Magdaragat, p.13
Magdaragat, page 13
Although it was a rough neighbourhood that taught me to be distrustful and cautious, I still loved where I lived because I belonged to that city as much as it belonged to me. In the mornings, I navigated the way to the cheapest and the best breakfast spots. Every day after school, I played with the street children in the park that also doubled as a prison enclosure for juvies. If I was ever in a fight with my parents, my grandparents and various family members were only a two-minute walk away. When I wanted to sneak out and buy candy, I knew how to avoid getting caught by the local patrol after the 10:00 p.m. curfew sirens.
Over a decade ago, my father announced that we were moving to Canada. He promised snow angels, ballet lessons, and our own bedrooms. He told us that it was the land of opportunities. It was the first time in my life that I pictured a life beyond the small world that I inhabited, to expand my horizons and seek out adventures beyond books. Every night after dinner, we gathered around a small laptop, typing in Regina, Saskatchewan on YouTube just to get a glimpse of what our new life will be like. Thus, at the age of nine, I became so irrevocably in love with a city that I had yet to step my foot on. All I could think of was how I would get to escape heavy rainfalls and trade them for gradual snowfalls.
On October 29, 2009, we arrived in our new home. This home was a two-bedroom apartment that we would share with another family of six. I slept in the living room in a pullout couch next to my sister, while across from us was another pullout couch with another pair of siblings. Since we were all close in age, we would have our own slumber parties every night. In this new city, there was always a surplus of toys and candies. Some days the kids next door would invite us over for a game of street hockey. Other neighbours, like the elderly lady with a golden retriever, would come by to bring us homemade cookies or show us how to make the best hot chocolate. Kids in school were even more welcoming. They talked really fast and always asked if I wanted to play grounders during recess.
After I made countless snowmen and grew bored of the new toys, the novelty of this home soon wore off. I looked around, and I missed my concrete jungle, where the leaves of the mango trees sheltered you from the radiating heat of asphalt coupled with the bare rays of the sun. And no matter how much I wanted the Dutch elm trees to shelter me from the biting cold of harsh Saskatchewan winters, they could not, because even the trees themselves embraced the cold.
The death of my grandmother was not unexpected. We knew that her kidneys were failing. Her chosen healing methods, as far as we knew, were dialysis and divine intervention. Suddenly, life started to change. Both of my parents had to take on multiple jobs to send money back for her medical fees. There were no more family dinners. And it was always “Sorry, anak, wala akong time” or “pagod na ako.” My older sister and I were tasked with taking care of our little brothers, making sure that they were fed and that they slept on time. We would be left alone in that house for hours with the TV volume lowered, hoping nobody asks questions.
My parents became tired, and their limited minutes did not account for snow angels nor ballet lessons. My grandmother passed within our first year in Canada. Our last hurried exchange of I love yous over the phone served as a final goodbye. Travelling home was impossible since we lacked the money. It was a miserable time, and I wished so badly to go back.
Over time, I became distant and uprooted from my first home. This new land, however, gave me the chance to see it beyond the failed promises of the ideal life my father initially painted. Canada may not be the place where I was originally planted, but it is now my chosen home that has nourished my growth and allowed me to root and bloom.
On August 25, 2015, when I swore an oath of citizenship to this land, my love and gratitude for this community strengthened. I love how Claude Monet’s en plein air paintings are nothing compared to the open Saskatchewan skies. I use terms like double-double and surprise myself with the numerous ways I can discuss the weather. I know how passionately Canadians take football and hockey games, but I have yet to find my way around them.
Now, I find myself navigating through the world split between two identities with two homes and being okay with that because there’s no need to choose. I know now that home is not a location you type into a GPS. In many ways, finding home is like the mango or the Dutch elm trees planted around us, they did not choose to be rooted to their land, yet they flourished, adapted to the weather, and continued to grow. And so, I shall too.
Erica Dionora
Cutscene
Part I: A Memory
My name comes out like a judgment. The dean reads through his list of graduates, and the video pauses for approximately seven seconds when the letters of my name are splayed across the screen in sans serif.
Mama and Papa stare at the screen, watching my virtual commencement alongside Kuya and me.
“Yan lang?” Papa asks.
Three years of graduate school for seven seconds of screen time. I tell him that we can always play it back once the live event is over. He agrees, so we wait for the end — each one of us sat on the living room couch in our old pyjamas. Then we rewind it, stretch those seven seconds beyond the landscape of time — past and present — until it comes to face with a moment I’ve lived in for so long. A story. One that Papa laments over and over, it has become a memory that I claim as my own.
ARTICLE XIV
Education
The State shall protect promote and
maintain, an integrated system to
limit the right of
the underprivileged;
out-of-school
adult citizens, the disabled, and out-of-school youth
They
are
an
additional cost
March 22, 1982
Papa’s toe peeks shyly out of the hole on his right shoe. The sole of his left hung with each step like the jaw of a ghost bemoaning its fate.
The security guard standing before the door does not move. “Pasensya na, bawal po kayong pumasuk,” he says.
“He’s a student,” Tita Gigi tells the guard, but he does not meet either of their eyes. Instead, his gaze tracks the sweat pimpling their faces.
It’s thirty-three degrees Celsius outside of Iloilo National High School, where all the other students are greeting the day’s heat dressed in their Sunday best and eager to get on stage in their caps and gowns.
The security guard shrugs, staring pointedly at Papa’s worn shoes and wrinkled beige polo shirt and jeans. “Pasensya na.”
Tita Gigi steps forward, face to face with the unyielding guard. “Pasensya?”
Papa puts a hand on Tita Gigi’s arm and urges her away from the guard and the school building’s entrance, which begins to congest with other graduating students and their parents. He pretends not to notice the iron-pressed clothes and shined shoes of his classmates or the fact that their mothers and fathers are with them as he walks toward the school’s quad that he and Tita Gigi passed only moments before. She puts a hand on his shoulder when they reach the sidewalk just past school property.
“Sorry sa sapatos, To.” Tita Gigi eyes the worn pair of shoes on Papa’s feet and pats him on the back apologetically. Papa shrugs, saying nothing of the shoes that Tita Gigi’s husband had lent him. He tells her not to worry, assures her that there is always next time. He tells her that when he graduates university, he will have shoes and clothes, and he will be on stage.
Neither of them believed that.
Part II: A Conversation
My name comes out like a curse.
“Dios ko po, anak! Vancouver?” Mama drops her half-eaten shrimp, and I poke at my cold rice noodles.
The dinner table is surrounded by four chairs occupied with stiff spines and vacant lungs. I am the first to recover my breath, but just barely. “That’s where the office is, downtown Vancouver. It will be a good experience for me.”
Kuya and Papa are quiet, plates too full to take on any more.
“There are lots of jobs here. You have family here!” Mama reasons, waiting for an explanation or, perhaps, an apology for my wanting to leave. Instead, I tell her that I am tired.
“Iiwan mon na lang ba kami?” Mama asks me.
I swallow a forkful of guilt with my noodles, and the words are caught between my teeth; I pick them carefully.
“The office is in Vancouver,” I repeat.
Silence colours in the negative spaces of our conversation.
Mama blinks a staccato rhythm, and her eyes overflow with water, salty, much like the one that stands between her and the home she left behind for this life that I could never seem to love.
ARTICLE XV
The Family
the Filipino
strength
is
a conviction
to care
for the
family
August 8, 2008
My right foot was first baptized in a puddle of rainwater just outside of Pearson Airport. In my smallness, I thought I would drown, but the waters here are never hungry, only sanctimonious.
Half past noon, Mama, Papa, Kuya, and I finally arrived at a brown-bricked, ten-storey apartment building on the east end of Scarborough, where the night always seemed to come before its time.
I remember the way our voices echoed inside our apartment and how the sounds of bags and boxes being unpacked had bounced around the walls and ceiling like star projections in the dark. We said our grace before meals over spicy ramen noodles, split four ways, but Kuya and I ate most of it. Papa rewashed Styrofoam plates and plastic forks; we slept on beds of flattened cardboards; Mama cried during her nightly prayer when she thought everyone had fallen asleep; and I counted the minutes down until daybreak.
The next sunrise did not come for another few years.
Angelo Santos
boxes
1.
They are almost the size of kitchen ranges, these boxes made of corrugated cardboard and sealed with packing tape, overstuffed with items like canned corned beef, Vienna sausage, bagged potato chips, and foil-wrapped chocolate bars. We bring them with us every time we fly back to the Philippines; they are our silent stowaways. In the days leading up to our flight out, they sit next to large suitcases in our living room, top flaps agape, as my parents debate in Tagalog about what should go in next:
— Kasya kaya dito ang isang spiral ham?
— Spiral ham? Yung nabibili sa Costco?
— Oo. Yung naka-vacuum pack.
— (rummages through box) Kung mga limang pounds ang timbang kasya siguro.
— (pause) Kailangan bang naka-ice pack?
— Hindi na, cured yan! Ganong katagal ba flight natin?
— Mga labing-anim na oras, straight flight tayo. Sana naman hindi ma-delay o magka-problema ang flight natin.
— (pause) Pwede bang idagdag yung ham para isa bawat isang pamilya?
— Pwedeng pwede. Magkakasya pa dito ang isa, doon sa isang kahon kasya pa siguro mga tatlo.
— O sige, dagdagan natin! Para masaya sa Noche Buena!
— (chuckling) Magugustuhan nila yan, imported kasi!
Once each box is filled just shy of bursting, my dad weighs it on a bathroom scale to ensure that it doesn’t exceed the airline’s allowance for checked baggage. Some boxes are so large that they cannot be balanced on a single scale, making it necessary to use two scales, one placed underneath each side of the box — far enough under for the weight to register properly, but not so far that the box obscures the window for the scale’s dial. After the weighing, my dad closes each box and applies a generous amount of tape to secure the flaps and reinforce the corners. The last step is for my dad to write, in his trademark fine printing, my maternal grandmother’s name and address — Lucy Cruz, 93 Blumentritt St., San Juan, Metro Manila, Philippines 1500 — on the outside of the box, to protect against accidental loss.
These boxes are balikbayan boxes, staples of any returning Filipino’s luggage, whose chief objectives are to maximize storage capacity and to minimize weight. From a design perspective, ergonomics and convenience are clear afterthoughts: the boxes are unwieldy despite measures like lashing with rope to facilitate handling. Lugging them around the airport is Olympic-level difficult. Removing one of these boxes from the baggage carousel is always a two-person affair: my dad has to pull the box from the conveyor belt while I steady the baggage cart below, such is the transfer of force when the box hits the cart.
Once we arrive at my grandmother’s house in Manila, the boxes are hauled up a narrow flight of wooden stairs to a frigid air-conditioned room in which my extended family are gathered, eager to see this trip’s bounty, each family member wondering whether their individual request has been remembered. A utility knife slices open each box, an ad hoc caesarean, and one by one, the contents are removed:
Ansbert (my cousin). Tita, nakapagdala ka ba ng KitKat?
Mom. Siyempre naman, kasi kabilin bilinan mo yan.
Ansbert, chewing. Mmmm. Talagang ibang iba ang lasa ng mga chocolate na dala ninyo kaysa sa nabibili dito! Fresh na fresh. Salamat, Tita! Kaya ikaw ang paborito kong Tita!
Dad, from across the room. Pakilagay na muna ninyo itong mga ham sa ref! May instructions yan kung papano lutuin. Siguradong magugustuhan ninyo yan, tunay na tunay na ham yan!
Every time we go back, my extended family celebrates this doling out of pasalubong, gifts from the other side of the world. Like seventeenth-century seafarers, my family has returned from our voyage from afar with plunder, plunder to divide among our landlubbing financiers. Of course, in the case of my family, no actual money is contributed by our patrons; rather, the cost borne by my grandparents, my aunts, and my uncles is my parents’ absence, a cost that incurs a debt that is compounded every passing year, a debt that is paid back over time in monthly remittances and regular phone calls, a debt for which these small gifts serve as mere tokens. Each time we leave the Philippines, there is an unspoken question: after you leave, will you remember us?
2.
My parents emigrated from the Philippines in their twenties, shortly after I was born, in search of a better life and greater opportunity. For them, each trip back is a family reunion and a repatriation, a return to the place where their parents and siblings live, the place in the world where they will always feel at ease and in their element. Every time we are in the Philippines, we spend an inordinate amount of time being driven in mammoth-sized SUVs through standstill traffic to and from the houses of relatives serving large, sumptuous meals. Growing up, I thought that these vacations were nothing more than a carnival of gluttony and self-indulgence, until I got older and realized that these weeks we were spending with my relatives were my parents’ attempt to make up for lost time, to cram all of those missed birthday parties and celebratory dinners and Christmastime festivities into one hard binge, a family-time bonanza.
3.
There is a phrase in Tagalog, utang na loob, which translates literally to “a debt of the inside,” although there is something lost in translation here, as the phrase references a concept that goes deeper than regular, run-of-the-mill debt, and the inside being referred to here is the inside of a person — namely, the person who owes the debt. The phrase refers to a debt that is immeasurably large, unquantifiable, and almost unpayable, a debt that is owed from something deep within the inner self of the debtor, perhaps something from within the debtor’s very soul. It is a phrase that has no real analogue in the English language. I have seen it translated sometimes as “debt of gratitude,” although this isn’t quite the same.
4.
Most years we visit the Philippines, we make it a point to travel to Cabanatuan, the place where my dad was born, a more rural part of the Philippines compared to Manila, where my mom grew up. Depending on traffic, it takes about three or four hours to drive there from my grandmother’s house. Rice fields flank the roads leading there; carabaos dot the horizon. The main roadway is a narrow two-laner, with one lane in each direction and no median barriers, and so it feels perilous for us to overtake slow-moving traffic, which we are often forced to do because of the proliferation of tricycles and other slower means of local transport.
Shortly after arriving in Cabanatuan one year, my dad announces that we are going to visit “The Doctor,” the person who, he explains, paid for all five years of his tuition at the University of Santo Tomas, an act of generosity that laid the foundation for my dad to be able to pursue a lifelong career as a pharmacist. The Doctor turns out to be a wiry Filipino man with a closely cropped head of white hair who lives in a large house at the end of a dusty road. After being introduced, I notice that The Doctor often repeats himself and sometimes appears to forget what he is talking about. Still, my dad engages him in respectful conversation as if nothing were wrong and asks him about their shared past, which prompts The Doctor to respond genially. After listening to them for a while, I get the sense that The Doctor has only a vague recollection of who my dad is. Despite this, I can tell that it is important to my dad that we have come here, and that he pays his respects.
5.
A few years after I graduate from university, my maternal grandmother and three of my mom’s sisters and their immediate families all come to visit us in Canada. It is the largest planned gathering of my extended family outside of Asia; in total, there are fifteen of them, enough for a rugby team. For my mom, my dad, my sisters, and me, it is our opportunity to finally reciprocate the hospitality that has been extended to us each time we return to the Philippines. Some family members stay with my parents at their modest two-storey home, and others stay at my newly constructed townhouse nearby. After a day of getting settled in, we drive everyone to many of the usual Ontario tourist traps (Niagara Falls, the CN Tower, and SkyDome), then we rent two boat-sized vans and drive down to the States, where we visit New York City and Atlantic City (my grandmother is fond of casinos). For these few weeks, we all keep close quarters: when we aren’t crammed into the tiny seats of those rented vans, we are crammed into small three-star hotel rooms, or else we are back in Oakville where we are crammed into either my house or my parents’ house, both of which have been converted into makeshift hostels for a few weeks, always abuzz with activity. It all reminds me of our trips to the Philippines; the cast is the same, only the backdrop has changed.
