At home with equals

Once upon a time, I lived in the United States, after Ninoy Aquino was assassinated and the economy here came crumbling down. Overall it was a fun time. In the beginning it felt like I had turned alcoholic to survive. I bought a gallon of Smirnoff vodka at the neighborhood Walgreens, kept that in a kitchen cabinet. When I came home from work before six, I would pour it over ice and drink anywhere from one to three of those until I dropped off to sleep.

Then I had to get up at 5 a.m. and start my trek to work — walk, train, bus, walk again. I worked as a secretary for eight whole hours. If they wanted more than that, they had to pay time-and-a-half, plus dinner, plus cab fare, and twice the pay on weekends. Only I knew I had been a vice president in the Philippines. Every time I typed up their proposals I made my own judgment: poor, mediocre, difficult to understand. When I resigned to move to another office, they gave me a goodbye dinner and expressed shock at the restaurant I chose. My Greek boss said he had not realized I was that aggressive, not assertive, not a comment on my good taste. It said something else to me.

That night opened my eyes. I was a secretary and secretaries are never equal to their bosses. They are inferior, belong to an inferior class, belong to middle America. When you’re a boss you belong to upper-class America. You probably graduated from Harvard or Yale and you belong to a class all your own. Only I knew I belonged to that class but no matter what I did I could not find my way in there in the USA.

One had to spend two years and a half finding one’s place. Through those years, my company was vodka to assuage my anxiety. I had tons of anxiety about money, life, staying in America, sending and keeping my children in school, finding some sort of happiness. I knew vodka soothed. At the end of two years I found my way into my class of Filipinos, also a bit different from most Filipinos there and I began to have fun. I began to drink less.

Back in the Philippines and retired, I want to extend a hand to foreigners here and introduce them to my class. We have a class system in the Philippines and it is equally difficult to crack. It reminds me of the Indian caste system and we who are born here just maneuver ourselves in and out gracefully with our language.

How do you talk to your maid or driver? In the same way you talk to your equal at the office? Of course not. Even as children, we spoke differently to our yaya, differently to our mama, and differently to our lola. We add levels of politeness and courtesy to the tone of our voice and the choice of our words.

So I’d like to invite foreigners to my restaurant, Lily Pad, in Calamba. First I invited a French gentleman who bought several copies of my book, We’re History!, from my market stall. Then I met an American lady executive, a Texan, in fact, at my travel writing class. She had to leave early because she could not sleep the night before, was freaked out by ants and cockroaches and a mouse. I had lived in Houston for a while. I wanted to mention road kill — dead armadillos and the intense stench of skunks you discovered driving across Texas — but as disgusting as those were, they never sent me home. Road kill was part of life in Texas. Ants, roaches and mice are part of provincial life here.

But because I want to be hospitable to foreigners here and she really seemed nice, I still invited her, sent her instructions on how to get there, spoke to her driver who said he could follow them, then was alarmed when she sent me text saying they could not find their way and they were turning back. Another group who was there had followed the very same directions. So something had gone wrong there. Maybe her driver did not read the instructions well. When I spoke to him he seemed fixated on Los Baños and I had to tell him it was in Calamba.

So far, I have only been partially successful in my invitation to foreigners, but I hope my skills will improve with time. All I want is to break through class barriers and get the same classes together. That’s what I hope to do. As I grow older I want to take the lessons I learned and do something about them.

Once upon a time, I lived in the USA and was hardly invited to dinner at the home of an equal. Maybe I can turn that around in the Philippines.

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