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BAMBOO GIRL:
For Fennie Rosales Casocot
Ian Rosales Casocot
Silliman University
ianrcasocot@su.edu.ph
About the Author
Ian Rosales Casocot is a novelist and teaches film, literature, and creative writing in Silliman
University in Dumaguete City. He has won the Palanca Award several times, and has also
won the NVM Gonzalez Prize, a PBBY Salanga Writers Prize, and the FullyBooked/Neil
Gaiman Philippine Graphic/Fiction Prize for his fiction. His books include FutureShock
Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures (Silliman Press, 2002), Old
Movies and Other Stories (NCCA, 2005), Beautiful Accidents: Stories (University of the
Philippines Press, 2011), Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror (Anvil, 2011),
and Inday Goes About Her Day (Locsin Books, 2012). In 2008, his novel Sugar Land was
longlisted in the Man Asian Literary Prize, the biggest prize for the novel in English in
Asia. He was Writer-in-Residence for the International Writers Program of the University
of Iowa in the United States in 2010. He is currently the Coordinator of the Edilberto and
Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center.
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Before my mother was Fennie and before my aunt was Fannie, they were
first Ceferina and Epefanianames of such old-fashioned import that my more
metropolitan aunt, my mothers older sister, was moved to doctoring the documents
of their births to give them easier-sounding names, airy ones that seemed more
perfectly attuned to the ways of the New Republicmore modern and reflecting
the twang of Hollywood glamour. What was airier than Fannie? What was more
modern than Fennie?
World War II was long over and the Americans were mostly goneand Tita
Fannie must have thought, This is our chance to give ourselves new lives! For her,
that meant giving herself and her younger sister new names to coincide with new
times, and consequently perhaps leapfrog from the poverty they knew in their little
town.
She had always known that naming had the power to transform, and in the
madness of the new republic coming into its own in the early 1950s, transformation
was vital like it was everywhere else. It was a key to the divergent fates of young
women in stagnant little towns spread across the archipelago. You transformed,
and the whole world could become your oyster. Or you didnt, and you remained
fixed in a small life without trajectory, making do with the cold fate of being a
probinsyana girl.
For Mother, it changed many things; it can rightfully be said that the real
beginnings of my mothers life was the erasure of this older name and everything
old that was attached to it. She must have also known that naming is a thing of
subtle power. It contains the secret of the divine. In the beginning, after all, was the
Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Still no one ever truly escapes the past or the palimpsest of old names, and
when Mother finally learned to tell her own tale apart from the machinations or
the dictates of an older sister, her story gushed forth to meher captive confidant
like a long-unreleased torrent of want.
She was 75 when she began to do journeys of recollection with me. This is my
story, she would tell me over and over again when I was in the mood of listening
to her stories of old friends, of old lives, and of old circumstances. The details were
labyrinthine, but she kept such tight possession of the unraveling of her life story.
I suppose that must be so. We who are able to tell our own stories own the
narrative. Silence is not history.
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***
One of Mothers first memories is of being told by a spinster aunt, Mama
Mediong (who had become their surrogate caregiver), that she has never had a
mother. Her Mama Mediongs alternative birth story was pure fantasy: Ceferina
and Epefania had come to the family from the liki sa kawayan, the crack of a
bamboo, gifts of some benevolent diwata living in the magnificent mango tree near
their old house in Tolong, the old name of Bayawan, the town at the southern tip of
Negros Island. Mother never doubted the story even whenyears laterthe tale
seemed positively borrowed from the popular legend of every Filipinos collective
mythical origins. The familiarity only bolstered her personal claim to it.
Mythology is a story of origins, among other things. The Bisaya loved to tell the
story of the first man and woman in the world, born in the stretches of the primordial
Visayan seas. In that story, there once was a bird of prey tired from being unable
to rest from the endlessness of flying between the firmaments: the heavens above
and the waters below. But he was crafty and took himself to the private counsel of
the god of the sky and later on the god of the sea. Manipulating both of them into
anger, and then eventually into quarrelwhich resulted to a mighty skirmish that
birthed the landsthe bird finally found itself resting on a piece of earth among
the other rocks and islands thrown into the sea in the aftermath of battle. While it
rested, a length of bamboo with two nodes washed up on shore, hitting the feet of
the bird. The maddened bird pounced on the bamboo and began to peck hard at it,
eventually splitting it into two. To the birds surprise, he found a sleeping creature
in the hollow of the first node, and from out the other stepped out another creature
with supple limbs and flowing hair. This was Silalak and Sikabay, the first man and
woman upon the world.
Ceferina and Epefania were Sikabays children, so to speak.
Her Mama Mediong must have meant the story as a harmless joke, Mother
would later tell me. Perhaps it was a convenient tall tale, manufactured on the quick
to shoo away a much-too inquisitive niece, the child of Mediongs dead older sister
Genoveva.
Except that Mother of course took the tale quite seriously, her childhood
navet pulsing through the fabrication, enough to believe that she was indeed
literally a bamboo child. Sometimes Id humor her by pushing it to the realm
of the metaphoricalthat perhaps her Mama Mediong meant she was pliant as
a bamboo, for example, someone able to withstand with graceful dancing all the
gales of life. Sometimes Id tell her what was perhaps closest to the truth: that this
story was a spinster aunts fanciful fabrication, stolen indeed from a popular legend.
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She would smile at these attempts of mine, but the look that she would give me
spelled out what she truly believed.
Such must have been the depths of her unshakable need to know where she had
come fromenough to give as reason to why she was different from her playmates
who all had complete families. They had mothers and fathers, for one thing. She
only had doting aunts, four of them, and elderly grandparents. She didnt know the
classroom retelling of Silalak and Sikabays story into Malakas and Maganda. She
had no chances, even for somebody that young, to listen to and get to know the
oft-told tales and legends. We were a poor family, Mother would recall. Much
too superstitious. Everybody was too busy trying to make sure there was food on
the table when meal times came around. We had no time for silly stories. Nor time,
it would seem, for the vagaries of childhood.
Mother could not recall how old she was exactly when she was told this particular
story of bamboo origins, only that it was the middle of the Second World War, and
everything was in a protracted state of chaos, fear, and utter boredom.
It was around that time when the familywhich consisted of their maternal
grandparents, Lola Valentina (or Intin) and Lolo Benito, and their aunts and uncles
felt it was necessary to evacuate their old house in the middle of the poblacion of
what was then New Tolong town (now Bayawan City) somewhere down Negros
Oriental. The guerillas had just killed Yoshi, the Japanese resident of the town who
had acted as go-between for the invading Japanese army. The town folk were quite
sure the Japanese were coming back very soon to retaliate, and perhaps even resort
to annihilating the entire town for the assassination.
Lolo Benito, according to the story, decided the family must pack up and go.
It was nighttime when they made the move, and the air was thick with much
suspense and fear. But Mother remembered taking care to observe the many
thickets of bamboo she came across on that evacuation, examining each hollow
sprout closely as they passed. While everybody else in her company crouched in
the dark, hoping no Japanese soldier could see them as they made their way to what
they had supposed to be the safety of a faraway place, she eyed every bamboo node
she saw and hoped for answers.
Years later, she would realize that their evacuation was a journey of dismissible
distance. They had thought they had crossed miles and miles of land, away from
the war sure to erupt in settled places, but they were barely gone: they had walked
only a few kilometers from where they started in the poblacion. We never really
evacuated Bayawan, she said, laughing. We merely moved a few trees away, to
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Punong, which was beside the sea, and we thought the nearby woods were the
jungles of the distant mountains.
***
It took me a long time to listen to my mothers story simply because, like most
children, I was paralyzed from entertaining the very idea that my parents were
once people who had lives that did not involve any of us children.
It was enough, it would seem, to consider only the woman who was wife to the
father I knew, who catered to all my needs or answered (with the decisive discipline
of the occasional spanking) my tantrums, and who had been there for all childhood
skirmishes, and, sometimes, triumphs.
Some years ago, in a rare streak of familial insight, I started to consider in a
rather oblique and unintended manner that this woman must have an inner life I
did not know about. We were talking about the concept of Great Love over Sunday
dinner, and I had casually asked her, Ma, did you ever have a crush when you
were growing up?not exactly expecting a reply. But it turned out she did. I
remembered asking myself: Who is this woman? How come I do not really know
anything about her?
Still, it took me time to finally listen.
I had not wanted to do what she had been egging me to do all those years, that
I should listen to her tales and make a suitable fiction from their beautiful chaos,
enough to memorialize an existence.
Ga, listen to my story, she would tell me when she had the chance. I think
my life would make a very interesting book. I have always thought that such
admission was everybodys common conceit. Each of us is complicit in feeling that
the nuances of our lives, convinced of every moments originality, would make for
great literature. All lives are a book waiting to happen, it would seem. And just
like how I often dealt with other peoples advances in telling me of the cinematic
possibilities of their own biographies, I did the patronizing tango with my mother,
kissed her on the cheek, ate the food she offered on her table, and promised her
time and againthat I would certainly find an inch of my week to sit down with
her, to listen to her life story, to write about how she came to be. When you are
young, you can be capable of such deviousness and hollow promises.
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It would take a few more years before it occurred to me, in a moment of stray
consideration, that my mother was in fact getting old, and that I had only known
a slight aspect of her existence: as doting mother, and as devoted wife to my father.
Still, I must admit that it was a small biography that felt comfortable enough to
mebut all storytellers know that there are many sides to a tale. Mothers story, I
felt, had intricacies and revelations that could even shed light on my own life.
I stumbled on this truth when Lola Mediong, my mothers maternal aunt and
the originator of the bamboo story had her last bad fall. A spinster, she had come to
live with us after my family got wind of unflattering reports that she was drinking
away her profits from making achara (pickled papaya strips) in Bayawan. She was
out-drinking the worst tuba drinkers in town, and regularly stumbled on her way to
some ramshackle hut that housed her. When we sent for her to live in Dumaguete
City, she was a lucid woman in her 80s who demanded a great deal of affection from
her apos. For the most part, she was the picture of health: she still had her teeth,
her eyesight was undiminished by time, and she still had the spunk to demand
she be given a household task she could do despite increasingly brittle bones and
a wavering sense of balance. Sometimes, that meant she would take to the broom
and proceed to sweep the entire house of its dirtstubbornly brandishing the
broom like a talisman despite our efforts to make her feel comfortable with her
old age, which usually (and perhaps unfairly) meant settling down in some faded
corner and whiling away the rest of the days doing cross-stitch. Youre getting on
with the years, we told her very patronizingly. You might have an accident if you
keep this up.
I must also confess that when I was a child, I carried with methe way most
children dothat strange dislike for old skin or old smell; I avoided Lola Mediongs
geriatric cajoling and then sometimes also her pleas for me to do the mandated
manocusping her hand to lead to my forehead, a gesture of respect between
generations most have found quaint. She also had stories of her life in Bayawan,
but nobody was there to listen to hernot me, not anyone of my five brothers, nor
any of my cousins, the nine sons and daughters of my mothers sister, Tita Fannie.
In hindsight, I realize that we should have been more welcoming of her stories,
because later on, when we became desperate to learn more about the history of my
maternal family, Lola Mediongour last link to that unexplored past thencould
no longer be counted on to give a straightforward narrative. She had her last bad
fall when she took to her trusty broom to swirl away cobwebs in one corner of the
house and broke her leg when the chair she was standing on gave way. Recovery
took months, but she was no longer the same Lola Mediong who had the ferocity
of tough countrywomen. Somehow, mentally, she had also let go. While she still
had some capacity to recognize our faces, the past for her was like broken pottery
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that she could no longer make sense of, nor try to put back together into a cohesive
narrative. Whenever Id ask her a question, Id get answers that were stuck in some
roundabout that had become her inner world. Lola, Id ask, what did you mean
when you used to call mothers father a buyong? What is a buyong? (Later, I learned
a buyong meant a wandering stranger one must be wary about.)
Lola Mediong would give me the worst kind of quizzical look possible, as if she
was trying so hard to understand what I meant by my question. Dugong? she
would ask.
No, lola, buyong.
Butong.
I would finally move to give half a shout, Buyong!
This would go on for a few more minutes until Ior somebody elsewould
finally give up in the quest for the simplest, but most elusive, answer. Like her mind,
her stories were gone forever.
Stories, especially real onesthe ones that shapes our families, the ones that
our fathers and our mothers know to be their sacrosanct biographiesare always a
fragile lot. Family stories, often than not, disappear into the void of the disinterest
of generations to come. Nobody ever bothers to ask some of the most vital, and the
most fascinating, questions anymore. What was my mother like before she met my
father? What did she dream to be? Who was her first love? What was the first movie
that she saw? What song made her cry? What curses did she shout the moment
I struggled to break free from her womb? All parents have their inner lives. The
tragedy of children is that they do not willingly try to uncover what fascinating
stories they may reveal. It was with this conviction that I had resolved to know my
mothers story.
***
Once each week for the past years, after waking up from the utter, bright
sunniness of most Sunday mornings, Id make way for the one ritual that governed
a life kept busy with the weight of bachelorhood and the demands of a semiworkaholic existence: Id visit Mother who lived a few blocks up north in Dumaguete
from my apartment in Tubod.
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Wed have lunch togethersometimes with chicken curry, which was my favorite,
and sometimes with Korean barbecue shed make from scratch. Sometimes, shed
prepare pako salad, made from fern and marinated in coconut milk. Wed talk like
giddy airheads about the celebrities wed see on the television, gossip about Piolo
Pascual and such and such.
Sometimes wed scan through old pictures and rummage through her wealth
of memories. I soon found out from our Sundays together that she seemed to
remember her childhood in Bayawan in a haphazard manner, like dots she made
play at connecting. There were many details she could not remember, but a tiny
fragment of memory could trigger wild gesticulations and excited storytelling, as a
flood of things sprung forth from her like a gushing cataract that sometimes I had
to suggest narrative restraint. Ma, Id tell her, youre not helping me here. Im
trying to reconstruct your past, and youre not helping me if you gush off like that.
Shed only laugh, but shed also try calming herself down and proceed to obey my
resolute efforts to streamline what came from her memory.
I listened to her, and I felt that her past was a completely different country: it
had a different smell, a different look, and a different feel. The grammar of it was
different, the cartography completely unfamiliar. What were for her ordinary relics
of an old childhooddetails of dishes and pots, houses and old dirt roads, names
of people totally unknown to mewere things I fought to give a name, or a face, or
a detailed rendering, so that I, too, could appreciate just how they had become so
much a part of my mothers young life. Shed talked about a batirol from childhood,
for example, and Id find myself asking, Whats a batirol?
She laughed at my modern-day ignorance. Its a thing for making tsokolate,
which was my Lola Intins favorite beverage. Its a clay jar with a long neck, and a
curved handle. It has a hole near the top from which a bolanyo could come through,
and Lola Intin would stir the chocolate tablets with it in till the mixture would
become thick, good enough for drinking.
I then asked her to sketch what a batirol looked like.
Such was how we learned to come to know the past.
***
My visits to Mother were something I surprisingly found myself looking
forward to every week. Perhaps, I told myself in the beginning, this was a sign of
years slowly edging off the brackets of youth. I was in my early 30s when I started
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that project. In the gravity of deepening adulthood, mothers could sometimes
become strange sources of comfort. We shared the same birthday, too, Mother
and IAugust 17and this added to a connection between us, and perhaps we
knew we were yoked not just by flesh and blood, but also by the reckoning of our
shared stars.
She lived in our family house somewhere in Piapi, bordering the teachers
village near Bantayan, in a huge compound the parameters of which used to be
lined with trees. Now only the coconut trees remain, but only ever devoid of their
fruit, because my older brother had complained to the neighbors that the falling
coconuts were wreaking havoc on our property. It is a big house, a two-storey affair
that looks imposing in front and yet is actually slim when viewed from the sides.
The house has a veranda, and overlooks a garden Mother grew from the sheer
effort of her geriatric hands; it was still something she watered every morning
after breakfast and prayers. The centerpiece of it was a modest bamboo grove in
one corner, growing freely from rich soil, its shoots a constant source of salad for
Mothers dining table.
On the Sundays that Id be there, her morning gave way to preparing something
delicious for lunch for her youngest son; shed water the garden only when she
came home in the afternoon while Id be in the back veranda snoozing in the
bamboo divan under the late sun, after she had made her weekly visits to the local
provincial hospital where she had made it her mission to pray over the sickthis
was something she had been doing every Sunday since as far back as I could
remember. This should make her a saint
Sometimes I think it is only now, in this present, that I am learning to appreciate
Mother more. Adulthood, edging close to middle age, gives you that ability: now
that I have grown up and flown the nest, so to speak, it is much easier to see her
as being more than just the provider for the most basic of needs I had when I was
growing up. I have known her all my life as the woman who fought so many battles
just to provide six growing boys three square meals every single day. Now that the
battle has largely been won, she has mellowedand has grown slightly plumpin
her twilight years.
I told her that: that her senior years had made her comfortably plump.
But I was always a skinny child, she remembered.
Sickly would be the word. Her ancient aunts had a word for itmasusuylo,
and said she had always been that ever since she was three years old. Her scalp, it
seemed, was festering constantly with small sores, and she had spent an entire year
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suffering from an extreme case of bo-og in her earwhich might explain why she
had a hard time hearing these days.
Looking back, she understood why she was the sickly sort: she and her sister
grew up incredibly poor, in noble squalor that was of course quite normal in the farflung provinces in the earliest years of the 19th century. And yet, I dont remember
thinking we were ever poor, she said. Only now when I look back to the past do I
find some of the things that we didor many of the things that surrounded usto
be the very picture of poverty. Childhood then, it seemed, was perfectly capable of
masking everything in a glow of innocence, even fun.
Despite the hardship, the house they lived inbuilt by the very hands of their
Lolo Benito Malasartewas more than large enough for the everyday smallness
of New Tolong. The house in the poblacion was a big wooden square on stilts, the
main floor accessible only by boards of hardwood germelina nailed together in
haphazard fashion to make for a staircase. Downstairs, on dirt grounds, their pigs
and chickens milled about. Upstairs, the front door led to a kitchen that had seen
better days, a corner of it sagging from the rot of water where they would wash
their dishes (and sometimes, themselves). Against the wall, and right next to the
makeshift sink, they kept their dapog, a tableau of hardened ash that housed their
cooking. To the immediate left was the komedorthe dining room. Farther on,
there was a raised bar along which several clay jars (called a tadjao) of water were
kept. And farther on there was the small sala consisting mostly of an old wooden
round table, and then there were the bedroomsthree of themthat housed a
brood of seven, plus Lolo Benito and Lola Valentina. There were, in succession of
uncles and aunts, Alfredo (more popularly known as Piding), Genoveva (Mothers
mother), Amadeo (Ining), Remedios (Mediong), Beatrice, and Ambrosio (Dodong).
Then there were, of course, Epefaniamy auntand my mother, Ceferina.
She remembered most the games they played as childrenpatintero, of course,
and tubig-tubig, and lantay-lantay, names of exotic and ancient play lost to me
now except for some vague idea that these were games played under the heat of the
sun, in the dirtied frenzy of the outdoors.
We loved playing outside, mother recalledbut the aunts, because it always
was in the very nature of adults to frown upon the frolic of children, would always
admonish them to come early, to stop all the shenanigans, lest Old Tiyong would
come and shanghai them to some secret abode where bad things happened. From
the open window from which Lola Beatrice and Lola Mediong would shell their
corn for the evening meal, they would call out to the playing children, Hoy, pauli
na mo! Kuhaon mo karon ni Tiyong!
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And the girls would scramble up the staircase, sometimes scraping the skin
of their knees in their nervous flight, too unsophisticated to even think that Old
Tiyong was nothing more than the bearded, and short, old man who went around
town selling kwitis, an inferior kind of fireworks that produced only the strangest
wee bit of spark that passed for fire.
Sometimes, they played houseusing the wooden upstairs furniture, upturning
them to create rooms and draping them with curtains or blankets to create
roofsand pretended they had prepared a banquet. Tita Fannie would pretend
to spoon-feed Mother generous helpings of the imaginary food, making clucking
sounds all the way.
When they did get their treats, these often consisted of dulce de lemon, which
cost 1 centavo each. Sometimes, there was coconut candy. And when tougher
times came, they sated themselves with the small fruits they plucked from the
maria-maria shrub (it tasted like marang, mother claimed), or even the udlot
sa manga. Mother sometimes had to make-do by secretly creeping to the kitchen
where she would climb the small nubs in the wall to get to the hanging clay batirol
where her Lola Intin made her tsokolate. Largely left unwashed, its sides often
became thickened by deposits of chocolate and refinido sugar, over which mother,
as a young girl, would scrape in a finger and lick out the chocolate. I became
too greedy one day, she says, and fell to the dapog. I still have the scars from all
those chocolate cravings. And then, in better times, there was breadespecially a
type they called baki, which meant frog. There was also kalamay, and puto, and
budbud, and sometimes tira-tira.
Her elder sisters own game plan for treats was remarkable for its original
deviousness. Before the end of each day, the young Epefania would be sent by Lola
Intin to buy the kerosene to light the evenings lamps, and for the tiny amount
they needed for the nights illumination, she was usually given five centavos. At
Dada Senits sari-sari store, little Epefania would then tell the slim and mestiza
shopkeeperwhose husband was the secretary of the town mayorthat she needed
kerosene worth only four centavos, with the last centavo to be spent on bubble gum.
Kengkoy was the brand of bubble gum we went crazy for then, Mother recalled.
Coming home, her elder sister would surrender the container with the kerosene to
their waiting grandmother, and then would hurry to the bedroom where she would
hide in the kaban meant to store their pillows, and in the darkness of the wooden
box proceed to enjoy, by her lonesome, her contraband sweets. In the kitchen, of
course, my mother would do her climbing to get to the chocolate-flavored batirol.
Such, it seemed, was the grammar of small desires in the olden days.
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Meal-time was never a grand affair: there was always linugawa kind of rice
congeeon the table every night, made to taste with a pinch or two of rock salts.
On better days, there was rice and yellow ripe bananas. Lunch was mostly fish
or chicken. Sometimes there was pos-pas. And they had to eat without much
complaint. When we didnt like what was there to eat, mother says, Mama
Mediong would pinch us, or kuhiton mi ug tukog, or scare us that an abat was right
outside waiting to eat us if we didnt clear our plates soon. Ni-a na pud, dili mo
nganga, she would say.
Lola Intin usually cooked, while their Mama Mediong washed and ironed the
clothes. Their Mama Beatrice, being the artistic type, would help the young girls
make cut-out dolls.
***
Some time later, Id ask Tita Fannie her own memory of their childhood, and
I found that there was no bamboo story to keep her guessing about their origins.
She knew there was a death in the family, although for a four-year old, the hushed
talk of the adults around her never penetrated enough to make her realize it was
her mother they were talking about.
It was 1934. I was lying down one night to sleep, Tita Fannie told me, when she
had joined my mother for one of our Sunday spells, and I remembered there were
so many visitors in the house. I did not feel anything. I had no consciousness of
anything else, except my want for sleep. She was lying on the brown buli banig she
shared with her sister, and remembered that the mat had felt scratchy against her
skin. The pillows, filled with local cotton or doldol, felt hard. She was half awake
when someone mentioned Genoveva dying.
How did she die? I asked.
She was bleeding, Tita Fannie said. We dont know exactly how she died. Only
that she had a hemorrhage of sorts, but all we got from our aunts and uncles were
lies, or at best, half-truths we didnt care about.
Years later, she would be told several versions of that night. How their mothera
beautiful, chinky-eyed young woman with long hair whom everybody called
Bebanghad watched herself bleed to death on a rocking chair, her blood gushing
out of a hole cut in the seat, down to the palanggana below. It was a morbid tale;
what it made it worse was that their mother Bebang had been pregnant for four
months. The first stories they were told were of the supernatural sort: how an
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engkanto had fallen in love with her because she had the most beautiful long black
hair in town. One of Bebangs chores then was to gather twigs for fuel from around
an old mango tree near their house. She had stayed too long once, and the trees
engkanto had come to claim her.
She had died giving birth to a stillborn son, our brother, Tita Fannie finally said.
After she died, our father disappeared. We never heard from him again.
It took a few more years for me to ask Mother if she had reconsidered her
bamboo story, knowing what I now knew about my great-grandparents. It was
growing late in the Sunday afternoon, and all I could see on her face was an old
yearning coming back: it was the face of a child who had known no mother or
father, and had only known a fantastic tale of how she came to be.
My mother was already 80-years-old then. And for her, this and other old stories
that she had kept were the last souvenirs from a childhood she held in a fragile
embrace: it was a secret garden for her, the place where her forgotten memories
thrived and she had the only key to its locked gates, and here, in these stories, she
became that child again, looking at that mythical bamboo, trying to ascertain her
own origins, and trying to find her own place in the increasingly confusing world
of too much reality, too much forgetfulness.
We make our choices in the stories of our lives that we tell, she finally told me.
I prefer the bamboo, ga.
I quietly understood what she had to say, and in the growing bathing of orange of
the sunset that embraced us, I turned to her to kiss her goodnight, but she was already
looking far away, gently staring at the bamboo grove in her garden, perhaps willing
it to share its secrets, perhaps longing for a return to some mythical origin perhaps
understanding finally and fully what it meant to have history.
Kritika Kultura 26 (2016): 702
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
Ateneo de Manila University
