Cornflakes, sugar and teardrops: a crazy teen-aged memory

Last year, I celebrated my first 50^th highschool anniversary with most of my old classmates, a few of my best friends, and some of my school idols. They found me through the Internet, and I joined our class chatroom. I didn’t actually graduate with them, because I dropped out in the middle of our fourth year. But I grew up with those guys. A big number of them later congregated at our old school back home to celebrate. They had an amazing time. Unfortunately, I had to stay back in Vancouver because of a sickness in the family.

I went back to school and finally graduated the year after them. So this year, I celebrated a second 50^th highschool anniversary with a different group of people. This batch added me to our Facebook group.

I was particularly excited because I reconnected with my very best friend from this class, another girl whom I had been looking for in the last 20 years. We were both 15 years old at the time. I’ll call her Dora for the purposes of this story.

Dora was everything I had always wanted to be: she sang, she played the guitar, she drove the family car to school. She was smart, funny, artistic and confident. I, on the other hand, was a feral child with absentee parents, and I lived by my own rules. I boarded with my aunt’s family, but nobody paid any attention to me, unless I was needed to run an errand. I was quiet and obedient. I kept to myself. I read mountains of books and magazines, and skipped school when my pocket money ran out.

In my eyes, Dora represented the height of cool. And she was my best friend. She was the head of our class choir while I ran the theatre group. During that year, we won every school competition in music and drama.

One day, I copied a poem called Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops from a Playboy Magazine that I borrowed from one of my friends’ dad. It was written by Shel Silverstein. I showed it to Dora. The poem went like this:

I’m eating cornflakes with sugar and teardrops

Since the milkman ran away with you

He stole my every dream and forgot to leave the cream

So I’m sitting here wondering what to do…

Dora loved the poem and immediately set it to a blues tune of her own composition. I was very impressed.

Dora and I had our own kind of fun. We were both crazy kids, and our teachers often looked at us and shook their heads. One time we decided to sit away from each other and had a staring contest for about 30 minutes during our English class. The first to blink would lose. I forgot who won, but our English teacher called us after class because she was worried we were fighting. It never crossed our minds that having a staring contest during class hours could be classified as weird. The teacher kept a straight face when we explained what we were doing.

We drew faces on our notebooks and day-dreamed during our mathematics classes, but kept an eye on the math teacher who habitually moved around the room while teaching. I remembered panicking when we lost sight of her, only to discover her standing behind us, about to knock our heads together.

Dora was gay, which didn’t bother me at all. She would often tell me about her secret crush, a pretty girl in our class. I would listen attentively and silently wished her well. I didn’t think our classmates knew she was gay, though, because Dora got a lot of attention from the boys at the time.

Dora and I graduated from highschool and went our separate ways. There were no mobile phones and no Internet at the time. I lost contact with Dora, but I kept the memory of our one-year friendship close to my heart. Later, I searched for Dora for years but failed to find her.

This year, I found Dora. We got reconnected. We had a long conversation and updated each other on the progress of our lives. She had vague memories of our year in highschool, but she did say that she had fun. Although I didn’t remind her of our crazy highschool antics, I found some sort of closure.

I googled the poem Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops and found two musical versions of it on You Tube. I thought Dora’s version still sounded better.

Me And the World Wide Web

Facebook wasn’t around then.

Back in 1989, I had no idea what the Internet was. I was a regular church-goer, along with my buddies who all came to Canada from Singapore to look for a better future. I helped prepare the church newsletter. I wrote about members of the congregation, little personal testimonies that they wanted to share. The man who ran the newsletter was an older white guy who downloaded his material from somewhere --- religious stories and articles he gathered from sources online. Only it wasn’t called ‘downloading’ then. He ‘copied’ them.

What he did seemed strange to me at the time. I got my information from newspapers, books and magazines. I communicated through the phone, the fax machine, or by snail mail. (Snail mail, for the benefit of the millennials, is when you write something by hand, stuff it into an addressed envelope, stick a stamp to it and drop it into a mailbox.) My boss, who worked from home, was very impressed that his foreign nanny owned a fax machine. I heard him telling his friends about my fax machine. Sometimes he even used it.

Back in the Philippines, my family and I talked regularly by long distance phone and less regularly, by snail mail.

At that point, a technological tornado was slowly brewing but nobody among my friends and family members ever noticed, least of all myself. The Internet was about to arrive. According to history, the World Wide Web was launched on the 6^th of August 1991.

The precursor to the internet itself was born in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) connected computer networks between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. Email was invented in 1971, to facilitate an exchange of information among the networks. (I only started using email in 1997.)

Around the same time, projects like the DARPA’s were also being developed in other countries. Geniuses back then created a system that connected even larger networks together for more efficient information exchange and sharing, and thus the Internet came to be. The same protocols they applied then are still being used today. I didn’t think those guys foresaw how their invention would change the world.

The Internet came to us like a bottomless empty vessel. One could pour into it whatever one wanted. See what we got back: To date, the Internet and the social media have made the world smaller; helped carry out regime changes; overturned election expectations; influenced public opinion, killed some traditional businesses and gave birth to new ones; created its own version of established truths; encouraged crimes; solved others, and made friends out of virtual strangers.

The number of internet users in 2018 totalled 4.021 billion, while social media users were pegged at 3.196 billion.

Millions of these users are from the Philippines, plus over 10 million more Filipinos scattered all over the world. It’s amazing to see how interconnected Filipinos are, by phone or social media, how cheaply communication can be achieved nowadays. Second hand phones back home are readily available. Almost everyone else I meet in urban areas has a cell phone. Less so, however, from the rural areas.  Still, one can buy a load of minutes for several pesos and send a text message for one peso. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook and Messenger have since become a favourite social medium for Pinoys, both at home and abroad. It’s free, it’s always available, and totally democratic. My daughters and I talk everyday by Messenger and follow each other’s news feeds, although we don’t subscribe to the practice of posting what we ate, or purchased, nor our duck-faced selfies. We leave all that to others. The only misgiving I have is, it could have been so much easier and cheaper if Facebook were available in the early years of my absence.

For a lot of people in the Philippines, Facebook has become the place from where we reach out to the world, express our dreams and desires, our joys, sorrows, angers and frustrations. It’s also the place from where can show the best version of our ourselves.

But there’s a flipside to something free, available and totally democratic. Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter, have also been used to change the course of events all over the world, to achieve darker purposes. Even the Philippines has not been immune to all this.

Good thing I only read dog and cat stories that have happy endings.

Published at the Mill Woods Mosaic on January 15, 2019.

What is a living will?

What’s a living will? How important is it? Based on my friend Rossana’s recent harrowing personal experience, I’d say very important.

What is a living will? According to the Internet’s legal dictionary, a living will is a written document that allows a patient to give explicit instructions about the medical treatment to be administered when the patient is terminally ill or permanently unconscious; also called an advance directive. It can be revoked by the patient at any time.

Is it legal in Canada? Yes, according to a Supreme Court ruling in a British Columbia case in 1993, where the Court ruled that “there is a right to choose how one’s body will be dealt with, even in the context of beneficial medical treatment, that has long been recognized by the common law. To impose medical treatment on one who refuses constitutes battery, and our common law has recognized the right to demand that medical treatment which would extend life be withheld or withdrawn.”

If you don’t have a living will, for instance, and you get very sick, so sick that your body is still alive and consuming medicine and sustenance through tubes attached to your body, but your brain is no longer working, the doctor’s job is to keep you alive by making sure those tubes stay attached. You may wake up and get better one day, or you may stay asleep like that for years. Or you may die. Nobody knows when. A good doctor will have a better idea, and will let your relatives know about your chances. He will suggest courses of action, and give them the option to decide what to do next.

My friend Rossana had been placed in such an extremely difficult position three weeks ago. Her older cousin who also lives in Vancouver, had a massive stroke and landed in a hospital. She was unable to move, talk, or open her eyes, but is alive. There is a very little brain activity. They had been keeping her on life support since then, hoping that one day she’d wake up and start to get better. After her first stroke, this sick cousin gave Rossana a signed Power of Attorney, giving her authority to take charge of any arrangement necessary in case she passed away. The cousin also told her that if she got really ill, she didn’t want to go to a nursing home. However, said cousin didn’t sign any living will, as Rossana had suggested.

After many days, the doctor took Rossana aside and told her that there wasn’t a very big chance that her cousin would ever recover. Hooked on life support, she could go on like that, unconscious, for a long time. There was no way to tell. The doctor wanted to know whether my friend would allow them to remove life support and let nature take its course. 

"Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen."

Rossana knew she had no right to decide. It wasn’t detailed in the Power of Attorney. She went home and contacted the cousin’s family in the Philippines. They told her No Way. Rossana knew she could overrule the Philippine cousins if she wanted to, instead she asked her cousin’s sister who lives in the US to come down and talk to the doctors. This sister works in the medical field and would understand. They had a meeting with the doctors and made a decision two days later. The sick cousin was taken off life support and was moved to a nursing home where she would receive 24-hour care while they were waiting for her to get better or get worse.

Rossana was now relieved, but emotionally burned out and physically spent. She phoned me to say, “Nobody had to make a decision like that for someone else. I’m thankful I didn’t need to do it. I wouldn’t want my family to go through the same experience that I just did. I’m definitely writing my own living will. As in, right now.”

I see her point. My husband has written his, a long time ago, and I will prepare mine first thing tomorrow morning. You never know.

Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen.

(First published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, on January 15th, 2018)

The bitter aftertaste of colonialism

Two Sundays ago, I came across a personal essay written by a 30-year-old Dominican-American man, published at the New York Times. Christopher Rivas remembers as a child how his father took great care of his appearance, so much so that he spent more time getting ready to go out than his mother or his sisters did.

His father explained, Rivas wrote, “that as a young man in the Dominican Republic, you had to work so hard, perfecting yourself, preparing your mask, so that when a young European or American woman came through, she might choose you, might take you home with her, like that was your only way out.”

It was a belief, Rivas says, perpetrated by the movies and TV, that a black or brown man gets made better by being with a white woman. It was, he adds, a whole system coded within him.

The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain for over three hundred years.

This story strongly reminded me of the Philippines, another country which had been under the Spanish rule for three hundred years. Before the Spaniards came, the nation we now call Philippines was actually a group of 7,100 disparate islands, every island had its own ruler, language, religion and culture. They were fighters too. The first explorer Spain sent to the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed by a ‘Filipino’ warrior as soon as he stepped on the beach.

In response, Spain sent religious missionaries instead. They conquered the people through religion, planted in their hearts the fear of God, and made them feel guilty, unworthy and inferior. Cultures disappeared, religions died, identities got blurred, and languages evolved. Those who resisted were thrown into prison, killed or deported. At some point in those days, they declared those islands one country under Spain and called it Philippines in honour of their king at the time. Afterwards, when the Filipinos decided they preferred freedom, the Americans came to supposedly help deliver us from that nightmare, only to replace Spain’s with their own hidden agenda. This is my simplified version of my country’s history. 

But more than anything else, all colonizers left a toxic cultural spoor that the colonized then absorbed and accepted as their own. In the Philippines, how often has one heard an innocent remark about someone else who could be prettier, if only they had a fairer skin, or a more western nose? Or how proud or how superior someone feels for carrying a colonizer’s genes? As if being brown, short and flat-nosed is being second rate? Or how a lot of people think we can only get our act together when run by another country? Those are conditioned attitude, formed through centuries of colonization.

Dependency, feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and resentment are common by-products of being under another country’s power for decades. Filipinos are not alone. All over the world, I have no doubt that thousands of peoples feel this way. England was in India for two hundred years. In fact, a recent research shows that historically, only 22 countries have never been colonized or attacked by England at some point in the past.

Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was considered one of the largest empires in history. Spain controlled vast overseas territories that included places in the Americas, in Europe, Africa and Asia for over four hundred years.

Not to mention other countries like Portugal, France and the Netherlands, which left their own colonial mark upon countless places in the world.

More recent, however, more palpable and currently, still being felt in real time are the after-effects of colonization on the First Nations peoples of North America. In Canada, before the Europeans came, First Nations communities were self-sufficient, healthy, and confident of their special place in the world. They have their own form of government, languages and cultures. Their only fault was that they were too hospitable.

Colonizers took their lands away, forced them to live in reservations, destroyed their cultures, and sent their children to residential schools, where they were then converted to Christianity, and many of them sexually or physically abused. This is common knowledge. News media has detailed these abuses and the resulting court cases in the recent years.

I’ve been wondering about what benefits, if any, have the colonized gotten out of all these? I don’t know. Let me do some more research and I will get back to you.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, April 15th, 2019 issue)

THE OCEAN BETWEEN US, a film by Crisanta Sampang

Motherhood for Dollars

“They come from alien cultures to fill our culture’s most important job, raising our kids. We’ve decided to let other women take care of our children so that we can give them a better life. It’s an excruciating decision, as the nannies know better than anyone…” Susan Cheever, Global Woman

It’s beginning of September at Vancouver’s Jericho Park. Today, as I sit alone on a knoll absorbing the sunshine, the oaks and the maple trees around me are gently shedding their leaves. To my right lies the duck pond surrounded by weeping willows. To the east, tall evergreens conceal the apartment buildings that line Fourth Avenue. To the north, the undulating peaks of Cypress Mountain guard the beaches of English Bay. Yet I didn’t see the magic nor feel the peace these surroundings offer. Instead I peer beyond the bay towards the Pacific Ocean. As if I could discern across this ocean the two adjacent houses in Antipolo, a town in central Philippines --- where two of my daughters live with their families. This evening, I watch the bay and I think about them. It’s early morning back there. They should be waking up soon.

Jericho Park represents the North American edge of my fractured life, the cliff upon where I could look down at the deep, invisible divide that keeps my dreams forever incomplete. Season after season, this park never fails to remind me where my brain says I should be as opposed to where my heart wants to be, and that getting them in the same place remains to be done.

But I’ll see my girls tonight when I get home. We’ll exchange news, trade stories, laugh together and have a good look at each other, then blow kisses and say, “Bye-bye. Lub you. Mwah-mwah!”  Afterwards I’ll go to bed happy, back to my own life. And they back to theirs. We do this regularly through our web cams. I’ll have to wait for a few more months though, before I can really kiss them and hold them in my arms, and distribute the presents I’ve been hoarding in my Balikbayan Box.  My life revolves around these homecomings.

I’m here and they’re over there because years ago I made a tough choice.  A single parent at the age of 26, I left my three daughters in my mother’s care to look after other women’s children in Singapore, then four years later, in Vancouver, Canada.  In return, my children went to a good school, they had generous allowances, mobile phones, and all the brand-name denim jeans my money could buy. They had everything, except my presence.

I remember the first time I left for Vancouver. My whole family went to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to see me off. We walked together to the departure gates, as far as the security personnel would let us. When it was time to go, I kissed each of my three daughters goodbye, then walked towards the doors. I heard Maricel start to cry. Maricar and Catherine joined in. My heart was pounding. I walked away, faster and faster, without once looking back. Because I knew that if I stopped, if I looked back --- like Orpheus at the gates of Hell --- my dreams would disappear. But I had to leave. My plans for them were only half-achieved.

While working in another country, I think about them every day. I silently tallied in my calendar all the birthdays and hugs and kissies that I missed. I made sure that I talk to my daughters by phone at least once a week, to send their allowances twice a month, and go home to them every year. I reminded them every chance I got that I was here and they were there because I wanted them to have the things I never had as a child. I told them that going away was very hard for me, but sacrifice was required of us to break away from poverty and lack of education, circumstances that most of the people from my farming village in the Philippines will spend the rest of their lives in.

Until today, I never realized I’ve been living my life in smug delusion. Although I had been physically absent from my kids’ daily lives, I’d believed I’ve raised them right, and expressed my motherly love in a variety of personal and material ways. I thought I’ve learned from, and done better than other mothers like myself.

“Not so,” writes Catherine, my youngest, about the past: “When I was a kid, I’d wanted to tell you, ‘I don’t care about the allowances and the toys. I want you to stay home with me and my sisters. You’ve always said you loved us. Do you think I believe you?’ But I never expressed these things because I was afraid that if I did, you would never come back.”

“Not so,” says Maricar, my middle child, of the present: “Me, I would never leave my kids to work in a foreign country. I can’t imagine my child crying alone in the middle of the night because I’m not there. I know what it feels like.”

Because I waited too long, I failed to bring my daughters to Vancouver. Maricar and Catherine both dropped out of college and got married in their teenage years. Only Maricel, my first-born, has a university degree. All three of them have their own families now and are living away from me. Catherine lives in Washington, USA, with her American husband. Yet, despite these kids having grown up and chosen their own paths, they remain little children in my mind. I stay trapped in a time warp, doomed to be fighting my guilt and trying to make up for the years I’ve lost: visiting yearly, bringing them chocolates, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and umbrellas; treating them to mall shopping trips… cooking with them, snuggling with them and telling them stories; treating them like little kids. And whenever I leave to pursue my own life once again, we’re back to replaying the same old good-bye drama at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, only this time my daughters are accompanied by their own children and husbands.

Until perhaps, I promised myself, I’ve managed to bring all of them to Vancouver. Next time I leave them at the airport gates, I will look back and wave, because my dream has changed.

 

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch