As Talanoa Hufanga prepared for his first day working his ancestral farm in Tonga, he didn’t pay much mind as his cousins wrapped themselves in protective gear, leaving nothing exposed but their eyes. It was a hot, humid summer day on the island, and the 14-year-old Hufanga didn’t want to be encumbered by the layers.
And his cousins knew not to say anything to the newcomer. He had to learn for himself.
So he went about the chores, leading cows on ropes from tree to tree so they could graze, collecting coconuts to feed the pigs. And when he trudged back to the family home at the end of the day, Hufanga was covered, not just with sweat and dirt, but a litany of mosquito bites.
“Never again. Any part of my skin that was open, I really got ate up,” Hufanga chuckled. “My dad was laughing at me, too.”
But it was just part of the initiation. Hufanga’s father, Tevita, had planned this trip since before his second son was born: to take his child to Tonga, his home island, and teach him about his own childhood.
Now, seven years later, after a standout career as a safety at USC and on the verge of being an NFL draft selection, the pilgrimage to the South Pacific still resonates with Hufanga.
“It just kind of humbled me in the sense that I’m grateful for everything I have,” he reflected. “You go to a place like that and see how my pops was raised is very different from how I was raised. He came from living on dirt floors to where he is now, it’s a different lifestyle.
“It made me work that much harder just to try to do what I can do and be the better version of myself because that was the best version of himself … moving and creating a better life for his family.”
Taking root
At first, Tevita Hufanga wasn’t sure about moving stateside. His parents settled in San Diego when he was 16, but the culture shock made Tevita move back to Tonga to stay with his uncles while he completed high school.
“Everything was bigger. It wasn’t what I expected,” Tevita said. “I thought it was going to be similar to a small town.”
He rejoined his parents in Southern California at 18. He enrolled in some community college classes but eventually decided to focus on work instead.
A family friend set him up with a gig with a construction company and he did whatever labor was asked of him. It was hard work, but he had grown up farming his own food in Tonga. Every paycheck Tevita earned went to his parents, with nothing saved for him.
“I was raised to work,” Tevita said. “The opposite of working hard is not doing anything, and I’d rather work.”
As he worked in San Diego, Tevita met his future wife, Tanya. They visited her native Oregon, a state he had never heard of in Tonga but reminded him more of his homeland. He got a job at Hewlett Packard in material handling, the beginning of an ongoing, 30-year career, and he and Tanya began to lay their roots.
They had two sons, T.J. and Talanoa, and bought a farm in Corvallis. As they established their goals for their family, one always rose to the top of the list: taking their children to Tonga so they could understand where their father, and by extension they themselves, came from.
“We made it happen,” Tevita said, adding that his message to his sons was, “The way I am is because of how I was raised. You’re part of that culture, even though you were born and raised in Oregon.”
On the island
Talanoa Hufanga was always an athletic kid. He played basketball and soccer in addition to football, and his father would take him after school to the local track and so he could run laps to burn off excess energy.
But that did not prepare him for what he saw when he went to the beach in Tonga and played volleyball with his cousins, who leaped higher and smacked the ball harder than Hufanga could have expected.
“It’s almost a hidden strength,” Hufanga recalled. “They’re just way more athletic than you and sit there wondering like, ‘What?’ You just wouldn’t believe it.”
In his two weeks in Tonga, Hufanga got to know more family members than he knew existed. They went to church and roasted a pig in the ground. Tevita’s plan had always been to take his children to Tonga when they were old enough to appreciate the experience and the meaning behind the journey.
Hufanga will spend the weekend in Oregon watching the NFL draft with his family. But he spent his draft preparation where his father’s American journey began, in San Diego, living out of hotels as he trained with former Trojan great Troy Polamalu. And the memories from his trip to Tonga with his father have stuck with Hufanga as he prepares for this next chapter.
“What I got to see and witness was something truly inspirational,” Hufanga said. “It helped when I got to visit for sure because I got to see the different things and what he had to endure on a daily basis. For me, I just try to make the most of what I have right now.”
