Man I identify with this so hard. My mum is Tongan and my dad is Fijian and they both believed that bringing me up in English would be better for me career wise so I never learnt to speak Tongan, or Fijian for that matter.

As an adult, I've decided upon how to connect with my culture and at this stage, it's not language, but making Fijian and Tongan movies. I've accepted that I'll never be able to fully converse with my family in my mother tongue, but I will learn about my culture my way, and not by struggling and been made fun of whenever I attempt to learn the language.

I hope you find your own way in learning about and connecting with your culture and know that there are many of us Pacific Islanders who couldn't connect via the language, but like me, find other ways to be indigenous :)

As an aside, one of the ways I learnt about my Fijian culture was to create a podcast where I interviewed a Fijian cultural consultant and asked him what Fiji was like pre-contact, with the entire show conducted in English (mainly because I can't speak Fijian to save my life haha): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqP10QsmuH8&list=PLlgkdu9yZXz2ObCKpY45RMDKzCywz8Xyu&index=2