At first glance, this collection of fifteen essays is a tribute to the author’s father whom she remembers as cooking for and feeding her Filipino comfort foods like chicken adobo. Interestingly, she says in the first essay that she doesn’t learn how to make her father’s adobo until she leaves home for graduate school in the United States. Macansantos says, “My father was concerned about my ability to feed myself in a foreign country.” Her dad told her to be able to substitute readily available calamansi in the Philippines with lime or lemon in the U.S.
I love this gesture of a parent’s love. One can feel the ambivalence and grief of a daughter leaving her beloved poet father. And then she finds herself, like many expatriates, faced with a second leaving. They lose their loved ones dying in the home country while the offspring are in the diaspora.
The other essays, varying from two pages to the lengthy “I Do Not Know How It Is In Your Country,” include poetry by her dad and Western poets. Macansantos evokes the elegant and textured profoundness of Bienvenido Santos’ A Scent of Apples.The hurts, the sacrifices, the misunderstandings, the continuing legacy of colonialism, kleptocracy, homelessness, invisibility and being “the other” unfold as Macansantos travels from Baguio to Manila, from Manila to Austin, TX, from Texas to Wellington, New Zealand, and artistic residences and writers’ workshops around the world.
For those born without power, education, especially higher education, is viewed as the road away from powerlessness and toward respect as a fellow human being. It often means leaving home and then questioning what a credential is really worth. Her dad had been a full professor in his hometown in Mindanao. Furthermore, he received the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, considered the highest literary honor in the Philippines, often called the “Pulitzer Prize of the Philippines.” Ambivalently, he moved to his wife’s home in Baguio for her career. As a child, Macansantos and her father accompanied her mother to the US so she could earn a PhD. in mathematics. This took several years. As an adult, Macansantos herself left the Philippines and her dad to study abroad.
Upon his death, his daughter re-reads his poetry At the kitchen table he spoke of the act of writing as well as how to prepare the family meal. When the author returns to Baguio to live with her widowed mom, they observe and contemplate the changes in the neighborhoods as houses, parks and gardens make way for bulldozers and condominiums. Macansantos says, “I want to enjoy what is left of the garden that my grandparents cultivated and my parents cared for. This land is my own Eden, allowing me rest as I continue to nurse my grief… I don’t know when all of this natural beauty will disappear, but perhaps I can claim the future my father once saw for himself as he watches a strange bird perching beside his guava sapling. I am his echo, communing with the echoes of everything he once saw.” One wonders if she is also her mother’s echo. Her father’s kitchen is in her mother’s house. She is her parents’ legacy.
Juanita/Nita is an activist since the 1968 BSU/TWLF San Francisco State Strike; since the 1970 census advocating for more detailed racial and ethnic data in Washington, DC, and now singing with the Seattle Raging Grannies. Her collection resides in the Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Author of Golden Children, Legacy of Ethnic Studies, SF State, Juanita is featured in the documentary, Agents of Change https://www.agentsofchangefilmnational.com/
