December 10, 2013: Reclaiming the Holidays

For Christmas every year, with very few exceptions, my family of six will go home to our ancestral house in Legazpi, and on Christmas Eve, we would go to midnight mass at the nearby Catholic school I and my siblings all went to. We would go home to a feast of jamon, queso de bola, latik, cassava cake, cake, fruit salad, spaghetti and ice cream. After dinner, we’d gather in the living room, where Lola Inos, my grandmother, would play Christmas tunes on the piano, or my brother and I would be cajoled into playing tunes, too. Later on, there would be gift giving, and after everyone has ripped their share of wrapping paper, we would all retire, waking up to hot chocolate and more feasting in the morning.

New Year’s is a deafening celebration in the Philippines. Dangerous, even. Once it starts getting dark, we refrain from leaving the house because the streets will be filled with people lighting fireworks and even drunk people shooting off their guns. It’s a raucous tradition that brightens the night sky with lights, as neighbors set fire to ever bigger and bigger fireworks. Losing limbs is a very real threat on New Year’s, but it does little to dampen the revelers’ spirits, at least while the party is going on. Inside our house, we would have set up a feast whose theme is roundness—to usher in a year filled with prosperity. We’d get the roundest ham we could find, more queso de bola, pomelo, oranges and other round fruit, plus of course, Mama’s spaghetti, which we serve because it’s delicious. We would open all the windows to let luck in, and bang on doors and tables and chairs and whatever would make a sound to scare all the bad luck away. The dogs would be barking because of the noise outside and the gunpowder scent of the air. Once the noise and the smoke have died down, which is usually shortly after the countdown, we’ll all sit down to a big family dinner.

One of the things that I didn’t realize migration would take from me were these holidays.

I first came to America in early October of 2005, and in a few short weeks, while still bewildered by the strange familiarity and unfamiliarity of LA, I found myself giving out sweets to kids, faking a smile through my homesickness. My first Christmas was spent with relatives who, although they meant well, were people I’ve only known for two months. There are very few things more alienating than spending an intimate holiday with people you barely know, but are supposed to suddenly be close to because they bear the name of family.

Since then I’ve spent Christmas in various places—a few years in Berkeley, a few in Texas, a few in Las Vegas, one in Atlanta. Though the celebrations have, over the years, become better—especially since my sisters and I made the decision to make it into a holiday wherein we’d make it a point to be with each other—I don’t think they would equal the tradition I had while I was growing up. Partly because that tradition was so solid: ancestral house, a matriarch gathering all of us together, a complete family. As the years passed we’ve been gathering more family. Last year, we even had Mama over in Texas. The year before, my sister and her husband pulled out all the stops and we had a tree, with all the trimmings and a glut of presents. Every year, I still mourn that I miss out on the Filipino Christmas: the cool December breeze, carollers that start in September, the giant parol, family, Filipino Christmas songs. But I also welcome these new positive changes that are helping me build my own Christmas traditions, although they’re more American than Filipino. One day, we might even have my brother and his family over, and if that happens, then it doesn’t even matter where this Filipino-American Christmas is.

But as for New Year’s, I don’t think I can reclaim that yet, at least not right now. There is still nothing in America that could compare to the joyous, crazy, dangerous way that Filipinos ring in the new year.

November 26, 2013

Two poems, one from September of this year and another from almost the same day last year. They both mention Seoul, but they don’t have much in common beyond that.

To Seoul

I could be quite happy in the lateness of the summer
The trees have reddened deeply, as if already cold
The sight of the Hangang makes me concede
It’s possible to fall in love with this city
If I could call its faults foibles
And I could call its foibles endearing
Seoul, I have grown old and you are shy
Slow to show me your charms
I could like you, if begrudgingly
I could be sad when I finally leave
Is it strange that I look forward to your long winter?
It might snow and I could melt you into water
Right here in the palm of my reaching hand.

poem to first and last

today was the last official use
of the guillotine in france
and the day
i was almost convinced
that we need to intervene
in syria where they gas children
war is a mess and yet we promised
to never forget
that tomorrow is 9/11
and just in time
and how fitting
or is it how ironic

the crux is that i live in a bubble
i call car it hurtles me
to future dates
wherein i can look askance
at all the firsts
we like to commemorate

the muddled mint leaves
in the bottom
of your glass perhaps
the rhubarb pie
we had in seoul
the studied way
you fold the laundry
while i remember
being 14 knowing
there’s something treacherous
about getting older

November 12, 2013: Resilience is a Dirty Word

I am lucky enough that my family has been spared from the strongest typhoon in recorded history. It’s strange; growing up it was common knowledge that my city would always be one of the first hit by a typhoon, that low pressure areas tend to form and pass by my region fairly often. In recent years, the typhoons have been trickier. They’ve also been stronger and deadlier, no thanks to people who still, stubbornly, and really at this point maliciously, deny that climate change exists. I write that my family has been spared because it seems the only appropriate word.

These days I’ve been finding it hard to look at pictures of disaster. I refused to look at the devastation in Fukushima as I now refuse to look at the devastation Typhoon Yolanda (international name Haiyan) has wrought on my country. Instead, I read. News articles that contain trickles of facts, the awful loss in black and white instead of fullscreen, full color. The news, because they are only reporting facts, allow me no space for judgment yet. Is the Philippine government really being inept and corrupt this time, as it has been so many other times? I don’t know yet. Rescue missions are still ongoing, and the last NPR report I heard told of damaged roads and bridges, making the transportation of aid especially difficult.

But it’s hard not to be angry. Not at the ongoing crisis management, but at everything else. While Yolanda was going through the Philippines, a woman accused of stealing and aiding politicians in stealing $220 million from public funds was testifying in Congress. Those millions could have helped Tacloban not just after the typhoon, but in investments in development and infrastructure. In previous typhoons, relief funds have reportedly been pocketed by officials, making the citizenry wary of sending help. It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by the challenges to recovery, so easy to be cynical about where the aid goes.

In the midst of this, I just watched President Aquino give an almost unnervingly nonchalant interview with Christiane Amanpour. He said that the death estimates are overblown, that Filipinos are used to typhoons, that steps were being made to make Filipinos more resilient to these kinds of natural disasters.

Lately I’ve been thinking that resilient is a dirty word. It’s a word that seems like a compliment, but it’s also a word that excuses the circumstances that led to resilience. It’s a word that does not assign accountability. You’re resilient, so nothing I hurl at you can break you. Never mind that the effects of climate change has such a devastating effect on a country whose carbon emissions are negligible, the people in that country are resilient, they’ll keep going. The truth is that the people in my country are resilient, because they have no choice but to be resilient. Politicians fix elections and use the country’s tax pesos as their own personal checking accounts. The biggest polluting countries in the world refuse to acknowledge that their (our) actions are killing thousands of people in underdeveloped countries, so what other choice do we have but to keep going, to display that so-called, so admirable resilience?

I do appreciate President Aquino’s attempt at reassuring everyone, but this is not the time for reassurance. It’s really time to be angry, to be appalled, to be indignant that this has to happen at all. It’s time to make sure that public funds don’t go to the corrupt few so the money is there for even regular typhoons. It’s time we refuse to bear the burden of others’ utter selfishness.

I’ll end with a quote from Philippine delegate to the UN climate summit Yeb Saño, who delivered an emotional speech linking Typhoon Haiyan to climate change. I note that Saño and President Aquino might as well have come from different countries, so different are their statements about what happened.

“We refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.”

October 22, 2013: The End

In Seoul, it was almost impossible to meet another foreigner who wasn’t a teacher. The job markets in the West have shut their doors to a lot of fresh graduates saddled with student debt and the realization they couldn’t really live at home anymore after college. South Korea was hiring anyone with a passport from an English-speaking country and a degree. They would fly you out, put you in company housing. They would fly you back. The standard of living is lower. You might be able to pay off loans.

So a lot of foreigners in Seoul shared the bond of having left home (some of them for the very first time), being in a foreign place, with foreign food, being called John Teacher or Jane Teacher, and having expendable income in a city with purportedly cheap drinks (I’ve never actually found this to be true, unless talking exclusively about soju and Hite).

I was awful at sharing bonds with other teachers. For one, it usually took them awhile to figure out I wasn’t Korean, and usually by then things have gotten too awkward. The next reason was that I failed at gushing over Seoul the way they fawned over it.

“So how do you like Seoul?” is a very common icebreaker among the teaching populace, and that’s where friendship, or at least, genial acquaintanceship, takes off. Advice about great bars, great districts and where to get the best dukbokki are traded, and everyone goes away happy, convinced that they’ve landed themselves in a great city.

“I’m not in love with it,” was the most polite response I mustered during my stay.

When people ask me about it now, I say that Seoul just turned out to not be my city, or the job turned out to not be something that I wanted to do for any protracted period. It’s vague, and skims over ugly details like how much I hated the pushing on the streets, and skims over beautiful details like Mikey, the sweet five-year-old whose little English at the time included saying “Soleil Teacher is beautiful,” and all the other smart, sweet, loving and funny students I had the chance of teaching. “It’s not my city” is vague and unsatisfying, but so is my post-mortem of the whole experience.

Four months after prematurely leaving South Korea, I would still wake up in the morning and be relieved to be away from it. I still am confused, appalled even, at how my time in Seoul played out. There I was, with my self-professed wanderlust, unleashed in a young, vibrant city that had no concept of last call. The Seoul public transit system is still something I sigh for to this day, the compactness of the city something I wish that Los Angeles could have. And I’ve migrated before! How hard can it be? And yet I failed to adapt, and failed to adapt rather spectacularly, too. I refused to even admit, without qualification, how beautiful the city can be in the Fall. I was too busy being cold, too busy being worried about how much colder it was going to get, too busy resenting that in my 10-month stay, there have been a grand total of five days which had, to me, perfect weather. Every other day was too cold or too humid. The Seoul Shit List grew and grew and I was powerless to stop the spiral of hate that coursed through me. The only real remedy was to leave, which, after a few failed attempts, I finally did manage. When I left the room I was renting in Kyungridan, there was no regret. I took a picture of one of the city’s many bridges as a form of farewell. When I got to the airport and found that my flight was delayed, there was no frustration, either. It was as if my final act of leaving (or running away, I still haven’t decided which one it was), had robbed me of emotion. Or maybe that’s how a real ending feels like.

October 8, 2013: Hangzhou

West Lake came into view from our taxi and I knew we were in the city proper of Hangzhou. I’d written the place into our 10-day China itinerary after hearing about it from my Uncle, who’s probably the most well-traveled person I know, with countless trips to China under his belt. He said it was beautiful, and he was right. Even the rain couldn’t take away from the beauty of West Lake, Lihue Pagoda’s peak visible in the background, Leifeng’s own golden peak a fitting counterpoint. Weeping willows, which I have grown to love so much since first stepping foot in China, framed the lake on its perimeter. The rain was just a bonus, the way it made the green of the foliage glisten, Leifeng shine.

But the rain wasn’t letting up twenty minutes later, when Luke and I had been out of the taxi, pieces of luggage in hand, their fabric getting wetter and wetter by the minute. We couldn’t find our hostel, and when Luke, who has a great sense of direction, can’t find a place, it means the place either doesn’t exist or he’s been given really bad directions. The same directions that told us to get off the taxi at that juncture and that we’d see the hostel then. Well, we’d been walking and trying in vain to ask where the hostel was to no avail. We were on the tail-end of our vacation and waiting for us, for me, at the end of it all, was the unbearable thought of six more months in Seoul, which, in the half-year I’d spent teaching, I’d come to loathe with a passion I usually reserve for LA. I was beginning to cry and when Luke left me with the luggage to look for the place himself, I almost lost all control. Tourists gave me strange looks, of course. How I could manage to cry in one of the prettiest places I’ve ever seen was a testament to my utter selfishness. Just as my self-righteous telling off of the people at the front desk of the hostel when we finally found it was a testament to my utter brattiness.

While Luke and I ran an unscheduled load of laundry, and among clothes that were just damp and could stand to dry, Luke told me to do a pros and cons list of staying to teach in Seoul. As I thought, at that point I was only really in the foreign country for the money. So I made plans to leave, and I could then enjoy the rest of Hangzhou.

We waited in line for hours and hours for West Lake Vinegar Fish and Beggar’s Chicken at The Grandma’s. We found Oolong Tea Blizzard at the local DQ. We went up spiral stairs after spiral stairs to get to the top of Lihue Pagoda, then did the same at the recently renovated Leifeng Pagoda.

Our last day, running late as usual, we tried flagging down taxi after taxi, who all refused to take us to the train station. Then it was Luke who ran out of patience, asking why they even drive taxis if they don’t want to take passengers where they need to go. We finally managed to catch a taxi, which was stopped and ticketed ten minutes in. We took another taxi and finally seated in the High Speed Train, the Chinese countryside receding fast behind us, I let myself be sad again, knowing that after an overnight stay in Shanghai, we’d be back in Korea, and I wouldn’t actually leave.

September 24, 2013

I’m auditing a poetry workshop taught by Doug Kearney. The first week, we were assigned to write one poem a day. Here are two selected poems from that mad week. Both come from prompts that I found were more generative for me. Also, I’ve been dabbling in writing Tagalog into my English poems, because I owe it to the poems to give them more linguistic room.

Legazpi

Remember rain and mist, and take
that feeling, but not the gloom nor
the pounding of a typhoon that
years later my mother would worry
over—that Year of the Flood of all
those years of floods, the one that brought
on the blues or the boiling reds of the tide,
nothing on the pier but certain death, I find.

So I cower in the memory that isn’t.
My father saying, Wala nang Mama mo,
with such finality. Years later the sea
recedes and I am witness to a man
who, having lost everything, takes
to walking Legazpi streets: barefoot,
in cutoffs, to the scandal of the city.
As if we’ve never known such suffering.

We’ve gone to the mall
instead of church, the local arcade contains
a man singing all the standards: Regrets,
I’ve had a few, but then again, the hour’s up
and my elder brother
and I are on our way home,
having snuck a peek at the Sunday paper,

to bring news of the homily to our waiting
grandmother.

After Li-Young Lee, or Dissolution: A Rhythm

1.
Through the night
the waves
lull me through
sleep so deep
it’s almost
a meditation on peace.
I can’t see, but hear
the crash of surf
the sea breaking into
ever smaller sea molecules.

I’d like to believe
that the salt
itself travels from
major landmass to
major shore, its
crystalline structure
enlivened more by the
company of the whales,
the carageenan, the shy
urchins of the sea. Salt,
travel-weary, on its way to me.

2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of waves crashing in

the beach, a rhythmic breaking down
of all the earth I stand on

now, confident of its immortality
not knowing that my salinity

is the sea
dissolving the sea

the cubic salt smaller
and smaller.

September 10, 2013: What Do I Miss About Korea?

What do I miss about Korea?

Mainly, I miss the idea of Korea. For the better part of a year, there I was, in the capital of one of Asia’s fastest-growing countries, experiencing the rise of a middle class and observing the giddy exuberance of a standard of living that’s just skyrocketed. Seoul was a city still in the throes of love: Of pop culture, of consumerism, of headlong hedonism. Gangnam, the district where I worked, was teeming with new Mercedes-Benz’s and BMW’s. A block from my hagwon (after-school tutoring center), was a Louis Vuitton flagship store housed in a mall hailed as one of Seoul’s most interesting architectural structures. What a difference from the United States I’ve left behind, a country that seems sometimes to be past its heyday. Here was a new city, with new money, without the hangover we in the US have been suffering from so much excess.

Even though, for me, the seemingly thoughtless spending was part of the problem, I could miss the sensation of a city that seemed, in its core, to just want to live. To catch up with what years of civil war and foreign occupation have denied them. It’s something problematic to me, not only because coming from the Great Recession ere US I know what it must come down to, but because coming from the Philippines, I’m struck with some sort of wishful thinking, a thought that if things had worked out in my country it could be like South Korea, too.

Seoul seemed to have brought out the many ambivalences I’ve been feeling about inhabiting two worlds at once. But instead of bringing these interlaced feelings to clearer focus, the experience left me even more muddled. Not that it should have. Seoul’s not obliged to help me make sense of the first world/third world dynamics roiling inside me. Only I can unravel that, and I’m still waiting to gain even more of a perspective.

To be continued/edited/revised…

August 27, 2013: South Korea, or the Beginnings of an Essay

It was early March when I was first introduced to Seoul. Cold, windy city, its many neon lights blurred by my eyes running over from the frost, I thought, “How cold,” meaning every layer of the word.

The next few days I expected the city to brighten, but the gloom stayed on: sky the color of steel, the buildings like structures from a future  I didn’t want to be part of. That’s the Seoul in my memory now: gray ultra-modern architecture, orange taxis dotting the sea of white, silver, gray and black cars that all together amount to so much nothingness.

No gingko trees, their dark yellow fan-shaped leaves covering the sidewalk, no traditional Silla architecture. Those would all come later, when Seoul would be a little more forgiving… or is it that I would be more forgiving of Seoul?

How do I make sense of the Korea experience? All the while I moved through its thoroughfares (the street lights never quite rigged for pedestrians, which is really ironic) I kept resenting the fact of my being there, held tight by a year-long contract that month after month I kept meaning to break. There were pockets of beauty, and great eye-opening experiences, but always in my memory they are overshadowed by everything else that was problematic about the city. I kept hashing and rehashing my reactions, worried that my dislike of the place might mean that I was somehow racist.

A week in the capital of South Korea and I was dissatisfied. The food wasn’t that great, and was expensive besides. I thought about K-Town in Los Angeles, and blasphemed about how much better the food there was, how much more plentiful the Korean BBQ. Beef is expensive in the mountainous country, local beef (hanwoo) even more dearly bought. I went to a restaurant once and had to stare at the three pieces of raw beef I got, forlornly presented on a wooden block. It was the hardest twenty dollars I’ve ever spent.

Subway, bus and street etiquette were the most foreign things I’ve ever experienced. While I was waiting for the train that would take me to Seoul that night in March when I first landed, an older woman purposefully walked into my luggage, the one that I was trailing behind me. As she went past, she made sure to give me the ugliest look she could muster. I’ve never been fixed with a stare so malevolent. I thought it was just an instance of traveler ire, the consequence of an especially stressful flight. Turned out that my entire stay I would have to jostle past people, or actually, cause I never fully adapted, people would walk into me, shove and walk off without so much as a backward glance. Or if there were backward glances, they were the kinds that would rival that old woman’s. I learned from a friend, who is from Canada, to say “joesonghamnida,” a very formal way of saying sorry or excuse me. No one ever extended me the same courtesy, but at least I didn’t have to push anyone anymore.

I don’t know what it says about me that this was the one aspect of Korean life that I still cannot get over. I can forgive my employers their medieval view of their employees, I can forgive the utter dullness of Gangnam. I can forgive the food and how much I was asked to pay for it. But the shoving was a constant cause of stress, until the very bitter end.

To be continued/edited/revised… 

August 13, 2013: Fostering

The day I was going to get a puppy to foster, I spent more than two hours at Target. It didn’t matter that Target had a very limited number of choices for stuff to spoil a dog with—or just help it survive—I still spent more than the requisite number of minutes debating which harness would do, which color leash to get, which chew toy he’d love the most.

My friend’s friend was giving a puppy away. I had an uncle who wanted a small dog. I needed my puppy fix. So there I was outside my apartment waiting for the little bundle of joy to come to me from inside a white Ford Fiesta. I fed him treats the moment I saw him. I’m not opposed to that manner of bribery.

Inside the apartment he proceeded to prance around like he owned the place, taking special pleasure with the stairs. He knew how to play fetch. He knew how to pee close enough to his pee pad. He knew how to lick and tug and bite. He knew everything except that night time was for sleeping. Over the phone, my elder sister was excited about a new puppy, my eldest sister urged me to give it back. At two o’clock in the morning I started to wonder if this was a bad idea. I tried calling my uncle. No answer. My boyfriend couldn’t come until the morning. At three o’clock I settled in for a long night of fetch. As soon as I tossed his toy to the far side of my room, he snuggled next to my knee and was soon unconscious.

The next morning we went on a very long walk. We both got to see my neighborhood. His previous owner called him Chiba. My uncle wanted to call him Brandy. I called him “my love,” “my little love,” “my little fox.” To call him by a name was to claim ownership. I contented myself with endearments and kisses.

My uncle’s car broke down the day he was supposed to pick the puppy up. The realities of his current situation—a pending move—crept up on us over the phone. The puppy was ecstatic to see me home. I was ecstatic that he did his business outside. He decided he didn’t much like the little fox I got him as a toy and much preferred the suppleness and chewiness of my fingers. He would cry in indignation whenever he was told, “no.”

I looked up vets at the same time I looked up California tenancy laws. Three days to get rid of a pet or I get evicted, if found out. I considered moving closer to a pet-friendly place closer to work so I could check up on the puppy over lunch.

He got really angry at me one night when there were a lot of people downstairs and he couldn’t say hi because they were all working. I saw him tremble at the sight of other human beings outside and barked to be petted.

The boyfriend’s parents fell in love with a picture of him and suddenly he had a home. My uncle said it might be for the best. The puppy and I parted on a Thursday dusk, him inside a car looking confused. I learned he wouldn’t settle down until the boyfriend set him down on his lap.

I packed my bags to go away for the weekend. My uncle said he was going to name him Clark, after all. I told him I’ll find him a new puppy once he’s settled in. The puppy’s new family renamed him, saying Brandy was a girl’s name. He reminded them of a gremlin, so they started calling him Gizmo. He hasn’t stopped biting yet, and is still pretty much nocturnal. He likes to carry his little fox around everywhere. I like to think it’s because it’s the only thing he has that still carries my scent.

In my apartment, the sheets have been washed. The scent of puppy is slowly dissipating, so much so that the landlord would be hard put to get a whiff of it, hard as he might try.

July 23, 2013

Also

Also to acknowledge that darkness
is just that—a deepening
of night, some temporary insanity.
Show me blinking lights
and I will slip into
seizures of lucidity, even
clairvoyance for what has been
said, or read, or
misquoted. Also
to fear that I’ve lost
my passport in every airport
I have ever been. I take
comfort in the invisibility
of blue. With green,
I seem so vulnerable,
my backpack a threat, my
pepper spray tear gas.
I seduce them
with tales of family, yet
I have been marked.
Also to say,
“Bahala na,” is to acknowledge
the futility.

after the break

we will see what’s left of you, if it’ll do me the favor of coalescing into something else, a bunny, perhaps, its teeth bared, its foot thumping impatiently. “if it’s san bernardino, it’s a dollar more, see?” there is nothing so real as time right now. the moment breaks up in ever tinier pieces, until no detail is lost–the magnetic fields song playing, my feet in cruel flats, the oft unused metrolink shrieking. what i would do to forgive the man who, seeing obvious distraction, made me pay for a used ticket, then asked for it back once i’ve reached my stop.