7th
The seventh of February marks my six years of blogging. Six years. Longer than we’ve had Lia. Longer than I have been living this dream, this love of stringing words together full time.
Come to think of it, February is a month when most loves are found. I was conceived in February. Many others were, as Valentine’s looms.
Still, the dead weighs more this time of the year. The scent of flowers heavier in the air, like the hands that lay them on tombstones.
11th
I carefully spooned and tasted the dizzying array of Cantonese fare on the table. My mother-in-law was celebrating her birthday. Surrounded by the buzzing voices of full-bloodied Chinese customers and the sea of chinky eyes, I was reminded of the deep connections that accompanied these familiar tastes. I held back the tears and kept my eyes closed, calculating the weight of gravity.
A Chinese raised in Manila, my stepfather brought to our table the diverse tastes of his homeland– the good, the cruel, the trivial, the utterly wonderful.
Noodles on birthdays for long life. Mandarin oranges, grapes, and other rounded fruits for prosperity. Sticky tikoy and mooncake in pretty boxes for Lunar New Year, with the sight of dragons dancing to gongs.
On Friday nights, while gorging on Chinese take-out, we children surrounded him and my mother and listened to their stories as they drank beer and wine. Always excitedly, I take the first bite of white chicken and dip it deep in tangy ginger oil. My stepdad allowed me. He will let me take all the meat, even if he loved white chicken too.
On Sundays, we ate fishball soup and misua at a sidewalk stall in Ongpin. Sometimes, it was maki and brown rice at Delicious, or hakaw and chicken feet at The President’s Tea House. It was always the same food weekly for years. Sometimes it was spectacular, sometimes just okay.
But now, three years after his death, it turns out to be the most comforting but also the most painful to eat.
These are flavors, are prior truths that remind me very much of home, of a part of home that I no longer have access to. These are hearts in bowls and chopsticks. Sweet, savory, tangy, heartwarming, and smarting like a papercut – all at once.
14th
It is heart’s day today. The merry hearts are celebrating love with much gusto. There are vultures attempting to feed off my spirit as I write this. The tears and tiny tremors are uncontrollable.
It takes forever to remedy the gaping wounds that death creates, if they can be remedied at all. One day you are all glitter and sun rays, then the next you are in a dim room where smiling hurts; where the only way to nurse pain is with a pile of laundry and to ask for one more long hug from your daughter.
There is so much that I miss, so much that I wanted to do and say. He tempered his hopes as we did, but we were all badly beaten.
So here I am, on a dreary Valentine’s, remembering the 11th and the 7th. But mostly the 7th.
Today
On the 7th, we visited his grave – a grassy space lined by soaring trees, lost among clouds and the sound of airplanes jetting off the city. They were low lying, massive, almost too near to touch, almost surreal.
The sun bore down as I ran my fingers through the carvings on stone. “Kung Hei Huat Tsai,” I muttered under my breath.
We surrounded him with a candle, an umbrella, and what’s left of us. Bits and pieces of memories scattered in the wind, like those Feng Shui books that get replaced year in and year out for best yin and yang. Memories of overeagerness to count from yee, uhr, san to shi because I am the odd one out in the family. Memories of a deeply patriarchal, multi-cultural home founded and imposed by one man who was himself a paradox. Memories of soul-stirring journeys on the road from childhood and beyond that spurred this wanderlust.
Mama complained that he never visited – not even once – since he went away. I told her maybe he’s happy where he is – with the sight of planes to remind him of his favorite thing to do when he was alive; to remind us that life is always marked by arrivals and departures, one final destination where we all meet.
Departures, I say.
His was unwelcome. But on this day and all other days, I choose to remember how he arrived. I remember him for sunshine, the bowls of heart over fatherless decades. There are many that transcend the palate. It’s those bowls that taught me to be good and giving. To give with heart, even when the weight of flowers and memory is tempting you to just shut your door and be selfish about giving all you are, what remains of it after the dead has claimed the rest.
“Is angkong here?” my daughter asked as she studied the marble tombstone.
“Yes, dearest,” I told her. “He is always with us.”
