Kanlaon

“Oaks”, in Mayor of the Roses: Stories (Miami University Press, 2005)

The truth is, everything she did these days was what her family might call “unbalanced.”

For instance, she’d visited her husband once at his officemate’s apartment. The officemate was named Dan. She had never met him, but she looked up his address from a company roster her husband had left behind. The apartment was in a complex called The Oaks, near the San Jose Airport. There were no trees anywhere; she wondered how the complex had gotten its name. Perhaps there had been, at one time, large trees where the apartments were now. But they’d apparently been cut down, every single one of them. Perhaps they’d even been victims of sudden oak death, which she knew had been a problem mentioned in the newspapers — on the rare occasions when she happened to read them — recently. All she had seen, that one time she visited, were low buildings and rows of small Japanese cars — Honda, Toyota, Nissan — parked in numbered spaces by the building entrances.

She’d never been to this part of San Jose before. In fact, she rarely ventured south, disliking the monotony of the buildings, the featureless streets. This part of the Bay Area felt different, flatter. The buildings were makeshift, thrown together. The freeway was close by and she could hear the roar of traffic.

“Siko”, first published in The Forbidden Stitch (Calyx Books), later included in my first collection Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books, 1991)

The village of Bagong Silang is an untidy assortment of half a dozen palm-thatched houses, about a hundred kilometers north of Manila. It falls under the jurisdiction of the municipality of San Pablo, a town of a few hundred people, a day’s walk away. The people of Bagong Silang have lived for generations along a narrow strip of mud road that borders the rice paddies. They are, as a rule, thrifty and industrious folk. When not toiling in the rice fields, they tend vegetable gardens. They own a few pigs, a few chickens– nothing much else of value.

Aling Saturnina used to live in the last house on the left, the one behind the santol tree. But last year, she and her married daughter were taken to San Pablo in a military jeep, and since then no one has seen or heard from them. The villagers don’t like to talk about the events that led to Aling Saturnina’s disappearance. When asked, they cross themselves and their eyes slide sideways and perhaps one or two will invoke the name of the town’s patron saint, as though the saying of it had the power to protect them from all harm. If the questioner becomes too persistent–as lately some of these newspapermen from San Pablo have been–they escape to the rice fields, and wait there till nightfall before returning to their homes. They are simple folk and don’t bother with things they cannot understand.

“Sutil,” first published in The Threepenny Review, Fall 1995, later included in my 2nd collection, Mayor of the Roses : Stories:

I was last home for my father’s funeral. I say “home” even though I am an American citizen now, sworn in with a twenty-piece Navy band in the grand ballroom of the Marriott Hotel on 4th and Mission in San Francisco. Yet “home” for me was always that other place, that city James Hamilton-Patterson describes as “a parody of the grimmer parts of Milwaukee.”

“Don Alfredo and Jose Rizal“, Story Philippines, vol. 1, and in Sou’wester (with a new translation of El Ultimo Adios by Edwin Lozada), Spring 2007

The man in the black frock coat sits hunched over a wooden table, presses pen to paper. It is quiet in his dank little cell in the bowels of the old fort. I can hear the scratches his pen makes on the coarse paper. The sweat trickles down the back of his neck.

The man’s eyes, like mine, like all of ours, have an Asian cast. But his clothes are European. A tailor in Madrid made his coat, when he was a young student there. That was long long ago– before Bonifacio, before the Cry of Balintawak, before the ripping of the cedulas. And his wife has brought it to him with tears, so that he can face the firing squad with dignity.

“Silence”, Threepenny Review, Issue 72, Winter 1998

Before Tina got married, her mother took her out to lunch with a friend she knew only as Tita Fely. Tita Fely had a loud voice. She had hair cut short like a man’s. She was married to a handsome tennis instructor and had a beautiful house in Monterey and was raising four sons. Tita Fely looked at her and said, “Don’t let your husband push you around. Don’t be too good.”

“Extinction”, ZYZZYVA–
podcast on KQED, Pacific Time, Feb. 23, 2006

The coastlines were bare, and the soil on which the people had built their homes was slowly washing out to sea. Thus there was great fear and trepidation in the coastline villages and the people there generally exhibited the clinical symptoms of depression

I made my home in a valley roughly 8 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide, in the province of S_____. Oval in shape, this valley was surrounded by a low rim of hills with fairly steep escarpments. Interspersed among the ravines grew loose thickets of bamboo. One side of the valley opened out to a narrow beach. In the mornings I walked down to the sand and observed the almost imperceptible movement of the waves.

“Bad Thing”, first published in Into the Fire: Asian American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996

It was October. Dela was driving along when suddenly she felt sick, as though she anticipated hitting a car or a road barrier. She could see the collision in her mind, almost hear the thud of something hitting her bumper.

Her son turned six that year. She realized that, for weeks, she had been expecting something to happen. Driving him to school, a feeling would come over her and she would slow down and look furtively right and left, right and left. When they arrived at the school without mishap, she would be surprised and thankful, though she didn’t know who she should be thankful to, she wasn’t the praying sort. Dela would ease her unsteady legs out of the car, call to her son with some measure of confidence, and push herself through the rest of her day. Like that.