“Butong”

NOTHING different sets apart the husband’s “suki (preferred seller)” for coconut, the family’s shack surrounded by an oasis of dark green coconuts and browning husks beside the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road.

Ever since a Laguna pioneer returned home from working as a helper in the U.S. and used the plentiful coconut as substitute in making the local version of apple pie, “buko (young coconut in Filipino)” pie is a favorite “pasalubong (present)” in these parts. 

Due to its white sugar and condensed milk, though, buko pie can only be an occasional treat, not daily fare. Paring down to the basic and essential, the husband bought buko from this couple in their 30’s and was pleased to find that a coconut sold for P20 yielded about two liters of “water” and “meat,” a leap in savings from the P100 bottle of coco juice only sold in supermarkets. 

In Cebu, coconut fetches P40 to P50 a piece, especially during holidays when buko strips are popular for fruit salads. 

Beneficial for many ailments from diabetes to kidney stones, coconut is ideal as a snack or even a meal. The Cebuano “sagbay-luwag” that slips from the still pinkish coco shell to throat and gut has a less literary, ruder translation in Filipino: “malauhog” or mucus-like. I cannot think of anything else that looks and feels slimy but tastes so good. 

According to Binisaya.com, sagbay-luwag is the stage between “dalinog” and “butong”. Dalinog refers to a white and creamy substance surrounding a coconut sprout. As a child, I was often given “buwa,” a spherical, spongelike bulb found in germinating coconuts. Despite its strange appearance and texture, buwa is juicy and delicately sweet.

Cebuano is rich in capturing the diversity of desirable young coconut meat: “balatungol (tender),” “kuyamis (soft),” and “lamog (meaty)”. Between the Bisdak husband and the Silang-born suki, there is no loss in translation because the wife (her husband is often away on buying trips, as well as takes on tree-felling and -cutting) performs the time-tested technique of “reading” coconuts: knocks the coconut and listens to the echo to determine if the meat is young or mature.

A coconut between butong and “lahing (mature)” is called “bagatungol” or “ungol,” the latter term also meaning “grumble”. Shaken, the lahing rumbles. Harder and thicker, mature coconut meat is more filling, a bit akin to the consolation of accepting our easily peeved older selves.

When the suki recently sold a load of coconuts to a buko pie maker, she gave the husband and other buyers free water since the entrepreneur only needed the meat. Sweeter than butong is the kindness of strangers, unforeseen and thus, more exquisite.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

"Sa bangkito"

LIKE the “kabo (dipper),” the “bangkito (stool)” is a ubiquitous prop for the Pinoy’s art of making do.

It is cobbled from “retazo” wood, leftover pieces from a bigger construction project. In a country more intimate with dearth than surfeit, we learn to not just not throw away but also to put everything to use.  

Pail and dipper are necessities where faucets drip water by appointment and spew air the rest of the time. In the countryside, where meals are communal affairs, the “bangko (bench),” with its long plank of wood balanced on legs at each end, enables folks to squeeze in for meals by batches. 

The “bangkito (foot stool)” is an adaptation, a diminution of the bangko in size but not in resourcefulness. Before coronavirus disease (Covid-19) demanded physical distancing, public utility jeepneys squeezed in commuters on the bangkitos conductors pulled out from under the seats and positioned on the aisles.

Bangkitos also seat the vendors and patrons of “pungko-pungko (sidewalk-squatting meals sold by the plastic bags)” and other street hawkers of candies, cigarettes, lighters, newspapers, magazines, SIM cards, and face shields.

Papang taught my sister and I how to shine our school shoes like the boys in Colon, straddling a bangkito he painted in bubblegum pink (left over from another job). Is it because our center of gravity is close to the ground that the bangkito is a seat of repose? 

On a visit to Paete, I did not notice the bangkito in the corner of a large showroom of monumental, lushly detailed wood carvings. When the husband asked my opinion, I had to look twice at the reclining figure, so absolute in its stillness.

Barely two feet, the sleeping boy emerges from a stump of wood.  His shirt bares the uncircumcised penis, plump cheeks, and round legs ending in dingy soles.

Pillowed on his right arm, his head radiates ripples of wood. The unknown carver indulged the deep sleeper with a sea for a pillow. Only the splayed legs supporting each end of the stump reminds the viewer of a humble crib, a bangkito.

Every January, when the “novenario” begins for the Sto. Niño, the sleeping boy is not at the center or anywhere near the family altar.  This time, a spray bottle of surface cleanser keeps it company, a reminder of the universal, perpetual fight against the virus.

On the bangkito, the young-old face, slightly bruised around the eyelids, sleeps on.   When construction workers take a nap, they cover their faces with a shirt to keep out the sun or the gazes that catch them with their guards down. 

The boy bares his face, as an animal lies in its lair with exposed belly, the world with its appetites held in abeyance sa bangkito.

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata” 

Fictions

CLEARING cabinets, I found old pictures. One photo was taken at the Silver Studio, squeezed in among the automobile spare parts sold in Leon Kilat St.

The woman wears denim pants and T-shirt, the latter bright red in memory but, in the black-and-white photograph, is almost bleached of color, blending with shadows cast on the wall. 

Dwarfing her head are marble roses thrusting out of pots flanking the seated figure. The monster blossoms compete with the large crystal patterns of the rug, on which her dusty loafers rest.

Scrutinizing this younger self, I remember tilting my head a bit to the left, pulling back slightly the right foot, as directed by the woman who took my order and payment in the front office and then that photograph in the studio. 

Decades ago, my Yaya gave me a picture taken at the same studio. Within the fringed borders of her photo, Yaya stood like a caryatid, one foot slightly in front of the other, reminding me of sculpted women holding up temples. 

Or perhaps photographers just like how the eyes follow the slope and fall from shoulder to bust and hip.

I entered the Silver Studio, wilting from the downtown heat. I drooped on the stool, making no attempt to imitate Grecian statues. 

If the woman thought I was incongruous with the overblown flowers and woven snow crystals, she did not let on. Her last instruction before clicking the camera was to remove my eyeglasses.

Scrutinizing now the cupped hands in the photo, I see these are empty. Where did I keep those eyeglasses? Is this why my hands cup air, a last-minute subterfuge to hide the spectacles beneath in a pictorial that did not happen as I imagined it would?

Photography is more simulacra than mimicry. As Baudrillard writes, the simulacrum is not an imitation but the truth hiding the reality that is not true. 

According to the studio receipt, I paid on Dec. 9, 1996 sixty pesos for “JR” photos, which I claimed on Dec. 12. The receipt bears my married name. I recalled I was a coed when I attempted to mimic Yaya’s Silver Studio memento. The yellowed slip proves I was a college instructor when the photo was taken. 

Aside from worsening astigmatism (slowed down but uncorrected by the spectacles), the woman in the photo read and wrote at dawn after inventing stories for a three-year-old son took over bedtime rituals. 

Or did the stranger hoard herself for dawn, before the domestic and the academic imposed their demands?

Studio props are fakery that is true: larger-than-life roses and snow crystals in the tropics setting up the viewer for the more elusive illusion, the creature who tilts and smiles but will not say where those eyeglasses are.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 20, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spines and oracles

       

       

        COVER art is the reason I collect printed books.

When I had eyes only for Nancy Drew mysteries, I would cross the field in campus whenever I spotted a matte-yellow spine popping out in a sea of blue-and-white uniforms. 

Myopic, I passed back and forth to check the title of the book held by a stranger. This was long before Grosset & Dunlap published the neon-yellow “flashlight” editions.

Appearing in the 1980s’ editions, the flashlight did not thrill me as much as the magnifying glass Nancy peered through in the vintage copies I inherited from my mother and the brand-new ones she treated me to during trips to Paul’s Bookstore at Sanciangko St., where odor of ordure dropping from the horses drawing the occasional tartanilla mingled with the smell of books as soon as we opened the door. 

Driven by the anemic fiction collection in my college library, I became a regular at the Music House, a downtown Mecca for secondhand finds. Book spines cued me as I shuffled piles of pocketbooks for that serendipitous find. 

When I wanted to be closeted with a book in mint condition, I went to the USIS Library in Jones Ave. Everything here was hushed, from readers lost like acolytes deep in their prayers to the squeak-free caps placed under the chair feet. Only the cellophane covers of the hardbound books, with their snap and crackle, faintly subverted this order.

The USIS books rarely kept on their dust jackets with the illustrations.   Missing the paperbacks with their crass and loud covers marketed for the masses, I returned to the Music House, which had these in galore, along with a noisome creek, plumes of vehicle exhaust, and a corner bakery that served hot Spanish bread with craters of sweet filling to sustain hours of book excavating.

Because the Music House accepted trade-ins of old books for new ones, I experimented with genres and tasted authors on a student’s budget. I detoured to science fiction fantasy (SFF) novels for their covers of pure kitsch; I stayed for SFF’s unmatched tales of invention and presentiment. 

I brought home, with the Music House’s trademark price handwritten in pencil (“8L”), the 1975 edition by Berkley Books of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. The story of a fictional desert planet warring over a rare spice was rejected 23 times before published in 1965 by Chilton Books, known for printing car manuals.

For the 1975 cover, Vincent Di Fate drew a pillar of rock that could be a monstrous sandworm guarding the coveted resource from humans. Jim Tierney’s treacherously undulant cover art in the 2010 Ace edition is aptly ambiguous for our time.

Fiction is not stranger than life. Oracular, book covers are the writings on the wall. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 22, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

If

IF I were a hundred years old today, I would put my faith on a “suwiter (sweater)”.

In the American colonial-era periodical, “Bag-ong Kusog,” I came across in its editorial page a two-sentence article advising the reader to choose the right sweater and avoid catching the influenza going around Cebu on Jan. 28, 1927.

The final line clinched it, weaving fashion and public health: “Pangitaa ang ‘Sport Coat Sweater’, kon dili ang ‘Ideal Sweater’.”

The “leading periodical of its time,” according to the 1975 research of National Artist Resil B. Mojares, the “Bag-ong Kusog,” has been digitized by the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center and may be viewed on The Nueva Fuerza Online Archive.

In the age of coronavirus disease (Covid-19), this century-old publication has become my favored “layas (escape)” hatch.

Though I miss the hushed-library sensation of turning slowly an almost sacrosanct sheet of newsprint, the PDF files of the periodical are clear enough for daydreaming.

If I were seven years old in 1927, I would bite all fingers in indecision, unsure what to order and buy from the Mercer Book Company: “Ang Lunario” for P0.20 or “Pocket Dictionary” for P1.50.

More expensive than the dictionaries of Castellana and Binisaya “hinubad (stripped? unchained?)” into English, the new colonizer’s tongue, was the P2 price of “How to write love letters” at the Gacura Mailing Store on Dalan Borromeo.

Two pesos for a book was eyebrow-raising in 1927, when “50 sintabos ang bulan” or P6 for a year was the subscription price of “Bag-ong Kusog”.

If I were seven and had two pesos, I would not choose love but the Philippine Candy Factory (Telephone 388). No seven-year-old can be deaf to their siren call: “Always remember… ‘PhiCyFy’, don’t forget it, they satisfy”.

Nostalgia, exacerbated by quarantine, cloaks the past in romance. A shipment of “Crown” bicycles “for men and boys” was announced in a half-page ad on Jan. 28, 1927. With P150, the most expensive “Model 75, Motobike de luxe” could be brought home by the workman, office messenger, school boy, boy scout or any male taking “pleasure… in the great outdoors”.

Five pages after, another half-page ad shows a 10-year-old girl embroidering on a “maquinita,” which C. Q. Demerry Store offered at P2.50, discounted for all “kababayen-ang sapian kon kabus (women, rich or poor)” to master the craft.

What if I do not fancy sitting for hours before a maquinita? What if I want to escape on a bike? What if I do not believe biking devirginizes disobedient girls who mangle their sewing?

When such questions raise their unruly heads, I know I am back in the present. “If’s” never satisfy for long.



“Old progressive”. (Source of illustration: Dreamstime.com)



* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 5, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)

“Sa amoa”

TWO months of staying put in Silang helped me grow a few vegetables, calluses, and some certainties about “amoa”.

After the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) closed the laundry shop outside the village, the husband and I washed our clothes by hand. In the afternoon, we pulled weeds and planted the seeds of vegetables he turned into our meals.

Then the authorities borrowed again from the alphabet and came up with new acronyms. Cavite, where we currently live, was placed under general community quarantine (GCQ) starting May 16; Metro Manila, under modified ECQ (MECQ).

Scrabble players may be familiar with the mini-storm stirred when a player comes up with a strange combination of letters that just happens to hit double- or triple-the-points squares.

Comprehension of meaning became a lower priority than establishing the existence of novel acronyms reorganizing the new normal after the lifting of the ECQ.

In four days of GCQ, the Cavite governor opened and then closed all malls for violating safety protocols. More than three thousand citizens were arrested for violating one or a combination of the five measures aimed at containing the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic: leaving home with a quarantine pass, wearing a mask in public, maintaining physical distancing, observing the curfew, and following the liquor ban.

In the alphabet soup stirred up by the latest acronyms, Covid-19 was shunted aside as families trooped to the malls and clogged highways. What happened to fears of a second or a third wave of the pandemic reinforcing the indisputable logic of staying home?

Unless one needs to report to work, “home” remains the best one-syllable arrangement of letters responding to Covid-19. Acronym soups calibrate but also obfuscate official responses.

I prefer the easier-to-understand logic of survival, sanity, and community embedded in the slogans charting the pandemic timeline: from “Stay home, stay safe” to #HealthyAtHome and #TravelTomorrow.

Among Bisdaks (native Cebuanos), “sa amoa” is a phrase that captures the self-possession of being in the sanctum sanctorum that is one’s home. In my generation, one did not treat guests to eat out in restaurants. “Kaon ta sa amoa” invites a stranger to more than a home-cooked meal; it means to be with the family.

Perhaps because Cebu, my home, remains under the ECQ status that stringently restricts people movement, I am immune to the temptation of misreading GCQ and MECQ. I promise four puppies born here in Silang, though, that when it will be safe to travel, “uli mi sa amoa (we go home)”.



Peacock. Lapu-Lapu City, 23 May 2020 (pix by Carlos Q. Tabada)



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the May 24, 2020 edition of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Haze

IN my imagination, the world will not end in cold or fire but dust.

Nearly each day, I cross a bridge to go to the city to visit my 80-year-old mother. The sun has yet to rise when I cross the bridge; the disc’s ascent is at its highest when I return by that bridge.

One day, the sun wasn’t there. Or it was lurking in the haze that originated from Indonesian wildfires and spread by the Southwest monsoon, reported Wenilyn B. Sabalo in SunStar Cebu last Sept. 19.

The greyish sky blanketing the cityscape didn’t merit even a blink from me until my mother took a sudden chill while undergoing dialysis.

A long-time diabetic prone to fluid overload that causes respiratory difficulties, Mama recently began hemodialysis (HD) to reduce the excess fluids accumulating in her lungs. One moment we were chatting while she was being prepped for her HD session; in less than an hour, she vomited twice and required emergency measures to improve her access to oxygen.

As phrased by medical jargon, “respiratory system disorders” are “standard complications” in “end-stage renal disease” patients undergoing hemodialysis.

For personal protection, a mask, particularly the N95 facemask, is prescribed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to protect the wearer from liquid, dust, and other airborne contaminants.

N95 refers to the industry-tested capacity of a respirator or facemask to filter out “at least 95 percent of very small (0.3 micron) test particles,” according to the U.S. FDA.

Masks became newsworthy after the Department of Health suggested its use for the protection of “toddlers, the elderly, those with allergies, and those with respiratory illnesses” in the haze covering parts of Metro Cebu, reported SunStar Cebu.

The daily also reported that the Environmental Management Bureau 7 recently conducted the particulate matter (PM) 2.5 test, which found “unhealthy” levels in Metro Cebu of the dust “particle measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or about three percent the diameter of a human hair”.

What can be more vital than breathing? Communication.

Mama and many of her HD “classmates” wear masks, haze or no haze. Yet, my talkative mother often lowers her mask when she chats with us, doctors, nurses, and orderlies. She singlehandedly breaks the FDA injunction that facemasks should have “very close facial fit” to achieve “very efficient filtration of airborne particles”.

Isolation and silence are the steep cost of infection-control.

Yet, in the subdued, energy-sapping atmosphere of the renal center, where the whirring of machines interposes more often than the human voice, my mother’s voice is a silver thread illuminating each moment, haze or no haze.

[Photo: snapdeal.com]


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 22, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Matamata”: Storytellers

IN the flesh. Enfleshed.

An artist’s rendering shared on social media brought me back to those mornings in Sanciangko, the street behind my son’s downtown campus.

Whenever we brought him to his morning classes, I often saw this woman washing clothes like any dutiful homemaker.

Yet hers was no humdrum chore. She wore not a stitch, all fleshy contours carnally glisteningly wet as she squatted on the sidewalk, rinsing clothes in an overflowing canal.

My first reaction was to look away. Where was this woman’s family? What if she came to be harmed by more than the fetid wastewater or a jeepney driver racing to meet the day’s rent?

I spared her the few seconds it took to form these thoughts and then forgot her. Life took over.

It became part of the morning ritual to see and not see her, this woman who blended with the city waking up around her, the still-shuttered stores, bars, honky-tonks. She was a face on the other side of our car windows.

Yet, she was me. We had chores; on some days, I could not say I looked forward to mine the way she pinned her attention on those bits she rinsed along with the city’s waste.

Then my friend H. shared a sketch of the woman posted on the Facebook page, “JuanMiguel does Art”.

Juan Miguel Cañeda, a comics creator who started and manages the page, transformed the woman I saw years ago washing in the gutters of Sanciangko into a graphic novel “bida (hero),” surrounded by a halo of half tones and dingy blotches on bulging acreages of exposed skin.

Only rabid comics readers recognize the sigil representing the power of this misbegotten creature: the half-note or minim, universal notation for music.

In his caption for “Our Nudist Neighbor,” Cañeda wrote: “I don’t know her personally but she reminds me to just do what you love to do…”.

Like the spinners of tales of old Cebu, Cañeda’s sketch sparks other riffs. Some of the 900 people following his page commented that they have seen the same woman turn up in other streets, other gutters in Cebu City, still washing clothes. One Netizen recognized her, saying the woman’s family looked for her and brought her back home each time she ran away. In the end, they let her be.

Through their FB page, Cañeda and his partner, Rio Maghinay, make and sell shirts and hoodies. Their real passion are the stories of the people sketched by Cañeda.

Or enfleshed. Just as the woman washing in Sanciangko brings me back to the days my mother brought me across the same street to the now defunct Paul’s Bookstore, which started my girlhood’s collection of novels.

And, yes, I learned her name: Helen. In my favorite stories, no one, not even a character named Nameless, remains nameless.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 10, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Displaced

I COUNT the days now. From years to months to weeks, the plan has finally come to shortening the gap by days or 24-hour cycles.

Soon, hours and minutes will measure how close I’ll be to Cebu.

This game helps to pass the time while I am a nomad by occupation, settling for now in Manila while work and the bulk of family are in Cebu.

I wonder if other migrants also keep track of time in increments or take recourse to phrases, such as “for now,” as if these were reassurances for the return journey. Plans can be charted; tickets, purchased.

The return, though, is mutable. While waiting to disembark at Mactan, I overheard a flight crew discussing plans for dinner. Any place, said someone, that does not require “crossing the bridge”.

We reside in Mactan, in the shadow of the bridges. Two bridges connect the cities of Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue. More often than not, these disconnect, being often locked down in traffic, with one bridge alternately serving as the “lesser evil” to the other, depending on the day of the week or the time of the day.

The stewardess must have been a frequent flyer to Cebu to speak like a native. Before Waze, Cebuanos referred to the “first bridge” or the “second bridge”.

“The bridge” is the generic term associated with hours of deadlock resulting in tentacles of snarled traffic trailing for kilometres on both sides of the islands. If you are rushing to catch your flight out of Cebu and encounter “the bridge,” there is no more memorable send-off.

To cushion my displacement, I read online about home. (A Google search of “traffic” and “Cebu" pulls out 9.7 million results in 0.64 seconds, still viewed as an odd pairing by someone who took lunch at home during the hour-and-a-half break in grade school during the 1970s.)

According to SunStar Cebu’s June 30 report by Razel V. Cuizon, the Regional Development Council-Visayas recently endorsed “priority projects” to “ease traffic in Metro Cebu”.

Urban experts identified a Mandaue-Lapu-Lapu Link Bridge, making this the fourth bridge as construction of the third, the Cebu-Cordova toll bridge, is underway.

An Urban Mass Rapid Transit (UMRT) system was also endorsed as part of the road and rail transport modes for 2050, when Cebu becomes a mega-city with a populace of over 5 million.

Nights when I cannot sleep, I pore over the Roadmap Study for Sustainable Urban Development in Metro Cebu. As a Cebuana, I don’t need the maps. I know my Cebu by heart.

Still, the order and clarity of computer-generated maps and plans comfort. Displacements—sons starting on their own; my coming home only to leave again—are “for now”. Cebu is “kanunay ania dinhi (always here)”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 1, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Ginamos

A DISH of salted fish.

My late father’s dining table was never without this. My yaya only changed the ginamos when its sauce was made even murkier by all the stuff we dipped into it.

I thought those dregs made the gunk taste even better; my younger sister would not look at it. It was fine that she turned up her nose at it; it left the ginamos for Papang and I.

We thought ginamos could make any dish taste better although we never said it aloud. It would have insulted Yaya, not just a very good cook but also a resourceful one, given the budget she had to stretch to keep the family fed.

Once we ran out of ginamos, and Papang sent out Yaya to buy some from a neighborhood store, without waiting for Sunday, market day. It wasn’t fully maus yet so the whole fish lay fully discernible on the dish, one beady eye watching me do my homework.

When the tip of a sheet ended up in the dish, I flicked my tongue at the grey goo seeping the paper. Papang was right; ginamos could make anything taste better.

My first visit to my father’s hometown in Camiguin made me appreciate the dish that had grown as familiar as the rings seared on the mahogany by the hot cups of coffee Yaya frequently left behind, half-finished, without their saucers.

During the summer holiday after my first grade, Papang miraculously allowed my sister and I to go with my cousins to Tupsan.

My uncle’s home faced the sea. Every morning, he and my aunt walked to church; my cousins and I crossed the street to the sea.

Having the sea as your nearest neighbor was, at the age of seven, paradise. The only thing missing was the lechon.

In Cebu, visits to the beach guaranteed a groaning table, presided by a whole lechon. Admittedly, before lunch was over, the entire pig was reduced to vaguely archaeological remains, finally into just a head minus ears and tongue, by the time we headed home.

The first time I took a break from wading and splashing around in Tupsan, I looked for the lechon I thought would be on a table in a cottage. I looked up and down the coast but could see no cottage, no table, and therefore, no lechon.

I went back to the sea, mystified. What is a beach outing without lechon?

The first afternoon of low tide answered me. The neighborhood, including our family, turned up for panginhas. We dug for shellfish; the adults flushed out sea cucumber and sea urchin. I filled my pail with pretty shells and stones.

When my aunts cooked and served the shellfish for dinner, I subdued my hunger, remembering the useless bits I brought to the table.

In Camiguin, where the sea is more than a playground, I learned that just a pinch of saltiness, like ginamos, can go a long way.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 22, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love without reserve

“NATIVE chocolate drink” was the Tagbilaran waiter’s rejoinder to my order of “sikwate” for breakfast.

I could not fault him as the menu indicated the exact words he used.

It was more of a personal preference that I chose “sik-wa-te,” prolonging each syllable, as if I were already holding a cup in hand, blowing at the steam rising from the opaque blackish brown surface, sipping the viscous lava, seeking the sweet in the bitter, and, after adding a little hot water to swirl the sludge silting the bottom of the cup, trying to sip the drink to the very last greedy drop.

With genuine “sikwate,” you cannot. Cheat, get enough of, sate.

The dregs that settle down like a clotted conscience prove not only that several “tableya” coins, unsweetened and unrepentantly bitter, were used to make the “sikwate," but also that the “tableya” is pure and made entirely of cacao seeds picked by hand, dried, roasted, pounded, kneaded, and shaped into the dark coins that turn breakfast into memories and family lore.

The waiter’s choice of an English phrase disappointed. His hotel’s choice of “tableya” supplier did not.

The cup he set down still bubbled, as if the “sikwate” had just been whipped to a foam inside a metal “batirol (pot)” with a wooden “boloneo (whisk)”. The only difference between this cup and one I would be sipping at home is that I had to add milk and brown sugar to taste.

Those cups of “sikwate” in Tagbilaran reminded me of other cups of native chocolate encountered, with varying degrees of disillusion, in places faraway from home. In Tagaytay and Baguio, powdered chocolate drink, sipped as the house specialty, only made me more homesick and alienated.

If the locals accept this as “native chocolate,” was I to also settle for this “tsokolate-ah”?

According to lore, thick and rich “tsokolate-eh” (“espresso”) is served to guests. However, for uninvited visitors, decorum still requires a serving of diluted “tsokolate-ah” (“aguado”), meaning less “tableya” and more water.

My friend, Lilia, a diabetic and a sweet tooth, prefers “tsokolate-ah” as healthier. “Tsokolate-eh” is more sinful and thus, like love, must be taken with moderation.

In our family’s traditional yearend sojourn to the south of Cebu, we wended our way to a roadside store in the interiors of barangay Canbanua in the town of Argao.

We smelled the “tableya" even before we saw a young man carry out white-rimmed-with-blue metal “sarten” bowls with telltale smudges of brown.

At the source, where Miguela “Guilang” Lanutan, 92, and her family still makes them, the “tableya” coins are wrapped in old newspaper. Stark and pure, love in no other form demands abandon and no reservations.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 31, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The good life

WHAT would Walter say to the fat cats of Singapore?

On the family’s first overseas journey, we stopped overnight at Singapore. I would have been content to explore again Changi Airport, the airport city, but the older son brooked no slacking or clinging to safe harbors.

I got plus points from him for collecting all the tourist information materials after clearing with the immigration. Sucking a candy—free also from the poor young man, too tired to do anything but express a soul-deep weariness with his entire body, one of the many processing all the foreigners streaming into this multicultural state—I scan the lushly printed guides and am convinced that I have done enough sightseeing and am ready for bed.

Bedtime, however, is not yet within sight in our itinerary. If one leaves from Cebu at 3 p.m., it’s 7 p.m. and still bright as midafternoon in Cebu when the plane touches down at the Changi Airport.

Having a long work day must be why Singaporeans tend to be brisk to the point of brusqueness. The driver of the coach ferrying us from the airport to the hotel in Tiong Bahru Road barks in a curious mix of Singlish and English.

I notice he restricts himself to the by now familiar body language of silence and strain when a Caucasian family comes on board. The older son, better travelled and more tolerant, observes that as Singlish, the local lingo, is spoken with a clipped, abrupt tone, their Singlish-accented English must come across as cold to foreigners.

Anywhere in the world, people remain the most exotic. I think of this as we drive up to our first view of the Gardens by the Bay.

Silhouetted against a velvet evening horizon, the Flower Dome, Cloud Forest, and Silver Garden are unlike the humble gardens back home. The coach drives by at 8:45 p.m., in time for the second scheduled switching on of the Garden Rhapsody, which displays the Supertrees, more architectural than horticultural marvels shooting 22 meters above the ground.

My glimpse of Singapore emphasizes more than anything the Otherness: streets and sidewalks washed clean of people. Tourist brochures with more information than one thinks one needs about Singapore; night-shift workers who release only the minimum data to keep transactions functional with the city’s transients.

Searching for dinner, we ended up by mistake at the back of the kitchens of a local hawker center. Two tabbies lolled, replete, on the pavement.

These street toms dragged bellies that scraped the ground. These ones never chased rats, if such deviants had a niche in this socially engineered city.

The cat in our campus, Walter, who keeps several human pets, might be keen to swap stories about the good life.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayette.tabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the April 9, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Campus sex

WHEN I call it a day in the college where I teach, I find that darkness has already fallen. Set off in the pitch-black campus grounds are the gazebos, where light and wifi connection attract study groups.

Where do students go after the library closes and the evening classes are dismissed? I assumed that they would be like me, hungry and looking forward to falling asleep before the evening soap.

Different students on different occasions gave one answer: gazebos offer faster connection than the nearby Internet cafés. And it’s free.

I remembered these interactions when I read a May 21 Sun.Star Cebu report that young women in Central Visayas are “14 times more likely” to “engage in early sex,” compared to their male counterparts, who are only “five times more likely” to be sexually active before the legal age of 18.

Lorraine Mitzi Ambrad, an intern of the University of San Jose-Recoletos, quoted the 2013 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study (Yafs) 4. This is a national series that presents cross-sectional surveys of Filipinos aged 15 to 24 years.

Ambrad reported that the early “sex debuts” and frequency of sex among young adults alarmed health authorities because many of these encounters are unprotected. Having sex without a condom increases one’s risk of exposure to sexually transmitted infection, specially HIV/Aids.

For Cebu, the Yafs 4 findings raise another alarming trend: students who board are more vulnerable to early sex. An education hub, Cebu attracts enrollees from the central and southern regions of the country.

College teachers know from experience what parents whose children live in a dorm or boarding house fear by instinct: lack of parental supervision, coupled with landlord apathy or laxity and big-city temptations, may overwhelm young persons and distract them from finishing on time.

However, I’m not convinced that the proposal of presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte to impose a curfew and liquor ban will douse sexual hyperactivity among the young.

Republic Act (RA) 1224, passed by Congress in 1955, bans establishments located within a radial distance of 50 meters from schools, churches and hospitals to sell liquor to students and minors.

Section 12 of Cebu City Ordinance 1413, also known as the Liquor Licensing Ordinance, prohibits the issuance of a liquor license to a business located within an urban residential zone or within 100 meters from the perimeter of a school or hospital.

If RA 1224 and City Ordinance 1413 are strange, you are not alone. As a college freshman in the 1980s, I learned not to sit in the back row of the classroom, where the seriously drunk often slipped in or those with a serious hangover hid behind dark glasses. Most of my classes then were in the morning.

Resting the fate of young people on a curfew is as archaic. A 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. ban may prevent youths from roaming the streets; it will hardly clip their social media wings. Many transactions leading to sex are initiated online. Google is not a favorite search engine for nothing.

How can we help young adults? Educate them. Enable them to walk away from being coerced into sex for love or money. Make them mature enough to resist posting their sex trophies on Facebook. Give them tough requirements that keep them researching from dusk till dawn because they know, education is not about “cuarto o cuatro (motel room or conditional grade)”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 22, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Cebu by night

A PERSONAL emergency brought me to face a side of Cebu that I rarely encounter. For nine-to-five drones, the daily reality is the wall of heat that hits one on the streets, which are clogged with vehicles seemingly leading to the same direction.

When we rushed to Cebu City two hours before midnight, a drizzle left the streets into a slick, shiny state. The scene reminded me of toy cars running by remote on the plastic platform our boys played with when they were still at an age riveted to repetitious patterns.

The illusion dispelled when we entered uptown Cebu City. The yellow coin of a moon hung over black moving masses that spilled out of a well-known watering hole.

The slang is inadequate for the scene I witnessed personally for the first time. In the literal sense, it is a pool where animals regularly visit for a drink.

Colloquially, a watering hole is a “social gathering place”. I didn’t have such an affable reaction, perhaps because I imagine that, with an actual watering hole, the animals slake their thirst according to a system that dictates a species approaches the water when its natural predators are not nearby. Otherwise, no drinking will take place; only slaughter and feeding.
Do the city authorities see what I see: incidents waiting to happen or spiking the spread of sexually transmitted infections?

When I was a schoolgirl in the 1970s to 1980s, I saw the same area transformed from an affluent family’s residence, its high walls enclosing rolling, perfectly clipped emerald lawns and backyards where the only things stirring were lines of laundry swaying in the breeze into an uptown high-rise for a department store whose glass-encased display of rosaries in semi-precious stones seemed unspeakably decadent to our starched Catholic conscience.

When I was a schoolgirl, a risky adventure meant slipping past the school’s security guards during dismissal to purchase at a nearby bookstore a romance paperback my teachers dismissed as having no literary merit whatsoever.

Scenes from the watering hole I passed that night made those school excursions bleached and pale. Does youth always seek to scale the heights of the forbidden? Yet, there seems to be a world of differences between dallying with execrable writing and going into the deep with drugs, violence and HIV/Aids.

In the emergency room (ER) of a nearby private hospital, I waited with a stranger who told me about a bottle thrown by a drunk foreigner during a bar performance. The bottle shattered but in slightly fewer pieces than the man who threw it.

His mauling came not just at the hands of the bar bouncers but also of strangers who were less motivated by righteousness than from an amoral curiosity about the many ways the human body can leak fluids under unrelenting violence.

According to this stranger, who works for a firm that mixes and plays music—or what passes as music—in these places, the exhausted mob later dumped the broken body near some trash cans. Only when the morning shift heard the man groan did they act: the signs of life meant a hospital, not funeral services, was needed.

The usual ER parade of broken bodies saw night pass into dawn and morning. I cannot recall a warmer welcome I gave when I greeted a young day and the wall of heat slamming into eyes that will not forget its brush with Cebu by night.


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 24, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Children of the Sto. Niño

IN the land of eternal rush hour, my fellow passengers and I had time to meditate while waiting for our jeepney to move in the sludge-like flow of uptown traffic. At the end of a work day, no one perhaps had the interest or energy to comment on the traffic, swelled by the fiesta for the Sto. Niño.

When two young boys clambered on, passengers checked their belongings before lapsing back into traffic-induced stupor.

The boys started to sing. The kid hanging on to the right side of the jeepney could definitely carry a melody.

He turned heads, though, with his clear enunciation of the lyrics. A family in a parallel lane became part of his audience, with a teenaged son mouthing the lyrics.

This young troubadour turned Kurt Fick ft Paola Sandiego’s popular Cebuano hit, “HAHAHA Hasula,” into a poem of the streets, transforming a daily encumbrance into a moment of clarity, self-mockery and musical appreciation.

At the heart of the devotion to the Sto. Niño is a love for children. For nine days, the sons and I heard dawn mass at the Basilica Minore. Even among the devotees hearing mass on the streets surrounding the church, where one either stands the whole time or brings a chair, many parents and grandparents brought their children.

The patience and perseverance to carry a sleeping infant, quiet a fussy tot, or teach one’s child to wave while singing the traditional “gozos (hymn of praise)” attest that the church is right in trusting the Filipino family to be its frontline vanguards. More than one homilist recalled the childhood start of his devotion to Cebu’s Patron.

Looking at the posters and tarpaulin displays promoting the Sinulog, the older son questioned the popular depiction of a woman carrying the icon. Why the bias for the feminine when many fathers also sacrifice for their children?

The portrayals can be traced to history (Hara Humamay, queen of Humabon, converted and received Magellan’s baptismal gift of the Sto. Niño), culture (only women offer candles and the “Sinug (traditional dance prayer)” outside the Basilica), and aesthetics (winsome and graceful, women remain the favorite choices of choreographers to lead Sinulog street-dancing contingents).

If there is a blind spot in the fiesta of the Sto. Niño, it is for the other children, the ones not borne for hours on their father’s shoulders as the solemn procession winds down city streets, for the youths who are, in the unforgettable euphemism of one writer, “other men’s children”.

A friend recalled, while having a staycation in one of Cebu’s hotels, sharing the elevator with an elderly foreigner and two prepubescent girls whose manner of dressing and talking was “incongruous in the setting”. Both groups were heading to their rooms.

My friend and her partner encountered the girls on other occasions. These elevator rides marked a contrast of moods: between the young girls who always “looked so happy” and my friend and her partner, depressed by this star-crossed realignment of young girls and elderly foreigners during the world’s longest holiday centered on children.

One novena homilist waxed rhapsodically over the virtues of children: their innocence, smiles, obedience, joy. May the Holy Child shield the young, including those who, in some men’s eyes, remain “other men’s children”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 17, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Road trip

IN the country, one of the guaranteed shortcuts for going native is to commute. Take a bus if you are that desperate.

When the husband and I returned to Badian on a Friday afternoon, we found out that, after 30 or so years, the South Bus Terminal has come full circle: from pandemonium to “world class” pretensions back to pandemonium.

Backpacking was the best way to travel in the 1980s. The Cebu City terminal for buses plying the southern route was an obstacle course favoring survivors, not beginners.

One had to be swift and nimble enough to climb and enter the bus through a window to avoid the horde clamoring at the lone entrance/exit. Or ferocious in bawling out lesser mortals lunging for the last seat.

A degree of civilization later settled in the terminal. Pre-departure comforts created the illusion that one was taking the bus to Tokyo, Rome or Ginatilan. Then management changed.

Too stiff-jointed now to fight for seats, I relied on my salt-and-pepper hair. The guard bawled out our silver-haired group because he probably assumed the elderly are all stone-deaf, but he let us in first.

Three young Korean backpackers shook their heads at the shoving. I approved of their luggage but not their choice of footwear. Those heels are not for scrambling in through a bus window.

“Do not overload” is a rule no one follows in the country. There’s a respite following a tragedy drawing a bad press and a public outcry. But in the days that follow, the normal abnormal is timeless.

Even though sidewalks overflow with vendors and their wares, pedestrians, and illegally parked vehicles, bus drivers can spot the lone person in the crowd who doesn’t have to make the right-hand pumping gesture that stands for eternal optimism: willing-to-stand-until-someone-gets-off.

So while you’ve paid and struggled for an aisle seat in an air-conditioned bus, expect to be prodded by an elbow, a hip or the entire person of the eternal optimist and his ilk, who are camped out in the aisle, along with their bags and the all-time favorite cylinder canister of cookies (after the cookies are polished off, the canister becomes a pail).

During peak season, bus aisles go the way of sidewalks in this country: they disappear after planks are pulled out from nowhere to connect the aisle seats for commuters boarding the bus along the route.

To leave the bus, passengers must clear the planks without knocking off the aisle seaters—a challenge one gets first taste of in the disorder at the Cebu City terminal, which proves the principle that for everything, including unreason, a reason.

The conspiracy not to leave any bus space unused is perfected by food vendors. When one nears Carcar City, men clamber in. They hoist huge bags of food. Their specialization is to insert this considerable load past all the animate and inanimate obstacles blocking the aisles to reach the passenger at the back of the bus who will scrutinize a tiny pack before, in keeping with the Cebuano virtue of stinginess, giving this back to the vendor because it is overpriced.

I am for free enterprise even though my principle when travelling is to minimize what I take in to limit the need for public toilets. Our “comfort rooms” deserve more than a column. Next time perhaps.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 13, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Queen’s confessions

FROM slippers to shabu. Hers is the story of Cinderella that went wrong.

Last Sept. 5, Daryl T. Jabil reported in Sun.Star Cebu about the arrest of Badian’s “queen of shabu”. When Jerami Matugas, 49, was arrested in her new home in Poblacion, Badian, the operatives caught her repacking the illegal white crystals for selling. On the streets, the packs might fetch P1.3 million.

Minus the substance, that domestic scene would have complemented the self-reliance stamping the story of Matugas.

According to Jabil’s nuanced report, Matugas once sold slippers made in Carcar. In November, an acquaintance introduced her to shabu so she could “send her children to college”.

Matugas has five children, aged four to 21. She told Sun.Star Cebu that, even without a father, her children “never went hungry under my care”. In February, the family moved from Barangay Awayan, Carcar to their newly constructed and “more comfortable” home in the town center of Badian.

The story moved to a different vein last March, when a warrant for her arrest was issued. Metamphetamine is concocted from several chemicals and then crystallized. Known also as “ubas,” “siopao, “sha,” and “ice,” “shabu” is smoked, snorted or injected by about seven million Filipinos or 10 percent of the population. It is the illicit drug “most used” in the Philippines, reports the United Nations.

Once associated with big cities and corruption, shabu has made inroads in new markets. Queen said the police have yet to catch other “big fishes” in the illicit drug trade in the south, which curves from Carcar City to reach as far as Alegria and Badian on the southwestern side of Cebu.

The day before Sun.Star Cebu reported Queen’s arrest, I climbed to the fourth-floor Capitol office of Vice Governor Agnes A. Magpale to get our copy of the Badian and Alegria town histories. From 2008 to 2011, my husband Roy and I were part of the team of writers, researchers and editors tapped by the Cebu Province and the University of San Carlos (USC) for the landmark Cebu Provincial History Project.

Last month, the 55-volume set of books narrating the local history of Cebu—the province, the Provincial Capitol, nine cities and 44 towns—was turned over to the local governments.

Roy and I met first in Badian. He was tapped by the USC for a research project. I was a development communication worker with the government. One rainy night in 1987, we met at a farmer leader’s house. I escorted a group of Manila journalists interviewing farmers about the impact of a World Bank-funded project.

Presuming he was the farmer’s son, I was surprised when he answered the journalists articulately in English. This bias shamed me, which worsened my ill temper with the journalists, who dawdled in our trip and kept the farmers waiting. Roy thought I was one of the rude visitors, who demanded the farmers be roused from their sleep so they could have their interviews before flying back to Manila.

Despite the checks imposed by all disciplines, from journalism to research, no discourse is ever complete. The shabu trade in the south is not in the town histories I co-authored. The Queen’s confessions reveal a gap that has to be addressed in the threads of “sugilanon (story)” interwoven one night in 1987.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 6, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Food pyramid

THE RETCHING sounds in the supermarket drove me to instantly try to locate the source of distress.

Instead of a choking baby, I saw young tourists clustered around a display of durian. One of them bent close to the odorous pile, retched and theatrically retreated while her friends laughed.

Watching them replay that scene, I realized once more how food touches us at the gut level. Aside from satiating hunger, food leaves us vulnerable with its associations.

Complaints about their meals were recently aired by police officers deployed for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) meetings held in Cebu. The Police Regional Office (PRO)-Central Visayas is probing nine caterers preparing the officers’ packed meals, reported Daryl T. Jabil and Princess Dawn H. Felicitas in Sun.Star Cebu last Aug. 28.

Why were the cops dismayed? Reports quote unnamed cops who compared the food to pig slop. According to Sun.Star Cebu, one packed meal included a boiled egg, two pieces of vegetable rolls, a cup of rice and a bottle of water.

Since I have to avoid overeating and certain food triggers for my health, my typical meal is just as sparing. There can be no arguing, though, with the same meal’s rejection by a policeman deployed for hours under grueling conditions.

Certainly, the perception of food sufficiency varies among individuals. By taking on the impossible task of satisfying the taste buds, not to mention gut capacities, of more than 5,000 cops assigned for the Apec, the PRO-Central Visayas embarked on an impossible mission.

Yet the practice of packed lunch works quite well in a commercial setting. An entrepreneur who has to convince a customer to order packed lunch has to offer the most favorable terms on many aspects, from quality and variety of food to sanitation, affordability and convenience.

With a captive market—such as cops who have no say about their food allowance—the quality of packed meals slides drastically.

So why does the government insist on packed meals? Last January, the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) also had to deal with criticisms about the meal allowances of police officers securing Metro Manila during the visit of Pope Francis.

For the Pope’s eight-day visit, a meal allowance of P2,400 was budgeted for every cop. Some of the Metro Manila officers posted on Facebook that they received only a portion of this allowance; others complained that they received neither food nor money.

According to NCRPO officials, an “organized messing” was made to ensure that cops would not leave their posts or go hungry because they were deployed hours early so they would be unable to personally pack their meals.

Like most jargon, “organized messing” has unfortunate associations. From the institutional perspective, to “mess” is to take meals with a particular person in a specified place. An “organized messing” is to carry out joint eating exercises for fellowship or efficiency.

For humans, a “mess” has other synonyms: disorder, chaos, trouble. This is a situation where persons (cops) get upset (hungry or frustrated) by conditions they cannot control (despite poor field feedback and official probes, packed meals prevail).

Another synonym would be “food pyramid”: the ones on top decide what crumbs to throw down to the bottom feeders.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 30, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Letters in Simala

LAST year, when my niece had to be operated twice to relieve bleeding in the brain, family members prayed to the Birhen sa Simala for her recovery.

This September, my niece turned 17. My sister and her daughters recently came home, and I joined them in visiting the Simala church in Sibonga.

A trip down the south of Cebu usually offers a scenic respite from the city and its tawdry charms and charmless hustlers. Today, one can still string a couple of sleepy southern towns, where a dog sauntering across the street constitutes the biggest excitement in a week.

Yet, the church in Simala, with its reputation for miracles and its droves of devotees and tourists, has raised the local threshold for spectacles by several notches. I prefer empty churches, where one can hear oneself better. After several visits, I conclude that the church in Simala will never lack for two things: people and construction projects underway.

The pilgrimage up the hills of Lindogan in the barangay of Simala requires the same mindset and skills required to survive in the cities, if one chooses to visit on the 13th of the month or on weekends. On these days, the “habal-habal” drivers waiting at the junction connecting the highway to the upland road will be more snobbish than Manila taxi drivers mobbed by mallgoers in November when ATMs are disgorging Christmas bonuses.

The scenery in Lindogan is verdant and unspoiled, save for the parking signs that demand P50 for the privilege of parking under swaying coconut trees. Patronizing local sellers is a bit of a challenge, specially when a jackfruit about the size of two basketballs will make the buyer poorer by P700.

To avoid these vexations, we went to Simala on a weekday and ate fast food in Carcar. Leaving Lapu-Lapu City at midmorning, we reached the Simala church a little after noon, just in time to hear mass.

It’s been at least two years since I’ve visited the shrine. At the carpark, my reaction to the view of the church silhouetted against the bright blue mantle of a cloudless sky was the same as my nieces, who were there for the first time: It’s a castle! It’s a church! No, it’s a castle church!

What does it say of a faith if believers require monuments in stone and gilt to worship? I had no time to answer my question as I quickly packed bottles of mineral water and chips, revealing a mindset that perhaps answered adequately my confusion as to whether I was stepping inside a place of God or a theme park.

Fortunately, the rest of the churchgoers seemed to be less muddled than I was. In comparison to the church exteriors, with its towers, curtain walls and Disneyesque features, the place where the mass is heard is small and intimate. I found myself listening to the homily, singing the hymns.

There were children but they were nearly as solemn as the grown-ups. As we made our way to the image of the Birhen sa Simala, my niece whispered that no one jumped the line, a rare experience for her in the country.

The church interiors still resembles a warren but there is better documentation and organization now. The curation is interesting, the collection of crutches, wheelchairs and testimonials donated by the healed and the aided as riveting as the narrative accompanying the multiple images of the Virgin Mary.

To experience Simala is to be pulled in different directions all at once. We bought rosaries and religious items. We got our change along with the information that our purchases had already been blessed. It’s pretty efficient: from buyer to sales clerk, cashier and priest. Look, Ma, no lines.

What tames the heathen in me is not a miracle. It’s the tables with their sheaf of paper and pens. Like many others, I don’t consider a visit to Simala complete without writing a letter to the Virgin and dropping the folded sheet into a box.

The box slit is too small to accommodate a pair of crutches or even a graduation medal. Like the perpetual construction and trading occurring in the place, there must be a system, too, that sieves the letters of the faithful for archiving and showroom display.

Yet, in the near silence of bent heads and whispering pens, it is not impossible to believe in the impossible. In the Age of Disbelief, that surely counts as a miracle.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 5, 2014 issue of “Matamata,” Sunday editorial-page column

“Gana”

CEBU is not just lechon and danggit.

Waiting for my flight, I overhear a group plan the Cebu hoard they will haul back to Manila.

Roast pig and dried rabbitfish seemed to be on everyone’s list. What else? asked someone.

My flight got delayed so, with the extra minutes, I answered the question in my head until I realized I needed to write down the answers.

For how can anyone remember except through the papillae, tiny receptors that store taste as memory: chicharon (fried pork skin, fat and meat) and kusahos (sun-dried beef) in Carcar, pinabagtik nga baboy (crunchy pork cutlets) and tinap-anang tulingan (smoked fish) in Danao, inasal manok (roasted native chicken) in Dumanjug, ngohiong along Gen. Maxilom Ave., sweet or spicy chorizo in Guadalupe, fall-off-the-bones goat’s meat and goat’s head in Panganiban, fish head tinowa at Reclamation, nilarang (seafood in a sticky broth of black beans) and tuslob-buwa (puso or hanging rice dipped in sizzling pig’s brains) sa Pasil, bakasi (eel) and sa-ang (spider shell) in Cordova, adobo ni Carmen of Argao, budbod kabog (birdseed suman) in Tabogon, bibingka (ricecake) and tagaktak (fried sticky rice noodles) sa Mandaue, tabliya (native chocolate) and torta (unforgivingly made of pure egg yolk, tuba or coconut wine and pork fat) of Argao, guisadong kabaw (carabao menudo) in Carmen…

When I reviewed the list, I was dissatisfied. Fortunately, I’m not one to impose views on strangers. That enthusiastic band of first-time visitors would have been confused, flabbergasted or disgusted if I had rattled off my gastronomic recommendations, only to stick in an even longer list of caveats.

First, taste is personal. Picking a goat’s eyelashes from the tip of the tongue after one has swallowed eyeballs made gelatinous from several hours of slow cooking is hard to translate, even without the vexations that oppress a speaker remembering as a Cebuano and speaking in English to communicate to a Tagalog speaker.

Second is the trickiness of giving directions. In the 48 years that I’ve lived here in Cebu, I know where to find what I want to eat at prices I will not walk away from. Many of these places don’t advertise or run blogs. Some are still linked to the cooks that made the original recipe famous (Matmat, Gilang, Didang, Esmin and Auring) but many can only be located by minimal pre-Waze directions (by the highway, before the bridge, across the school, rightside of the market or, typical of a small-town mentality, by the pursing of one’s lips in the sought-for direction).

Destination is part of flavor. When the husband interviewed a taxi driver that took us from Taguig to terminal 4 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, the fellow—who was also a forest ranger, heritage warrior and guide for National Geographic photojournalists—gave us very specific answers to his favorite food eaten in Cebu: tinap-anan and puso-mais eaten “kinamot (with hands)” by the seashore of Danao City.

We have never eaten “hanging rice” made of corn grits, even the husband who traces his roots to Danao. But I don’t doubt the taxi driver’s endorsement of eating mais by hand. In the fish market of Pasil, P45 will get you a sarten or plastic plate of steaming corn grits, over which you pour sticky brown taosi sauce and mash with the nilarang ubod (eel). Even with the extra challenge of swatting at divebombing bluebellied flies (resembling fat taosi beans with wings), you will find yourself tapping your empty plate to loosen the mais grains stuck between your fingers for the grand finale.

Lastly, like all things in life, a list of Cebuano favorites is subject to change. A mural recently began outside St. Joseph’s Academy in Mandaue bears origami images of sharks and the message, “Dili mi karne (we are not meat)”.

As delicacies and aphrodisiacs, pawikan (sea turtles) and tadlungan (shark) violate the Law and nature conservation. Even without endangering species, one will still have more than lechon and danggit to occupy one’s plate and palate in Cebu.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 24, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”