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Not at all true.

"You are a good wife and mother."

Even less true; I was there with my adult daughter, a darling blond 22-year-old who didn't need mothering, and I hadn't had a husband around for years. "For Samoans, age isn't important. Only the love is important," he said when I pointed out the blinding difference in our ages. He was a waiter at Aggie Grey's Hotel in Samoa. I was a guest on my last day in the country, and I just wanted to lie by the pool and try not to think about flying away from this paradise. He had been standing in the sun's heat for 45 minutes, holding his tray and trying to persuade me to meet him in my hotel room. I was amused, but not at all tempted. He was sweet, a tall Samoan with a really nice smile and cocoa-colored skin. He was also younger than any of my children -- and seemingly out of his mind. About 6 feet away a retired Australian couple lay silent, lapping it all up.

I've traveled to the South Pacific often, always to the tiny island nation of Samoa. The young men there, in all honesty, are ravishing. Before they settle into their village chiefdom, where the size of their bellies reflects their status, they are gods of the rain forest. As boys they run barely clad through the taro plantations on errands for their elders. They tote water, palm branches and baskets of coconuts suspended on poles that span their widening shoulders. And they climb coconut trees.

I watched an 8-year-old boy fetch my breakfast one morning: He tied one end of a rag to each ankle to keep his feet about 10 inches apart; then he wrapped his arms around a hairy tree trunk and scampered up in thrusts. Soon the blond nui, the youngest coconuts, dropped and rolled in all directions. It takes any kid there about 90 seconds to whack out a hole in the top of the fruit with his bush knife. The prize is sweet -- creamy, cool coconut milk. These boys, whose small hands become deft at handling bush knives as children, grow to young men with prominent calf muscles and broad backs, black hair and flashing smiles. I'd see them at large along village roads, completely bare except for the brightly colored, saronglike lava lavas knotted at their waists and the large hibiscus flowers stuck behind one ear. They seemed so easy in their bodies, surely ready for any urgency.

These are young men descended from the Samoans whose bush knives cleared a path up the steep side of Mount Vaea in 1894 as they carried Robert Louis Stevenson, that "sailor, home from the sea," to the mountaintop for burial. These are young men who spend hours at sea spearing fish and octopuses, who cut grass by hand, their bush knives doing a mower's work. Many come of age by enduring weeks of tattooing, painfully earning the tatau that covers every inch of their lower body in traditional patterns. And these are young men who sometimes wear "Samoan Power" T-shirts and watch the latest American video violence on TV screens that glow from their open thatched huts late into the night.

But mostly they wear no shirts. They are works of art in their own natural setting, Polynesian possibilities of the imagination.

Most fully grown women who travel outside the United States know how easy it is to attract a man's lingering glance far from home. Once away from the States' tiresomely stylish and annoyingly fit females, normal-size American women who travel to other, more reasonable cultures are valued for their natural and uncontrived charms. It's fun and it's flattering. But when the attention comes from actual boys, it's always so surprising.

During one hourlong wait for takeoff at LAX on a nearly empty plane, I desultorily resisted a young Samoan man's invitations for me to sit beside him for the nine-hour trip to Pago Pago. I had no desire to sit next to anyone when I could have an entire row to myself, and I mostly ignored him. But after he described the tour of the island he had in mind for "us" on our arrival, I finally asked:

"Why are you interested in me? I'm probably your mother's age."

"But I like you."

I asked him if he was attracted to me "because I'm palagi" -- not Samoan. He admitted it was true, saying, "Palagi women have white skin and they know what they want." I thought he might mean they are self-directed, independent women who travel alone and love it, as I do. Then I wondered just what all those other women wanted and how they knew it.

Next page | "I'd like to climb the coconut tree with you"