Category: Nonfiction

My So-Called Glamorous Life As A Freelance Writer

Nonfiction by | May 17, 2009

Everyone assumes that writing is such a romantic occupation. I most certainly did—I wished with all fervent hope that I would eventually walk the path that Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad and Mary Shelley took when they made it through the annals of literary history.

In my youth, I had imagined writers cloistered away in their lavish Victorian-inspired home, dark with velvety crimson curtains and thick tapestries. Quill in hand, parchment under their elbows, these writers would look out into the vast open countryside seeing not the green landscape, but characters—fictional characters, characters of their own creation—speaking, weeping, and eventually floating back to the paper, becoming wisps of breath fashioned into the writers’ great languid scripts where both characters and writers would eventually be immortalized in written text.

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Kite

Nonfiction by | May 2, 2009

It was during the summer of 2001. I and my playmates were under the heat of the glaring sun busy making our “tabanog”. Arjan, who was four years younger than me was holding a blue plastic bag. Like any inquisitive kid, he kept on asking me, “Ate Banban unsaon paghimo ug tabanog?1” he didn’t stop pulling my skirt until I replied his childish query.

“It takes patience to make a kite Arjan. So just sit there, relax and wait for me to finish the kite I’m still making, okay?”, I carefully explained to him.

So he sat at the corner and waited for me. When I finally finished my hand made kite, I asked the little boy to structure his blue plastic bag. He was very excited that time. He drew a curve on his lips when I narrated him my first instruction, “Okay Arjan first you have to fold the bag in half and it should be flat and even.”

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From a Davao Diary

Nonfiction by | April 19, 2009

davaodiary
Move.

There I was, one pleasant morning, on a long sweaty walk that started at the Davao City Hall and led to the unimposing Gaisano South Ilustre mall downtown: moving, maybe lost, but moving. Even though according to the locals I actually came close to the Chinatown of the largest city in the world, it was a stretch that struck me as more Western than Oriental: diners and billboards, no teahouses, and no lanterns.

No matter. Why exchange sixty minutes of sun and solitude for anything else? The weather was agreeable, and I was enjoying being a traveler, as opposed to being “just a domestic tourist.” Only briefly did I stop: upon a minor assault of hunger I had breakfast at a McDonald’s at one corner of an intersection. I forgot for one reason or another to take mental note of the streets’ names, a habit I had acquired in Manila. It was something else which I let guide me: the kites being flown above –looking like seven sperm cells in the clear blue sky– or something simpler perhaps, and vaguer, such as an impulsive fearlessness of the unknown. Whatever it is, if the guide disappointed, I still would’ve moved, just moved, in what R.L. Stevenson had once called “the great affair.”

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Endangered Pink Road and Sunflower Streets of Mindanao

Nonfiction by | April 5, 2009

sunflowers
Travel is the trendsetting lifestyle in the planet. The Venusian backpack is now virtually galloping from
one island to the next for many reasons: some maybe looking for men, some looking for love, some wanting to see places, and some maybe for work. Why do women travel? How are they different from the way men travel? Women may bring extra clothes all the time, for they are privileged to decorate themselves. An extra scarf will make a difference.

One of my most beautiful travel experiences are my journeys with women. It is travel by intuition rather than linear guide book driven. Women always carry candid open secrets, real meaty stories for they pay attention to details and listen to their hearts. They can hear the wind, touch the clouds and dance in water. These are the magic in women.

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Six Degrees

Nonfiction by , | March 29, 2009

Six DegreesI am better than you. We are better than you. They are better than you. You are better than me.

What made you say that? Why did you say that? How can you say that?

Our senses are fixed only on what we perceive. Black and white. Short and tall. Fat and thin. Male and female. The list goes on and on and on. The question remains: are we really all that different from each other?

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Our Cow, Red

Nonfiction by | March 15, 2009

I cannot recall how our cow was called “Red”. Maybe it was because of his color. Red was really a bull, but I prefer to call him a “cow”. At the time Red was acquired I was still an infant. My vague memory of Red was at three, close to the concluding years of World War II.

There were trees and bushes around the clearing in the forest of Cotabato. The sun was bright and warm. Red was lying down on the grass under the shade of a tree. He had horns (like a Texas longhorn) so he must have been a bull, but I prefer to remember him as a cow. My older sister Norma, was standing on his head, holding on to a tree branch, while she picked fruits. A dog napped near the cow’s belly.

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By the Sea, Sun-Kissed Children

Nonfiction by | February 22, 2009

There is a place in Zamboanga that is almost obscured by the onslaught of the fast paced life in the city. It is there, behind the revered structure of the La Nuestra Senora de la Virgen del Pilar, past the lighted candles held by the pious as their prayers rise, past the stalls that sell cotton candies and cheap rosaries, past the old acacia tree where placentas placed in shopping bags hang from its branches.

It is a place where a mere game of basketball is almost a religion, where women with baskets of fish on their head walk on rickety slabs of wood strung together by ropes. They walk cautiously, lest they plummet to the water below, which is almost solid after years and years of human waste of every kind have amassed. But they walk with fluidity and grace, like dancers listening to the ancient music produced by the tides of the sea. The men, whose flesh are wrinkled and dark, walk with a gait that belied their years.

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On Moving Forward…Then Staying

Nonfiction by | February 15, 2009

Tonight, I look at my child, with her hair bunched up like a fountain at the top of her head, with eyes wide and seemingly wondering whether I’m going to pick her up or not, and feel something painfully heavy on my chest.

A year ago, I had made a very selfish decision not to have her. Before she turne 2 months, I resolved that the creature inside me was not going to make my life any better. In fact, I had decided that her
presence will only bring an onslaught of bad luck and a multitude of clinical depressions. I had wanted to let her go — even forced her to leave.

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