Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, September 25, 2006


TO START the week on a light note, here’s one for culture shock: just to check up on their reading, I gave an objective quiz last week to my American students—the ones I teach Philippine Culture and Society to, here in Wisconsin—and one of the questions had to do with an essay on Filipino riddles by our foremost expert on the subject, Dr. Damiana Eugenio (who once gave me a “5.0” on a similar quiz, taking care of my surfeit of self-esteem and guaranteeing my rapt attention for the rest of the semester). I asked for the answer to a riddle cited in the essay: “A deep well full of sharp blades.” (Isang balong malalim, puno ng patalim.)

The answer, as every Pinoy should know, is “mouth.” One student of mine—drawing on more familiar experience—wrote “garbage disposal.”


LAST WEEK, the 20th of September, marked the tenth year my father Jose Sr. left us. I can still remember the day he died—how his heart literally exploded, how the ambulance came too late, how I whispered our love to him in the ER, how the tears burst forth when the doctors let us into the operating room after they had sewn him up. I remember kissing his cold brow before pushing him gently into the eager fire of the crematorium, and then reclaiming his ashes—still warm, like a bag of bread I cradled in the crook of my arm—hours afterward.

Even as I write this, those tears keep coming. Some sons lead their lives in defiance of their fathers, seeking escape and deliverance from the tyranny of their own blood. I have led mine as an offering to him, seeking his quiet and continuing approbation.

He was far from a perfect man, and his flaws ran across his character like long and tender scars. He was a gambler, and we were forever in need of money; I was never sure which one caused the other, but I remember the steaming pancit he would bring home when he won something—and also the long dark hours of waiting for the door to creak open, assuring us that, win or lose, he was home safe.

He was blessed with a bright, sharp mind that, under different circumstances, could have brought him to Congress or the Supreme Court. He topped his elementary and high school classes and dreamed of going on to law school. He read voraciously, and mastered English so well that, despite growing up and going to school in a small seaside village in Romblon—where I the eldest would also be born, when he was 31—his way with words would be sought by men of power. He put me to bed with the promise of stories from the Readers’ Digest; we had no TV until I was 12, but the house seemed always full of books and newsmagazines, albeit cheap pulp editions of Erle Stanley Gardner and back issues of Time. Until his last days, beyond my mother and their brood of five, my father’s closest companions were his rosary, his dictionary, and his crossword puzzles.

He never finished college. He was both too poor and too brash, and had met my mother at a pier where they were both waiting for somebody else. She was a landlord’s daughter from the same province, studying in Manila for a UP degree. He swept her off her feet, and they were married soon after, confident in his natural intelligence. She too was a bright young woman—much later I would find a book to which she had contributed a poem, a feat she had conveniently forgotten, yielding her dreams to his.

And then, as in most marriages, followed good times and bad: the loss or lack of jobs, the constant moving from one habitation to the next, each seemingly smaller and more plebeian than the one before it, until we ended up squatting in a hovel in Diliman, sharing the toilet with a pig being fattened for slaughter. In the meanwhile, largely through my mother’s labors as a minimum-wage clerk, I had been sent to a rich boys’ school, there to expand and cultivate my own trove of English words, which I was expected to parlay into something bankable down the road, while my siblings made do in public institutions, or otherwise stopped schooling. My father threw in what he could from wherever he could get it; no job was beneath him, not even a stint as a barker for jeepneys—a man’s first responsibility, he would later impress upon me, being “to provide.”

My father had briefly been a Manila policeman; a Motor Vehicles Office agent; a clerk in the public works department; an aide of the governor; and then a barangay elder in his old age, a man whose views and judgments were much sought and respected by those who knew him, even if a townmate would sting my ears years later by asking, over one too many beers, “If your father was so smart, why was he so poor?” So poor, indeed, but rich in kindness; even his favorite expressions—“Gademmet!” and “That’s foolish!”—sounded more like mild complaints than curses.

My mother nurtured us with heroic love and devotion, but it was my father’s gentle roguishness that stirred my imagination. I tagged along to wherever he would take me: his office with its swivel chair and red-blue pencils, the valleys and mountain passes of Nueva Vizcaya where we had distant cousins, his own mother’s burial in the old hometown, a fleeting and solitary visit to my estranged grandfather, a “Trip to the Galaxies” in a fake rocketship built by Reynolds Aluminum as a Christmas gimmick, a bed of newspapers on the floor of a charity ward where my mother was being operated on. It was my little sister Elaine whom he missed the most on these sorties, but it was I, first-born, who stood and sat beside him. If he had told me that the boat we were getting on would take us to America, I would have believed him and dusted off my preformed notions of San Francisco.

He would never set foot outside the country, even when it became possible for him to see at least Hong Kong. The reality of the world didn’t seem to excite him as much as reading about it did. Romblon and its politics seemed worthy enough of his fine mind.

So I have done, and still do, his traveling for him. Every new place I see—more than twenty countries now, over 25 years—I report to him about, in mental letters that pass for prayer. And as I confess my own fears and foibles to him—my own gambling, my own predilection to hurt those whom I love the most—I also tell him things to mend his exploded heart, those things he never saw: how Elaine finished law near the top of her class, and married a great guy in America; how Jessie took his undergraduate diploma at the age of 49 (topping my 30), and is now in law school himself; how Rowie has been resisting offers to work in Washington so she could serve our people here; how Joey’s son Pipo is besting others far older and bigger than him in class; how Beng heads a successful art-restoration company, and how Demi is racking up “1.0”s in graduate school; how I became vice president of the university I dropped out of; and how his bride Emy misses him terribly, but enjoys gardening in Elaine’s and Eddie’s backyard in Virginia, and continues to care for all of us, as though we had never aged.

Father, perhaps we never have. I’m 52 now, but every time I have visited your crypt these past ten years and touched my fingers to the marble between us, I feel like that boy again, waiting for you to come home.

Penman for Monday, September 18, 2006


I HAVE two rules—which I apply to myself—for fiscally-challenged Pinoys settling into a new city abroad: master the local transport system, and make a beeline for the thrift shops. Last week, thanks to some sleuthing and a bit of luck, I was able to do both here in De Pere, Wisconsin (home of the Green Knights, the Phantoms, the Redbirds, and other redoubtable avatars of athletics).

There are actually two parts to De Pere: the west side and the east side, and you cross the Fox River to get from one to the other. Yes, a river does run through it—broad and deep enough for yachts and speedboats to negotiate with aplomb, its banks pitted with willow-shaded corners and rocky outcrops for ducks and herons to perch on. More startling than its beauty to me, the visiting Manileño, is the Fox’s cleanliness: not one speck of floating plastic mars its surface, not one dark rivulet of sewage.

But it’s that kind of town, unhurried and unsullied, where the flags flew at half mast the day I arrived to honor the first fireman on its force to have died in the line of duty in 150 years. At lunch, the students in my college leave their backpacks in a pile on the cafeteria floor, and I’m sure that if I pulled on people’s doors I’d find more than half of them unlocked. On a walk across the campus with Beng, I paused and told her: “Something’s missing, we’re not seeing something. Guess what we always see at home but haven’t found here?” She couldn’t tell me. “Security guards,” I said. “We haven’t seen a single security guard.” And indeed we hadn’t, not even in banks, or groceries, or the college itself. Not one blue uniform, not one bag search. There is a De Pere Police Department; I know because I’ve seen a cop taking a coffee and doughnut break.

Of course, prettiness and placidity can be deceptive, and there’s no better place than Wisconsin to appreciate irony. This is a state often touted as the most politically progressive in the whole Union—as late as the ‘60s, Milwaukee had a socialist mayor, the inheritor of a contrarian tradition brought over by the refugees from a troubled Europe who streamed into the American Midwest in the mid-1800s. The University of Wisconsin at Madison was a bastion of student protest in the 1960s, and remains a fountainhead of progressive thinking in America. But Wisconsin also gave rise in the 1950s to the vociferous Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose name would become forever wedded with Communist witch-hunting. Even today, I have a creeping sense that the liberal arts college I’m teaching in is the only liberal outpost in a staunchly conservative environment that loves beer, bratwurst, and a good foreign war.

Maybe worse than politics, there’s bloody murder. Picturesque, wholesome Wisconsin also spawned two of history’s worst serial killers: Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. (Since you’re reading this on a nice Monday morning, I’m not going to spoil your week by giving you details of their gruesome deeds; try Google, but don’t eat too much steak or spaghetti before you do, because you’ll just throw it up).

But what am I doing talking about mass mayhem in a piece about small-town survival?

Like I said, last week’s great discovery for me was De Pere’s one and only thrift store—its ukay-ukay, if you will—on a city map. (We Pinoys have never, I think, been great map-readers, and many Manileños will be hard put to draw a map of their own city, despite the fact that our powerful homing instincts will carry us through any number of bus, jeepney, and tricycle rides to that corner in the maze of loobans we call home. The maps are etched in our subconscious, and any Filipino who loses his or her way is truly, pitifully lost.) With Beng sidelined by a bad toe and a wet chill wind that had blown into town, I resolved to reconnoiter the shop myself, darkly afraid of losing some yet-undiscovered treasure to a casual browser.

Fresh in my mind was a recent item in my Yahoo inbox from a mailing list called Kovels Komments, run by two of America’s most famous antique experts: “Last September a $15 piece of glass from a thrift store sold at a Green Valley Auction in Virginia for $22,000. There are less than eight known examples of this Boston & Sandwich Glass Co. tulip vase in dark cobalt blue with white striations.” As a longtime thrift-shop and ukay-ukay fiend, I nurtured fantasies of finding a lost codex of Leonardo da Vinci’s, a first edition of Poe, or an unknown Rembrandt, or—heck, forget the foregoing—a 1927 Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in mandarin yellow. (I’d found one in Milwaukee in 1989 for $68, then sold it a year later for $380; it now goes for around $1,500; if you think that’s lucky, ask a fellow Pinoy fictionist—whose name will go unmentioned for his own safety—who bought a $10 painting in a garage sale in the Midwest during his own grad-school days, only to be deliriously shocked to discover that it was by a minor American master, worth a thousand times over when my friend resold it.)

But thrift-shop treasure hunts aren’t really about stumbling on the kind of fortune that could send you cruising on the Caribbean while your workmates are slaving away at midterm exams and unintelligible critiques of some equally wretched novel. It’s about finding the familiar, and bringing it home for next to nothing—giving it a new home, actually. Thrift-shop wares are cast-offs, to be sure—things people no longer need, either because they’re on the move, or on the rise (or, just as likely, forever departed)—but their donation is well meant, never for money, a recognition of the enduring value of objects as much of charity itself. That may be a lot to say for what many people would dismiss as junk—and, indeed, it’s almost pathetic when the homeliest and also most useless of articles such as a clutch of chewed-up pencils won’t sell for even 5 cents—but, as they say, love comes in the most unexpected places, and so, serendipitously, do the best thrift-shop finds.

Bundled in a thick jogging suit, I ventured across the river in a drizzle to reach the shop before it closed, and was rewarded with two floors of gloriously uneven hand-me-downs, from brand-new T-shirts for 25 cents, used but smart and comfy pennyloafers for 50 cents, any book for 10 cents. I’d been sent to find some extra utensils for our kitchen, which was easy enough to round up; I was, in fact, in a bit of a hurry to march on to the nearby department store, in need of an obscure computer part for an audiovisual presentation. The college had but one such part in its inventory, on loan to others; no store in town had it; I could’ve ordered it online for about $10, but it would take at least a week to get, and I needed it ASAP.

I was also looking for a coffee mug. If Sir Galahad and the Knights Templar had their Holy Grail, then I have my Holy Mug, that perfect vessel for the steaming coffee that keeps me awake and writing columns like this one. I’d bought one at ShopKo for $2.99, but remained unhappy. A coffee mug is a very personal and personalized thing, like a toothbrush or a pair of eyeglasses; I’m of the firm belief that these daily objects are very ones you shouldn’t scrimp on, but should endeavor to get the best—not necessarily the most expensive—of, to your satisfaction. The requisites for my ideal mug are fairly simple: neither too big nor too small, heavy enough to sit solidly on a table but not too thick-lipped, stylish but not dainty, easy to hold in one hand. Without too much trouble, I found it in a shelf full of mugs and cups of every sort, from fragile demitasses to the generic plaster productions you can stamp a logo and your nickname on. It was a brown stoneware mug with a bold floral design in deep blue—a definite steal at 25 cents.

Much more remarkable was a discovery upstairs, among the electronic knick-knacks, where I saw a man holding something like a thin beige snake in his hand—a snake with a flat head at either end—and heard him telling his wife, “I wonder what this is—I don’t know a darned thing about computers!” Well, I did, and was praying that he’d put the item down, because it was, against all odds, the very thing I’d been chasing down for days, on campus and on the Internet: a six-foot HD-15 male-to-male VGA extension cable to hook up my laptop to the classroom’s AV projector. The second that cable fell back on the shelf, I snatched it up.

This wasn’t just coincidence or serendipity, but a strange phenomenon that psychologists and paranormal researchers call synchronicity. That cable and I were meant for each other, fated to meet on the second floor of a church thrift shop in distant De Pere. I gladly paid a dollar for it, and, clutching my precious bag of goodies, set out for home. It was still drizzling, and seeing a rare bus come by, I boarded it, only to realize that it was going the other way, where I hadn’t ventured—downtown into the much larger city of Green Bay. Instead of a 15-minute ride I took a leisurely hour-long detour around the city, filing away useful landmarks (the Greyhound bus station, Ralph’s Antiques), mulling over the gifts of the afternoon.

On another visit to the shop, Beng and I would make even more wonderful discoveries—for her, a music box in the shape of a rocking horse perched on a drum; for me, a mint and working 1950s table clock—each of them for a dollar, which probably can’t go a longer way in this inflation-ravaged world than in far, trusting De Pere.

Penman for Monday, September 11, 2006


I DIDN'T realize it at first, but one of the most challenging tasks I assumed when I said yes to teaching for a semester here at St. Norbert College was a class in Philippine Culture and Society—a course that’s traditionally been taught by an exchange professor from the Philippines, who happens to be me this year.

It may seem surprising that a small private college in northeastern Wisconsin—one set up by the Norbertine priests in 1898, when our own nation was a-borning—should have a Philippine Studies program. There are very few Filipinos (and, for that matter, other minorities, aside from American Indians) in this neck of the global woods, and aside from the fact that St. Norbert College is a Catholic institution, there’s little to connect us to this pretty but distinctly un-Filipino land, where the aspens grow tall and the ducks glide unmolested on the glassine river. But fortunately, strong personal contacts between some SNC professors and administrators and their counterparts at the University of the Philippines enabled an exchange program that’s entering its tenth year soon.

Sometimes these personal bonds work better and last longer than any kind of academic or logical argument you can advance. Much bigger American universities in places where significant Filipino communities exist have gone without Philippine Studies programs or even permanent courses on Philippine concerns. At SNC, on the other hand, Philippine Culture and Society is listed as PHLP 100 or HUM 282, described thus: “The course has four main areas: Philippine History, Philippine Culture Through Literature and the Arts, Philippine Politics and Economic Development, and Philippine Cultural and Physical Geography. Each of these four areas will be covered in a broad survey of Philippine culture and society, but the course sill be specially designed by each Visiting Exchange Professor from the University of the Philippines to take advantage of his or her area of expertise. Hence one of the four areas will predominate as the focus of each instance of the course. The focus will act as a lens through which to study the other three major areas. The course will commence with the history and physical geography of the Philippines as the background necessary to situate the discussion of the other areas. Fulfills General Education Area 7 - Foreign Heritages Requirement.”

Well before I left for the US last month, I knew that I was due to teach this four-unit course aside from another one on the American short story, and that I had to prepare for it with both comprehensiveness and specificity, the past and the present, in mind. Inevitably, in the great mad rush of things, I didn’t, thinking foolishly that I knew enough about the country and its people to be able to wing it with the barest sketch of a syllabus.

That didn’t happen, either. I flew into Green Bay—the airport nearest De Pere—in time for new faculty orientation, and, despite being a full professor at UP, I felt like an instructor here all over again, learning about “writing across the curriculum”, “community and prayer”, and, portentously, “syllabus construction”, which in these litigious United States means putting together a syllabus precise and detailed enough to be taken as a binding contract between teacher and student.

We also, of course, produce and present syllabi for our classes in UP, but we tend to take them more as general study guides than as ironclad pledges of performance. One business administration professor presented us with a 24-page, single-spaced document that prompted nervous laughter and a half-jesting question about whether it contained his readings as well; it didn’t. I knew I had my work cut out for me. The weekend before classes, I plunged into the SNC library, desperately matching what I thought I knew with what I was sure I didn’t. And the shorter the weekend got, the clearer it became just what a bind I’d gotten myself into. It wasn’t even just a question of resources, like textbooks and films; the bigger question which I should’ve thought about was: What do I tell these young Americans about the Philippines? How do we want the world to know us?

As a practicing journalist and writer, you’d think the answers should be right there at your fingertips: solid facts and nuanced opinions on every aspect of Philippine society and politics. But academic inquiry demands objective context, and objective context takes time and care to set up—in other words, a broad range of readings in history, culture, economics, and politics. And beyond and beside my immediate academic mission lurked a desire to present our experience as positively as I could without sounding like the Department of Tourism.

At the end of the day—make that the end of the semester—I’d like my students to have learned this: that we Filipinos come from a big country (at 300,000 sq. km., about the same size as Germany) that has for too long thought of itself as being small; we pride ourselves in our love of freedom and in our democratic ways, but it’s hard to enjoy true freedom and democracy where very few families and individuals own and control so much. We are a tremendously gifted and resourceful people, peaceful and fun-loving; we can work and do wonders anywhere; but we need to do more for ourselves as a nation, and not just as individuals. We need leaders who can inspire us and whom we can trust; but so far our history has been one of betrayals and broken promises. We know the world a lot better than the world knows us; but sometimes we don’t know ourselves well enough.

That last thought makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be holding classes like PHLP 100 for our own young pupils—and for older folks as well. Of course we do something like it in Social Studies and half a dozen other assorted subjects, but hardly ever in an integrative fashion—in a way, for example, that can connect (as Pope Paul VI, I think it was, put it) the universal desire for peace to the fundamental need for justice. And I’ve met one too many consuls who knew everything about the nightlife in his privileged posting, but scarcely a fact about Philippine art and culture beyond showbiz gossip. I remember when, during martial law, no government employee could go abroad without taking a crash course on Philippine geography, history, and politics under the much-maligned Presidential Center for Strategic Studies; surely it was part of the propaganda effort, but at least you didn’t leave empty-headed, and you could always use your own intelligence to filter what you heard.

So I began planning for about 50 meetings over 15 weeks, starting with the materials at hand. Despite the absence of an introductory textbook to Philippine history, culture, and society—an omission my colleagues and I should soon address—I was elated to discover a trove of books on the Philippines in the stacks, including the lifesaving, ten-volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (Manila: Asia Publishing, 1998), which I just happened to have been the executive editor of, and quickly secured permission from the publishers to use for my course (just selected essays, the full plain text being 1,700 pages long). Over the semester, my students—all 33 of them, including two Filipino-Americans—will journey with me through our creation myths, our 110 languages, our many revolts and revolutions, our love of rice, adobo, and sinigang, our love-hate relationship with America, our Christmas and Lent, Islam in the Philippines, Pinoy sports and pop entertainment, and the Filipino diaspora. I’ll supplement the essays with stories and poems by Amador Daguio, Angela Manalang Gloria, Juan Gatbonton, Ricardo de Ungria, and Nick Carbo, among others, and films on Filipino architecture, cinema, and indigenous peoples.

It’s a lot to do in one semester, and I just know I won’t even get to touch half of everything I’d like to cover, but it does help to map out a detailed syllabus—just a five-page one, in my case, a kind of difficult love letter to a temporarily distant Inang Bayan.

Penman for Monday, September 4, 2006


THIS HAPPENS every time I find myself living abroad for at least a month: the first thing I try to do is recreate a space called “home,” which is as close an approximation as I can conjure of the objects, flavors, sights and smells I need to function without any excuse other than “Where’s Chippy?”

Chippy, of course, is my seven-year-old Persian tomcat, who always gets left behind, and whom I honestly miss more than I miss most people. (To be fair to most people, they don’t nuzzle my leg, or get their necks and bellies scratched.) I often wish that I could stuff the furry fellow in a bag or pocket and pull him out when everyone else has gone, but he’s just too freaking huge, and flashing feline malice toward all but his doting master.

But let’s not dwell on the impossible. I may not have Chippy with me here in De Pere, Wisconsin (pop. 22,850), but I can have a picture of him—a ball of orange surliness—on my desk. Except that I didn’t bring a framable picture—who does, these days? But wait! I have tons of Chippy pictures on my computer… and no printer. There’s a communal printer in the office, but I don’t think it handles color, and I don’t suppose my new colleagues would be too thrilled to catch me printing out portraits of an overfed cat instead of my syllabus for English 221, The American Short Story.

So I march over the Allouez Bridge spanning the Fox River to the city’s only department store, a single-storey, warehouse-type affair called ShopKo (making me want to say “Shop ko rin”), and look for, among others, a cheap inkjet printer, 4 x 6 photo paper, and suitable frames (plural, because I want a picture of Chippy in the office as well—and, okay, let’s throw in some family faces).

A fraction as it may be of our Megamall, ShopKo has nearly everything I need. And what, exactly, are the bare essentials as far as I’m concerned (excepting food, another list altogether)?

As far as I’m concerned, a house is not a home unless it’s also an office, and an office isn’t an office unless it has a stapler. That’s right. A stapler—that toothy castanet without which papers would be flying all over the planet in mad disarray, with final chapters preceding prefaces, gasoline receipts and hardware invoices insinuating themselves between hastily and fervently scribbled pages of romantic verse, endnotes vanishing into bibliographic oblivion—just imagine the chaos. So I choose a stapler in bright green—remember, you want one you can spot on your cluttered desktop as easily as a red suitcase in baggage claim; and it can’t be just any bright green stapler, but one with a metal tongue—yep, a staple remover, giving me the awesome power to undo whatever I do. Immediately I feel enlarged and more secure, envisioning a day of intense activity at my work desk, with papers coming and going like a swirl of autumn leaves, and I beaming with confidence in the midst of it all, blithely clicking away with my bright green stapler, with staple remover.

And what’s a stapler without—well, that other staple of office desks—a pair of scissors? I need scissors to open packages and envelopes, trim nose hair, and cut noodles (not necessarily in that order). There’s something about the sound of “snip, snip, snip!” that I find oddly reassuring—although I’m not quite sure what I’m being reassured of; I’d guess it’s the same vestigial warrior in me that revels in brandishing modern weaponry—albeit a stapler in one hand and scissors in the other. (And while we’re in the neighborhood, let me add that one accessory I’m hardly ever without is a sewing kit, against the inevitable day when I’ll be struck by some catastrophic wardrobe failure—such as when my zipper came undone on a long flight to South Africa; sewing kits are tiny armories of pins, needles, and threads that can hold suits, pants, and pride together in the thickest and nastiest of social skirmishes.)

Today’s office is useless unless it’s connected to half a million other offices around the world. That should mean broadband Internet, but I’m dismayed and distressed to find that all I have in my apartment is a phone, and a clunky ‘80s model with a handset large enough to mash potatoes and hunt small mammals with. So I do the next best thing and find a splitter that will give me a phone and a dial-up Internet connection at the same time. Like most guys, I’m a lazy bum—or, rather, I won’t expend valuable labor where a simple technological kludge will do, like a 99-cent splitter that will save me the trouble and the exercise of plugging and unplugging the line from the jack every time I want to dial up the Internet, which is every five minutes or so. Of course this requires another phone line ($1.99) and—what the heck, might as well, I can take this home with me—a sleek new cordless phone, on clearance at $14.99 (I’m beginning to pile up those pennies).

These store managers are smart. They know that 50-something guys—unlike 15-year-olds whose eyes can remain catatonically glued to the same jerky figures in the same computer games for hours—have great peripheral vision. So where they put irresistibly cheap cordless phones, they also put irresistibly cheap TV remotes. I swear, these guys can read my mind. I almost forgot, but come to think of it, the TV remote in my new apartment isn’t working as it should—I’m squeezing the keys hard enough to draw blood, but all I keep getting is CNN and C-Span. OK, so I’m a current-affairs and political junkie—but I came to America to watch “Project Runway”, “Antiques Roadshow”, college football, and all the serial killers they can round up for the A&E channel. The mere thought of missing out on all that fashionista cattiness makes up my mind, and an $8.49 remote—one more thing to click-click—goes into my shopping cart.

And what’s an office without coffee—hot, black, strong enough to bring tears to your eyes and a satisfied smile to your lips? There’s a coffee maker in the apartment, and a bag of Batangas barako, a pabaon from our ninang Leonor. What’s missing is a crucial implement—a proper coffee mug. I used to travel for years with the same coffee mug, a souvenir from my first American sojourn in 1980. Like every serious coffee drinker, I take my coffee mug just as seriously; it should sit flat and solidly on my tabletop; it should be thin-lipped, so I can sip the hot brew without feeling like I’m gnawing on a flower pot; and it should be a manly mug, without any decals of petunias or cutesy animals (I’ll take a cat, but it has to be a fierce-looking marmalade Persian). I hop over to the kitchenware section, and find my mug—a squarish, large-mouthed, creamy-white bucket large enough to keep me bug-eyed all night; $2.99. I think I can get it for 25 cents at the Salvation Army—but it’ll cost me $3 in bus fares to get to the nearest thrift shop and back, so I figure I’m getting a bargain.

And now, I think, I’m all set to get some real office-type work done—like a syllabus, or a newspaper column, or an interview transcript—but the coffee’s too good, and the TV too tempting, and there’s really nothing yet to staple or to snip. The cordless phone sits smartly in its cradle, quiet as a cenotaph; no one knows my number yet, and I’ve never been one to call. I open my laptop and print out and frame a picture of Chippy, exchange silent meows, turn the TV on to some new program about forensics, and then I realize how, except for the maples outside my window, I’ve recreated home, which turns out to be an unsettling fullness, a sense of having no further excuse not to work. My fingers glide over the keyboard, peck out a word, then two, and suddenly 2 a.m. in De Pere, Wisconsin feels just like 2 a.m. in Diliman, Quezon City.