"...manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. the mecca, the cathedral, the bordello. the shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. i'm hardly speaking in metaphor. it's the most impermeable of cities. how does one convey all that? if one writes about its tropical logic, its familial loyalties, its bitter aftertaste of spanish colonialism, readers wonder: is this a magical realist?...how do we fly from someone else's pigeonhole? we haven't. we must. and to that, we have to figure out how to properly translate ourselves..."
- excerpt from ilustrado, by miguel syjuco
the except rightfully refers to manila, but reading it somehow reminded me of how difficult it is to describe my country to foreigners.
a few years ago, i had the opportunity to study in france, and i inadvertently found myself participating in a series of activities that involved me spending time with "foster" families along with other foreign students. a family would "adopt" a foreign student, and both student and family would be obliged to spend time together at least once a week. these weekly immersions aimed to improve the foreign language skills of the students, and in my opinion, it also gave the families (which are actually parents) something to while away their time with, as a lot of them were already experiencing the empty nest syndrome. despite not having signed up for this activity, i eventually got dragged into several family gatherings, because a lot of my friends became part of this, to the point that even the families themselves thought i was already one of their "adopted."
one topic that always popped up was to tell them something about my country and my culture. easier thought than done. for one thing, the families couldn't quite reconcile how someone who looked like me (fair-skinned with almond eyes) could come from a land of sun, beaches and brown-skinned natives (travelogues and tourism documentaries were really popular with them). second, they couldn't quite accept that "jacqueline" was my actual name (a follow-up question would almost always come after having said my name: "and what is your real filipino name?"). seeing their disappointed faces, i couldn't help but wish for my parents to have had the grace to christen me with a native filipino name--something like "lakambini" or "amihan" (wishful thinking, since my family is chinese-filipino). last, they seemed amazed that i could converse with them about politics, books, art, movies...i did come from a third-world country, right?
in a paced and scholarly french, i tried telling them that my country is a melting pot of sorts--any breed/interbreed of asians, africans, and caucasians, they could find them here. and it was not so much about having a name that was too french, it was more about following the norm by having westernized names. and despite the high levels of poverty and illiteracy in my country, they could encounter a lot of educated and erudite filipinos not only from this part of the world, but also in paris, toulouse, lyons, bordeaux, lille, etc (i couldn't add "if they would only venture out of their provincial hole"--i might have come from a third-world country, but i was taught how to be polite while growing up).
i wanted to say more but i feared my limited vocabulary would give way to smatterings of english, french, and tagalog, and we all know how incoherent that would sound. i knew that i wasn't able to satisfy their curiosity, but how could i when they already had fixed notions of what filipinos (and the philippines) would be like? so for lack of better words and extraordinary wordsmithing skills, i tried introducing the philippines to them by cooking adobo, sinigang (thanks to maggi and knorr instant mixes), and yema (thanks to a fellow filipina friend who brought a filipino recipe book with her) for them. what i couldn't say in words, i hoped to be able to relay to them through my food. i wanted them to taste all that tanginess, sourness, and sweetness, and maybe they would get more than a picture of shanties, barefoot children, and sandy beaches. maybe they would figure out that a certain savviness was required in knowing how to simmer that tastefully tender adobo meat, how to keep the vegetables edible yet crunchy in a sinigang broth, or how to combine the flavors of ground nuts, milk, butter, and sugar in yema that they're satisfyingly, but not cloyingly, sweet. i was offering them a cuisine which had been a product of recipes/formulas of generations of filipinos, and any race that could concoct food with such richness of taste and texture could not be as backward or as poor as they initially thought.
but as reality would have it, my adobo was far from perfectly tender, and my yema was a tad too sweet. my sinigang was a bit bland for my taste, but surprisingly, it was a winner for them (they had never tasted anything like it, according to them--woohoo for me!). they were magnanimous with the meal i had served, but any hopes of them having experienced profoundness on my take of filipino cuisine went out of the window as soon as the dishes were placed inside the dishwasher.
in the end, it didn't really matter whether or not i was able to convey to them what filipinos and the philippines were really like. i figured out that my version would always differ from their versions. how could i possibly explain to them, in several meetings, that corruption, poverty, apathy, and crime can exist alongside art, progress, american movies, and the best of nature's wonders? that we can always smile, laugh, and find humor in our tragedies and misfortunes? or that beauty and ugliness thrive hand in hand in this country, but the people and the country will always be home for me?
No comments:
Post a Comment