The Lost Language by Marianne Villanueva

Author:Marianne Villanueva [Villanueva, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789712727764
Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

MY MOTHER’S COURTSHIP

My parents arrived in America within a year of each other. Ironically, they’d both attended the same school in Manila but they didn’t meet until they were both graduate students at Stanford.

Back home, their families lived within a mile of each other, in an enclave of homes patterned after American suburbia, with streets named after the signs of the zodiac: My father’s parents lived on Hydra, my mother’s on Leo.

In Manila, my mother had had two boyfriends: the first was the son of a Chinese tycoon who was named, improbably, Archie. His real name was Archimedes Wenceslaus Chua. Archie’s parents expected him to study in Boston College, which was also his father’s alma mater. After his first semester in the Jesuit college in Manila, Archie left for Boston, and then my mother promptly found herself another boyfriend.

She had to tell Archie about it over the phone, and to her horror Archie cried and had his mother and father come over to speak to her, but she wouldn’t change her mind.

Her second boyfriend was Filipino. His name was Deo. He was the 11th of a family of 14 children. When my mother started going out with Deo, everyone was shocked because they thought Deo had made up his mind to join the seminary. They called my mother a bad influence, and Deo’s parents refused to meet her. After three years of dating, my mother and Deo broke up, because my mother found out that Deo had secretly been seeing another girl. My mother had been broken-hearted. It all worked out, however, for less than six months later she’d been accepted to Stanford and was on her way to California.

MY PARENTS’ initial outings didn’t really seem like “dates.” They’d watch the Sunday flicks at Mem Aud. Once my father dared to bring my mother to see “Debbie Does Dallas,” and she watched the pornographic doings patiently, with what he thought was a commendable lack of curiosity or drama.

My father’s roommate was an amorous Spaniard who always brought a string of girlfriends back to their high-rise apartment in Escondido Village. When my father started bringing my mother over, he’d make dinner while she sat on the green plastic sofa, nonchalantly leafing through a women’s magazine. From the inner room, where the Spaniard would hole up with his date, there would emanate moans and grunts and thumps which my mother studiously ignored. She was a woman, my father once told me in amazement, of great and impenetrable poise. I got the impression he hadn’t really known her at all.

In those days, my father liked to impress people with his cooking. My mother told me his specialty was a kind of sour soup, which he made with chicken and radish and spinach and crushed tamarind seeds. After my parents married, my father forgot everything he had learned about cooking and never set foot in the kitchen again. But my mother continued to make this soup, and in fact it’s the one thing I can say she cooked with absolute mastery.

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