KEY POINTS:
My daughter complains that she's not like the other Samoan and Tongan kids she knows. She's brown, yes. She's Samoan and Tongan through her parents, yes.
But what's that supposed to feel like, she asks, when she doesn't speak either language and when we're not exactly your stereotypical
Pacific Island family?
I tell her she's a hybrid and it's up to her to define what it means to be a Samoan-Tongan-Kiwi born and raised in Auckland.
It's whatever you decide it is, I say. Stop whining and figure it out.
But I don't blame her for the occasional identity crisis. We're not big on Pacific cultural traditions in our household.
Yet in in some ways, we're staunchly, stereotypically Pacific Island. I go to church on Sundays, I respect my elders, I'm often too polite for my own good. And I feel responsible for my extended family. It never occurs to me to say no when there's a phone call asking me to contribute to a funeral, wedding or other occasion.
For the most part I regard those cultural values as strengths, even if they've kept us a little poorer than our contemporaries.
But we're hardly purists. We always give to family and church, but we get to decide how much.
We're inclined to pick and choose our cultural cues. At our house, the question isn't so much, "What is the appropriate cultural response?" but "Which culture? And why?"
We're definitely not respecters of cultural practices that hold us back - something that does apply to many others. I was reminded of that when reading about debt in the Pacific Island community, and the comments of a Samoan Methodist minister in Auckland about the practice of reading out in church the amount donated by every person. This led to many people getting into debt because, to save face, they felt pressured to give more than they could afford.
The minister defended this practice as "part of our tradition".
"We indigenised Christianity," he said, "and that's the way we do it."
I found that to be unfortunate and short-sighted. If we made up the rules in the first place, why can't we unmake them? How hard would it be to let people give anonymously?
What was to stop us choosing to do it differently, choosing to care more about people than outmoded cultural traditions?
It never ceases to amaze me how often culture is used to excuse all manner of harmful and undesirable practices, particularly when that culture has been transplanted or has minority status.
I think some of our leaders have been slow to catch on to the fact that more of us are starting to ask: "Why? Who does it serve?"
Ironically, we in the Pacific community are hostage not only to cultural traditions but to newly acquired cultural trends. That includes moneylenders. Herald social issues reporter Simon Collins says they "have become as much a part of the culture in South Auckland in the past decade as they have been for centuries in Third World villages in India or in the Pacific Islands, from which many of their South Auckland clients come".
In fact, we have no tradition of moneylending in the Pacific, which is probably why we're so easily hoodwinked into borrowing at outrageous rates just to buy essentials. Too many Pacific Islanders adopt the culture of easy credit without being aware of the pitfalls.
Of course, harmful cultural practices aren't the exclusive preserve of Pacific Islanders. What, for example, does our culture say about teenagers drinking? I've had to confront that as my privileged 16-year-old - more sophisticated than I was at her age - gears up for her first school ball.
She sighs when I recount for the umpteenth time my own eminently forgettable experience of my high-school social. I wore my best (and only) pair of jeans, we drank soft drinks under the glare of bright lights and watchful adult eyes, and the boys kept mainly to their side of the school hall.
My protective Samoan parents had no problems working out where my boundaries lay - firmly within their sights. But the rules seem to have changed. In addition to the ball, there is a pre-ball party at a friend's house, and an after-ball party at an undisclosed location - ostensibly, not disclosed for security reasons. And there is alcohol.
I, spoilsport mother that I am, was the last to give permission, and then only after extracting a promise from my teenager that no alcohol would pass her lips.
She protested, of course, that she would only have had two drinks. She'd be the only one of her friends not drinking. She would never learn to handle alcohol if I didn't let her drink now.
I'll change my mind when I see scientific proof of alcohol's positive effect on the ability of 16-year-olds to make sound judgments.
I can see her now moaning to her friends about her unreasonable, culturally out-of-step, seriously un-hip mother. They'd probably conclude that it was a cultural thing. I'm just another over-protective Samoan mother.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
