Tracing My Filipino Family Roots
Images from The National Museum of Anthropology + The National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, Filipino-Tagalog: Pambansang Museo ng Antropolohiya + Pambansang Museo ng Sining
Groggy. Hot. Jet-lagged. Disoriented. I had no idea what was waiting for me at 3:00AM. I had just arrived in Manila a few days before. Still in a blur, my mom told me to “be ready” – that we were taking a trip. She didn’t tell me it would be a 10 hour drive in a cramped white van with 10 other Filipinos to the farthest northern coast tip of the Filipino islands along the South China Sea. (Good times!) We were headed to a town called Vigan. My cousin Raymond told me that I would like it. Thank goodness for Raymond, my cousin who looked like a Japanese sumo wrestler’s hipster younger brother. He told me that a Japanese admiral in WWII fell in love with a Filipino woman from the village, and based on their star-crossed love, the admiral spared the town of Vigan and his beloved from bombing and devastation. I was intrigued and frankly had no idea how long the trek would be. And no idea how life-altering it would be, either.
“Who doesn’t love a good love story? The first one I had ever encountered with a Filipina heroine at the heart of it, saving her people? Yep, I’m in…”
We left with the din of whirring jeepneys and sleepy blinking street lights on Labo Street where my Tita Ita (“Aunt” in Filipino) lived in the family apartment. My grandparents had the foresight to buy an apartment in Manila where all of their children and children’s children could live while they studied at the University of Santa Tomas in Metro Manila, with a home base back at the main house in the country near Bataan. We piled into a white van, with my Tita Ita, Tita DiDi, Tito Noli, mom and me in the back seat by the rear window, facing each other like a female prison chain gang about to embark on the ride of our lives.
“The air was cool and dim with dusty pink cloud puffs reflecting in irregular water pools, catching the morning light like mercury.”
Friends of my aunt and uncle from San Francisco came. Eddie brought his guitar and was like a cool, acoustic minstrel. He was easygoing and likeable from the start, a handsome, youthful man with easy 80’s styled hair. Mila, his wife, was petite with glasses, a husky voice and Dorothy Hamill haircut. Eddie’s quiet strumming was a soothing soundtrack and backdrop to the jostling van ride.
“Looking past the rice fields and mountain silhouettes – I didn’t quite know what would happen next. But I knew I was about to be transformed forever.”
Bouncing along, seeing the serene rice fields and the straw nippa huts dotting the provincial roads, street stalls laced with pearls of garlic strands, piles of colorful mangoes, pineapples and coconuts. I was mesmerized seeing these cross-cultural influences of Spanish, Mexican, Malaysian, Chinese and Japanese settlers who left traces of themselves, like cultural fingerprints, along the cobblestone streets. I loved listening to Eddy sing the Beatles, John Denver, and Elton John, and everyone else joining in with thick Filipino-accented English. “Cat in the Cradle” anyone? How about “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” my sweet Tita DiDi asked, being from San Jose and all.
Singing the old Filipino folk songs, then translating into English for me. I looked out the rear window, wide-eyed watching motorcycles and jeepneys choking along the dirt roads. I was trying to de-code the fast Filipino / Tagalog that was being sling shot all around me. We would start each van ride with the rosary (as all good Filipino Roman Catholics do) and singing. My aunts packed food – chicharron, hoppa (sweet pastries), and bananas, while I marveled in feeling so alive and awake to my own life.
“I had never seen my mom so happy, giggling with her sisters. It made me envision them as young girls coming to life from the black and white picture frame on my Tita Ita’s altar table way back on Labo Street…”
Many years ago, I read a Real Simple article that outlined the need-to-know questions every kid should ask their parents.
“I hit the generational jackpot with my aunts and my mom and the 10 hour trek north. It was the perfect backdrop for someone like me, hungry to ask and learn everything in a crash course of 11 days. It was the cherished gift of a lifetime.”
About my grandparents. My mom and her childhood. And the stories that were never shared – until now. I had actually ordered How to Speak Tagalog books and Lonely Planet guide books from Amazon to bring with me on the trip. When I proudly pulled them out of my backpack upon arrival at my Tita Ita’s, my mom and Filipino aunts burst out in mother hen cackles as I tried to read the catch phrases for tourists with my state-side accent.
It was humbling and truly life-changing. From the jungles of mango groves and banana trees, to the cascading bands of rice drying on the shoulders of the roads, to the open air Catholic schools with Filipino boys and girls in crisp light blue and white uniforms walking to school in locked arms and lock step under colorful umbrellas for cooling shade.
“I felt both frozen and transported
in time. A porous pocket of reality. When I was no one’s mom, niece, daughter, wife, or sister – only a
prism reflecting and magnifying everything I was experiencing in
high def and pure transcendence.”
Is this how my mom and her sisters and brothers walked to school? Past rice fields with bronze glistening babies cradled precariously on young Filipino mom hips. Main streets in tiny provinces that if you blinked you’d miss the signature wooden and tin arches welcoming you as you approached each town. I didn’t want to miss a moment. My history and heritage were moving past me like a live HD movie in every direction, awakening my senses and humbling me to my Americanized core. It was both parts traveling back in time and being only ever in the present, golden moment blooming before my eyes.
“Sacred and ageless moving through time and towns – I rubbed my eyes laughing out loud.
I was floating, a Filipino Alice in Wonderland whisked on a magical artisan woven mat ride leaving Metro Manila to who knows where…”
A baby water buffalo calf riding side car on a speeding motorbike, the full pig in cage case (also hitched to a speeding motorbike!), and the 10 baby goats (yes 10!) swaying in unison, swerving tight round a dusty corner turn. I saw magical larger-than-houses parols, colorful floral tissue blooms tucked into ancient scraggly trees like flowers in green leaves of hair.
The white and gray yoked water buffaloes, and the dark gray and brown elegant cranes. Like a raucous circus caravan mirage right before my eyes. Looking out onto the rice fields and seeing the moms and babies, the children following their grandparents, and the naked glistening brown kids jumping for joy into the rice field water banks. It felt like time stood still just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of where I really came from.
Raymond had kindly taken us to The National Museum of Anthropology + The National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, Filipino-Tagalog: Pambansang Museo ng Antropolohiya + Pambansang Museo ng Sining. I pictured the paintings of my ancestors that I saw just days before. Gestural, Degas-like paintings of women in periwinkle taupe brush-stroked rice-fields. Barefoot and noble in the heat, with straw pointed hats. My mom used to garden with these hats back in Ohio. Was this what my ancestors did? Could this have been me? How many centuries and generations touched these lands and planted these grains of white rice gold? Seeing the rice fields with my mom, now it all made sense. It made me realize the sacrifices that were made for me by the generations of women before me a world away. And the stories that live within me, planted by them.
Image from “Philippines Lifestyle News”
Images from The National Museum of Anthropology + The National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, Filipino-Tagalog: Pambansang Museo ng Antropolohiya + Pambansang Museo ng Sining