Magdaragat, p.23
Magdaragat, page 23
Now that I’m here, you’re constantly disappointed that I didn’t turn out more like you. But how could I do that when I don’t know who you are? I know that you’ve worked hard to bring me here, to give me a nice house and a good school and the latest gadgets, but none of that means anything when I feel like you don’t really hear what I have to say.
Now you’ve reached the end of Seven Steps to Reuniting with Your Teenage Daughter. In case you haven’t figured it out already, the answer to every single exercise is e) All of the above. If you didn’t circle e) every single time, read this guide again and again until you do. When you show me that you got a perfect score, I’ll be proud to announce that you’re truly ready to start building a relationship with your teenage daughter who …
Wants to apologize and start all over again to build a better relationship with you.
Wants to spend more time with you to get to know your past and who you are.
Wants the internet password and her phone back please please please.
Wants to post this online to help the millions of other Filipino parents and kids who are struggling just like us.
All of the above.
Christine Añonuevo
roots & routes
As a child born and raised in the Okanagan Valley, being Filipina felt very much like a performance. My parents would spend hours practising in the basement before dancing the tinikling at a community event. My mother is an excellent seamstress, which ensured that my sister and I were fashioned into handmade terno dresses before trekking down Main Street, waving to people in the annual Peachfest parade. Other instances of performing that come to mind include a stunning black-and-white photo of my Tita Chita, my father’s eldest sister, participating in a Filipino fashion show in the west end of Vancouver in the late 1960s. It’s a photo of her in a beautiful, hand-embroidered dress with elegant butterfly sleeves with her hair upswept, effortlessly holding a fan adorned with sampaguita flowers. These sorts of events shaped my earliest knowing of what it means to be Filipina. There were other material objects in the house I grew up in that gestured to me, reminding me of a motherland far away. There was the capiz shell chandelier in the southwest corner; a teak carabao figure whose horn I broke and fixed with Elmer’s glue; baníg mats; baskets and hats made from bamboo, tilog grasses, and rattan.
I think about being Filipina as a tenderness rooted in one’s tongue. My family and I did not live in an urban centre where Filipino foods were readily available at Asian stores. I remember my father bringing a box of mangoes home from Overwaitea, sniffing and smelling each one as if he had won the lottery. He tried taking the mango seeds and planting them in the backyard, but to his disappointment, nothing came up. To this day, my father still saves the tops of pineapples and plants them in the backyard. He never loses faith or hope that maybe one day the fruit of his childhood might make an appearance. While no tropical fruit trees exist in my parents’ backyard, two Italian plum trees have been bearing fruit my entire life. For over four decades, my father has picked the plums and shared them with whoever came to visit. My mother dehydrates the fruit and makes plum chutney or plum fruit leather to give away to friends and family. I like to keep the seeds from the plums in a little jar by my writing desk. Those stone fruit seeds keep me grounded and connected to the place I was born, to the longevity of my father’s ability to grow food, and are a reminder that seeds germinate nostalgia and connection. The seeds also represent the generative nature of my father’s hands and heart in taking care of a small space that, year after year, continues to bear kamatis, upo, kalabasa, ampalaya, bawang, and many kinds of flowers. Only now do I reflect on how challenging it must have been for him to leave his home during Martial Law and to be uprooted from familiar food, tastes, and climates.
My tongue does not twist easily around Tagalog. My mother’s first language is Pangasinan. My father’s first language is Tagalog. My first language is English. My parents speak Tagalog at home but wanted me to be rooted in English. While I wish they had spoken one of their mother tongues to me while growing up, in this day and age you can take classes online. For most of the two-year pandemic, my Wednesday nights have been spent learning verb tenses, ligatures, monosyllabic roots, and those confusing markers ang/ng with other Filipinx in the diaspora searching for the sounds that connect them to the empty parts of themselves. Language is an expression of a world view, a way to share thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Part of me has always felt that something was missing because of this inability to convey myself in the sonics of language that surrounded me during my formative years. My mother’s language is still largely inaccessible to me, although I did Google how to say “I love you” (Inaro taka). I have a son, a stepson, and two nieces, who mostly speak English. I try to teach them the Tagalog words that I know and search for age-appropriate bilingual books for them. I want them to learn more about the Philippines, the diversity of the islands, the many languages and dialects, the folklore, the colonial history, and of course, the food. I didn’t learn anything, as there were no classes in primary, secondary, or post-secondary school about the Philippines. I don’t begrudge my parents for wanting me to adapt and assimilate into the mainstream. They were learning themselves how to find their way as new arrivants. But losing that connection and relationship with my roots and habitually not seeing myself reflected in media, pop culture, literature, and textbooks had an impact on how I view myself in relation to others. Sometimes I was the only racialized person in a classroom, or in a piano or dance recital. This had a detrimental effect on my self-esteem causing stress, anxiety, and feelings of being an imposter. I try to find examples of pop culture, books, and movies with Filipino characters so that my nieces, son, and stepson can feel validated and proud of who they are.
My mother was one of the first Filipina women in Penticton in the 1960s. She worked at the Penticton Regional Hospital for over thirty years. Beyond her labour, she is an active volunteer, a lover of birds and orchids, a talented seamstress, and an avid reader. As a child, I have memories of my mother exchanging leche flan and lumpia for whole salmon from her friend on the Penticton Indian Reserve. On a recent trip back to Penticton, my mother and I visited the Penticton Library and Museum. The permanent collection at the museum has changed over the last few years, highlighting more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band histories, languages, stories, and culture. My mother lamented the passing of her friend who used to give her salmon but saw her spirit in these initiatives to highlight more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band ways of knowing and being.
When I was in junior high school, the book that made me dream about being a writer was a novel called Slash by Jeannette Armstrong. It is a powerful novel about the political realities of First Nations’ ongoing struggle for recognition of rights and land claims. It was a story set in a place that I was connected to and published on the Penticton Indian Reserve. It was a novel that opened me up to learning and unlearning what I know. This novel and author taught me about the power of literature and made me aware of systemic issues that are at the forefront of contemporary current events in so-called Canada.
My youngest son is First Nations (Witsuwit’en, Gitxsan, Ts’msyen) and Filipino. He likes to call himself Indipino, a combination of the words Indigenous and Filipino. He attends a trilingual elementary school (English, Gitxsanimx, French), although English and French are the predominant languages, and he is learning how to read. As a mother, I try to infuse daily life with Tagalog words that I know and recipes passed down from my mother and father. I often wonder what life is like for him, navigating different world views and ways of knowing and being. I think back to my own childhood and formative years of existing in the interstitial spaces of unbelonging. Not quite Filipino enough due to my inability to converse in Tagalog, and never quite Western enough, despite a lifetime of “Oh, you speak English so well!” microaggressions.
I reside in Northern BC with my family and circle back to Penticton as often as I can to visit my aging parents, despite the fourteen-hour car drive. My father turned seventy-seven this year and my mother is in her early eighties. I try to time our visits to coincide with the blossoming of the plum flowers and when the stone fruit is falling off the branches. Climate change, wildfire threats, and inclement weather have become a reality that impacts our planned road trips. Each time I visit, I return to the place that moulded me, and my kinship roles shapeshift from daughter to caregiver, to mother, to Tita, to Ate, and back again to daughter. Three generations eating food from the backyard, conversing in English and stitched-together Tagalog, and spiralling through the histories of our memories of one another. I am nostalgic for the smell of ponderosa pine trees in the thick of the summer heat. I feel grateful for the time my parents, my sister, my nieces, my son, and my stepson can spend together as we braid time and geography: past, present, and future existing in each other’s iterative and shared moments.
Isabela Palanca Aureus
Finding Home
“Ba’t mapait ‘tong orange juice?” is my first thought as I sip my drink, served cool by the flight attendant. I drink this on the last leg of our family’s trip to Toronto. It’s Good Friday, April 2, 1999, and we’re flying to our new home in Canada to be reunited with Papa. I miss the sweet hit of sugar and my tongue looks for the undissolved crystals of Eight O’Clock orange juice that aren’t in this thick and pulpy beverage with a slightly bitter finish. Eight O’Clock was one of the tastes of our old home that I didn’t realize I’d be leaving behind. I’ve been anticipating this day, this new home, for the last four years. I have said my goodbyes to the homes, family, and friends we left behind in San Juan and then in San Mateo. Mom and I have purged, packed, and unpacked for two major home moves in the last two years and this one is the biggest yet. I can’t wait to settle in. I wonder what home here and now will look like for the six of us. When we arrive in Toronto to the apartment that’s waiting to be furnished, we discover that Papa has thought to put Sunny Delight in the fridge. It is sweet and tastes new and yet also familiar.
For our first Canadian breakfast the next day, there’s something called kielbasa that he’s sliced up and pan-fried, along with sunny side up eggs that had brown shells and some bagels warmed in the oven. It will be some time before we get our red Betty Crocker toaster oven, but we’re not impatient. I’m excited to have an oven and look forward to making all the dishes I read about in the books I got from Tita Ditse in the States. Homemade cookies and coconut macaroons need an oven. Lasagna was only ever served at parties in houses that had working ovens or ranges. Maybe I’d even be able to make lasagna myself now. Our new Canadian breakfast doesn’t seem too dissimilar to the ones we used to have, back in San Juan or — for the last two years before we moved to Toronto — in San Mateo, Isabela. Papa isn’t too surprised that we drink coffee with our breakfast. Mom probably told him I did. That Jade and I do now. We’re fourteen and fifteen, and we’ve been drinking milky, sugared coffee since we started high school two years ago in Isabela. Coffee’s on the menu here for the four of us, except for the sips my little sisters, Bea and Tiny, the youngest in our family, will sneak even as they are teased, “Huwag muna, hindi kayo tatangkad.” I make the coffee in a Proctor Silex coffee maker, not too different from the one at Mama and Lolo’s house in San Mateo. I won’t need a lesson in how to use it.
Our first morning, we’re awake at five thirty, incredibly jet-lagged and excited. We’re sitting on the bare dark wood floor of our fourth-floor apartment at Park Vista Drive. There is a table and some stackable chairs in the dining area of the apartment. Our balcony faces out to the street and right at our sightline there’s a big pine tree with a raccoon curled up in sleep. Papa goes out there to smoke and there’s an ashtray on this small, round wooden table that I’ll later figure out is a spool for cable or telephone wire. Years later, I’ll fantasize about decorating a whole room around this spool, making a Guitar-brand matchbox bed with postage stamps blown up to poster size. I’ll make everything human scale but cozy like it’s for a little Disney mouse who’s decorated its home in the walls of the house with found objects. My sisters and I are watching Breakfast Television while eating this new breakfast. I’m getting used to how to watch news TV here, suddenly caring about temperature and all the new numbers that factor into how we’ll be dressing these days. Back home, Alas Singko Y Medya was on at breakfast in the same way MTB was on at lunch and TV Patrol was on at dinner, just in the background. I never used to have to check the TV for the weather before I went out. Now I do. Flurries, wind chill, feels like minus five. We have to care about that stuff now.
There’s a Filipino store not too far from our apartment. It’s three blocks north of Park Vista Drive, past Halsey, Chapman, and then Gower, on the west side of Dawes. It’s on the same side of the street as the library where Mom will borrow Shirley Temple movies on VHS and where we will all get library cards, even Tiny who will write her name on a library card “Maritnee.” I’m orienting myself to the way people give directions here. Eventually, I’ll step into my new skill of learning and giving directions, or maybe as my Lolo will later say about me, it’s because I’m never lost like his Tatang, “di ka naliligaw kahit saan magawi.” We’re lucky to be living not too far from the Filipino store and have these tastes available to us within a short walk. We find out they have longanisa in Canada, twelve pieces of frozen sausage on a Styrofoam tray. It’s only the sweet, red kind and it will be a few more years before I easily find Vigan (sounds like vegan but is definitely pork not vegan) and Lucban longanisa here. None of the garlicky Ilocano pork longanisa flavour that transports me to the yellow kitchen on Rizal Street or even to the early mornings in San Juan, when someone from the province came south with longanisa, frying it up for breakfast, the first task of their visit. Nothing like that, at least not for a while. No matter, we buy the longanisa, cooking a twelve-pack to split among the six of us, together again after two years apart. We can’t forget the little bowls of Datu Puti white vinegar, seasoned with a little bit of cracked pepper. Oh yeah, Papa, we picked up eating with sawsawan at Mama and Lolo’s house while we waited for our landing papers.
Nana Leony and Tata Ernie’s shelves and freezers are stocked well. At Palma Food Mart, besides finding what becomes Mom’s first job in Toronto, Mom and I will also find sardinas in cans, six-packs of pan de sal, Sky Flakes, and Sunflower Crackers. I’ll miss the merienda of Nissin Butter Coconut biscuits and my younger sisters sometimes think about Iced Gems, V-Cut, and Cupp Keyk. We see they have kornik and we grab some of that to snack on with balsamic vinegar, Italo and not quite Iloco, but it will do, and we’ll later learn it can stand in for mango sawsawan. We’re a little homesick so we stock up — frozen daing na bangus, frozen siopao, frozen hopia, frozen malunggay, frozen sili leaves. Mom even brings home frozen dugo and frozen papait. She never used to make dinuguan and papaitan, but here she learns to make these dishes and we learn to crave them.
“Mahal ng Filipino groceries,” we think as we can’t help but convert dollars to pesos when we shop for our new favourites. We’re buying flavoured Century Tuna for snacks, newly excited for tastes we would have ignored or taken for granted in the days and months before our big move. For a while, we are making and eating a cassava cake almost every week, thrilled that we can make our own kakanin with canned coconut milk. We don’t have to work too hard to squeeze milk from kinayod na niyog and it’s easy enough to cut open a bag of frozen grated cassava that’s been QC’ed for export. You rarely find hard hairy bits of the tuber mixed in.
We still eat rice, cooked in the kaldero we packed in one of our ten alis bayan boxes. We were allowed two each on our departure and I had carefully documented the contents of each box. In the back of my Papemelroti brown paper diary, past the calendar pages where I recorded everyone’s birthdays to remember to send birthday cards, I had written out an inventory of what we were bringing. Mostly, details about our thickest, heaviest clothes in preparation for the Canadian cold. There are five bulky comforters packed in there too — cotton fabric, polyester-cotton fill — a present to us that Lolo, Mama, and I made together in the weeks leading up to our departure. And because we were warned that everything was expensive, we came with dahon ng laurel, sewing kits, and a couple packets of safety pins (“Dahil walang aspili sa Canada.”). There are no toys in the mix; eight-year-old Tiny said goodbye to her Barbies — leaving them as a goodbye present to our cousin Ien in San Mateo — and the three of us older girls had already left our toys in our old bedroom for our cousins Mishi, Sara, and Sammy in San Juan when we moved to the province two years before. There aren’t many books; they would be too heavy anyway, so I had donated some to our school library as gifts, while the majority would stay at Mama and Lolo’s house. A shiny new kaldero came with us because it is the pot for cooking rice. Is it steel? I assume it is and write that down too, in case Canadian Customs and Immigration officers ask us. (I am responsible for knowing what we packed and being able to answer correctly and truthfully.) When we arrive, nothing is confiscated. I don’t think they even ask about our luggage, just whether we speak some English.
With the kaldero in play, my sisters and I can fight over whose turn it is again to saing. There is too much choice available on TV and no one wants to miss a thing with the few minutes it takes to cook rice. In those early days in our new home, we’re distracted by episodes of Full House on TBS that we’ve never seen before, and we frequently crisp the bottom of a few pots of rice. It’s no big deal — Mom and I don’t mind tutong anyway. Once, in an attempt to rescue the rice, someone rushed to take the kaldero off the heat but then let it rest without a trivet on the laminate countertop. It left a three-inch burn that would be there until we move out of Park Vista.
Now you’ve reached the end of Seven Steps to Reuniting with Your Teenage Daughter. In case you haven’t figured it out already, the answer to every single exercise is e) All of the above. If you didn’t circle e) every single time, read this guide again and again until you do. When you show me that you got a perfect score, I’ll be proud to announce that you’re truly ready to start building a relationship with your teenage daughter who …
Wants to apologize and start all over again to build a better relationship with you.
Wants to spend more time with you to get to know your past and who you are.
Wants the internet password and her phone back please please please.
Wants to post this online to help the millions of other Filipino parents and kids who are struggling just like us.
All of the above.
Christine Añonuevo
roots & routes
As a child born and raised in the Okanagan Valley, being Filipina felt very much like a performance. My parents would spend hours practising in the basement before dancing the tinikling at a community event. My mother is an excellent seamstress, which ensured that my sister and I were fashioned into handmade terno dresses before trekking down Main Street, waving to people in the annual Peachfest parade. Other instances of performing that come to mind include a stunning black-and-white photo of my Tita Chita, my father’s eldest sister, participating in a Filipino fashion show in the west end of Vancouver in the late 1960s. It’s a photo of her in a beautiful, hand-embroidered dress with elegant butterfly sleeves with her hair upswept, effortlessly holding a fan adorned with sampaguita flowers. These sorts of events shaped my earliest knowing of what it means to be Filipina. There were other material objects in the house I grew up in that gestured to me, reminding me of a motherland far away. There was the capiz shell chandelier in the southwest corner; a teak carabao figure whose horn I broke and fixed with Elmer’s glue; baníg mats; baskets and hats made from bamboo, tilog grasses, and rattan.
I think about being Filipina as a tenderness rooted in one’s tongue. My family and I did not live in an urban centre where Filipino foods were readily available at Asian stores. I remember my father bringing a box of mangoes home from Overwaitea, sniffing and smelling each one as if he had won the lottery. He tried taking the mango seeds and planting them in the backyard, but to his disappointment, nothing came up. To this day, my father still saves the tops of pineapples and plants them in the backyard. He never loses faith or hope that maybe one day the fruit of his childhood might make an appearance. While no tropical fruit trees exist in my parents’ backyard, two Italian plum trees have been bearing fruit my entire life. For over four decades, my father has picked the plums and shared them with whoever came to visit. My mother dehydrates the fruit and makes plum chutney or plum fruit leather to give away to friends and family. I like to keep the seeds from the plums in a little jar by my writing desk. Those stone fruit seeds keep me grounded and connected to the place I was born, to the longevity of my father’s ability to grow food, and are a reminder that seeds germinate nostalgia and connection. The seeds also represent the generative nature of my father’s hands and heart in taking care of a small space that, year after year, continues to bear kamatis, upo, kalabasa, ampalaya, bawang, and many kinds of flowers. Only now do I reflect on how challenging it must have been for him to leave his home during Martial Law and to be uprooted from familiar food, tastes, and climates.
My tongue does not twist easily around Tagalog. My mother’s first language is Pangasinan. My father’s first language is Tagalog. My first language is English. My parents speak Tagalog at home but wanted me to be rooted in English. While I wish they had spoken one of their mother tongues to me while growing up, in this day and age you can take classes online. For most of the two-year pandemic, my Wednesday nights have been spent learning verb tenses, ligatures, monosyllabic roots, and those confusing markers ang/ng with other Filipinx in the diaspora searching for the sounds that connect them to the empty parts of themselves. Language is an expression of a world view, a way to share thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Part of me has always felt that something was missing because of this inability to convey myself in the sonics of language that surrounded me during my formative years. My mother’s language is still largely inaccessible to me, although I did Google how to say “I love you” (Inaro taka). I have a son, a stepson, and two nieces, who mostly speak English. I try to teach them the Tagalog words that I know and search for age-appropriate bilingual books for them. I want them to learn more about the Philippines, the diversity of the islands, the many languages and dialects, the folklore, the colonial history, and of course, the food. I didn’t learn anything, as there were no classes in primary, secondary, or post-secondary school about the Philippines. I don’t begrudge my parents for wanting me to adapt and assimilate into the mainstream. They were learning themselves how to find their way as new arrivants. But losing that connection and relationship with my roots and habitually not seeing myself reflected in media, pop culture, literature, and textbooks had an impact on how I view myself in relation to others. Sometimes I was the only racialized person in a classroom, or in a piano or dance recital. This had a detrimental effect on my self-esteem causing stress, anxiety, and feelings of being an imposter. I try to find examples of pop culture, books, and movies with Filipino characters so that my nieces, son, and stepson can feel validated and proud of who they are.
My mother was one of the first Filipina women in Penticton in the 1960s. She worked at the Penticton Regional Hospital for over thirty years. Beyond her labour, she is an active volunteer, a lover of birds and orchids, a talented seamstress, and an avid reader. As a child, I have memories of my mother exchanging leche flan and lumpia for whole salmon from her friend on the Penticton Indian Reserve. On a recent trip back to Penticton, my mother and I visited the Penticton Library and Museum. The permanent collection at the museum has changed over the last few years, highlighting more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band histories, languages, stories, and culture. My mother lamented the passing of her friend who used to give her salmon but saw her spirit in these initiatives to highlight more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band ways of knowing and being.
When I was in junior high school, the book that made me dream about being a writer was a novel called Slash by Jeannette Armstrong. It is a powerful novel about the political realities of First Nations’ ongoing struggle for recognition of rights and land claims. It was a story set in a place that I was connected to and published on the Penticton Indian Reserve. It was a novel that opened me up to learning and unlearning what I know. This novel and author taught me about the power of literature and made me aware of systemic issues that are at the forefront of contemporary current events in so-called Canada.
My youngest son is First Nations (Witsuwit’en, Gitxsan, Ts’msyen) and Filipino. He likes to call himself Indipino, a combination of the words Indigenous and Filipino. He attends a trilingual elementary school (English, Gitxsanimx, French), although English and French are the predominant languages, and he is learning how to read. As a mother, I try to infuse daily life with Tagalog words that I know and recipes passed down from my mother and father. I often wonder what life is like for him, navigating different world views and ways of knowing and being. I think back to my own childhood and formative years of existing in the interstitial spaces of unbelonging. Not quite Filipino enough due to my inability to converse in Tagalog, and never quite Western enough, despite a lifetime of “Oh, you speak English so well!” microaggressions.
I reside in Northern BC with my family and circle back to Penticton as often as I can to visit my aging parents, despite the fourteen-hour car drive. My father turned seventy-seven this year and my mother is in her early eighties. I try to time our visits to coincide with the blossoming of the plum flowers and when the stone fruit is falling off the branches. Climate change, wildfire threats, and inclement weather have become a reality that impacts our planned road trips. Each time I visit, I return to the place that moulded me, and my kinship roles shapeshift from daughter to caregiver, to mother, to Tita, to Ate, and back again to daughter. Three generations eating food from the backyard, conversing in English and stitched-together Tagalog, and spiralling through the histories of our memories of one another. I am nostalgic for the smell of ponderosa pine trees in the thick of the summer heat. I feel grateful for the time my parents, my sister, my nieces, my son, and my stepson can spend together as we braid time and geography: past, present, and future existing in each other’s iterative and shared moments.
Isabela Palanca Aureus
Finding Home
“Ba’t mapait ‘tong orange juice?” is my first thought as I sip my drink, served cool by the flight attendant. I drink this on the last leg of our family’s trip to Toronto. It’s Good Friday, April 2, 1999, and we’re flying to our new home in Canada to be reunited with Papa. I miss the sweet hit of sugar and my tongue looks for the undissolved crystals of Eight O’Clock orange juice that aren’t in this thick and pulpy beverage with a slightly bitter finish. Eight O’Clock was one of the tastes of our old home that I didn’t realize I’d be leaving behind. I’ve been anticipating this day, this new home, for the last four years. I have said my goodbyes to the homes, family, and friends we left behind in San Juan and then in San Mateo. Mom and I have purged, packed, and unpacked for two major home moves in the last two years and this one is the biggest yet. I can’t wait to settle in. I wonder what home here and now will look like for the six of us. When we arrive in Toronto to the apartment that’s waiting to be furnished, we discover that Papa has thought to put Sunny Delight in the fridge. It is sweet and tastes new and yet also familiar.
For our first Canadian breakfast the next day, there’s something called kielbasa that he’s sliced up and pan-fried, along with sunny side up eggs that had brown shells and some bagels warmed in the oven. It will be some time before we get our red Betty Crocker toaster oven, but we’re not impatient. I’m excited to have an oven and look forward to making all the dishes I read about in the books I got from Tita Ditse in the States. Homemade cookies and coconut macaroons need an oven. Lasagna was only ever served at parties in houses that had working ovens or ranges. Maybe I’d even be able to make lasagna myself now. Our new Canadian breakfast doesn’t seem too dissimilar to the ones we used to have, back in San Juan or — for the last two years before we moved to Toronto — in San Mateo, Isabela. Papa isn’t too surprised that we drink coffee with our breakfast. Mom probably told him I did. That Jade and I do now. We’re fourteen and fifteen, and we’ve been drinking milky, sugared coffee since we started high school two years ago in Isabela. Coffee’s on the menu here for the four of us, except for the sips my little sisters, Bea and Tiny, the youngest in our family, will sneak even as they are teased, “Huwag muna, hindi kayo tatangkad.” I make the coffee in a Proctor Silex coffee maker, not too different from the one at Mama and Lolo’s house in San Mateo. I won’t need a lesson in how to use it.
Our first morning, we’re awake at five thirty, incredibly jet-lagged and excited. We’re sitting on the bare dark wood floor of our fourth-floor apartment at Park Vista Drive. There is a table and some stackable chairs in the dining area of the apartment. Our balcony faces out to the street and right at our sightline there’s a big pine tree with a raccoon curled up in sleep. Papa goes out there to smoke and there’s an ashtray on this small, round wooden table that I’ll later figure out is a spool for cable or telephone wire. Years later, I’ll fantasize about decorating a whole room around this spool, making a Guitar-brand matchbox bed with postage stamps blown up to poster size. I’ll make everything human scale but cozy like it’s for a little Disney mouse who’s decorated its home in the walls of the house with found objects. My sisters and I are watching Breakfast Television while eating this new breakfast. I’m getting used to how to watch news TV here, suddenly caring about temperature and all the new numbers that factor into how we’ll be dressing these days. Back home, Alas Singko Y Medya was on at breakfast in the same way MTB was on at lunch and TV Patrol was on at dinner, just in the background. I never used to have to check the TV for the weather before I went out. Now I do. Flurries, wind chill, feels like minus five. We have to care about that stuff now.
There’s a Filipino store not too far from our apartment. It’s three blocks north of Park Vista Drive, past Halsey, Chapman, and then Gower, on the west side of Dawes. It’s on the same side of the street as the library where Mom will borrow Shirley Temple movies on VHS and where we will all get library cards, even Tiny who will write her name on a library card “Maritnee.” I’m orienting myself to the way people give directions here. Eventually, I’ll step into my new skill of learning and giving directions, or maybe as my Lolo will later say about me, it’s because I’m never lost like his Tatang, “di ka naliligaw kahit saan magawi.” We’re lucky to be living not too far from the Filipino store and have these tastes available to us within a short walk. We find out they have longanisa in Canada, twelve pieces of frozen sausage on a Styrofoam tray. It’s only the sweet, red kind and it will be a few more years before I easily find Vigan (sounds like vegan but is definitely pork not vegan) and Lucban longanisa here. None of the garlicky Ilocano pork longanisa flavour that transports me to the yellow kitchen on Rizal Street or even to the early mornings in San Juan, when someone from the province came south with longanisa, frying it up for breakfast, the first task of their visit. Nothing like that, at least not for a while. No matter, we buy the longanisa, cooking a twelve-pack to split among the six of us, together again after two years apart. We can’t forget the little bowls of Datu Puti white vinegar, seasoned with a little bit of cracked pepper. Oh yeah, Papa, we picked up eating with sawsawan at Mama and Lolo’s house while we waited for our landing papers.
Nana Leony and Tata Ernie’s shelves and freezers are stocked well. At Palma Food Mart, besides finding what becomes Mom’s first job in Toronto, Mom and I will also find sardinas in cans, six-packs of pan de sal, Sky Flakes, and Sunflower Crackers. I’ll miss the merienda of Nissin Butter Coconut biscuits and my younger sisters sometimes think about Iced Gems, V-Cut, and Cupp Keyk. We see they have kornik and we grab some of that to snack on with balsamic vinegar, Italo and not quite Iloco, but it will do, and we’ll later learn it can stand in for mango sawsawan. We’re a little homesick so we stock up — frozen daing na bangus, frozen siopao, frozen hopia, frozen malunggay, frozen sili leaves. Mom even brings home frozen dugo and frozen papait. She never used to make dinuguan and papaitan, but here she learns to make these dishes and we learn to crave them.
“Mahal ng Filipino groceries,” we think as we can’t help but convert dollars to pesos when we shop for our new favourites. We’re buying flavoured Century Tuna for snacks, newly excited for tastes we would have ignored or taken for granted in the days and months before our big move. For a while, we are making and eating a cassava cake almost every week, thrilled that we can make our own kakanin with canned coconut milk. We don’t have to work too hard to squeeze milk from kinayod na niyog and it’s easy enough to cut open a bag of frozen grated cassava that’s been QC’ed for export. You rarely find hard hairy bits of the tuber mixed in.
We still eat rice, cooked in the kaldero we packed in one of our ten alis bayan boxes. We were allowed two each on our departure and I had carefully documented the contents of each box. In the back of my Papemelroti brown paper diary, past the calendar pages where I recorded everyone’s birthdays to remember to send birthday cards, I had written out an inventory of what we were bringing. Mostly, details about our thickest, heaviest clothes in preparation for the Canadian cold. There are five bulky comforters packed in there too — cotton fabric, polyester-cotton fill — a present to us that Lolo, Mama, and I made together in the weeks leading up to our departure. And because we were warned that everything was expensive, we came with dahon ng laurel, sewing kits, and a couple packets of safety pins (“Dahil walang aspili sa Canada.”). There are no toys in the mix; eight-year-old Tiny said goodbye to her Barbies — leaving them as a goodbye present to our cousin Ien in San Mateo — and the three of us older girls had already left our toys in our old bedroom for our cousins Mishi, Sara, and Sammy in San Juan when we moved to the province two years before. There aren’t many books; they would be too heavy anyway, so I had donated some to our school library as gifts, while the majority would stay at Mama and Lolo’s house. A shiny new kaldero came with us because it is the pot for cooking rice. Is it steel? I assume it is and write that down too, in case Canadian Customs and Immigration officers ask us. (I am responsible for knowing what we packed and being able to answer correctly and truthfully.) When we arrive, nothing is confiscated. I don’t think they even ask about our luggage, just whether we speak some English.
With the kaldero in play, my sisters and I can fight over whose turn it is again to saing. There is too much choice available on TV and no one wants to miss a thing with the few minutes it takes to cook rice. In those early days in our new home, we’re distracted by episodes of Full House on TBS that we’ve never seen before, and we frequently crisp the bottom of a few pots of rice. It’s no big deal — Mom and I don’t mind tutong anyway. Once, in an attempt to rescue the rice, someone rushed to take the kaldero off the heat but then let it rest without a trivet on the laminate countertop. It left a three-inch burn that would be there until we move out of Park Vista.
