As a boy growing up in Tonga, Simi Poteki remembers watching a couple get into a fight that led to the husband beating his wife.
His father told Simi, “Turn away, stay out of it. It’s not your problem, that’s his wife, she belongs to him, you have no say.”
And so he stayed out of it.
The boy grew up, stowed away on a freighter bound for North America, got caught, stowed away on another ship, then another. By the time he was 23, he’d stowed away on seven ships, and got caught every time. Simi Poteki was a lousy criminal.
But his persistence, in a convoluted way, proved to be his way out. Just before his 24th birthday, a sympathetic clerk at the American consulate heard his story and took pity on him, granting him a visa and green card so he could come to the United States legally and see what he could make of himself.
That was almost 50 years ago. Simi, 72, is retired now, able to look back on a successful career as a bus and truck driver (including 2 million miles of safe driving with Utah Transit Authority). He and his first wife, who died in 2002, raised four children, all of them grown and raising families of their own.
And what’s he doing in his golden years?
Leading a cause that encourages men to stop beating their wives.
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It wasn’t until Simi married his second wife, Susi, that he stopped staying out of it.
Susi had been married three times before, and every husband had one thing in common: they beat her up. When she left the third one, she was fed up enough to become an activist against domestic violence.
When she and Simi were married in 2010, she began educating him about how wrong it is for men to think women are their property and they have the right to hit them. The message really sank in when Susi invited Simi to come with her to San Francisco for the Asian American Pacific Islander Violence Prevention Conference of 2014.
“That’s where I started to understand that I had been around domestic violence…
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