“YOU DO LIVE IN A DREAMWORLD,” THE OTHER PEACE CORPS RECRUITS TOLD HER. “THAT’S YOUR GREATEST ASSET.”

Enter that dreamworld in this whimsical, often funny memoir weaving together essays, diary entries, original song lyrics, and even a novella showing how the author chose to fictionalize the true story she relates to us about her life and loves in the Kingdom of Tonga and “the valid expression of human existence” that led her there and back.

Tina Martin, a self-described hypergraphiac who even today rarely travels without pen and notebook in hand, mined her twenty-eight diaries from the Kingdom of Tonga to write this memoir of her life there a half-century ago. Before teaching at City College of San Francisco for thirty-two years, she taught and/or trained teachers on five continents—Oceana, Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. Her most eventful decade was the 1970s, when she lived in Tonga, Spain, and Algeria, got her MA in TESOL, got married, and had a baby, now forty-two years old. Her pieces “An Algerian Wedding” and “Crash Course in Spanish: How Getting Robbed Can Enhance Language Learning” appear in the anthologies I Should Have Just Stayed Home (2003) and I Should Have Gone Home (2005), and “God, President Kennedy, and Me” in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth (2011). She has also written three novels, three full-length plays, and a volume of very bad love poems. Hers is “a valid expression of human existence.”