Tuesday, August 17, 2004
7:55 AM |
Birthday Boy
Okay, here we go...
(Takes a deep breath and becomes a year older...)
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:55 AM |
Birthday Boy
Okay, here we go...
(Takes a deep breath and becomes a year older...)
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:55 AM |
Birthday Boy
Okay, here we go...
(Takes a deep breath and becomes a year older...)
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, August 16, 2004
The feeling is that of waking up after a long, long sleep. You embrace the sudden familiarity of light, and then you know that you are home.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
The feeling is that of waking up after a long, long sleep. You embrace the sudden familiarity of light, and then you know that you are home.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
The feeling is that of waking up after a long, long sleep. You embrace the sudden familiarity of light, and then you know that you are home.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
4:41 PM |
Signs of Dread After a Certain Age
I was watching reruns of
Sex and the City the other week on HBO, and in one episode, the fabulous (and already iconic) New York girls -- Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte -- romped off to Atlantic City to have fun and gamble, and affirm the bonds of friendship and sisterhood. And then also to celebrate Charlotte's 35th birthday --
again. Over cosmopolitans, they discussed the subtleties and little trepidation of aging gracefully, or with defiance, in the era of Demi-Ashton and Botox. "I don't
look 36! I don't
act 36!" Charlotte demanded, "And besides, men are so much more interested in 35 year olds."
Which, in a sense, strikes many of us -- especially if you're
burgis -- as a familiar horror.
Yesterday, I told Mark, "It's my birthday on Tuesday. Better make sure you remember that day
is still my 28th birthday.
Again."
He laughed, and I laughed, and we chalked it up as another joke about growing older in an increasingly strange world where becoming 20 has become the new mark of turning over-the-hill, so to speak. We used to talk of 35 as being the definite end to that much-prized category "youth" -- but this is increasingly hard to believe in a time when we already have a new demographic named: the
tweens, that age between nine and thirteen where young people today suddenly blossom into the kind of sophistication and smarts we used to associate with turning 16.
I was still playing
tayukok when I was 13.
Today's typical 13-year old -- reared on MTV and
Cosmpolitan magazine -- is a vegetarian, wears make-up, and follows the exploits of Paris Hilton, as if
The Simple Life is the bible.
But no matter how pooh-pooing I might be of the very idea of ageism, I still feel it in my bones: the dread of turning 30, of leaving the perfect cocoon of the 20s, that wonderful decade when your body and your mind are in perfect sync with the rest of you. These are the Happy Years.
When I was a decade-and-a-half younger, becoming 30 felt like going the way of the dinosaurs. I would look at my older brothers' friends, and I'd tell myself, "God, they're
old" -- a sentiment, I realize now, that only the very young could offer with such innocent disdain.
Thirty meant becoming one of those middle-aged drones who have lost whatever vitality they once had that used to define them. There is, around them, that dreadful air of having "settled," be it professionally (stuck to a boring 9-to-5 just to feed the family), mentally (no time for reading or for watching a movie), socially (would rather watch
Marina on TV than dress up and go out), and physically (the 36" waistline becomes the definition of having lived).
Becoming 29 is like knocking on the very door of that reality. It means one more year of reprieve, and then you
become just like one of
them.
My brothers, for one thing, have a tendency to balloon their girths to utter disproportion
after the 20s. "It's a genetics thing," my mother -- who is also turning 73 on my birthday -- said. And she was right: Already, my body refuses to yield to what suppleness and energetic bounce it once knew. I easily get tired, and only Stresstabs contains enough magic to get me through any day. And now, buying new pairs of pants has become an ordeal in itself. Stripped bare under the harsh white light of Lee Super Plaza's fitting rooms, I have confronted the worst of my nightmares. Unsightly love handles from all those months of eating Dunkin' Donuts and fried chicken and
lechon. I used to be a 28"; now I have to
squeeze into a 33".
One could say, "What about gym?" But really who has time? At work, I am deluged with responsibilities that would make anyone's heads spin. If I find the time to even be able to read, that would be the very definition of "wonderful." And now,
gym?Then, listening to myself rant and reason out, I realize: Oh my God, I
have settled. I have
finally become them.
But why do we treat growing old as if it is a disease? The easiest reason anyone can give is to accuse an increasingly youth-centered culture. We prize youth. It has become currency to how we deal with the ideal. The beauty myth essentially spells out something springing of the youthful. The growing demand for Vicki Belo's services point to this. Words like Botox, liposuction, lipo-dissolve, breast augmentation, face-lift, and other nip-tucking procedures have become household words, no longer something foreign, or something to be wary about. To get under the knife and transform into a kind of swan (like how the reality show about plastic surgery,
The Swan, affirms) has become routine, like going to the dentist.
In the process, we have demonized old age, and refer to it in terms of disease and diminished capacity. Wisdom through old age has ceased to be the goal and end-all of being human. Packaging with youthful trimmings is all what counts: look at Jessica Simpson and all her troglodyte lapses ("Who's Rigor Mortis?" she says in one of the episodes of MTV's
Nick and Jessica: Newlyweds, "Did we invite him for dinner?") -- and we realize that anyone can be successful as long as you embody the youthful.
This is true even when we are offered new models of becoming old. Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, and Goldie Hawn have given us glimpses of what life can be when you just embrace it -- age be damned. In fact, the trend now is to distinguish between emotional age and chronological age.
So why isn't anybody happy yet about the age we have now?
I think the fear of becoming old basically springs from the fear of not having accomplished anything by a certain age. We want to die remembered, immortalized. We want to die having done something worthwhile for the world. Each passing year of not realizing the most basic of our dreams adds to that apprehension.
Some time ago, I promised myself, "When I turn 30, I'd be a millionaire." I'm 29, and I don't even have a car yet. Or a house. Or a name that will endure the forgetfulness of everybody else. And that scares me.
Numeric age becomes symbolic thus of time ticking by, taunting each one of us about our sheer incapacities. The fervent wish then is to delay what seems to be the inevitable, and fulfill our fondest hopes.
I still have a long way to go before I can call fulfillment my name.
So tomorrow, I
still turn 28.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
4:41 PM |
Signs of Dread After a Certain Age
I was watching reruns of
Sex and the City the other week on HBO, and in one episode, the fabulous (and already iconic) New York girls -- Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte -- romped off to Atlantic City to have fun and gamble, and affirm the bonds of friendship and sisterhood. And then also to celebrate Charlotte's 35th birthday --
again. Over cosmopolitans, they discussed the subtleties and little trepidation of aging gracefully, or with defiance, in the era of Demi-Ashton and Botox. "I don't
look 36! I don't
act 36!" Charlotte demanded, "And besides, men are so much more interested in 35 year olds."
Which, in a sense, strikes many of us -- especially if you're
burgis -- as a familiar horror.
Yesterday, I told Mark, "It's my birthday on Tuesday. Better make sure you remember that day
is still my 28th birthday.
Again."
He laughed, and I laughed, and we chalked it up as another joke about growing older in an increasingly strange world where becoming 20 has become the new mark of turning over-the-hill, so to speak. We used to talk of 35 as being the definite end to that much-prized category "youth" -- but this is increasingly hard to believe in a time when we already have a new demographic named: the
tweens, that age between nine and thirteen where young people today suddenly blossom into the kind of sophistication and smarts we used to associate with turning 16.
I was still playing
tayukok when I was 13.
Today's typical 13-year old -- reared on MTV and
Cosmpolitan magazine -- is a vegetarian, wears make-up, and follows the exploits of Paris Hilton, as if
The Simple Life is the bible.
But no matter how pooh-pooing I might be of the very idea of ageism, I still feel it in my bones: the dread of turning 30, of leaving the perfect cocoon of the 20s, that wonderful decade when your body and your mind are in perfect sync with the rest of you. These are the Happy Years.
When I was a decade-and-a-half younger, becoming 30 felt like going the way of the dinosaurs. I would look at my older brothers' friends, and I'd tell myself, "God, they're
old" -- a sentiment, I realize now, that only the very young could offer with such innocent disdain.
Thirty meant becoming one of those middle-aged drones who have lost whatever vitality they once had that used to define them. There is, around them, that dreadful air of having "settled," be it professionally (stuck to a boring 9-to-5 just to feed the family), mentally (no time for reading or for watching a movie), socially (would rather watch
Marina on TV than dress up and go out), and physically (the 36" waistline becomes the definition of having lived).
Becoming 29 is like knocking on the very door of that reality. It means one more year of reprieve, and then you
become just like one of
them.
My brothers, for one thing, have a tendency to balloon their girths to utter disproportion
after the 20s. "It's a genetics thing," my mother -- who is also turning 73 on my birthday -- said. And she was right: Already, my body refuses to yield to what suppleness and energetic bounce it once knew. I easily get tired, and only Stresstabs contains enough magic to get me through any day. And now, buying new pairs of pants has become an ordeal in itself. Stripped bare under the harsh white light of Lee Super Plaza's fitting rooms, I have confronted the worst of my nightmares. Unsightly love handles from all those months of eating Dunkin' Donuts and fried chicken and
lechon. I used to be a 28"; now I have to
squeeze into a 33".
One could say, "What about gym?" But really who has time? At work, I am deluged with responsibilities that would make anyone's heads spin. If I find the time to even be able to read, that would be the very definition of "wonderful." And now,
gym?Then, listening to myself rant and reason out, I realize: Oh my God, I
have settled. I have
finally become them.
But why do we treat growing old as if it is a disease? The easiest reason anyone can give is to accuse an increasingly youth-centered culture. We prize youth. It has become currency to how we deal with the ideal. The beauty myth essentially spells out something springing of the youthful. The growing demand for Vicki Belo's services point to this. Words like Botox, liposuction, lipo-dissolve, breast augmentation, face-lift, and other nip-tucking procedures have become household words, no longer something foreign, or something to be wary about. To get under the knife and transform into a kind of swan (like how the reality show about plastic surgery,
The Swan, affirms) has become routine, like going to the dentist.
In the process, we have demonized old age, and refer to it in terms of disease and diminished capacity. Wisdom through old age has ceased to be the goal and end-all of being human. Packaging with youthful trimmings is all what counts: look at Jessica Simpson and all her troglodyte lapses ("Who's Rigor Mortis?" she says in one of the episodes of MTV's
Nick and Jessica: Newlyweds, "Did we invite him for dinner?") -- and we realize that anyone can be successful as long as you embody the youthful.
This is true even when we are offered new models of becoming old. Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, and Goldie Hawn have given us glimpses of what life can be when you just embrace it -- age be damned. In fact, the trend now is to distinguish between emotional age and chronological age.
So why isn't anybody happy yet about the age we have now?
I think the fear of becoming old basically springs from the fear of not having accomplished anything by a certain age. We want to die remembered, immortalized. We want to die having done something worthwhile for the world. Each passing year of not realizing the most basic of our dreams adds to that apprehension.
Some time ago, I promised myself, "When I turn 30, I'd be a millionaire." I'm 29, and I don't even have a car yet. Or a house. Or a name that will endure the forgetfulness of everybody else. And that scares me.
Numeric age becomes symbolic thus of time ticking by, taunting each one of us about our sheer incapacities. The fervent wish then is to delay what seems to be the inevitable, and fulfill our fondest hopes.
I still have a long way to go before I can call fulfillment my name.
So tomorrow, I
still turn 28.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
4:41 PM |
Signs of Dread After a Certain Age
I was watching reruns of
Sex and the City the other week on HBO, and in one episode, the fabulous (and already iconic) New York girls -- Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte -- romped off to Atlantic City to have fun and gamble, and affirm the bonds of friendship and sisterhood. And then also to celebrate Charlotte's 35th birthday --
again. Over cosmopolitans, they discussed the subtleties and little trepidation of aging gracefully, or with defiance, in the era of Demi-Ashton and Botox. "I don't
look 36! I don't
act 36!" Charlotte demanded, "And besides, men are so much more interested in 35 year olds."
Which, in a sense, strikes many of us -- especially if you're
burgis -- as a familiar horror.
Yesterday, I told Mark, "It's my birthday on Tuesday. Better make sure you remember that day
is still my 28th birthday.
Again."
He laughed, and I laughed, and we chalked it up as another joke about growing older in an increasingly strange world where becoming 20 has become the new mark of turning over-the-hill, so to speak. We used to talk of 35 as being the definite end to that much-prized category "youth" -- but this is increasingly hard to believe in a time when we already have a new demographic named: the
tweens, that age between nine and thirteen where young people today suddenly blossom into the kind of sophistication and smarts we used to associate with turning 16.
I was still playing
tayukok when I was 13.
Today's typical 13-year old -- reared on MTV and
Cosmpolitan magazine -- is a vegetarian, wears make-up, and follows the exploits of Paris Hilton, as if
The Simple Life is the bible.
But no matter how pooh-pooing I might be of the very idea of ageism, I still feel it in my bones: the dread of turning 30, of leaving the perfect cocoon of the 20s, that wonderful decade when your body and your mind are in perfect sync with the rest of you. These are the Happy Years.
When I was a decade-and-a-half younger, becoming 30 felt like going the way of the dinosaurs. I would look at my older brothers' friends, and I'd tell myself, "God, they're
old" -- a sentiment, I realize now, that only the very young could offer with such innocent disdain.
Thirty meant becoming one of those middle-aged drones who have lost whatever vitality they once had that used to define them. There is, around them, that dreadful air of having "settled," be it professionally (stuck to a boring 9-to-5 just to feed the family), mentally (no time for reading or for watching a movie), socially (would rather watch
Marina on TV than dress up and go out), and physically (the 36" waistline becomes the definition of having lived).
Becoming 29 is like knocking on the very door of that reality. It means one more year of reprieve, and then you
become just like one of
them.
My brothers, for one thing, have a tendency to balloon their girths to utter disproportion
after the 20s. "It's a genetics thing," my mother -- who is also turning 73 on my birthday -- said. And she was right: Already, my body refuses to yield to what suppleness and energetic bounce it once knew. I easily get tired, and only Stresstabs contains enough magic to get me through any day. And now, buying new pairs of pants has become an ordeal in itself. Stripped bare under the harsh white light of Lee Super Plaza's fitting rooms, I have confronted the worst of my nightmares. Unsightly love handles from all those months of eating Dunkin' Donuts and fried chicken and
lechon. I used to be a 28"; now I have to
squeeze into a 33".
One could say, "What about gym?" But really who has time? At work, I am deluged with responsibilities that would make anyone's heads spin. If I find the time to even be able to read, that would be the very definition of "wonderful." And now,
gym?Then, listening to myself rant and reason out, I realize: Oh my God, I
have settled. I have
finally become them.
But why do we treat growing old as if it is a disease? The easiest reason anyone can give is to accuse an increasingly youth-centered culture. We prize youth. It has become currency to how we deal with the ideal. The beauty myth essentially spells out something springing of the youthful. The growing demand for Vicki Belo's services point to this. Words like Botox, liposuction, lipo-dissolve, breast augmentation, face-lift, and other nip-tucking procedures have become household words, no longer something foreign, or something to be wary about. To get under the knife and transform into a kind of swan (like how the reality show about plastic surgery,
The Swan, affirms) has become routine, like going to the dentist.
In the process, we have demonized old age, and refer to it in terms of disease and diminished capacity. Wisdom through old age has ceased to be the goal and end-all of being human. Packaging with youthful trimmings is all what counts: look at Jessica Simpson and all her troglodyte lapses ("Who's Rigor Mortis?" she says in one of the episodes of MTV's
Nick and Jessica: Newlyweds, "Did we invite him for dinner?") -- and we realize that anyone can be successful as long as you embody the youthful.
This is true even when we are offered new models of becoming old. Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, and Goldie Hawn have given us glimpses of what life can be when you just embrace it -- age be damned. In fact, the trend now is to distinguish between emotional age and chronological age.
So why isn't anybody happy yet about the age we have now?
I think the fear of becoming old basically springs from the fear of not having accomplished anything by a certain age. We want to die remembered, immortalized. We want to die having done something worthwhile for the world. Each passing year of not realizing the most basic of our dreams adds to that apprehension.
Some time ago, I promised myself, "When I turn 30, I'd be a millionaire." I'm 29, and I don't even have a car yet. Or a house. Or a name that will endure the forgetfulness of everybody else. And that scares me.
Numeric age becomes symbolic thus of time ticking by, taunting each one of us about our sheer incapacities. The fervent wish then is to delay what seems to be the inevitable, and fulfill our fondest hopes.
I still have a long way to go before I can call fulfillment my name.
So tomorrow, I
still turn 28.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, August 09, 2004
10:16 PM |
The Languages of Our Every Day
I will begin this essay reflecting on a fervent misconception (on my part), springing mainly from a charge once made by the literary critic Fr. Miguel Bernad who, in his seminal essay "Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate," surveyed the state of that national literature and proclaimed it as continually being in an "amateur" phase, never quite regaining maturity principally because of three reasons -- economic, linguistic, and cultural.
About the second factor, he wrote: "The linguistic difficulty is obvious. It is possible to, produce great literature only in a language that has been mastered. By "mastered" is meant more than mere grammatical or idiomatic mastery.
It must be the type of mastery which assimilates the thought processes, the verbal nuances, and the characteristic rhythms, peculiar to an idiom. Every language has its peculiar genius: he is the master of the language who has caught that genius. Unfortunately the Philippines has not had a thorough chance to assimilate the genius of any particular language. Those whose education has been in English but whose parents were educated in Spanish will understand what this implies. In their case a wall of separation stands as a barrier between parents and children, between the younger generation and the one that preceded it. It is not that parents cannot understand English or the children Spanish, or that parents and children have no common medium of conversation.
It is not a question of conversing; it is a question of thought processes. The thought patterns are different."
So I thought: I consider myself a Philippine writer who writes principally in English by choice -- not because I am not well versed in the language of my fathers (although, admittedly, anyone can make that accusation about me), but rather because my creativity springs from that particular linguistic well, foreign though it may be. (Only recently have I ventured into writing poetry in Binisaya, and while I have found this particular experience "liberating" and worthwhile, the instinct to write in the Queen's language is still what defines my oeuvre as a writer.)
So there it goes: the instinct to write is primarily colored by English. There has always been comfort in that. The words come easier...
But the Bernad charge made me uneasy:
Does he mean that in my choosing to write in a foreign language, I am actually an eternal fraud? That no matter how I conceive of my situation as a writer, my thought processes can never really be in English? I felt like a linguistic bastard.
This made me reflect on another once-upon-a-time, when I had wanted to have an
arbaito, or a part-time job, in Japan, ostensibly to teach English to Japanese nationals who were ever-hungry to learn the language's nuances. And yet, scanning through the Help Wanted booklet regularly published by my Tokyo university's student affairs section, I was constantly met with this restriction "Wanted native speaker only." And "native speaker" invariably meant being blond, blue-eyed.
American.Which, needless to say, negated me.
Does not this language called English belong to me? I write in it and my education and upbringing has been characterized by my very immersion in it. And yet, by virtue of the geography of my birth and the color of my skin, I was not deemed a "holder" of that language, a "non-native."
This, coupled with Bernad's unsettling contention, made way to a self-willed construction of my language identity: if I must be a writer in English, then I should believe that my thought processes are in English.
"I
dream in English," I began telling myself. "I
think in English..."
And I believed that. Sometimes, when I wanted to prove this very point, I would pause and listen to how I think, and I'd get thrilled by the fact that I heard my mind whirr in English -- although I now know, reading from Stephen Pinker, that human thought actually does not possess language. We think in images and metaphors, not in any particular tongue.
Still, disregarding this piece of cognitive science, I believed in the concept of my Anglicized thoughts: the "evidence," after all, proved to me overwhelming. The spontaneous outbursts that come from me were always in English, and that satisfied me. Seeing a deformed woman on the street, for example, I'd say to myself: "What an ugly hag!" and never, "Hala, ka-maot gyud niya!" Taken by surprise by something or someone, I'd say, "What the--!" and never "Unsa ba!"
Last week, however, came this experiment: I wanted to listen to myself more, and objectively, and to take note of the language of my every day. The procedure was hard: I proved to be not too much of a keen observer, especially an observer of myself and my interactions. I kept forgetting to keep track of my linguistic use.
But I remember waking up one morning, nudged awake by the shrill of my alarm clock, and thinking... "Huh? What the...? What time is it?"
That's English.And then, after turning off the alarm: "It's still a bit early. Makatulog pa ko."
That's English, and then Cebuano.When I finally do wake up, I go about the morning preparing for what needs to be done for the late morning and afternoon, and the conscious conversation with myself seems to be in English. I either watch
Oprah or the running programs of Discovery Channel or CNN while going about these morning rituals, and the language of my thoughts seems to parallel the language that comes out of my television. I react to the news or to the televised conversations in the language they come wrapped in, and that is English.
When I finally go out for lunch to the little corner
karinderia in Tubod near my pad, my language switches to either Tagalog (the proprietor is a Bikolana) or Binisaya, but never in terms of a full-fledged conversation, only as indicators of function: "Kani ra" (indicating my choice for food), "Usa ra" (indicating my choice for number of cups for rice), and "Pila?" (asking for the total payment of my order). When I finally converse with people, I do so generally in English, with a bit of Binisaya thrown in for measure. I have no idea why but when people come up to me, they speak in English, so I reply to them in English, as well. Do I look a certain way that demanded this use of language? I have no idea.
At work, there seems to be a tendency for my colleagues -- all of them English teachers-to speak to each other in Binisaya. Paradoxical? Maybe, but I see it as a linguistic and psychological compensation: our classroom lives are engulfed, after all, in the straight use of English, non-stop, and so when we do gather together in the office away from our students, we speak in the local language "to balance" the language usage. I once asked a fellow teacher why this is the case. In reply, she joked: "Nahutdan man gud ta ug Iningles sa classroom." Which, I think, contains kernels of truth.
This is my conclusion: It is foolhardy to claim that our language life
must be defined only by one exclusive tongue.
Language is alive and ever-changing, never inert. Our linguistic mentality, I think, must also be the same -- so why do we need to impose on it, especially in the case of multilinguals like us, the rigidity of one tongue only? Our everyday lives speak in multiple tongues, shifting from code to code effortlessly, and we have learned to smoothly accommodate situations to particular languages we deem fit for it. I speak English to myself because that is the fountainhead of my self-expression. I speak Binisaya to the man on the street (or the
karinderia) because that is the language we share from the cradle (but even that comes in a mixed bag: I would ask the
karinderia owner "Pila?" and she would reply, "Twenty pesos"). I speak English in the classroom because I am an English teacher, and my University encourages this to be the medium of instruction. I speak both in English and Binisaya to my work colleagues because the office becomes the bridge in which our linguistic twains must meet. There is no singular language to live our daily lives.
Thus, a necessary revision: "I dream in Pinoy English."
What then can I now say about Bernad's contention knowing this? That he may have a point, but he is barking up the wrong tree. True, we cannot have real mastery over a foreign language, but I will read that as mastery over
American English. I subscribe instead to Pinoy English, something that is still english, but peppered with the richness of my brown, multilingual identity -- I can say, for example, "Where man ka mo go?" -- and of this language, I am certainly very much a master.
And as for the Japanese who wanted only "native speakers"? They can have all the blue-eyed blondes they want: former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle is blond, blue-eyed, and American, but he once spelled "potato" as "potatoe."
Now,
that's a native speaker.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
10:16 PM |
The Languages of Our Every Day
I will begin this essay reflecting on a fervent misconception (on my part), springing mainly from a charge once made by the literary critic Fr. Miguel Bernad who, in his seminal essay "Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate," surveyed the state of that national literature and proclaimed it as continually being in an "amateur" phase, never quite regaining maturity principally because of three reasons -- economic, linguistic, and cultural.
About the second factor, he wrote: "The linguistic difficulty is obvious. It is possible to, produce great literature only in a language that has been mastered. By "mastered" is meant more than mere grammatical or idiomatic mastery.
It must be the type of mastery which assimilates the thought processes, the verbal nuances, and the characteristic rhythms, peculiar to an idiom. Every language has its peculiar genius: he is the master of the language who has caught that genius. Unfortunately the Philippines has not had a thorough chance to assimilate the genius of any particular language. Those whose education has been in English but whose parents were educated in Spanish will understand what this implies. In their case a wall of separation stands as a barrier between parents and children, between the younger generation and the one that preceded it. It is not that parents cannot understand English or the children Spanish, or that parents and children have no common medium of conversation.
It is not a question of conversing; it is a question of thought processes. The thought patterns are different."
So I thought: I consider myself a Philippine writer who writes principally in English by choice -- not because I am not well versed in the language of my fathers (although, admittedly, anyone can make that accusation about me), but rather because my creativity springs from that particular linguistic well, foreign though it may be. (Only recently have I ventured into writing poetry in Binisaya, and while I have found this particular experience "liberating" and worthwhile, the instinct to write in the Queen's language is still what defines my oeuvre as a writer.)
So there it goes: the instinct to write is primarily colored by English. There has always been comfort in that. The words come easier...
But the Bernad charge made me uneasy:
Does he mean that in my choosing to write in a foreign language, I am actually an eternal fraud? That no matter how I conceive of my situation as a writer, my thought processes can never really be in English? I felt like a linguistic bastard.
This made me reflect on another once-upon-a-time, when I had wanted to have an
arbaito, or a part-time job, in Japan, ostensibly to teach English to Japanese nationals who were ever-hungry to learn the language's nuances. And yet, scanning through the Help Wanted booklet regularly published by my Tokyo university's student affairs section, I was constantly met with this restriction "Wanted native speaker only." And "native speaker" invariably meant being blond, blue-eyed.
American.Which, needless to say, negated me.
Does not this language called English belong to me? I write in it and my education and upbringing has been characterized by my very immersion in it. And yet, by virtue of the geography of my birth and the color of my skin, I was not deemed a "holder" of that language, a "non-native."
This, coupled with Bernad's unsettling contention, made way to a self-willed construction of my language identity: if I must be a writer in English, then I should believe that my thought processes are in English.
"I
dream in English," I began telling myself. "I
think in English..."
And I believed that. Sometimes, when I wanted to prove this very point, I would pause and listen to how I think, and I'd get thrilled by the fact that I heard my mind whirr in English -- although I now know, reading from Stephen Pinker, that human thought actually does not possess language. We think in images and metaphors, not in any particular tongue.
Still, disregarding this piece of cognitive science, I believed in the concept of my Anglicized thoughts: the "evidence," after all, proved to me overwhelming. The spontaneous outbursts that come from me were always in English, and that satisfied me. Seeing a deformed woman on the street, for example, I'd say to myself: "What an ugly hag!" and never, "Hala, ka-maot gyud niya!" Taken by surprise by something or someone, I'd say, "What the--!" and never "Unsa ba!"
Last week, however, came this experiment: I wanted to listen to myself more, and objectively, and to take note of the language of my every day. The procedure was hard: I proved to be not too much of a keen observer, especially an observer of myself and my interactions. I kept forgetting to keep track of my linguistic use.
But I remember waking up one morning, nudged awake by the shrill of my alarm clock, and thinking... "Huh? What the...? What time is it?"
That's English.And then, after turning off the alarm: "It's still a bit early. Makatulog pa ko."
That's English, and then Cebuano.When I finally do wake up, I go about the morning preparing for what needs to be done for the late morning and afternoon, and the conscious conversation with myself seems to be in English. I either watch
Oprah or the running programs of Discovery Channel or CNN while going about these morning rituals, and the language of my thoughts seems to parallel the language that comes out of my television. I react to the news or to the televised conversations in the language they come wrapped in, and that is English.
When I finally go out for lunch to the little corner
karinderia in Tubod near my pad, my language switches to either Tagalog (the proprietor is a Bikolana) or Binisaya, but never in terms of a full-fledged conversation, only as indicators of function: "Kani ra" (indicating my choice for food), "Usa ra" (indicating my choice for number of cups for rice), and "Pila?" (asking for the total payment of my order). When I finally converse with people, I do so generally in English, with a bit of Binisaya thrown in for measure. I have no idea why but when people come up to me, they speak in English, so I reply to them in English, as well. Do I look a certain way that demanded this use of language? I have no idea.
At work, there seems to be a tendency for my colleagues -- all of them English teachers-to speak to each other in Binisaya. Paradoxical? Maybe, but I see it as a linguistic and psychological compensation: our classroom lives are engulfed, after all, in the straight use of English, non-stop, and so when we do gather together in the office away from our students, we speak in the local language "to balance" the language usage. I once asked a fellow teacher why this is the case. In reply, she joked: "Nahutdan man gud ta ug Iningles sa classroom." Which, I think, contains kernels of truth.
This is my conclusion: It is foolhardy to claim that our language life
must be defined only by one exclusive tongue.
Language is alive and ever-changing, never inert. Our linguistic mentality, I think, must also be the same -- so why do we need to impose on it, especially in the case of multilinguals like us, the rigidity of one tongue only? Our everyday lives speak in multiple tongues, shifting from code to code effortlessly, and we have learned to smoothly accommodate situations to particular languages we deem fit for it. I speak English to myself because that is the fountainhead of my self-expression. I speak Binisaya to the man on the street (or the
karinderia) because that is the language we share from the cradle (but even that comes in a mixed bag: I would ask the
karinderia owner "Pila?" and she would reply, "Twenty pesos"). I speak English in the classroom because I am an English teacher, and my University encourages this to be the medium of instruction. I speak both in English and Binisaya to my work colleagues because the office becomes the bridge in which our linguistic twains must meet. There is no singular language to live our daily lives.
Thus, a necessary revision: "I dream in Pinoy English."
What then can I now say about Bernad's contention knowing this? That he may have a point, but he is barking up the wrong tree. True, we cannot have real mastery over a foreign language, but I will read that as mastery over
American English. I subscribe instead to Pinoy English, something that is still english, but peppered with the richness of my brown, multilingual identity -- I can say, for example, "Where man ka mo go?" -- and of this language, I am certainly very much a master.
And as for the Japanese who wanted only "native speakers"? They can have all the blue-eyed blondes they want: former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle is blond, blue-eyed, and American, but he once spelled "potato" as "potatoe."
Now,
that's a native speaker.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
10:16 PM |
The Languages of Our Every Day
I will begin this essay reflecting on a fervent misconception (on my part), springing mainly from a charge once made by the literary critic Fr. Miguel Bernad who, in his seminal essay "Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate," surveyed the state of that national literature and proclaimed it as continually being in an "amateur" phase, never quite regaining maturity principally because of three reasons -- economic, linguistic, and cultural.
About the second factor, he wrote: "The linguistic difficulty is obvious. It is possible to, produce great literature only in a language that has been mastered. By "mastered" is meant more than mere grammatical or idiomatic mastery.
It must be the type of mastery which assimilates the thought processes, the verbal nuances, and the characteristic rhythms, peculiar to an idiom. Every language has its peculiar genius: he is the master of the language who has caught that genius. Unfortunately the Philippines has not had a thorough chance to assimilate the genius of any particular language. Those whose education has been in English but whose parents were educated in Spanish will understand what this implies. In their case a wall of separation stands as a barrier between parents and children, between the younger generation and the one that preceded it. It is not that parents cannot understand English or the children Spanish, or that parents and children have no common medium of conversation.
It is not a question of conversing; it is a question of thought processes. The thought patterns are different."
So I thought: I consider myself a Philippine writer who writes principally in English by choice -- not because I am not well versed in the language of my fathers (although, admittedly, anyone can make that accusation about me), but rather because my creativity springs from that particular linguistic well, foreign though it may be. (Only recently have I ventured into writing poetry in Binisaya, and while I have found this particular experience "liberating" and worthwhile, the instinct to write in the Queen's language is still what defines my oeuvre as a writer.)
So there it goes: the instinct to write is primarily colored by English. There has always been comfort in that. The words come easier...
But the Bernad charge made me uneasy:
Does he mean that in my choosing to write in a foreign language, I am actually an eternal fraud? That no matter how I conceive of my situation as a writer, my thought processes can never really be in English? I felt like a linguistic bastard.
This made me reflect on another once-upon-a-time, when I had wanted to have an
arbaito, or a part-time job, in Japan, ostensibly to teach English to Japanese nationals who were ever-hungry to learn the language's nuances. And yet, scanning through the Help Wanted booklet regularly published by my Tokyo university's student affairs section, I was constantly met with this restriction "Wanted native speaker only." And "native speaker" invariably meant being blond, blue-eyed.
American.Which, needless to say, negated me.
Does not this language called English belong to me? I write in it and my education and upbringing has been characterized by my very immersion in it. And yet, by virtue of the geography of my birth and the color of my skin, I was not deemed a "holder" of that language, a "non-native."
This, coupled with Bernad's unsettling contention, made way to a self-willed construction of my language identity: if I must be a writer in English, then I should believe that my thought processes are in English.
"I
dream in English," I began telling myself. "I
think in English..."
And I believed that. Sometimes, when I wanted to prove this very point, I would pause and listen to how I think, and I'd get thrilled by the fact that I heard my mind whirr in English -- although I now know, reading from Stephen Pinker, that human thought actually does not possess language. We think in images and metaphors, not in any particular tongue.
Still, disregarding this piece of cognitive science, I believed in the concept of my Anglicized thoughts: the "evidence," after all, proved to me overwhelming. The spontaneous outbursts that come from me were always in English, and that satisfied me. Seeing a deformed woman on the street, for example, I'd say to myself: "What an ugly hag!" and never, "Hala, ka-maot gyud niya!" Taken by surprise by something or someone, I'd say, "What the--!" and never "Unsa ba!"
Last week, however, came this experiment: I wanted to listen to myself more, and objectively, and to take note of the language of my every day. The procedure was hard: I proved to be not too much of a keen observer, especially an observer of myself and my interactions. I kept forgetting to keep track of my linguistic use.
But I remember waking up one morning, nudged awake by the shrill of my alarm clock, and thinking... "Huh? What the...? What time is it?"
That's English.And then, after turning off the alarm: "It's still a bit early. Makatulog pa ko."
That's English, and then Cebuano.When I finally do wake up, I go about the morning preparing for what needs to be done for the late morning and afternoon, and the conscious conversation with myself seems to be in English. I either watch
Oprah or the running programs of Discovery Channel or CNN while going about these morning rituals, and the language of my thoughts seems to parallel the language that comes out of my television. I react to the news or to the televised conversations in the language they come wrapped in, and that is English.
When I finally go out for lunch to the little corner
karinderia in Tubod near my pad, my language switches to either Tagalog (the proprietor is a Bikolana) or Binisaya, but never in terms of a full-fledged conversation, only as indicators of function: "Kani ra" (indicating my choice for food), "Usa ra" (indicating my choice for number of cups for rice), and "Pila?" (asking for the total payment of my order). When I finally converse with people, I do so generally in English, with a bit of Binisaya thrown in for measure. I have no idea why but when people come up to me, they speak in English, so I reply to them in English, as well. Do I look a certain way that demanded this use of language? I have no idea.
At work, there seems to be a tendency for my colleagues -- all of them English teachers-to speak to each other in Binisaya. Paradoxical? Maybe, but I see it as a linguistic and psychological compensation: our classroom lives are engulfed, after all, in the straight use of English, non-stop, and so when we do gather together in the office away from our students, we speak in the local language "to balance" the language usage. I once asked a fellow teacher why this is the case. In reply, she joked: "Nahutdan man gud ta ug Iningles sa classroom." Which, I think, contains kernels of truth.
This is my conclusion: It is foolhardy to claim that our language life
must be defined only by one exclusive tongue.
Language is alive and ever-changing, never inert. Our linguistic mentality, I think, must also be the same -- so why do we need to impose on it, especially in the case of multilinguals like us, the rigidity of one tongue only? Our everyday lives speak in multiple tongues, shifting from code to code effortlessly, and we have learned to smoothly accommodate situations to particular languages we deem fit for it. I speak English to myself because that is the fountainhead of my self-expression. I speak Binisaya to the man on the street (or the
karinderia) because that is the language we share from the cradle (but even that comes in a mixed bag: I would ask the
karinderia owner "Pila?" and she would reply, "Twenty pesos"). I speak English in the classroom because I am an English teacher, and my University encourages this to be the medium of instruction. I speak both in English and Binisaya to my work colleagues because the office becomes the bridge in which our linguistic twains must meet. There is no singular language to live our daily lives.
Thus, a necessary revision: "I dream in Pinoy English."
What then can I now say about Bernad's contention knowing this? That he may have a point, but he is barking up the wrong tree. True, we cannot have real mastery over a foreign language, but I will read that as mastery over
American English. I subscribe instead to Pinoy English, something that is still english, but peppered with the richness of my brown, multilingual identity -- I can say, for example, "Where man ka mo go?" -- and of this language, I am certainly very much a master.
And as for the Japanese who wanted only "native speakers"? They can have all the blue-eyed blondes they want: former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle is blond, blue-eyed, and American, but he once spelled "potato" as "potatoe."
Now,
that's a native speaker.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, August 05, 2004
An estimated 1,800 chickens -- perhaps even more than that -- get the axe
every single day in restaurants all over poultry-hungry Dumaguete. In this educated guess, no one's even including the chicken meat anyone can purchase from our public market stalls, or from the refrigerated confines of the city's supermarkets.
One thousand eight hundred, and counting... pre-packaged, or organic, or straight from someone's local backyard. If you really think about it, that's an awful lot of chicken.
Because when anyone must come up with the essential Dumagueteno, chicken meat is way up there -- together with the observation of our local habit of walking too slow, like leisurely turtles, like promenading under a full moon -- in defining who we are.
The other day, meeting up with a friend from Manila who was here for a brief visit "to get away from the exasperating hustle and bustle of big city life," he asked me: "Now, where can we have a good lunch for today?" and then, with a certain emphasis bordering on over-saturation: "And I don't mean
another dish of chicken."
I pretended not to know what he was implying, but I knew what he was talking about. We want to Lab-as instead, to sample their fare of
bangus. But truth be told,
this is a city in love with chicken meat. Every corner of Dumaguete has some small shrine disguised as eating places dedicated to the art of chicken-meat mastication. Admit it: no visits by far-flung friends can end without the mandatory trek to the biggest temple of them all: Jo's Chicken Inato. Its grilled chicken -- a choice of
pecho or
pa-a immersed overnight in some secret ingredients -- has become very much a part of Dumaguete tradition. Jo's delectable white meat, sweetish to the taste, and smelling always of some grilled heaven, is part of our blood. It is the first thing we miss of home, together with the Taster's Delight cheeseburger. I still have old high school classmates, now based all over the world, who's first query with regards home food always makes reference to both Jo's and Taster's Delight.
No one can tell why this is so. Pork or beef or fish are fine -- but chicken? Chicken defines our very taste buds. So much so that last summer, and even the other month, it was possible to go to any restaurant in the city and get told by an apologizing waiter that there would be no chicken dish available. "The city has run out of chicken," he would say.
That's what happened --
twice -- when Mark and I were in Chin Loong. "How can any city run out of chicken?" Mark asked, exasperated, because he was already dreaming of chicken dripping with the sweet and sour combination only Chin Loong could make. The waiter mumbled some more apology, and recommended the sweet and sour squid.
I remember now that it was also with some craziness when Panda -- that ice cream shop over at Harold's Mansion in Tubod -- announced its shortage of chicken. I panicked. Not a lot of people know this but Panda Haus serves more than ice cream. One of my favorites from its menu is steamed rice chicken, which is not exactly the regular dimsum variety we all know. The plus side of this dish, aside from the fact that it is addicting, is the fact that all of Panda's chicken are "organic chicken," which, I am told, makes the whole lot quite healthy to eat. And most days, living the bachelor's life always on the go, I subsist on this dish. I would call up 225-9644, place my order, and ten minutes later, I would munch the peppered combination of rice and chicken meat in the comforts of my own pad. So when the attendants told me one day that they had run out of organic chicken, I immediately texted Angeline Dy, one of the owners, to beg.
She laughed. "We don't grow organic chicken from trees and pluck them just like that!"
"Well, then," I said, "better hatch them fast."
I knew then what I think I have always known. You can deprive a Dumagueteño of chocolate and cake and lechon and all other delicacies in the world. But just give me my chicken meat. It is the definitive meat. Isn't it any wonder that when people must describe some exotic meat dish -- say snake, or kangaroo -- they always say, "Tastes just like chicken"? It is, now I know, the universal paragon of the tastefully divine.
Every Sunday, after church in Bread of Life, we go to City Burger. We do not mind the strange angles of this restaurant along Real Street, an open-air space that resembles the ruins of a gutted house (it is, in fact, the ruins of a gutted building). We do not even mind the apparent misnaming of the place (who eats burger in City Burger?). We all come for one thing: its grilled chicken quite unlike its delicious cousin over at Jo's. How? The extra-sweetish taste of the sauce it drips with.
I always feel guilty after eating in City Burger, but it is a guilt I can live with. The same guilt that possesses me whenever I cross the street from my office in Silliman University to the stone's throw distance of Nena's Kamalig. People have made distinctions about the grilling of chicken. There is supposed to be the Dumaguete-style (Jo's and City Burger's), and there is the Bacolod-style. We first imported the latter a few years back with the coming of Nena's Kamalig, which serves
liempo and chicken and a host of other grilled meat in a distinctive taste that is a combination of burnt liver and catsup. The mixture is surprisingly delicious -- but it is never complete without the final touch: that sauce on your table that looks like reddish moonshine. It is chicken oil drippings. "Egad,
cholesterol. That's a heart attack waiting to happen!" a health-conscious friend once warned me.
"Honey," I said, "it's a risk anyone's willing to take."
I won't risk anything, though, for Ati-Atihan, whose chicken is quite passable -- but there's nothing's new about it. Not even the
amakan interiors (and faucets built from
banga), which seems to be the proscribed material design for any chicken place in Dumaguete and elsewhere. And Dumaguete Fried Chicken? Mark told me once they made the best chili chicken wings. I've been missing the spicy chicken wings from defunct Giacomino's. And so we went one evening to DFC, got horrid service, and were eventually given a miniscule serving of the dish incompatible with its steep price. Plus an order of soggy pizza. Of the chicken: an uninspired piece of fried meat dipped in chili sauce. We left our review of the food on their paper napkin, lettered with their catsup:
"Wala'y lami."I'd rather go chicken-hopping to the various
lechon manok stalls all over the place, especially Manok ni San Pedro, and then Golden Roy's -- the original
lechon manok place, its generous chicken still amazingly spicy to the smell and to the taste.
Eventually, though, we all still go to Jo's for our chicken. A few years ago, when my Dutch friend Martin Slot came into town, Jo's became the first in our list of places to go and explore local delicacies. This was before the restaurant became the swanky place it is now. (The old Jo's was a crowded affair of
amakan darkened with soot and the grime of years.) When we finally had our orders, I told him that the only way to go about eating chicken
inato is through bare hands straight to mouth. "No spoons and forks here.
Kamayan is the way to go about it," I told him. And we did -- me and this flabbergasted foreigner who must have thought this society strange, people eating with bare hands. But it didn't really matter. Because, really, this was the only way to go about it: chicken touching skin, going straight to mouth. Such ritual has become the mark of our familiars. It is our bare, intimate homage to the food that defines us all.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
An estimated 1,800 chickens -- perhaps even more than that -- get the axe
every single day in restaurants all over poultry-hungry Dumaguete. In this educated guess, no one's even including the chicken meat anyone can purchase from our public market stalls, or from the refrigerated confines of the city's supermarkets.
One thousand eight hundred, and counting... pre-packaged, or organic, or straight from someone's local backyard. If you really think about it, that's an awful lot of chicken.
Because when anyone must come up with the essential Dumagueteno, chicken meat is way up there -- together with the observation of our local habit of walking too slow, like leisurely turtles, like promenading under a full moon -- in defining who we are.
The other day, meeting up with a friend from Manila who was here for a brief visit "to get away from the exasperating hustle and bustle of big city life," he asked me: "Now, where can we have a good lunch for today?" and then, with a certain emphasis bordering on over-saturation: "And I don't mean
another dish of chicken."
I pretended not to know what he was implying, but I knew what he was talking about. We want to Lab-as instead, to sample their fare of
bangus. But truth be told,
this is a city in love with chicken meat. Every corner of Dumaguete has some small shrine disguised as eating places dedicated to the art of chicken-meat mastication. Admit it: no visits by far-flung friends can end without the mandatory trek to the biggest temple of them all: Jo's Chicken Inato. Its grilled chicken -- a choice of
pecho or
pa-a immersed overnight in some secret ingredients -- has become very much a part of Dumaguete tradition. Jo's delectable white meat, sweetish to the taste, and smelling always of some grilled heaven, is part of our blood. It is the first thing we miss of home, together with the Taster's Delight cheeseburger. I still have old high school classmates, now based all over the world, who's first query with regards home food always makes reference to both Jo's and Taster's Delight.
No one can tell why this is so. Pork or beef or fish are fine -- but chicken? Chicken defines our very taste buds. So much so that last summer, and even the other month, it was possible to go to any restaurant in the city and get told by an apologizing waiter that there would be no chicken dish available. "The city has run out of chicken," he would say.
That's what happened --
twice -- when Mark and I were in Chin Loong. "How can any city run out of chicken?" Mark asked, exasperated, because he was already dreaming of chicken dripping with the sweet and sour combination only Chin Loong could make. The waiter mumbled some more apology, and recommended the sweet and sour squid.
I remember now that it was also with some craziness when Panda -- that ice cream shop over at Harold's Mansion in Tubod -- announced its shortage of chicken. I panicked. Not a lot of people know this but Panda Haus serves more than ice cream. One of my favorites from its menu is steamed rice chicken, which is not exactly the regular dimsum variety we all know. The plus side of this dish, aside from the fact that it is addicting, is the fact that all of Panda's chicken are "organic chicken," which, I am told, makes the whole lot quite healthy to eat. And most days, living the bachelor's life always on the go, I subsist on this dish. I would call up 225-9644, place my order, and ten minutes later, I would munch the peppered combination of rice and chicken meat in the comforts of my own pad. So when the attendants told me one day that they had run out of organic chicken, I immediately texted Angeline Dy, one of the owners, to beg.
She laughed. "We don't grow organic chicken from trees and pluck them just like that!"
"Well, then," I said, "better hatch them fast."
I knew then what I think I have always known. You can deprive a Dumagueteño of chocolate and cake and lechon and all other delicacies in the world. But just give me my chicken meat. It is the definitive meat. Isn't it any wonder that when people must describe some exotic meat dish -- say snake, or kangaroo -- they always say, "Tastes just like chicken"? It is, now I know, the universal paragon of the tastefully divine.
Every Sunday, after church in Bread of Life, we go to City Burger. We do not mind the strange angles of this restaurant along Real Street, an open-air space that resembles the ruins of a gutted house (it is, in fact, the ruins of a gutted building). We do not even mind the apparent misnaming of the place (who eats burger in City Burger?). We all come for one thing: its grilled chicken quite unlike its delicious cousin over at Jo's. How? The extra-sweetish taste of the sauce it drips with.
I always feel guilty after eating in City Burger, but it is a guilt I can live with. The same guilt that possesses me whenever I cross the street from my office in Silliman University to the stone's throw distance of Nena's Kamalig. People have made distinctions about the grilling of chicken. There is supposed to be the Dumaguete-style (Jo's and City Burger's), and there is the Bacolod-style. We first imported the latter a few years back with the coming of Nena's Kamalig, which serves
liempo and chicken and a host of other grilled meat in a distinctive taste that is a combination of burnt liver and catsup. The mixture is surprisingly delicious -- but it is never complete without the final touch: that sauce on your table that looks like reddish moonshine. It is chicken oil drippings. "Egad,
cholesterol. That's a heart attack waiting to happen!" a health-conscious friend once warned me.
"Honey," I said, "it's a risk anyone's willing to take."
I won't risk anything, though, for Ati-Atihan, whose chicken is quite passable -- but there's nothing's new about it. Not even the
amakan interiors (and faucets built from
banga), which seems to be the proscribed material design for any chicken place in Dumaguete and elsewhere. And Dumaguete Fried Chicken? Mark told me once they made the best chili chicken wings. I've been missing the spicy chicken wings from defunct Giacomino's. And so we went one evening to DFC, got horrid service, and were eventually given a miniscule serving of the dish incompatible with its steep price. Plus an order of soggy pizza. Of the chicken: an uninspired piece of fried meat dipped in chili sauce. We left our review of the food on their paper napkin, lettered with their catsup:
"Wala'y lami."I'd rather go chicken-hopping to the various
lechon manok stalls all over the place, especially Manok ni San Pedro, and then Golden Roy's -- the original
lechon manok place, its generous chicken still amazingly spicy to the smell and to the taste.
Eventually, though, we all still go to Jo's for our chicken. A few years ago, when my Dutch friend Martin Slot came into town, Jo's became the first in our list of places to go and explore local delicacies. This was before the restaurant became the swanky place it is now. (The old Jo's was a crowded affair of
amakan darkened with soot and the grime of years.) When we finally had our orders, I told him that the only way to go about eating chicken
inato is through bare hands straight to mouth. "No spoons and forks here.
Kamayan is the way to go about it," I told him. And we did -- me and this flabbergasted foreigner who must have thought this society strange, people eating with bare hands. But it didn't really matter. Because, really, this was the only way to go about it: chicken touching skin, going straight to mouth. Such ritual has become the mark of our familiars. It is our bare, intimate homage to the food that defines us all.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
An estimated 1,800 chickens -- perhaps even more than that -- get the axe
every single day in restaurants all over poultry-hungry Dumaguete. In this educated guess, no one's even including the chicken meat anyone can purchase from our public market stalls, or from the refrigerated confines of the city's supermarkets.
One thousand eight hundred, and counting... pre-packaged, or organic, or straight from someone's local backyard. If you really think about it, that's an awful lot of chicken.
Because when anyone must come up with the essential Dumagueteno, chicken meat is way up there -- together with the observation of our local habit of walking too slow, like leisurely turtles, like promenading under a full moon -- in defining who we are.
The other day, meeting up with a friend from Manila who was here for a brief visit "to get away from the exasperating hustle and bustle of big city life," he asked me: "Now, where can we have a good lunch for today?" and then, with a certain emphasis bordering on over-saturation: "And I don't mean
another dish of chicken."
I pretended not to know what he was implying, but I knew what he was talking about. We want to Lab-as instead, to sample their fare of
bangus. But truth be told,
this is a city in love with chicken meat. Every corner of Dumaguete has some small shrine disguised as eating places dedicated to the art of chicken-meat mastication. Admit it: no visits by far-flung friends can end without the mandatory trek to the biggest temple of them all: Jo's Chicken Inato. Its grilled chicken -- a choice of
pecho or
pa-a immersed overnight in some secret ingredients -- has become very much a part of Dumaguete tradition. Jo's delectable white meat, sweetish to the taste, and smelling always of some grilled heaven, is part of our blood. It is the first thing we miss of home, together with the Taster's Delight cheeseburger. I still have old high school classmates, now based all over the world, who's first query with regards home food always makes reference to both Jo's and Taster's Delight.
No one can tell why this is so. Pork or beef or fish are fine -- but chicken? Chicken defines our very taste buds. So much so that last summer, and even the other month, it was possible to go to any restaurant in the city and get told by an apologizing waiter that there would be no chicken dish available. "The city has run out of chicken," he would say.
That's what happened --
twice -- when Mark and I were in Chin Loong. "How can any city run out of chicken?" Mark asked, exasperated, because he was already dreaming of chicken dripping with the sweet and sour combination only Chin Loong could make. The waiter mumbled some more apology, and recommended the sweet and sour squid.
I remember now that it was also with some craziness when Panda -- that ice cream shop over at Harold's Mansion in Tubod -- announced its shortage of chicken. I panicked. Not a lot of people know this but Panda Haus serves more than ice cream. One of my favorites from its menu is steamed rice chicken, which is not exactly the regular dimsum variety we all know. The plus side of this dish, aside from the fact that it is addicting, is the fact that all of Panda's chicken are "organic chicken," which, I am told, makes the whole lot quite healthy to eat. And most days, living the bachelor's life always on the go, I subsist on this dish. I would call up 225-9644, place my order, and ten minutes later, I would munch the peppered combination of rice and chicken meat in the comforts of my own pad. So when the attendants told me one day that they had run out of organic chicken, I immediately texted Angeline Dy, one of the owners, to beg.
She laughed. "We don't grow organic chicken from trees and pluck them just like that!"
"Well, then," I said, "better hatch them fast."
I knew then what I think I have always known. You can deprive a Dumagueteño of chocolate and cake and lechon and all other delicacies in the world. But just give me my chicken meat. It is the definitive meat. Isn't it any wonder that when people must describe some exotic meat dish -- say snake, or kangaroo -- they always say, "Tastes just like chicken"? It is, now I know, the universal paragon of the tastefully divine.
Every Sunday, after church in Bread of Life, we go to City Burger. We do not mind the strange angles of this restaurant along Real Street, an open-air space that resembles the ruins of a gutted house (it is, in fact, the ruins of a gutted building). We do not even mind the apparent misnaming of the place (who eats burger in City Burger?). We all come for one thing: its grilled chicken quite unlike its delicious cousin over at Jo's. How? The extra-sweetish taste of the sauce it drips with.
I always feel guilty after eating in City Burger, but it is a guilt I can live with. The same guilt that possesses me whenever I cross the street from my office in Silliman University to the stone's throw distance of Nena's Kamalig. People have made distinctions about the grilling of chicken. There is supposed to be the Dumaguete-style (Jo's and City Burger's), and there is the Bacolod-style. We first imported the latter a few years back with the coming of Nena's Kamalig, which serves
liempo and chicken and a host of other grilled meat in a distinctive taste that is a combination of burnt liver and catsup. The mixture is surprisingly delicious -- but it is never complete without the final touch: that sauce on your table that looks like reddish moonshine. It is chicken oil drippings. "Egad,
cholesterol. That's a heart attack waiting to happen!" a health-conscious friend once warned me.
"Honey," I said, "it's a risk anyone's willing to take."
I won't risk anything, though, for Ati-Atihan, whose chicken is quite passable -- but there's nothing's new about it. Not even the
amakan interiors (and faucets built from
banga), which seems to be the proscribed material design for any chicken place in Dumaguete and elsewhere. And Dumaguete Fried Chicken? Mark told me once they made the best chili chicken wings. I've been missing the spicy chicken wings from defunct Giacomino's. And so we went one evening to DFC, got horrid service, and were eventually given a miniscule serving of the dish incompatible with its steep price. Plus an order of soggy pizza. Of the chicken: an uninspired piece of fried meat dipped in chili sauce. We left our review of the food on their paper napkin, lettered with their catsup:
"Wala'y lami."I'd rather go chicken-hopping to the various
lechon manok stalls all over the place, especially Manok ni San Pedro, and then Golden Roy's -- the original
lechon manok place, its generous chicken still amazingly spicy to the smell and to the taste.
Eventually, though, we all still go to Jo's for our chicken. A few years ago, when my Dutch friend Martin Slot came into town, Jo's became the first in our list of places to go and explore local delicacies. This was before the restaurant became the swanky place it is now. (The old Jo's was a crowded affair of
amakan darkened with soot and the grime of years.) When we finally had our orders, I told him that the only way to go about eating chicken
inato is through bare hands straight to mouth. "No spoons and forks here.
Kamayan is the way to go about it," I told him. And we did -- me and this flabbergasted foreigner who must have thought this society strange, people eating with bare hands. But it didn't really matter. Because, really, this was the only way to go about it: chicken touching skin, going straight to mouth. Such ritual has become the mark of our familiars. It is our bare, intimate homage to the food that defines us all.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 01, 2004
6:32 PM |
Monkeys in My Mail
( ... i love the smell of new books)
Got my copy of M. Evelina Galang's wonderful anthology
Screaming Monkeys: Critique of Asian American Images in the mail last Friday.
Thanks to writer Cathy Viado!
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
6:32 PM |
Monkeys in My Mail
( ... i love the smell of new books)Got my copy of M. Evelina Galang's wonderful anthology
Screaming Monkeys: Critique of Asian American Images in the mail last Friday.
Thanks to writer Cathy Viado!
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
6:32 PM |
Monkeys in My Mail
( ... i love the smell of new books)Got my copy of M. Evelina Galang's wonderful anthology
Screaming Monkeys: Critique of Asian American Images in the mail last Friday.
Thanks to writer Cathy Viado!
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, July 30, 2004
Part of the
Twilight Zone reality of having a crashed computer is that you have to go to an Internet cafe downtown to get your online fix. In this dread world, an 8-year old kid is dancing the
otso-otso to a webcam while the mother chats with the leery audience of one, a foreign geezer with a day-old beard.
Disgusting.I slept the whole day today. Maybe that's the reason why I feel so relaxed.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Part of the
Twilight Zone reality of having a crashed computer is that you have to go to an Internet cafe downtown to get your online fix. In this dread world, an 8-year old kid is dancing the
otso-otso to a webcam while the mother chats with the leery audience of one, a foreign geezer with a day-old beard.
Disgusting.I slept the whole day today. Maybe that's the reason why I feel so relaxed.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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