My mother's family is from the north of Luzon, in an area known as Ilocos. It is the northernmost part of the Philippines, some really gorgeous beaches line the land here. In the northernmost tip, you can see Taiwan. If you're quiet enough in the morning, as the sun rises, you can actually hear it. I've done this. After my father's funeral, we came back to the province to visit and given our exhaustion after a week of the funeral, we found ourselves wide-awake at night. My aunt suggested we go north and go to the casino, see the sights and see the place where my grandfather is from. We discovered a gorgeous, almost untouched place. White beaches. And as I snapped a picture of the sunrise over Taiwan, in could hear cars from it's direction; it's closer to the Philippines than Cuba is from Florida. It was a pretty cool experience.
Ilocanos speak a specific dialect, known as Ilocano. Of which I only know a few choice phrases, and if you know anything about me, most of these phrases are mostly useless and it was, most certainly, a language in which I strove to learn a phrase I have since learned in many different and random languages - "There's a party in my pants." You'd be surprised how quickly this sparks conversation in a purely amusing and funny way - especially when I assert that it's simply a phrase, not an invitation. Instant conversation starter. Or ender.
But I digress. I swear, knowing that I only understand a few words and can somewhat make heads or tails of a conversation now by picking up general context will become important. But it still is Greek to me when they all really get going.
Here in Luzon, the sun shines brightly, and hotly. People here live a simple existence, selling wares and food from house to house. The kids play loudly in the streets. Dogs roam into family yards, looking for the occasional scrap of food from the tables. Motorcycles, a popular form of transportation, zoom up and down the narrow streets. During the middle of the day, the hottest part of the day, it's customary to sleep. Take a nice siesta.
Life is slow here.
Lapog is a little village, tucked off the main road, where my maternal roots go back decades. My grandmother's house was owned by her mother, my great-grandmother, Consolacion, but better known as Mamang Bet - who I had met a few times in my life - as she lived to 82. The house was part of a dowry when she married my great-grandfather, Vidal Vera-Cruz.
This house was one of the first two-story houses in the town. Back then, it was easy to see from far away. Now there's a lot of them. The house was used in the Spanish-American War, though details about how are sketchy and most of the people who did now have long since passed on. It is the house my mother and her sister and brothers were born and raised in. Yes, born. In the house. All six of them.
When I was kid, I loved it here. Nothing better. Me and my cousins, borrowing mopeds from our uncles, driving around town. It was a place of fantasy when I was much younger. My first time on a plane was to the Philippines when I was three. I loved crawling under the mosquito net and watching the lizards that would walk on the ceiling. My cousins and I would play for hours in the yard. When I was eight, there was a typhoon and my cousins and I played in the street, enjoying the cold rainwater.
As I got older, this elation at going home has dissipated. For starters, I am older. Obviously. But my cousins no longer accompany me here. I don't understand the language so I cannot converse unless someone serves as my interpreter or I listen really really hard for some clues. Even then, someone has to explain it to me. It's hot here. Sometimes unrelentingly so. I end up in front of a fan, a book in front of me. Or in a room with air conditioning, reading or taking a nap.
I know. Poor me. This is where I'm forced to slow down. Literally. I find it boring. Against my nature. This time, however, I have given in and am enjoying it immensely.
However, one nagging thought has accompanied my more recent trips here in the past five years: I've become obsessed with learning what my family's life was like growing up here. Perhaps I have become more keenly aware of just how delicate a line my life has straddled: if my mother had never left here, I would have grown up here, worlds apart from the life I have known.
When I press my mother about what her life would have been had she never sacrificed everything and left for the states all those years ago, she asserts that she never would have stayed here. And she doesn't just mean San Juan. She means the Philippines. If not for my mothers plucky and independent streak, I could be that kid in the flip flops riding a bike much too small for me, my skin browned even more from long hours on the sun. My uncles all tell the story of how they were chased into a tree by a caribou (water buffalo) and my youngest uncle swears he could tell me the depth of any part of the river that used to wind behind the house. My aunt broke her clavicle trying to steal fruit from a neighbor - who happened to be a cousin and probably would have given it to her if asked. They speak with a wistful look of times gone by, of dances and movies in the square in the center of town - a big deal for a place that didn't have electricity back then. If you weren't home by the time the town bell rung, you were in trouble. And no matter what you were doing, when the church bells went off, you stopped to pray.
Could this have been my life, too? Granted, they have plumbing and electricity but this is still a vastly different world than the one I grew up in.
I wonder what I would have been. Would I have stayed in the province? Would I have gone to Manila? Would I have been the first of my family to break away to the west? My mother sent her family to school once she got to the states. What would we all have been otherwise?
I sit and watch the world here, lost in my own thoughts, unable to fully communicate and wonder what would have been. Honestly, what else do i really have to do? I think about my roots. How different, yet how strong they are, even thousands of miles away from each other. I didn't grow up with my family around me and yet, here I am, in the middle of a place I never imagined growing up in and strangely feeling sated and at home.
Despite all my hesitations, I am always glad I came back. It makes me humble. And thankful for fate.
And family.
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