Early 1970s

KAREN TONGSON

When I was in my teens, strangers always remarked that I looked “especially mature” for my age. This explains how I was able to pop nonchalantly into our corner liquor store next to the Alpha Beta grocery to stock up on wine coolers for our high school theater cast parties when I was only fifteen.

People used to say the same thing about my mother, Elizabeth “Maria” Katindig, a jazz singer born to a bourgeois-bohème family of musicians who is credited with innovating Latin jazz in the Philippines. When I look back at pictures like this, I know what those folks meant, because my mom must’ve only been around seventeen or eighteen when someone snapped this picture of her and Eartha Kitt after she and her band opened for the legendary singer at a swanky supper club in Manila in the early 1970s.

My mom was only eighteen when she had me in 1973, so I, like all the other onlookers in my early childhood who marveled at her preternatural poise, had no idea what an actual baby she was. Indeed, “Baby,” was how I heard people refer to her the most when I was first sentient enough to notice my mother had a nickname.

Whatever tension and closeness we have now stems largely I think from this series of semantic misunderstandings swirling around and between us—between “Ayen” (my infantile pronunciation of my own name) and “Baby,” between me and her—from the moment I was born to this good Catholic girl who got married just seven months prior. She was a baby who herself had a baby. I find it almost poetic that she’s pictured here, in her full youthful glory, with Eartha Kitt, a woman who owes at least some of her iconicity to a swinging Christmas song with “baby” in the title.

To top it all off, my mom’s nickname “Baby” was spoken as a kind of honorific to most eldest daughters in Manila, thus infantilizing her (and all others who carry that nickname), while also saddling these women with a compulsory sense of family leadership and responsibility. It is that tremendous burden, that responsibility to the entire clan, that my mom still carries with her now, decades after she mothballed those gowns and eventually began trotting around in matching REI fleece with my dad instead, all the while pursuing a second—nay, third or fourth career—selling real estate in the Inland Empire of Southern California. She gave up the glitz, the glamour, the literal rubbing-of-elbows with powerful women like Eartha Kitt to take care of me. To take care of all of us.