I am going
halfway across the world to a place I have never been before.
I am going home.
This home
is the Republika ng Pilipinas, an archipelago located about
500 miles from the rest of Asia. Consisting of over seven
thousand islands, the Philippines looks as though Someone had
carelessly dropped a glass figurine, shattering into countless
fragments over the Pacific Ocean. Due to its location, 300
years of Spanish rule and 50 years of U.S. watch, the
Philippines contains pieces of Polynesian, Chinese, Muslim,
Spanish and American cultures. I never could grasp the true
identity of this country, much less the identity of myself. As
a first-generation Philippine-American, I have often wondered
how to answer people when they ask me where I am
from.
“I’m from here,” I would state
plainly.
“No, I mean, where are you from?”
“Well, my parents immigrated from the
Philippines.”
“Are you Chinese, then? You look
Chinese.”
“No, though it seems to be acceptable here to think
that all Asians are the same.”
“Yeah, that’s so true! They do look the
same.”
“Great.”
“How about your name...that’s Spanish, isn’t it? Are
you a Latina?”
“No.”
“What are you?”
“What?”
“Forget it. When are you returning
home?”
If others don’t think America, the country I’ve lived
in for all of my life, is my home, how much more will the
Philippines accept me? And most importantly, will I accept
this country?
My paternal grandfather—“Papa”—is the reason why I am
going to such a nebulous mass of islands. He feels as though
his time is near and wants the pieces of his family, scattered
over the United States, near him. The whole family will have
to leave the comforts of the fast-paced Americanized lifestyle
for the serenity of the home they
outgrew.
Time limits are mystery to me. Adults tell me I am at
the peak of my hedonistic life, where I refuse to see the
bottom of the hill. They tell me that I see an illusion of
immortality—a flat plain, instead. I hardly ever converse with
anyone older than sixty. I avoid the elderly, as though their
rusty spirits were contagious. When I was much younger, my
elementary school chorus performed at a nursing home, which
was also my first visit to a place like this. Even now I can
see the yellowing paint on the abandoned walls; I can breathe
in the dry air invaded with dust and the heavy smell of Lysol;
I can hear the faint, indecipherable murmurs. Some students
talked to the wheelchairs. Others passed out cookies to
wrinkled, shaking hands. I stood near the punch bowl and
pretended to be busy, averting eye contact. We began our
performance with an American song, moving tunelessly to a
piece about an everlasting flower and ending with a spiritual.
The finale was peaceful, legato, slowly increasing to an
allegro. Right before the music ended, a resident who was
immobile earlier suddenly stood up.
“Hallelujah! The Lawd is a-comin’! Amen!” she prayed,
clapping her hands. She then raised her hands to the sky and
fell over. A flash of white passed in front of us as the aides
ran to the delicate woman, her breath now permanently
shattered.
We were chauffered out of the room. Later, as
we left the nursing home, two somber men carried out a steel
bed covered with a white blanket.
I thought I could easily avoid reminders of a drawn-out
death. For awhile, I did. I grew up in a young city; the Civil
War destroyed Atlanta, and now, rising business and technology
augments further demolition of the remaining historical
landmarks. People still died, of course, but they were young:
a 32-year-old teacher died in a car accident, a
twelve-year-old acquaintance died from a heart problem, an
epileptic father of three was beaten to death by a couple of
teenagers, my aunt had a brain tumor and became the first
person on my father’s side to die, a friend from high school
shot herself. For as long as I have remembered, I’ve watched
the news with apathy. Young adults, teenagers, children—they
all died, one way or the other.
Dying from old age, on the other hand, seemed to be an
old wives tale. It seemed to be bewildering, unreasonable to
wait so long to die. Or maybe I found old age mystifying
mainly because I didn’t know Papa and Mama well. Old people,
as I knew them, did not have pasts. They began old.
My parents
never told me any stories, and I never found it appropriate or
necessary to ask. Here and there, I would hear delicate
fragments of a past life. I have all these shattered ends, but
I have never been able to piece together a coherent, linear
tale. My parents left the Philippines to come to the land of
opportunity after college; the new world does not hold
memories. My father intended to return home after he finished
his medical residency in Chicago; instead, he married a
beautiful Filipina nurse and settled down in a cozy Baltimore
suburb. The historical text ended, and the subtle romance
novel began.
Even when
my grandparents visited, the past was difficult to piece
together. Nothing they did made sense. Papa and Mama would
stay in the house and, in my elementary eyes, wander around.
At the break of dawn, they were already up, cooking almusal
-- breakfast; usually they made these sweet and salty
sausages called longaniza or a sweet cured pork called
tocino. These meats would be laid on a paper towel
covered plate, alongside a bowl of yesterday’s rice, fried
simply with garlic. If the savory smell did not break through
my dreams, the zip of Mama’s slippers against the plastic
floor would gently rock me to consciousness. Around 6 o’clock
Mama would call our nicknames: “J’mee! J’nell! Tong-boy!
Kain na! (Eat!)”
I would
rise slowly yet deliciously. My parents, however, were already
up and rushing to work, to the hospital, to save lives. They
left without breakfast. When my siblings and I entered the
kitchen, Mama would kiss us on the cheeks. Her kisses were the
special “Mama” kiss—she would bring my cheek near hers and
inhale deeply.
Their
constant movement took place of verbal communication. While we
ate, Mama would slowly sweep the already clean vinyl floors
with a bamboo broom. Papa would take out his cards and glasses
and play solitaire on the table. I did not know how to play
solitaire until a few years later, so the game seemed more
like an endless shuffling and reorganization of cards. I would
stand by his side, observing his preoccupation; he did not
acknowledge me. However, whenever I bent down to scratch my
leg or retrieve a fallen card, Papa would turn his head to the
side, looking for me. Then he would return to the
game.
Lunch was
simple—a salty dried fish called tuyo, again
accompanied by rice. Mama and Papa would slowly pick out the
bones, mixing the meat in the sticky rice with their fingers.
In the afternoons, they would sit together on the couch and
watch soap operas. “Days of Our Lives” and “As the World
Turns” were their favorites. Occasionally, I would sit on the
floor near them and attempt to watch. When the shows ended,
Mama went into the garden and knelt by the flowers, while Papa
busined himself in the garage, building small wooden benches
for us until evening. Then they softly ate dinner with my
parents and three children, and around 9 p.m. they were in
bed. Quiet routine was as stimulating to them as the
unexpected was to me.
Their past
was different from today. They raised seven children on a
sugar cane farm. Mama held social dances and sewed beautiful
dresses with puffy sleeves—baro’t saya--for her
daughters. My aunts sometimes criticized their children’s
dances, comparing them to their own social soirees. They were
the debutantes of Luzon City. Papa was an engineer; he later
taught military strategies at my father’s school, which, as
nepotism decreed, allowed my father to become the sergeant of
his class. My grandparents made sure all of their children
received a college education. Five went into the health field,
two became accountants.
Before
this peaceful life, Papa was a prisoner in the Bataan Death
March.
I learned about the Bataan Death
March from a couple of paragraphs pre-highlighted in used
history books from school, not from emotional stories told
around the dinner table or lengthy tales from Papa. In the
early stages of World War II, the Japanese forced thousands of
Filipinos to march miles across their homeland. One such march
was from Mariveles to San Fernando, where the POWs were then
cramped into cargo train-cars and marched again to Camp
O’Donnell. If a prisoner collapsed from hunger, fatigue, heat,
disease, dehydration, he was immediately shot or beaten to
death. In the train-cars, however, there was no room for the
dead to fall. Out of 70,000 prisoners—both Filipinos and the
American soldiers--about 45,000 reached the camp. After
reaching the camp, at least 25,000 more Filipinos died within
the first four months of captivity.
That was
all I knew.
I was
studying for a history test in high school and showed the
small paragraph to my father. He briefly mentioned “Papa was
in the Death March.”
He
wouldn’t say any more. I don’t think he was trying to keep
anything secret. It was simply the way the past existed in our
family. Perhaps the idea of sharing emotions was distasteful
to my father. Perhaps he wanted to protect me from the past. I
wanted to learn the meaning of time. Perhaps he believed the
world now has no need for the painful fragments of yesterday.
I wanted to feel that pain. I needed to understand, to see, to
learn. I wanted to know: Are Filipinos a little bit of every
culture except ourselves, or do the pieces somehow form its
own identity?
I am going
home to find those broken pieces.
When I
arrive in Manila, Philippines, there are at least twenty of my
relatives and their relatives waiting for me at the airport.
They had bought me duty-free chocolate bars like Toblerone,
flowers, tropical fruits, a straw bag. They smile, laugh, hug,
ask me about my flight, my family, my home. What is the
uso – the trendy thing to do? Do you have any chis
mis to tell us about your brother and sister, or on those
Hollywood celebrities? What is it like in your home, the
States?
I smile
and tell them that I am home now. They laugh, a happy, excited
laugh, laughing because they are happy to see me, laughing
because they want me to consider this country home, laughing
because they like to laugh. The Filipino people are a happy
people.
It is hot
outside.
We travel
in an air-conditioned (luxury) van through the city, avoiding
brown people callously crossing the middle of the streets,
jumping onto buses, hailing down jeepneys, remnants of World
War II, surplus American G.I. jeeps that have been repainted
with flowering colors, folk art, silver lettering and now used
as a mini-mass transit system. We pass a marketplace, rows of
raw whole chicken sitting out in the sun, flies swarming,
people pointing with their pesos. Further out, huge tubes of
cement stored aside for later construction use sit atop each
other, the holes covered by thin cloth. We pause at a stop
light. I look closer at the tubes; the cloth raises from one
tube, a man comes out, goes to the tube next to his and wakes
up someone else. People live there.
A few
hours pass, and the scene has less urban poverty, more rural
poverty. Recent weather events, such as tornadoes, caused the
rice patties to flood, and the people are desolate, said one
distant relative. I gaze across the hills overflowing with
water. On the side of the road are two men, farmers perhaps,
one holding a bamboo stick with string cast into the water,
the other holding a sign telling motorists they have fresh
fish for sale.
We
continue on. I ask tentatively about Papa, hoping they won’t
think I am being too direct. They laugh. It seems that the
indirectness only comes when Filipinos are in a foreign place.
When they are home, everything is told. Loudly. With laughter.
They say Papa is all right, he’s been grumpy lately, he’s
stubborn, he’s Papa. They say the stroke he suffered wasn’t so
bad, he can still talk, he gets lost in his words a few times,
he needs to walk with a cane now, but mostly, he’s the same
Papa. They laugh again, tumbling into the bright tones of
Tagalog, pausing every now and then to translate if I look
confused.
We arrive at the
Rhodora compound—named in memory of Papa and Mama’s daughter.
I settle in, trying to ignore the pervasive heat, and
immediately everyone encourages me to eat: Kain na!
Mama comes to me, slowly, with a smile on her face, trembling.
She brings her face to my cheek, and
inhales.
We eat.
Adobong pusit. Sinigang. Pan de sal. Pinakbet. Ensaymada.
Laing. Lumpia Shanghai. Siopao. Pancit luglug. Halo-halo.
Cute names, tasty dishes, different origins. But all
currently, definitely Filipino, if for no other reason than
the phonetic respelling of the dishes.
I fill my
plate and sit to the side, on a bamboo chair, observing the
family—my family—interact. Then Papa arrives, late, waving
everyone to continue eating, and comes towards me. I get up,
place my dish to the side, and we share a brief hug before he
waves me away.
“You eat,”
he says.
I
eat.
When the
dishes are cleared, the relatives begin leaving, a kiss from
each one. “We will pick you up tomorrow; we will go around the
city; we will take you to this American restaurant called
Friday’s, it’s the uso,
ba?”
I nod,
suppressing a giggle, and return to where my grandparents are
sitting.
“J’mee...”
Mama motions for me to sit down on their plastic-covered
couches. Her eyes are expectant; she wants to say more but
cannot grasp the English. She has forgotten that I learned
Tagalog by the sheer need to eavesdrop on my parents. Or
perhaps she can no longer grasp Tagalog as well—in the
Philippines, each province, each neighborhood, has its own
dialect, which usually has little similarities to Tagalog, the
national language. My father’s family speaks Pangasinan, more
gutteral, more percussive, and definitely a different
vocabulary and sentence structure altogether.
Papa
watches me sit down, nods approvingly, and holds his cane with
both of his hands, ready to rise. He remains.
“Your
father...he said you want to know more about the family. About
the past. About the war.”
“Yes.”
“I will
tell you.”
His head
lowers for a bit. Mama moves away from him to the other couch,
still trembling, still looking at me with expectant eyes.
He begins
his story, the words accented, retold, historical, personal,
disjointed. “During the war, this World War II, I was a medic.
I was going to be an engineer and run our farm. But the war
had started. The Americans had come, the Japanese had come,
and the war had started, and I was to join the Allied Forces.
I had just married Mama; we were just newly
married.”
Mama
places her hands gently in her lap.
“I was not
fighting; I wanted to help people. I did not know when I
joined the army how horrible it would be. The pain. The
wounds. The diseases. You could not help everyone, just as
much as you could. We were starving, there was so little food
left. We ate horses, carabao, snakes,
monkeys.”
I wait to
hear the kinds of bloodshed, stories, scenes. Instead, he
brings his old hands to his forehead, squeezes. A faint sound
comes from him.
“And Mama
was at home, with our first born, your Tita
Cleofe.”
Mama
stands up, shuffles over to a closet, brings out a bamboo
broom and begins sweeping, like the years ago when she would
sweep the already-clean floor.
“They
captured us, the Japanese, there was very little resistance.
And once we were captured, they began to march us, in long
lines, for many, many miles, shouting at us in Japanese,
making us march without rest, without food, without water. We
drank from puddles which caused dysentery. So many men dying,
I’ve never seen...”
Again, his
hand quickly goes up to hide his face. His eyes begin to
redden.
“Whenever
someone fell down, they were kicked, shot, killed by bayonet,
beheaded. They seemed to enjoy torturing us. One man had found
his father, who had fallen over, and was trying to help him
up. He was trying to help him up,
and...”
He stops
again, holding his forehead.
“And he
tried to explain that this was his father, and the enemy kept
yelling at him. In the end, they killed his father. Right in
front of him.”
A long
silence passes, only broken by the zip of Mama’s slippers
against the floor.
“I did not
know anyone marching with me. We were all strangers, and we
were all scared. I only thought of Mama, my family, my child.
I knew that I would not survive. I was already sick. Only a
matter of days before I too would
collapse.”
He begins
crying. I reach to get the box of tissues; Mama in the
meantime has moved over to me, her hands signaling for me to
give her the box. She nods her head, hands the tissues over to
Papa. He looks at Mama’s hands for a minute. She stands there
next to him, silent. He dabs his eyes, clears his throat, and
continues.
“We passed
by rice fields. Endless rice patties, hills, places to escape,
places to run. I looked out over the land. I wanted to see
Mama again. So I began to run. I’ve never ran faster in my
life...I heard yelling from far away, commotion. I didn’t turn
back. Just running over the dryer footpaths of the fields. I
saw little splashes of water around me. They were shooting.
But I just ran.”
By now,
tears are streaming down his scrunched up face, his body is
shaking. The emotional trauma caused by such an event combined
with the physical trauma of his recent stroke takes its toll.
He cries for a while, with Mama trying to hand him a new
tissue. I rise, hold my Papa, trying not to think about my
existence had he decided at that exact moment to act
differently.
I realize,
in the hug, that the broken pieces I had been looking for all
along, were never really broken. What I had considered
fragments are actually whole. Simple.
His tears
stop and he waves me away—9 p.m., time for bed. His hands
tighten over the knob of his cane, and he raises himself up,
proud, wise, experienced.
“Mama,” he
calls, and she follows him.
--jmfe