Food was a big deal for Filipinos. A really big deal. My memories of home and family were peppered with my mother making dilies, dried until they were nice and crunchy; or her spooning out a thick, pink blob of shrimp bagoong from the jar, with the shrimps’ eyes still staring through the glass, and stirring the paste into the mungo bean soup; or my father checking on the pressure-cooked oxtails, a necessary ingredient for kare-kare, a peanut-butter and oxtail soup. But the dilies, bagoong, kare-kare, and even adobo chicken were comfort foods, family foods, and even though everybody brought such foods to the Filipino fiestas -- traditionally pot-luck, so there were always plenty of food, very practical! -- some foods were distinctly special foods, celebration foods, especially lechon, because it was whole roast pig, and chocolate meat, because nobody seemed to make enough of this pork dish to satisfy everybody’s appetites, so it was always the first to run out during parties.
A party had to be a really special occasion to warrant lechon, and so I asked my parents, as we struggled up a narrow mountain road in our ‘77 Caprice Classic station wagon to a pig farm, “Whose party is it?”
“It’s Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl’s 50th anniversary party,” my mom replied tiredly from the passenger seat. “I told you already in the house.”
“Why do we have to get the pig?”
“Because it’s our turn,” my mom replied. “Ray, there’s another bend in the road.”
“I see it.” My pa slowed the car, made the bend, and sped up.
We had been driving steadily inland, which meant driving from the lowland coast, where we lived, to the lush highland plateau of Guam’s interior. The lowland coast was the most accessible part of Guam, with its low sandy beaches and paved roads. The more inland you went, the less sandy the soil, as it became old volcanic ridges covered with a tropical marshiness that was the inland soil. The volcanic ridges petered out onto a plateau, which was cracked with ancient canyon-like crevices so that you’d be driving on a highland road with a black volcanic rock wall covered with dark green jungle on one side and a sheer drop of several hundred feet into a deep blue inland pool on the other side. There was a reason why the highest speed limit on Guam was 45 miles an hour.
“How come the pig farm is all the way up here?” I asked, looking at the dark green jungle outside, which consisted of nipa palm trees, coconut trees, hardwood ifits, and waxy, broad-leafed evergreens which reminded me of magnolia trees I had seen when my family was stationed in South Carolina a few years back -- except these “magnolias” looked like headless green giants. All of these different shades of dark green mingled and shimmered into one another as the light glinted off the drops of tropical dew on these trees and was sucked into the dark, dark green, pulled along by the mossy vines which draped the jungle like snakes. Or were they really snakes?
I had been looking at this jungle for what seemed to be hours, and it was starting to blur in a monotonous greenness which could lull you to sleep.
My jungle must’ve been getting to my mom too, because she sounded tired as she answered, “The farm’s up here because that’s where the pigs live.”
“How come we can’t just buy a roast pig from the commissary?”
My mom turned and glared at me. “So many questions!” she scolded. “Ellen, can’t you be quiet? Your pa’s trying to drive!”
I slumped back and looked at the station wagon’s headliner. It was ratty orange, and the glue connecting the headliner with the car’s ceiling had dried with age, so the headliner sagged like a deflating balloon. Mom had stuck thumbtacks in strategic areas on the headliner, attaching the liner to the thin layer of ceiling insulation which was still glued to the hard-top ceiling, because the sagging got so bad that the liner could easily flop on top of my head. So now the headliner looked like a pin cushion. I suppose it was good that my mom had done that because when the liner was loose, some insulation had started to sprinkle down like orange dandruff, and an orange dandruff-covered roast pig wouldn’t look too appetizing, especially to Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl.
Even though I called Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” they weren’t my real grandparents, who lived in the Philippines. Most Filipino grandparents lived in the Philippines, which made Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl a rarity because they had moved to Guam to live with their son, Uncle Mat, and his wife and kids. Because there weren’t many Filipino grandparents to go around in Guam, Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl were surrogate grandparents to a lot of kids, myself included, and were surrogate parents, especially to my mom, who often went to Grandma Tes for advice, for what I wasn’t sure. That made Grandma Tes and Grandpa Carl’s children my surrogate uncles and aunties -- actually, since it was polite custom to call every Filipino man or woman who was a friend or acquaintance with your parents “Uncle” or “Auntie,” I had a lot of surrogate uncles and aunties, which jumbled up my sense of who was really related to me by blood, except for my grandparents, because I used the Pilipino words for them. But whether those words were Tagalog or Ilocano, I didn’t know.
My baby sister was with Uncle Mat and Auntie Linda, and I remember that my parents didn’t want me to come along with them to get lechon. But I had whined, “Why can’t I come? Why? Why? Why?” and my mom had finally given in, saying, “All right, but only if you behave and be quiet.” I wanted to come along because there were many places on Guam I hadn’t been before, even though Guam, looking like a cock-eyed hourglass, was small, only 209 square miles, according to the encyclopedia at school. You’d think with an island that small I would’ve seen everything since I had lived here for two years. But all I’d seen were the west coast side of Guam, where Apra Harbor, Agana, and the naval base were, nestled in the lowland nook where the lobes of Guam’s north part of the hourglass and the south part met; the extreme north point where Anderson Air Force Base was, with its long, sandy-colored airstrip; and the long, sleepy road connecting the two bases, which looked similar to the road I was on right now except with fewer bends and fewer steep grades.
“Are we there yet?” I asked, but then I saw that we had arrived at a flat, graveled space with a small, one-story wooden house, a large metal shed, a wide cleared space behind the house, and a wire-fenced area behind the clearing.
The station wagon had made lots of noise over the gravel, and so my pa didn’t need to honk the horn to announce our arrival. As my parents began to get out of the car and while my pa called out, “Hey, Santos!” an old Guamanian man, looking like a dry, bamboo reed and wearing sandals, ratty pants and an undershirt soiled with sweat and grime, came from behind the wooden house.
“Ay, Chief!” the old Guamanian greeted, using the name many men used for my pa. “Just pull around to the back! Your pig’s all scrubbed and ready to go!”
Scrubbed? What did they mean by scrubbed? Weren’t we going to pick up a lechon, a pig nice and roasted on a plank, ready to serve?
My parents got back in, and we slowly headed to the clearing behind the house, where I saw two young Guamanian men, looking like younger versions of Santos, drying off a large, brownish pig, from which they had just finished washing off the jungle dirt. I saw that the wire-fenced area behind the clearing included another cleared space and then the jungle, where I saw shadows of open-ranging pigs amidst the green, and I realized that, no, we came not to pick up a pig prepared by Santos into a lechon. We came to pick up a live, young pig, a female which would never have piglets.
And I suddenly remembered, as I stared at the pig wriggling under the pig farmers’ towels, that I been to another farm, stateside. I wasn’t sure where because it was between my fourth and fifth birthday, and when I was four I was at Great Lakes, Illinois, and when I wasn’t quite five, I was at Charleston, South Carolina. I certainly did remember I was on a school field trip because it was late October and my classmates and I were at a farm to pick our own pumpkin for Halloween. This was the first and only I’d ever seen pumpkin for real (pumpkin wasn’t found normally in my house), and I didn’t quite know what to look for since all of the bright orange gourds, scattered in the soil in untidy rows, looked the same to me. I finally decided on a nice, small one, easy to carry in my small, skinny arms, and waited for my teacher to say we were going back to school.
“Children, there are some baby goats in this pen here. Don’t you want to pet the baby goats?” my teacher had announced, and she began to herd us from the pumpkin field to a wide, open pen next to a barn, baby humans to pet the baby goats.
I remembered that I did not want to pet the baby goats, little animals which didn’t seem little to me. They were my height with scratchy-looking, dingy hair, wide, glaring eyes, and overly-inquisitive lips. I saw some of my schoolmates tentatively petting them lightly on the head, giggling when the kids moved underneath their hands, and Miss Brigham (or was it Mrs. Forrester?) goaded me, “Come on, Ellen, don’t you want to pet the baby goats?” I began to cry, and the little pumpkin I had proudly picked out fell from my arms and smashed to my feet because I hadn’t set it aside to pet the baby goats.
And I didn’t pick another pumpkin, didn’t pet the baby goats, because I was crying and couldn’t stop. I cried all the way home, and my mother saw me, my eyes squinted and red and snot running down my nose, mingling with my tears.
“What’s wrong?” my mother had asked, wiping my face with Kleenex, toilet paper, anything, and I told her, and she shook her head. “Crying because you were scared of baby goats! Why, in my hometown in the Philippines, there were goats roaming through the streets! Goats and chickens! Why, when I your age --” She had stopped and saw that I was still crying. “Ellen!” My eyes snapped open and I muffled my sobs. My mom continued, “When I was your age, my neighbor had fighting cocks. Mean-tempered roosters which became even meaner because my neighbor would but razor spurs on their feet. One day I followed my father to one of my neighbor’s gambling matches. Fear? I’ll tell you fear. Fear is seeing two roosters, while in their owners’ hands, trying to bite and gouge their owners’ hands and bellies. Fear is seeing these two roosters crashing in the middle of a circle and spearing each other in the breast, neck, legs. Fear is smelling the odor of chicken blood and men’s sweat mingled. I cried to my mother, and she scolded me, saying, ‘Why are you crying over a rooster? You are bigger than they are, you have a knife! And if your father gambles right, we will have some centavos and a piece of the defeated chicken for Defeated Chicken Soup! So stop being scared of your food!’” Mom had looked at me closely. “Are you afraid of hamburgers? No. Adobo chicken? No. Same thing with the goats -- it’s only food! Now stop crying!”
But, even as I remembered my Mom’s long-ago command at Santos’ pig farm, a crazy, live pig, who could bite your head off, and a safe, dead roast pig, served in nice, manageable bits on my plate, were two different things, and I was trying very hard not to cry from the idea that we were going to transport the former.
“Hey, Old Man, you sure that pig got plenty of exercise? She looks pretty small,” my pa bantered as he and my mom got out of the station wagon. My pa went to the back the back of the wagon to open the back.
Santos laughed. “Good pig. And she runs fast, Chief! Paulo and Mike nearly took an hour to catch her back there -- lots of muscle! Good meat!” He motioned the shorter of the two men to the station wagon. “Paulo!”
As Paulo went into the back of the wagon, I got out, just in time to see Mike and Santos lift up the pig -- Santos the front end and Mike the back. It wasn’t so easy because the pig started to kick and squeal, “Weeeweeeweeeweee!” A deafening, high-pitched squeal, which only grew louder and higher in pitch as Mike and Santos hoisted the pig into the back of the station wagon with Paulo guiding the way.
“Weeweeweewee!” The pig’s squeal bounced against the wagon’s interior and escaped through the open front windows and the open front side door with a resounding BAM! I saw through the windows the pig’s glaring, wide eyes -- just like the baby goats -- and saw the wagon begin to rock as the pig, closed in the station wagon, thrashed about in the back. “Weeweeweeweewee!”
“Mom,” I asked, tugging my mother’s sleeve as my father paid for the pig, “can I sit with you in the front?”
Why did I want to accompany my parents to this awful pig farm? Why didn’t I realize earlier that my father was going to buy a live pig, not a roast pig? If the trip to Santos’ farm seemed long to me, the trip returning to Uncle Mat and Auntie Linda’s house seemed longer, what with the pig thrashing in the back, rocking the wagon on an already windey volcano road. With the pig’s eyes wide and glaring. With the pig drooling into the back of the wagon as it squealed, legs splayed to balance itself. With it stinking up the car with pigflesh, even though it had been washed by Paulo and Mike. Pigflesh, pigdrool, pigsquat, piqsqueal.
“Weeweeweeweewee!”
In the front seat, squashed between my pa and my mom, I covered my ears and closed my eyes. I refused to look back, desperately trying to ignore the pig behind me. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” I began. “Weeweeweewee!” “Three hundred and six, three hundred and seven --” Noisy, disgusting animal! Why did it have to be my parents’ turn to buy the pig? Why didn’t Paulo and Mike tie up the pig so that it wouldn’t thrash so much, maybe nearly breaking a car window, maybe leaping forward to the front to bite!
“WEEEEE!”
My eyes snapped open, and I saw simultaneously in the rearview mirror my wide, brown eyes and the pig’s wide brown eyes. Brown? Yes, they were brown, with stubby, dark lashes, the pig’s and mine, and mine were wide with fear, and the pig’s? The same. The fear.
I felt the station wagon stop, and I saw that we were up the wide driveway of Uncle Mat and Auntie Linda’s house. Uncle and Auntie’s house was large, a wide one-story designed to remind you of Spanish villas, with its pinkish stucco and tiled roof. There was plenty of room for Uncle, Auntie, Grandpa Carl, Grandma Tes, and the two kids who were a little older than me, Jeanna and Susan, who went to Mt. Carmel School instead of New Piti Elementary, like I did. And, of course, there was plenty of room for all the parties Uncle and Auntie usually threw on a regular basis.
Pa honked the horn once to announce our arrival, which only aggravated the pig even more, sending it to a fresh round of squealing and thrashing. Pa, Mom, and I got out of the wagon as Uncle Mat and two Filipino men, all of whom I called Uncle, streamed out of the house to help my pa with the pig. One of them was in Paulo’s role, getting into the back of the wagon to guide the pig out, while Uncle Mat and Pa grabbed the pig’s legs and dragged the pig out of the back, hoisted it squirming and thrashing and flailing in their grip, and followed the remaining man to the back of the house.
Curious, I followed the men, and I saw on the cement patio many lengths of rope, a sharpened machete, a bucket of steaming water, and an empty bucket.
“What’s the empty bucket for?” I thought, but I must’ve said it aloud because Uncle Mat said, “It’s to catch the pig’s blood for dinuguan, chocolate meat.”
“Pig’s blood? Chocolate meat?” My stomach began to turn.
“Chocolate meat, dinuguan. Pork in pig’s blood soup.”
And I only stayed long enough to see them tie up the pig’s legs and the hear the pig’s fear, “WEEEWEEEWEEE” and to see my father raise up the machete, then I ran as fast as I could inside the house, past the busy kitchen filled with Filipino women cooking, past the living room, to the deepest, most secluded part of the house, to get away from the sight and sound of that doomed pig, to a tiny storage closet, dark and musty with never-used winter coats, where I huddled among the coats, my fingers plugging my ears and my head filled with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which I sang loudly to drown out the sharpest, dying squeal of the pig, the pig with my eyes, which were squeezed shut even as tears streamed down, shaming me because I wasn’t a baby any more.
“WEEeee --” The dying squeal, a squeal like a little girl’s shriek, was cut short with the cut into its throat, into its vocal cords, to drain the blood for chocolate meat. Chocolate meat! My favorite dish, with succulent pork pieces covered in rich, peppery, chocolate-brown soup like velvet, served over a steaming bowl of rice. But now I knew the soup was blood! How could I drink the blood of a creature that was so alive only minutes ago, a female pig with wide, fearful eyes, brown like mine, the eyes of a little girl pig? Cannibalism! Vampirism! No, no, no! I cannot eat, I will not eat, it isn’t fair, not fair, not right...
The closet door opened, and I blinked, blinded by the light outside of my dark hideaway. I unplugged my ears to wipe my wet eyes, and I saw Grandma Tes in front of me, her small, stooped form in the doorway.
“Ellen? Why are you in here? Your mama is worrying where you are. Why, you’re crying!”
I shook my head, furiously wiping my still-wet eyes, fearing that Grandma Tes would scold me for crying. Instead, Grandma pulled out a box from the closet, sat down, dug into her many pockets, and handed me a Kleenex.
“Ellen,” she asked softly, “why are you crying?”
“Because... because of the pig, Grandma, because... because... oh, Grandma, Papa killed the pig and she had my eyes, and I saw that she was afraid, Grandma, she was afraid, and now she’s dead and we have to eat her, and it’s so unfair, and we drink her blood in chocolate meat, chocolate meat -- nobody told me it was blood! I know it’s only food. It’s only food!”
Grandma Tes looked at me, handed me another Kleenex, and said, “Food, yes. But not only food. Food for the Filipino soul.”
I frowned, not understanding, and blew my nose.
“Unfair, you say, but it is not unfair. Pig, yes, we must kill the pig in order to eat, but we eat all of the pig, even the blood, so as not to waste what God gives us. That is fair. That is respect.” Grandma looked at her hands, brown and knobby. “What makes a Filipino? His language? But you cannot speak Tagalog, no?” She saw me shake my head. “No Tagalog, no Ilocano, which are two different languages, you know. But no, you don’t know. Which is why you didn’t know that ‘dugo’ is blood, and ‘dinuguan,’ Tagalog for chocolate meat, is ‘of blood.’” She looked at my hair, short and black. “Is the Filipino in his culture? But so much is Spanish, you know. The barong, the love songs, our Catholicism. Why, my grandfather was a full-blood Spaniard!” Grandma Tes smiled. “Anak ko, but I don’t look Spanish! I’m a little brown nut!”
I smiled and tried to hide it with my Kleenex, but Grandma saw it.
“If there is no language, no culture, then what is left for the Filipino? Do you know?”
I shook my head, my tears now gone, my eyes dry.
“His food! That American saying, ‘You are what you eat’ is true. In the Philippines, many are very poor and don’t have many things. No big house. No two cars. No fancy clothes. But we make up for everything in our food, and we share our food with others so that no one starves. We share our gifts from God! And we waste nothing because waste is disrespect, ingratitude. We make dinuguan because spilling blood without taking the blood is disrespectful to the pig, which died in order to feed us. We roast the pig whole as a celebration of life, all of life, the hardships and the joy. We eat the food and remember who we are. You like pancit, yes? Lumpia, yes? Lechon, yes?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Tagalog names for Filipino foods -- so you do know a little Tagalog!” She laughed. “And you remember that you are Filipino, even though you are not in the Philippines, even though you are not in the Philippines, even though you are an American, too. Our food is a remembrance, do you understand?”
“A little, Grandma.”
“Good enough. Now help your Grandma from this box.”
I scrambled up from my Indian-style position to help her up, and as she stood up, I was reminded that Grandma Tes wasn’t very tall for an adult, not quite five foot tall, short even for a Filipina.
We walked from the bedroom closet to the living room, which was crowded with Filipinos, all family and friends of Grandma and Grandpa.
“Accompany me to the kitchen,” Grandma said, and I followed her to the kitchen, still crowded with Filipinas, busily cooking and talking in Tagalog, sounding like chirping birds amidst the hot steam of cooking pots. While Grandma helped one aunt to stuff ground beef and vegetables into egg roll wrappers to make lumpia, I saw another aunt tend to the kare-kare, adding anatto water to color the peanut-butter and oxtail soup a rich, muddy red. Another aunt poured sweet rice into gingery chicken broth for arroz caldo con manok, chicken rice soup, but with the consistency of watery oatmeal and spicy with pepper, ginger, and green onions. Another made pancit luglug, shrimpy bean thread noodles with more vegetables than I could count and bits of pork, chicken, and shrimp, tossed and tossed and tossed. I saw Auntie Linda make sopao, steamed buns with meat and eggs in the center, of which I would always forget to remove the wax paper from the bottom of the buns before getting my first bite. Another aunt made adobo chicken, the mainstay of any Filipino household, like meatloaf in white households, a chicken stew with soy sauce, vinegar, pepper, bay leaves (the secret ingredient!), and sometimes potatoes, to make it extra hearty. Another made mungo bean soup, even adding the dreaded shrimp bagoong, which tasted okay as an ingredient but was yucky by itself (my parents and my uncles and aunties, of course, would beg to differ!). Some made flan. Some made karioka, looking like chicken nuggets but really a fried pastry of coconut and brown sugar. And I saw my mother cook dinuguan, pouring the pig’s blood in with the pork pieces, adding salt, black pepper, soy, a large, green pepper, stirring under low heat so as not to make the soup clump. I remembered that chocolate meat was one of my baby foods, that I grew up on this stuff, that I grew up watching my parents and other Filipinos cook together, speaking in Tagalog in laughing, loud voices, above the steam and the boiling pots and the frying pans and the whirring kitchen fans. That I grew up smelling the richness that was garlic, ginger, soy sauce, pepper, pork, and rice, not realizing just how rich those smells were, what those smells and sights and food meant besides feeding a hungry body.
It meant feeding a hungry soul.
After an hour or two in the kitchen, after I helped another aunt make rice (Auntie Linda had four rice cookers, all twelve-cup!), I went to the side patio adjacent to the back where my father, Uncle Mat, a handful of my uncles, Grandpa Carl, and the roasting spit was. The pig was now a lechon, golden brown and stretched out, its skin glistening with fat pouring out from its body as it turned around and around over the wood fire below. The eyes were gone, sunken into itself just as its life sunk into my mother’s large pot of dinuguan. But wasn’t the life still there, ready to be fed to other lives, like me, like the life of a marriage, which was what we were celebrating today, after all?
About two hours later, my pa said, “Okay, looks like its ready!” and he and Uncle Mat unhooked the fasteners from the spit and lifted the spit out, each holding the bar on either end, and carefully brought the pig to a nearby table, covered with wax paper. After setting down the pig, Uncle Mat pulled out the spit, and I saw that the roast pig’s lips had burned back against its jaw, giving the lechon a weirdly funny smile.
“Beautiful,” Grandpa Carl said, standing back. “Anybody got a camera?”
The men laughed, and one of my uncles, who did have one, took a picture of the lechon in all of its pristine wholeness before being carved up into serving size chunks.
“Ellen, go tell your Auntie Linda that the lechon is ready,” Uncle Mat said.
“Okay.” I went back to the kitchen, seeing the women bring out the finished dishes to the living room to the long buffet. I told Auntie Linda that the lechon was ready, and she darted back into the kitchen and, minutes later, brought back a heaping platter of lechon chunks with another aunt following her with a large bowl of salty-sweet lechon sauce, which you pour over the lechon chunks like gravy.
“The happy couple first, the happy couple first!” Auntie Linda called out, and my mom went to drum out Grandpa Carl from the side patio so that he and Grandma Tes could be the first ones in line. And I saw them, getting their food, Grandma smiling and Grandpa looking a little embarrassed with all the attention but smiling, too, saw the long line of family and friends getting the good food, too, and I realized that I had better get in line or there wouldn’t be any left for me. And besides the pancit and lumpia, I also got myself a steaming bowl of rice, nice and sticky like it should be, and saw the huge pot of peppery, chocolate meat, halfway gone because it was so popular. I ladled out a small serving of the dark brown soup and pork pieces onto my rice and mixed my serving well. Then I looked at my bowl, shrugged, and took a bite.
It was good.
© 1996 Rufel F. Ramos