These words that you’re reading, though flat on the page, are in fact in the shape of a reliquary. The things herein are tucked away for the future generations to see and hold. A snapshot of the past, what it was like to live in my time, in this skin, with these experiences. What they do with these words, the memories shaped like the objects they’re tied to, is up to them. I can only hope that they hold them with as much care as I have for the cultural inheritances left to me.
See this low seat made of wood, rectangular in shape. Its colour faded to deep grey like stone, signalling the strength imbued in the wood from years of use and love. Hold it in your hands. Now set it down. Sit. Feel the grain of the wood; the grooves are deep and filled with story. Notice how sturdy and level it is? The square, squat legs were salvaged from a sofa and fixed to a thick plank of teak.
My mother had trouble standing in the shower when she was heavy with me. To help her, my father built this seat, a place to sit while she showered. Mom never learned to swim so she never enjoyed tub bathing, and my father understood this.
After my birth, the seat found a new purpose as a stepping stool in the kitchen. Sometimes I’d sit on it and watch her cook or chat on the phone to her sister.
When I was five, we moved from the house in Scarborough to a farm in Stouffville. When we had settled in and Mom found time for baking again, my father transformed the relic into a kudkuran for her. He added a tail, forged from blackened steel and imported from the homeland, to one of its width-ends. I see my mother straddling the small beast, scraping out meat from inside coconut shells to make budbod to sprinkle on kutsinta and maja blanca.
See me in this photo, with rounded edges and chequered matte finish. The words Winter — 1983 scrawled in my mother’s cursive on the back.
I’m sitting in a snowbank, cradled by my mother. My mittened hands warm in red acrylic, I’m clutching a pale orange shovel in my left hand, raising it to the falling flakes, my lips curled into a howl. My snowsuit is blue, sinking into the sea of white fractals. See my mother, bundled up in a snowsuit, her hair in a bob cut. She’s smiling at my father winking behind the camera, her arm wrapped around me.
What was she thinking in those moments? Was she thinking how far she’s come? Did she think about my future? Or was the present too urgent and fast? What did this sampaguita from Banca-Banca, the barangay named after the boats that carried our seafaring ancestors through the archipelago, know of snow and cold before she emigrated? Did she hear no two snowflakes were the same? Did she wonder what I would come to know of this land?
Hold this brown paper towel roll, a white sheet of paper cut to triangles, two rubber bands and this sando. Ordinary things made extraordinary.
My parents were frugal. They often avoided purchases from department stores and instead hunted for sales at Bargain Harold’s, BiWay, and Goodwill. All the while, those on the outside, looking in, labelled me spoiled. My parents poured their all into me, spending little on themselves. I had every He-Man I could wish for. I had monogrammed Yves Saint Laurent print bedsheets I thought were made special for me. I attended private schools. Still, I remember times when it had to be explained that we could not go get a new action figure or visit a drive-thru for a Happy Meal. Sometimes I’d complain, with petulance, and my dad would warn me, “Don’t dabog.” Two words said sternly, with threat looming behind them.
In these times between paydays, my father would rely on his storytelling to entertain me. These moments came to be my favourite — soft vignettes filled with narrative and play.
He’d tell me about the boys getting circumcised by the river, how they’d jump into the water after the slice. He was one of them.
He’d tell me about forcing his older brother to help him fly a kite in low winds, the kite string pulled taut between them across an empty plot of land in Cabanatuan. When Dad detected a faint breeze he’d yell, “Sige!” and throw the handmade kite into the air, signalling to his kuya to start running in a futile attempt to leverage the craft into the sky. After numerous attempts and when it became clear the winds were insufficient for flight, Dad would throw his hands up and yell, “You take it home!” stomping away from his brother in frustration.
He’d tell me about the time he was dared to jump on the back of a carabao on his way to school, and how he rode the water buffalo for a few seconds before it threw him off.
He’d tell me of the old man who let him take guava fruit from his tree, but drew the line when my father, a troublemaker, began cutting limbs from it trying to find the perfect Y shape to fashion a sling-shot out of.
He’d tell me about his older sister, my quiet and reserved tita, coaxing his bullies to come within arm’s reach of her with feigned softness. With the quickness of a viper she’d grab hold of them, pulling the two of them to the ground, dragging them and dunking their heads in the fetid canal water that flowed past their home.
He’d tell me about magic, monsters, history, and lore. His stories made me believe he was magic himself, that he could make anything, and make anything happen.
“Do you believe in magic?” he asked, as he cut up the sheet of paper into triangles. With both his hands, he swept the triangles into a neat pile on the colourful baníg on the floor of our bedroom. Gathering all the small triangles into his hand, closing his fist tight, he handed me the cardboard tube, the sando pulled taut like a drumskin over one end, held in place by rubber bands. “Hold,” he said, his hands cupped around mine as he poured the triangles in. Then he reached for his nightshift flashlight on the dresser. Flicking it on, he put it under the clothed, closed end. Leaning over, his one eye open and spying into the tube, he twisted it clockwise then counterclockwise. “Look,” he said, tilting the tube to me. I peered in, one eye squinted as he had demonstrated. I saw a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes powered by imagination and my belief in him.
See this photo of a library, tall shelves packed with books, small chairs and long desks between the resting tomes and novels. The children are sitting quietly in the chairs as the librarian, Ms. Heintzner, hands out worksheets. I am six years old, wild curls, uncomfortable but sure. This is a class for gifted children, a supplementary portion of the school day where students nominated by their teachers and deemed exceptional through a series of tests were asked to participate.
Peek over my shoulder, I’m holding a worksheet. There are questions on it, asking us to write any answer we like. The first question reads: “What do you wish to be when you grow up?” I write, “A helicopter.” The second question reads: “What is the name of your hometown?” I write, “Stoveville.” The third question reads: “What city is your school in?” I write, “Scarboro.” The fourth question reads: “What province do we live in?” I write, “Ontairio.” The fifth question reads: “What was your favourite part of the summer? Write four full sentences or more.” I proceed to write the bare minimum, misspelling every word I plausibly can. I would continue to do this through the next few days until I was unceremoniously removed from the gifted program.
I did this because my friends treated me differently on the ball court at recess when gifted classes started. I did this because I already felt distant from all of the city kids, who had friendships with each other outside of school. I did this because I did not want to be in the different class. I already felt different.
See — no, hold — this by-law book for the township of Whitchurch-Stouffville. Feel its weight in your hands and leaf through its pages. See the annotations written in the margins? That’s my father’s handwriting.
My father went to war with my hometown in ’89. It started with a series of impotent siege attempts by our NIMBY neighbour, Terrence. Terrence was constantly harassing my father, calling him to meet on our joined driveway after work. He was jealous that my father had so many friends. Or maybe it wasn’t green that shaded his heart, but something whiter, like prejudice. Each weekend, my father’s friends would come over to the farm, hang out, drink all through the hot summer days, and reminisce about their lives back home. Sometimes — often, one of them would pass out in tall grass, only to be woken by the chill of nightfall and high-hum of mosquitos. At night, they’d tell stories in Tagalog around a fire, sharing food and drink and laughter. They’d talk about how much a night outdoors, by a fire, with the murmur and cooing of nesting hens settling in for the night reminded them of their villages back home.
To accommodate larger animals like pigs and goats, my father decided to build an extension to the existing barn. With the help of his friends, it was finished in a handful of weekends.
A few days later, I saw my father speaking to Terry at our gate. I watched from our kitchen window before deciding to move outside, curious as to what was happening.
“Hi, Yves,” he said, before continuing with my father. “That barn extension looks like shit. All cobbled together with wood and rusted roofing tin. You’re decreasing the value of my property! You see how I keep my yard? It’s beautiful and manicured. Look at our rose garden! Look at our grass! Then you look at your property. It’s all tall grass, weeds, and junk cars.”
“You see junk, Terry. I see things I can use to fix my car. You see tall grass and weeds. I see places for our hens to lay eggs and for our chicks to hide from hawks. I like what I see. If you don’t, don’t look over here.” Terry walked away in frustration, throwing his hands in the air and cursing.
A few days later, a letter arrived from the township by courier. It was an order to attend a meeting. Terry had called the township to report my father, claiming that the barn extension was in violation of the by-laws.
At the meeting with by-law officers and other officials of my hometown, my father sat and listened as they began reading off alleged violations from a book. Before they could finish, my father asked, “What are those books, and where did you get them?” They told him the books contained the town’s by-laws and that he could purchase one from the township. Dad stood up and said, “Then this meeting is over until I get one of those books.”
He left the township offices, tome in hand, walking back to the car where Mom and I waited. Hopping in the passenger seat, pulling the car door shut, he said, “I’ll get these fuckers. You’ll see.” His brazen, devilish smile was broad, appearing closer and larger in the car’s sideview mirror as I looked on from the back seat.
Days passed and each day he read the by-law book as passionately as a seminary student would a Bible. He combed each passage for some hidden meaning, searching for an interpretation of the words that would allow him to find peace. Eventually, he found a path forward.
Our five acres are zoned agricultural while the flanking properties are zoned residential. This difference, along with a permit, allowed for the addition of our barn, which still stands today.
Over our gate I watched Dad put on a clinic. “I could’ve fucked you over, Terry,” Dad said. “That pool you just put in? It can’t be on the eastern side of your yard according to the by-laws. It’s too close to my property line. That’s a violation. There’s also no fence around it with a locking gate to prevent my chickens from drowning if they crossed into your yard,” he said wryly. “That’s another violation. Also, that addition to your barn you put on a few years ago? That makes it too tall according to the by-laws. Another violation. I could’ve said something to the township and you’d have to fill that pool and tear down your barn, but I didn’t. Why take away joy? That’s not what life is about.” He turned to me, “Life is about not getting fucked over, son.”
See this photo, snapped vertically. This was taken before I was born. The solo figure in the photo is my mother. She’s standing high atop the Scarborough Bluffs, her back to the water and sky. The trees flank both her sides, their limbs touching above her. She’s smiling, her body quarter turned to the camera, hands hanging at her side. She’s wearing a simple dress of dark red. The heel of her forward foot is raised slightly, pulling the hem just above her knee. My mother is beautiful and strong — a seafaring warrior, her miles travelled encoded in my DNA.
Pull back. The photo is in the centre of bristol board, hand-drawn lines emanating from it with important dates and facts from her history.
This was an assignment from grade nine. We were asked to give a personal history of a hero in our family. I chose her.
She was the first of her family to leave the Philippines for Canada; she bought the home that provided her siblings with a roof over their heads, a starting point for the next phase of their lives.
She was the one who, as a result of a severe asthma attack, lived in a coma for weeks. I remember a Thanksgiving years ago where my mother sat around a table with her nieces. My cousins were young mothers then, discussing the rearing of children and the uncertainties that they felt. They were looking to her for advice. She told them about her time in stasis, how dark and lonely it was. She described only one constant in that time, the thought that I was still young and needed her. That was the invisible tether that led her back to me. She said that each of them, too, had that bond with their children. All they needed was to remember that. Mothers are the ones who make the Fates genuflect, make them change their plans. She forced them to bend for me.
For months the assignment hung on the wall of my history class. After the semester ended and we returned from Christmas break, I went to Mr. Gallagher’s class to retrieve it.
“I told all the students on the first day that anything left behind at the beginning of winter break would be thrown out,” he said, unapologetically while at the blackboard scrawling something for incoming students to read. This had been my favourite picture of my mother, the only print I had. The negative developed and lost years ago.
In a moment of desperation, I ran out to check the school dumpsters. It was never possible that it could still be there, but I had to try. I never found it.
How could this man look at this photo, read the history of this woman, know the hardships and triumphs she experienced, then shrug and throw it out like common trash?
Here, tie one end of this thick, knotted rigging rope around your waist. I’ll help you. My father taught me good knots. Feel its coarseness and see the twisted natural fibre it’s comprised of. Dad purchased this at a garage sale. On the farm, we’ve used it for many purposes: to saddle break our spirited hackney, Bagga, that I rode. To tow cars we cannibalized for parts to the back of our property. To lead trees away from the house to fell them safely. To anchor myself to him.
In the winter of ’97, there was an awful windstorm that pulled sheets of roofing tin off of the barn, rolling them about the yard like loose-leaf. Some sections of tin clung to the roof by a few persistent nails, and the wind turned them over like book pages, slamming them back down with eerie finality. A winter storm was coming, and my father and I rushed to repair things before the burying blizzard arrived. The side of the roof stood at a sixty-degree angle, peak to ground measuring thirty feet. Having collected all the sections of tin, we waited for the winds to die down. The quickest way to secure the sheets to the roof was for one of us to hang over its edge. I was the lighter of us two, so we determined it should be me. Out of this rope, my father wove a harness to slip my legs into. The other end he criss-crossed around his torso, his body an anchor for me to hang from. Coiling the slack around his arms, he was the hoist to lower me down and bring me back up.
Swinging my legs over the peak, nails in my pocket and hammer in one hand, I slowly made my way down. Between lulls in the bluster, we worked like this, and when the work was done, he pulled me back up over the peak. We lay there on the roof side by side, looking at the grey sky, laughing, panting with exhaustion as the snow started to fall.
Now, see this pendant. Careful — don’t drop it. A delicate gold crucifix with four small diamonds stacked on top of each other, two diamonds flanking the second from the top.
“My mother gave it to me when I started high school, and it’s time for you to have it. I’ve worn it all the days since then, only taking it off a few times,” Mom said as she gave it to me in the days leading up to my first day of high school. This pendant is an heirloom, its true meaning hiding behind an entire belief system. As a child, my father worked this pendant into stories he told me before bed. He’d look to my mother, gesturing to her pendant, and tell me that the diamonds came from the sea. As a young adult, when pensive or stressed, I used to put it in my mouth. I could taste the soothing salt of the Pacific.
When I was in university, I began writing a story about my mother. I was under pressure to write the centrepiece for a portfolio that would be used as part of my application to enter creative writing as a major. Only one hundred students had been selected to enrol in the introductory class. From those one hundred, only twenty would proceed to the major. My work to this point had been experimental and awful. I was a nascent trying to harness fire. Out of fear and what felt like a last-ditch effort, I instinctively turned to the stories that I had heard as a child. I was unknowingly writing what would become the beginnings of my first literary novel. It was a short story titled “Water Whisperer.” Priscila Uppal, our professor, had us pair off to discuss our stories.
I was working with a young man named Dan who always wore a wool beanie. We talked about sentence structure, dialogue and pacing. We talked about imagery, authorial intent and character motivations. We talked about motif, metaphor, and anachronism. We talked about symbols. And as our time drew to a close, he hesitated to tell me something.
“What is it, man? Just spit it out.”
“Well, I see you’re wearing a cross,” he said, gesturing to my pendant. “I don’t want to offend you.”
“I wear it for my own reasons, not because I’m religious. My religion is more ctrl-x, ctrl-v,” I said.
What I went on to explain is that I was raised Roman Catholic, but I was never a fervent believer whose hands burned when I prayed. Through my life, sharing stories with others, I’ve found beliefs outside of Catholicism that mesh better with my core — my very own cut-and-paste religion is still a work in progress.
He nodded, saying, “Gotcha. I understand.” But he didn’t actually understand me, and that wasn’t his fault. I was doing what I always did back then. I said something clever to put him off the scent so that I wouldn’t have to show him how uncertain and uncomfortable I was with reaching back into my history for stories. I felt shame doing that, felt that I had no right to these stories. I only knew them third-hand, and maybe I was not Filipino enough to wield them. I was bifurcated; though I held the stories close to my heart, I felt removed from them because I did not think that they belonged to me. It’s taken me years to accept that they are a part of me, that they have always been, and that their value and inherent strength make up a large part of who I am.
Too often in youth I shied away from putting my heritage at the forefront of my writing and identity. The stories were important to me, but in the way that keepsakes from childhood are — never meant to be played with, just stored away for sentiment’s sake. Having never seen anyone like me or the things I knew of being Filipino portrayed in mass media, I was afraid I’d be made fun of. Though it’s true Canada is a mosaic of cultures, there was always a deep-seated longing in me to belong, to assimilate at the cost of my uniqueness. I also did not feel Filipino enough to take up the mantle of storyteller. I assumed that someone who spoke the language fluently, someone who lived in the Philippines was surely better positioned and knowledgeable than I. But also, who was I to write Canadian fiction, when much of the Canadiana I read at the post-secondary level was written by white men and women? I was of both, yet belonged to neither — how could I have a voice in either land?
If I told Dan that as a child I used to wander the forest behind my home while imagining the motivations the aswang might have for eating babies in utero, what would he think? If I told him the stones in the pendant came from the sea, how they were once made of one stone and my great-great-grandmother was born with it in her spine, what would he say? If I told him about tikbalang and Mariang Makiling, and Berberoka, and kapre, and dwende, and manananggal — if I told him all the stories that hid behind the broad symbol that hung from my chain, then he’d see me in a way I wasn’t yet able to see myself.
Dan only saw the symbol, the cross, not how the minerals break invisible white light, revealing an entire spectrum of colours and story. He could not see the refracted shades of light my heart swam in behind the half-inch pendant. This was my fault, not his.
Hold this blue book in your hands. See the figures on the cover, four women in water, sampaguitas in their hair. Flip it over. This is the first of my books, and this particular copy is the first of all the physical copies — the prototype, the proof. I can tell this one from the thousands out there because the blurb on the back is left-aligned, not fill-justified. I wrote this. I made this. I published this and sent it out into the world. But I wasn’t alone in doing so — I could not have created this in a vacuum. The women within those pages, though embellished and modified, are the women of my family. I am descended from an ancestral lineage of warrior women, healers with infinite care, patience, and wisdom. I have their fire in my chest and their stories under my tongue.
There is a spike on my wall back home in Stouffville driven deep into the stud. It used to be a push pin that held up rejection letters like participation ribbons for my failed attempts at finding a publisher to print my book. Over time, the collection outgrew the push pin. Those letters were boulders set in my path, another obstacle preventing me from telling the stories I loved. I buried them, repurposed them, turned them into stepping stones towards self-publishing.
This book reminds me that dreams and wishes do nothing neatly tucked between the mattress or locked away in a drawer. It reminds me that every year is the year of the longshot, that a failure earned is better than one handed to me. This book is a symbol, a touchstone, a turning point. This book is the key that opened up my life. This book is a love letter.
These objects and photographs I’ve shared, they remind me who I am and where I’ve been. These treasures are landmarks, constellations, points of reference that help me see the path forward through the unmapped landscape ahead.
I hold them close.
I take them with me.
Forward.