Fanggualo’

Written by Lehua Taitano | November 2019

Fresh | photo by ifit

Pulan : Fangualo’ - planting season

Tonight I realize we are gathered around a guafak we are weaving with our hearts. With our intentions and need and desire for something deeper. This is my second Pulan Collective gathering, and I am eager and shy. Just last month I was introducing myself to the group for the first time, as we sprawled on blankets in the park and talked story and thought of how Angela’s baby would be born into this group of loving CHamoru aunties. 

Now we prepare a feast of familiar foods that join us all in celebration of not only the birth of a beautiful neni girl, but our owns families, our shared histories, and each other.  I urge my heart to open to the possibilities of sisterhood, and I find I am met with a love so fulfilling and necessary that I wonder at how powerfully migration and diaspora has expanded and contracted around our lives. Though we are gathered away from our island, we bring our island with us wherever we go. And because we have come together, the sense of home is so focused, so amplified, I scarcely remember to be shy or reserved among these women I already call familia. 

We eat and tell stories of food—always food. We pinch shrimp heads between our fingers and slurp coconut milk while remembering other times we’ve eaten shrimp heads. Or we plan for times to come when we’ll make the kåddo the same or a maybe just a little differently or maybe we’ll make it the way our bihas made it, who knows.  All the while, our hearts work at the guafak, preparing a place for us to keep gathering. The place for family and hope and births and home. For the first time in a long, long time, I feel just the right amount of full.

Menu

• whole head-on shrimp kåddo with white rice

• purple yam chips with spicy mayo

• pickled daikon with donne’

• pickled green papaya with donne’

• roast lamb with squash & pumpkin 

• fuyu persimmons

• fresh fruit salad