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| WILFREDO O. PASCUAL JR. |
| Lost in Childrensville |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
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| THIS ESSAY IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |
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How do you rear a child and let go?
From far away, a Filipino navigates the seascape of memory to make sense of our most delicate and enduring bonds in this personal essay on childhood, being childless and abandoned children. . The answers do not come easy. 1. Sometimes I imagine myself as a seafarer at night; and that beacon from an old-world lighthouse, I see that as childhood, beaming across the deadly crashing of waves. Other times I only see the frantic blinking of a red light. Childhood, for me, is a guide, a warning, a memorial, and ultimately, a destination. I imagine children the way ancient lighthouses are built on bedrock. I imagine their stories surviving the battering forces of time, the impact of blunt tools, the constant pounding of mighty waters. Many years after my father died, I returned to the Philippines of my childhood and met one of my father’s closest friends who told me a secret. “Your father,” he said, “was hard on you when you were growing up, and that was him, hard as stone. I never saw him cry. Only once. He came to me one night with a crumpled piece of note. It was something you had written. You ran away from home remember? He could not comprehend how you could have written something so wounding. He was visibly hurt, in tears. But I also remember how easily he shifted from that hurt, how his face suddenly lit up and he exclaimed, “But damn, what my son wrote was brilliant!” He was hurt but he was proud of you.” My father, who took up Botany and Animal Husbandry in college, just couldn’t take it. He was in his mid-thirties and I was sixteen, smacking the words of Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-American poet, straight to my father’s face: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” I do not have a child of my own but I think I might have, on several occasions, experienced how my father had felt. And perhaps this has happened because I have wandered away far enough. Or maybe even too far. 2. In my mid-twenties, I moved to Thailand where, on weekends, I did volunteer work at Ban Tarn Nam Jai, a charitable home in Bangkok for babies and children who were either HIV positive or were born to HIV positive mothers. Every year, 24,000 of them are born in Thailand. While only a third of the babies will contract the disease, all will eventually be orphaned as their parents succumb to AIDS-related symptoms. Some parents, fearing they cannot provide the financial, emotional or physical support, abandon their children at hospitals shortly after birth. I was afraid, unsure of my place there. I could have been in a typical nursery or childcare center and still it would be the same. It was a daunting experience. What did I know about childcare? Their fragility mortified me. Yet I had dared myself to be there, to get wounded as if I had expected to cradle in my arms a heap of broken glass instead (although most of them appeared to be healthy). I did what was expected of me in the playroom: stacked towers of toy blocks, waved dolls and stuffed-toys to their faces while making idiotic sounds, anything to get their attention. At the end of the day, my lullabies only unmasked my pathetic attempts to claim my baby commercial moment. I could not feel any connection. I had wondered what was wrong, where the disconnect was coming from. The only time I felt even mildly appreciated was when they got tired or hungry, and they would curl in my lap, as if that was all that was expected of me - my body as a warm ergonomic prop. I dwelled on these moments. When the dripping milk or saliva trickled down on my skin, I did not move. It left me breathless until it was time to leave and I would walk out lightheaded, whiffing the pungent smell of urine and shit, making me feel strangely organic, like I had been fertilized and my pores were just about ready to sprout buds. My volunteer work at Ban Tarn Nam Jai ended after I invited a co-worker to visit the babies’ home. Lynda was our Thai receptionist in a small company that offered joint venture meetings between Thai and US environmental firms. She had long, straight hair, thick brows, and thin lips. We were the same age and like me, she also lived alone. She thought my spoken Thai was hilarious. To be fair, I taught her a little Tagalog, which she heartily mangled. Pretty soon, we were speaking in a peculiar hybrid of Thai and Tagalog, a third language with strange pronunciations and very, very odd syntax. One day, over lunch in the office pantry, I asked Lynda what she wished for on her coming birthday. Lynda became pensive and said, “Mahilap.” (Hald.) “Mahirap tammai?” (Hard why?) “Pohm gusto dekdek teh wah maidai.” (I want children but not can.) She forced a smile and explained that she could no longer get pregnant because of the constant beatings and miscarriages she had suffered from an abusive relationship in the past. It baffled me: the physical abuse it took to permanently impair a womb. She tried to describe it in Thai but my understanding of the language was limited. Even our hybrid “Thaigalog” did not help. Frustrated, she stood up and tried to act out what she went through. She struggled for words, even sounds, which I gathered involved a lot of kicking, pushing and punching. She recalled this incredible assault and batter like an action movie, a cartoon. “Boom!” “Whack!” “Pow!” This actually made it easier for us since she found her performance comical, as if she had somehow mustered the ability to make a parody out of her own tragedy. And I laughed too. I have never laughed so hard, and at the same time, felt that something inside me was being shredded to pieces. Eventually the laughter died down and in the awkward silence that followed, I told Lynda about my volunteer work at Ban Tarn Nam Jai, haltingly followed by my invitation. Did she. To celebrate her birthday. Want. At the babies’ home? We looked at each other. The moment turned moist. My invitation stirred unspoken yearnings. It scared us. We ran out of words. Lynda and I spent her twenty-eighth birthday day together; surrounded by small arms raised, tiny hands grabbing the balloons we had bought. Lynda gleefully handed out chocolates, candies and toys to the children, their faces streaked with icing from her birthday cake. For the first time, I found myself completely relaxed, even enjoying the company of children as they took turns, all wanting to be carried in my arms. Lynda, on the other hand, seemed more cautious. She busied herself handing out goodies, perhaps an excuse not to hold the babies. And I understood that trepidation, that petrifying fear of fragile bonds. Much later, while we helped prepare the sleeping area and the staff bathed the little ones, Lynda thanked me. She said that it was the happiest birthday she had ever had and that definitely she would like to come back the following weekend. I immediately sensed danger. She wanted more of them to fill her barrenness. I wondered whether she was aware of life’s traffic in Ban Tarn Nam Jai, how fast children came and went. “Pohm gusto dekdek teh wah mai dai.” Fine, I told her. Just don’t expect the same children to be around when you come back. She said she understood. And then she said it again, “Chan mee look mai dai”, she could no longer have children, as if she had to remind herself over and over. Always be mindful of the present, I advised her, a Catholic strangely sounding more like a Buddhist than her (or maybe I was trying to reach out to the Buddhist in her). Yes, this IS my happiest birthday, she said again, relishing the thought. She wasn’t listening. Yes, it could have been her happiest birthday, but for some of the babies, it would be the only birthday party, perhaps even the last, they would ever have. I castigated myself, how this was so typical of me, to employ my ruinous talents in finding the dismal and the bleak from the most joyful moments, a depressing habit that stemmed from my own childhood. Actually, I had a happy childhood. What I wished I didn’t have to go through was an unhappy maturity. Nowadays, I tend to ground almost everything in paradox. I thrive on the miserable with the mirthful. It’s hard for me to be completely happy. Very rarely do I completely let go. It’s not so much of seeing the glass either half-empty or half-full. I see the glass. I see the transparent glass. I see water and I see space, imagine air, the way you would always see shadow when you see light. “Life as paradox,” Salman Rushdie wrote, “each statement contradicted by the next, life as contradiction, life canceling itself out.” Always be on guard, was my father’s advice when I was thirteen, and then he disappeared. It was getting dark. Lynda had gone ahead and I was left standing outside the babies’ home. As I walked out towards the gate, I turned and looked back and saw a little girl peering behind the half-open door. I thought we had tucked them all in. I walked back towards this child, three or four years old, my heart sinking. I wanted us to hold each other, to commune in our emotional hunger. But as I approached, I noticed that she wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking at the gate, the iron bars where she had seen enough volunteers, where different faces had come and gone. She didn’t stand there for one last plea or to say goodbye. She was looking at the gate. She looked pass through me. I shattered. I was air. I stood there, and yet for this child, I had already gone and left. It was the last time I saw the babies of Ban Tarn Nam Jai. Shortly after, I quit our company and got a new job in an intergovernmental organization. I kept in touch with Lynda and then it was just a matter of time before we just sort of drifted apart. I’m not sure if she ever did return to the babies’ home but a year or so later, I did. I came with two Canadian interns in the office who wanted to do volunteer work. When we arrived at the babies’ home with toys, clothes and chocolates, we were dismayed to learn that due to shortage of funds, Ban Tarn Nam Jai was forced to close its doors. The year before, Thailand’s stock exchange lost 60 percent of its total value and as a result of floating, the Thai currency had fallen in less than three months. It was the year after the economic crash of 1997 and nobody could tell us what had happened to the babies of Ban Tarn Nam Jai. 3. When I was growing up in Nueva Ecija, Philippines, I would often go to my grandfather’s study room and stand on a couch to reach and pull the sliding glass of a three-level hanging shelf. Inside, my grandfather kept his treasured books, which included 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and 52 volumes of the Great Books of the Western World. Up until the age of twelve, I turned to the Encyclopedia Britannica merely for reference. But I knew they were special. They were unlike the illustrated books I read at school or those that my father bought for me. I suspected that the dark leather-bound covers compiled secrets of vital importance. On its pages, I tracked down alphabetized and indexed information, the uninitiated mind perpetually on the verge of new discoveries. Each time I reached out to pull a volume, I grew taller. I carried its immense weight with a mixed sense of pride and a vague melancholic feeling that I would no longer be the same when I put them back on the shelf. I will be transformed. I will no longer be ordinary. I will carry secrets inside me. I will have powers no one will know about. Knowledge will be my refuge, my armor and my weapon when the world turns itself against me. Meanwhile, the other set, the Great Books, mysteriously beckoned. It was as handy as the books I read in school but when I opened them and turned the pages, I was stumped by the small fonts, the narrow leading and the rigid two-column layout. I tried to read them but entire pages were reduced to dreary columns and blurry lines. There is no catalyst more powerful in liberating the mind than an early tragedy, the ones that put a clean end to childhood. I was thirteen in 1980, growing up in the central agricultural plains of Luzon, in a provincial region also known as a hotbed of political clan wars in the country. That year, my family was defeated in the elections and lost the power we held over own town for more than half a century. My father killed a man and disappeared. My uncle was assassinated in front of his children. My heroes fell and these tragic events turned us into a family on the run. I could not even articulate the questions that hounded me. I just wanted everything back as they were, which was impossible, of course. Instinct dictated instead that I increase my capacity to understand and accept all the events that had taken place. Like a bird teetering on the edge of a nest for its first flight, my mind had to trust the invisible wind. I returned to the Great Books. 4. The evening bell rang, disrupting the tranquility of a Thai village in a forest close to the River Kwei. The gathering that responded to the call was characterized by the rushed shuffling of small feet, wearing rubber flip-flops. Inside the village hall, a pandemonium of over a hundred children, coming from poor, orphaned and abusive backgrounds poured through the door. Some of them climbed and entered through the windows. It was Friday evening in Moo Baan Daek or Childrensville in Thai. Once a week, their voices are heard. The outnumbered adults were there to supervise -- mostly, to just listen. In these meetings, the children preside. An adult volunteer from abroad noted the proceedings. Rules were reviewed in children’s court. Slingshots were permitted provided they were not shot at people. If a child was within his or her first three months of living in the village, then he or she was not subject to be punished for breaking the rules, except for rules that apply to physical violence. A plaintiff was called. One small girl stood up and accused some kids of throwing “twenty pieces of trash”. However, it was found out that the girl herself was guilty of this offense. The council, by popular vote, decided that this thrash-throwing group would be punished. They would have to go on for a number of days without snacks. The girl would only receive half of that sentence because she had told on herself. Later, another young boy accused a kindergartener of throwing away a shirt. Unfortunately, his witness had curled up in his seat and had fallen asleep. The case was thrown out. Although it may appear to be, Moo Ban Daek is not a detention center for delinquent juveniles or children. The weekly council meeting is one of the methods employed by Moo Baan Daek in promoting alternative education. Ellen Cowhey, a World Religion teacher from New York, had invited me to visit the village where she used to work as a Maryknoll volunteer. I met Ellen in a Buddhist retreat in Southern Thailand in the summer of 2005, almost ten years after my volunteer work at the babies’ home. In Childrensville, we stayed in the staff house and slept on straw mats under mosquito nets while translucent lizards feasted on white moths in the ceiling. By daybreak, I was already exploring the village. Nestled in leafy surroundings, I followed a dirt path that wound around a pond, the playground, a basketball court and a soccer field. Bamboo groves shaded the library. The workshop area, the central kitchen and the main office peered behind spreads of woodlots. Learning here is not confined to the tree-lined classroom buildings. It took place at any corner of this natural school, seventy percent of which was covered with forest and cultivable land where the children grew their own organic produce. I followed the path that led to the herb and vegetable garden where I found the children weeding and watering their eggplant, stringbeans and tomato plots while a staff checked their attendance. Small hands gripped garden tools and water cans with ease. It was impossible to resist the little fingers that dug and loosened the parched soil of what I had denied myself, the fecund life of being in the company of children. There was nothing left to do but surrender to their pull. I followed them to the open-air theater for their early morning meditation. While watching the children sitting on a lotus position on the floor, completely still with their eyes closed, I saw them again as an old-world lighthouse at night, besieged but firmly rooted amidst the deadly crashing of waves. I wondered how impervious they truly were against the combined onslaught of poverty, abuse, neglect and every imaginable evil. But something intriguing was taking place in Childrensville. You rarely see them like this, a hundred little Buddhas meditating in the forest. Pondering a child’s final refuge, I asked myself, where is it and what is it made of, this secret sanctuary within a child, this flame that is continually threatened by the rest of the world and the passing of time? And here, finally, was the source of my own collapse: the knowledge that I once had it too and had no need to understand what it was. The children of Moo Ban Daek are never forced to attend school. Interestingly enough, I learned from Ellen that nearly every child went to school every day. Just because they wanted to. After breakfast, I met a six-year old boy on his way to class, meandering along the dirt path. He bided his time under the dappled light, curiously picking up objects along the way. He found a pingpong ball pierced with a ballpen. That cracked him up. I remembered how at that age my younger sister and I made each other laugh by cupping one of our eyes with our palm. Why was that hilarious? The boy dug into the pocket of his khaki shorts and showed me his collection of flat white pebbles and chips of colored glass. He held a chip of orange glass under the sun and laughed. What did he see? I tried to do the same but the glare hurt my eye. The boy took my hand and led me to a bungalow that housed one of the classrooms. Inside, a young Thai teacher played a DVD of Lilo and Stitch, dubbed in Thai, on a 21-inch old TV. No one sat on the chairs. The children preferred to watch the movie lying on the floor. The boy motioned for me to sit on the floor so he could rest his head comfortably on my lap. I leaned back and supported myself with my arms straightened behind me. The boy reached for my hand and turned his attention to the movie. A tender image buoyed the moment. I imagined myself holding the small hand of another child -- my own or maybe my father’s at the age of six. The children of Moo Ban Daek confidently leveled with me, the equal footing built on a foundation of choices made available to them. After lunch, the children chose between a number of workshops: carpentry, making tie-dyed cloths, weaving, molding ceramic, or computer programs. Weekends at Childrensville were spent cleaning the school surroundings, planting trees and making compost. In the afternoon, they rehearse plays to be performed in the evening. The democratic school's underlying philosophy is very close to that of A.S. Neill's Summerhill School in England, with Buddhist elements incorporated. Teachers in Moo Ban Daek are not so much regarded as authority but more as "kalayanamit", a spiritual friend. Wrongdoings are brought up in the council and the conviction and punishment is decided by popular vote. Each person, whether he or she is a teacher, student, or staff, is allowed one vote. Every year, individuals, organizations and hundreds of foreigners visit the village. Supported by foundations and a coalition of homeschoolers, Moo Baan Daek has campaigned for the inclusion of the alternative education it offers in the National Education Bill. Later that evening, a young girl came up to me and spoke in Thai. I politely asked her to speak slowly so I could understand her. I’m a foreigner, I explained, a Filipino. She studied me for a moment and then with a straight face said, “Goh hok.” I was stunned. She just called me a liar. My close ties to her race may have led to the confusion, although I suspected that it was more likely my language that led to her accusation. I have been saying it for the past ten years in Thailand - I’m sorry, I’m not Thai, I’m a Filipino – too many times perhaps, that somehow I had lost the accent in saying it. A liar! It floored me, how in a way, it was true. She saw through me in the most unnerving way children always do. I did not visit Moo Ban Daek to learn about the school. I came because of Ellen. I was leaving Thailand and was feeling lonely. Ellen and I were both in our late thirties, single and childless. There were a number of things about Ellen that I admired. Envied. She spoke Thai quite fluently and even translated a book on Moo Ban Daek. She had spent years, a significant amount of time of her stay in Thailand, with disadvantaged children. Like me, she had also done volunteer work at Ban Tarn Nam Jai (we were actually at the babies’ home at the same time but missed each other because she worked weekdays and I on weekends). After she left Thailand, she managed to raise funds abroad through her parish in Brooklyn to help a family of Burmese refugees from Moo Ban Daek migrate to the United States. She shares her big-hearted stories completely consumed by its memory, that sometimes I’m afraid she would just vanish right before my eyes. When she listens to my wounded thoughts, her eyes would glisten in surrender, as if, she had, at that moment, focused her sight on a bow and arrow aimed at her. She laughs a lot and cries easily. She is intense and yet at the same time, she can locate her center when needed. She is devoted to life, a very dangerous person to those who want our world to remain unchanged. Along with other foreigners, our paths crossed in a forest monastery where there were also a few like her returning to Thailand for a visit and others like me, about to leave. This was the reason why I gravitated towards her. I wanted one last chance to experience what I had imagined home to be for the past ten years, not as a place and a people about to recede in memory, but something more organic, a consciousness, a seed I could nurture. In the end, I got more than I wished for. Ellen also allowed me to reexamine what I had missed in my passing and why I had missed it. That afternoon, a fair-skinned young boy in red shorts came up to me and asked if what he had heard was true, that I am a foreigner. He said the other kids had largely ignored me because I did not talk to them much. They had all assumed that I was a local visitor. I told him that I am a Filipino and added that I knew some Thai words and could even sing in Thai. The boy said he would like to hear me sing. But not in Thai, not in Filipino -- he wanted to hear an English song. Good, I thought, a second language for both of us; we’d be on equal footing. I was thinking of which song to sing when the boy called out to his friends. “Hey guys,” he yelled. “The foreigner is going to sing!” I panicked. Dozens of boys and girls ran and gathered around me. I stood in front of my audience, petrified, surrounded by kids used to handing out verdict in children’s court. Great, I thought, my singing is on trial. I wanted the ground to crack open and swallow me. The boy, the instigator, noticed that I was nervous. He sighed impatiently, rolled his eyes and asked me to “just sing!” In my mind it’s 1978 and I see a trembling, teary-eyed African-American spinster from Harlem. She’s about to sing a story that hits close to home, hers and mine. It is, in fact, a retelling, of a lost white girl’s story from Kansas in 1939. Half a century later, believe it or not, the tornado-blown tale reached Asia and the singer, doing the imitation of Diana Ross imitating Judy Garland, both divas bidding farewell to transience, is me, a brown Filipino in the Kingdom of Siam. It’s my ode to memory and displacement, this crack I had fallen into, my necessary position. I took a deep breath and began to sing the Oscar-nominated song from Sidney Lumet’s enormous flop. “When I think of home…” 5. The Great Books were color-coded: blue for history, politics, economics and ethics; red for philosophy and religion; gray for mathematics and natural sciences; and green for novels, short stories, plays and poetry. At thirteen, I turned the pages of the green-coded books with the reverence of an acolyte entering the sacred temple of literature. Even when the passages reached incredible levels of indecipherability, I labored patiently to find the meaning of each obscure word. The great minds claimed me as if I almost sensed salvation in the imagined story. While my high school classmates grappled with Algebra and Trigonometry, I wrestled with the archaic language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I underlined passages. I wrote marginal notes. In the end, I was rewarded. I stood at the edge of a dark forest in the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy and I knew there was no turning back from Inferno to Paradise. I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and was converted by his stubborn faith on man’s humanity. I soared with Shakespeare and in no time, with my mind and heart open like the vast landscape of an unmapped country, I was ready to venture to the blue books, my faculties broadened by minds that I trusted and never betrayed me. I read Sir Francis Bacon’s essays on Truth and Death, on Parents and Children (“The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other”), on Youth and Age (“A man that is young in years, may be old in hours, if he have lost no time”). One summer, my grandmother told me the story of one of my grandfather’s youngest brother, the other writer in the family who locked himself in his room and read a lot. He lost his mind and was often heard rambling discourses with himself. He died at the age of sixteen, his legs mysteriously covered with sores, as if he had just completed a terrible journey on foot. After his death, his father burned all his books and cautioned his other children to be guarded on their reading habits. The story depressed me but with no friends to turn to, I ended up seeking solace once more from the books. I pulled an Encyclopedia Britannica volume and read the biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious boy-poet of French symbolism who died at the age of nineteen after his legs were amputated. After reading Rimbaud's biography, I returned the book to the shelf and walked to my grandfather’s bedroom to rest. Everyone was asleep. To reach my grandfather’s bedroom, one had to pass through a tiny bedroom where in the old days, armed men kept guard. Right beside the door that led to my grandfather’s bedroom was a tall mirror. I slowly walked towards it. I saw myself and realized that I had not taken a shower for days. I still wore the same clothes: my grandfather’s knitted maroon sweater and my father’s green and white striped pajamas. Why was I wearing them? I moved closer to scrutinize this stranger. Slowly I raised my hand to my face, my fingers tracing furrows and creases on my forehead, down to the melancholic mouth lines that marked a child’s solitary passage. The books have carved a canyon, a deep gorge inside my heart. I would like to see these titles again, the same volumes that kept me company when I cocooned myself. I want to reread my notes, the passages I have underlined years ago. But I’m not sure. I know that the books are no longer complete. Volumes are missing. I know this because I took them with me whenever I ran away from home and lost them. I also remember passing on a volume with Dostoevsky’s White Nights in it to a cousin who passed it on to another relative. One day my father called me to the office. He was with an uncle and an aunt who came to borrow books from my grandfather’s library. My father, upon checking, had found out about the missing volumes. It enraged him. He humiliated me in front of my relatives. I can’t recall the actual words that he hurled at me, but I remember not dodging, how quietly I received each spiteful word and allowed it to lodge inside my chest, like dark stones. I remember standing in front of them, crushed, staring at the shiny green floor, which at that moment, I prayed for God to turn into quicksand. I told my father that I wasn’t sure where I had lost the missing volumes. I stuttered. When I looked up, I couldn’t even look at him. I looked at my uncle and my aunt, but they both looked away. 6. “So what did the children think of your song?” Ellen asked while we ate fresh mangosteens in the pantry. “I’m not sure,” I said, brushing away a black ant that had crawled from the fruit to my upper lip. “They were quiet the whole time. I sang the entire song. It was long. And they stayed till the end. Then they just quietly walked away. It was unnerving.” “They didn’t say anything?” “The boy said thank you in English. That was pretty much all he had to say. He smiled benignly.” Later that afternoon, those who were assigned to cook stayed behind while Ellen and I followed the rest of the children to the river for their afternoon swim. I took pictures of children picking up clams in the riverbank while Ellen watched all of us from the dock. A scrawny boy wearing an oversized jacket stood right next to her. I noticed that the boy, eight, maybe nine years old, had been quietly escorting Ellen since we arrived. On our way back to the staff house, the boy asked Ellen if she remembered him and this one night, shortly before she left Thailand and returned to the United States. He said he had a high fever then. Ellen said that this was a long time ago; the boy must have been very young. But “I remember you,” the boy told her. “You stayed with me the whole night.” I remembered my last day in Ban Tarn Nam Jai, before Thailand’s economic downturn in the late nineties shut down the babies’ home. I remembered the little girl who looked pass through me, as I was about to leave. It's true. We're more likely to remember the ones who stayed when life loosens its grip on us amidst the uncertainty of night. It humbled me that I will not be remembered. I was, after all, just passing through. But given the chance, could I actually survive the shattering contact at Ban Tarn Nam Jai, holding tiny hands as they slip to the other side? What were their last thoughts? And whose faces lingered, if there were faces at all? For wasn’t this how childhood for most of us ended, the sledgehammer that breaks the stone? Alone with our imagination. Who really knows what goes on inside a child when he disappears behind the schoolroom door? I know it did not protect my father from hurt. He had crumpled my note, the words of the prophet I had quoted at sixteen when I ran away from home. “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” It broke him. I suppose a father cannot shield himself from hurt and turn to his child and say, you bastard, you cannot hurt me with a poem - I taught you how to read poems! He cannot and he wouldn’t, even if he could. In his poem, “September, the First Day of School”, poet Howard Nemerov understood this well when he wrote, “The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down/ Before the dreaming of a little boy…My child has disappeared/ Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live/ To see his coming forth, a life away,/ I know my hope, but do not know its form... I do not know, I do not need to know./ Even our tears belong to ritual./ But may great kindness come of it in the end." Finally, it did come. The kindness reached me across time and across seas, six months after I had left Thailand and moved on to other worlds. On Memorial Day weekend of 2006, I found myself on a road trip along Route One in Northern California, the thin highway clinging along the wild western coast of America, outlined by rugged cliffs that plunge to crashing waves hundreds of feet below. I climbed to the top of the 115 ft. Point Arena tower, one of the tallest Pacific Coast Lighthouses, as keepers have done for more than one hundred years. From there I marveled at the sublime vastness of the Pacific Ocean that spread and extended far and wide, up to the faint line that divided my current point in time and place and my point of origin on the other side. In 2005, before I left Asia for good, I made one last trip to my birthplace in the Philippines. I backpacked for two months all over Luzon, all the way to where one road ended in the Pacific. Deep in the mangrove forest of Palanan, Isabela, I spent a night with a fisherman who told me how he once survived the deadliest typhoon at sea. “Imagine this is my small boat,” he said, holding a matchbox close to a burning wicker lamp, his ancient fingers emerging from the shadows. He rocked the matchbox, describing how monstrous waves tossed his small fishing boat in the dark. He was close to the shore but he could not see anything. He could only feel the horrifying force that lifted his boat on its side until he found himself clinging to the boat on a vertical position, his fate held by a raging wall of dark water that refused to stop rising. The fisherman put the matchbox on the table and left it standing on its side. “I turned to the shore where I could barely see the dim lights of lanterns in my village. There was nothing I could do but pray. My oars were gone. The motor was useless. My life depended on tiny openings between ridges of jagged rock and coral that lined the coast.” On a starless night, he explained, a fisherman depended on memory to locate those tiny openings. His life at sea was spent marking their whereabouts by heart, situating them with his knowledge of the undulating silhouettes, the distinctive outlines of mountains, rocks, tree lines and cliffs. You have to remember. The memory of landscape is your salvation. “Now imagine this as the long line of ridges,” he said, laying down a straight line of two twigs with an opening between them just big enough for the matchbox to pass through. “If you miss the gap, a wave as big as a house, heavy as a truck, will slam and crush your boat, your body against those deadly rocks and corals.” During those last moments before the wave came crashing down towards the ridge, he called out his children’s names and screamed for God’s mercy to save him, his final bargain banking on filial dues. “My children! My children!” he screamed as the wave peaked and fell him straight, by God’s grace like an arrow, to that narrow passage of deliverance. 7. I have this early memory of my father sitting right next to me on the red and black abaca carpet of our living room. In front of us were huge white carton boxes. He opened them and took out a complete set of Walt Disney’s twenty-volume, 1971 first edition of the Wonderful World of Knowledge and the complete collection of Dr Seuss’ books. When I tell people that my mother used to be a teacher, they easily assume that it was she who influenced my reading habits. The truth is, it was my father. I remember my father and I reading together Dr. Seuss’ Mister Brown Can Moo, Can You? and I would give anything to hear my father moo again. My favorite was And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street about a boy on his way home from school imagining fantastic stories he would tell his father. I read all the books over and over until the bindings loosened and pages fell off. I reread them when I grew older because of the memory it brought back and what it stood for. Years later, my father thinking that we have outgrown the books, passed them on to my cousins. Even books, I learned, a child must part with. And yet I knew of the more important things that my father has given me, those that cannot be taken away. Once I went to a Bangkok book fair looking for used titles. In one of the stalls, on top of a shelf, was a set of familiar volumes that made my heart jump: the complete set of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Knowledge. When I pulled out a volume and saw the cover illustrations, I realized that it was a much later edition. Still, just by looking at the numbers, I knew its contents by heart. Volume 14 was a collection of fairy tales told by Dopey, Volume 4 was on Transportation by Peg Leg Pete, Volume 2 was by Daisy Duck on Nature and so on. I opened the book and just by looking at the pictures I recognized them without reading their descriptions. I recognized the photo of Trafalgar Square in London, the yellow lichens, the esophagus. I bought the second-hand set knowing that at one time they had captured a child’s imagination and had made him less lonely. I stacked the books right next to my bed, in memory of my father and the nights he read to me and left me sleeping with the most wonderful dreams. 8. I was in my Bangkok apartment in early 1997, just about ready to leave for the airport when the phone rang and I heard a familiar, panic-stricken voice on the other line. “Help me.” It was Lynda; nine months after we celebrated her birthday at the babies’ home. She was calling from a phone booth on the beach side of Pattaya, an hour’s drive away. She was disoriented, couldn’t remember how she ended up there; couldn’t remember anything that had happened the night before. My first thought was that somebody had drugged her. I asked her if she was okay. She said she wasn’t sure. I told her that we should call the police and that she should go straight to the hospital. She said she didn’t want to do that. She was very scared. I asked if she had money. She said yes, just enough to return to Bangkok. She was desperate and I was getting frantic. I had a plane to catch and my driver had already paged me twice from the lobby. Lynda lived alone so I offered my apartment just in case she needed to stay out of trouble. I told her I’m leaving her cash till I get back in three days; gave her numbers she could call; left my Manila Hotel number and made her promise to call me collect. I told her everything would be okay. “I’m wearing only one shoe,” she broke down as if she had just noticed it. “I don’t know what happened to the other shoe.” Later that evening in Manila, I called my Bangkok apartment and she answered the phone. We didn’t talk long. She sounded like she badly needed rest. I never called her again and she never called back. When I returned to Bangkok three days later, she had already left. I found my apartment clean and tidy as I’d left it. She did not take the money I’d left her. The only sign that somebody had stayed in my apartment were two empty bottles, whiskey and soda, right next to my bed. I never really did find out how long she had stayed. I called her office and learned that she had gone AWOL. Apparently it wasn’t the first time. There had been occasions too when she had gone to work drunk and had passed out on the reception desk. I never saw her again. I’ve had this happen to me countless times. Something inside me clenches like a fist every time I would get a pat on my shoulder and I would be told that I had done my best, that it’s best to just let go. As if I had consciously sought to save the world and failed. Wrong. The motivations were, if anything, selfish. I had done the things I did to save myself, to let myself live. We live with this iciness inside us and sometimes it takes love’s failure to encompass the unlovable, for that deep frost to split us open. And it's possible, when it seemed easier to look away, to brick up our hearts and just be mindful of life’s little favors, that we often miss this: the grace bestowed by the heart's fiercest battles. Lynda could never have children as a result of domestic abuse she had survived in the past. It took grit for her to accept my invitation – that day ten years ago when I had asked her to spend her birthday at the babies’ home. We had cradled a heap of broken glass in our arms. And who knows how many of those children died. But we lived. And I have wondered since if Lynda ever thought of them the way I did, wondered who had stayed with them on their last night. A strange thing happened the night I called Lynda from my hotel room in Manila. She woke up in my Bangkok apartment and picked up the phone from the bedside table. She didn’t say a word. "It's okay, Lynda," I assured her. "It's me." And then I heard her horrified scream. I almost dropped the phone. As it turned out, she had woken up in the dark, disoriented, and was startled by something floating above her, glowing luminously. And then she started laughing. I thought she'd gone crazy. She couldn’t stop laughing and the only word I could make out were “stars..." “The stars,” she kept saying “the stars…” It dawned on me that she had never seen them before. I was a member of the Thai Astronomical Society and I had glued glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling to memorize the constellations like seafarers did in ancient times. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “The stars… They’re really beautiful.” I told her that I still have many stars left in a box in my bedside drawer and that she could take them if she wanted to. And she did. Took the light years away. I checked and the box of stars was gone. I imagine Lynda now, along with Ellen, my father, the children of Ban Tarn Nam Jai and Moo Ban Daek, all of us floating, buoyed by the ripples of my cramped, frightened heart, claimed by the sea and the night, until we all became each other’s absolution, each other's children - even as we had to let go, so kindly, of each other’s hands. This won First Prize for the Essay in the 2007 Don Carlos Palanca Awards |