It was easy to see that my parents had an auspicious business partnership, complementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As to whether or not it was a happy marriage, I do not know.
My father was the third of four children born to an unschooled fishmonger. (I later heard from a relative that my grandfather Jose’s own family was more prominent but that Jose was disinherited.) Never having known his own father who died when he was five years old, Abelardo helped his mother catch mudfish and collect vegetables for sale in the wet market. He taught himself how to read from the old newspapers used to wrap their products. His mother, realising her son’s aptitude, asked more prosperous relatives residing in a bigger town to let my father stay in their household whilst he went to school there. By the time he was twelve, he was self-supporting, making and selling handicraft he was taught at school, and sharing his earnings with his mother.
After graduating from secondary school, however, he realised the only way he could go on to university was if he could win a scholarship. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s scholarships were scarce and thus competition to secure one was fierce. For many of these opportunities, there were several qualifying examinations to be hurdled until, through a pyramidal process of elimination, one candidate was finally selected. He had already been awarded a scholarship for the newly-formed sugar technology degree at the University of the Philippines when he was informed that he had also passed the initial qualifying examinations to be a pensionado5 at the Annapolis Naval Academy in the United States. Reasoning that a bird in the hand was better than two in the bush, he accepted the offer from the University of the Philippines. It was a fortuitous decision for I could not imagine my retiring father in military uniform! Later on, he taught himself chemistry and successfully took another examination, becoming a registered chemist in 1955.
It was my father who was the greatest influence in my life. It was he who insisted that I learn to drive, uncommon among Filipinas my age, so that I could take care of myself. It was he who encouraged me to read and learn because what I put inside my head nobody could take away. And it was he who later advised me to leave the business school where I had a frustrating career because, if I were willing to work hard, why should I let others take the fruits of my labour? Because of my father, I was never sensitised to the notion of gender role typing—I had always thought that men and women, aside from minor differences, were not merely equal but, essentially, the same. To this day, I still get surprised every time I observe glaring differences!
It was only much later when I accepted the fact that, like all people, my father was not perfect. My mother was highly emotional, using physical force in their quarrels, hitting her children when they disobeyed, whilst my father valued peace above all else. Likewise, whereas my mother was steeped in the political machinations of her siblings in order to wrestle and wield power in our town, my father didn’t concern himself with politics. This was brought to a head when our house was machine-gunned by the political rival. Father was home at the time. He quietly walked to the movie theatre at the opposite side of the street. The gunmen, knowing that he was not involved, held their fire as he crossed the street. I was by then already out of the country but I would have been surprised if my mother’s guards had not returned fire. (If I remember correctly, she had two armed guards by our house at all times.) Despite such rivalries, nobody appeared to have been hurt. It was simply a show of force, a political charade. It would, however, culminate in my mother once more using her networks—a senator here, a general there—ultimately leading to a warning from the provincial military commander directed at her political foes to desist from their intimidation. It paid to have friends in high places.
If the incident seems slightly farcical, my memories of fright in the wrath of my mother are still vivid. I missed the protection of my father, as indeed I saw in the case of my eldest sister. He abstained from what I thought was my mother’s unfair treatment of my sister in order to preserve peace in the family. Possibly to compensate, those of us who were lacking my mother’s affection, including my eldest sister and my younger brother, he took under his wing. Just as he encouraged me to take advanced degrees, he apprenticed my younger brother in his work. Hence, when he died, it was not his eldest son—among my mother’s favourites—who took over the reins of the business, but my younger brother as it was my younger brother who was more familiar with—and interested in—my father’s work. These early memories would imprint in me a deep regard for fairness, which would later dominate my relationships with others, and pit me against practices in a culture that didn’t value it as highly, and didn’t consider it an essential component of justice.
Early Memories
I woke up in the brightness of the white noonday sun. Lying in bed, alone in the room, I stared at the ceiling. Presently, my grandmother came and cooed, “Good girl, she was by herself and didn’t cry, nice girl.” She picked up my bottle and fed me. I felt good, not about the bottle, but about her praising me. Thus, my earliest recollection dealt with positive reinforcement, a pat on the back for a job well done. Ever since then, I have always hungered for pats-on-the-back. Psychologists call this imprinting—earliest experiences that form part of the backbone of one’s personality.
I felt comfortable that day, lying on the mat atop a woven cane bed. (My family didn’t sleep on mattresses in those days.) It was a sizeable room with a huge ceiling fan and large windows on both sides. My memory cuts across time because I always associate that pleasant and bright image with the fear that one night someone or something, a hairy hand perhaps, would reach through such a window as we had, and steal me away when no one was looking. I must have gotten this image fixed in my mind from one of the stories told to my cousins and me by a household helper, or perhaps by Felix who operated the projector in my mother’s movie house next door. Whichever way it was, I carried the idea well into adulthood that happy moments were not meant to last—there would be a hairy hand coming after you. Who knows, perhaps they influenced my anxiety-ridden life, and shaped me into the ever superstitious adult that I became, my training in science notwithstanding.
Felix would tell us stories about the Bagat, an evil old woman with hair standing straight out of her scalp, who waylays people walking alone at night. What she does with these people, one never knows—they simply disappear forever. The Bulalakaw are fiery birds. Don’t be in their path or they will drop a curse (sinda) on you; therefore, before going out, especially at night when they are prone to fly, you should always look up and inspect the sky. Then, there are the Aswang—evil witches who can look like ordinary people. You can use a number of protective measures against them: should you have a helpless baby with you, for instance, always pin a piece of ginger on its shirt as this will ward off the Aswang. Still, you must beware of someone who says your child looks nice and fat, for they can be sizing it up as possible prey. The Lantiog are giants who step over the rooftops of houses, you can only see their shadows, but they are harmless. So are the Tamawo or fairies, unless you offend them. A big tree might look like a tree but no one ever knows whether it is in fact the home of a Tamawo; therefore when passing close by, you must always ask their permission. And above all else, never point in their direction as they want to stay hidden from humans! I had a short memorised request—tabi, tabi lang anay, mga amigo kag mga amiga, paki daan lang ako (your permission, my friends, may I please request to pass)—which you must say on appropriate occasions.
Much later, when driving through Ireland, I was reminded of Felix’s stories as I saw a highway road fork in order to wrap around a big tree before joining again not too far ahead. Our Irish driver explained that the big tree was meant to be cut down during the construction of the road, but the workers who tried to do it died one after the other, until the government could no longer find enough workers to build the road and so finally decided to simply bypass it. It seems the Irish and the Filipinos have much in common. That’s one of the rea
sons why the Irish would always remain among my favourite peoples.
As if to show how the heart rules over the head long after the head is cognitively conditioned otherwise, I was playing golf recently when my ball flew straight into a lunok (a big, impenetrable tree, which could possibly be the grand house of a Tamawo), and I surprised myself when I automatically said under my breath, “Sorry”. Perhaps I was right, indeed better safe than sorry.
I’m still searching for foreign equivalents on the interpretation of dreams. When you dream of glass breaking, a tooth being pulled, or of hair being cut—beware. Those are omens that a bad accident is about to happen: the moment you wake up and before uttering a single word, look for a tree and bite into its trunk—that will negate any foreshadowed bad event. Fair enough, I had thought, but in a big city where trees were difficult to come by, I decided any good old wooden furniture inside my room would do the trick, and so I would gently click a couple of incisors on my wooden night table, then peacefully get back to sleep.
Our house was built a year or so after I was born in 1947, to replace our old home that was burned by the Filipino guerillas. These fighters came down from the hills after the surrender of the Japanese and, filled with Marxist ideals, torched the whole town including our place, supposedly so that everyone could restart their lives on an equal footing.
That said, the Liberation Period was reputed to have been a heady time. My mother told me of receiving a whole roll of textile that my father brought home one day to mark the start of a time of plenty. As an accomplished seamstress, she transformed this into curtains, dresses, and even upholstery, to decorate our new home. Eternally grateful to the Americans, my parents named my sister “Armita” (for when the American army came in 1945) and me “Victoria”, symbolising the raising of one’s index and middle fingers in a V sign to greet every GI who passed by. “Victory, Joe, give me chocolates!” was the supposed refrain of children.
Our new home was in the town’s main street, with its mix of residential and commercial establishments, for we had no zoning regulations in Victorias during those days. Originally, it was a charming Spanish-style wooden house with windows embellished with balconied grills first painted black, then silver, then grass green—depending on my mother’s mood when she would suddenly embark on her latest project of refurbishment. My young cousins and I would put cushions and pillows inside those grilled enclosures and play house, often observing the goings-on outside while eating snacks we had bought from the bakery next door. This was one of our favourite pastimes.
The house would be increasingly mongrelised as my mother became ever bolder in trying her hand at architecture, redesigning it every couple of years until the balconied grills were all gone. After years of remodelling, the current one, now mostly empty, is a much bigger, undistinguished block of concrete, named by the townsfolk Balay Daku or Big House.
As Balay Daku lost its character, so did our street. The neighbourhood became progressively noisier with the growth of traffic—from ear-piercing motorised tricycles and smoke-belching buses carrying paying passengers, to open overweight lorries with mighty cargoes of sugarcane, swaying one way, then the other. Moreover, my mother insisted on polished wooden floors and light-coloured ceiling-to-floor curtains, so that the housemaids would forever be sweeping the dust away or washing the ever-greying curtains. It didn’t help that for years, the sugar mill was spewing out tons upon tons of heavy, polluting ash, and the townspeople were powerless to put an end to it.
When I started school, my first teacher was my mother’s cousin. I was seven years old then but I do remember that, although I had a good memory, I didn’t yet know how to read. Undeterred, and because I liked reciting in class, I raised my hand one day and “read out” one whole page about the story of two little children named Pepe and Pilar and their dog Bantay. Bantay said, “Bow, wow, wow.” My self-confidence was further enhanced when my teacher called out, “Excellent!”
It must have been a year later when I asked my Yaya Teresit, the housemaid who took care of me, to please teach me how to read. She was concentrating on a magazine called Hiligaynon. I loved my Yaya Teresit. She was particularly fond of a column in the magazine called Tiktik, or “gossip”. It was written in Ilonggo, which was an ideal language to use as a reading primer. Phonetically, you read the words the way you see them. All the vowels are short regardless of where in the word they are found. There are no silent letters, and no difficult consonants such as “v” and “f”. A singular word would become plural by simply adding mga. Best of all, there is no such thing as correct spelling. You spell the word the way you say it, and if you spell it differently from your neighbour’s spelling, that’s fine too. And, of course, Ilonggo is my native language, so with Yaya Teresit’s instructions, I learned how to read the gossip column in no time.
Because my family was prominent in the town, the town doctor was my godfather. He was a Spanish mestizo (mixed race), with an equally Spanish mestiza wife who always nodded her head as some sort of a reflex every time she spoke. They were a good-looking family and their daughters were friends of my sister. Much more important for me, my godfather was a very generous gift-giver. During Christmas, all my toys came from him: first was a doll, which unfortunately, I accidentally beheaded on the day I received it. Then, on the next Christmas arrived a carousel that actually moved and played music; after that, a sewing machine that really sewed, and as I grew up a bit, a two-wheel child’s bicycle. That I never really learned to ride that bike (or indeed any other bike) was proof not of my having been a risk-averse child, but of the fact that I had to share the bike with all my cousins who lived in the house with us. Sometimes we took turns, and sometimes we fought over it. In due course, I simply lost interest in it.
My godfather died of a heart attack whilst relatively young and I heard the family had fallen on hard times and had emigrated to America, or perhaps Canada. I always regretted that I lost track of them before showing them my true appreciation for all those memorable toys.
My own family didn’t quite believe in toys, and whilst I loved them when I had them for Christmas, I never missed them when I had none. My cousins had no toys either. Instead, we played imaginative games together. There must have been almost a dozen of us brothers, sisters, and cousins of similar age living in that houses — relations from my mother’s family. Of her own eleven siblings, two, sometimes three, lived with us—a widowed aunt with her four children, an uncle who never married but had two kids, and so on. My grandmother and other relatives were also with us at various stages of my childhood. As a result, I have conflicting memories of those particular years, but the earlier ones were fun. We played together with marbles and rubber bands—including a game where you placed several rubber bands beside each other on the ground and flicked your own band with your finger—or, in another version of the game, horror of horrors, blew your own band so that it lay on top of your competitor’s. That’s probably the reason why I don’t remember too many illnesses among my extended family—we all seemed to have acquired natural immunity and didn’t need shots!
We played cards as well. For “money”, we would wake up very early in the morning, and before the movie house got cleaned—showings only started after lunch—we would roam around collecting cigarette wrappers. Chesterfield and Camel were the most valuable currencies while Salem was lower in value. Then, there was the stick game known as pitiw, a version of American softball. We would make two fat and strong sticks, one about four times longer than the other. There was the catcher, pitcher, and baseman. You would have to hit the pitched short stick with the long stick and make sure it wasn’t caught by the opposing team whilst you were running to the first and only base. I was particularly good at it.
Shut-bong (a glorified form of hide-and-seek) was equally popular as there were all kinds of hiding places around the yard. I am sure many of us were tempted to hide inside the dried-out well at the side of the house, but even as
kids, we were not that stupid. The well was deep and dark and could have housed dangerous snakes and spiders.
We also loved the rain and would go and play under it. We would stand under the roof’s open gutter, pushing aside the mosquito larvae-infested drum that was used to catch the rain water whilst we stood in its place feeling the strong gush of this wonderful “waterfall” over our heads and shoulders. I would push and shove, or take my turn, depending on the mood of the group—not quite aware that I was the only girl participating and amongst the smaller ones at that. Or we would race to the, by now, rain-soaked and slippery Philippine cherry tree in the yard, daring each other to climb as far up as we could. Again, I was a fast climber, often beating the boys.
Meanwhile, my older sister (the eldest sister being a number of years our senior, was already studying in Manila) and another girl-cousin my age played with the Spanish mestiza girls. Another of my mother’s favourites, my sister was the lucky owner of a playhouse built in the garden for her, and my mother bought her clay pots as well. She and her playmates would search for buried potsherds and use them as currency. They would divide themselves into two teams, playing sari-sari (variety) store operators and buyers. They would dip into their small, empty earthenware pots and trade their “wares”. This went on for some time until they decided to play cooks, and that’s when the playhouse burned down. I thought all these “pretend” games were silly. Instead, I wanted to compete with the boys. Years later, my mother was fond of telling me, time and again, a story of my having been quarrelsome. Our farm administrator, Sito, was one day shaking his head in amusement, and my mother asked him what was so funny. He recounted that I had arrived to join the boys, and before long, as to be expected, I destroyed their game, as to be expected. Perhaps, I justified myself each time my mother brought it up, I had to fight my way in.
When Turtles Come Home Page 4
