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MOMOTARO IN THE PHILIPPINES
Here, peaches come from boxes that smell like Europe, from cans made of a tin-coated steel.
I lie with the peaches soaking in saccharine darkness until freed.
I don’t recognize the children who run towards me. Their faces like the feathers on the feet of birds. Their slippers repeating that melancholic drone. “Wake up,” they say.
“Wake up.” And as I rise from the dreamy fluid—oh, the America,
which preserves me—I press my sticky forehead on your sun-
freckled hand. I love you, am sorry,
am not a warrior, no hero. I
fight for nothing, am stingy. I ate all the peaches from the can from the box from which I came.
WHEN THE MAN AT THE PARTY SAID HE WANTED TO OWN A FILIPINO
I should’ve said, all I’ve ever wanted was to own a 70-year-old white man (which is what he was),
but I didn’t say that, because it wasn’t true. Instead, I said
nothing, but I almost said, amicably: Yes, our bodies are banging, aren’t they? Our skin is leather upholstery beneath the savage sun, our eyes are fruits fallen
from the highest trees, the bottoms of our unshod feet the color of amethyst. I almost said: We will parade around your living room in a linen cloth and feed you
turtle eggs and cornioles meat from a porcelain dish.
I almost said: I’ll be your Filipino, you be my Viking.
We’ll ride in a boat together. I’ll wear your horny
helmet. But I said nothing. At that party, I wanted to be liked, which is my tragic flaw. I always find myself on the street smiling at people who look to be Neo-Nazis.
I call it a “safety smile.” Rarely do they smile back,
but I would hug them if they needed it, if I think it would spare me. I used to wonder if this amenability
was inherited. Raja Humabon, a Filipino king in the 1500s, did not resist Magellan’s missionary agenda.
Humabon greeted Magellan and his Christian lord
with friendship. Maybe out of genuine religious feeling,
or maybe servitude and friendship are a type of fire-
retardant, protection from the torches that burned down
the villages of the chiefs who refused to kneel. Of course,
there were some who refused to kneel, and maybe this is also something inherited, along with everything else,
all the possible variations, and it doesn’t take me long to realize the flaws in this notion of an inherited friendliness.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, the white husband
of my parents’ friend showed me pictures of his Filipino wife in different bikinis, the ones she sent him in letters before he hopped on a plane to the Philippines
to marry her. He had a 5x7 album full of these photographs,
these flirtations. It made him nostalgic to sift through them.
“What’s good about my wife,” he said, “is that she’s easy
on the eyes.” A tuft of his chest hair appeared from the collar in his shirt, and the soul inside of me nearly choked on its own regurgitations. Before I could ask if he’d sent her
pictures of himself, I heard his wife’s bright cackle from the other room, like the firing of artillery from a distant ship.
I noted that she was not easy on the ears, that she was
not easy at all. I realize now that this story was never about us being owned, because we will always own ourselves. This story is about the way the world believes that it owns us, holding
its album of pictures in its wishful hands. And we are not amenable as much as we are insidious. We are the cornioles,
who, after being eaten alive by a whale, enters the whale’s body
and takes small, tender bites of the whale’s enormous heart.
ORIGIN STORY
1.
Not Eve, but Eve’s Filipino half-sister, bad dancer, lute player, naked and fat, fermenting grains, painting veins with berries and clay, shoots the shit with snake and tree beneath moonlight, while God, Eve, and even Adam make fires in caves, drawing pictures of buffalo and horses on walls, like a bunch of wacko, hallucinating tunnel dwellers.
2.
“When you were born,” my mother tells me, “You resembled our statue of Buddha.” Not the thin icon, not the skeletal, ascetic Siddhartha Gautama, but Pu-Tai, the fat one in American Chinese restaurants, symbol of abundance and generosity. She says: “You always drank too much soda. Your father gave you whatever you wanted, even if it wasn’t good for you. That is why you were happy.” Hedonism is not natured, but nurtured. As she finishes telling me this, she stretches her stout body along the loveseat in her newly bought suit. She burps after her snack of fried chicken. She asks me to rub her feet while she watches Jeopardy, and then, she offers to rub mine.
3.
Not Eve, but Eve’s serpent, imbibing fruit juices and writhing her leggy body on the branch of a tree. I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons before God took them away as punishment. Maybe she wanted them to go. She wanted to feel the earth, her origin, warm on her belly. Where are the legs now? Perhaps, at the bottom of the ocean, alongside the remains of the Ark, a pair of ancient nylons is steadily disintegrating.
4.
“When you were born,” my father tells me, “you looked just like I did.” He hands me a black-and-white picture of himself in a crib, a weeping baby. How pleasurable it is, as a child, to instantly find your origins in some earlier being. The future is predestined. I see my eyes in his eyes, his crooked gait in my crooked gait. I look up at my father. I think: In a few years, I will be a sixty-year-old Chinese man with a black-and-white mustache.
5.
Not Eve, but eve. Before my father was my father’s father, a man who had twenty children with numerous women, a man who drank and smoked and did not wish to die. Before my mother was my mother’s mother, a woman who lost her legs, like the wonderful, wise serpent who initiated life and earthly joys. Eve. The day that comes before an important day. A name given after shame. My brother tells me that when I was born I had a mark on my head that resembled a tree, and it grew fruit until it disappeared. That’s a myth. The truth of the story: after us, there will be another, then another, then another.
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