My first childhood memory was of listening to songs and chatter from our old G.E. radio. I thought our radio housed real people inside. I spent my days fascinated, wondering when they would come out. If they slept and ate like real people. Curious, I once pried open the back cover hoping to catch people as they did their broadcast. Yet all I saw were glass tubes flickering in the dark, not tiny people.

‘After follows before’

When Tatang (a term for father in Filipino), was elected mayor of our hometown of Gapan in the early 1950s, I was the youngest of the siblings, so I often went with him and our Inang (Mother) when they visited constituents in the far-off barrios. Gapan, Nueva Ecija, is one of the big rice-growing towns in Central Luzon. Once, my father was invited to officiate at a wedding in one of the outlying barrios. As mayor, my Tatang and Inang were honored with the best seats. Then the hosts tried to seat me with the children at a separate table. I refused. I wanted to sit with my parents at the head table. Embarrassed, my Tatang grabbed me and seated me with the children because my refusal had turned into a major temper tantrum. In my four-year-old mind, I deserved the same rights as the older people, so I howled and cried. I got a spanking, but stood my ground.

A field visit (Watercolor by Mabel C. Bautista)

‘Everything is relative to every other thing’

Although ours was the typical postwar Filipino family where the father was the breadwinner and the mother the homemaker, decision-making was done by both of them equally and with respect. You wouldn’t know where the real center of power lay: Tatang was gruff and quiet, sometimes almost unfathomable, while Inang was forthright, more vocal and fierce with her convictions.

We had rules in the house:

1. No swearing (or Inang threatened to soap off our mouth with her laundry bar)

2. All children in the house before dinner although we could go out and play afterwards

3. Everyone must pitch in with household chores

4. Study, study, study!

5. Wishes of older children always come first; the younger ones could have theirs later

6. You can eat as much as you want: the more, the better (to Inang’s eyes, a round child was a healthy child)

7. Prayers before bed; Sundays are for church (although Tatang was exempted and went only at Christmas and Easter, if at all)

Tatang was distant and stern, never our go-to person if we were in trouble. We usually consulted Inang. She was more approachable, a straight-shooter who was both kind and strict. I remember being pinched for talking too much, or fighting with my siblings.

Tatang liked to trim our nails when we were small. It became a ritual. Each Saturday, he would line us up, and we would wait one by one as he pared our nails with a pair of small, sharp scissors. There was no nail-cutter yet in those days. It was a sight my father relished. With his unlit favorite tobacco pipe dangling from his lips, he would boast how clean our nails were afterwards.

When we went on picnics in the countryside, Tatang would skewer native chicken on a spit. He taught Inang how to cook, and then she learned on her own how to prepare leche flan and the favourite dishes of our childhood: arroz valenciana; haleyang ube; ginataang bilo-bilo and munggo; puto; suman and cuchinta. Of course, we would have our daily fare of fried tulingan and labahita, paksiw na bangus, sinigang na hipon, burong mustasa and pinakbet. For breakfast, we had fried fish— tuyo or daing or tinapa—and eggs over-easy with rice. And once a week, longganisa or tapa.

‘Easy gives way to the difficult’

During my grade school days, I attended the afternoon sessions. This allowed me to go to the wet market early in the morning to accompany my mother— trudging my bakya (wooden clogs) over muddy side streets in search of cheap fish, vegetables and fruits. I lived for the treats: a handful of bayabas (guavas) or siniguelas or kaimito or santol, or lanzones if they were in season.

Inang was resourceful; always brimming with ideas to keep us busy. One summer we spent cutting out stamps from discarded mail in the court back rooms in Balayan, Batangas, where our father held trials in the summer. We spent weekend mornings by the beach. After lunch, we sorted our stamp collections. At night, we fell asleep to the clatter of bats flitting among coconut trees.

After school during regular school days, Inang would cook shredded young coconut meat into bucayo (sugar-coconut patties) or other delicacies that our younger brother Roy and I would sell on a bilao, a flat bamboo basket covered with banana leaves, on the street corner closest to our house.

I also remember jars of fermented nata de coco lining the upper shelves of our kitchen cabinets in our old house in La Loma, Quezon City, which bordered Manila. Inang grew the fungus from a mother “nata” or “culture” she bought from Blumentritt Market, a bustling market past La Loma’s famous Sabungan or Cockpit, and the North Cemetery where famous public figures were buried.

The family home in La Loma (Watercolor by Mabel C. Bautista)

Nata was harvested and preserved in syrup and became our signature dessert at the yearly May feast in La Loma, our neck-in-the-woods suburb about a ten-minute jeepney ride from Manila’s downtown core.

My mother also experimented with cooking on a stove she herself built from empty kerosene cans and which she then filled with sawdust for fuel, to save on electricity and gas. There was a time too when she raised chickens and pigs in the backyard.

But always, Inang was the consummate eco-warrior ahead of her time -- using, re-using and not throwing way stuff until they could no longer function, or can be recycled.

Our father went to law school at the University of the Philippines in Padre Faura in Manila. Inang completed fourth grade in primary school, but you would not believe she only reached this far because she read Ellery Queen and True Confessions and True Detective bought from second-hand bookstores. No Liwayway or Bulaklak, the Tagalog weeklies (which I devoured), for her. She found them too romance-driven. She preferred imagination and intellect combined. This included solving heinous murders and diving into the mayhem of killers, private sleuths and cops.

‘In dwelling, think it a good place to live’

Before we moved to the capital city, we had lived in a nipa-and-bamboo-and-wood house in San Lorenzo. That was the tiny house Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay visited when he passed by Gapan in the early years of his presidency in the 1950s. The late president, then known as the Man of the Masses, was my father’s boarding-house mate when they were still attending university. One of the president’s first moves was to unclog cases in the courts which handled disputes involving peasants and landlords. In awe of his bar-topnotcher-and-boarding-house friend, he appointed Tatang as a judge in the Court of Agrarian Relations. Since the Court was based in Manila, Tatang moved our family to La Loma.

Judge Cabatuando (Watercolor by Mabel C. Bautista)

Our first house in the city was a small wooden house fronted by guava and ratiles trees, before our bigger house was built. I remember the carpenters of the new house tossing my Grade 1 homework and test papers for kindling when they cooked their meals. All my corrected assignments and tests with their “100%” and “Very Good” marks were lost to fire: worldly treasures I had kept in a box but mislaid and forgotten in the ruins of the old house.

‘One begets two, two begets three; three begets everything’

Inang gave birth to 14 children, but six of them died at childbirth or as toddlers. My siblings included Jose (Pepe) Jr., a lawyer; Dante, a doctor, who later migrated to the United States; Narciso, who completed two years of agriculture school; Azucena, a teacher; Roy, a lawyer who served as a fiscal in Manila; Imelda, a medical doctor now practising in Australia; and Cynthia, our youngest sibling, who took early retirement as a nurse in Texas.

Inang and Tatang (Watercolor by Mabel C. Bautista)

‘The greatest fullness seems empty’

In the fifties, as pater familias, Tatang thought it was his duty to help young relatives who came to study in Manila by providing them with free board and lodging. We always had people coming and out of the house, our beds and bunks always filled with cousins.

To manage our big household, our mother had to budget every cent. She also became a hoarder in the process. She kept everything. Old bottles, old clothes, even rusty wires and pots! She kept her old clothes even if she did not keep her waistline. She hid scraps of lace she bought in bulk from Divisoria, a wholesale market in Manila, thinking she could sew them as hemming for curtains and pillow cases. She never did, but she still kept bulks of them inside cabinets and under our beds.

If you looked at the woodblock letters on top of walls separating the three bedrooms of our old house, you would see the letters M W M. They stood for M-eron, W-ala, M-eron—or Full, Empty, Full. For Inang, that was the cornerstone of her life. To live securely and without debt, with food on the table, savings in the bank. She would rather be a lender many times over, but not a borrower. I think growing up poor made her hoard. She could not part with the old stuff because she thought she would have need for them later. The first Girl Scout in our family, she always wanted to be prepared.

Memories of food (Watercolor by Mabel C. Bautista)

‘The highest fame is to have no fame’

On his retirement, our father decided to continue his law practice by handling pro bono cases. He died from a stroke at 75, while arguing in court on behalf of a farmer in Nueva Ecija. Our mother followed soon after; dying at 67, from a broken heart.

(Note: All subheadings are quoted from Tao Te Ching, Translated from the Chinese by Chu Ta-Kao, A Mandala Edition by George Allen & Unwin (Publishers), London: 1976.)

Patty Rivera

Patty Rivera is a poet and writer in Toronto

More articles from Patty Rivera

The Magazine

Growing Up in La Loma, Listening to Lao Tzu