passages, part i
sala
sunday mornings in my dasmarinas life go something like this: i use my weekend rights to wake at 8 but get out of bed at 845a; visit the CR; stroll through the sala to the front porch where C and i have breakfast with Tita E. our breakfasts combine all the comfort foods my mom served only rarely and in separate sittings. this morning, for example, i gorged on garlic fried rice, lechon kawali, hot pan de sal and cheese wiz, and suman. as we eat, trikes rush by on our relatively busy street, leaving behind trails of exhaust and the gurgles of motors. Tita’s meal is usually interrupted a couple times by folks who swing by her corner store for something (a bag of cold water, a packet of crackers, a cigarette).
all the while, Tita blasts 102.7 Kiss FM, an aural privilege reserved especially for sundays. the station uses the same tag as the station in LA circa 1997, but instead of Rick Dees we have a less abrasive, Filipino-speaking DJ. and instead of pop hits from the 90s, the station plays ballads from the 1950s and 1960s.
lazy sunday morning saturation: the air is heavy with heat, moisture, exhaust, paul anka, weepy strings and dramatic musical climaxes; my stomach is weighted by lechon and grains. more ballads – elvis this time? – accompany the trek back through the darkened sala, back to my room.
–
one of my classmates here is puerto rican, and we often trade stories on motherlands, inflected by the lens of our experience now. she marvelled once at the lingual-colonial similarity, something like: “english is like a layer of garbage here, just like in puerto rico. it exists, but it’s in lower, vulgarized forms, left behind by US colonization.”
what i visualized when she said this were Coca-Cola images on handmade signs for corner stores that are more numerous than a 1:corner ratio, Rabsico wrappers that litter streets and waterways, and characters in teleseryas whose Tagalog is interrupted by English phrases used to heighten the drama.
–
my mind is still reeling from conversations with P, R, and A yesterday, part of the herculean and hubristic project i’ve taken on of sketching out communities of writers in cavite, the province where i’m staying this first month. (so far P, R, and A have offered me beautiful things: cavitenos and their writers are matapang, they are travelers and migrants, they are in a complex and dynamic relationship to metro maynila, which sits northeast of cavite and encroaches on the province through its cultural hegemony and exurban sprawl).
P, former editor of the literary folio at DLSU-D, shared stories of the enemies he’s made around campus because of his provocative columns. at one point he spoke with humor and scorn about one of his targets, a student group that exists specifically to further the practice of speaking English among its members.
he said, in tagalog, that the members of this group were of course the more wealthy students on campus. i laughed when he mimicked their english, the kind spoken by valley girls and teenagers in the US, at least in P’s demonstration: “like, you know.” (and in the back of my mind i thought, oh god this is how i talk). after his first stories about the difficulties of convincing the school of the importance of student publications, especially at a school whose funds are funneled to the business school (perhaps the same students of the english group), and after a few hours of hearing stories and thoughtful takes on cavite literature in tagalog (our chats could only be in tagalog, even my broken tagalog), i felt myself laughing with the same scorn and shaking my head with the same disdain.
–
low rider
for short distances within town we’ll sometimes take trikes, these motorbikes with covered sidecars. as a passenger in one of these, you sit low to the ground with the driver a few inches away to your left. there is no door to your right, so the street opens up to you with alternatingly terrifying and exciting immediacy. passengers in other trikes and sidewalk wares can be at an arm’s length away, and so can jeepneys and gargantuan buses (i can almost touch the tops of their wheels from my seat). i quickly learned to put my trust in the trike drivers even when they insist on inching into brisk traffic, because they maneuver so adeptly between buses and pedestrians, and because i just need to in order to get from one place to another, sanity in tact.
soundtracks for a nonexistent past
nostalgia around my college years doesn’t appear so frequently and with force as it used to. now it’s more an odd matter of ahistoric memory through sound. music that i hadn’t heard until after college gets transposed onto places and scenes from my past, like i’m laying down a soundtrack across time. or maybe more accurately, it’s wishful thinking: it’s music that i associate with aesthetics, places, and people that i wish i had known or been immersed in when i was younger — nostalgia for memories that never existed for me.
i wish i had been at the greek theater in berkeley for this, if only because it would have been so apt:
watching and wishing this, though, i remember events that actually are part of my fabric: lots of events at the greek — common, ozomatli, pep rallies (!), graduation, and hearing/watching this under california stars:
heat for the ears
the heat in socal can be overwhelming in the summer. one september in high school we played a tennis match in 102-degree weather. it’s desert where we live, so there wasn’t so much stickyness so much as warmth everywhere - on the handles of racquets, between my skin and cotton shirt, on the vinyl seats of the school bus that took us to duarte. i slogged through my sets, barely being able to breathe, then afterward went in search of cooler temperatures. the gym was a noise of volleyball, yells, and handclaps, all generating their own kind of unbearable heat, and there was no shade (duarte high school - more trees, please!). i ended up back on the schoolbus with a few other teammates, slouched on hot green vinyl. my head throbbed, maybe from some combination of exhaust from the idling bus, the fiery furnace around me, and the ice cold water i drank. for the rest of the afternoon i sat still, staring out the window at trees and heat waves.
best coast, especially this cover art for one of her 7-inches last year, conjures memories like that.
as varied as LA childhoods can be, i suspect that most kids who grow up there can at least share the experience of sitting in some car on a clogged freeway, like the one downtown in the cover art (LA friends, is that the 110? or the 5?), while the sun beats down, and you’re staring out the window up at a brown-layered sky.
best coast’s music is like the aural descriptor. it’s a hazy slog, and like the heat, so loud in its noise to the point that you don’t complain, you just move through it. the pop vocals could be something i’d actually hear in the car when my parents tune the radio to the oldies station, which seemed to play a beach boys song every hour as if by socal mandate.
–
more than any accusation of materialism that could be launched against LA (which i don’t buy completely), what keeps me from settling back in LA is the threat of this malaise — that feeling of not wanting to do anything but sit there and move passively through. clogged heads and clogged freeways.
where the heart is, where the limbs rest, etc
my parents care for their new house in a way i’ve never seen in the home where i grew up. they purchase furniture very carefully, scanning magazines for inspiration. the pops sweeps away cobwebs from the uppermost corners of the ceilings; the crevices of the bathroom and kitchen tiles are kept void of any dark smudges. the beds in the rooms are always made, covered in what feels like egyptian cotton. they’ve even given the new house a name – Shifting Breeze – after the street that it’s on.
staying here is like staying at a hotel, a model home, or with a distant relative.
there was one afternoon over the 10-day trip when i had space and time to myself, which is unusual since i live alone. i sprawled my books, computer cords, and legs across the coffee table in the upstairs loft, and took advantage of the surround sound stereo system. the house is perched on a hill, 15 miles from the strip, 15 miles from noise. from this perch, sitting with myself, i started to grasp what i think is the point of this new home: it’s like my parents are cultivating a new energy and identity.
if our nameless old house is an artifact of dad’s experiments in furniture-making, pock-marked by physical traces (the dishwasher that leans out when opened, the uneven sealing of former baseboard heat, taped-over cracks in windows) of the time my parents were getting by, then Shifting Breeze is a monument to a certain kind of perfection (making it, not just getting by), practiced and paved for over the course of 30 years. the gate around their new community like an antidote to 30 years of living two blocks from the freeway and a liquor store, on a busy arterial that i once ran into without looking as a 7-year-old and got spanked for it. the furniture sets reflect a more precise bourgeois aesthetic. see: the wine cellar/fridge gracing the corner of the dining room.
i’m with them on the new house because despite the pretense to perfection, i still see what makes it not so, or i see the work, effort, and error that goes into it. the inspiration for the new home comes from two-year-old magazines. dad props wood under the sofa bed to keep it from falling. and that wine cellar in the corner is apparently too cold, my french in-laws tell me, set by me at a frigid 55 degrees.
drumming for take-off
i’m limited by indecision and myopic musical taste to even attempt a ‘top five’ of the year, much less the decade. instead i offer a song, “i knew” by lightning dust, that kept me company this summer.
it’s a brief, 2.5 minutes of burgeoning excitement — a fast, steady pulse of a drum machine that gives way to fluttering vocals painting an image of a love out of nowhere, of its headlong first moments. the song knows its limits, and doesn’t try to do more than it should, even though it seems like those pulsings and synths would burst into something big. “i knew” acts as poetry should: brief, disciplined, aimed at capturing, verbalizing, and representing (however inadequately) specific snapshots of thought/life/feeling that will always escape verbalization anyway.
pretty much summer perfection.
edit:
for further appreciation: live. in tiny desk concert form, starting at 8:30 (file under: hippy-like; pregnant; knowing glances).
island world, pineapple planet
my second national academic conference, behind me. the verdict: work + hawai’i = futile.
–
only one panel engaged me multiply – for the AAS star-studdedness of its audience; the rigor of the work presented and the political intensity and passion that runs through it; the physical idiosyncrasies of the panelists.
–
this muscle-y, gruff filipino-american man could be straight out of WestCo (close: Riverside). his studded ears stick out slightly from his shaved head. when he speaks it is with intense, wide-open eyes, his tone not angry but forceful. he wields muscle-y academic and abstract terms, throwing them combatively but with precision, like a long-range missile meant to inflict maximum damage in a specified area. the words come heavy, ‘fundamentally, ‘epistemes,’ ‘eurocentric rationality’; always, though, swiftly, like rapid artillery.
S whispers in my ear, ‘he’s dreamy.’
i can’t follow his argument because of the distraction of his physicality, and because when said aloud, the string of academese flies over my head; i’m a words in front of my face kind of person. i think i get the gist of what he means to do, relayed in my own clunky way: to see the instability of fil-am subject formation in the very acts of producing this subject (specifically, areas i don’t know enough about: state violence, genocide) and the inadequacies of the way the fil-am subject is conceptualized by everyone – Fil-Am studies, AsianAm studies, Philippine studies.
[my problem and love with academese: these terms are precise because they access ideas and concepts that are unnamed by popular or everyday discourse, but they’re also opaque because they reference concepts that are/seem to be illegible to everyday discourse]
–
in the woman seated at the panelists’ table, i can hardly believe this was my mousey bespectacled TA who 5 years ago gave me grad school advice and recommended some fil-am novels i never wrote down. she’s here now, speaking with fierceness and precision about gang members, a population whose value her work tries to recuperate. now she goes without glasses, is the sharpest dresser among the three panelists. the tattoo lacing her upper arm occasionally peeks from the sleeve of her blue shirt dress. she is the older cousin i wanted to be, or to hang out with, when i was 10 years old.
–
the first speaker is a prof i lobbied to fund a campus visit for, and her talk tells me i wasn’t wrong. her paper tries to make sense of an outmoded racial theory that doesn’t allow us to understand a simultaneity of grievances and discourses from two differently racialized communities – southeast asians living in a housing project in SF, the building of which displaced a chunk of the area’s AfAm residents, which in turn spurred a slew of AfAm on SEAsian crimes.
her default face is something like tearful; it seems like she’s going to shed some halfway through her talk. she gives a meandering, excessive presentation, in that she exceeds her time limit; her last words are injected from her seat, as she interrupts the second speaker before she even starts. but her crinkly eyes translate to passion, I think, and a certain pained perplexity at the two wronged populations at the center of her talk. her appearance is like her presentation — within the range of smart, but a little disheveled. her hair is pulled up, but the wavy thick bangs keep sweeping over her face, so she’s constantly shoving them out of the way. i remember liking her blazer.
[oh god. if our personal/physical appearance is analogous to the work we produce, this will be me: sometimes put together, but mostly lazy or careless; pedestrian; barely dressed up for special occasions, and even then, grudgingly so; defiant for no reason; a change of clothes 4+ times a day]
–
the panel redeemed the conference, made me want to get my exams and diss behind me and join the big kids. At another extreme, it made me want to abandon 1920s literary concerns and tackle more immediate problems – different, potentially violent value systems; crimes against the unprotected; excessive penality.
just tell me how it ends
these days, a folding into myself, a resetting of fortified walls to surround, secret passwords to enter, enigmatic responses to decode: a series of protective measures.
–
already there’s a tumult around what will likely be a jarring, out-of-body next few months — i leave for a 2.5-month trip to the philippines a couple of days after my oral exams in june. to anticipate your next questions: yes, i’m excited; and nervous, and dreadful, and uncertain.
let’s just skip to the end, can we? straight to the promises of a september after a long, unordinary summer: to catharsis in the form of a long drive down the i-5 and back; to some sort of synthesis of what has transpired and hopes for what will come; to reunions with familiar friends who will register for you how you’ve changed (and to assure you you haven’t changed at all); to naps in my armchair before lush trees on 10th st., sun and breeze reaching into the open window.
i like the way you merge
the lovely people of makipag make me want to write, make me want to write better.
—–
LA by number: 5, 134, 210, 2, 110, 10, 105, 405
—
this will sound regionalist, but i mean it when i say that LA has the most competent drivers.
exhibit #1: the ratio of immaculate (non-dinged) cars to number of scary maneuvers attempted on the road. in other words, during my travels to other big cities like boston, nyc, and chicago, i’ve seen my share of dented and scratched cars. drivers in these cities either don’t care about their cars and/or don’t have enough know-how to drive them. maybe by dint of that socal car obsession, even the oldest cars in LA are cosmetically spotless.
exhibit #2: one of the most frightening aspects of driving is merging into traffic, especially in LA where the average speed on the freeway in the exit lane alone is probably 60 mph, the speed limit on the I-5 through seattle. in seattle, drivers seem to take ‘yield’ to mean ‘enter timidly, at a crawl; stop if you see car approaching; puttputtputt onto freeway when free.’
in los angeles, the freeway is a sight to behold. aside from criss-crossing highways and soaring, stacked interchanges, there’s this: on-ramps that feed into lanes that feed straight into the highway after a few hundred feet, leaving no time for hesitation. the unwritten rule is to floor it when entering the freeway, leaving it to cars already on the freeway to make their choice — floor it with equal vigor to beat you, or do the courteous (ungame?) thing and slow down for merging traffic. i’ve never seen cars in LA do what east coast drivers do, and what i’ve started doing — switch lanes to allow mergers time and space, clearly in fear of collision. call it an initiation to LA driving or a dare to recklessness: LA drivers move as if to say, ‘merge like an angeleno — fast, headlong, at near-risk — or don’t bring yourself on the freeway in the first place.’
when it works, it’s beautiful: cars in the left lane spaced a vehicle’s length apart from each other, matched to their right with a lane of alternately spaced cars. at the opportune moment — in the .25 mile stretch where the on-ramp becomes freeway — the cars in the right find their rhythm, their interval, their spaces, and in a delicate dance they nestle themselves into the nooks that open up just for them at just the right time. no puttering, no hesitation, no awkward pauses.
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by the cut of your jeans
[imagine this was posted in january, because that’s when it was written]
–
because i think one’s consumption habits (of culture, food, everyday necessities) are shaped and solidified in one’s 20s, and because these habits are our social faces, i’m trying to be more attentive to what i and others consume and where it places us. these two acts — what we buy and what we wear/use — are tethered to and are public iterations of our politics, class, geographic locations, and social affiliations. [for the record, i’d say i’m pretty firmly LA suburbanite; someone who wants to be politically left of center, but probably with more centrist tendencies than i think.]
when academics ‘read’ whatever it is they read — literature, history, cultures, the law, policy, music — isn’t this what they’re doing, at least in part? they map out synchronic and diachronic affiliations [’this is ____’s social class, they descend from ___, this is how they lean politically’], asserting their implications, making narratives about them, etc.
—
LA A and i set out late for our thrift store shopping excursion, deciding only an hour or two ahead of time to go ahead with it [a big deal, since she lives an hour away]. we started local, and wended our way west toward LA proper, eventually ending up on melrose.
my inner surly shopper emerged by store #3, the salvation army. unlike the clean, well lit goodwill five minutes from my parents’ house, the SA store crawled with folks (it was 1/2 off day), was not as well organized (goodwill arranges clothes by type, spreads garments by color gradient!), and gave off slight whiffs of urine.
i can’t place the shoppers at SA that evening. there was a couple in their late 30s walking away from the fancy dress section; a woman who seemed to be searching for work clothes; a few old men perusing the bookcases. they could be folks in relative financial straits or cheap browsers like us.
in the narrow clothing racks, we chatted and flipped through hangers, made way for oncoming shoppers with polite smiles. in the middle of our ambling and rambling, i spied a speedy woman, making beehives through the racks even as she flipped through and grabbed clothing. she was very unlike the rest of the shoppers, she being dressed like an olsen twin with a waifish frame — boots, tight jeans maybe, a cowlneck top, sunglasses perched on her head like a headband. she’s one of those women you read about in fashion magazines who put their outfits together on a $15 budget at a place like SA, and you ask how. this is how: with shrewd eyes, quick hands, and a stylish man at her call.
—
while on vacation in sf, i swung by MLA, just because. this is the big nerdfest for literature and language scholars, and also where soon-to-be phds interview for jobs. i was hoping for glimpses of academic superstars, young faculty looking for an audience, and nervous ABDs pre- and post- job interview. i wanted to see my possible fate.
i didn’t see any academic superstars except in print, but i did get a lesson in academic/political affiliation and fashion/aesthetics. at the panel presented by the americanist section the audience was littered with what i imagine was the typical northeast small college english department in the 1950s: men in ill-fitting shirts and sweaters, sensible loafers on their feet. balding. women in sensible pantsuits. at the literature by people of color panel: dramatic coats, pops of color, pencil skirts, high-heeled oxfords.
one lesson: if i’m going to make it in this field, the wardrobe’s going to need an overhaul.
—
i try not to — but do — judge people by the cut of their jeans, the length of their bangs, the distribution of their dollars.
i know enough to understand when aesthetic and consumer acts are choices versus when they’re what you do because of your location. we’re always in the latter, groomed in the path of whoever raised us [my parents: climbing [LA] suburban middle class], always participants whether we choose to or not, always enmeshed in the politics of our class locations and social circles. but at some point [especially, i posit, now in my 20s] we can consciously control affiliations and spending habits.
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studies in devotion, home edition
st. therese is bright: sunlight, when seattle gets it, streams through the windowed wall on the short side of the building, better to reach families at the fountain during baptisms, of which there were three on the day i attended. three times, children were dunked head-first into the holy water fountain, emitting the most horrendous screams that make you wonder at the nature of that holy water.
the baptisms help explain the camaraderie at this church that day. so much hand-shaking, back-slapping, baby head-petting during all parts of the mass. the peace-doling portion lasted five minutes longer than usual, with people traversing across the church to give and receive peace, creating a din i’m unaccustomed to hearing in a catholic church. even without the baptisms, it’s clear that this parish is a social hub. me, i sat between two friends [of each other’s, not of mine], and spent a good part of the mass moving forward and back in my seat to accommodate exchanges of glances and words. it was warm and isolating at the same time.
—
this winter break, i came home to two of three parishes my family frequents.
we returned to st. phillips [cf this other post], not the usual parish but host to some of the most important events for the extended family, this time for my uncle/ninong’s funeral. our 7-family clan occupied less than 1/5 of the church, but it never felt so intimate, even at K’s wedding. i was seemingly exiled to the wing of the church that held the piano so that i could accompany the initially ornery singer for ‘ave maria’ and ‘amazing grace.’ [she let up once she saw me bawling in between songs.] but i knew everyone in the pews, i knew who was missing that morning because of work/distance and what details to remember so i could pass them on [cousin M cried. cousin R’s eulogy was unknowingly witty.], and i caught a reference to my family in the eulogy. afterwards, we hugged, gave peace and condolences, and caravaned in heavy rain to a military cemetery an hour away.
a week later i was up early again for simbang gabi at our usual parish, where my personal catholic milestones were marked. more dolor: the filipino priest gave a shoutout to his mother who had died the week before, embedded in a reminder of how pasko should be celebrated — “we sit together at christmas enjoying those with us, not knowing who may not be with us the next time.” some wet eyes, even if it was too early in the morning for tears. during the last ten minutes of the mass, pops and i rushed to the social hall to set the buffet and to prep the honey baked ham, realizing that it required some warming up before being served. oops. i love lucy-like hijinks ensued. the ham was eviscerated anyway, half-cold, 15 minutes later. folks were hungry.
i hear of simbang gabi’s around LA with dozens-strong choirs, a parole parade, tagalog mass, networked with other parishes. assumption’s stands on its own, and is cobbled together — with great love and as much care as they can give — maybe a month beforehand. the planning committee is populated with retirees, who also comprise the choir, who also cater the social, who also put the program together and photocopy, collate, and staple it the day before. i imagine this mass is anemic compared to the LA cathedral’s. i imagine an army of folks, mostly young people, in charge of the cathedral’s production. there’s charm, though, in the spirit of this simbang gabi put on by my parents and their catholic posse.
—
how i want to remember this winter break:
