“Come to Our Place So We May Welcome You”: Asian-Oceanian Solidarities in Mā’ohi Literature

Henri Hiro, cofounder of the Mā’ohi sovereignty movement, famously addressed spectators in his 1981 movie Le Rescapé de Tikeroa [Tikeroa’s Survivor]. He declared: “If you had come to our place [chez nous], we would have welcomed you with open arms. But you came here to your place [chez toi], and we do not know how to welcome you to your place.”14 Was he talking exclusively to European settlers, or was he also thinking of the Hakka diaspora? Who considered themselves at home in 1981 French-occupied Polynesia?

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Tahiti in 1865, as Scottish businessman William Stewart hired one thousand indentured laborers from Hong Kong to work on his cotton plantation in Atimaono. The majority of these first immigrants were contract laborers, brutally exploited by Stewart, and most chose to return to China when the plantation went bankrupt in 1874.15 A few years later, a second contingent of migrants settled on the islands, this time primarily Hakka Chinese from Guangdong seeking better work opportunities in the Pacific or fleeing the 1911 revolution in China. The Hakka are the most diasporic of all Chinese communities, and by the beginning of the French nuclear tests in 1966, about six thousand Hakka Chinese lived in French-occupied Polynesia.16 Despite the fact that Mā’ohi people became French citizens in 1946, the Chinese community was only granted citizenship in 1973.

Tahitian politician Gaston Flosse, president of the Territorial Assembly at the time, saw the political potential of these new voters who could make or break an elected majority. A pro-French, pronuclear advocate, Flosse began promoting the concept of a multiethnic Polynesia under French jurisdiction. Flosse’s reasoning was that the Chinese community that had fought so hard to become French would be reticent to fight for independence. Addressing the Chinese members of the Kuo Min Tang association, a center of the Chinese cultural renaissance in Tahiti, Flosse urged the Chinese community to join his political party as Polynesians, on equal footing with the other ethnic groups of the country. “You are fully Polynesian; you are not strangers living in Polynesia.… This is about whether or not you want to stay with France or leave her; about having a French passport or not, about keeping the CEP or kicking it out” [emphasis added].17

While Tahiti-born Chinese were thus openly courted by the pro-French and pronuclear political party, Mā’ohi decolonial activists also took a stance to make their position on the Chinese presence known. In the 1950s, Tahiti’s decolonial leader Pouvanaa a Oopa had spoken against Chinese immigration.18 Yet the Mā’ohi decolonial activists who succeeded him made it clear they were open to multiethnic coalitions with the non-Natives who supported their fight for independence. Under the leadership of Oscar Temaru, in the 1990s, the main pro-independence party, the Tavini Huira’atira, officially committed to a multiethnic yet Indigenous-centered nationalism:

The Tavini … respects everyone’s rights, without distinction of race, language, or religion. This is why it is out of question, at the Tavini, to envision any purge or expulsion on simple racial considerations. However, everyone will be called upon to determine …: do they or do they not want to adopt the Mā’ohi nationality as their only one? Their presence in the freed Mā’ohi country is contingent upon the answer.19

What form can a multiethnic Mā’ohi sovereign nation take? Some answers to this question can be found in the writings by Tahitian writer-activist Chantal Tiare Spitz.

Spitz is a prominent leader in the Mā’ohi decolonial and antinuclear movement. Born in Papeete in 1954, she rose to fame in 1991 after the publication of her debut novel, L’Île des rêves écrasés [Island of Shattered Dreams], a forceful critique of the CEP. Spitz subsequently published many essays, novels, and short stories denouncing French colonialism in the Pacific, and she crisscrossed the world to fight for denuclearization. While her antinuclear literature is well known and widely diffused throughout the Pacific, her stance on multiethnic coalitions is far less discussed and unfortunately untranslated into English. Yet she wrote several essays on the question, published both in Littérama’ohi and in her 2006 collection of essays Pensées insolentes et inutiles [Insolent and Useless Thoughts].

Spitz notably adopted a very controversial position when stating that political allegiances make some Tahiti-born Chinese more apt to represent Mā’ohi people’s decolonial aspirations than pro-French Mā’ohi themselves. While this statement can seem shocking in other colonial contexts, it made sense in French-occupied Polynesia at the turn of the century. The country had been ruled for twenty consecutive years by a Tahitian leader who defended the nuclear testing program and promoted assimilation into the French Republic.20 In the early 2000s, political opposition to Flosse was becoming more mainstream, and in Chantal Spitz’s island of Huahine, Hakka politician Marcelin Lisan ran against Flosse’s aganda and won the elections to become mayor in 2001. Enlisted in the To Tātou Ai’a party, critical of Flosse’s policies, Lisan was elected on a platform for change. When taking his functions, however, he was subjected to an onslaught of anti-Asian racism by the Tahitian elite benefiting from the status quo. Spitz describes the attack in her striking asyntactic style in an essay entitled “Échos d’un racisme ordinaire” [“Echoes of an ordinary racism”]:

I look at them I listen to them, unanimous to denounce the insidious and dangerous deviation of democracy. Inveigh against the Chinese who was just elected Mayor of Huahine. These are the same people who talk loud and clear about the harmonious pluriethnic society of the island. Lost Mā’ohi people in search of a hypothetical identity, admirers of the reviled papa’ā. Make way for the locals.21

In Hawai‘i, Haunani-Kay Trask argued that Hawaiians should not allow settlers of color to represent their people.22 Here, Spitz’s essays offers a radically different take on non-Native political allyship. She denounces the hypocrisy of some pronuclear Mā’ohi (the “locals”) who seek to secure the comforts of a Western way of life by assimilating into French society and lauding Western (papa’ā) values. In Hawai‘i, Asian settlers may “politicize the term local” to deny their responsibilities toward Indigenous people and justify their political dominance.23 Here, by contrast, Spitz accuses “lost Mā’ohi people” of politicizing the term “local” to exclude their political opponents.

Spitz then moves on to evoke how, like many Mā’ohi people, she has become genealogically linked to Chinese arrivants through her partner’s heritage: “I think about him great-grand-father of my sons, Chinese coolie enslaved by the sugar-cane, tossed around by the waves to make a progeny.”24 Spitz is not attempting here to “create a third space that exempts immigrants from colonial responsibility.”25 Rather, she indicates that she judges people from their current political positioning vis-à-vis French colonialism rather than their ancestors’ deeds. In this framework, she finds herself having more in common with the Chinese mayor opposing Flosse’s regime than with the “lost Mā’ohi people” supporting French colonialism. Spitz adds a unique perspective to Asian settler colonialism debates, arguing that Tahiti-born Chinese invested in the decolonial fight deserve the appellation of “locals”:

Wouldn’t this Chinese-newly-made-mayor be local?

Wouldn’t this Chinese-newly-made-mayor be at home [chez lui]? Wouldn’t this Chinese-newly-made-mayor be my brother?26

The main reason Spitz calls Chinese mayor Marcelin Lisan a “local” is because he does not purport to be what he is not. Spitz has long been vocally opposed to non-Natives performing their Indigenization, repeatedly criticizing what she calls “cultural cannibalism.” She describes it as the settler’s self-proclamation of being “Tahitian at heart,” a proclamation substituting “a few integrating mantra-words” to the learning of the Tahitian language, and the sporting of flowery garments as a substitute for learning Mā’ohi culture.27 For Spitz, settlers who proclaim they are Polynesian are

unaware that by wanting to be others they disown themselves

that by disowning themselves they turn into cultural identitarian cannibals

that by cannibalizing our culture our identity they deprive themselves of sharing with us what they are.28

By contrast, non-Natives such as Marcelin Lisan who do not declare themselves Tahitian at heart, but rather embrace their Chinese heritage, become

strong of their identity

coming to our land [chez nous] in our country

with whom we can share

whom we know how to welcome in our land29

According to Spitz, compartmentalizing the Hakka and Mā’ohi communities in their specificities is a colonial ploy. She suggestss: “to these words of exclusion … let us oppose words of openness of encounter of respect. Words to dismantle institutional racism and undo the folklorization of Indigenous and Hakka communities.”30 Even though Hakka and Mā’ohi people were differently impacted by French nuclear colonialism, and even though the latter do bear the blunt of nuclear violence, Spitz argues that both communities have everything to win in recognizing that they share a common enemy in France’s institutional racism. Spitz’s position thus dismantles the French government’s argument that Tahiti-born Chinese can only remain in Tahiti under the protection of French republicanism.31 In a sense, Spitz is offering a pan-Pacific template for “settler-allyship”32 that can resonate with Indigenous nationalists and settler allies in a variety of Pacific contexts.

One of the ways used by literary writers to highlight the common interests shared by Mā’ohi and Hakka communities is to represent mixed-raced Sino-Polynesian characters, as in Rai Chaze’s stories. A famed Mā’ohi novelist, Chaze wrote her debut work, Vai, la rivière au ciel sans nuages [Vai, River of the Cloudless Sky], at a time when the pronuclear Flosse government was all powerful. One of the stories, “China Blue,” translated into English by Kareva Mateata-Allain, focuses on the fate of mixed-race Mā’ohi-Chinese under the CEP.33

The main character, China, is the daughter of a Marquesan father and a Hakka mother growing up in Tahiti.34 China appears to grow up happily, surrounded by friends on the island’s beaches. But one day, everything is turned upside down as a tall man with a big nose declares that he will build an airport. This foreigner, a clear reference to President Charles de Gaulle, “speaks of force and power, of defense and of bombs. He comes with other men from his country to see the bomb explode over the Pacific sky of the islands of the night.”35 Shortly thereafter, China is diagnosed with leukemia.

What makes Chaze’s story so compelling is the fact that despite her nickname, China, the protagonist ends up embracing her Mā’ohi heritage rather than attempting to integrate into the French system—as people of Chinese descent were encouraged to do by the French government. For example, she speaks Tahitian to denounce the bombs: “E ua huru e roa! / Parau aera o papa, / E tupita ia tei paaina aenei!” [“What strange rain! Daddy says that another bomb exploded”].36 Her use of Reo Tahiti makes her stand against France, as an anonymous voice (presumably her schoolteacher) immediately punishes her for speaking the forbidden tongue: “China! Don’t speak Tahitian! You’ll write a hundred times: I will not speak Tahitian.”37

This story also suggests that it is nuclear colonialism that keeps the Chinese and the Mā’ohi communities apart. Chaze’s narrative choice to make her Mā’ohi Chinese character die of leukemia intimates that nuclear colonialism has put an abrupt end to the intertwining of Chinese and Mā’ohi genealogies. Indeed, in the incipit, China is compared to the fruit of the hotu tumu (barringtonia tree):

China.

You were called China. You sang. And in the blue night, you left without understanding.

At the creation the world, Rahotu created … the hotu, whose useless fruit gives a flower. That flower opens at night like a sun. In the withered sunrise, it falls and quickly disappears into the sand’s humid yellow. And one doubts that the flower ever existed.38

Foreigners in Tahiti are often derisively called “hotu pāinu.” This comparison with the floating fruit of the barringtonia highlights that foreigners have been haphazardly carried to Mā’ohi shores by the waves, that they do not have roots in the country. Yet in Chaze’s incipit, China’s negative association with the “useless fruit” is tempered by the fact that this fruit gives a beautiful flower. “Like a sun,” China exudes happiness, cheerfully singing throughout her few years of life. Comparing her with the hotu is no longer a derogatory allusion to her part-Chinese heritage; rather, it adds to the tragedy of the situation. The child embodying the integration of Chinese heritage to Mā’ohi culture passes away before having had time to dig roots in the island, making one “doub[t] that the flower ever existed.” The question then stands: has Hakka literature imagined the possibility of viable Hakka-Mā’ohi alliance?

French Citizenship in Exchange for Nuclear Bombs: The Devil’s Bargain in Hakka Transpacific Literature

The possibility of Hakka-Mā’ohi alliances permeates the work of the two most famous Hakka writers born in Tahiti: Jimmy Ly and Lillian Howan. From the outset, it should be acknowledged that some of the criticism leveled by literary scholar ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui against Asian settler literature in Hawai‘i holds true in the Tahitian context. Ho‘omanawanui notes that settler representations of the land differ sharply from Indigenous ones. “Natives see these issues differently than settlers do,” she writes. “We are descended from the land and are related to and not separate from elements of ‘nature.’”39 This is evident in Mā’ohi texts such as Chaze’s and Spitz’s, which foreground the importance of the land for Indigenous peoples. By contrast, both Ly’s and Howan’s texts relegate the landscape to “a setting, a background to the plot.”40 Ly and Howan’s books also eclipse the fact that Mā’ohi people suffer the brunt of nuclear colonial violence and are disproportionately impacted by the destruction of their ancestral homelands. With these limitations in mind, however, it can be helpful to turn to Hakka transpacific literature to see how multiethnic solidarities in Mā’ohi Nui can also be built through the mediation of fiction. Thus, in his literary works, Jimmy Ly openly bemoans that his community’s integration into the French Republic came at the cost of nuclear destruction and increased estrangement between the Mā’ohi and the Hakka community.

Born in Papeete in 1941, Ly is a second-generation Hakka Chinese who played a major role in the revalorization of Hakka culture in Tahiti. Questioned by Littérama’ohi alongside Chantal Spitz, he explained his philosophy in terms that echo Spitz’s request to settlers to come as guests. “If Chinese people lose their original particularities,” he says, “they will not bring anything to the Polynesia of tomorrow.… Polynesian people themselves are the ones asking us to bring the best that we have.”41 Far from performing his Indigenization, Ly honors his roots and becomes, as Spitz wished for, strong of his identity and able to be welcomed in the Mā’ohi nation.

In his autobiography, Bonbon sœurette et pai coco [Mayom Candy and Coconut Pai], Ly narrates how he left Tahiti to study in France and came back as the nuclear testing program had thoroughly transformed the island. Published in 1997, one year after the end of the nuclear tests, the book explores how Ly’s identity was shaped by the nuclear industrial complex. Ly acknowledges that it was “hard to call ourselves Polynesian back [in the 1950s] since we were not considered such.”42 Yet at the time of his writing, in the 1990s, he considers himself Polynesian. He clearly uses the word as intended by Flosse, making the prefix “poly” symbolize “not so much the plurality of the islands, but rather an intrinsic ethnic diversity whose most effective cement is the appurtenance to the French Republic.”43

Ly is aware, and highlights throughout his autobiography, that this “Polynesian” integration was a devil’s bargain. He describes Chinese people’s access to French citizenship as preconditioned by their support for the nuclear testing program: The central government “imperatively needed new votes supporting [the CEP] … Thus, in the greater interests of the nation … the Chinese community of Tahiti became entirely French, by the grace of … the diplomatic fallout of nuclear testing in the Pacific” [emphasis added].44 This ironic conclusion, however, does not alleviate what he describes as an irretrievable loss of the prenuclear Tahiti. He depicts the arrival of the CEP as “a nightmarish awakening” segregating the Indigenous and the Hakka communities initially represented alongside each other in the book.45

Bonbon sœurette et pai coco is a story of assimilation into French-occupied Polynesia, but it does not read as a success story. As the author’s identity goes from “Chinese of Tahiti” to “Franco-Polynesian,” he loses access to the delights that brightened his childhood, leaving him with French citizenship and a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. This prenuclear happiness is symbolized by the sugary foods of the title: coconut pai and mayom candy. As Trans-Pacific studies scholar Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland highlights, the food items omnipresent in the autobiography function as madeleines de Proust, automatically bringing the narrator back to his youth.46 Post-CEP, bemoans Ly, “Polynesians” eat mostly American foods, symbolizing their integration in the age of the atomic bomb initiated by the United States. In the last chapter, Ly suggests this nightmare was an inevitable sacrifice to make to enter the era of modernity: “this was the price of progress, and even though [Polynesians] did not know yet what the total bill would be, thoughtlessly maybe, they agreed for the price to pay.”47 Yet despite claiming that the CEP was a necessary plague, the entire book leaves a yearning for a prenuclear Tahiti.

Jimmy Ly’s book does not frontally take a stance for a nuclear-free and independent Mā’ohi country. Yet his writing acknowledges the devil’s bargain made by the Tahiti-born Chinese. Not yet defiant, but already skeptical of French official rhetoric, Bonbon soeurette et pai coco paves the way for later Asian-Oceanian alliances against French nuclear colonialism such as those depicted in Lillian Howan’s debut novel.

Lillian Howan is a third-generation Tahiti-born Chinese. She later moved to Hawaiʻi, but frequently returns to Tahiti.48 In 2017, she published in English The Charm Buyers, a novel about the Chinese diaspora under the CEP, which was given the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for Excellence. The Charm Buyers is narrated through the perspective of the main protagonist, Marc-Antoine Chen, second-generation Chinese settler and son of a wealthy black pearl cultivator. Coming of age in Papeete, Marc drops out of school and soon finds himself committed to the lucrative drug dealing business. Throughout the first half of the novel, retracing these events, the narrator does not think much about the CEP: “even if I thought [nuclear testing] was a bad idea, that thought was a pebble thrown into the sea where it sank forgotten beneath everything I had to think about.”49 The CEP, however, begins to impose itself on Marc halfway through the novel, when Marc comes to meet a Mā’ohi worker named Vetea. When the old Mā’ohi man and the young Chinese dealer are left alone, the narrator evokes the nuclear tests at length for the first time:

Once when we were walking to his field of taro, Vetea told me that he had worked for several years at Mururoa [sic] … “I worked for a long time there,” said Vetea. He paused and looked up at a rambutan tree. “You like rambutan? Come back in a month, when the fruit is ripe.” I knew he would say nothing further about Mururoa [sic]—about how long he had worked there or what work he had done for the CEP. Everyone had signed papers swearing that they would say nothing.50

This first extensive evocation of the CEP places a Mā’ohi protagonist at the center of the nuclear narrative, and the reader can already sketch out the possibility of further exploring Asian-Oceanian dialogue (“come back in a month, when the fruit is ripe”).

Marc’s radicalization, or “ripening,” happens shortly thereafter, as both Vetea and Marie-Laure Li, Marc’s true love, are struck by illnesses explicitly linked to nuclear fallout. After this turning point, references to the CEP proliferate throughout the text. The Chinese characters become highly divided on the issue—some supporting the CEP because of the business it brings, others opposing it, pointing out health risks. Either way, the bomb is on everybody’s lips. The narrator, most affected by his lover’s ill health and medical evacuation to France, becomes thoroughly, albeit belatedly, committed to the antinuclear cause.

This radicalization narrative sharply contrasts with canonical antinuclear Mā’ohi texts. In the novels by Chantal T. Spitz (1991), Titaua Peu (2002), Jean-Marc Tera’ituatini Pambrun (2005), and Rai Chaze (2010), characters become radically opposed to nuclear tests upon learning what the bombs do to the land.51 Here, the Chinese protagonist never mentions “the rape of the land.”52 Rather, he becomes compelled to join the antinuclear struggle once personally affected by the consequences of radioactive fallout, when a close member of his community becomes sick. Yet despite the different roots of his political awakening, the protagonist fully commits to the Mā’ohi struggle. At the end of the novel, he has become ostracized from the pronuclear Chinese bourgeoisie, and his closest friend is a working-class Mā’ohi character, Hinerava (literally “the brown girl”). His commitment to the sovereign Mā’ohi nation is so thorough that he is not even assuaged by the end of the nuclear tests in 1996, exclaiming: “Chirac signed the ban only after hundreds of nuclear tests. That’s like saying you won’t play with matches after you’ve burned down a hundred houses.”53 At that point, his evolution is complete—in Vetea’s words, “the fruit is ripe.”

Lillian Howan’s book goes further than Jimmy Ly’s autobiography in articulating Asian-Oceanian antinuclear solidarities. There are problematic aspects to Howan’s narrative arc: the representation of nuclear violence is limited to its effects on people, eclipsing its effects on the land and on the connection Mā’ohi people have with it. Yet despite these limitations, the novel opens new avenues for thinking about Asian-Oceanian solidarities against French nuclear colonialism. Like Ly, Howan shows that the Hakka community can—and should—side with Mā’ohi people rather than attempting to find a comfortable fit in the French nuclear colony.

Conclusion

Mā’ohi activists have fought against imperialism and environmental racism in all its manifestations, often welcoming Chinese arrivants into their struggle. Some members of the Chinese diaspora have fought alongside Mā’ohi decolonial activists, humbly asking how to be welcomed to their country. Through poetry and fiction, writers identifying along a spectrum of racial identities have forged alternative alliances to France’s prescribed divisions.

In 2016, the editors of Littérama’ohi published a special issue entitled Si tu étais venu chez moi [If you had come to my place]. The founding members of the journal wanted to return to Henri Hiro’s proverbial question: if you come here thinking it is your home, how can I welcome you? When asked how Hiro’s question resonates in the twenty-first century, Jimmy Ly contributed a short story in which a fictional character, “Ah Fong Number XXXX,” shares his anxieties about the place of Chinese arrivants in the Mā’ohi nation. “I came to your place [chez toi] … How could I dream and think that one day, at your place, I could feel at home?”54

Ly’s question is taken up by Mā’ohi writer Odile Purue in the following essay, entitled “Réflections””

Sit by my side and share my meal, my home …

Talk about my culture, my language, legends, stories, live my dances.

Learn how to speak, know how to use the right word to appease social tensions. Say “’Oia ho’i” … Those little words that simply mean “I want to sit by your side” appease wrath, anger … [This is] the path of love and affection that leads to accept and assume responsibilities in the independence of the Mā’ohi people.55

This dialoque shows that the questions raised by Spitz, Chaze, Temaru, and Ly at the turn of the century are still valid and relevant twenty years later. Mā’ohi activists are still fighting against settlers who come to the island as if they were in their own country. This still engenders “wrath, anger,” and “social tensions.”56 The Hakka community still has to “assume [its] responsibilities” toward Mā’ohi independence.57 And many Mā’ohi people are still willing to guide arrivants to find their place in the Mā’ohi nation, often turning to the power of “the right word” to explore Hakka-Mā’ohi solidarities. As Chantal Spitz concludes, such Trans-Pacific literature can “resonate our diversity / bring together our resources / exalt our independences.”58

Notes

1. Ly, Jimmy M. Bonbon soeurette & pai coco. Tahiti: J. M. Ly, 1997, 150. Mitterrand, François. “Allocution by Mr. François Mitterrand, President of the Republic of France, on Decentralization, the Internal Autonomy Status in French Polynesia, its Economic and Social Development, and its Relations with other South Pacific Countries, May 15, 1990.” Public Speech presented at the Territorial Assembly, Papeete, Tahiti, May 15, 1990. https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/128029-allocution-de-m-francois-mitterrand-president-de-la-republique-sur-la. All translations mine.

   Return to note reference.

2. François Mitterand, “Allocution de M. François Mitterrand,” May 15, 1990.

   Return to note reference.

3. Sebastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2021), 131–37.

   Return to note reference.

4. Bruno Barrillot, “Les Irradiés de République : Les victimes des essais nucléaires français prennent la parole” (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe. 2003).

   Return to note reference.

5. Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma, “At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (2022).

   Return to note reference.

6. Jinah Kim and Natasha Sharma, “At the Nexus,” 2022.

   Return to note reference.

7. This is not to say that there were no Asian settlers in Hawai‘i fighting for Kanaka Maoli sovereignty. From Jose Libornio to Patsy Takemoto Mink and Candace Fujikane, Asian settlers have fought, sung, and written for Hawaiian independence. Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai’i,” Amerasia Journal, 26, no. 2 (2000), 1–26, 3.

   Return to note reference.

8. ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui, “‘This Land Is Your Land, This Land Was My Land’: Kanaka Maoli versus Settler Representations of ‘Āina in Contemporary Literature of Hawai‘i,” in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 116–54.

   Return to note reference.

9. Kareva Mateata-Allain, Bridging Our Sea of Islands: French Polynesian Literature within an Oceanic Context (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), 22.

   Return to note reference.

10. Chantal Spitz, Pensées insolentes et inutiles (Papeete, Tahiti: Éditions te Ite, 2006), 221.

    Return to note reference.

11. Chantal Spitz and Jimmy Ly, “Où êtes-vous?” Littérama’ohi 3 (2003): 14.

    Return to note reference.

12. Ernest Sin Chan, Identité hakka à Tahiti: Histoire, rites et logiques (Papeete, Tahiti: Éditions Te ite, 2004).

    Return to note reference.

13. Epeli Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 49.

    Return to note reference.

14. Henri Hiro, Le Rescapé de Tikeroa, quoted in Jean-Marc Tera’ituatini Pambrun, Henri Hiro, Héros Polynésien (Moorea: Puna Honu, 2010), 327.

    Return to note reference.

15. Yuan-chao Tung, “Chinese in Tahiti,” in Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard (Boston: Springer US, 2005), 742–50.

    Return to note reference.

16. Anne-Christine Trémon, “Flexible kinship: shaping transnational families among the Chinese in Tahiti,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, no. 1 (2017): 45.

    Return to note reference.

17. Gaston Flosse, quoted in Bruno Saura, Tahiti mā’ohi: culture, identité, religion et nationalisme en Polynésie française (Papeete, Tahiti: Au vent des îles, 2008), 311.

    Return to note reference.

18. Bruno Saura, Pouvanaa a Oopa: père de la culture politique tahitienne (Papeete, Tahiti: Au Vent des Îles, 2012), 107.

    Return to note reference.

19. Tavini Huira’atira communication, 1991, quoted in Saura, Tahiti mā’ohi, 497.

    Return to note reference.

20. Jean-Marc Regnault, Gaston Flosse: Un Chirac des tropiques? (Papeete, Tahiti: ’Api Tahiti, 2020), 103–20.

    Return to note reference.

21. Spitz, Pensées, 175–76.

    Return to note reference.

22. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (January 1, 2000): 10.

    Return to note reference.

23. Trask, “Settlers,” 9.

    Return to note reference.

24. Spitz, Pensées, 176.

    Return to note reference.

25. Candace Fujikane, “Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawai‘i,” in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 10.

    Return to note reference.

26. Spitz, Pensées, 176.

    Return to note reference.

27. Chantal Spitz, “Cannibalisme Identitaire,” Littérama’ohi 23, no. 1 (2016): 39, and Pensées, 213.

    Return to note reference.

28. Spitz, “Cannibalisme,” 40.

    Return to note reference.

29. Spitz, “Cannibalisme,” 40.

    Return to note reference.

30. Spitz, Pensées, 215.

    Return to note reference.

31. She parallels here Hawaiian studies scholar Noelani Goodyear-Kā‘opua’s call for a “strategic alliance” between Hawaiians and settlers of color, which would include both Native and non-Native activists “as valuable members within this ‘ohana without glossing over the differences between them.” Noelani Goodyear-Kā‘opua, The Seeds We Planted: Portrait of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 9–31.

    Return to note reference.

32. Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 14.

    Return to note reference.

33. Rai Chaze, “China Blue,” in Vārua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia, ed. Frank Stewart, Alexander Mawyer, and Kareva Mateata-Allain, trans. Kareva Mateata-Allain (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 101–3.

    Return to note reference.

34. Interestingly, none of China’s parents are from Tahiti, and both her Polynesian father and her Chinese mother traveled thousands of miles to meet on the island. As Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma remind, “it is not the case that Pacific Islanders, as Indigenous people, stay in place whereas Asians are always only migrants” (Kim and Sharma, this volume).

    Return to note reference.

35. Rai Chaze, Vai: La rivière au ciel sans nuages (Papeete, Tahiti: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1990), 35. Jinah Kim and Natasha Sharma, “At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies.”

    Return to note reference.

36. Chaze, Vai, 35.

    Return to note reference.

37. Chaze, Vai, 36.

    Return to note reference.

38. Chaze, Vai, 34.

    Return to note reference.

39. ho‘omanawanui, “‘This Land,’” 128.

    Return to note reference.

40. ho‘omanawanui, “‘This Land,’” 135.

    Return to note reference.

41. Spitz and Ly, “Où êtes-vous?” 15.

    Return to note reference.

42. Jimmy M. Ly, Bonbon soeurette & pai coco (Tahiti: J. M. Ly, 1997), 113.

    Return to note reference.

43. Bruno Saura, “Tahiti (Polynésie Française) est métissée; mais est-elle métisse?” in Violences Océaniennes, ed. Frédéric Angleviel (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004), 170.

    Return to note reference.

44. Ly, Bonbon, 150.

    Return to note reference.

45. Ly, Bonbon, 143.

    Return to note reference.

46. Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, “Savouring the Francophone Asia-Pacific: Métissage and Foodways in Ook Chung’s Kimchi and Jimmy Ly’s Bonbon Sœurette et Pai Coco,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 18, no. 4 (2015): 455.

    Return to note reference.

47. Ly, Bonbon, 143.

    Return to note reference.

48. Lillian Howan and Leslie Tate, “Tahiti: The Image in the Mind,” Leslie Tate (blog), November 19, 2018. https://leslietate.com/2018/11/6344/.

    Return to note reference.

49. Lillian Howan, The Charm Buyers (Honolulu, University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2017), 231.

    Return to note reference.

50. Howan, Charm, 113.

    Return to note reference.

51. Chantal Spitz, L’île des rêves écrasés (Papeete, Tahiti: Au vent des îles, 1991); Titaua Peu, Mutismes: E ’ore te vāvā (Papeete, Tahiti: Haere Pō, 2002); Jean-Marc Tera’ituatini Pambrun, Le bambou noir (Papeete, Tahiti: Editions le Motu, 2005); and Rai Chaze, Avant la saison des pluies (Mahina, Tahiti: Les Editions Présumées, 2010). For more on Mā’ohi antinuclear literature, see Anaïs Maurer, “Écrire l’histoire autrement: créativité poétique des océaniens antinucléaires,” in Histoire et Mémoire du CEP, ed. Renaud Metz (Paris: Vandémiaire, 2022).

    Return to note reference.

52. Spitz, L’Île, 123.

    Return to note reference.

53. Howan, Charm, 292.

    Return to note reference.

54. Jimmy Ly, “Le jour où Ah Fong était venu chez toi!” Littérama’ohi 23, no. 1 (2016): 23.

    Return to note reference.

55. Odile Purue, “Reflexions inspirées du discours d’Henri Hiro: Rassemblement pour l’indépendance Hau Ma’ohi le 23 mai 1982.” Littérama’ohi 23, no. 1 (2016): 33.

    Return to note reference.

56. Purue, Réflexions, 32–33.

    Return to note reference.

57. Odile Purue, “Reflexions inspirées du discours d’Henri Hiro: Rassemblement pour l’indépendance Hau Ma’ohi le 23 mai 1982.” Littérama’ohi 23, no. 1 (2016): 33.

    Return to note reference.

58. Spitz, Pensées, 168.

    Return to note reference.