Friday Feedback

Thanks so much for sharing your truthful writing journey. I am still trying to find my voice. I especially like your one liners after the dialogue: I blink in disbelief. His head tilts as he studies me. My jaw drops. His eyes gleam. Showing not telling. Great banter going on.
I am sharing an excerpt from something I have been working on very slowing. I only have one chapter. The character is based on our experience with adopting our own daughter from Tonga. Our daughter has also given me details. When I start to crawl, my mother wraps me around her waist with a bright cotton cloth, and we walk three or four miles to the bush. The bush is ghetto. The bush is shacks, no electricity, plumbing, or phones. My mother’s mother is there; grandma, kui fefine, barely a grandma herself, for she was sixteen when she bore her first child.
“Still sleeping with married man?” says kui fefine.
She ignores her mother’s question, and instead asks: “Can you take Samena for awhile? She is crawling now, and I cannot keep her.”
“I have five other mouths to feed, and where will I get food for them and her?”
“I will send money.”
Kui fefine swats at a fly around her head. “Did you see that woman in town who is taking babies to America? You should talk to her, better life for Samena.”
That is my name. Samena. My mother did go see the woman from America, and the woman gave her some instructions of things for her to accomplish before she could take me to America. First, my mother took me to a dingy clinic in which a German doctor with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth had to sign a paper that I was fit. Then, I had my picture taken for a VISA, and I look sad. I was three and a half by the time everything went through. I know all these things because my adopted mother told me. I asked her over and over again to tell me about my birth mother, tell me about Tonga, tell me anything and everything.
This is what she knows, and what I know. My mother was 15 when she had me. Her mother, kui fefine, kicked her out because she disgraced her family hooking up with a married man. So, my mother lived in a shack with another girl who was also in the same predicament.
I was three when I boarded a plane with a lady who put a new dress and some new underwear on me. My ears hurt on the plane and I was scared of the toilet. I watched out the window as the palm trees swayed, and the ocean stretched out. I had never seen the ocean, and I did not know what it was. I pointed, and the lady said, “tahi,” or sea. The blue green water looked like swaying grass. I awoke once in the semi-darkness, and cried out for my mother. The lady comforted my whimpering, and I fell asleep. When I woke again, the gray dawn was peeking through the small window.