You’re not a true
Tongan until you eat like one.
Eating like a
Tongan means a lot of things. It means eating whatever’s in front of you. It
can mean eating with your hands, even if there’s silverware around. It is kai lahi or kai lelei (“eating big” or “eating well”), which means eating
enough for two, or three. Or seven. I saw my host brother, Inu, eat a whole
loaf of bread for breakfast, once. He washed it down with a plate full of cooked
sausages and veggies. He’s 13 years old.
Eating like a
Tongan also means letting nothing go to waste.
One
night, while having boiled fish for dinner with my home-stay family, my sister,
Sioa, and mom, Milise, teased me for not eating the fish’s head. I had picked
out all of the bones and eaten off all of the meat that I could find, but had
pushed the head to the side of my plate to feed to the animals later on. Laughing
at me, they said they knew that palangis
don’t eat the heads, but, to Tongans, that’s a waste.
I
took that as a challenge.
At
language class the next day I asked my LCF, Taua, to teach me how to eat fish
the “Tongan way.” I told him how my family had made fun of me and then excused me
because I was a palangi, but I wanted
none of that. Right after põ ako he
came over. He told my family he was there to teach me how to be Tongan, but
really he probably just wanted a free meal.
He sat with me at
the table and walked me through it, swallowing literally the whole fish—brains,
eyeballs, everything—spitting out only the bones and gills. Then it was my
turn. They all thought it was hilarious. Taua called me a “crazy palangi,” and Sioa filmed while I took
more than triple the amount of time that Taua had taken to finish it all. But I
did it!
Here’s the video,
courtesy of Sioa. WARNING: Content may be kind of gross.
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