The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  There were no other guests; it was just me, Maren, Tisa (guessing fiftyish, short hair, radiant), Candyman (about the same age, tall, Aussie, utterly laid-back), and their dog, Palusami (watch your step). Over dinner, Tisa boasted of how healthy her reef is and how, in August, the trade winds subside and the water is like glass, and whales come into her cove to calf. She gets out her ukulele and sings them traditional Samoan songs.

  “I stand here, and just siiiing and sing to them,” she said, strumming an air ukulele.

  “Do they respond?” I asked. She stared at me like I’d asked if the whales get wet.

  “Of course! I can tell they like it. They sort of look at me.”

  Candyman mixed us cocktails with layers of color and juice and inadvisable amounts of rum and then brought out dinner. He’d just caught the parrotfish himself. “Grilled it, squeezed a little bit of lemon on it, should be nice and light.” Next to it was boiled green banana with a coconut sauce and a green salad. After days of meats in thick brown sauce and salads consisting of wilted cabbage, I had almost forgotten what this looked like, greens that were actually green.

  “I like it nice and quiet like this,” Tisa said as we ate. She gets crowds when cruise ships call in Pago Pago, about a dozen times a year. There’s good turnout for her weekly feast of traditional Samoan barbecue, called umu, cooked in a mound of heated basalt rocks covered with banana leaves, served with hefty helpings of palusami, her dog’s namesake dish, consisting of taro leaves cooked in coconut milk, rich and sweet enough to make even the most devoted vegetable-shunner ask for seconds. And she rents out her two fales a few nights a week. But that’s enough. Tisa has no interest in tourist crowds disrupting her comfortable life. Besides, they might come here expecting a plush resort. There’s no room service, no air-conditioning, and the bed is surrounded by a much-needed mosquito net. The shared bathroom is bare-bones and up a sandy path that, for Tisa’s sake, I should note is covered with slowly pinballing hermit crabs that could probably snap off your toe if they wanted to.

  But there’s also this: That night, covered in the sticky residue of the ocean after an hour of splashing in the waves with Maren, I walked to the shared outdoor shower to clean up. The water was hot and the stall’s side was open to the cove, the waves crashing some fifteen feet below me. And when I rinsed the soap off my face and looked up through a broad frame of tree branches, there was the Milky Way, brighter than I’d ever seen it before, not just a sprinkle of points on a hazy scrim but a flowing wash of white against pure black, with depth and layers and glittering eddies. I walked back to the fale and sat on the porch with Maren, looking out at the starlit water in wordless contentment, before we fell asleep to the lullaby of the rising tide whispering in and out, in and out, in and out below our hut.

  OUR DAYS in American Samoa were numbered. Soon I would continue on to Guam and Maren would fly back to Minneapolis, back to her job, her vacation days depleted. For now, though, we wanted to make the most of what time remained. In the morning, we dawdled on Tisa’s deck, enjoying a breakfast of pillowy pancakes topped with banana sautéed in its own juice, with a side of fresh papaya, so soft and rich that it seemed like something you’d buy by the scoop in a gourmet shop in Rome or Paris. Candyman brought out mugs of thick, robust Samoan hot chocolate.

  Eventually, we dragged ourselves off the deck and hopped a passing bus to the eastern end of Tutuila, then took a ten-minute boat ride to Aunu’u, a mile-wide dot of an island. Tisa and John had described it in terms that city-dwellers often use to describe the country—more rural, more traditional—which was a jarring thing to hear from people who lived in a place that was itself, to our mainlander minds, pretty rural and “traditional.” John also warned us that the local stray dogs were particularly vicious.

  Kids swam under the boat as we arrived and the Mormon missionary on board deftly jumped out onto the dock ahead of us. A cell-phone tower stood near the dock, and the village (population five hundred or so) looked much like any other we’d seen: one-story houses in various states of repair (from the recently remodeled to the just-about-falling-down) and arranged around an open lawn; assorted fales; a few churches, which were the largest and best-kept buildings around.

  Heeding John’s warning about dogs, we armed ourselves with long sticks. The island’s village is concentrated near the dock, but not far away we began to understand what John and Tisa were getting at. The houses became sparser and we passed a hut constructed of leaves and tarps, a Mormon church—characteristically tidy and sparkling white—and a school, before the road ran out, leaving water and jungle. Along the beach, two people were fishing in the shallows and a young girl of perhaps six years old was poking at something in a tide pool. As we passed her, a dog came bounding over the low-lying shrubs at the beach’s edge, barking at us. Maren held out her stick with a fencer’s poise while I simply flailed at the air. The girl calmly pulled her hand out of the water to reveal a six-inch knife. She flashed it at the dog and yelled, and it stopped in its tracks before trotting away. The girl nonchalantly turned her attention back to the tide pool. The air was still, the only sound the crashing waves.

  For the first time on my territory journey, I felt like I was a galaxy away from the states, somewhere wholly unfamiliar to my own American experience.

  There’s so little on Aunu’u that one of our guidebook’s highlighted attractions was a swamp known for its reddish hue. In search of this local landmark, we headed back through the village, where we inadvertently picked up an entourage of four kids, ranging in age from four to eight.

  “You know Christina?” they asked.

  “No, sorry,” Maren replied.

  “You know Masina?”

  “No.

  “You know Shakira?”

  “The singer?” I said, startled.

  “No, my friend.”

  “Sorry, don’t know her.” I couldn’t resist asking, “Do you know Prince? He lives in my village, Minneapolis.”

  “No,” the kids chorused.

  They merrily followed us for ten minutes or so, trying out their English and continuing to list names, seeking common ground with us. They were good company.

  We got the impression, from the kids’ gesturing and chatter among themselves in Samoan, that they hoped we’d give them money if they led us to the swamp—although they couldn’t agree on where, exactly, it was. So we gave them the only cash we had, a five-dollar bill, to split four ways on an island with no stores or, really, anywhere to spend it. A series of thoughts flashed through my mind: (1) a cosmic guilt for embodying, in this small way, the Corrupting, Patronizing Forces of Outsiders; (2) an indignant self-scolding: Geez, haven’t they earned it? Can’t we spare it? Couldn’t it maybe possibly help them a teeny-tiny bit?; and (3) a realization that it was best not to read too much into this; we were neither saviors nor corrupters, just tourists passing through, forgotten by tomorrow.

  The boat puttered back to Tutuila, where I realized that, somewhere on Aunu’u, I’d lost my hat—evidently the trickster aitu of Mount Alava had followed us. We waited for a bus that didn’t come, and then we started walking. It was a couple of miles back to Tisa’s, we figured. After a few minutes, though, a truck pulled up next us, a giant white Chevy with a Seattle Seahawks flag and tinted windows—archetypal “Real America.”

  “Do you want a ride?” asked the driver, a man in his sixties. His name was Tony, he said, as I climbed into the front seat and Maren got in back. He had a thick mustache and a white polo shirt, and sipped from a Coors can; he had another in the cup holder and offered it to me.

  “Um . . .” I hesitated, not really wanting to encourage drinking and driving on winding roads.

  “Doug, take the beer!” Maren hissed from the backseat. “Be polite!”

  I took the beer.

  “I am retired from the government, so it’s okay,” Tony said, nodding toward his Coors. He, too, started listing the people he knew; his brother, he said, used to be the governor.


  Tony turned into his family compound. “I want to show you where I live.” We stopped outside a white house with red trim, then walked around the side and found a small cove. “Here is my beach. And my fale.” Part of the roof was a section of an old Charlie the Tuna sign.

  “Here is my boat,” Tony said, pointing to a small powerboat. “And here is my umu. I will have a barbecue with my friends tomorrow.

  “It’s nice?” he asked, gesturing around—to his spread, his view, the ocean, and then to the island beyond. His expression was pure contentment. It said: This is why we live here. This is what we cherish. This is fa’asamoa writ small.

  “It’s really nice,” I said, nodding.

  BACK ON Tisa’s deck, our host proffered a series of monologues as she alternated between making a palm-frond basket and looking at her iPad, periodically scrolling through photos or finding a document. She wore her hair in tight curls and a teal lavalava and a white T-shirt that advertised her “Barefoot Bar.”

  Tisa supported citizenship, she said, although she was worried about the possibility of outsider land-grabs, which seemed to be the main concern of everyone I talked to about citizenship (matai power and Sa, not so much; they directly affected a much smaller portion of the population). Her nephew served in the military and had problems getting a job on the mainland, even after he served, because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

  “That makes me so mad!” Tisa said. “I went to California and I had the same issues when I was looking for a job.” Eventually she started working as a real estate agent.

  “That’s why I know how to sell,” she said. “Right now I’m working on our tattoo festival.” She pulled up a document on her iPad, promotional copy for the annual event, which draws hundreds of people, with live streaming online.

  “My first festival was in 1993,” she said. “It was before its time.”

  Tattooing here goes back thousands of years; the Pacific is where the very word originated. (It’s tatau in Samoan.) The most traditional tattoo, called a pe’a, runs from the waist to the knees, and is created by a master tattooist called a tufuga ta tatau, using ink created with the soot from a burned candlenut, a blade made with tortoiseshell, and a bone comb. The predominant feature of a pe’a is a sequence of horizontal lines of various thicknesses, with diagonal lines and color blocks and intricate, angular patterns—an aesthetic theme, but always personalized. Today, the most popular tattoos—which you see on nearly all adult men, and some women—swirl from the breast to the shoulder and halfway to the elbow, and feature abstracted motifs of sharks and turtles and outrigger canoes interlocked with shapes and lines, all telling a story representing your ’aiga.

  When the Christian missionaries came, tattooing was one of their prohibitions. It stuck for generations.

  “I think it was that first festival that planted the seed” and started to bring tattooing back, Tisa said. “But people looked at me like I was some kind of heathen.” She didn’t have another festival until 2005.

  By then, tattoos had inked their ever-growing spot in the American psyche, with teenagers and soccer moms and retirees going under the needle; even Miss America contestants have tattoos. There are TV shows devoted to tattoos, shops on seemingly every corner of most large cities. Along with Maori and Hawaiian motifs, Samoan designs have been part of the trend, spurred on by celebrities, including Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and other professional wrestling stars of Samoan descent, as well as NFL players. (The Rock is part of the extended Anoa’i family, which includes at least seventeen professional wrestlers, among them his father and grandfather.) Meanwhile, Peace Corps volunteers in Samoa started getting armband tattoos as souvenirs before heading back to the states, where they helped popularize this stripped-down version of the traditional designs.

  Tisa said she didn’t mind outsiders getting tattoos with Samoan motifs. “It’s helping spread the culture and bring it back here,” she said. “It’s the only traditional art the kids get really excited about. Not so much the dancing and other crafts, but the tattoos go viral and the kids are always showing them off and tweeting it.”

  Today, Samoan tattoo artists are in high demand. Like Tisa’s brother: “He used to come to me for money but now he’s doing really well and traveling all over. Right now he’s at the Smithsonian showing his designs,” she said. “The revival has been a blessing to the island.” It was reclaiming their roots, but also sharing them with the world, at thousands of dollars a pop for the larger designs.

  American Samoa has become more Americanized, Big Mac by Big Mac, but the flow of culture isn’t one-way. The USA has also become incrementally more Samoan, even if we haven’t realized it, through tattoos and Polynesia’s myriad pop-culture influences and, more important, person by person, in the form of everyday Samoans who make their mark on the mainland, from everyday citizens—or at least nationals—to NFL stars to the forest-fire fighter we met one day, biding his time back home while awaiting his next assignment in a mainland national park, with the rest of his crew of hotshots, all Samoan.

  Like so many other “alien races,” the people of the territories have changed the fabric of the USA—and what a magnificent thing that is.

  “I’m probably the only one not making any money from tattooing, and I’m fine with that. I’m just sitting here with my cocoa and papaya,” Tisa said, beaming. “For so many years, we’ve been poor. You either had a government job or worked in the cannery.” This was still the reality for many American Samoans, of course, but for some, “The whole clan, they’re teaching everybody, even the babies, how to be a traditional artist and use your skill and make the most of yourself. That’s the American Dream.”

  * At the time Foreign in a Domestic Sense was published, in 2001, her name was Christina Duffy Burnett.

  † Some scholars, including Ponsa, argue that a handful of other territory-related cases should also be considered among the Insular Cases.

  ‡ The Joan Crawford film is, somehow, better remembered than the 1953 version, Miss Sadie Thompson, a 3-D musical starring Rita Hayworth.

  § Technically, Pago Pago is actually one village among several strung together along the harbor, all of them seemingly a contiguous town to the untrained eye. If you called them, collectively, the Greater Pago Pago Metropolitan Area, you could add in a couple thousand more people. But still: small.

  ¶ Swain’s is an odd outlier of a place, listed separately on many present-day U.S. government documents. This includes college financial-aid materials, even though Swain’s has no permanent population. It was abandoned not long ago, due to lack of potable water and general remoteness, although it still has a seat in American Samoa’s legislature—which is held by one Alexander Jenning, Swain’s Island having been a privately held coconut plantation owned by the Jenning family since the mid-1800s.

  # When Ala’ilima was born, in 1955, this was the American embassy closest to Tutuila. The United States established diplomatic relations with (Western) Samoa in 1971, and there is now an American embassy in Apia.

  ** (Western) Samoa recently switched to the west side of the International Date Line so that it would be on the same business day as New Zealand and Australia, instead of being twenty-one hours behind these important trade partners. At the end of the day on Thursday, December 29, 2011, (Western) Samoa jumped ahead to Saturday, December 31.

  †† You might also note that the second-ever non-Japanese sumo wrestler to attain the sport’s highest rank, yokozuna, was the American Samoa–born Musashimaru Ky. “I guess I got my start in sumo thanks to the American football and Greco-Roman wrestling I was doing at school in Hawaii,” he told the Japan Times.

  ‡‡ Births are understandably rare there, but not without precedent: in January 1947, a baby boy was born to parents who were stationed at the atoll’s American Radio Propagation Field Station. Even if his parents hadn’t been American, because of the atoll’s political status he would have been a citizen by birth.

  §§ Incidentally, th
e USVI also played a supporting role in NASA history, by way of an undersea habitat program that the agency helped sponsor. Tektite I (1969) and Tektite II (1970), both based in Saint John’s Great Lameshur Bay, were intended to measure the effects of extended stays underwater by humans. In Tektite II, four “aquanauts” stayed in the undersea capsule for fifty-eight days as NASA analyzed the psychological effects of working in such close, confined quarters.

  ¶¶ In fact, I would later learn that this is one of the local names for it: Dragon’s Tail. The official Samoan name, though, is even better, translating to Cockscomb Point.

  Chapter 3

  OFFSHORING

  THE

  AMERICAN

  EXPERIENCE

  Guam

  “HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, EVERYBODY! ARE YOU ALL HAVING A GOOD TIIIIIME?” A goateed radio DJ bellowed from a stage set up in the middle of a pulsing crowd of thousands of revelers in the heart of Guam’s Tumon tourist district. High-rise hotels and hulking malls formed a canyon around me and illuminated the cloud of meaty smoke rising from the food stands set up in the middle of Pale San Vitores Road. It was the second annual Guam BBQ Block Party and the local visitors’ bureau had gone all-out to make it a truly archetypal American extravaganza, with shredding rock bands and a barbecue contest headlined by celebrity pitmasters flown in from Vladivostok and Seoul.

  To get to Guam from American Samoa requires backtracking to Hawaii and then flying seven and a half hours west. In terms of distance and direction, this is like starting in Jacksonville, Florida, traveling northeast of Hudson Bay, in the outer reaches of Canada, and then back across the continent to Anchorage, Alaska. Guam is north of the equator, in the western Pacific; it’s part of Micronesia, not Polynesia—same ocean but different regions and different cultures. And compared to the pastoral quiet of Tutuila, Tumon was a different world, a shock to the system, a farce, a twisted fantasy of brands and brashness and bustle. Here was the Westin, the Hyatt; here was the nearly block-sized duty-free complex with Bulgari and Dior and Hermès and Rolex boutiques; here was a water park, an amusement park, and the Guam Slingshot, a sort of reverse bungee-jump contraption that shoots you high into the sky.