MY MOTHER—THE BEST I NEVER HAD—INTRAMUROS—BALUT—MANILA CATHEDRAL
My mother, despite her faults, which I occasionally find myself despising, truly despising as one would the faults of one’s worst enemies, is a good, loving person. In her childhood, she was abused, marginalized, and neglected. We know now that the children treated this way are forever transformed. Their brains are physically changed, so that they become almost irrevocably damaged. Without intervention at the soonest possible time, such people may become defensive, insecure, frightened, and anxious. My mother is now in her 70s. She has totally foregone the idea that anyone should help her, especially since her parents—my grandparents—had given her and her siblings a massive inheritance that made it unnecessary for her to ever succumb to the will of any other.
Thus, she is willfully ignorant. She despises being taught anything, or learning anything, because she views this as a sign of weakness. In allowing somebody to teach her, it means that she concedes her own stupidity, which she never would, though it is very apparent that she is stupid. She gives only one person the privilege of teaching her anything—me. Mostly regarding computers and business processes as relating to the government. These are things that she cannot afford to fuck up, and so it is a necessary compromise. In any other thing however even I like anybody could never dare correct or inform her.
Despite this she is a loving woman obsessed with duty, like the best mothers of the previous generations. She hates only one thing more than being learned, and that’s sensing (not even necessarily correctly) that one of her children or grandchildren are hungry, sick, or in pain. Whenever she comes across anything she thinks we’d like, she buys it as a surprise. I love her.
When my mother was 18, she was forced to leave her home because she was with my father, and my grandparents hated my father because he was a country boy from Batangas: A gaunt, dark-skinned farmer’s son with a mustache and unrepentant ambition to make it big in Manila. My grandparents on my mother’s side were already extraordinarily wealthy as a result of a work ethic shaped by the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. They did not want the likes of my father in the family. I have 10 aunts and uncles on my mother’s side. They lived in a building that was so large it was converted into a hotel when the children moved out. It was sold recently.
Still, my mother found in my father the love that he never truly found in her family. So, despite having to move out and live in a slum, she did. Around this time, she had my three sisters, each a few years apart. During this time, they were so poor that they seasoned rice with soy sauce and sugar and called it barbeque, and this would be their meal. As a snack, my sisters had sugar sandwiches. Still, they were happy.
Later, my grandparents accepted her back. The entire family was part of a corporation, and this meant that she was now eligible to receive a portion of the profits. She was lifted from poverty, along with my family, and it was around this time when they had me.
I was adopted. The story is hazy because I do not want to know the story, though my mom and my sisters have asked me before if I wanted to know. But I don’t. I don’t because I’m not interested and because I think it would make my already complicated life that much more complicated for no reason. Although many times I do feel like an outsider in my own family, but I feel that way everywhere. I wonder sometimes if this had anything to do with being told that I was adopted, but I doubt it. I’ve always felt this way.
My father did not want to tell me the truth, and even when they already had, he was adamantly against giving me more information or even acknowledging that I now know the truth.
Over the next couple of months, Nikolaus and I got to learn about each other. We spoke online, and he visited the house. We watched movies, drank coffee, played games. Mostly, we played narrative games. We played Life is Strange, and I was happy to know that he found it a disgusting piece of emotional slop like I did. He also adored The Walking Dead series by Telltale, as did I.
I called him Niko. He was extremely polite. I thought that maybe this was because of his upper-class European background. He was not only kind and considerate. He was seemingly enthusiastic about whatever someone around him offered him or showed him. When my father came in from the garden carrying chilis, the way he acted so amazed and asked questions and listened carefully to the answers made it seem as though he had never seen chili before. When my mother fed him some pinakbet, he acted like it was the best thing he had ever tasted. It was good, but nowhere near the best thing my mother or anyone else has ever cooked.
But this endeared him to us. Filipino culture can be quite brutal. We value brutality; weakness is undesirable, pitiful, pathetic. Even among friends we express our deepest affections in terms of fake, play aggression. Sincerity is “drama.” It is uncomfortable. A sense of doom accompanies it: The feeling that now we have let our guard down, we could be assaulted and destroyed at any moment. Our colonial past had made us so ridden with anxiety that we comforted ourselves with reminders of our brutality and strength and ruthlessness. And that never left our national conscience, even if independence was more than a century ago.
I have been lonely for most of my life. More than 90 percent of my life. But with Nik as my neighbor, I was not so alone. Mostly because he was literally always around. There were times when he joined us for breakfast, stay until we had to sleep, and then cross the street to return home. My clone would also be there with us, but he treated us exactly the same. He sometimes did what my parents did and continue things he started with my clone with me. By this point I had already gotten over how annoying this was and did not mind. It was also easy to overlook things that otherwise irritated me when I was with him.
One time he told me he wanted to visit Manila Cathedral. As an architecture student this was supposed to be interesting to him. Emily, Danny, and Juno came with me, my clone, and Niko. In the car we asked him if he listens to CUT. Juno was scandalized to learn that although he has heard of them, like most of the world, he has not actually listened to any of their songs. So, she played her entire playlist, picking songs from their EGO and SUPEREGO eras.
I liked CUT. There was a time when I was a diehard, and I was the one who introduced Juno to cut, once upon a time. It was X who captured me. He totally entranced me with his beauty, in a way that made me relate to cult members and the insanely religious. He was an avatar of the concept of perfection, which included—rather than excluded—the faults and follies of an ordinary human. It was like how people love Jesus, who was God reduced to human form, shedding his omnipotence and power. That was what X was like to me. His imperfection was part of his perfection.
But it was hard to love somebody the way I did in the fake way that I did. I was in for the art, but there was no escaping that they were a business. Much of their natural, human impulses were suppressed in the name of brand image. I was irked by their commercialization, even though that was supposed to be a natural and expected part of who they are. Eventually, the contradictions could not sit so comfortably within me, and I had to move on, even if I still liked X, and I still liked CUT.
I reminded Juno to play The Best I Never Had. That’s my favorite song from them. CUT was at their musical best, their most musically innovative. Before then, they merely repeated hip-hop tropes, though they did it exceptionally well. After that, they had sadly descended into a kind of power pop slush with enough variation to diversity their offerings but still maintain a constant, identifiable sound. All their new songs sounded alike to me.
The Best I Never Had was a response or companion piece to their earlier, hip-hop driven The Best I Ever Had. This was an earlier song during their second (or was it third?) album. It was a hip-hop song with long rap sections, synthesizer music, and a surprisingly complex arrangement. Still, it was standard fare. The Best I Never Had was from their MANIFEST album, which was released around a year after they achieved the pinnacle of their international success. Here, they broke free from all preconceived notions and—crucially—they were doing it for the first time. Thus, there were no rehashed ideas, there were no retreads. There was no redoing something that succeeded before.
The song was ostensibly a power ballad, something that might be akin boy band version of a Jim Steinman song, who wrote It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), obviously with rap sections built in. However, the total effect was nothing short of extraordinary, in that classic power ballad ideas were used in a fresh way, with the unexpectedness and syncopated beats of hip-hop.
The song changed keys as the song progressed, but it was always in a minor key, and ostensibly so. It bled a palpable melancholy like a Beethoven song. And the synthesizer sounds were so alien. In the background, spaced very much apart, was the sound of something like a drop of water, a single note echoing in such a bizarre, almost otherworldly way. And this was paired with conventional instruments that carried the melody and the beat.
The lyrics of the song were in Korean, but I’ve read several translations of it. The individual rap parts shared the general theme with the chorus, which was longing for someone you’ve known for a long time, and are friendly with, but would never be with you: “After everything, this is it? / This is all that we have, and I’m thankful. / Thank you for being here, though you don’t love me. / What does it mean if you don’t love me?”
Like all the best sad songs, it resonated with my specific, personal sadness. They vibrated at the same frequency. Even then, when I hadn’t heard the song in a few months, I was still somewhat overwhelmed with how much I loved the song in all its ways, all its subtle twists and turns. Niko said that he loved it, but I could never really tell with him. He said that about everything. I could see that Juno thought he was a CUT fan in the making because he asked if he could have a list of all their best songs and albums. But I knew that he did that with everything.
We stopped at Plaza de Roma, which was across from the Manila Cathedral. The afternoon heat was unbearable. In the car, before we got off, Niko took out a little spray bottle from his body bag and covered himself in sun screen.
“You don’t use sun screen?” he said, when he saw that we were all looking at him. “The UV is really high this time of day.”
Juno asked some, and then Emily. I thought I might as well have some, too, and when I did, Danny followed suit so that he wouldn’t be left out.
We went on a Thursday, so that it wouldn’t be so crowded. Emily had the week off, and Danny decided to use a sick day when I guilted him into the trip. He owed me. Juno worked from home and did not have much to do that day, which was so unusual that she decided it deserved to be celebrated, even though all she really wanted to do was rest. She was also a true believer and thought it would do her good to visit the Cathedral.
The plaza was a quaint place with benches and a statue to King Charles IV, who sent the first smallpox vaccine to the country. For a time, statues of the three friars who aided the Philippine Revolution against Spain stood there, but they changed it back to King Charles IV for some reason. Consequently, this area and the place it was in, Intramuros—the walled city, was a kind of monument to our colonial past and the foreign powers that demarcated these more than seven thousand islands as one nation (though we were, are, and always had been a diverse peoples) and then exploited it to ruin.
“Disgusting,” I muttered, while looking at the statue. It was all green and dirty and malignant.
“You don’t like it?” Niko was holding up his phone to take a photo of it. “I think it’s quite beautiful.”
“I don’t mind the statue, I guess… But it’s just what it represents that bothers me.”
“What does it represent?”
“Imperialism.”
Niko looked at the pictures he took. Then, he spent a while posting it on his Instagram. He was trying to make the most of his move by turning it into some kind of inspirational narrative on social media.
“Maybe it did this country some good,” Niko said. “Brought prosperity and religion here.”
How could I miss something like that?
“Are you saying that imperialism was a good thing?”
“Don’t get me wrong.” He put his phone in his pocket. “I know that imperialism had some very evil aspects. I don’t deny that. But there was also much good that imperialism brought. Don’t you think? It civilized many people.”
“I don’t know about that…”
There were not many people around because it was a weekday, but the square was still full and all the seats were taken. Some stalls in front of the Cathedral were selling street food, and people were also crowded around them, eating fishball and kikiam and isaw.
It was a little past noon, and we hadn’t eaten yet. We decided to have some as well. Niko hadn’t tried the street food so we let him try a little bit of everything. Predictably the fishballs and the kikiam were delicious to him. The first challenge was the isaw. Grilled chicken intestines. He asked if it was so fresh that there was a chance there was still chicken shit inside it. We said no but I didn’t really know. I had just always supposed that they removed all the contents of the intestines before cooking it. And yet there were still gunk and stuff inside when you eat it. That’s where all the flavor came from.
And then there was a man with a straw hat and a basket of eggs seated on bench. We herded Niko there and told him that as a stranger in our land he must undergo the most brutal trial any of our visitors must face.
He must eat balut—fertilized duck egg.
Niko said that he’s never heard of balut before. That only made us more excited. We ordered one from the old man, who was smiling at us with his crooked and yellowed teeth. He knew what was going on. The other people seated around him were also watching, and we encouraged them.
Niko stood there holding the egg with his long, delicate fingers. His nails were so well-manicured. So curved and a little shiny. Did he do that himself or did his mother insist on that when she brought him to the parlo? Or maybe one of his sisters had a kit at home.
“What do I do?” he said, smiling awkwardly.
“You peel the top off,” I said. “But be careful that it doesn’t spill. There’s juice in there.”
“It’s the pee,” Emily said.
The strangers around us laughed.
“That’s not the pee…” I said. “It’s the amniotic fluid.”
“Well, it’s gotta pee at some point,” Emily said. “And where does it go?”
Niko peeled the top of the egg, revealing the hardened albumen, now a mass that almost looked like a pebble. His eyes widened upon spotting the chick, almost fully formed, with bits of black feather. “Don’t look at it!” I said. But he was already staring at it: its closed eyes, its beak. It was easy to imagine it as only sleeping. That if you coax it gently a bit, it would wake up and chirp and spread its wings and fly away. But it wasn’t alive of course, and could not be revived.
I could see from his gulping that he was trying hard not to gag. He could see the fluid. He placed the egg against his lips and tipped it into his mouth and sipped. He looked like he was in agonizing pain.
“What does it taste like?” Danny said.
“Soup,” he said. “Stale, salty soup.”
“Now I want one.” I motioned to the old man for another. He gave me one and I paid him and I sipped mine too after quickly cracking it open.
“What now?” Niko asked, but he knew what was coming, and he looked like he dreaded it very much.
“You eat it,” Emily said. “Obviously. It’s food.”
“Even the baby?”
Juno did not eat balut. She groaned and pouted at the characterization.
“Yes,” I said. “Eat it.” I began to chant: “Eat. It. Eat. It.”
My friends followed, and then the strangers. Even the old man was clapping his hands, but he wasn’t saying anything, and he was clapping like a seal, with his fingers all stiff.
Niko took the chick and closed his eyes and dropped it into his open mouth. He chewed with a wincing expression and then picked the beak and feet from his mouth.
There was applause.
The façade of the Manila Cathedral was not as ornate as one would expect from the name. In fact, it was the minor Basilica and Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The gray façade and the tower on its western side was certainly big. A basilica, whether minor or major, should indeed be large. However, one cannot help but feel it should be grander somehow. There were three archways for the entrance, as well as four statues of men at the front. I did not know who they were. I imagine school children are taught who they were in social studies. I cannot even recall being told, ever. I imagine they were important foreigners. Important to somebody, at least.
Niko and his family were Protestants. Such sights were quaint to them but important only in a cultural way. Strictly speaking, such buildings should inspire disgust within him, at the gross excesses of Papists. I doubted he took religion that seriously. I wasn’t sure.
We wandered around inside. Juno lit a candle. Danny and Emily were the common type of agnostic, for whom apathy were the main concern. In a kind of childish way, they felt that God must probably not exist because they certainly could not see him, and have not seen him at any point in their lives.
A mass started while we were in there. The Primate was celebrating. He arrived from the back, sacristans on either side of him. He was wearing violet as well, but with gold trimmings and a golden ferula topped with a crucifix. The people who were on the sides of his path fell on his knees as he passed. It was a dramatic sight—quite dramatic for an after-lunch mass on a weekday. The choir sang in dark, melancholy Latin.
Niko was entranced with it all. Or maybe he was just happy to get out of the afternoon heat. I was seated to the right of him, and when I looked at him, his nose blocked my view of the stained-glass windows. It was large, but in the way that I liked. I thought it was very attractive.
“I’ve seen a few Catholic masses,” he said. “But I’ve never participated in one.”
“A bit underwhelming, don’t you think?” I said, whispering. We weren’t allowed to talk in church.
“It has its charms. I understand it’s not as magnificent as the Cathedrals in Europe, but it has its own… colonial character.”
“Can you say that? Colonial?”
“Say what you will about imperialism—”
“You bet I will.”
“—but it was a tremendous productive force in history that really… Well, it made the world better for that time even if there were some trade-offs. But there are always trade-offs, aren’t they? Some things must be sacrificed, given up, so that we can have better things. And when we have those better things, then we do not need to make those sacrifices anymore.”
“Historical dialectics.”
“Yes. In a way. But not in a Marxist way.”
“In what way, then?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It is what it is, but there is no, like, historical force that will make violent, working-class revolution inevitable.”
“Empire seems pretty violent to me.”
“In general, but not in particular.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
We didn’t finish the mass. We walked out and went into the car and thought about the other places we should go. We visited all the interesting sights, for Niko’s sake, and in the end had dinner somewhere in Makati, because we had had enough of Intramuros.
One evening we were watching a Korean movie, and we were lying in my bed so close together. I had the urge to embrace him; it felt only natural because of how closer we were together. I found myself staring at him in the dark, lights flashing against his face. His handsome face. He turned to me, and he smiled. I think he smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. But I know that he knew. He must have known. I wanted more than anything for him to lean in and kiss me. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it unless he wanted to. And I could only know that if he leaned in and kissed me.
But then he turned his head. I sighed. He must have known I sighed. He must have heard it. But he didn’t do anything. He didn’t move. I wanted to blow into his ear, but that might have been too much. I didn’t want to do too much. I didn’t want to be too much. I was looking at him the entire time. I didn’t even watch the movie anymore. I was lying there with both my hands underneath my head, staring at him.
I woke up around an hour later. He was watching YouTube on the television now.
“Fuck…” I said.
“You fell asleep.” He didn’t turn to look at me. “Too bad you missed the movie. It was pretty good.”
He turned towards me. I tried not to breathe too in case I had bad breath. My spit tasted stale in my mouth.
“You good?” he said.
I spoke with a hand in front of my mouth. “Yeah.”
He laughed at what I was doing. “Listen. I appreciate you a lot. And not just because you’re the first friend I’ve ever made in this place. And not just because you’re been so good to me. I like you. But—”
“Right. Right. Sorry.”
“I’m not like that. I’m sorry.”
I’ve felt that kind of pain before. From this type of thing. But you can’t ever get used to it. It always stung like the first time. Like barbed wire tightening against my heart.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t be sorry.”
“Okay.”
“What should we watch next?”
“You’re not going home?”
“Unless you’re tired.”
“No. No. I just took a nap.”
He laughed. “Right. So, what do you want to watch next?”