Looking for mom, the OCW

Rosalia Reyes, Filipina caregiver, took her seat in a bus somewhere in Israel on Dec. 2, when a suicide bomber who boarded the same bus made sure it would be her and several others’ last ride.

No such high drama, approaching that of Greek bathos, occurs in Carla Pacis’ novel for young readers, OCW, about a young boy’s search for his mother. All told, the novel’s plot is not so much the difficulty of being an overseas contract worker, as it is about the consequences of such a phenomenon for the family left back home.

Pacis’ story has as protagonist Tonyo, eldest of four kids whose mother leaves them for a job as domestic helper in Hong Kong. What breaks loose after their family goes through this separation is not exactly hell, but could well simulate it, at least from the point of view of pre-adolescent Antonio Peralta, whose journey to find his mom may be an analogy of the current Filipino condition, what with our traveling president–but that’s an altogether different topic.

As can be expected of Pacis, the story is well-researched, and how: one can easily picture the decrepit state of our inter-island ships, catch a whiff of the fermenting, oil-sated smell of the pier. One only has to take a single boat ride to realize that Pacis knows whereof she writes, down to the last call for "puwera bisita."

Tonyo’s adventures in Manila–first with the street children and amateur thugs, then at the church and bakery–are also convincing.

For all the trouble Tonyo goes through, we cannot help but marvel at his relatively good luck in finding solace at a church where a priest offers him a job at a nearby bakery.

The really wretched wind up as child prostitutes, sniffing glue and turning the occasional trick, but this is a young reader’s novel, not a short story by Ricky Lee or Lualhati Bautista. Of course Tonyo gets pretty close to the edge with the young thugs, but things are kept relatively wholesome.

On the other hand, what drives Tonyo to leave home and take the long road and slow boat to Hong Kong may be a bit hackneyed, but no less truthful: the abusive, drunken father who squanders whatever little savings they can scrape up.

This is a perennial problem in many Filipino homes with moms working as OCWs; those that wind up with a Ang Tatay Kong Nanay scenario with a comic Dolphy-like character as lead can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Many times what results are incest, adultery and similar abominable sins if we are to believe the tabloids and news stories. It doesn’t take much research to guess the self-immolation these families go through. And all because the father lacks strength of character. We can imagine the young readers already saying: "Bad papa!"

Tonyo’s stowaway adventure to Hong Kong is likewise replete with detail: the cramped cargo hold, the crewmen of cargo ships who turn into fixers to give passage to stowaways, the precise moment of jumping overboard into the dark water as soon as the boat docks in a foreign port.

Once in the former Crown Colony, good fortune continues to shine on Tonyo, who is taken in by a Filipino warehouse supervisor whose salesclerk girlfriend also helps in the search for OCW Lydia Peralta.

Pacis thanks her Hong Kong-based friend for the research done in this episode of the novel, who provided her with a ticket to the place in order to better imbibe the sights and sounds of little China.

Already one feels the suspense build up as Tonyo gets closer to finding his mom, at least before any suicide bomber or slashed wages do.

The cable cars, Sunday plazas filled with domestic helpers on their day off, the cramped business districts and the general hubbub of downtown are expertly drawn up by Pacis, an accomplished writer of stories for young readers.

There is even a kind of a love angle thrown in, with Tonyo becoming the link that makes his host Jimmy and Lorna closer. When we do finally get to meet Mrs. Peralta, it is evident that she too is blessed with having kind employers –not the type who would burn the helper’s hands with a flat iron, among other forms of exquisite torture that would drive her less lucky compatriots mad. Then again, this is a book for young adolescents, not a horror melodrama directed by Gil Portes.

On the down side, there are typographical errors, as if the author can’t decide what exactly to call Tonyo’s hometown, Luaun or Lauan, which is in Antique or is it Aklan, surely on Panay island.

In the end we can only applaud, not only at how Mrs. Peralta beats up her husband when she arrives home, the crumpled father figure an image worthy of a Joaquin or Villa, or the manner by which Tonyo manages the round trip to and from Hong Kong with soul intact, but also how Pacis weaves together a tale that hews close to the hard truth, never once stooping to hardsell or the easy moralizing of bleary-eyed soap.