Uncle Ed

My mother is from the Philippines. Few of my Filipino-Australian friends believe I am half-Filipino, but every year until was seven, we spent at least a month there. My second childhood home was a small village called Aureliana, in a town called Patnongon in the province of Antique on the island of Panay. To my five-year-old self, it was a day and a half on a plane and the better part of another day looking out the window of a van as we drove forever. When we finally arrived, we were in another world. A better place. One much brighter, more colourful, with more people who were always smiling. With stronger smells, tastier food, and more parties. A place where it was always hot and sunny, and afternoons were spent at the beach or a rainforest. A place where someone was always around to hold my hand. Something I cherished more than anything, as an only child.

Then, we just stopped going. I waited for my bags to be packed, to leave for the airport. We never did. I learned later that my mother fell out with her family. All I remember were late night phone calls, my mother screaming, as though she had to shout loud enough for them to hear her all that way across the ocean. She'd spend hours stewing on what was said, internalising that rage and taking it out on me in other ways. 

Over time, she only ever received calls about deaths, my mother screaming, voice breaking into sobs, my father quietly walking over to hang up the phone. My mother sobbing into his chest, as he held her tenderly. As more time passed, they stopped telling her about the deaths altogether. Including her own mother's. 

Twenty years after our last trip, my mother and I returned to the Philippines. Some reconciliation had happened, though I don't know how or why.

The trip was as long as I remembered. One of my uncle's collected us in a van, an updated version of the old Toyota he used to drive. I remembered scenes I’d glimpsed through the half-sleepy eyes of my childhood self – dusty unsealed roads winding over rainforested mountains. Wide stretches of coastline lined by green rice fields. Dark volcanic beaches and palm trees. The sun always close to setting as we drove through the town of San Jose, dirty roads and low buildings covered with advertising, roads full of cars and tricycles and Jeepneys. People of all shapes and sizes in colourful tshirts, dresses, baseball caps, sunglasses all going about business that never seemed to stop. Past an old Spanish church that was slowly reclaimed by trees and vines in the centre of the town square. Back into the countryside, into the clear afternoon sky. 

The village driveway was lined with large mango trees and palms that created a canopy sheltering it from the sky. A natural archway you passed through to this special, secret place. Our family – my mother’s seven brothers and sisters and their husbands, wives and children – lived in a collection of homes scattered around a central courtyard. A combination of two-storey modern concrete homes and bamboo huts called bahay kubo, used by the old folks and children to escape the heat. There was a network of footpaths through gardens of flowers, ferns and grasses tamed by goats and cows that wandered about on long ropes. Chickens and ducks scampered freely. Roosters, both regular ones and ones destined for the arena, were tethered to little stakes outside of triangular huts to keep them away from the chooks and small children. There were a couple of pig pens at the back of the property where pigs, all doted on and affectionately called Rambo, were being fattened for the upcoming fiesta. 

All of this was as I remembered it, if a little more aged and worn. The garden a little more overgrown. Some of the paths were worn away to dust. There were a few more fighting cocks, and a lot more dogs.

Everyone had come to greet us – at least twenty people, from 7 months to 70 years old. The old people were still old. My uncle Ontan remained ancient, a walking skeleton with no teeth but a grin that told you he remembered everything about you and more. My mother’s older sister who was so hunch-backed she couldn’t walk unaided, still had long, thick, white hair. My cousins seemed fatter, and had children who almost eerily resembled their younger selves.

I was scooped into tight hugs by each in turn. My uncles and aunts still smelt of garlic and Tiger Balm. They pressed wrinkly, leathery faces to mine and sniffed, as if they could inhale the last of my youth and somehow make it their own. How big you are now. My cousins reintroduced themselves, and their children. To my relief, no one mentioned our 20 year absence. As though they’d seen us only the year before.  

Finally, there was an older fellow, maybe in his early fifties. He looked not unlike statues of the laughing buddha you can buy in souvenir stores all over Asia – a short, squat, round man. A bulbous stomach (I’m six months overdue, he’d joke), a broad, round nose, a balding head, a huge, generous grin, and twinkling eyes that seemed to be laughing, now red with happy tears. The only son of my mother’s older sister, Mama Didi, which actually made him my eldest cousin rather than my uncle, but for some reason ‘uncle’ stuck. My uncle Ed.

In a moment, it all came back. I was five again. Golden, sun soaked afternoons on the beach, running bare foot on the sand, screaming at waves that tried to get me. Ed, the pirate king with a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, leading me on elaborate missions up and down the beach, through palm trees and rice paddies to uncover seashell treasures. Climbing into the back of a Jeepney, my hair streaming in the wind, Ed reminding me not to hang too far out the window as we ventured to eat Halo Halo - mountains of shaved ice and assorted sweet and savoury, crunchy and soft toppings. He’d charm the waitresses into giving us extra condensed milk, or an extra scoop of ube ice cream or extra chunk of leche flan. He knew these were my favourites.

I never realised how much I'd missed him. He was crying.

Ed’s mother, Mama Didi, passed away a year earlier. This was why my mother and I had come back, the first anniversary of her death. A family reunion. A fresh start for all of us – too much time already wasted on anger.

I remembered Mama Didi’s her toothy smile, how she always smoked, and wore bright floral house dresses. She kept her hair short and wore reading glasses always. She liked pinching my fat cheeks and arms.

Mama Didi's home was small and cosy, with windows open to the gardens. At the front of the house, facing the road, she had a small store where she sold individually packaged, artificially flavoured chip snacks, chewing gum, chocolate bars (my favourite was Butterfinger), candy, beer, rum, Coca-Cola, juice and cigarettes. We’d spend hours in her home, playing games and watching television.

There was a never ending parade of people dropping in to say hello. No one seemed to buy anything, but everyone stayed to eat.

Mama Didi cooked constantly. Mountains of rice. Never ending bowls of sour fish soup. The tenderest pork stews you ever tasted. Fingers sticky and smelly with garlic, vinegar and sweet barbecue sauces, she would make me rice balls packed with grilled fish and pop them into my mouth.

The house was full of chatter, laughter and noise from the TV. The fan slowly pushed warm, smokey air around the room.

Mama Didi’s house was vacant now. The furniture was gonw. The shelves were empty. The windows were closed. The only sound was the traffic that passed by at speed on the road outside. It smelt of dirt and stale air. It was slowly falling to pieces. There was a hole in the thatched roof.

You should just tear it down, my mother said coldly. I saw her wipe her eyes as she turned away.

Night settled over the village. Come on, said Ed to me, time to eat. The same words he’d said to me daily as a child. The courtyard which all the homes and bahay kubo seemed to congregate around, was lit up. Mismatched, sunbleached plastic chairs and tables were dragged out. An assortment of soup bowls, platters of rice, tubs of dipping sauces, plates of stewed, grilled, fried, sauteed, pork and chicken and fish, and a couple of token vegetable dishes were set out. Again, like a child, we all ate with our hands and licked the sticky, salty, garlicky mess from our fingers. Chewed with our mouths wide open. Talked with our mouths full. It was still glorious.

I used to eat first with the children, my plate filled and refilled until I couldn’t fit another bite. My other cousins would take me to watch TV until it was time for Ed carry me to my parents’ room and tuck me into bed under a mosquito net, to sleep to the sound of crickets and chatter in the courtyard below.

Now, I was an adult or because no one quite knew where I fit, I was invited to eat with the children and the adults. When before only the adult men drank beer and smoke, I always had a cold one, and an ashtray of my own.

Ed introduced me to his son Bobbie, later in the evening after he’d arrived home. Ed was on his way to drunkenness, his gestures loose and voice loud. ‘Come on, come on! Come see your… your… what are you… Tita. Come see your tita’

‘I’m too young to be a tita.’

Bobbie was wearing an old Radiohead T-Shirt I’d sent over years before. We had the same haircut, which was popular in 2010, long and layered with heavy side fringe. He was like a 19 year old version of me. He shook my hand and never called me tita. Bobbie had inherited his father’s sense of good humour, the twinkle in his eye. After eating and opening a beer, he settled back and asked, What kind of music do you like?

The three of us caught up on 20 years in the span of a bottle of rum and a whole bunch of beers. We all loved the same kind of music. We all enjoyed the same films. We all loved cooking, thanks to Mama Didi. When all the tables were packed up and chairs put away, we headed over to our cousin’s house to watch TV while the rest of the village slept. It was a re-run of Anthony Bourdain in Vietnam, an episode we all loved and knew by heart.

Voice hoarse from hours of talking, throat raw from laughter, drunk on nostalgia I forged a path through grass untrodden, past the sleeping fighting cocks, to the Bahay Kubo I shared with my mother collapsing into my bamboo cot covered with a mosquito net.

As when I was a child, I couldn’t keep track of days. They unfolded with a lazy awareness of daybreak from the crowing of roosters, rising when the sun was high and hot. Breakfast was a mix of leftovers from the night before with more rice. What was left of the morning was spent wandering around chatting with family, snacking, till lunch with more rice. As the sun beat down fiercely and the air grew thick and heavy, we’d siesta until a few hours before 

sunset.

A group of us would walk to the beach – Ed and me, cousins who had the day off and their kids if they ditched school that day. We walked in rubber flip-flops in steps I’d taken thousands of times before, a path that remained completely unchanged from my childhood. Across the road and down a lane lined with cottages with beautiful gardens, and a few little stores behind barred windows. Someone would buy a soft drink and share it out into little plastic bags, straws secured with elastic. Dogs ran by. Children played games on the street and waved. People in our group would drift to conversations with neighbours. New people would join our pilgrimage to the sea. The laneway shrank to a dirt path between the wide, flat rice fields, green broken only by the occasional black water buffalo.

We made a final turn through the palm trees and onto dark, volcanic sand that stretched for the whole world to the left and right. The beach was quiet today, when I was a child there were fishing boats and men pulling in nets. I could see boats far off at the horizon, fewer than I had remembered. Our little beach gang played on the beach till the sea changed colour from blue to indigo, the sky became a gradient of gold, then lavender, the clouds blushing.

None of this had changed, except faces and ages.

There was always a fiesta in my childhood memories. My uncles would kill a pig, or cow, or both. I watched from my parent's bedroom which overlooked the courtyard. It took a long time for the animals to die. They cried. They wailed. Eventually, they lay still. The men talked in hushed voices, collecting the blood in buckets, calling for people to bring boiling water. Ed spoke to me quietly as I watched (apparently white as a ghost), about how we'd eat up the cow and the pig at the fiesta, and they’d been well looked after, and lots of people would be fed.

This fiesta, to commemorate the death of Mama Didi, ‘lots of people’ was an understatement. We seemed to be related, in some way, to at least half the country. It was impossible to keep track of who they were. Even the all-knowing Ed didn’t know. Does it matter, he asked as we lined up to eat. Everyone who looked like a grandparent was a lolo or lola. If not, they were my ninong or ningang, godparent – I had at least six. If they were my mother or father's age, they were my tita or tito. Anyone slightly older than me, but not quite a tita or tito, was an ate or kuya. Or you could just smile and wave.

My mother was in a rare happy mood, dragging bubbly old ladies over to introduce me briefly, to tell me they went to primary school together, to give them a brief history of my academic career and an abbreviated curriculum vitae of my more notable employers. Many of these women hadn’t made it further than the main town, some as far as Manila. My mother had fared much better. It made me embarrassed, the way she paraded around.

Ed smiled at me and patted me on the head. ‘Don't worry. You're not your mom. Everyone knows that.’

There was a lot of cake at the end of the fiesta and the children giggled as they watched three lolos fighting over the last piece. Someone had rented a karaoke machine. All of us cousins and children and even a couple of the lolos sang songs until the early morning – happy songs, sad, romantic songs, air guitar hits, power ballads, the shared soundtrack of our lives lived separately for twenty years. Bobbie had to help me walk back to my bahay kubo.

Leaving was always hard. As a child, I never knew what day the end would come. Suddenly our bags would be packed, everyone would be lined up to say goodbye. I wasn’t ready this time either, even though I was the one who packed my bags. It happened too quickly. I hadn’t thought of anything meaningful to say to Ed, to Bobbie. We just promised to keep in touch through the miracle of the internet.

In the car, I sat with clenched fists, chewing on my lip, eyes watering behind my sunglasses, staring out the window, seeing nothing but a blur of colours as we drove away. 

Late one evening, I got a phone call from Bobbie. Ed had died suddenly; a heart attack. I didn’t scream and wail like my mother. I wept. For all the things that had, and hadn't changed since then, for not keeping promises, for life getting in the way, for future visits to the village without Ed, for my loss, for Bobbie's loss.

I went back to the village this year, with my husband, my daughter Lucy. I wanted her to have these memories I cherish. One afternoon I woke late to find Lucy gone. But a tinkle of laughter and tinny music from a phone from my old Bahay Kubo. I peeped in to see in her diaper and a Peppa Pig dress, dancing to Baby Shark, a magic marker in her hand. She'd drawn all over the walls. She danced as though no one was watching. Bobbie played the bongos on a pair of overturned buckets as she danced, himself a bit older now and now growing his own buddha belly. We caught each other's eye for a moment and remembered.