for Aida Rivera-Ford
On the eve of the Chinese Lunar Festival in October 2009, Aida Rivera-Ford invited me to her farm in Mintal to see sculptures of Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzales made by National Artist Victorio Edades. I grabbed the chance to spend some time with her, a woman writer I considered a kind of literary mother for having paved the way for those of us who write fiction in English. I used to teach her story “The Chieftest Mourner” in my Philippine Literature classes and La Mujer Esa is an icon for me. As it turns out, Aida had a more interesting story to share. And it’s not the one about Don Jose Oyanguren, the Spanish conquistador who took Davao and whom she considers her soulmate.
That balmy afternoon, we sat in a large nipa hut talking about her biographical stories and her secret: “Bengt Birgander, a very blond Swedish seaman whose fervent love for me was undeniable.” In 1954, Aida met the sailor on her way back to the Philippines after graduate studies in the US. She writes, “We had tried so desperately to get married after a shipboard romance on the freighter MS Mangalore where I was the only female on board carrying my Fordomatic car from New York through the Panama Canal to LA and across the Pacific to Manila—or a total of one month and a week.” Unfortunately, Bengt was unable to find a way to get off the ship and come back to Manila. And Aida decided to marry Donald Ford instead, the director of the United States Information Service in Davao.
Remembering Bengt and those four years of correspondence with him, Aida was giddy with nostalgia. But she was mum about why she gave it up to marry Ford, whom she later divorced. I did not want to impose my interpretation on her narrative. It was enough for me to know that the story “Ling Who Cried in the Night,” about a young woman and her tragic love for a seaman, was based on this real-life experience. It reassured me of the power of story to commit a person to a kind of immortality even as we commit him or her to oblivion in real life. Aida chose to let Bengt go, but she held on to him through story.
One year later, Aida decided to publish some of Bengt’s letters to her in our online literary folio Dagmay, and somehow, the son of Bengt found the piece. They corresponded by email and Aida found out that Bengt had died in 2008. They never saw each other again after saying goodbye in 1954. But the love they shared in the ship at sea lived on for her, I am sure.
Her choice haunts me. I cannot look at Aida today and not see “Ling Who Cried in the Night,” especially in the light of what happened to her marriage, which she also writes about in the story “Ah Korea.” I cannot imagine how she manages to justify it to herself and not feel sorry. I dare not ask her. In the story, the narrator suggests a more practical point-of-view on the romance: “If you do get married, how do you think you’ll live?”
Maybe Aida comforted herself by focusing on the practical considerations of marrying Don instead. And later, after their divorce, by training all her energies on work. She never loved another man, claiming no one was interesting enough. In the story, Ling goes mad because of losing her Swedish love, and the narrator admits, “I could not but be happy for her.” The only relief from the pain of a heart broken by what may have been the wrong choice was madness. And maybe that’s why Aida always breaks into song (in three voices) when she speaks about Don Jose Oyanguren. But I do imagine that for Aida, writing played a pivotal role in her endless post-Bengt days. She once shared during a lecture, “In my younger days, I hated to impose myself on the reader, preferring to be an observer who discovers truths about life. Oh, but it’s true: as one gets older, one dares to flaunt and inflict upon others the secret recesses of one’s life.”
I know it. Because my own writing is testament to how the burden of one’s secrets is lighter when they are brought to light.
When I left, she said, “I’ve told you the story of my life.”
The One That Got Away.
This tribute to Aida Rivera-Ford is excerpted from Jhoanna Lynn Cruz’s memoir Abi Nako, Or So I Thought (2020), published by the University of the Philippines Press. Cruz is a Full Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. Her latest book, Lugar Lang: Dispatch from Davao (2024), gathers essays from her now-defunct opinion column in Mindanao Times.