Out of Cebu: Essays and Personal Prose

By Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Out of Cebu collects 28 essays by award-winning Cebuano author, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Many of the essays are about Cebu, Philippines: its history, her experiences growing up in the port city, and colorful accounts about her mother's political relatives the Cuenco family. There are also travel and food essays, all told from Brainard's unique point of view of a Cebu-born writer now living in the United States.

Professor of Education Edmundo Litton says, "Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's essays are invaluable to students as they reflect on their own life journey. These essays celebrate a pride in a heritage. Brainard is clearly proud of her Cebuana heritage and this pride shows in this magnificent collection of essays. No doubt, educators and students alike will be enthralled by the details and pictures created in these essays."

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the author and editor of over 22 books, including the novels, WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT, MAGDALENA, and THE NEWSPAPER WIDOW.  She has received a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Brody Arts Fund, and an Outstanding Individual Award from her birth city of Cebu, Philippines, among others. Her literary endeavors is considered a significant contribution to Filipino, Philippine American, as well as Asian American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PALH
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781953716392

Book preview

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART I

Where the Daydreaming Came From

Learning How to Survive

My Father

My Grandfather

Remedios and Mariano

Lola Remedios and Her Sayas

How I Learned to Make Leche Flan (Or How I Met My Husband)

Lengua

The Writers’s Path in California

Haggling in Peru

Death of a Carnival Queen: Concepcion Cuenco Manguerra (1912-2002)

Finding God through Mary

Life in Parian Now

Taking Care of Dylan

Kiki

PART II

Another Look at Magellan’s Journey around the World

Images of the Filipina in Literature

Museo Sugbo: A Story of Hope

Cebu’s 1730 Jesuit House

Aula Angelorum: The Secret Hall of Angels

Finding Jose Rizal in Cebu

Sagada

New Orleans and the Philippine connection

Diaspora in Italy: One Filipina’s Story

The Ghosts of Siena

Visiting Colonial Mexico

Kenya’s Big Five and the Bongo

The Holy Land

Acknowledgements

Another Look at Magellan’s Journey Around the World first appeared in the anthology, Journey of 100 Years: Reflections of the Centennial of Philippine Independence, edited by Cecilia Brainard and Edmundo Litton, PAWWA 1999.

Aula Angelorum: The Secret Hall of Angels first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, April-May 2009.

Cebu’s 1730 Jesuit House first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, October 2009.

Death of a Carnival Queen: Concepcion Cuenco Manguerra (1912-2002) first appeared in Weekend Sun Star, December 15, 2002.

Finding God Through Mary first appeared in the anthology, Finding God:True Stories of Spiritual Encounters, edited by Cecilia Brainard and Marily Orosa, Anvil 2009.

Finding Jose Rizal in Cebu first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, June 2009.

"How I Learned to Make Leche Flan (Or How I Met My Husband) first appeared in the anthology, A Taste of Home, edited by Ed Maranan and Len Maranan-Goldstein, Anvil 2008.

A shorter version of Kenya’s Big Five and the Bongo was published under the title of Up Close and Personal with the Bongo in Town & Country Magazine (Philippine Edition), January 2011.

A version of Kiki first appeared in the anthology Cherished: 21 Writers Celebrate Animals They Loved and Lost, edited by Barbara Abercrombie, New World Library, 2011.

Life in Parian Now first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, November 2008.

Learning How to Survive first appeared in the anthology, Behind the Walls: Life of Convent Girls, edited by Cecilia Brainard and Marily Orosa, Anvil 2005.

Lola Remedios and Her Sayas first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, August-September 2009.

Museo Sugbo –A Story of Hope first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, June 2010.

The Writer’s Path in California first appeared in the anthology, From America to Africa: Voices of Filipino Women Overseas, edited by Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, Fai Resource Management Inc., 2000.

Visiting Colonial Mexico first appeared in Zee Lifestyle Magazine, November 2010.

Where the Daydreaming Came From first appeared in the anthology, Cebu We Know, edited by Erma Cuizon, Anvil 2009.

Preface

Iknew Cecilia Manguera Brainard first as a fiction writer, writing from the U.S. but grounded in the physicality of Ubec, Cebu, of course―her fiction seemed to grow from a rich childhood of fruit trees and shadows and household help gossiping and telling stories, a Catholic school from which her father picked her up every day, a close family, and the food of Cebu.

Later when I got to know her as a friend, I discovered another layer which involved her deep interest, research in and thinking about, Filipino history, particularly Magellan, who died, of course, in Cebu.

I visited her in her current Cebuano home in the Parian, and we walked past the old Jesuit house down the street. Thus I found this collection of essays charmingly familiar and yet fresh and new: I didn’t know the complete story of the family history, of Lola Remedios running a printing press, of her mother’s entrepreneurship, of the lola whose body didn’t decay (a saint?) or even of how Cecilia herself ended up in the U.S. and, much later, was able to realize her writing ambitions. I liked her ‘courtship story’ featuring leche flan, and her admission that she still gets a dinaguan ‘fix’ once or twice a month at one of California’s Goldilocks outlets―of course, her American children won’t eat that!  Cecilia’s historical essays are just as interesting, just as original, with a fresh take on Magellan’s death and on Filipina beauty, and more Cebuano history.  A beautiful collection!

Susan P. Evangelista

Professor

Palawan State University

Introduction

Iam pleased to offer twenty-eight essays in this book, which I have entitled Out of Cebu: Essays and Personal Prose , a title inspired by Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa . The title is not supposed to suggest that my essays are as elegant as Blixen’s. What they do suggest is that all the essays, whether they be personal in nature, or more academic in tone, or entertaining as the travel articles try to be, came from someone who was born and raised in Cebu, with solid Cebuano ties of ancestry dating back to the 1830s if not earlier, so that even after over four decades of living in California, the point of view of the essays still have a Cebuano slant.

The essays can be categorized simply by saying that there are essays that look inward and essays that look outward.

The essays in Part I look inward and are more reflective and personal in nature, for instance, Where the Daydreaming Came From and Learning How to Survive, which look at my childhood. I have included in this Part essays that deal with people close to me because they are very much part of my personal stories.

Part II has essays that look outward, at historical events, for instance: Another Look at Magellan’s Journey Around the World, New Orleans and the Philippine Connection, Images of the Filipina in Literature. This part also includes reprints of travel articles of the different places I have visited, including my beloved Cebu, Mexico, Italy, Kenya, and the Holy Land.

It is my wish, always, that my writings offer my readers not just enjoyment but some new insight about people and the world around us.

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

PART I

Where the Daydreaming Came From

Ihave always been prone to daydreaming, traits which sometimes got me into trouble. Pay attention, Cecilia! the nuns used to tell me. The upside to the daydreaming is that the active fantasy world led to storytelling, which led me into writing. 

But let me trace my beginnings to see where this daydreaming came from.

I was born and raised in the island of Cebu where my mother’s people came from. My father and his people came from another part of the Philippines—the North, Laguna specifically, where people spoke another dialect and ate meat and vegetable dishes with strong flavors.  Laguna used to fascinate me for the simple fact that my father was born and raised there. Otherwise, it looked like any other provincial town, with a city hall, old church, and Spanish colonial stone and wood houses. I never lived there and only heard secondhand stories about my father’s family, about how for instance they had owned huge tracks of land which my grandfather gambled away. Laguna was a kind of mythic place which I didn’t really know.

It is Cebu I know. The very first breath I took was in Cebu. My first words were those spoken by Cebuanos. Even though I’d gone on to live in other places in the world, it is as if I carry a part of it within me always and likewise I feel as if Cebu has a place for me always.

My mother was in the nearby island of Opon for the fiesta of the Birhen sa Regla (Virgin of the Rule), patroness of the place, when her birth pains came. This was in 1947, two and a half years after Liberation. She had to catch the ferry to hurry to St. Anthony’s Maternity Clinic in Cebu City. It was Doctora Ramona Fernandez who assisted her. She had to be summoned in the early morning. On November 21, at 8:30 a.m. I was born, the fifth child of my mother, although one had died during wartime and so I grew up with three siblings. I was a large baby, almost 10 lbs, but with beriberi, a disease caused by thiamine deficiency and characterized by edema, weakness, irritability, and more serious issues such as heart problems. My mother suffered from lingering effects of World War II when she carried me in her womb. She was malnourished, which meant I too was undernourished.  The lack of Vitamin B1 caused the beriberi and I almost died.

My mother turned to the Santo Niño de Cebu, the Child Jesus patron of Cebu, famous for being miraculous.  She danced her prayers just like the women you can still see shuffling their prayer-dances in front of the old stone church that houses the beloved Child Jesus. For the rest of her life, my mother always reminded me of my debt to the Santo Niño. You owe your life to him, she said, as she dragged me to hear Mass in the Santo Niño church. There I watched women dance their prayers and walk on their knees down the center aisle, and I smelled incense and burning candles, and I looked in awe at the small-sized Niño clothed in red robes, while waiting for the interminable Mass to end. I continue to make it a point to visit the Santo Niño when I’m in Cebu.

Back in 1947, from the clinic, I was brought to the house my family lived in, in Talisay. It was a temporary dwelling, a place my parents and their three children stayed in after the war ended. When they first got married, my parents lived in Manila, but when World War II broke out, they evacuated to Mindanao, travelling by outrigger boats, with their two young children and some servants. My father joined the guerrilla movement in Mindanao, and there they had to move and hide from the Japanese soldiers. It was there where my mother gave birth to her third child behind some bushes with a Japanese patrol walking nearby; it was there where she lost her fourth child, a boy, whom we never discussed but who had taught my mother about the fragility of babies and life in general. The beriberi had frightened her and when I was a girl she made sure I got my Vi-Daylin vitamins daily, and I had to drink milk every morning with breakfast. In the evening she made me take one raw egg―the whole slimy thing. She was constantly prodding me to eat, giving me choice morsels from the dining table, chicken gizzard and liver for instance. I recall a supper episode when I had to eat some dreaded vegetables, and finally to silence my mother I pretended to chew the veggies, only to secretly spit them into my hands and give them to one of our Police dogs.

That first house in Talisay belonged to my mother’s brother. The house was made of wood, on stilts, like a big nipa hut. It was situated near the sea and so early on I slept and awoke to the sound of waves lapping the shore and to fishermen shouting as they beached their outriggers. I was used to taking in the sea breeze and to having salt on my skin and in my hair. I was carried through coconut groves to the sandy beaches where I wondered at all the living things scampering on the grey sand, and where barefoot women sold fried bananas skewered together and dripping with caramelized sugar. I ate rice, fish, pork, chicken, seaweed, mallungay, sweets made from coconut and sugarcane, and other simple straightforward foods still eaten by Cebuanos. Even now I will hanker for inun-unan, fish cooked in vinegar with crushed garlic, salt, and pepper.

My father worked as a District Engineer. He had done other things before the war but I’d only heard bits and pieces that he’d been to Thailand, that he’d worked for some bureau, and that he’d even worked in Indiana where he’d gone to engineering school. By the time I was born, he has 59 and had already led a full life. But I think that the more memorable things that my father did was teaching at the engineering department of the University of the Philippines, fighting as a guerrillero during World War II, and constructing roads and buildings, many of them still existing. I do not think I picked up my daydreaming from him because he was a very logical, methodical person.

I am not sure I got it from my mother either, who had a keen business mind, although she was more helter-skelter than my father. My mother said she was malnourished when she was carrying me within her because she would sometimes forget to eat. She and her lifelong friend, Mercedes Rodriguez, had a buy-and-sell business, and they sold things like army surplus goods, fire wood, and just about anything they could get their hands on. Later on, they went on occasional trips to Hong Kong to shop for merchandise to sell. All her life, my mother was busy with her business ventures. I’m sure that in Talisay, we children were left in the care of servants. My sisters talk of how my mother’s sisters looked down on us children because we smelled of fish or were not dressed nicely. This was possible since my mother came from a political family with some pretensions, and the kind of down-home style of living we had in Talisay was probably too country for my aunts who carried some ancient sibling rivalry with my mother. My mother’s sisters also questioned why my siblings attended the local public school instead of a private convent school. And why were we living in a glorified nipa hut as if it were still wartime and we were in the hinterlands of Mindanao?

It was probably my father, with his logical, methodical mind who decided we had to move to better quarters.  The event that may have precipitated our departure from Talisay was the horrific typhoon that blew into Cebu. The heavy rains caused waist-high floods and the violent sea rose and roiled up the local cemetery so that corpses floated about on the flooded streets. There were stories, which I can picture in my head as if they were my own experiences, of my siblings swimming through flooded streets to get home from school. Shortly after this, my parents finally talked about building their home in the city. 

My mother’s brother helped my parents acquire the land in Cebu City, where they finally built our home, across some corn fields, near a river and the foothills, an area that was sparsely populated and remote. My father drew the plans and hired workers to construct the house. It was a Spanish-style house, with balconies, marble floors, and crystal chandeliers. The surrounding grounds were spacious and my mother did most of the landscaping, fruit trees mostly (jack fruit, star apple, guava) flowering shrubs, and low flowering plants. There was a teeter-totter and canopied swings so that even grownups could sit on the swings in the late afternoon to enjoy the cool breeze and supervise the gardener as he swept dry leaves and branches and burned them. We believed the smoke drove away mosquitoes and other insects.

There was the main house with the kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms, bathrooms, veranda, and balconies. There was another structure for the servants and the cooking hearth.