Another year-end ritual of going home and keeping my ear plugged to the ground on the offbeat and the newsy among other things hometown. This time around, I plugged off almost entirely; I didn’t bring my laptop, and I refuse to have an Internet-connected smartphone or tablet, and I waited to see what would happen.
First off, the firsts:
For the first time, I didn’t read anything. I repeat – that’s a first, in my history of vacationing. That’s three whole weeks, or almost. I brought Kindle, just in case, but it went right through hibernation.
As in last year, I too had a full-blown country music phase ‘soundtracking’ my ‘staycation’ in the province. The songs I used to despise in my childhood as “adult songs” were now a thing of boundless beauty to me. And I didn’t care what anyone else thought. The set list, at least in my mind:
Ventura Highway - America
Sister Golden Hair America
Dust in the Wind - Kansas
Country Roads, Take Me Home - John Denver
Tin Man - America
A Horse with No Name - America
Sandman - America
Bonus tracks, if only to break the monotony:
Hotel California – Eagles
Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin
And the biggest headline news? There’s a new status symbol in town – actually, since last year: fireworks during New Year’s. The terrible noise of New Year’s eve firecrackers was toned down compared with last year’s, although the pet cat and dog still got traumatized -- the dog wouldn’t eat, while the cat sought the unlikely shelter of kitchen cabinets. In all the four major directions, there was a major fireworks explosion going on competing for little children’s attention. Baby Saimon, my brother Rommel's son, certainly had a good time.
This new trend is less noisy, but far more showy, social status-wise. I don’t know which I prefer, though, because both are terrible air pollutants -- not a good idea if you have household members with asthma and the like.
Next: There are now three malls in town -- three malls! They are mini-malls to be exact, if Manila’s monstrously big malls are to be the standard. But they are malls just the same, one with proper twin escalators, albeit the structures merely have two stories.
Another thing noticeable was the proliferation of Internet shops in certain places, particularly in front of the university, my hometown being a university town. There was a time you could count the Internet shops with the fingers in one hand. The only time I sought the help of Internet connection, however, was when a long-time client (meaning preferred client I couldn’t refuse) sent me some work for editing and proofreading. ASAP, he said, if I didn’t mind. Happy holidays!
This is a carry-over from last year, but this new beef dish remained a hit: pigar-pigar. Originally invented by food stalls in Dagupan City, it has become a town favorite. I should try and experiment with this recipe one of these days. Pigar-pigar, as a verb in Pangasinense, roughly means "to turn over and over." Why pigar-pigar? I surmise it's because the recipe involves marinating the meat in soy overnight, at which span of time the filleted pieces of meat are to be turned over several times to even out the immersion.
What preoccupied my meals, however, was the humble dish of papait or sekan. Sautéed simply in tomatoes and white onion, it was bitters heaven. Speaking of herbs, my mother reminded me again that a kumare of hers (Jeck, Rommel's godmother) who worked in Lebanon as a DH discovered that the Lebanese grilled in olive oil a certain herb we have always considered to be only fit for pigs (no offense to the Lebanese; we are merely being ignorant). We call the grass, or herb, ngalub. My mother also clarified that tulango, another one we consider fit only for pigs, is what they consider in Manila as kulitis or the native spinach.
Other hometown favorites and home-cooked meals I indulged in included: inlubi, round latik ricecake, higado (my father’s recipe), bulalo/nilaga, buridibud, and bulanglang. I missed certain recipes of yore, such as the inkaldit, kulambo, and tapong. Due to allergy or fears of allergy, I avoided touching sinigang na hito, grilled hito, burong dalag, dilis, alamang, and bagoong. I couldn’t resist the pinakbet, however, which unavoidably contained the fish-based reddish brown bagoong. That's a terrible deprivation for a Pangasinense like me.
Nevertheless, I am reminded that, from the perspective of a native, the beauty of Philippine cuisine is that it is done just right. It is not too rich like Chinese cuisine; it is purposefully under-spiced, unlike Thai and Indian cuisines; and to the adventurous, it is endless in its customized variety, in a way that Malcolm Gladwell would approve (chunky tomato theory and all).
As to my neighborhood, amazing is the operative word. No, stupefying, as I was left speechless, even humbled and mortified, because I could only dream about the material achievement of our long-time neighbors. I felt happy for them all, but did I have to feel left out, too?
Thanks to OFW money, most people’s houses are almost like those of exclusive subdivisions in Manila: gated, with tallish fence, car... Make that cars. There is at least a couple of houses with high-end roofing material. Wow.
I was reminded that nothing is indeed impossible these days. Justin Bieber became an international star because of one YouTube video of his that went viral. The same story is repeated locally in the case of, say, Charice Pempengco and Arnel Pineda. To be sure, these three people have something remarkable in them with or without the validation of gazillion YouTube hits. Their excellent talent has always been there. It just so happened that new technology turned things around to their favor.
When I looked around in my little provincial reality, the same prodigious story is happening on a smaller scale. Gone are the days when certain people I know from childhood were just the helpless, sniveling kids that they were. Most of them are gone now, in that they have long left town, but look at their own families and houses today.
J’s house now looks like a grand mansion compared to its old self. R’s house looked already grand then – marble tiles and all. It is even better furnished now, with an air-con for each room.
How on earth did J. possess a car? Or even his younger brother N? Isn’t life unfair? J. couldn’t even pass his subjects in school!
One house even have not one, not two, but three cars! (There was a time all of us only had tricycles or motorbikes, or not even, just bikes.)
As for B’s family – another wow! Everything has now leveled up, starting from the ornamental plants.
L’s house is one of those high-end houses I was talking about earlier. How did he obtain all that? I heard he hit the jackpot with his wife after they got a big break as local fish dealers at the public market.
As to my first cousins on the father’s side, if I recounted their good fortune one by one, I would not have enough space.
Most of my classmates are gone as well. The nurses abroad have especially made it big. They can afford to travel around the world monthly and build palaces that would make the mansions at Ayala Alabang look like tenement or bunkhouses.
The shocker is when I went to B’s house. Also fueled by nursing, I was totally incredulous at the improvement. No, it was a leap, an unbelievable one, from a flimsy nipa hut to richly upholstered and tiled affair! Oh my God! Was I overcome with a kind of envy I didn’t know I had.
I had to blunt the shock by rationalizing. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to open my mind because I couldn’t take what I just witnessed. I couldn’t take the fact that I was left out, that my whole family was left out.
But one day, my anxious prayer was answered. Alone in silence after all the festivities, I sat down with the realization that my neighbors had to pay big time for all of it. They were in for a great trade-off. I just have to list down the cons.
A died of cancer of the colon.
B had to work as DH in Hong Kong when she was a college graduate in Manila, and after that, she contracted breast cancer, although she survived.
C worked for how many years in the UAE as DH. Same story: she’s a UST Commerce grad. How depressing and traumatic is that?
D’s much sought-after baby boy K died. He was not even one year old, I think.
E died after a botched attempt at abortion. That is after the family lost the father, who was not old enough to die.
F lost his father when he was not even 50 yet. Worse, his family discovered that he had a mistress and left her with a daughter, a sister they never had.
G’s husband had long been in coma, and eventually died after having his family endure years of silent suffering.
H’s brother Y died suddenly from a snake bite when he was still in grade school.
I. gained the whole world but left her faith in favor of a new one.
J died of asthma before tasting the fruits of his sacrifice. His children, though, all left their faith, except for one.
K died of lung cancer when she never smoked a cigarette. She suffered for it for years prior to that.
L got divorced from his wife and got separated from his sons. He didn’t see them physically for years.
M lost both his parents, his mother after a long bout of stroke and cancer of the stomach.
N lost her beautiful daughter K to brain tumor at such a tender age.
O lost three babies in a row, the last when she was already two years old. She also had to endure years of abuse as an undocumented worker in the US.
P's mother has been in a wheelchair, and judging from her face, her emotional life doesn't look good.
In almost every family, there was someone who had to sacrifice by going abroad. None of us in my own family had to, and we are complete, so far, thanks be to God.
And I don’t have any idea what else they could be missing, what other pains they have gone through.
But alone with myself, or with God, I had to confront my envies. God, who sees everything, is the provider of all good things – who am I to scream no? who am I to question him as to whom to bless and not bless materially? And for that matter, whom to embarrass or punish with poverty and want, and who to visit with sickness and sudden death?
I appeased myself with this consoling thought: What is success anyway? It’s all relative. Success depends on one’s own definition of success. For me, success is when I am able to do what God wants me to do. Maybe I am not loved less, just different. I was greatly consoled by thoughts like this.
But an unconscious side of me was in disagreement. Obviously, it’s I that’s the problem. I and my own secret impositions on myself. I had a problem with integrating my head knowledge with my ‘heart knowledge.’
And it turns out, all along, my heart has been saying, “I am not satisfied with my lot.” Worse, I suspected that "I am being punished, or my family, for some sins we aren’t aware of, that are living under a curse, or a spell somebody we had hurt cast upon us."
On my way back to the city, inside the bus, I took a peek at the window in the gathering light of day. Down the road I saw a beautiful house, with a well-appointed garage. And in the garage was a sleek car, of recent make. It was such a dreamy image. It was an image directly from my dreams.
Then I began to realize that, ever since I was a child, I have unconsciously vowed to myself that, being born of poverty, I would rescue my family from poverty. And I failed. And it hurt me profoundly, and I had been angry just as profoundly that I failed. That that anger is what has been causing my hypertension lately, not to mention the host of other psychosomatic symptoms I complain about now and then.
In the silence of this realization, I was reduced to wiping rampaging rivers I couldn’t contain. Then long silence between me and my God.
Then I felt good. I felt relieved of a burden worth decades of being bottled up. “It’s okay. I am good as I am.” I give myself a butterfly hug, a kind of self-embrace I learned from trauma counseling. “I am not my failure to deliver the goods.” I added, which was a learning I had from the Landmark Forum seminar.
When I hit the dirty cacophony of grungy Manila, my ultasensitivity to noise was suddenly gone. I ate salty dishes earlier, and I didn’t get hypertensive like before, for some reason.
I have been healed! At least I claim it so.
Alone again, in my room, this time in the city, I would read this message as I randomly opened my Bible:
John 9:1-3: Jesus Heals a Man Born Blind
"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?'"
"'Neither this man nor his parents sinned,' said Jesus, 'but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.'"
