Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
There are only temporary bandaids for the grief we feel.
But I made myself believe I’d be okay regardless of how the election turned out. What mattered most, I told myself in that lofty tone of taking the high road, was taking a stand and being in the right side of history.
I did not worry. I woke up early on Election Day, and by 5:30 AM, I was on my way to Amador Dagudag Elementary School to cast my vote, hoping to beat the crowd by coming early. True enough, the school was only beginning to stir. And when I found my precinct—after temporarily being befuddled by the new cluster system COMELEC apparently just enforced—I found myself being the fifth in line to vote. The classroom was small, the chair I was made to sit in even smaller. It was a discomfort I was more than willing to take in, all for the sacred right of doing my civic duty. With the marking pen in hand, I stared at my ballot with trepidation.
For the first time in all my years of voting, I actually prayed. This was how crucial I felt this election was about. It was a fight for the fate of a beloved nation. And at the back of my head, a shrill alarm sounded: I could not take six more years of the same. That will be a total of twelve years. I cannot have more than a decade of commiseration—I simply cannot do it again.
I had never shaded a ballot so carefully in my life. Every circle was like a fragile thing.
When the machine finally accepted my ballot, and when I finally checked my receipt—the moment felt like a triumph. Before exiting, I asked the teachers on duty: “You know about Amador Dagudag, the man your school is named after, right?”
“No, sir.”
I told them that Amador ‘Amading’ Delfin Dagudag was a public school teacher and hero. He was born in 1922 in Pontevedra, Capiz, but later moved to Dumaguete, graduated in 1949 from Silliman University, and eventually became a science teacher. He died at the age of 45, and is known for his heroic act in protecting the ballots during the 1967 Senate election, which claimed his life. Lo-oc Elementary School, established in 1927, which was later called East City Elementary School, was renamed the Amador Dagudag Memorial Elementary School in 1969 in his honor.
“In the name of Amador Dagudad, thank you for your service this election season,” I said.
I hoped that made them feel at least heroic.
But I was happy to be done with voting in less than 10 minutes.
Later on, as I exited the school, I felt the first instance of panic setting in: I surrendered my voting receipt to a cardboard receptacle. That seemed weird. Didn’t we always drop our ballot receipts into metallic boxes with padlocks? This felt like an anomaly. Later on, I was assured by friends that it was perfectly fine. [In hindsight, was it?]
After a post-voting breakfast that Monday morning, I made my way home to catch up on lost sleep—and woke up in the late afternoon to panic on social media. Slowly, the anxiety dug deep, and even if I purposefully logged out of social media to stem the incoming grief, the need to know was stronger. I kept logging on and logging off Twitter and Facebook. It felt like digging one's own grave.
What was it that made this election season extra painful?
The return of Sauron, most of all.
Also perhaps the knowledge that so many young people, most of them first time voters, have had their hearts so thoroughly broken yesterday. Will they still believe in democratic elections when the system is so corrupted and rigged, there was no contest at all right from the very start? Will they be so disheartened they will contribute to the brain drain—all these brilliant young people opting to leave the country instead? I don’t know.
I felt especially hopeless in my nth realization that what seems to matter most is not competence or brilliance or hard work. People will chose a Robin Padilla over a Chel Diokno. So what’s the use of all our efforts to be good, to be competent, to be educated when apparently these are no longer valued by the community at large?
And then there was the sense of personal failure. When I was a literature teacher, I taught Martial Law literature as my contribution to the rising historical revisionism I knew was going on even in college. I feel like I did not succeed in the long run, I feel inutile.
That Dumaguete turned red this time around felt especially galling: I felt like an alien in my own hometown. The disappointment ran deep. When bedtime came, I found myself unable to sleep. I kept tossing and turning for hours on end, until my body exhausted itself from the anxiety. It didn’t help that the last two things I saw on socmed were the following: a glib post by someone urging everyone to add each other as friends in Facebook again, and a tone-deaf post by a local artist who posted something to the tune of X’ing the faces of every Presidential bet and declaring them not to be the answers—that “only Jesus Christ was the answer.” It annoyed me so much, I wanted to say: “You’re not helping, girl. Let people grieve. This is not how you win people over to your faith.”
I made my decision: my resistance will be both subtle and creative. I’m going to accept novelist Charlson Ong’s challenge: “The best resistance is work. Write our books. Make our movies. Help all those we can in times ahead. Don’t lose heart. Don’t be bitter. Work our butts off. Get out of our comfort zones. Do the darn best work of our lives in the next years.”
I woke up late today.
I made my body decide when it was the appropriate time to get up and face a world that feels hostile. My S.O. decided to cheer me up by taking me to a late lunch at Qyosko; then dropping by to see two new exhibits at Shelter Gallery and at Cafe Memento Gallery; and ending the day with early dinner at Himawari, where we commiserated over gyoza, gyudon, yakitori, and mochi ice cream.
Art and food. These were my bandaids. What were yours?
Complacency.
Our biggest failure of the past three decades has been complacency. After we make the country pink tomorrow, let’s make sure we’re going to rectify the silence and the idleness we resorted to for years, simply because we thought no one could possibly forget the evils of the Marcos regime. All along, without our knowing, they laid the extensivee groundwork that has made people susceptible to historical revisionism.
Let’s take a closer look at our school curricula, our history books, our teachers. Let’s make good and interesting movies and TV shows about the Martial Law. [Eto dapat!] Let’s remake the TV newsroom and strip it of its entertainment “Marc Logan” mould, and make the news matter again. [All stations are required by law to have news anyway if they want to be granted a franchise. They don’t have to be patently commercial.] Let’s write more books and more comics. Let’s amp up our YouTube and TikTok creations. And let’s take the newest platform that will come and make sure they are not inundated by Marcos propaganda.
What is toxic privilege? It’s thinking that because nothing bad happened to you, nothing bad happened at all — and then refusing to listen or to believe people who tell you the otherwise. It’s robbing people of their own story by your flippant denial of it. [“That didn’t happen at all.” “Yes, but...”] That “but” is the gateway to small evils. It’s gaslighting, it's historical revisionism at its minimum level.
I was terrorised once by a former close friend in 2010, which sent me on a spiral of depression that actually made me go seek legal advise for the first time in my life. [Hi, Myrish! Remember this?] When I told a common friend of my plight, she dismissed what I was saying by telling me: “There are many sides to every story.” That hurt, to be honest. To be disbelieved is awful. UNTIL. Until she herself was terrorised by that former friend, to the point of her landing in really bad legal trouble.
Moral of the story: be careful what you dismiss; it might happen to you.
My family lost everything because of Marcos—our house, our car, our lives.
This was in the mid-1970s, right around the time I was born—and because I was a newborn at the time the New Society was being touted as the “saving grace” to a troubled country and because I only stumbled on this information in my adult years, I was never able to ask the proper probing questions, until now.
My father and mother in Hacienda Roca, Bayawan in 1971.
No one in my family ever talked about it either, except in broad strokes that told a simple story of lost fortune: that once we had an extensive sugar plantation in the rich farmlands of Bayawan with the opulent lifestyle [and a vast circle of friends] that went with it, and then we lost it all. No one mentioned Marcos, and I attributed the story to quirks of fate. Bad things happen to good people.
We did not talk about the origins of our reduced circumstances, perhaps out of shame. I, on the other hand, would have been the one person in the family to ask the terrible questions for the sake of writing—but I simply did not know.
What could not be denied, however, was the state my family was in those later years in the 1970s, and especially more so throughout the trying decade of the 1980s. I did not feel much the hardship because I was too young to notice anything beyond the regular hunger pangs I felt—but I know now that my older brothers, all five of them, must have. They bore the brunt of my family’s sudden poverty because they were aware firsthand of what they’d lost. When I’d go through old photos in family albums, I see them enjoying lavish birthday parties. My brothers in those photos had birthday cakes and birthday candles, always surrounded by an assortment of people I didn’t recognize hogging tables laden with abundant feasts. I never had a birthday party—but I honestly didn’t know what I was missing until my 30th birthday when friends surprised me with a birthday cake, and only then did I realize I had never blown a birthday candle my entire life.
My brother Dennis enjoying his second birthday in 1969.
We were very poor, we could barely eat three square meals a day. Things became so hard that when the family was finally forced to sell off our Bayawan house and our car [a yellow Sakbayan] to avoid the stigma of foreclosure, the only recourse was for the family to move to Dumaguete City in 1980. This was when the financial crunch was finally tightening around the illusion of Marcos’ New Society.
We lived like nomads in that decade, moving from one house to the next in search of cheap rent. This is what I remember most from my childhood—all the houses we stayed in, from a small compound at the Capitol Area to a wooden house with many rooms in Calle Sta. Rosa, from an upstairs apartment overlooking Holy Cross High School to a secluded one in an alley off Silliman Avenue, from various apartments in Bantayan to a virtual zaguan of a rickety old house in the bowels of Tubod.
My mother, who was once a society belle in her hometown of Bayawan in the flush years of the 1950s and 1960s, was reduced to a skeleton of a woman darkened by the sun as she went from house to house selling peanut butter she herself made—just to be able to feed us. She still kept in touch with many of her old friends, some of them still well-off, and most helped her out by buying her peanut butter. And when one of them would throw birthday parties, she’d take me along—her youngest child—just so I could have a proper meal. My mother still loves to tell this particular story from that time: that once, when I was 11 or 12, I was so hungry after not being able to eat the whole day that I woke her up in the middle of the night, urging her to pray with me, so that God would listen and give us food. A miracle came: the next day, an anonymous friend sent us a whole bag of groceries. Until now, that sautéed sardines my mother prepared remains the best meal in memory.
In the 1980s, my mother would take me around with her to attend friends’ birthday parties just so I could eat properly.
Our reprieve came with the usual story of many Filipino families. One of my brothers managed to work abroad just as the 1990s came along—and only then, with the remittances he sent the family, could we breathe properly again. I remember buying our first refrigerator. I remember buying our first TV. I remember buying our first Christmas tree. I remember our first car. I remember moving into our new house we didn’t have to rent anymore.
Where does Marcos come into the story?
* * *
“The personal is political,” so the old mantra goes. This truism is an honest accounting: our personal circumstances and experiences are rooted in, or invariably dictated by, the politics that surround us, especially in issues of inequality.
This was my prompt, and when I used this as the framework with which to see my family’s history, I stumbled into a rabbit’s hole. When I went deeper, I was confronted by facts that had not been readily told to me, not even by my family. The twist in my family’s personal history—our descent into indignity—came about because of the late dictator’s rape of Sugarlandia in the 1970s.
Here’s a bit of history.
Negros enjoyed decades of untold wealth because of one crop that grew abundantly on the island: sugarcane. All over the provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental, landed families controlled haciendas that produced sugar for export, particularly to the United States. You can still see remnants of this gilded age: the beautiful houses of Silay City and Bais City, even the famous “sugar houses” of Dumaguete, the small seaside mansions of Negrense landowners that line the Rizal Boulevard.
Families of more modest means—including mine—were also able to tap into this market with sizable landholdings devoted to the crop. Our plantation in Bayawan was named Hacienda Roca—after “Rosales Casocot”—and for many years, it sustained my family and catapulted it to the higher echelons of Bayawan society.
And then the United States ended its sugar quota in 1974, after which Ferdinand Marcos—only two years after declaring Martial Law in the country (and thus having the power of life and death over everyone, even rich hacenderos)—appointed cronies “to head a state-owned marketing and trading monopoly” of the sugar industry, writes Inday Espina-Varona for Licas News.
On paper, Marcos and his economic advisers argued that it was a necessary move, because “pervasive market failures were the root cause of the decline of the sugar industry”—this, according to a 2001 paper by Gerald Meier—and that in order to rescue the industry, “central coordination was crucial.” Marcos called for the government to replace the market “in order to stimulate the market development of the sugar industry.” He established the Philippine Sugar Commission or PHILSUCOM in 1976, as well as its trading subsidiary, the National Sugar Trading Corporation or NASUTRA, to do the job.
NASUTRA was given the sole power to buy and sell sugar, set prices paid to planters and millers, and purchase companies connected to the sugar industry. In May 1978, the Republic Planters Bank was established “to provide adequate and timely financing to the sugar industry.”
Except that this was all illusion, good only on paper: Marcos and his cronies never paid back the planters—including my family—for the sugar NASUTRA got from them. All the money went to the pockets of Marcos and his cronies.
Inday Espina-Varona further writes: “[Marcos and his cronies] robbed sugar planters, taking advantage of fluctuating global prices and drowning landowners in debt. That, coupled with centuries of irresponsible lifestyles and a feudal system that reserved land only for the rich, led to the collapse of the island’s economy.”
And then that financial disaster blew up into an even bigger one:
“On Negros’ vast plains, man—not nature—ushered in famine,” Inday Espina-Varona writes. “Almost 200,000 workers lost their jobs. Hacienda owners, facing bankruptcy, fled to the safety of cities, abandoning families that had served them for generations. Unemployed workers on paper enjoyed some social amelioration. Those who actually received this were the exception. Corrupt officials had siphoned off funds to personal coffers or to bankroll the extravagant habits of the dictator’s family. Farm labor flooded the cities to scrabble for work but there was little to be had.
“In trickles, and then streams of misery, children began arriving in hospitals with swollen bellies, stick limbs, and eyes that drooped or stared sightless from pain. Some were too weak to talk; many could not walk.”
Negros suddenly became known worldwide for its starving children. Some of you might still recall the 1980s campaign that screamed: “Feed the Hungry Children of Negros.” In the public grade school I attended in Dumaguete in the early 1980s—during the last years of the Marcos regime—I remember well what that entailed: being fed pospas every day during recess. I hated pospas.
The most infamous of these “hungry children of Negros” was a boy named Joel Abong whose skin-and-bone visage appeared “on the front pages of newspapers and the covers of magazine,” writes Inday Espina-Varona, who covered the ill-fated child’s last days.
A photo taken on 4 May 1985 by Kim Komenich of young malnutrition victim Joel Abong, which has become iconic of the situation in Negros during the 1980s.
She notes: “Joel had pneumonia and tuberculosis. He was brought in with bones so brittle doctors had to wrap padding around his limbs. Joel’s body was the size of a baby. Stringy hair the yellow-brown of severe malnutrition lay limp on a head that seemed grotesquely big. A rattling sound accompanied every breath. His father was one of those who had fled the cane fields. On an island where people joked about shoveling money from the ground, Joel’s family had literally starved. My mother headed that hospital’s pediatric department. She came home every night in a silent rage. Some nights she could hardly eat; food was a reminder of her patients. Doctors couldn’t save Joel. He was not alone.”
By 1985, ten percent of Negros’ children were suffering third-degree malnutrition, according to Dr. Violeta Gonzaga of La Salle College in Bacolod.
* * *
So, is this the “golden age” people talk about when they crow about the Marcos years? Years of starving children? Years of financial mismanagement? Years of lining the coffers of cronies while whole industries suffered?
But the bigger question has got to be this: how come we don’t know many of these things?
How come I had to dig deeper to understand where my family’s misfortune came from?
How come these things are not taught in our history classes—so much so that historical revisionism threatens to overwhelm us all?
And lastly: how come people have come to ignore how Marcos virtually raped our localities, our provinces, our regions—and believe instead YouTube and TikTok videos about “the glory years” of the dictator’s grip on power?
That last one came to me when I was chatting with Frank Cimatu, a writer/friend and journalist based in Baguio. We were talking over Messenger about the person who heckled Jillian Robredo as she went about a Baguio market on a campaign for her mother’s presidential run.
“Hirap kasi sa Benguet,” Frank told me. “Anlakas ng [he who must not be named].”
That took me aback.
“Even with the Chico Dam controversy and the murder of Macli-ing Dulag?” I asked.
[Historical aside: In 1973, a year after Martial Law was declared, the Marcos regime proposed the Chico River Dam Project, a hydroelectric power generation project involving the Chico river system that encompassed the regions of Cordillera and Cagayan Valley—without consulting the lumads in the area. Locals, notably the Kalinga people, resisted fiercely because of the project’s threat to their residences, livelihood, and culture—and the project was soon after shelved in the 1980s after public outrage in the wake of the murder of opposition leader Macli-ing Dulag. It is now considered a landmark case study concerning ancestral domain issues in the Philippines.]
“Clueless,” Frank said. “Even Sagada is hati.”
I thought back to what Marcos did to Negros in the 1970s—and I blinked from the sheer exhaustion I felt after realizing that even people from a land that has been raped [or threatened with it, as was the case of the Cordilleras] could still be so enamored by the son of that rapist, someone who insists to this day that no rape ever happened.
* * *
I doubt my mother—who is now 89 years old—still chases fanciful dreams of a return to the old splendor she enjoyed in Bayawan in the gilded age. I know she has come to a place of peace, having come to a reckoning with that past and the immediate catastrophe that followed it that saw her destitute and that saw her struggle so hard to feed her family [although she still managed to put through six sons studying at the very expensive Silliman University]. The hardship ultimately strengthened her, and for that she is grateful.
[1] An unexpected turning point in a beloved's life.
[2] Lowkey anxiety to start the day with.
[3] A book signing event for a local memoirist who wrote about life during the Martial Law -- and I found myself voicing out at length and with unexpected passion about Marcos, politics, and historical revisionism. This was the first time I've ever done this, off the cuff.
[4] A letter from an old classmate who has been going through a lot lately. She was diagnosed with being bipolar years ago, and is now the caregiver for an ailing parent. She asked me to write her a eulogy, while she was still alive and can read what others can say about her. She recently got out of a terrible depression, and she just wanted to know how she has mattered in the lives of others. She knew I have ADHD, and she thought I'd be one who could best understand where she was coming from. I read her request to my s.o. after dinner, and I unexpectedly burst into tears. Mental health struggles are an invisible wound, and I realize that sometimes we just want to be seen.
I contributed my voice to this chorus of Filipino writers urging everyone to vote Leni/Kiko 2022 for the sake and love of country. [This is the second batch video, by the way.]
Isang paalala galing sa inyong mga kaibigan at mga katrabaho:
Sana yang iboto mo, ay yung katulad mo na mabait
at may pagpapahalaga sa ating mga katrabaho
sa mundo ng panitikan, patalastas, telebisyon at pelikula.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mo na masipag
na nauuna sa pagtulong sa mahihirap
at sa mga biktima ng mga kalamidad.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mong matalino
na hindi nagpapakalat ng fake news
at ng mga paninira sa kapwa.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mong matapang
na hindi umaatras sa ano mang hamon ng panahon.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mong mabuti
na nagsisilbi sa iyong kapwa at sa bayan.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mong matapat
sa ano man tungkulinge na pinagagawa sayo
at hindi nanglalamang sa kapwa.
Sana ang iboto mo ay yung katulad mong masinop
na may pagpahalaga sa pera
at hindi nagnanakaw.
Sana pareho din ang iboboto natin na mabait,
masipag, matalino,
matapang, mabuti,
matapat at masinop
… na katulad ni LENI at KIKO.
Pag-isipan mong mabutie…
para sa kinabukasan ng iyong pamilya at bansa.
The way the mangoes fall down on the galvanised iron roof of the shed next door, you'd think there are unholy skirmishes at play. A fight perhaps, or a neighbour throwing stones, or hail falling in hail-free country. I conjecture only violence from the sounds I hear. When it rains, as it does now, the thud each impact makes is thunder; when the wind blows, a thunderstorm — it disturbs what repose I fashion of the comforts of my bedroom. (How many fruits does that tree hold?) I tell myself, it’s just fruit. It’s just mango flesh slamming against metal sheets. There is no comfort in this fact, however: in my mind, I see that flesh torn and bruised, helpless against wind or rain, the sound of their fall their last call that catches my attention before they surrender to the cruel ground below.
The haircut was long in coming. We tried to catch our regular barber over at the Food District along E.J. Blanco but we didn’t expect the past few weeks to be so busy we found making time impossible. [We went to our book launch with hair that needed trimming, to our personal consternation.] And then the barbershop closed down without notice, our barber virtually disappeared.
I panicked a little: hair is a personal business that requires familiarity and easily induces anxiety when that familiarity is disturbed. My mother, a former beautician, exclusively cut my hair until I was a junior in high school. Every time she did, she would tell me that my hair was particularly difficult to manage. “Daghan ka’g alimpolos! You have too many strange whorls! It will take someone patient enough to do your hair right,” she said, again and again. That someone was always her — and so, come senior year in high school, when I had to graduate from her haircare to a barber who would give me the required crewcut for CAT class, I did so with much trepidation.
I found Manong Max at the old Tavern Barberia. He was this quiet, gentle soul who looked like a librarian, a strange duck in the company of other barbers who were macho in their ways and loquacious in their talks about local politics. [I swear they all had solutions to the world’s problems. When Erap was about to be ousted from the Presidency, I remember one of them asking earnestly: “Asa sya mo-hatag og resignation letter? Sa Presidente sa United States?” Ah, the good old days.] Luckily, Manong Max was someone patient enough to do my hair right — and I stuck with him through the years until he unexpectedly died from cancer.
I was back in my limbo, and I hopped from one barber to the next, never satisfied with what they gave me. There was a brief time in my late 20s and early 30s, when I was at my prime, and I frequented beauty parlors for a more stylish cut. But then soon it was back to barbers, and more disappointments.
And then, upon the recommendation of a friend, there was Manong Denmar, who knew my hair well and gave the best after-cut back and head massages. I followed him from his old post somewhere along Silliman Avenue to his new one along E.J. Blanco, which promptly closed for a few months because of the pandemic.
When barbershops were allowed to open again, I was back in his chair, my hair quite long and my mental health in shambles, and I came with one request: I wanted to have all my hair cut off. Totally shaved.
[What is it about trying times that make you do crazy things to your hair? It was also an effort to stem the copious hairfall I was suffering from because of the stress and the depression.]
But I dithered — and he gave me an extreme crewcut instead. He was really good, and I was loyal — but now he was also gone.
There was a note in the premises that informed us of a relocation and a phone number to call. But we went over and the venue does not seem to exist. And from what we've been told in the few text messages we’ve received from the advertised number, Manong Denmar was keeping strange hours in the new place because he has another [new] job at a local hospital and now only does haircutting on the side. [Times are hard.] And now the number does not even bother replying anymore to queries about reservations or appointments or more specific directions.
It was time to find another barber. [Sad.]
For now it's Manong Rodney over at this new place also along E.J. Blanco, Black and Copper Co., a barbershop that doubles as a cafe and gives free Americano or espresso for every cut you get. It certainly is an enticement. Will Rodney be the embodiment of my hairdresser mother’s wish for hair patience? Let’s see how this goes.
Really considered stopping the whole business of creative writing at the tail end of last year. Not because I stopped believing in myself, but more so because I felt my mental condition would just spoil whatever increment of success I might make in my efforts. [Plus, I could not write after I went off meds. It was difficult just even considering a paragraph. Or a Facebook post. You must have noticed I wasn’t on Facebook for months!] I was my own worst enemy and saboteur — still am, actually. But right now I’m trying to fight again, and right now I’ve at least learned to ask for help. Part of what made The Great Little Hunter the success that it is was me surrendering the nitty-gritty of its publication process to my S.O. because I knew I could not handle whatever it took to make it a reality. I owe him so much.
Currently doing research and preparing for my next video essay. Yes, I'm about to go back and do this again. Something happened a while back that made me stop: a small [but totally valid] backlash that hurt me for the way it was handled. I was also going through bad withdrawal from my ADHD meds at that time, and I didn't need another source of anxiety on top of that. So I stopped. For mental health's sake. But I realize now I had to expect feedback like that if I want to do this consistently. I'm passionate about this, and passionate about sharing. There should be no killing passion. In my recent book, I write about a kid who makes friends with his monsters [his fears embodied]. I should learn how to do that, too. So let's begin. Again.
I have never been to a political rally in my entire life. Going to one—braving the stifling crowd, bearing the heat and the exhaustion, enduring the often bloated and meandering speeches of politicians—just feels like the most extreme form of rendering political support, even if you do believe in voting for that politician in the coming elections. It has never been a line I was willing to cross, although I am very much a political animal and I believe in the importance of political expression.
But go to a rally? Not a chance.
It is already enough that at the height of election season we have to navigate city streets where the faces of politicians running for public office leer at you from every street corner and from every tree that has been made to suffer the indignity of having to be papered over by an assortment of posters and tarpaulins. It’s already quite disconcerting to see them smiling at you with their blown-up Photoshopped faces, their “friendliness” almost mercenary. But to go to a rally where these “friendly posters” become fully bodied? Not a chance.
And yet there was something different in the air in the days going towards April 20th in Dumaguete. You could say that it was part conviction, part trepidation, part desperation, part anger, and part hope that were stirring the atmosphere. For months, all these feelings could only truly show expression via social media posts, often resulting to rabid sparring with others who are, in the words of comedian Ogie Diaz, “from the other parlor.” And while we acknowledge that social media has indeed impacted how politics are managed in this day and age, for better or for worse, I think people have been craving for a “physicality” of that political expression, even if they have never done it before.
The rallies in other places—Cebu, Pampanga, Davao, Bataan, Bohol, to mention only a few—were already providing us a template with which to sate this need for a physical demonstration of a political stirring. But beyond that need, and beyond being awed by the thousands who flocked to these rallies before Dumaguete happened, I think there was also a conviction that this election was “different.” It almost felt as if the Election of 2022 was a referendum on the very core and spirit of the nation. So much was at stake. Given the chance to publicly voice out one’s political convictions, you had to be present, for all that it was worth.
I think of my friend Marita Ong, proprietor of O.K. Mart, who also confessed to me that she had also never been to a political rally before. “But this time feels different,” she said. She had to come.
So she came to RUSI Ballfield on the 20th, and also 40,000+ others—not counting the 15,000 crowd that gathered at the Rizal Boulevard in a separate rally that was also a miting de avance of the city administration slate early that evening.
We went, not because of artistas. As a political rally virgin I didn’t even know there were performers involved. But a friend from theatre, Hope Tinambacan, who sang during the rally and was part of the Sidlak group of performers, commented: “Para syang cultural show, not a political rally!”
We went not because we were bayaran. Most of us spent our own money to get this thing going, to participate in the spirit of this being a “people’s movement.”
We went because we felt the need to be counted—and we needed to meet this reckoning with history full-on. In the years to come, when I will be asked: “What did you do in 2022 when the country called on you to do the right thing?,” I want to be able to say that I contributed my voice to the movement that signaled best our love for country.
I came with friends and family, knowing that this was a red [or pink!]-letter day for all of us. We prepared by printing our own shirts, with design from a pair of Cebu graphic artists [Phawip and Dawie of The Con Artists] who willingly donated it to anyone who wanted it. We prepared by plotting out, days beforehand, what food and drinks we needed to have, and what chairs we needed to bring. [We ended up deciding on an easy-to-carry platform—which served us perfectly as a common chair, as holding area for our bags, and as riser to bring us to workable heights with which to see over the heads of the gathered throng. It even accommodated the occasional stranger who needed rest from the grueling day.] We prepared because we had no idea what to expect. All of us were political rally virgins.
Our friends Anna Espino and Carlo Regalado prepared by also doing their own shirts, and crafting out their own placards and banners. I loved Carlo’s take: “Mga Mang-aagaw ng Kanta sa Videoke for Leni!” I knew many others were preparing the same thing. [Two of my favorites: “Swifties for Leni!” and “Mga Palahubog for Leni!”]
Many volunteers, led by leaders such as lawyer Golda Benjamin, prepared by fine-tuning and executing many of the essentials of very difficult logistics. Others volunteered to give performance. [One of my favorites was seeing Dumaguete medical frontliners perform "Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo." That made me tear up.] Others prepared by readying food [cupcakes! candies! biscuits and cookies!] and bottled water and fans and pink roses made from art paper—all given out for free in the duration of ten long hours as people milled about the rally venue. One of my best friends, the dentist Xandro Dael who previously voted for Duterte in 2016, loved the fiesta atmosphere of it all: “I love the keychains, pins, pencils, and food! Daghan kaayo!” he said. “Doughnuts, siopao, cookies, silvanas, ice cream—all in pink!”
We did not expect that kind of festivity at all. [Is this common in political rallies?] I overheard someone say, “Mura’g Hibalag, Buglasan, og Pride Parade combined.” True enough, there were many members of the LGBTQ community around—some in fabulous pink drag. [One appropriated the horns of Maleficent, all done in pink, and sashayed all over RUSI Ballfield, to gleeful applause.] There were also, delightfully, cheerleaders doing their routine—even in the blasting heat of the afternoon sun.
We were there since 1 PM, sheltered for a bit in neighboring restaurants to wait out the sun, came back to the grounds at 4 PM, and stood in our designated spot until 11 PM. That’s seven hours of standing up along with the rest of those thousands inside RUSI Ballfield; no one in their right mind would do that without the clearest conviction that they were doing the right thing.
And when the rally finally started around sunset with a couple of well-known comedians, the crowd only got bigger, the collective energy growing brighter by the minute. When I looked around, I was astonished that I could see people all the way to the margins of the ballfield. I was even astonished by the demographics on full display: this was a very, very young crowd—all of them incredibly impassioned. One young guy behind us, someone clad in white-washed jeans, a white shirt, and an opened polo shirt in various baby pastel hues, and who was there with his barkada, was a bundle of energy that was infectious. He was fun and demonstrative in his participative shouts, which only egged on the rest of us who were near him.
It wasn’t all flawless, needless to say. A former action star and athlete running for senator had to do an embarrassing kissing bit with a female rallyer. [In 2022? In the wake of the #MeToo movement worldwide?] And one incumbent senator with an embarrassing campaign tagline dragged on forever with what was supposed to be a short stump speech, meandering about railroads and the various possible acronyms for W.O.W., and peppered his “I love you’s” with strange insults hurled at the audience—at one time telling all of us, “Ang laki-laki ng mga ulo nyo.” He went on forever and did not make sense, and he said his goodbye a thousand times—and soon the energy that built up all throughout the evening noticeably went down. [Even the energetic young man behind us was now sitting down on the grass, noticeably grown quiet.] It was such a downer, not even the great Kuh Ledesma who immediately followed him could reignite the energy that was previously there. It took Gab Valenciano’s performance prowess to bring up the energy again—and thank God, because that was the crucial moment going into the very heart of the rally. Kiko came on with a heartfelt call for action, and then there was, finally, Leni.
The crowd went wild.
From Cong. Josy Limkaichong’s introduction to the presidential candidate, I remember the awe in her voice when she beheld the crowd from the stage: “In my whole 20-year political career, I have never seen this many people in a political rally in Negros Oriental.” [True! Oriental Negrenses are famously reticent in political demonstrations.] Later on, in a private chat, she would admit that she was overwhelmed with the huge crowd and with the unexpected turnout—and for once she was not sure how the diverse crowd [composed mostly of young people] would react to her message: “To be candid with you, it was my first time to address a crowd of that magnitude, and I wasn’t sure if my message would come across the Millennials and Generation Z.”
From what I witnessed, it clearly went over very well—and so did Leni’s call for better governance in a time when it is most needed. As my friend, the writer Tara De Leon, later on commented (borrowing from the title of a famous movie): “The kids are all right.”
Two days later, I was back in my old haunt where I work best: a hotel café along the Rizal Boulevard. One of the waiters there [name withheld to protect his privacy] told me: “Sir Ian, I was there, too—right after I got out of my shift at the hotel. And I’ve been trying to convince my friends and family here and in Siquijor to vote for Leni, even though some of them are voting for [he who must not be named].” And this waiter proceeded to tell me about the research that he did, all the articles he read, to arrive at the conclusion he has: he has to vote pink. Clearly an informed choice—and I was happy for that!
Politics is essential and should not be reduced to a flippant vote come election time. Politics is the distillation of everything one believes and holds dear—a cumulative core of everything, from sociology to history, from science to culture, from morality to legality. It is not nothing. Who you vote for is the sum of who you are as an individual and as a person of the world.
In the light of those 40,000 and counting, I am gratified to know there is still some light and decency left in this world. I am throwing off my old cudgels of despair: I love finally knowing that I am not alone in the fight against the darkness that threatens to further engulf us.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and its color is pink.
[PHOTOS BY MELISA MAGHANOY AND ROBBIN DAGLE OF RAPPLER]
A sigh of relief and gratefulness. The art talks went over really well! Lovely interaction with a great audience — although admittedly I was at pains preparing a talk after the gruelling day we had yesterday. This was also the first time I’ve done a face-to-face lecture since the pandemic started, so that took getting used to. And that concludes our final event for The Great Little Hunter exhibit, which concludes on April 24, Sunday. Thanks to all who supported us in this journey!
I began writing The Great Little Hunter in the summer of 2018 with the hopes of entering it into an international picture book competition. I knew I wanted to write about a boy confronting his fears, and I also knew I needed the story to be steeped in local culture. And then the idea of a child “mangangayam” [or hunter] came about. After a few days trying to bring the story down to less than 500 words, I thought of only one person who could bring my vision of this story to life: Hersley-Ven Casero. But before even meeting him, I needed to prepare the visuals for each spread of the potential book, so that my story and his potential illustrations would perfectly sync into the structure of a book. These are the pegs I prepared, culled from various art I collected online. [I didn't have the energy or the time to properly draw.] Hersley was quickly on board. Two months later, Hersley showed me his work — and I was astonished at how much he was able to flesh out the world of Ngayam, making the story also his own: it was his idea to make each canvas/spread bleed into each other like in a continuous scroll, making all sixteen spreads part of one very long work, with the last spread bleeding into the first one. And every canvas hides all sorts of flora and fauna Hersley studied while making the work. Part of the fun is identifying these!
The first spread...
The second spread...
The third spread...
The fourth spread...
The fifth spread...
The sixth spread...
The seventh spread...
The eighth spread...
The ninth spread...
The tenth spread...
The eleventh spread...
The twelfth spread...
The thirteenth spread...
The fourteenth spread...
The fifteenth spread...
The last spread, which bleeds into the first page, which is not part of a spread...
By the time you are reading this in the weekend paper—probably on a Palm Sunday afternoon at the tail end of the second year of the pandemic—I would most likely be at Dakong Balay Gallery along Rizal Avenue tending to social anxiety brought about by a book.
It is not just any book.
I’ve authored this one, the fourteenth title in my so-so career as a literary artist, but it is my first children’s book that’s actually being published in a major way.
It’s titled The Great Little Hunter, published in a deluxe edition by Pinspired Philippines—hardbound with gorgeous illustrations—purposefully on a limited printing run: a combination of a children’s book and an art book. And I’m proud of it. The way one becomes proud of something finally made tangible after dreaming about it for so long. It took almost four years for this book to come to being, and when I think of all that time passing, I marvel at the intricate ways with which things come into being. They don’t always coalesce, despite the best of efforts, so when they do, you marvel.
I’ve written other children’s stories before. In 2006, my children’s book Rosario’s Stories was an honorable mention finalist at the PBBY-Salanga Writer’s Prize—the country’s top award for children’s literature—in a year when no one copped the actual prize. The great artist Jomike Tejido actually had illustrations ready-made for that book, but I didn’t submit it anywhere for publication. Not then. I told myself I was not ready.
In 2007, another children’s story, The Last Days of Magic, won a prize at the Palanca Awards—and this story would have tremendous legs, quickly becoming a staple in grade school textbooks in Philippine schools, and would actually be translated to Vietnamese by the wonderful writer Nguyen Phan Que Mai in 2017. She would later include it in her 2018 anthology Bay Lên (Taking Flight), together with stories by Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood, Bina Shah, and others. This story never came out as a standalone children’s book, however—although I included it in my collection Heartbreak and Magic, which came out in 2012. It is probably my most popular children’s story.
In 2018, I tried shopping around a personal anthology of unpublished children’s stories to one or two of the major children’s book publishers in the country. I was told by one publisher they were not taking in such a format, especially for a manuscript written in English. Apparently the market leaned heavily towards those written in Tagalog—but then, a month or so later, that same publisher put out exactly the same kind of book, written in English, by another writer. What does one do? I shrugged and took that as pure publishing disinterest. You win some, you lose some. Such is a writer’s life.
So I privately published that personal anthology myself, which I titled The Boy, The Girl, The Rabbit, The Rat, and the Last Magic Days, in a very limited run—which quickly sold out. I never got around to doing a second printing run. It exhausted me.
It’s not easy to write for children [not even teenagers], but there is something about the genre that appeals to me in a masochistic way. It has set parameters in terms of language and vocabulary, word count, and appeal—and demands a very different way of telling a story, mindful that the intended audience is composed of children, but also mindful that it is never a good idea to underestimate this audience’s comprehension and sophistication. I continue to write children’s stories as an intricate challenge of particular storytelling. I am not alone in this regard. Some of my favorite children’s authors—the great Maurice Sendak, for instance—have the same mindset.
It was around that time—the summer of 2018, to be exact—when I started writing a short children’s story meant to be a picture book. I was teaching a workshop in writing children’s stories, and I wanted a chance to get away from my students’ efforts and put out something of my own. I also wanted to join an international contest—but writing the story I wanted to tell felt paramount.
I wanted it to be about a boy confronting his fears, and becoming triumphant in the end. That is the hope, isn’t it? To prevail versus the darkness?
But I’ve never done a picture book story before, which has its own very specific demands—mostly word count, and almost haiku-like in narrative brevity. How does one tell a satisfying narrative arc in less than 500 words? I’m notoriously a wordy writer, but I’m also notoriously a masochist when it comes to literary challenges. I often like writing in a mode I am most uncomfortable with; it stretches my writing muscles.
I spent three consecutive days in a café, drinking my usual latte and crafting the tale of Ngayam. It became The Great Little Hunter, a story of a boy whose fearful fantasies triggered by the moon conjure a dark jungle in his bedroom, and he soon encounters some of Philippine lower mythology’s dreadful monsters—a wak-wak, a sigbin, and a tikbalang. Shades of Sendak here, but transplanted in the texture of local culture, of personal struggles.
The story done, I knew I wanted an illustrator who best understood me and what went on in the recesses of my imagination. There was no other artist to tap except Hersley-Ven Casero.
Hersley and I go a long way back. I first knew of him sometime in the mid-2000s when MetroPost presented me with a Christmas gift: a pencil portrait of myself drawn by him. [But I thought “Hersley” was a girl’s name.] I loved the portrait, sought out the artist—who turned out to be a wunderkind based in Foundation University. He was prolific, churning out art and photography with the energy of a creative virtuoso. It was not long before I took up the challenge of curating an exhibit of his photography, together with that of John Stevenson’s, at the Silliman Library Gallery—in a 2008 show [Dumaguete Light and Dark] that compared and contrasted various views of the city both in vibrant color [Hersley’s] and in somber black-and-white [John’s]. That exhibit cemented a long-term relationship of artistic collaborations—and I’m proud to say that I am perhaps the one art critic constant in my championing of his work over the years.
In 2011, for the release of my second major fiction collection, Heartbreak and Magic, published by Anvil—I tapped Hersley to do the illustrations that heralded every story in the book. The works he submitted were astonishing, and so when it came to launching the book in Dumaguete, I broached the idea of doing both a book launch and an art exhibit, showcasing not just the illustrations Hersley made for the book but also gathering together all the art pieces and paintings he had made by then, which I curated. The resulting show, Uncommon Ordinary Magic, would also mark a turning point in Hersley’s artistic career: it was to be his first solo exhibition as an artist.
In the summer of 2018, after I extended to him my invitation to come on board as the illustrator for The Great Little Hunter, Hersley—who was already busy doing many commissioned work and preparing for various exhibitions—became possessed by the story, at least according to what he later told me. Ngayam possessed his imagination, and so, in a stretch of several consecutive days and nights [almost going sleepless], he set about putting the world of Ngayam’s fantasies on canvas.
The resulting seventeen paintings were [and are] exquisite. Each canvas, embued in rich shades of color, told separate segments of Ngayam’s story. But taking the inspiration [and form] of an unfolding tale, each canvas he made also became pieces of an interconnected visual narrative, each picture spilling into the next with almost magical continuity. The paintings taken together become like a scroll from beginning to the end, and even the last canvas connects in an organic way to the first, making an infinite loop of a magical story. I was enamored by what Hersley had done.
But everything remained in a standstill for two years after. Only in March 2021, right smack in the middle of the pandemic, did things start to move again. The principle reason for things being set in motion once more was the entry of Evgeniya Spiridonova—Jane to friends—into our lives. Having made Dumaguete home all the way from Russia, she—together with husband Max Vasiliev—have created a small but thriving empire devoted to all things imaginative and creative in Dumaguete. They have an escape room and a VR gaming salon with Outpost031, and they have a postcard, stationery, and art shop with Pinspired Philippines. Their first venture into local publishing was putting out a book of Hersley’s street photography titled All in Good Time, which was wildly successful, inviting several print runs. Jane saw our manuscript, and signed on as publisher right then and there.
It was good to have someone captain this ship, especially in fraught times. I had to deal with my mental health in the ensuing months, and having Jane on top of things made me feel safe, as I found myself unable to deal with the nitty-gritties involved. I am extremely thankful to my partner Renz Torres for acting as my agent [and my working brain and sanity] throughout the entire process of publishing this book. And I am sure that Hersley is equally thankful to his wife, the filmmaker Toulla Mavromati. In that regard then, The Great Little Hunter has been a labor of love, in all sense of that word.
What lesson can we—especially me—take from Ngayam’s tale? That it is okay to venture out into the despairing dark and confront what you fear. Your triumph however is in befriending those very monsters, acknowledging them as being part of who you are. I take this as my pandemic story, as my mental health struggle story, as my coming-of-age story.
I do hope you get a copy of this book. It should be available at the Pinspired shop at Dakong Balay along Rizal Avenue, or online at pinspired.ph. This story has been a gift to me and to Hersley, and I hope it will mean the same to everyone who will read it and marvel at the pictures.
The book and art launch of The Great Little Hunter is slated on 10 April 2022, Sunday at 3 PM at the Dakong Balay Gallery, Rizal Avenue. The exhibit will run until April 24. The book, which comes with an assortment of freebies, is available atPinspired.ph.
It took me a long time to get myself to watch George Seaton's Country Girl [1954], a film which won Grace Kelly her Oscar for Best Actress. I thought it was a drama about a country bumpkin [hahaha]. Nobody told me it is all about mental health, depression, and creative rut!
5:41 PM |
Dearest Concerned People Who Tell Me To My Face That I Need to Lose Weight in the Middle of a Pandemic
I was out in the world for once. It was an increasingly rare thing, to be out this way in a world still teeming with so much uncertainty.
Like many people I knew, I still harbored a suspicious regard for the outdoors, even in the beginning of the third year of this pandemic. A few weeks ago, someone I know had announced in his Instagram that—even after two vaccinations and a booster shot, even after all these time wearing masks and being extra careful—he had contracted the Omicron strain of COVID-19, and was battling a debilitating bout of it. “But I was going out a lot during the holiday season,” he wrote. “I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
I knew several other people who tested positive for COVID-19 in January. And that was enough to keep me indoors for longer stretches, again.
Not that I was already going out even before that. Taking care of my mental health was becoming a full time endeavor, and home and being out of the radar from people was proving to be comfort I needed to have. Or else go mad. Being out meant courting needless anxiety, so I stayed in.
And when I did go out, it was to combat the occasional stir craziness—and much as possible, only in the most furtive way. Like a mouse. And only in the company of people in my immediate bubble. And only to familiar places I felt was safe enough to be in—like the open-air comfort of Caña at The Bricks Hotel, which had become a second home in the pandemic.
And so when I do go out, the effort often feels like a prize, almost.
So I was out in the world at the Valencia municipal plaza for their Sunday tabo, which has also become a gathering place for many of the province’s major restaurants to set up stands to cater to the eating pleasure of the early morning crowd [a lot of them from Dumaguete]. It was my first time to be there, and it was a tentative joy to behold—given that I was also seeing people I have not seen in almost three years.
Near the end of our excursion, I saw a familiar face, someone I had not seen in many, many moons. There was a rush to my steps as I turned to greet her, my smile wide beneath my facemask, my fist ready for a bump in what had become the fashionable replacement for the old beso-beso. Before I could even say a delighted hello, she said:
“Tambok na ka kaayo! You really should lose weight.”
I really should just had taken it in stride.
I knew where it came from. It is cultural. One can even argue that it’s an unfortunate part of our DNA as a people. Even before the pandemic shattered our lives and reordered the way we did things and dealt with each other, Filipinos were wont to say, “You’ve gone fat!” in lieu of hello—and you can, with all honesty, say it is our hello. Apparently even pandemics are not earthshattering enough to change this.
It is rude—but it is also deeply ingrained, most people don’t even realize they traffic in its crudeness.
Still, it’s not easy to take this in stride. Whether in Tagalog [“Tumaba ka!”] or in Binisaya [“Nanambok ka!”], the comment—especially when it comes as a greeting—astonishes because it always seems to come out of nowhere. Your mindset is to be warm in greeting someone you have not seen in so long, and when the response you get is body-shaming couched in tones of concern mixed in with the salutation, your mind reels. You feel attacked just when you are about to welcome the person in your bubble of familiarity. You are never prepared to give an appropriate response.
What is an appropriate response?
Here’s one: “Ikaw rin!” My closest friends tell me this when I ask them over the occasional chat in Messenger.
But it strikes me as a witless, even commonplace, response; never mind that it is also answering passive aggression with equal hostility—and my mother once told me, in what she said was helpful Biblical metaphor, that it is better to throw back bread when people throw stones at you. [The Bible, I later found out, never said anything remotely resembling this maxim. But I was an obedient Sunday School-bred kid. So I learned to throw bread metaphorically, but also to eat them literally when I needed to soothe whatever pain I felt. I was constantly on the verge of becoming a doormat with eating problems.]
Besides, I am always afflicted by what the French term l’esprit de l'escalier, literally “the spirit of the staircase,” or what they call coming up with the perfect response a little too late. So when someone hails me with “Nanambok ka!” I almost immediately respond with nervous laughter—and think of the wittiest rejoinder thirty minutes later, the offending person already out of sight.
I am certainly not alone in this commiseration. In a 2019 paper on the context of fat-shaming among adult Filipinos, Dr. Roberto Prudencio D. Abello of De La Salle University-Manila’s Behavioral Sciences Department writes that “the contemporary Filipino setting is both harsh and humorous toward individuals labeled as ‘fat’ and in local parlance, ‘tabachoy’ that would suggest that fat shaming culture exists in the Philippine society.” He cites depictions [and reception] of obesity in our popular culture—including movies and television [think of Bondying and Dabyana and Vice Ganda’s infamous 2013 fat-and-rape joke involving TV journalist Jessica Soho]—as the battleground figures that codify the popular attitude towards weight. The ramification, he concludes, is a social hazard: many fat-shamed individuals in his study grapple with unending levels of shame that also leads to feelings of invisibility and inadequacy, among other things.
In other words, “Nanambok ka!” is not helpful at all to anyone’s mental health—so whatever friendly concern it may have been intended in its utterance is all for naught.
And besides, we are living in a pandemic!
When COVID-19 started its onslaught in 2020 and we were all forced to stay indoors for months, I knew what it entailed: it was a wholesale disruption to our ways of doing things, including our rites of fitness we once took for granted. Gyms closed down. We had no idea if it was even safe to venture outdoors for a run. And lockdown also meant, for most people, sedentary living bingeing on movies and TV and partaking of food that was closest comfort in precariously uncertain times. On Facebook, I posted: “In the next few months, please, let’s not comment on each other’s weight.”
There were many individuals, of course, who took to the pandemic like the perfect excuse to gain a six-pack. Good for them. Many of them had access to homebound gym equipment—which is privilege. Diet is also privilege. In Dumaguete, so many food delivery businesses sprouted in 2020, a lot of them touting the latest fad in “healthy eating”—but for a price.
I thought the pandemic was enough to give pause to the usual judgments on weight and other ornery things. I was banking on common understanding and goodwill. I thought: we were fighting a battle in this pandemic, surely we could afford to be kind to each other.
But still—after not seeing each other in months and months, there was this: “Nanambok lagi ka!”
In August 2020, actress KC Concepcion shared on Instagram her own experience with body-shaming: “I used to get body-shamed when I went on my 3-year hiatus for not having that Asian, stick-thin body (for an Asian like me), and many women like me get affected by this mentally, emotionally and physically. Going through a pandemic and realizing the big picture issues of the world, I realized life is to be celebrated, and enjoyed... Like, why would I choose to develop an eating disorder over losing all the extra weight healthily?”
Later, in November of the same year, the Department of Education had to issue an apology when a module for distance learning from DepEd-Occidental Mindoro took potshots at a celebrity and subsequently made the rounds on social media. The material, for a MAPEH class, prompted students with the following situation: “Angel Locsin is an obese person. She, together with Coco Martin eats fatty and sweet food in Mang Inasal fast food restaurant most of the time. In her house, she always watching television (sic) and does not have any physical activities.” It went on to ask students what would happen to the popular actress if she “continue[d] her lifestyle.”
Needless to say, I am perfectly aware that I have grown bigger as the pandemic stretches on. But I’ve weighed things—no pun intended—and have chosen to first take care of my pandemic-induced mental health issues. My anxieties add fuel to my being adrift, and I do find myself eating my feelings. [And food is such a glorious escape.] I will certainly get around to keeping fit. It is part of my recovery. I just do not need the casual reminders from the most random people that all they see of me—a person of so much more complexity—is my weight.
Most people I know never do this, I’ve noticed. It is only certain people, and I feel they are guilty of projection: the unsolicited remarks on people’s weight feel like shields to their own insecurities, deflecting their own deficiencies by lobbying petty grenades first. When I think of that, I ultimately forgive them. [But I do not forget.]
A good friend’s boyfriend told me, “You’re fat!” We were in Adamo and I had not seen them in six months, and this was how he greeted me. I forced a smile. Was my hello not effusive enough? But I thought: He has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. In the middle of the pandemic, he opened a milk tea café near downtown, which promptly closed within six months. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I know.”
An older woman from a social circle I used to run in told me, “You’re fat!” We were grocery shopping in Lee Plaza and I had not seen her in a year, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile. Was my eagerness to see her not sincere enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. She found out her daughter’s a lesbian and had called for a hasty intervention that doubled as a threat—because it was apparently an embarrassment to their tony family. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I do need to go to the gym.”
An acquaintance from school told me, “You’re fat!” We were at the Pantawan of Dumaguete to see the Christmas lights and I had not seen her in two years, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile. Was my fist bump not cordial enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. Her husband is having an affair with their driver, and she knows all about it—but can’t do anything because her husband is also an abusive prick. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I’m going on a diet.”
(I have of course changed details in these blind items so as to spare these people embarrassment—a courtesy they did not extend me. I know they are probably reading this. But they do have bigger problems than my weight.)
Extend understanding, be a bundle of love, and know with all of your heart the difficult circumstances of our lives in these fraught times.
We’re alive! So far! That’s what matters most, I think.
When you meet someone you have not seen in months because of the pandemic, say: “I’ve missed you. And despite everything that is wrong in the world, you look fabulous.”
To paraphrase a famous quote from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, he lived long enough to find himself become a villain.
I’ve always steered clear of the National Artist at local lit events, even during those at his bookstore. I think my reservation came from the fact that I was there that one notorious Palanca night when he tore apart the winning play — in front of the young playwright and hundreds of people.
I never introduced myself to him for years, nor sought his company. But during my last visit to Manila before COVID hit [in January 2020], I answered his invitation to be his lunch guest at his house in Quezon City.
It was a great meal, to be honest. He was charming and accommodating — and that was my last living memory of him. But I had to sigh several times over the succeeding months every time he opened his mouth to opine — and out came things I disagreed with in vehemence. [Sigh.]
And now he’s gone, unfortunately remembered more as the cantankerous senior writer who kowtowed to a strongman than for his stories, some of which I genuinely liked. [I love “Progress.”] And I guess he’ll never win his coveted Nobel Prize for Literature ever.
One forgets too easily that if you have loved and have been loved in return, and if you have pursued your own purpose no matter how small, nothing else really matters. To know these, and to believe, is to see the face of God.
I know how it started, and I also know that it started around 15 years ago, or thereabouts. I can’t exactly remember the year anymore, but I know that before this happened, I was always on top of my finances. I was a young professional with a vision of myself as someone who would be responsible with his financial situation. [Ha! Adulting soon teaches you otherwise.]
I got a credit card because it was part of my employment perks, and I thought I could use it to pay for things purchased online [like Amazon], to use as the payment base for subscriptions, and to use for emergency purchases like plane tickets. And I always paid on time, and generally managed everything in a golden way.
And then one day, on an April day near the beginning of the month, I learned that I had to pay extra taxes for income I apparently earned outside of my regular work the previous year—something I could not even remember receiving. And the amount was huge, like nearly P10,000. That gobsmacked me. It just so happened that I had enough on hand to pay that tax—but once I paid it, I had nothing left to sustain myself in terms of food and other everyday essentials. So I went ahead and filed my taxes, and I decided to use my credit card for those everyday essentials for the rest of the month. [In hindsight, I should have probably borrowed the sum I needed from my family—but I’m always independent-minded, and I never honestly thought of this as a solution.] At that time, only fancy restaurants in Dumaguete accepted credit cards, and so I ate in fancy restaurants the entire month. And when the credit card bill came the following month, it was more than I could pay given my salary, so I opted to pay the minimum.
I have been paying that minimum, or often a bit more, every month for 15 years.
And of course, when you do that, you’re only digging yourself into a bigger hole because the bank charges you for what it calls “finance charges” [the interest incurred for not paying the exact amount], and that amount is often exorbitant and only adds to the overall sum you need to pay back. So what was a small debt 15 years ago ballooned into a huge debt over the years. Often there seemed to be no way out, unless I won the lottery. Sometimes though I’d get awards for my writing, and I’d use a fraction of these to cover a huge part of the debt—but the enormity of the debt only grew back in time. The only real solution was to pay everything in whole to stop the never-ending finance charges.
Then, of course, there were unforeseen expenses [plane tickets, hotels, etc.] I had to charge to my credit card, which only added to the exorbitant sum. And sometimes, there were months where I’d forget about the due date—which resulted to exorbitant penalty fees. [This is how banks make money from credit cards.]
I need to admit that there were times I could have paid the entire thing at once because I got some generous award or other. But when those happened, I made the bad decision of only covering a part of the debt so that I could use a bit of my awards money for myself.
This year I told myself that I needed to solve my credit card situation once and for all.
And today, I finally did. I earned a substantial amount for writing work I did this year and I plunked down a small fortune to fully cover all of my credit card debt, and be free of this albatross around my neck once and for all.
It took two banking days to finish this. But when I came out of the bank today, I cried.
8:30 PM |
Bandaid
