September 22, 2005 – Coming of Age in Manila in the 1930s

September 22, 2005 – Coming of Age in Manila in the 1930s

My mother was born in Agoo La Union in the Philippines sometime after the turn of the 20th Century. She still likes to keep her age a secret and I’m not one to go against my mother’s wishes. I have a picture that I found on the Internet showing a school in Agoo La Union taken around the turn of the last century. It’s a black and white photo shot with a wide-angle lens. It encompasses the whole school ground and the faculty and students arranged in rows in front of the school buildings which are built on stilts, a couple of feet off the ground, five building each topped with a thatched roof, with others out of the frame. The foreground where the school body is assembled is neatly groomed and appears to be a clay surface. Where the buildings are the ground is covered with coarse grass cropped short to the ground. There is one large tree in the photo, near the building in the foreground behind the rows of students and faculty attired in white uniforms. This is my vision of the place my mother spent her early years.

I purposefully limit her time in Agoo La Union to her early years because she moved to Manila as a young girl. My mother was a young girl when her mother died. My mother’s mother was the only one left of her family, no brother or sisters nor parents or other relatives alive. My mother and her brother and newborn sister were her legacy to the world. My mother’s father, Luciano, a policeman remarried. My mother’s uncle, Domingo, also a policeman and his wife, Louisa, wanted my mother to come to live with them in Manila to provide a companion for their only child Julania, who was close in age to my mother. Juliana was seven years old and my mother was eight. Luciano acceded to Domingo’s request and my mother found herself living in Manila. I asked her if she didn’t miss her family and she said she came to think of Luciano, Louisa, and Juliana as her family. Domingo decided to give up his job as a policeman and take a position managing a mortuary for a wealthy woman owner.

Big families were the norm in the Philippines at the time. My mother’s father Luciano had a younger brother and two older sisters. Luciano remarried and had another six children: Mary, Cenon, Sabas, Cesar, Momay, George, and Cemon in addition to the three he had from my mother’s mother: Marion, Margarita and my mother. My mother’s uncle Domingo, on the other hand decided to have only one daughter, however, my mother confides in me that he was a bit of a womanizer, something his wife had surely come to accept. I learned from my mother that policemen were notorious rogues trading “favors” for forgiveness from violating the law.

The flat where my mother lived was above the funeral home on Rizal Avenue that her uncle managed. She and her cousin each had their own room “We had a lady to cook and go to the market everyday because there was no refrigerator and a man to wash the clothes—there was no washing machine,” my mother explains one Friday evening at the end of April. The lady cook was my mother’s Aunt’s cousin. The young man worked for my uncle Domingo. My mother and her cousin Juliana went to school together. Before the beginning of the school year, Uncle Domingo would take the two girls to a seamstress named Sylvia who made their school uniform. “We would have twelve uniforms made, twelve uniforms for my cousin and twelve for me,” my mother explains. “We would wear our uniforms for six months. After six months, Uncle Domingo would have new ones made. He was a great man my uncle. The uniforms were a blue skirt and a white blouse, black shoes and white socks. I carried my books in a book bag around my shoulder as my cousin and I walked the two blocks along Rizal Avenue to school from our home.”

I asked my mother to described what she remembered about her home. “It was a huge place,” she said. “You walked downstairs and pass through the caskets. Sometime I found my uncle lying in a casket fast asleep. I would jostle him and tell him to get out of there. I would get so mad at him. He would wake up and go back to work. He was the one embalming the dead. The chapel was downstairs and house where we lived is upstairs. You never heard anything upstairs because the first floor was so high. It was huge house and the bottom was like a church for funeral services.

“What became of your uncle?” I asked and she replied that he died when she was in her late teens. She said that there was talk that a spurned lover had put a curse on him and he died as a result. It was at this time my mother began to work as a typesetter in a print shop to support her family.