Stories à la King

THE storyteller in my mother’s family is my grandaunt Juanita, whom I often visited during summer.

A teenager with an appetite, I wanted lunch to be over. Granduncle Crispin, after coming home for the lunch my grandaunt prepared, then fell asleep in front of the TV set, newspapers opened helter-skelter on his lap or feet, splayed on his chair with the extended leg rests.

When he reported back to work, I could now read the newspapers. During the interlude my granduncle listened to the TV and scanned the dailies, he went through one or two crossword puzzles just before dozing.

My granduncle never left a square in those puzzles blank, a challenge unanswered.

In contrast to my granduncle’s completely filled-in word puzzles, my grandaunts’ magazines had pages with holes. These women’s magazines had features about food, which she clipped and filed away religiously.

Fortunately, I was not keen on recipes; only in their end results. Though all their children had moved away, my grandaunt prepared elaborate dishes.

While she took an hour or more to make con tui—a pig’s foot she emptied of its meat and bones, which she turned into a mash and then stuffed back, sewing carefully the foot-turned-sock—I was her reluctant apprentice.

Privately, I felt she could just have fried the trotter and I would have obligingly gnawed it to the bone. But this would have deprived me of listening to my grandaunt dipping into her bottomless store of anecdotes.

So while I tried to perfectly dice carrots and chayote (my personal opinion was to just delete veggies) for Chicken à la King, Tita Niting told me about her girlhood in pre- and postwar Cebu.

Beyond mediocre as a kitchen apprentice, I remember the stories. After the war, Juanita decided she was going back to school.

Great grandmother Carmen thought too much education ruined a woman, who would just end up as a wife. So these two headstrong women butted heads, Carmen certain that the absence of transportation in those gasoline-rationing days would discourage Juanita.

Age trumped youth. My grandaunt married and learned more practical things, like unstuffing and stuffing a pig’s foot. At one point, Juanita’s shoes so pained her, she removed them and walked home after class.

Ignoring those feet—which, I believe, she would just have stuffed for sausages—my grandaunt attended class the next day. That is how she finished college.

For feminists or any person striving not to be silenced, “voice” resonates. To quote Luce Irigaray, finding your “voix (voice)” is discovering the “voie (way)”.

Beyond pigs and chickens, Juanita’s stories still light the way for me.



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*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 19, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”