Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(10)

“Napabayaan sa kusina!” Like she was left alone in the kitchen! was a common joke with Paolo and his pals. They said it often and with the heckling tone that belonged only to big brothers.

“Napabayaan sa kusina!” Paolo said, rolling off his chair, clutching at his stomach, and dying from laughter.

“Stop!” I said.

“Napabayaan sa kusina!” he said once more after getting back on his seat.

“I said stop! I’m telling Mama!” I said.

“I don’t care. You’re fat. I don’t care.”

“You used to be fat, too!”

“But I play soccer now. And you, you’re just here playing with your pretend babies and talking to ghosts and coloring and reading and fatfatfat!” he said, sticking his tongue out.

“Yaya! Yayaaaa!” I said, beginning to cry.

“Paolo, stop it now,” Lorna said.

“Bleh. Yaya ka lang.” You’re just a nanny.

There was no winning against Paolo. My yaya said that he was a bully because he never got to spend time with his real father.

“He’s just lucky your papa loves him like his own son,” she said.

She took me upstairs, played a Betamax movie, and sat me in my plush bed. She fetched a tray of biscuits and rice cakes, and fed me again and again. And again.

Paolo changed the way all nine-year-old boys did. He became sweatier, stickier, taller, leaner, and meaner. While I was asleep, he struck silver forks against each other to make that scratchy, metallic sound that hurt the inside of my ears and the back of my mouth. He kept telling me that I had no shot at becoming a Ninja Turtle, especially not Donatello, because I wasn’t street-smart or ninja enough. He knocked down my Lego towers right before I could top them off with the last block. He hid my dolls. He ate my candy. And he never ever—not in a bajillion-gazillion galactic years—let me play with his Game Boy.



It was the first half of 1990 and Papa and Mama were rarely home.

Paolo reported the headlines to our yayas, pretending to be a news anchor and holding a Pringles can at chest level—his microphone.

“Mikhail Gorbachev becomes president of the USSR. Michael Jordan averages sixty points per game. MC Hammer tops the charts with ‘U Can’t Touch This.’ Imelda Marcos appears in court. And Arsenio Hall is TV Guide’s Personality of the Year.”

Paolo read these facts out loud repeatedly, from the television screen and from covers and pages of glossies from the duty-free American store, to which our tutor would say, as if she weren’t in the company of children under ten, “Ayayay! The new decade is all about politics, superstardom, sex, money, sex, money, money, sex, and fame.”

My parents’ lives were much the same.

Papa frequented Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Abu Dhabi, and the United States. He made deals with hotshots in the Arab world on oil and car-part imports to and exports from the archipelago, and deals with those hotshots’ fathers and brothers to recruit Filipino men and women for blue-collar jobs. He met with elite Chinese businessmen—the kind who played golf and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, and, like us, spoke perfect West Coast English—for trades.

“I give them something they want; they give me something I need,” my father tried to teach us. “It’s simple, it’s business.”

Mama ruled on the other end of the machine. She was a doctor, among many other things, and could approve a working-class man’s work permit based on health. Papa found them jobs, and Mama checked them for TB and STDs, and charged the OFWs—overseas Filipino workers—a fixed fee for their services. People needed work and they paid my parents to get it. Papa said that it was a genius plan for the ’90s—the decade of climbing the ranks and living life in full color.

Until the midyear crises struck.

As our televisions announced and blared, hundreds of people died in an earthquake in the northern mountains of the Philippines. Mama lost a few distant relatives and childhood friends, but was only fazed by their deaths for a day. A few weeks later, on August 7, 1990, Papa and Mama shook their heads and tsk-tsked in front of the television when the news anchor said that the United States was to join the coalition against Iraq.

“Anak ng puta,” both my parents said. “Anak ng puta yang si Saddam.” Son of a bitch, that Saddam.

The Gulf War began.

Papa repeated the anchor’s words for days, saying them under his breath and sweating, “Saddam. Naku. Diyos ko, huwag po. Not my men, please. Spare them. Not my men.”

My parents’ recruited laborers were displaced and dispersed throughout the Muslim-Arab world, caught in war zones, and Papa and Mama had to retrieve them, by all means, dead or alive, Papa explained to Mama. He rolled out a map of the world on the breakfast table and drew a red circle around the Middle East. He marked Xs where his men had likely scattered: Kuwait, Riyadh, Doha, Al Wakrah, Jeddah, and Abu Dhabi. He had Paolo bring him his plastic toy soldiers, which he positioned throughout the map—representations of where American troops were likely stationed or had attacked. Papa said that they had to pay countless officials, airlines, agencies, and civilians for repatriation. And he warned Mama that the mission to get everyone back would cost us tens of millions—my father’s FossilFil Project alone had ten thousand Filipino workers.

“Thousands of workers,” Papa said. “Good god.”