Tonga Time

You completely forget English while simultaneously becoming fluent in the Tongan language of Polynesia. What’s the sitch?

Your two options here are to stay where you are and attempt to re-learn English from scratch, or move to the Kingdom of Tonga and start fresh.

Tonga is group of islands in the picturesque South Pacific, where I’m sure I’d get a friendly exchange rate on my American cash (them greenbacks). The women would potentially be wearing coconut bras, and I could set up a nice life for myself in a simple shack on a quiet beach. Spear fishing can’t be that hard, and you can cut out any melanoma with a sharp knife and some palm tree-based moonshine. 

On the other hand, Amuurica is the best Got-damned country in the world. The streets are paved with gold, the rivers flow with honey, etc. It would be hard to leave this place. But, one of the strongest features of this country is its intolerance of outsiders. We discriminate against those who are different until they are forced to blend in… the great melting pot. As a person without any knowledge of the English language, I would instantly be one of those outsiders, and it may be hard to get around this place, even as a white male. 

I do have a great safety net in my friends and family, but it wouldn’t be easy to maintain some of those relationships, no matter how bad we wanted to. It would take years to be able to communicate on a level anywhere close to what we knew before, and by that point we would all be very different people. I could take classes, I could… I could also go spear fishing with the coconut-clad women. 

I think the best option is to do a little of both. This weird native language amnesia is really a great opportunity: I would move to Tonga and take English classes there. The years of slogging through the exceptions under strict Tongan school masters (“That I-E couplet is after a C dumbass!!”) would be spent alongside endless sunshine, fresh seafood, and again, coconut-based booze and women. I would keep a blog of my time spent there, which would gradually become legible to my American contacts (as I both learned English and learned to handle my moonshine), and would move back home when the time was right.  Frankly, I hope this happens to me.