Tiangguis

By Jack Wolflink

Annie was surprised by how little the mom’s group conformed to their label. The moms looked like bikers, with curling tattoos, facial piercings, and a penchant for denim or dark leather jackets festooned with colorful patches. The group even included three dads, plus a woman Annie initially mistook for a fourth. She’d spent three months prowling local playgrounds and bouncing off of gang after gang of insular, overly color-coordinated women. This group was different. She’d seen them twice before and had been daunted each time by the breezy chatter that flowed between its members. The third time, they’d noticed her reluctance and sent a representative up to the tree line where Annie lurked with her son Tony, beckoning her to join them like a lost sheep.

These moms were literate, progressive, and welcoming. The group had bonded years ago during the early stages of parenthood and stuck together through years of elementary school pickups and summer vacations. They were proudly shunned by the soccer moms who’d given this state to Bush last November, whose static gazes made Annie feel like a bad cut of meat. Her husband, Frank, had spent years hopping between temporary appointments, and at last found something tenure-track in this tiny town. With Tony having switched schools for both first and second grade, she was too relieved at Frank’s success to worry about the size of the town they’d put down roots in. But she’d found no Asians here, let alone Pinoys. At least this mom’s group was made up of people who could hold a conversation, and of boys Tony could play with, particularly on the long days her husband was pulling to make tenure.

Before Annie knew it, the group had shaved two letters off her chosen English name, turning it into “Ani,” like DiFranco, their favorite musician. She accepted the change. Her Tagalog nickname wasn’t much different. And she liked being friends with people who didn’t want to kill her brother, Rey, who would be called “gay” in this country, though Annie felt like there was a deep-seated difference between him and the group’s paired, sweater-vested dads. But she knew they would all stand up for him, would testify for him in immigration court if they had to. In the first few weeks, she nearly forgot how white they were.

The ten or so members of the group ranged from flour-white to paper-white, the color of old baking soda, of incomplete recipes. At first, Annie was confounded by the variety of their adornments: the Che Guevara patches they wore, the prayer flags they strung from their porches, the peace-sign stickers on their cars. But underneath, the moms were of the same pale stock from which the rest of the town was drawn.

Annie realized this in the middle of a conversation with Joan, a blonde, freckled mom who preferred a jean jacket and translucent pink eyeglass frames. Joan was the fifth mom this week to ask Annie about her childhood in Kalibo, and each one had picked up so smoothly from where Annie had left off that she was starting to think they were coordinating. Joan’s style was to lean keenly forward, place one warm hand on Annie’s arm, and pepper her with follow-ups. “What else grew there?” “What was the music like?” “Did you ever see soldiers?”

Annie sighed. The first few times she’d been interrogated had been delightful. She’d enjoyed being the center of attention, watching the group slurp up her stories like the pancit she’d brought to their New Year’s party; a needed bromide for their depressed, post-election winter. By February, though, she felt less like the chef and more like the meal. The moms clustered around her whenever they heard a story starting, their eyes big and wide like her goldfish’s when she sprinkled flakes into its tank.

At first, she tried flippancy: a short, direct answer, free of texture. “Bananas, I guess? Look it up in Encarta.” This led to her first real tiff with them, a ten-day stretch where Annie’s arrival dried up conversations like a hot wind. Joan had negotiated the end of her exile in what Annie could tell was a long series of private conversations.

Then Annie tried accuracy. ABBA was as popular in the Philippines as anywhere else on the planet, so were The Beatles; and some of her friends had flown to Japan to see the Bee Gees in ‘89. Her evident love of these bands scrambled the moms’ radar. Annie’s answers kept them from extracting further stories, but left the conversations flimsy and airless, like a used smoothie cup. The moms didn’t want to hear that teenage Annie had had the same tastes they did. They wanted exotic knowledge to display at their next social; another patch on their jacket; something foreign to differentiate themselves from the surrounding town’s conformist legions. The church moms used ABBA for their Easter plays.

Annie had been happy with that state of affairs, but Joan was erudite and persistent. Her husband was a sculptor, and she taught in Frank’s department. She’d pressed copies of Freedom from Fear into each mom’s hands; stapled printouts of Chomsky’s denunciation of last year’s election onto telephone poles across the neighborhood. To Joan, Annie’s dull obfuscation was as ineffective a defense as the foil wrappers on the polvoron young Annie had bought from Kalibo’s streetside stalls.

“Earth to Ani. You okay in there?”

Joan was peering at her, eyes twinkling with a mix of curiosity and concern. Several seconds had passed since she’d asked if Annie had had any run-ins with the military. Annie’s face grew hot. She could see the assumptions swirl across Joan’s face like cream in tea. In Annie’s silence, Joan heard the awakening of brutal memories, scars left by the cutting storm of history. Joan thought she’d found something authentic, something true, and that she was on the cusp of extracting from Annie an uncut facet of reality.

But Annie hadn’t had any noteworthy encounters with the military. She’d never been attacked, or seen anyone attacked, and she knew no one who’d caught the wrong end of curfew. She’d simply listened to music, gone to school, danced to imported records at friends’ houses, and eventually taken the resort management job where she’d met Frank. She’d been in America when the revolution happened. Obviously, she’d known that her government was abusive and corrupt, but she’d been blessed with a life that was neither funded by its kickbacks nor flattened by its greed. Annie was happy with that. Why wouldn’t she be? So she could have bruises stretched over across her body, like a canvas upon which others could paint self-portraits of their empathy?

Joan leaned over and clasped Annie’s forearm. Her grip was light, but tense, the kind you’d use to scoop up a lost puppy. She was wearing her fair-trade perfume again, a mix of anise, cardamom, and orange peel that had made the rounds last month. Annie had never touched her own bottle. If she wanted to smell like food, she’d cook. 

“You don’t have to answer, Ani,” Joan said. The bony tips of her fingers moved in circles around her arm. “I’m so sorry to have asked. Of course this is one of the axes of oppression, having to perform in certain ways to be accepted by the dominant culture. I should absolutely know better. I’m unbelievably sorry to be putting you through this.”

Annie jerked her arm back. Joan’s face fell, and she clutched the abandoned hand to her chest as if it had been burned. The wind now carried the sour, loamy scent of thawing leaves.

“Please, forget I asked, again I’m so sorry to put that pressure on you,” Joan said. Her words came in a confused rush, as if they were tripping over each other to escape.

The blood that had rushed hotly into Annie’s face was now flowing down, into her arms and chest. She wondered what Joan would do if she told the truth this time. She certainly wouldn’t extend Annie this deference simply for annoying her. Joan’s panic was entitled, in a way—a fear of doing damage to the story, and not to Annie.

“Fine,” Annie said. “I’ll tell you, since you want to know so bad.”

Joan dropped her hand and blinked, the edges of her mouth quivering as if fighting back a hopeful smile. Again, Annie caught the scent of baking spices.

“I was walking through the jungle after work. This was before I met Frank. And I saw these two soldiers, who said I was late for curfew. They had big, black guns, and they said I’d have to pay a fine.”

Joan stared unblinking as Annie began the story. Her mouth hung partly open, like a shocked dog’s, and emitted periodic “oh” sounds. She hadn’t noticed the cruel smirk that Annie felt creeping onto her face.

“And one of them winked at me and stroked his gun and said, he knew just what that fine would be. That was when I ran! I ran into the jungle, but they came after me, so I jumped up and started to climb a tree to get away, but one of them grabbed onto my ankle, and I couldn’t get any higher, because he was pulling down, you know, on my leg—he was pulling my leg. I couldn’t climb higher because he was pulling my leg.” She squeezed the muscles around her eyes, trying to make them big and wet with crocodile tears.

Joan’s open, fascinated expression crumpled into a disgusted frown.

“That’s not funny,” she said. She stood, brushed dew off her pants, and sulked over to where the kids were chasing each other across the jungle gym. Giggles and shouts echoed across the park.

Two of the other moms, and one dad, went over to Joan. Annie felt the glow of her victory fading. The four of them were shooting Annie furtive glances, and she knew she couldn’t pull the trick a second time. She might have warded off further probing questions, but one prickly joke wouldn’t change how they saw her. Their glances were already turning droopy-eyed and pitying. Annie could infer what Joan was saying so closely that she almost thought she was hearing it, at least until she realized she couldn’t hear the other moms. Joan was telling them that Annie’s outburst was another facet of her trauma, and that all would be revealed if they waited and supported her for long enough.

Annie sighed, her mood ruined. Perhaps there was no way out, and she’d have to tolerate the moms until Tony was nearly grown. There were worse fates, but she was still frustrated.

Tony, at least, was popular. The other kids liked him, and he was emerging as somewhat of a leader in the group—at least, as much as eight-year-olds could lead. Today, he was teaching them a game where they used their jackets as sails to catch the gusty spring wind and try for the longest jump from the jungle gym’s top rungs. He was marking each landing with a furrow in the mulch. Joan’s son, Chase, caught a hefty breeze and fell further from the rungs than anyone before him. The children shrieked with delight at the new record.

*

An hour later, when they’d come back home, Tony asked to watch TV. Annie usually refused, but she felt burned-out from the mom’s group and didn’t want to think. Excited, Tony began to scale the front of the TV cabinet, presumably to extend their set’s collapsible antenna.

Annie hated his impatience. Frank had screwed the cabinet into the wall, but she couldn’t help but imagine the whole thing flipping over, crushing her reckless son beneath a welter of sparks and splinters.

“Halika dito, Tony,” she said. Tony kept climbing. They’d wanted to raise him bilingual, which required one parent to speak each language at home. She’d asked Frank, ironically, to speak Tagalog—his fluency was enough for Tony’s early years, and Annie was keen to sand down the sharp peaks of her accent. But Frank was never home and Annie couldn’t muster the exuberance he used to keep Tony excited about lessons.

“Delicado yan,” Annie said. No response. She cursed. At this point she was basically speaking English. The kid was absorbing nothing.

“Tony, get off the damn cabinet right now or you’re grounded,” Annie said. Startled, he dropped to the floor with a jaunty, infuriating bounce.

“Sorry mom. I just didn’t know what you were saying.” He looked up at her brightly. “Can you move the antenna please? It picks up Cartoon Network better when it’s pointing left.”

Annie sighed and nodded. The TV came on with a click of a knob. She swiveled the antenna until the sound came in clear. TV was the problem, she’d told Frank. A bilingual kid needed parity. But Frank was busy, she was exhausted, and the channels came only in English.

*

Frank called to say he’d be late again, so Annie let Tony zone out for the rest of the afternoon. Vacuuming, laundry, dishes, cooking, then dishes again after a quick and silent meal. None of these chores expunged the playdate from her mind. The gleam in Joan’s eye as they talked; the cocked, eavesdropping ears of the other parents; the way the other kids imitated Tony’s games. Tony’s resistance to language lessons—how he hated learning a language useless to his peers.

Annie had once vented to Joan about the language struggles. Joan suggested teaching Tony things that he could do with his friends—were there any Filipino games, or plays, or songs they could perform together? Annie had bristled at the idea—how terrible to think of blonde kids in barongs—but now she was at her wit’s end. Her world was upside down: her culture was demanded by people she didn’t want to share it with, and rejected by the one person she wished would love it.

Tony was watching a cartoon purple dog scream at looming shadows. The TV mesmerized him in a way Annie could rarely muster the energy to achieve. Behind her, the sink drain gurgled.

She recalled how offended Joan had been, how her eyes and lips and chin had all been drawn tight, like saran wrap, when she’d understood Annie’s joke. Her pulse quickened at the thought. Tony might never speak Tagalog, but in that exquisite moment between starting and ending the tall tale she’d told Joan, Annie hadn’t cared. She’d found something else worth her while. Something achievable.

The dog show was rolling credits. Annie grabbed a marker and some cards. “Tony,” she called. The corners of her mouth kept pulling up into a wicked curve. She managed to soften her grin by the time Tony turned around. “Do you want to learn some new words? We can stay up until your dad gets home.”

*

Two weeks later, Joan passed Tony an invitation to Chase’s birthday party, hosted in her wide backyard. On the day of the party, paper flags fluttered between the trees, and Joan’s husband Russ fired up their new gas grill. Russ was in high spirits—he’d just been accepted into the inaugural class of the World Trade Center’s first artist-in-residency program. They were going to spend the summer in Manhattan, with Russ staying behind at the start of the school year to wrap up the program. Joan was all grins. When she brought out her kid’s ice cream cake, lit by eight burning candles, the kids were all screams. Annie still felt a chill from the moms. From a chair at the edge of the lawn, she chipped at her slice of cake. It tasted like sweetened glue. 

During presents, Russ sidled up to her. He wasn’t one of the honorary moms, and so was unaware of the tension between Annie and the group. Black stubble sprouted from his cheeks—was he anticipating a more accepting environment, or simply preparing to fit in with new colleagues? Either way, right now he looked like a divorcee, except for his smile, which lingered at the sides of his mouth and eyes even when his attention was elsewhere, as if his cheer was too ingrained to ever be released.

“Your son was teaching me a phrase in Tagalog,” he said. The name of her language came apart in his mouth like overcooked chicken. Annie kept her mouth shut and tried to match his smile.

“I’m not sure if I’m saying it right,” he continued. His mouth twitched before he said the words, as if practicing. “Mel-ekkin tah-ee?” He said it means big guy.”

Annie gave a slow nod. Excitement flooded into the gap between the smile she was performing and how she’d felt about the party so far. Annie had to switch from pushing her smile up to trying to force it back down, to hide her joy behind an expression of bland curiosity.

“Tony taught you that? Goodness, I’m glad it’s getting through to him.” Annie repeated the Tagalog words back to Russ, pronouncing them deliberately so he could learn.

After a few tries, Russ huffed in triumph. “Malaking tae,” he said. The syllables rolled smoothly off his tongue: mah-lah-king tah-ii. Annie cackled. Russ blushed and tried to cover it with a grin. Annie choked back the hard edge that had crept into her laugh, tilting it into a girlish giggle. She couldn’t let them suspect.

“Okay, try the whole phrase,” she said, raising a hand like a conductor.

 “Malaking tae ako,” Russ finished. The personal pronoun settled at the end of his sentence like a maraschino cherry.

Annie clapped him on the shoulder, beaming. “Great job. Really fits you, Russ! Go back and tell Tony.”

Russ ambled over to the kids and took one knee near her son. What they said was lost in the party’s ambient chatter, but over the next few days she began to hear the phrase shared by both children and adults, when she met them at the playground or brought Tony to other parties. The moms began to use it as a jaunty greeting—“Malaking tae ako!” followed by a happy giggle and the resumption of their previous conversation. Each time Annie overheard, she felt a warm, spreading glow, like the bite of a knife into a pig’s neck.

*

After that first successful caper, Annie found herself welcomed into the heart of the mom’s group for a second time. With Tony—who was only too happy to share—the target of their incessant questions, they let Annie chat about whatever she wanted to: Clooney’s performance in O Brother, Where Art Thou, Pierce Brosnan’s in The Thomas Crown Affair, the scandals of Britney Spears.

But in May, when Joan and Chase left to help Russ start his residency, the group grew unsatisfied with these routines. Their hunger for what that first taste of Tagalog had given them returned. Frustrated, Annie used Tony as her conduit to introduce increasingly absurd behaviors to the group. She told him that farting at meals was a sign of respect and gratitude for the food prepared. She taught him to extinguish candle flames by spitting on them. She said to throw chicken bones over his left shoulder while eating and tell his friends it “kept the devil away.” Each “tradition” that the moms endorsed drove Annie to further frenzy. Was there nothing too boorish, too crude for them to squeeze into their expectations?

The moms spent the summer sitting together on park benches, picnic tables, and lawn chairs, sharing wine and sandwiches, while their kids farted, littered, hocked loogies at each other, and shouted Tagalog homophones for vulgar English words. The parents watched with brittle, indulgent smiles. After two indulgent weeks, they’d begun talking behind Annie’s back about how to intervene Annie knew she was excluded only because they were—at last—afraid to make her feel disrespected.

Before, Annie would have been enraged by the furtive conversations, which evaporated as she entered earshot. Now, she loved them. The social maze she’d forced the moms into was delightful. More than once, a park ranger drove over to ask them to rein their children in. Each time, the moms descended on them in an angry gaggle, offended at the merest hint of the state imposing itself on their children’s learning opportunities. “Do we look like riff-raff to you? Do we look like rubes?” they’d say, until the rangers left them alone with a warning and a promise to clean up.

Annie managed to keep her ruses going all summer, but as August approached, she could tell the group was close to a consensus on how to ask Tony and Annie to stop being so generous with what the moms perceived as their culture.

Annie sensed the group’s patience drawing to a close. Joan and Chase were returning on the last Saturday in August, and the moms decided to plan a welcome party on the day following. Even Frank was available, at least for the early afternoon. The moms were keen to hear all about New York and were only too happy to accept Annie’s offer to plan an activity to occupy the kids. Perhaps this last humiliation could be the talisman she needed to endure the coming years of condescension guised as curiosity. She could return to the memory, like her mother’s rosary, when she got too lonely.

Annie chose a state forest just outside of town, a quaint picnic area with plenty of open space to absorb the children’s shrieks. She bought packs of yellow and purple costume feathers at Michael’s. August was the wrong month for an Ati-Atihan, but Annie had twisted things far more already.

When she got home, she found Tony seated inches in front of the TV, watching a diminutive boy-genius plot in a fantastical laboratory. He peered curiously at the feather packs she unloaded.

Annie beamed down at her son. “Do you want to learn something else to teach your friends?” she asked.

*

Hot dogs sizzled on the park grills, attended by two of the moms and a dad.

Magpies harried the edges of their picnic, hoping to seize a bun or two when backs were turned. The wind carried leaves and the scent of charcoal, though it was unseasonably warm. Joan had come with a new, shining leather jacket and stylish wool cap, which she stuck in her pocket after a few minutes in the sun.

The kids had immediately run to a thicket of newly planted pines, near enough for the moms to monitor them by sound, but far enough to test their growing sense of independence. Tony had rushed off after them with the bags of feathers and the rest of the kit Annie had given him. She kept glancing at the thicket, where shadows shivered in the yellow sun. Her ears strained to discern whether the emerging laughs and shouts were concordant with her planned activity.

When Frank arrived, she spared him a minute wave and smile before returning to her nervous vigil. Her husband blew her a kiss, then joined the moms seated with Joan on a picnic bench.

Annie turned back toward the thicket. The volume of the shouts had dropped a level, and an empty feather bag had been taken by the wind. Tony must’ve described the Ati-Atihan to his friends, as she’d predicted. What they would make of it was her next test.

Annie jumped at the sound of Frank whispering in her ear. “Honey, can I ask you something?” She stood. He only used terms of endearment when he was mad at her. She nodded. They took a few paces away from the thicket and the tables.

“Why is Joan calling herself a shithead in Tagalog?” he asked.

“What was that, honey?” Annie asked. She fluttered her eyelashes at him.

“Malaking tae ako—“I’m a big shit?” I just heard her say it. She thinks it’s ‘hello.’”

Annie huffed. “Just a little prank.”

“Whose prank? Joan said Tony taught her. Are you teaching our son to curse?”

Annie gulped. “No, not really. Sorry, I just thought it’d be funny.”

Frank’s voice dropped to a dangerous purr. “Jesus, Annie, you made me be the Tagalog speaker at home. And instead you’re using Tony to mess with people? What the hell is happening?”

Her nose flared with rapid breaths. “Nothing, Frank. Just nothing! I—I felt—”

Crunching leaves. Joan approached them, lips pursed and eyes narrow beneath her glasses. She cocked her head at Annie.

“Sorry to interrupt, Frank. But I was told that the kids are spitting on candles now? And throwing chicken? Annie, do you have anything to say about this?”

Annie stuttered. Her gaze darted from Frank to Joan, Joan to Frank, and, for a split second, past both to the other moms, all staring at the three of them. All this time, and she’d never paused to devise an alibi.

A child’s shout broke the pause. Chase, she thought, letting out some kind of war cry. Attention shifted away from Annie, and she managed a few desperate breaths.

“Aaaahhhhhhh!” came the cry again. Chase stomped out of the thicket, his sheaf of blond hair marred in places by black paint. He held his shirt in one hand, like a flag. Every muscle in Joan’s body went tense.

Chase beat at his chest as he stepped more clearly into view. Behind him came Tony and the other boys. All of them had smeared their skin, forehead to waist, fingertip to fingertip, with gobs of black paint, covering up their natural pale shade. The whites of their eyes bulged wildly from black-painted sockets, and the costume feathers had been arranged into crude headdresses. They marched into the clearing, stomping and shouting, as their parents watched in shock.

For years, Annie knew, the moms had fended off their kids’ requests for Cowboys and Indians parties with patient, oversimplified explanations of their disapproval of ethnic cosplay. But now their children were taking the worst parts of that concept and adding—in full mockery of those years of effort—blackface. Nothing would as starkly demonstrate their failure.

Annie couldn’t help herself. She began to laugh. Deep gales of jackal laughter shook her, even as Joan began to cry, and the magpies carried off a pair of unattended hot dog buns, cawing out their triumph.

*

Eight Years Later

Tony dragged his roller bag through the Manila airport, rushing to make his transfer to Kalibo. His Birkenstocks clapped against the tile floor. Each step felt portentous to him, heavy with the accumulated weight of social debt. Until this moment, the only other Filipino he had spent time with was his mother, Annie, and even then, he’d tried to avoid her as much as possible. Boarding the flight was a revelation: familiar faces, half-familiar words, and a way of inhabiting space that felt to him both utterly alien and completely natural. He longed to reach out and touch them, these other Filipinos, to ask them about their lives, their traditions, their relations. But he knew he was bursting with long-thwarted energy and didn’t want to force them to be the receptacle of his flood of anguished ecstasy, his excitement at seeing people like himself and bitterness that it had taken him so long to come here. He had managed to sit quietly for the eighteen-hour transpacific flight, and the next four hours after transferring through Hong Kong. He could wait fifty minutes to meet his uncle, Rey, at the Kalibo airport.

There, in Rey’s house, he would turn seventeen, would learn his real language and understand his real heritage. His mother had made a bizarre game of lying to him about his culture and encouraging him to share it with his friends, and eventually, their parents. He’d been popular, then, and taken to it with an eagerness he now understood to be naivete. This was a world in which one could not even trust parents.

Tony hated those memories; hated to recall how the white kids he’d grown up with used what they understood to be his culture as an excuse to wild out. The process had escalated into a full-scale breakdown by the end of the summer 2001, when Annie had taught him a made-up blackface dance as a means of humiliating his best friend’s mom. Just two weeks later, his best friend’s dad was killed by the destruction of the Twin Towers. Though unrelated, the grief and shock was too much for their social circle to bear. His mother’s exile from the group opened up fault lines in his parents’ marriage, made Tony into a scapegoat for his now-former friends, and sent Annie cycling through years-long cycles of obsession and paranoia. Four years ago, when the divorce had been finalized, his father had become one of the few men to be awarded full custody over his child.

Tony pressed his face against the jet’s plastic window to stare at the jagged, rocky islands they were passing over. Each one contained a lifespan’s worth of history and companionship—wells his mother’s actions had hidden from him. The last time he’d seen her was last year—the only time he’d freely chosen to come to her apartment—when he’d berated her into giving up the contact information for his uncle, Rey. He’d spent the rest of the year researching the logistics and getting Frank to let him visit the Philippines on his own, rather than waiting another decade for his father’s illusive, much-promised sabbatical.

The jet came in low over the bumpy, tan tarmac. He clambered down a stepladder with peeling red paint. There was no access ramp in sight. There was so much green here: the grass, the trees, the corrugated roof of the terminal building. Concrete traffic barriers were decorated with hand-painted wooden mask designs.

Rey waved to him from the edge of the tarmac, instantly recognizable with his long, magenta-streaked hair. He’d been eating pieces of roast chicken out of a paper tray, which he now walked over to a trash can and dropped in. He wiped his hands on a bandanna and tucked it into a pocket. Nobody seemed to mind his appearance, and Rey didn’t look like he’d care if they did. Tony trusted Rey immediately.

“Kumusta!” Rey shouted, beckoning with one hand.

“Helloo!” Tony replied, matching the way his excited uncle drew out the final syllable. They hugged, walked through the terminal, and flagged a brightly painted tricycle, sitting close together in the sidecar. Tony hugged his luggage close as the vehicle rumbled to life.

“So exciting to see you, Tony,” Rey gushed. “You came at the right time. Today is the Ati-Atihan festival—the biggest in the country. You’re Aklanon, you should know. We’re famous for Ati-Atihan.”

The words tickled at the edge of Tony’s memory. He’d heard them before, but why?

“What’s that?” Tony asked. He gulped, reminding himself it was okay not to know. Why else had he pushed his dad so hard to let him make the journey?

“It’s a parade, a festival,” Rey said. “It’s our way of honoring the indigenous people here. Honoring the treaties we made to parcel out the land.”

Tony nodded, confused. Weren’t Filipinos the indigenous Filipinos? Rey must’ve dumbed things down for him, using tropes Americans would find familiar: natives and settlers, breaking bread. He bristled at the patronizing undertones, but shook the feeling off. He’d have no need of Rey’s analogies once he saw the real thing.

“Treaties? What treaties? With the Spanish?”

Rey laughed—a splashing, liquid sound that soothed Tony’s tensing brow. “No, with the Ati. The Spanish called them Negritos. Your mom didn’t teach this? Datu Kalantiaw, the Maragtas?”

Tony shook his head. None of his mother’s fabulisms had been this specific. He used the weight of details to push down on his sour sputter of unease.

Rey clapped him on the shoulder. “Then you’d better not miss the start of the parade! You ready to hang on?” He grinned. Tony swallowed, then nodded.

Tony gripped the sidecar’s rebar railings with each hand, then gave a resolute nod. Rey saluted and gunned the tricycle onto a packed-dirt highway. Dust and rocks flared up from the rear tire, and the road shook Tony from toes to teeth. Nevertheless, his heart was glowing. Green hills drifted past, like clouds. They were his hills. This sooty, spicy air was his. Through all the chaos of his life, it had been the pull of this place that had kept him upright, like a wizened tree stabilized by ropes staked to concrete pilings. Refreshed by the headwaters of his culture, Tony knew his tree would grow up tall and independent, able to crack concrete with its own roots.

Rey took Tony’s bag when they pulled up to Kalibo’s central plaza. People were crowding around temporary bamboo fencing, chattering in anticipation. “Go on ahead of me, you’ll be able to squeeze into the front. I’ll keep your bag with me. We’ll go to my place after and I’ll show you your room,” he said.

Tony nodded. He slipped under armpits and between chatting couples. Chanting and stomping echoed off a wide cathedral, although the parade was still out of sight. His heartbeat thrummed with anticipation. The Ati-Atihan was the year’s biggest festival, and it would be his first direct experience with his own culture. Nothing could be more auspicious.

The chanting reached a crescendo. Tony could tell by pitch that it was mostly kids—hundreds of them, probably from many local schools. He couldn’t stop smiling.

For a moment, what Tony saw when they rounded the corner matched his nightmares so precisely that he thought he was hallucinating. Boys in feather headdresses, purple, blue, and yellow. Boys with their exposed skin recolored, head to toe, with oily black paint. Boys wielding costume spears and beating their chests and shouting. As Tony watched, a few of them dropped into low, splay-legged stances, and bared their teeth to howl.

But the black paint was not covering the white skin of his childhood friends. These were Aklanon children, just like him, marching in black paint in the hundreds. Their stomping sent shockwaves through the ground, all the way across the road, to where Tony stood frozen. He glanced back, at Rey, in desperation, but his uncle had climbed onto the hood of his sidecar and was watching the parade with undisguised pride.

Tony realized, then, that Annie hadn't lied—or at least, not entirely. The horrible day in the park, when he and his friends had made feathered headdresses and coated each other in black paint was being repeated, entirely organically, in front of his eyes. During that picnic, he had thought he was sharing the fullest of a long line of Filipino cultural traditions, leading his friends in a celebration of his heritage. In the years since, he had thought all of it was his mother's cruel joke, one in which he hadn't even been the target, yet was still the primary victim. How he longed for the spitting, the farting, the chicken bones to be the truth he found here. Instead, it was the worst trick of all, the splitting wedge that had torn his life asunder and mocked the very idea of inclusion. He had spent years searching for a glimpse of his true heritage, not knowing he’d already seen it in the deplorable act of ethnic parody his mother had tricked him into leading.

Tony pitched against the bamboo fence, and he clung to it to keep from falling. His spine, it seemed, could not remain rigid, and there was nowhere else to which he felt a pull, except down, into this place, the hungry earth which had spewed his mother forth. His knuckles paled where they gripped the railings, and he heard startled voices warbling around him. But he could not let go. He couldn’t even rest his feet. The bamboo creaked as he hauled his flopping legs onto its lower slats. Any part of him that touched the ground, he feared, would sprout thick, fleshy roots and bind him forever to the soil.

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Jack Wolflink is a Filipine-American writer and bureaucrat based in Denver, Colorado. He has a Creative Writing M.A. from Wilkes University and his stories can be found in Kinsman Quarterly and the Lighthouse Community Anthology.

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