Family Journeys Through Peaks and Valleys: With Recipes by the Pulse

By Demetria Vargas

These essays are true narratives about the author’s life with her Philippine family of origin. It covers her childhood and early adult years in the Philippines between the 1950s and 1970s and her more than three decades of working as a permanent resident in Canada, and then continues with her retirement years alternating between these two countries. Reflecting on her roles as daughter, granddaughter, niece and sister to six siblings, she describes joyful and unhappy incidents in the context of alliances and alienations formed between her and her elders and those between her and her siblings. Stories about her magnificent parents and other elders show how life’s joys become more rewarding when shared with deserving, meaningful relations; those echoing from the valleys are reminders that when a hand is extended to somebody hurting, it invariably eases the pain and oftentimes inspires gratefulness and reciprocity. Both peak and valley journeys provide a glimpse into the all too often inexplicable intertwining of chance and choice as the actors in this sort of tragicomic family play sought validation for their respective sense of person at certain points in time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796093315

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Copyright © 2020 by Demetria Vargas.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Biography and Autobiography

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Rev. date: 04/02/2020

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

A Preview of the Memoir

An Answer to Why the Title to this Memoir

MOSTLY ABOUT MAMA

CHAPTERS 1 TO 8

Chapter 1 Putting in Context Fouling the Fair

Chapter 2 Mama Carried the Day

Chapter 3 Onward with Mama’s Recipes

Chapter 4 The Empanada War

Chapter 5 The Truth That Set Me Free

Chapter 6 Beauty Is As Beauty Does

Chapter 7 Paying Back the Dead

Chapter 8 The Beloved’s Goodbye

THEN, TOO, THERE WAS PAPA

CHAPTERS 9 TO 16

Chapter 9 The Other Beloved Great Presence in My Life

Chapter 10 My Love Affair with Lechon

Chapter 11 My Father Did the Bump with Me

Chapter 12 Saying I Love You Slant And Out of Time

Chapter 13 A Visit from Papa

Chapter 14 The Deliverance

Chapter 15 Displaced Persons in a City Cemetery

Chapter 16 Coming Home with Me

AND OF COURSE LOLO, MY FIRST BELOVED

CHAPTERS 17 TO 21

Chapter 17 My Grandfather’s Treats

Chapter 18 My Resilient Grandfather

Chapter 19 A Granddaughter’s Yen

Chapter 20 A Most Loving Letter from a Daughter to her Father

Chapter 21 In Memory of a Good Samaritan

THERE WERE MY FAVOURITE UNCLES TOO

CHAPTERS 22 TO 25

Chapter 22 No-Strings-Attached Giver

Chapter 23 Beautiful Magical Money

Chapter 24 My Kind of Hero

Chapter 25 Lumpia Shanghai at the Gold Medal Party

MY MUCH-LOVED BROTHER AND SISTER

CHAPTERS 26 TO 30

Chapter 26 Wholehearted Giver

Chapter 27 From Bane to Blessing

Chapter 28 Fortune in the Hands of the Brave

Chapter 29 The Return of My Brother

Chapter 30 Letter to my Sister as I Leave Cebu Back to Canada

EPILOGUE

A Rather Long Epilogue

For

Felix and Omar, my steadfast witnesses

and

Armi Labitan, for her spontaneous treats

PROLOGUE

A PREVIEW OF THE MEMOIR

When I was teaching in a community college in Canada, I had to deal with some conflicted situations in my classroom. Somehow, as my students and I drifted towards resolving them, they spontaneously returned me to remembrances of saddening and hurtful happenings involving me and my Philippine family of origin.

In this memoir, I use those unstoppably intrusive reminiscences as a jumping-off point to reflect on my journeys with my first family through good and bad times. While the bad incidents look like they form the centerpiece about my family’s rather tragicomic narrative, I didn’t intend them to be so; I really meant them to serve as a foil, though quite glaring, to my remembrances of dazzlingly good happenings and amazingly magnificent people in my life’s journey. On this, I’ve to point out that all of us involved in these stories had our own measures of heroism and villainy in turn. Doubtlessly, in the end, we all have been touched, in one way or the other, by both the good and bad that happened, which later may have combined to form lights beckoning us to be better persons as shown by our having been validated by our respective intimate and social circles.

I have organized the narratives in this memoir into a prologue, five main parts, and an epilogue. The prologue An Answer to Why the Title for this Memoir and Chapter 1, Putting in Context Fouling the Fair, put in perspective my rationale for recounting unpleasant, unhappy tales alongside vibrantly joyful ones. I’ve presented the good and bad stories in five parts. Part I recounts the trials and rewards for Mama, my beloved mother, who survived and at times even carried the day over some trying spots in our family journey with her unparalleled humility and natural sense of fairness, topped with her continuing to choose to be joyful despite its snags. The narratives in Part II naturally intertwine Mama with equally challenging and rewarding incidents involving Papa, my also quite beloved father. In Part III, I go back to that glorious bond I had with Lolo, my first love, exploring why there was that special affinity between him and me as he privileged me to journey with him through the last valleys in his life. Part IV continues with narratives about my maternal uncles who’d given me treats and love that have made me feel so special and left me this almost unquenchable desire to express gratitude for whatever good I continue to receive from present benefactors. And Part V, the last section, tells about my having been beyond lucky as I’ve held on to loving relationships with two much-loved siblings. Here and there, I’ve written Mama’s recipes by the pulse, i.e., instructions mostly in her mind that she complemented with eye estimates and quickness of hand, which I associate with these unpretentious star foodies I’d been fortunate to have shared such delightful food with.

The epilogue is a last-minute lucky add-on. It embodies old soulful poems I’d written about my parents and grandfather, originally in Cebuano, my compellingly beautiful, passionate, first language. It also recounts how, by happenstance, these came back into my possession just when I acquiesced, though with a sense of loss, to just omitting them from the memoir. Grateful to this lucky turn of events, I’ve reproduced them as part of the epilogue with English translations. It could be said that the presentation of these sonnets of love for my now dear ghosts, which I’ve written way back twenty-five years ago, may well provide significant confirmation for my present version of the truth about these happenings.

January 12, 2020

AN ANSWER TO WHY THE

TITLE TO THIS MEMOIR

One of my glowing memories about growing up in what in my mind has become the Camelot-like village of Paraiso in Cebu, Philippines is that fiesta celebration Mama and Papa hosted for family, friends, and acquaintances in February 1955. It was a celebration bigger than past fiestas — a kind of thanksgiving for Papa’s having been promoted to a production manager’s position when he went back to his old company in Cebu a few months earlier. This was no ordinary promotion; it recognized his having successfully trained mill and kiln workers in a new cement plant in Lutopan province in the northern Philippines. Consequently, he was promoted to third in rank from the top, after the general manager and vice manager. What made this outstanding was that he was given the position as a practical engineer even though he didn’t have a professional degree in engineering as the two other managers above him did.

Watching the fiesta guests come and go through the evening, I was so impressed with how Mama saw to it that the black table at our bungalow’s back porch, prepared for those too shy to mingle with other guests inside the house, was continually supplied with oodles of rice, chow mein, adobo (pork or chicken braised with bay leaf, peppercorn, onions, and garlic), lechon (roasted pig) slices, cassava cake, and a pitcher of Pepsi Cola. I could hear about seven not so well-dressed market and itinerant fish vendors say "Thank you, Nang (Respected Elder) Patring" for every refill of a dish Mama asked the maid to bring to the table. I noted they didn’t address her as Mrs. Vargas, her more recent honorific title as the wife of the new production manager, but she didn’t mind. They complemented their thank you with shy smiles, some of them toothless, as she’d remind them to eat a lot since they had to go a long way back home. On the other hand, what I felt as I watched both Papa and her in the dining room while they entertained elite guests who were dressed to the nines, was pride for their carrying themselves in a very dignified manner. Like Papa looked quite deft and dependable as he cut off the tail of the lechon (roasted pig) lying at the center of the table — to wish all the guests good luck. And Mama showed herself to be most deserving of praise for her cooking as she served her to-die-for morcon (beef meat roll, a variety of the Spanish matambre). The vice manager’s wife, the company hospital’s resident doctor, asked Mama if she could have a second slice. Discarding her usual reserve, she told Mama that her morcon was just so tasty, and then asked: You have a secret recipe for this, Patring? Mama, just right friendly, replied without sounding dismissive: "I do it by the pulse, Doktora. You know … eye estimates and quick hands."

Mama’s polite reply, avoiding her detailing of what indeed may have been a secret recipe for her, struck me as admirably smart and gracious. Later, when I was studying sociology, I’d remember her interchange with her important guest as showing what some sociologists have pointed out as two requisites for a harmonious social living — common sense and courtesy. Hence, to give due honor to my mother, who, from her layperson’s situation, in fact, provided evidence of the formal sociological premise about harmonious societal living with her natural courtesy and implicit reference to common sense, I have worked into this memoir her astute recipes by the pulse and made it part of its title.

I’d refer to this fiesta memory when I taught sociology and anthropology in the 70s at a prestigious university in Cebu; I’d naturally extend it to an interpretation of how Papa and Mama shared not only abundant food but also their joy and gratitude about their new impressive, prestigious social placement with both elites and poor in our village. I’d tell my mostly Catholic students that I’d often hear them thank God, even in casual conversations, for having given them the grace of finally living in one of the coveted upper-end houses provided by the company— a three-bedroom, yellow, stucco-plastered cement bungalow at the village bench, after eight years of living in a lower-end seaside house for laborers, which had walls of amacan (woven strips of bamboo trunks) and roof of rusty galvanized iron. Looking back, I figure their gratefully attributing their success to God had a humbling effect; their acknowledgment of grace bestowed on them was greater than their claim that hard work and ability earned them their new privileged status.

In contrast, I have another vivid memory involving my family origin when I was in my early thirties, which somewhat puts a pall to that golden remembrance I have about that warm and friendly class-bridging fiesta celebration. It has to do with what would become a quite common drop-of-a-hat antagonistic, overtly hostile treatment one or the other sibling would dish out to Mama over the slightest misunderstanding or provocation. This happened when I first arrived in Winnipeg, Canada as an immigrant with my husband, Felix, and our seven-year-old daughter, Bianca, in the summer of 1978:

I’d invited Papa and Mama and my older brother, Ben, and his family to come to my barely furnished one-bedroom apartment in downtown Winnipeg for supper. It was my welcome dinner for Papa and Mama, who’d come from the Philippines to visit with my three, financially well-established siblings as Felix and I with Bianca, our seven-year-old daughter, were just starting to settle in the new city in the past two months. Mama was behind Papa, Ben, his wife, and son as they were walking out of the elevator to the foyer of my ninth-floor apartment we’d just rented in the past two weeks. I watched them come out of the elevator; Mama looked like she was fighting her tears. Whispering to her good-hearing right ear, I asked what happened. She told me softly in a few words that it was the same old story where she felt Ben, unstopped by Papa, was again rudely dispatching her point of view as if she counted for nothing. I knew from their conflicts in the past that, yet again, she was feeling trivialized. For some reason, I’d become her automatic champion since I was a little girl. This has led Papa to describe the two sides of on-going conflicts in the family as six against one. That one was I, the only one among their seven children who’d consistently stick up for Mama when others had issues against her. Unfortunately for everybody, this feuding would blow up into more explosive antipathies and resentment, which even now I look at as a convoluted bunch of rigid accusations, hints of explanations, tentative speculation mixed with almost incredible but objective chronicling (which I try to stick to in this memoir) of incidents, and disbelief and shame about some conflicts continuing in the present.

On that otherwise cool June evening, I heatedly cornered Ben and Papa in the bedroom of the apartment. I told them how Mama had been quite hurt by their recent exchange. As expected, my intervention evoked a hostile glare from Ben; it got dismissed with Papa’s half-chastising me: "Haay, Demetria, maskig maglukdo pag tai ang imong Mama, humot lang siya gihapon para nimo. (Geez, Demetria, even if there were excrement on top of your Mama’s head, she’d still smell sweet to you.") Though disappointed that he wasn’t protecting Mama from Ben’s antagonism, I didn’t resent him fully because I sensed that he’d said it with some admiration for my continuing loyalty to Mama.

I was right about not making him so bad; for, momentarily, I’d hear his soft comment during dinner time when I served the morcon meat roll Mama had brought over, which she’d made earlier at Ben’s house: "This morcon, so well-done." I knew he was referring to Mama’s fine culinary skills, not to the meat cooked just right. I liked him again for saying that. Hence, regretting I got angry with him, I curled my toes inside my house slippers, and then I relaxed them when I heard my sister-in-law swoon about the deliciousness of Mama’s morcon. I thought she was exaggerating it to make Mama feel good; indeed, it was some kind of a Band-Aid for the hurt spot in Mama. It worked. Mama sounded like she’d bounced back from the earlier unpleasant incident as she said with a smile: You like it. I’ll make some more before I go back to Cebu.

A common thread that could be pulled out from both these harmonious and conflicted family incidents is the food-sharing dimension in them. A few years later, I’d tap these remembrances to beef-up my discussion of the fabulous potlatch feasts in my Native Studies courses, which I taught at a community college in Manitoba, Canada. I’d use this to prime my students to explore the significance of potlatch activities among the hierarchical Northwest Coast aboriginal groups like the Nisga’a, Tsimshian, Gitxsan, Haisla, Haida, and Kwak waka wakw First Nations. One apparent link, a student from the Tsimshian community suggested, was the potlatch providing an occasion for compensating for past wrongs and healing rifts and differences within the tribe. Then, too, she pointed out, it was a leveling mechanism where the elites hobnobbed with people outside the royal circle to share their material advantage and, more importantly, the tribe’s priceless cultural heritage.

Her observations connected to my subsequent reflections regarding the sharing of food during that public fiesta and the private family meal I’ve recounted: The Philippine fiesta had an equalizing measure similar to the potlatch; my parents hospitably shared a meal with the poor guests who usually didn’t get invited to the houses of well-to-do people. A comparable theme between the potlatch and that Winnipeg family supper had to do with moves to sort out and soften an inflicted hurt. Belatedly, I’ve credited my father for having been quick on his feet to kindly focus our attention on Mama’s delicious morcon on the table even as I felt a mix of admiration and luoy (pity) for Mama while I watched her try hard to carry on the civility Papa started. In fact, Mama also realized that she was kind of pitiful. In a picture of her and Papa posing by Kmart store in downtown Winnipeg during their visit in 1978, she wrote at the back: My dear Demet, here’s a picture of your poor Mama. I knew that what she meant by poor had less to do with money; it had more to do, from her and my viewpoint, with how she’d be pitifully shoved during most family conflicts.

Now then, I bring these interlaced remembrances and thoughts forward, connecting them with the popularly quoted maxim of John Wooden, the American basketball player and coach Hall of Fame awardee and persuasive self-development guru: All life is peaks and valleys. Don’t let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low. Having found this quote opportunely in the Internet’s Brainy Quotes website as I was exploring possible titles for this memoir, I thought it was a more picturesque way of remembering the Buddhist tenet of moderation, which has always appealed to me. Thus, I settled for peaks and valleys as part of the main title for this memoir to refer to its underlying theme of enjoying treats and sorting out snags as one journeys through life.

In my life’s journey, for some reason, I’d have fewer problems with arrogantly heightened peaks. Then, too, I’ve had unexpected small and substantial breaks from deadening, often unwholesome, potholes in my valleys. The serendipitous occurrence of such reliefs was beautifully captured in the October 7, 2019 issue of Baba Mail’s Internet website. It had an astoundingly brilliant comedic review, edited by Violet Tar, about modern humans’ evolutionary line starting with our earlier primate origins. In twenty sketches, it showed the road ascending towards becoming human. It was strewn with a lot of bumps on the way and walkers in the middle of the line who slouch and drag themselves although fatigued with an almost defeated feeling of being lost. But then, from out of the blue, there popped up comic reliefs and fatigue soothers like an end-of-the-line marcher’s nonchalantly asking who farted? Or, that facilitating lift from an unexpected VIP intervener at one junction, pointing to the right pathway. Or, that heart-tugging frame which has the end guy swooning without envy as he sees before him two precursors of Romeo and Juliet — managing to hold hands even as one was ahead of the other in the line-up.

This brings to mind a recollection which has been etched in my memory turntable. Carol, my researcher colleague at a government agency in Winnipeg during my early migration years in Canada in the 80s, would describe her weekend luncheons with her rather competitive, every now and then unfriendly siblings and their families, even when it was biting cold outside. She’d told me that despite chills from the weather and sometimes from some family’s cold-shouldering her, she and her husband with their two children would still go out with the Yap family every Sunday to a popular restaurant in Winnipeg’s Chinatown for a lauriat meal of no less than ten dishes. Sharing with me during our Monday coffee breaks some special Chinese pastry she’d bought from the restaurant, she’d definitively declare: When you really come to think of it, food is indeed the great equalizer and happy maker. And then, she’d enumerate, without faltering, the ten dishes she had as if she were still eating them. I recall now how impressed I was that this observation came from a voluptuously beautiful, very competent and bright, thirty-something woman who made it sound as if food were the ultimate human appetite. I had to agree with her as I felt in my mouth the crunch of the sesame seeds wrapping her bochi (sweet yam wrapped in ground sweet rice) treat for me.

Here then are essays with some of Mama’s recipes by the pulse, i.e., mostly in her mind, complemented with eye estimates and quick hands, which I associate with my favorite people as they journeyed through life with dignity and decency; wisely, they enjoyed life’s peaks and some treats in moderation and moved forward from low, every so often potholed, valleys with common sense and courage. Now, as I turn seventy-three, I look back believing that these crests and troughs came to be because of the inexplicable intercutting of the human will to satisfy certain needs and longings with what the Japanese philosopher-novelist Haruki Murakami acknowledges, with seeming resignation in many of his writings, as inevitable accidents and happenstance. These timely or untimely convergences, he suggests, form the person that we have become — a separate raindrop, yet, inescapably, still a part in a vast stream of rain. My astoundingly brilliant philosophy professor at one of Cebu’s university would refer to this resonantly as the mystery of the concurrence between free will and destiny. True enough, for I’ve surely lucked out in knowing and loving these extraordinary peak moderators and valley perk-uppers who have helped me create a meaningful, rewarding tapestry of life.

October 12, 2019

MOSTLY ABOUT MAMA

Chapters 1 to 8

CHAPTER 1

Putting in Context Fouling the Fair

Looking back at my teaching experience in a community college in Canada at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I have two indelible scenes that flash in my mind. The first has to do with one of my students apologizing to me for having treated me with fierce disrespect during one class discussion. This was after I had also apologized to the class for what I believed was my accurate but rather passionate, sometimes aggravating, discussion of the then still volatile and sticky issue of aboriginal rights in Canada, which, on the second take, may have been insensitive to the view of the other side. Somehow, his apology raked out from my heart a sad yearning pertaining to my mother. At the time, I wished that her children, my siblings, who’d treated her badly, had apologized to her like what my rather self-possessed, fifty-something student had humbly extended to me. His humble act, contrasted with the way he had arrogantly dispatched my opinions in class, still send a ripple in my heart. I remember how he bent to touch my shoulder with his eyes filling as he clearly said, I’m sorry, Demetria. The second goes back to that time when I was exceedingly grateful for my thirty-something student’s intervention in an angry exchange between me and a middle-aged returning student over what she called my senseless term paper writing guidelines. Yet again, what I felt after he’d chidingly called out to my hostile critic Don’t talk to her like that. Show more respect, was pleased vindication like that which my mother must have felt when I’d champion her against some antagonistic siblings’ misplaced criticisms. Unstoppably, both incidents summoned harsher and sad flashbacks of my siblings’ refusal to recognize, much less apologize, for making Mama shed what she called blood tears during nerve-wracking family conflicts. Through the years, these became unresolvable antipathies and inconsolable hurts, which, consequently, congealed antagonistic sides with Mama’s obvious derogators and about two fence-sitters on one side, and Mama and me, her only constant champion, on the other. My siblings’ blatantly callused withholding of remorse, apologies, and reparations for their hurtful exchanges with Mama as well as what had continued to be strained relations between them and me and my present family as shown by their spreading unkind rumors about my daughter would be the staple in Mama’s and my chats through the years.

Reflecting on how my thoughts went back-and-forth from present to past, from classroom to family affairs involving tensions and resolutions, I’ve been struck by the dominant thread of my uphill struggle to champion Mama even as I had (and continue) to cushion myself and my new family from some of my siblings’ derogatory and belligerent gossip. This has so gripped my mind to a degree that they’ve become a part of what I’d call my real past narrative somehow extending towards the present.

While I’ve not hesitated to talk about these happenings with close friends and family, who were either directly involved or indirectly witnessed them, I had this constipated ambivalence about sharing them with others in black and white, though I’ve written essays about them which I’d just kept till now.

The constraints