her polished toes. “Marlon loved to watch me dance.” She leans toward me. “He didn’t know … well … let’s say he was surprised.” She laughs, throwing her head back and shaking her long, dark hair.
SONIA GIVES ME names of other fa’afafine, and for the next two days, I track them down—dancing at a club, playing netball, watching a thrilling rugby game against Tonga. In just a few days, people begin to wave to me on the street. I go a little native, learning to tie a sarong and wearing it with a T-shirt, as everyone does on the street—though when I show up that way at a club, a young fa’afafine scolds me, telling me to go home and dress up, girl, no one dresses like that to go out.
When I return to the palm-thatched club wearing jeans and high-heeled sandals, I sit with a friendly young
woman I met at the hotel and her friends. Soon the lights dim and drumming starts. A troupe of dancers enters the stage—the men in aqua lavalavas and black tattoos that circle their waists like giant bat wings or cover their legs like bicycle shorts, the fa’afafine in coconut bras and grass skirts. It looks as though it’ll be a cheesy talent show, but from the start, everyone dances as if it’s the purpose of their lives.
When the applause for the floor show stops, everyone in the audience gets up to dance. The girls pull me, and I can’t help but follow them onstage, doing whatever approximation of Samoan dancing I can muster, something like flamenco on acid at a Grateful Dead show. Everyone laughs—with me, at me, it doesn’t matter. They all dance, dazed by the drumming, exhilarated. Each of my body parts seems to be responding to a different rhythm. I’ve left my mind, my story, my culture, everything but my body back at the table with my beer, and I dance and dance.
It’s delirious—to be included as an outsider, to have stumbled into such a colorful group of revelers. All that dancing feels like shedding a skin. By the time I return to my hotel, I’m exhausted with exhilaration. I jump into the pool, float, and stare at the unfamiliar stars, content. If I had a husband and children, I wouldn’t be out dancing with Samoan drag queens and floating in tropical pools.
THE LAST EVENING in Apia, I meet Sonia in the bar. She’s wearing a leopard-printed mini with a stretch lace black top and is accompanied by Tini, a burly fa’afafine with a flower tucked behind one ear and gopher-size biceps. The waiter flirts outrageously with them, giving Sonia a squeeze around the waist.
“Do the men still see fa’afafine after they’re married?” I ask, when the waiter leaves.
“It’s still cheating, but it’s more cheating to be with another woman,” says Sonia. “That’s when the wives really get ferocious.”
“Being with a fa’afafine is like a joke to the wife,” says Tini, shrugging her giant shoulders.
It’s not much of a joke, really: knowing you are a woman but that men won’t take you seriously. Wanting to have a husband and children and not being able to manage it. I’m beginning to identify too closely with these fa’afafine, I think, and I have another drink. The fan twirls on the ceiling, and I realize we’ve all become quiet. “But did you ever fall in love?” I ask.
Sonia sighs. “We have women’s feelings, so of course we fall in love.” She waves this thought away and begins ticking off several long-term boyfriends she’s had.
“But the men always eventually leave,” says Tini, shaking her head. “They go with women who will give them children.”
“Do you have children?” Sonia asks, ignoring Tini’s last remark, and I shake my head no.
“Why not?” asks Tini. “Children are beautiful.”
“Never met the right father, I guess.” I twirl the parasol in my drink.
“But you’re not so old, you’re still attractive,” says Tini. “Why don’t you have a husband?”
“I don’t know.” They look at me expectantly. “I had a husband, but we split up, and since then … I guess I’ve been busy working.”
Sonia puts her hand on her hip and shifts her legs in her miniskirt. “You have a job like a man, traveling by yourself,” she scolds me. “Maybe a man wants someone who is more like a woman.”
It’s making me uneasy, having a fake woman tell me I’m not acting enough like a real one.
Later, in my room—after more drinking with the fa’afafine and dancing with tattooed Samoan men—I am too rattled to sleep, though it’s the middle of the night. I flip on the TV and see that the Brazilians have just won the World Cup. I know that on the other side of the world, Gustavo is going crazy, and I want to talk to him, hear his voice, feel his presence, congratulate him. I dial all the international codes, and when I get his answering machine, I hang up.
THE NEXT DAY, I leave Upolu for Savai’i, a more traditional Samoan island, to see how village fa’afafine are different from the big-city girls. From the plane, a little puddle jumper, velvety green islands rise out of the turquoise sea. Savai’i’s outermost piece of land, a panhandle called the Falealupo Peninsula, floats near the international date line, edging toward yesterday. The lush peninsula is considered the entrance to the underworld, the place where the sun sets into the sea, where the spirits roam freely at night but return to their terrible caves and fires by daybreak. From the air, Savai’i seems much bigger and wilder than Upolu, matted with rain forests, its jagged ridge of volcanic craters raised like the backbone of a dark and ancient sea monster.
The plane lands on a strip cleared in a dense jungle of banyan trees, propellers winding down. A few villagers in rust-rimmed cars greet the other passengers, but there are no taxis. I hitch a ride with a school principal, who offers that he’s going that way anyway. We bump our way over dirt to the main paved road that circles the island, passing open-walled houses, oval thatched huts, and cacophonous tropical gardens.
We chat, and he can’t understand that I came so far to write about fa’afafine, whom Samoans hardly think twice about. “Why don’t you write about how our islands are sinking into the sea instead?” asks the principal. He explains that global warming is affecting people who have no fault in creating the problem and can do nothing to change it. I agree that it would be a better story.
“When Manhattan starts to sink, the magazines will pay attention,” I tell him, and he smiles broadly.
He points to a group of huts with corrugated steel roofs. “This is your hotel.” He gives me the name of a fa’afafine I could talk to, a schoolteacher named Tara, and draws a map of where she lives.
I wander around the resort, a main house with a wide porch upstairs and some landscaped oval fales set around a wide grassy yard, with clusters of ginger stalks waving their waxy red flowers. My little hut is screened, with matchstick blinds, two cots, one frayed pink towel, a cold-water shower, and a cistern of drinking water. Tall coconut palms line the road, and across the street, a white beach seems to stretch forever.
I gather my things for the beach. As long as it’s Sunday, I’m taking the day off. I wander across the road and climb over a rock wall to the beach. It’s the kind of beach you dream of, the kind you never find when you go on a package tour that advertises a beach just like this one: fine white sand, palm trees, no trash, no people, no nothing but beach and water as far as you can see.
I unwrap my lavalava, spread it out on the sand, slather on sunscreen, and lean against a warm rock, reading. The sun penetrates layers of my skin until I’m glowing from inside like an ember. I dash across the burning sand and plunge into the water, swimming out far around a jutting rock. Then I float, letting the gently rocking water take me where it will.
I swim back, not because I can’t swim far but because there is no one on the beach to say, as the Professor always would, “Stay a little closer to shore.” I have to be that person for myself, the one who doesn’t trust her own strength or the gentle tides. Stay a little closer to shore.
I flop down on the sarong, then doze. I sense a presence and open my eyes. Not far down the beach, a large Samoan man is walking. I suddenly feel alone. I stand up, quickly shake the sand out of the lavalava, and wrap myself. I gather my things and start to walk along the beach, safer in motion.
The only time I was ever assaulted, the only time in all my travels I’ve ever been in serious danger—if you don’t count visiting Baghdad ten days before the first Persian Gulf War as a guest of Saddam Hussein, with no confirmed ticket back to Jordan—was when I was alone on a beach. It was twenty years ago. I’d been traveling in Egypt with another woman, who was fifteen years older—younger than I am now, I realize. She’d seemed so old then. I met Edie on an Israeli kibbutz where I worked as a volunteer for three months—fishing, picking dates, cleaning used flypaper off of grapefruit trees—and we decided to travel on to Egypt together. We both wanted to explore the Sinai Desert, the tombs of Luxor, the ancient temples and pyramids, but from the moment we arrived in C
airo, we realized it wasn’t so easy to travel around, we couldn’t leave each other’s side. Men constantly called out and hissed, tried to pull pieces of our hair or “accidentally” brush our breasts.
Even together, we felt threatened. We took a bus to the Red Sea, where the guidebook mentioned there were beautiful, peaceful beaches. The bus let us out in the center of a small town, with few tourists, where most of the women covered their heads with scarves. We wrapped scarves around our heads, too, so as not to attract attention or offend anyone.
After finding a little pensione, we went to the beach, a couple of miles from town, and found a nice sheltered spot near some rocks. I wanted to go for a walk, but Edie wouldn’t come along; her energy level didn’t match mine. I was tired of constantly being by her side; if I could just take a walk by myself for half an hour, I’d be content to be in her company again.
We were far from town, there was no one anywhere, so I walked vigorously along the beach, feeling free in shorts and a T-shirt, moving my limbs, stretching out after days and days of slow motion. Then up on the bluffs I noticed a figure in a djellabah. I kept on walking.
“How much for you?” he called out, and I ignored him.
“How much for you? One pound? Two pounds?” I walked faster, until I could no longer see him on the bluff.
I turned a corner, around a hill that tumbled into the sea, and there he was, down on the beach, coming toward me. “How much for you?” he asked, his mouth open and wetly pink under his thick mustache.
“Em-shee bayeed,” I replied, the only Arabic phrase I knew: get lost. He snickered.
“My husband is over there,” I said, pointing, turning to walk back.
“No husband,” he said, coming closer.
“Yes,” I said, and he grabbed my arm. “No!” I screamed and knew no one could hear.