She wanted to look lighter, less Polynesian and more like the women she saw in magazines. She thought she was too dark and too tall and too exotic and too heavy to ever join them.
The kids at school in her Southern California suburb would put their white arms next to hers at recess and giggle about how different she was. Her friends would joke about her curly brown hair with ringlets that bounced back like springs. During summer visits to Tonga, where her parents were born, her aunts would whisper, “She’s pretty, but she’s so big.”
So she tried to look how people thought she should.