“Ba’t mapait ‘tong orange juice?” is my first thought as I sip my drink, served cool by the flight attendant. I drink this on the last leg of our family’s trip to Toronto. It’s Good Friday, April 2, 1999, and we’re flying to our new home in Canada to be reunited with Papa. I miss the sweet hit of sugar and my tongue looks for the undissolved crystals of Eight O’Clock orange juice that aren’t in this thick and pulpy beverage with a slightly bitter finish. Eight O’Clock was one of the tastes of our old home that I didn’t realize I’d be leaving behind. I’ve been anticipating this day, this new home, for the last four years. I have said my goodbyes to the homes, family, and friends we left behind in San Juan and then in San Mateo. Mom and I have purged, packed, and unpacked for two major home moves in the last two years and this one is the biggest yet. I can’t wait to settle in. I wonder what home here and now will look like for the six of us. When we arrive in Toronto to the apartment that’s waiting to be furnished, we discover that Papa has thought to put Sunny Delight in the fridge. It is sweet and tastes new and yet also familiar.
For our first Canadian breakfast the next day, there’s something called kielbasa that he’s sliced up and pan-fried, along with sunny side up eggs that had brown shells and some bagels warmed in the oven. It will be some time before we get our red Betty Crocker toaster oven, but we’re not impatient. I’m excited to have an oven and look forward to making all the dishes I read about in the books I got from Tita Ditse in the States. Homemade cookies and coconut macaroons need an oven. Lasagna was only ever served at parties in houses that had working ovens or ranges. Maybe I’d even be able to make lasagna myself now. Our new Canadian breakfast doesn’t seem too dissimilar to the ones we used to have, back in San Juan or — for the last two years before we moved to Toronto — in San Mateo, Isabela. Papa isn’t too surprised that we drink coffee with our breakfast. Mom probably told him I did. That Jade and I do now. We’re fourteen and fifteen, and we’ve been drinking milky, sugared coffee since we started high school two years ago in Isabela. Coffee’s on the menu here for the four of us, except for the sips my little sisters, Bea and Tiny, the youngest in our family, will sneak even as they are teased, “Huwag muna, hindi kayo tatangkad.” I make the coffee in a Proctor Silex coffee maker, not too different from the one at Mama and Lolo’s house in San Mateo. I won’t need a lesson in how to use it.
Our first morning, we’re awake at five thirty, incredibly jet-lagged and excited. We’re sitting on the bare dark wood floor of our fourth-floor apartment at Park Vista Drive. There is a table and some stackable chairs in the dining area of the apartment. Our balcony faces out to the street and right at our sightline there’s a big pine tree with a raccoon curled up in sleep. Papa goes out there to smoke and there’s an ashtray on this small, round wooden table that I’ll later figure out is a spool for cable or telephone wire. Years later, I’ll fantasize about decorating a whole room around this spool, making a Guitar-brand matchbox bed with postage stamps blown up to poster size. I’ll make everything human scale but cozy like it’s for a little Disney mouse who’s decorated its home in the walls of the house with found objects. My sisters and I are watching Breakfast Television while eating this new breakfast. I’m getting used to how to watch news TV here, suddenly caring about temperature and all the new numbers that factor into how we’ll be dressing these days. Back home, Alas Singko Y Medya was on at breakfast in the same way MTB was on at lunch and TV Patrol was on at dinner, just in the background. I never used to have to check the TV for the weather before I went out. Now I do. Flurries, wind chill, feels like minus five. We have to care about that stuff now.
There’s a Filipino store not too far from our apartment. It’s three blocks north of Park Vista Drive, past Halsey, Chapman, and then Gower, on the west side of Dawes. It’s on the same side of the street as the library where Mom will borrow Shirley Temple movies on VHS and where we will all get library cards, even Tiny who will write her name on a library card “Maritnee.” I’m orienting myself to the way people give directions here. Eventually, I’ll step into my new skill of learning and giving directions, or maybe as my Lolo will later say about me, it’s because I’m never lost like his Tatang, “di ka naliligaw kahit saan magawi.” We’re lucky to be living not too far from the Filipino store and have these tastes available to us within a short walk. We find out they have longanisa in Canada, twelve pieces of frozen sausage on a Styrofoam tray. It’s only the sweet, red kind and it will be a few more years before I easily find Vigan (sounds like vegan but is definitely pork not vegan) and Lucban longanisa here. None of the garlicky Ilocano pork longanisa flavour that transports me to the yellow kitchen on Rizal Street or even to the early mornings in San Juan, when someone from the province came south with longanisa, frying it up for breakfast, the first task of their visit. Nothing like that, at least not for a while. No matter, we buy the longanisa, cooking a twelve-pack to split among the six of us, together again after two years apart. We can’t forget the little bowls of Datu Puti white vinegar, seasoned with a little bit of cracked pepper. Oh yeah, Papa, we picked up eating with sawsawan at Mama and Lolo’s house while we waited for our landing papers.
Nana Leony and Tata Ernie’s shelves and freezers are stocked well. At Palma Food Mart, besides finding what becomes Mom’s first job in Toronto, Mom and I will also find sardinas in cans, six-packs of pan de sal, Sky Flakes, and Sunflower Crackers. I’ll miss the merienda of Nissin Butter Coconut biscuits and my younger sisters sometimes think about Iced Gems, V-Cut, and Cupp Keyk. We see they have kornik and we grab some of that to snack on with balsamic vinegar, Italo and not quite Iloco, but it will do, and we’ll later learn it can stand in for mango sawsawan. We’re a little homesick so we stock up — frozen daing na bangus, frozen siopao, frozen hopia, frozen malunggay, frozen sili leaves. Mom even brings home frozen dugo and frozen papait. She never used to make dinuguan and papaitan, but here she learns to make these dishes and we learn to crave them.
“Mahal ng Filipino groceries,” we think as we can’t help but convert dollars to pesos when we shop for our new favourites. We’re buying flavoured Century Tuna for snacks, newly excited for tastes we would have ignored or taken for granted in the days and months before our big move. For a while, we are making and eating a cassava cake almost every week, thrilled that we can make our own kakanin with canned coconut milk. We don’t have to work too hard to squeeze milk from kinayod na niyog and it’s easy enough to cut open a bag of frozen grated cassava that’s been QC’ed for export. You rarely find hard hairy bits of the tuber mixed in.
We still eat rice, cooked in the kaldero we packed in one of our ten alis bayan boxes. We were allowed two each on our departure and I had carefully documented the contents of each box. In the back of my Papemelroti brown paper diary, past the calendar pages where I recorded everyone’s birthdays to remember to send birthday cards, I had written out an inventory of what we were bringing. Mostly, details about our thickest, heaviest clothes in preparation for the Canadian cold. There are five bulky comforters packed in there too — cotton fabric, polyester-cotton fill — a present to us that Lolo, Mama, and I made together in the weeks leading up to our departure. And because we were warned that everything was expensive, we came with dahon ng laurel, sewing kits, and a couple packets of safety pins (“Dahil walang aspili sa Canada.”). There are no toys in the mix; eight-year-old Tiny said goodbye to her Barbies — leaving them as a goodbye present to our cousin Ien in San Mateo — and the three of us older girls had already left our toys in our old bedroom for our cousins Mishi, Sara, and Sammy in San Juan when we moved to the province two years before. There aren’t many books; they would be too heavy anyway, so I had donated some to our school library as gifts, while the majority would stay at Mama and Lolo’s house. A shiny new kaldero came with us because it is the pot for cooking rice. Is it steel? I assume it is and write that down too, in case Canadian Customs and Immigration officers ask us. (I am responsible for knowing what we packed and being able to answer correctly and truthfully.) When we arrive, nothing is confiscated. I don’t think they even ask about our luggage, just whether we speak some English.
With the kaldero in play, my sisters and I can fight over whose turn it is again to saing. There is too much choice available on TV and no one wants to miss a thing with the few minutes it takes to cook rice. In those early days in our new home, we’re distracted by episodes of Full House on TBS that we’ve never seen before, and we frequently crisp the bottom of a few pots of rice. It’s no big deal — Mom and I don’t mind tutong anyway. Once, in an attempt to rescue the rice, someone rushed to take the kaldero off the heat but then let it rest without a trivet on the laminate countertop. It left a three-inch burn that would be there until we move out of Park Vista.
We have two kinds of oil to cook with at home: vegetable oil for breakfast food frying and pang-guisa for easy stir-fries. But olive oil is new to me. It smells light and clean, and I’m thrilled at the novelty of having a different kind of oil to cook with. I’m careful not to leave it on high heat, saving it for Canadian cooking.
We notice how easy it is to cook pasta here. Look at all the different noodles — rotini, penne, macaroni, bucatini, farfalle! We still buy mostly spaghetti, but sometimes we pick up fettuccine and I handily make an alfredo with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, which is a pantry helper we also use to make seafood pasta. (Throw in some tuna flakes drained of the water or oil.) If we can make the effort, we bake tuna casserole in the brown glass Vision cookware we found in the giveaway section of our building’s laundry room. We use that cookware for many years until we learn that it can shatter from exposure to high heat.
The smells of Filipino food linger longer in the apartment. To keep the smell down, we take to baking our longanisa over frying them so that we can use less oil. On Sundays, when we go to St. Catherine of Sienna on the Danforth, we probably bring the smells of our breakfast on our coats. When I cook Canadian food, I don’t find the smell sticks as much. We learn to light candles throughout the house to help keep us smelling fresher and less like ulam. I wonder if we carry these smells to school with us.
During our first winter in Canada, I learn how to make vegetable soup. Asparagus is readily available here. It’s tender, succulent, and each stalk looks fresh and crisp. I make a variation of the sopas we used to eat at school for merienda. I sauté asparagus and carrot with onion in olive oil, adding some vegetable stock, salt and pepper, and some herbs, then some 2 percent milk at the end for a lighter version of the soup pictured on the Knorr Cream of Asparagus packets we used to buy back home. I’m proud of my soup and I make it a couple more times for practice before I volunteer to contribute it as the starter for our first Canadian Christmas dinner. This year, we’re going to celebrate with our extended family at the building next door where Papa’s cousin Uncle Sean, his girlfriend Auntie Yolly, and their daughter, our little cousin Julie, live. I make a concoction of Sunny D, peach juice, and Sprite — a mocktail we invented that Papa says is good. I’m excited when Christmas lets me showcase my cooking prowess, whereas Thanksgiving didn’t because we decided to order KFC. We ate fried chicken, coleslaw, macaroni, and gravy with rice when we gathered at the little house on Denton Avenue where Papa’s sister, Tita Ann, her husband Tito Chris, and their young daughter, our cousin Tina, lived.
In September 1999, Mom leaves Palma Food Mart. The job has let her earn some pocket money. It doesn’t add much but she shouldn’t need to work; Papa works at an animation studio at 401 Richmond. At Palma, Mom works from nine to three until she spies the school bus coming down from Our Lady of Fatima on St. Clair. Bea and Tiny are latchkey kids for a few minutes every day from the time they get off the bus to when Mom gets home after a fifteen-minute walk. Palma is convenient for picking up ulam when we don’t feel like cooking, and it keeps Mom occupied while we are all at school. On the referral of a new friend and armed with a resumé I typed on Tita Ann’s electronic word processor at the Denton house, Mom lands a job at the Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto. She starts a career in academic administration that gets her dreaming about our future education at U of T, now that she has benefits and can get our tuition covered. It’s a given that we will all apply when the time comes. There’s no doubt in Papa’s mind about it, so he is slightly offended when my grade eleven General Religion teacher suggests they encourage me to pursue post-secondary learning. “Siyempre, you’re going.”
Mom gets me a casual job too. I feel productive being able to work and go to school. After class at Notre Dame, I take the Bloor train westbound to Spadina, then take the 510 streetcar to get off at Willcocks and walk to the Lash Miller Chemical Lab. Mom usually has a snack waiting for me, either leftovers from an occasional splurge at the food truck or more often a selection of extra sandwiches from a catered faculty event or grad students’ lunch. My favourite is a tuna sandwich with avocado and alfalfa sprouts. I love the crunch of alfalfa and the soft cream of avocado. There’s a way to eat avocado without adding sugar and milk! Mom’s manager comments that it’s good I don’t eat fast food and my mom contributes that I only eat fast food once a month. It’s a new rule I’ve given myself after too many McDonald’s lunches after Sunday mass at Our Lady of Fatima or Burger King meals from the BK at Shoppers World Danforth. Not to mention how the dryer’s been shrinking everyone’s clothes lately.
I help with large mailings for the Faculty of Chemistry a couple of days a week after class at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School and I imagine myself going to school here someday soon. When I return a few years later, I am already knowledgeable of the food trucks along St. George Street. I have had the occasional hot dog or sausage from the cart in front of Robarts Library. And I know I can be squared for those longer days on campus with lunch and a kallong if I split smoky beef ho fan or spicy ma po tofu on rice from the maroon truck in front of the Sid Smith building. In my second year of university, I pick up the habit of drinking sugary and milky orange pekoe tea during my evening shifts from six to nine in the basement of 21 King’s College Circle. The other student tele-fundraisers and our supervisor teach me it’s a good alternative to coffee. Free from the staff kitchen, the milky tea in a U of T mug, labelled with my name in Sharpie, goes well with sweet Timbits on those late and dark autumn and winter evenings we work to get pledges, raising funds for scholarships, bursaries, and capital projects at the university. I look forward to graduating.
It’s 2005 and I’m in my third year at U of T, but I’ve taken time off because I am having a hard time and I feel like I am going to fail out of school. I ask Mom to come with me to speak to the registrar, and then I discuss my options with her. I take a semester off, then come back in the summer and work hard to catch up. We live with Mom at Overbank Towers in Scarborough. Papa let us have Park Vista for a bit while he bounced around, then he moved back to the old apartment for a bit. These days, he lives northeast of us at a house on Kennedy. He’s staying in someone’s basement. It’s easier if we make plans outside of the apartments, but sometimes we go see him and he cooks. The only dish I really remember him cooking is this chicken and potato stew that is yellow like curry but is coloured and flavoured by Dijon mustard. I eat it and tell him it tastes interesting. Sometimes we might meet him for a movie, or he bikes to Old Navy in the same plaza at Eglinton Town Centre where I work part-time, and I use my discount to get him some St. Patrick’s Day shirts. He meets up with us for phở at the next plaza over on Eglinton and Warden and talks about the first year we are apart. It was the year before he landed in Toronto for a visit with Tita Ann, when he tried to make it in Vancouver, living with my mom’s Diego cousins, aunt, and uncle in Richmond. I know he couldn’t find animation work in Vancouver, so he made his way back to Toronto. Eating Vietnamese food reminds him of his time working in Ho Chi Minh the year before he moved to Canada and two years before we are reunited.
My sisters and I are careful with our words when we say goodbye at Kennedy Station. It’s hard on him and he gets sad if we say, “Get home safe.” It sets him off and he says things like, “Home is where you and your mother are.” We don’t know how to answer, so we try to avoid the subject of Mom or home. We part ways when he takes the 43 Kennedy north to the basement apartment and we take the short, mostly walkable bus trip home, travelling west on the 34 Eglinton.
When I walk home from Kennedy Station, l usually make a stop at Soon Lee Supermarket on the southwest corner of Kennedy and Eglinton. It’s where I pick up Lee Kum Kee sauces and other Asian groceries. My sisters and I help Mom cook. We learn to make pad thai, black bean sauced chicken or fish, teriyaki anything, and ma po tofu. On Sundays, after church at Maria Goretti, the four of us hit the No Frills on the northeast corner of Kennedy and Eglinton with Mom. It’s there we pick up groceries — just what’s on the list, Mom’s on a budget. We make sure we pick up our new flatbread of choice for homemade pizza.
Mom’s still at U of T, she’s at 21 King’s College Circle now, working as the Circulations and Advertising Manager for the Bulletin. She and I usually leave for school and work together. On the westbound train to St. George Station, we catch seats for the morning commute, long enough for a nap before my first class, while Mom closes her eyes and prays a rosary. We walk to the station to be on the platform before eight in the morning, which means everyone with an early morning has to move fast. We take turns in our one shower and quickly eat an early breakfast at home at the crowded pine IKEA kitchen table that doubles as extra counter space. Morning coffee is ready in our programmable coffee maker as long as someone presses the button the night before. Everyone drinks it these days, milky and sugary. Breakfast might be rice, a fried egg, and some other breakfast protein like ham, Mom’s salmon fritters with patis dip, or Tomé sardines. Sometimes there’s Vienna sausage, but I can’t eat those anymore, not after babysitting Noelle, my best friend Mia’s toddler, through a bad bout of a stomach bug and catching it from her afterward. Just like the coordinated way we get ready in the morning, there’s more choreography to follow throughout our day, especially when we get back home. We fall in step and do our parts: defrost the protein for the day, saing in the rice cooker (remember to press the button), chop up the vegetables, cook the ulam, set the table, pray, eat, clear the table, wash the dishes, sweep up the kitchen and the dining room, wipe down the counters, program the coffee machine, close the kitchen, open it up if we’re snacking while watching movies rented from Blockbuster or whatever show we’re following on the WB channel.
Money’s a little tight, so that Christmas, I’m in class three days a week, working retail two weekdays and the whole weekend. For extra cash, I pick up some Saturday night shifts at a club on Richmond Street, doing coat check with my best friend Mia. I keep it up for a few weeks just for the season since they need an extra girl. Every bit helps and I remind myself I won’t need to keep up this frantic dance for long. On Saturday nights after a full day working at Yorkdale, I head back east to get home, drink a coffee, get ready for an evening shift at the club, drink another coffee before working four hours checking coats. I catch a ride with Mia to be home at three thirty, sleep ’til seven, wake up and grab a coffee and some breakfast, pack a lunch then help Mom sing at Maria Goretti. I leave after the final blessing, take two buses on Eglinton west and then a northbound train to make it for my ten thirty shift at Yorkdale, and I’m home by eight thirty or nine to eat dinner and wind down before the week starts again. It’s tiring but I know when I graduate things will change. I’ll sleep again and home will really be where I rest my head.
The next year, our family moves to the west end of Toronto to a house at McRoberts and Rogers Road. From this home, we’re only one bus ride away from Yorkdale Mall where I still work part-time. Papa lives in the Philippines now. I’m one year away from graduating and I’m happy not to share Jade’s room when she moves out to the east end of Toronto and I move back home after a few months living with the family I babysit for nearby on Glenholme.
Mom buys that McRoberts house with her brother Tito Manong, his wife Tita Blanca, and our cousin Ace. Bea and Tiny make the long commute east to Notre Dame. There’s been at least one Palanca girl every year there for the last eight years and it ends with Tiny, who will graduate high school in 2009. Here in the west end, Tita B, Tito, and Mom mostly shop at B Trust. Tita Jack drives everyone. Eight years on from when we first arrived in Canada, there is more choice for what to buy. Plus, we eat inabraw and pinakbet more frequently these days with Tito and Tita in the kitchen.
In the last few years, cousins arrive to be reunited with their moms and are now living in the west end too, just nearby at Tita Jing’s house on Glencairn and then later, the condo at Marlee. We find ourselves watching movies on demand in our basement as long as our schedules permit. A bunch of us have school and more of us have to work part-time jobs too. We order pizza and chicken wings, and we talk about how we used to eat Tito Raul’s lechon manok. We say we’ll all drink together too, but the cases of beers and coolers we buy gather dust, stacked by the washing machine. We’re (almost) all together again; it’s just the Julians, the youngest five cousins, who are left back home. Being together like this brings me back to summers at the house on Rizal Street, when my sisters and I have made the bus trip up from Manila and Ces, Tata, Ien, and Lex have been picked up from Bayombong to join Ace, Theo, Coco, and Weewong in San Mateo. It’s nice to hang when we can make time, and these days, my weekends aren’t as frantic as they used to be.
In the early days of living at McRoberts, we enjoy having Angel’s Bakery within a five-minute walk from us. Picking up the crusty loaves of bread they bake fresh reminds me of the times I used to walk two minutes out of our gate and buy fresh baked pan de sal. The thin brown bag had “Sampung piso, tostado” written on it and was warmed by the bread inside. We make room for dessert all the time at McRoberts, and having our extended family around makes it feel like there’s always something to celebrate, and it’s fun to commemorate these days. One time we even come home with a white cake iced with a greeting of “Happy Wednesday.”
“Ana sida tayo? Ada ipagatang yo?” It is a good habit we pick up calling the home phone to check in with any of the parents if anything else is needed for dinner that night. If one comes home early enough, the offer to stop off for a quick shop is appreciated. I’m always curious about what’s for dinner and what to leave room for later in the day. What will I kallong when I come home from my closing shift at Yorkdale? Ace and I coordinate catching the 47 or the 29 if we’re both working late. It’s nice to have a brother to walk with when you have to do the dark walk home. Those times, I don’t have to use the TTC Request Stop on the 161 to get off a block before the designated stop. Despite the baon available from the kitchen at home, there are options at the Yorkdale food court that I just can’t pass up. There are discounted, end of day cucumber and avocado rolls at the Sushi and Bubble Tea kiosk close to Little Burgundy, where Ace works, and I still like a sweet milky tea, so I pick up hot taro milk tea with bubbles if I need the sugar rush. I eat a little bit of dinner when I get home.
On Sundays, after morning mass at St. Matthew, we might pick up freshly made cod fritters and some pasteis de natas on the walk home. Maybe that dessert is not quite the leche flan we know, the Portuguese flan is lighter and barely requires chewing. We have small treats from outside, but more frequently we eat what’s cooked at home. “May ulam na. Isu pay.” Sometimes we can convince the parents to have pizza with us. Often though, Tito and Tita would rather cook. There’s always food at home.
In 2008, it’s just Mom, Bea, Tiny, and me at the McRoberts house. We shuffle rooms after Tito, Tita, and Ace move out to a triplex on Winston Park Boulevard. I help Mom with the house. I travel for work, and it’s a whirlwind few weeks, setting up and striking down booths at trade shows, spending hours on my feet showing samples, making contacts, and taking orders. I live out of suitcases for trips to Edmonton, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and Florida, but I’m done. In early spring, I quit my first job out of university, two months shy of a full year, but I feel overworked and underappreciated and very tired from my three-hour commute every day from the west end all the way east and north to the office and showroom at Pharmacy and Steeles. I pick up some retail shifts at Yorkdale and I look for a new job. Mama and Lolo are visiting from the Philippines to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary with us and they tell me the home improvement store that’s opening just up the street from home is hiring. Mom is proud of my work at Kapisanan where I volunteer and I’m board chair and she tells me to keep volunteering. I’m happy to be doing this work and invite my sisters to volunteer with me and get connected to our culture and learn from other Filipino-Canadian youths we meet through the Centre and its community partner, Carlos Bulosan Theatre. Mom’s only happy for us to be occupied, and anyway, she’s confident I will find the right job soon. After a month of working retail again, I find myself interviewing for a copywriter position at a small advertising agency. Mom scores me that interview after she mentions my job search to someone who’s placing an ad with her at the Bulletin. I start my new job in late spring and soon the four of us are moving to new choreography as we bump around that house, working, living, studying, not knowing the dance is about to change again.
That summer, I’m volunteering and associate producing a Toronto Fringe show out of Kapisanan called Baggage and I get to know one of the actors, Leon. I think he’s serious because he always has his shoulders squared and I’ve only seen him in dramatic roles, until he plays a drag queen in this show and I take his dress home from rehearsal to get Mama’s help fixing a ripped seam. He makes jokes about turon and ad libs a line about it in the play. We talk and I promise to make it for the closing night party. My sisters are volunteering with the show too and Bea helps me roll the plantain Mom buys for me because I have a migraine that morning. The show closes, cast and crew party, and the turon gets served. The weekend after, Leon sends me a message on Facebook with the subject line, “Sheetrock in Suburbia,” to tell me about his time visiting with his parents in Mississauga and to ask me out.
We make plans; we go on dates. I like him. I start to stay out more. He lives in the Annex, so I’m there a lot to hang out, eat sushi late at night at New Generation, have beer and wings at Paupers, and on weekends, brunch at Dooney’s. He jokes that he probably threw a jacket at me at the Fifth when I used to work coat check. I am in love, and I am home less and less. Sometimes I remember to call, often I don’t. On weekdays, I take a cab home early in the mornings to catch breakfast with my mom and make lunch before I get ready for work. I get in arguments with Mom and my sisters for not being home and for not remembering to call. Eventually, I get better at calling again or maybe Mom just knows I’m only ever at work or I’m safe with Leon so we don’t have to fight about it anymore. I don’t check in as much.
I feel at home in Leon’s red-walled apartment on Bloor Street. I get to know the little kitchen and find things in it even he never realized were there, like the crisper drawer in the fridge, or the baking trays stored in the warming drawer. I cook. One day, we both crave nilagang baka and we buy the wrong cut of beef. It takes five hours to tenderize the meat and we are starving when it finally is fit to eat. I move in the next summer and I get better at making meals on the one good burner in that kitchen. We shop for our ingredients at Oriental Harvest and the Metro on Bloor and I make adobo and pinakbet for a dinner party we have with friends at home. I make pasta with mussels when my best friend Mia comes over and we joke that it’s the most muscles we’ve seen on the workout bench that doubles as our coffee and dinner table. I learn to cook lobster tails so they don’t curl up into a ball and I make a levelled-up seafood pasta for one of my first New Year’s Eves with Leon.
It’s 2022 and Leon and I live in the east end of Toronto, where we have been living for the last twelve years. We’re a bit far from his family who are in Mississauga and Burlington, but we see them often. My sisters live in Rexdale and in the west end of Toronto. Mom lives five minutes away from us with Tito Manny, now that they’ve made their home in Toronto after some years in Baltimore.
Leon does most of our grocery shopping these days, taking the risk of being indoors with other people while we ride out the pandemic. He works from home mostly as well. I am on maternity leave, and I stay home with our baby, Anders Noel. Then Leon and I alternate kindergarten drop-offs and pick-ups for our older son, Leon Victor. We also trade off cooking for our family. Some of the things I make these days are lasagna, guinisang munggo, a slow cooker pork or chicken stew with tomato, cumin, star anise, cinnamon, dates, and root vegetables, pork chops, nilaga, baked oat fingers for baby-led weaning, vegetable soup, lumpiang Shanghai, roast beef with gravy, tofu kare kare with almond butter, my own version of Cantonese chow mein, and chili. Leon makes palabok, adobo, spaghetti, mushroom risotto, steaks, roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, and breakfasts of hot dog, sunny side up eggs, and rice. I can make my own versions of longanisa, one sweetened with maple syrup and another loaded with minced garlic. We leave dim sum, fancy pizza, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern food to the experts. We attempt to make sushi. We work together to bake and decorate our son’s fourth birthday cake, his request of “a black-and-white cake with pink icing and rainbow cheerios, and monsters on it.” We make a home together.