A Field Guide for Immersion Writing by Robin Hemley

Author:Robin Hemley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4373-0
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Daisy’s Debut

Margie and I have barely touched down in the Philippines when I learn that I’m to attend the “debut” of Daisy, the daughter of my wife’s first cousin Peach and Peach’s husband, the inimitable Bong Bong. After 19 hours of flying from the States—well, under any circumstances—Daisy’s debut wouldn’t make my personal Lonely Planet index of must-do’s in Manila. File this under family obligation. Peach and Margie are practically sisters.

John Cheever spent his Guggenheim year in Italy. I’ve chosen the Philippines, which seems fitting: for a somewhat more down-market writer to live in a somewhat more down-market country. I love Italy, too, but nothing’s quite like the Philippines. My wife is from here, and I’ve come here so often since 1998, when I started researching a book set in the Philippines, that I’ve come to feel at home in this bedraggled and ever-surprising archipelago of 7,107 islands (at low tide, as the joke goes).

The debut is to be held at Peach and Bong Bong’s restaurant, Titanic. Restaurant? Since when do Peach and Bong Bong have a restaurant, I want to know, as I’m peeling myself out of my sweaty travel clothes and indulging in a little pre-debut whining. What happened to their medical laboratory?

“Cerrado,” Margie tells me with a shrug and a schadenfreude smile. It failed. Over the eight years I’ve been a part of this family, Peach and Bong Bong have had at least three business ventures that I know of: the medical laboratory, another restaurant, and buying and reselling cars. The simple reason that they can afford to hop from one failed business to another is Bong Bong’s mother, who lives and works in the U.S. and sends them money. Bong Bong’s mother petitioned for him to join her in the States, but he couldn’t wait and went there about nine years ago using a fake passport, was caught, and deported. While he was there, he made pretty good money, working three jobs, but he wept every night on the phone talking to his kids. He probably wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t returned to the Philippines on a visit.

I love all of Margie’s relatives, even, or maybe especially, the nutty ones, being a little nutty myself. Titanic! Indeed. How did they ever come up with a name like that? “The kids suggested it,” Margie tells me. “They all loved the movie.” With that same smile, she gives me this: “Peach told Merle [Margie’s older sister], ‘I don’t know where I got my business sense.’” A gale of laughter overcomes us and my jet lag has been temporarily relieved.

Still, in the car on the way to Titanic, I wonder if perhaps Italy would have been the better choice. No one would force me to attend a debut, at least not this kind of debut, the Filipino version of a debutante’s coming out. An opera debut, maybe. Do they still write operas in Italy? Who’s the contemporary Puccini? If only I wrote about Westchester County! I’m lost in this Italian/John Cheever daydream as we crawl through Manila’s legendary traffic.

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