We just got back from a Thanksgiving Party at the Billingham’s (Joe and Claire) in the woods in Erwinna, Bucks County, PA. Just relatives: Al, Laura, Laura’s parents, Isabel and her husband Jay and Ava, Lolit and me. It was such a pleasure just being with family, chatting updates, what everybody was doing. Ava, now 23, is employed in New York City. Isabel, now 25, is doing her doctorate in bio-engineering at Penn. Even the time spent stooped over the jigsaw puzzle of Gustav Klimt’s The Woman in Gold was a pleasure.
The menu was simple, too: corn casserole, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffings, turkey. For dessert: pecan pie, apple pie, and pumpkin pie. I bought the first two from the Village Farm and Bakery in the Delaware Water Gap, my usual destination for baked goods. Isabel brought a fruit salad with apple, pear, pineapple and pomegranate seeds. She said that I taught her how to peel a pineapple the Philippine way when she was 10! I remember that when she and Ava were small, I taught them how to cook. One time we cooked broccoli with ginger. I taught Ava how to chop the broccoli. I told her that in a traditional Chinese kitchen, she has to spend 10 years to learn how to do it right! We still laugh about the joke.
I was asked what I was thankful for but I did not give it much thought. But now, the morning after Thanksgiving, I could say that for one meeting people is a real delight. When you are living alone as a couple and you are often home-bound, it is a genuine pleasure to be with people, not just with family but with others with whom we could share activities. At the community center nearby, we have dinners, games, arts and crafts, bingo, poetry reading and exercise with other seniors and even just sitting and nursing a glass of wine with the retired couple next door is a welcome change from the sedentary routine of being shut-in.
Here are the fliers for my two seminars organized by INAM Philippines (https://inamphilippines.com).
Most probably they are my last seminars in the country. At 84 (DOB: 10/25/40, the Year of the Metal Dragon), I could no longer do certain movements, not to mention traveling 17 hours straight from JFK in New York to NAIA in Manila. I decided to teach because INAM, the sponsor of many of my seminars in the Philippines since 1998, was celebrating its 40th anniversary. I thought I should wind down my teachings there. Tie up the 25 years of lessons and methods, include a few details about Zi Nei Zang internal organs massage and Tai Ji Quan Dao Ren (drawn from the first section of the 108 solo fist Yang Family form), and add the Qigong movement I called Babaylan Prayer depicting the shamanic trinity of Heaven, Earth and Humanity. There was also dantian breathing and Tiandijiao … But I realized too late that there was really not enough time and opportunity to do even half of them. How do you teach eastern healing and meditative disciplines in one weekend? I’ll probably not see those students again: will they continue practicing the techniques? Who will they study with when I am gone? I feel a sense of guilt when I think about it. I know I’ve trained others at INAM who could repeat the courses but how do they continue if the students do not return? Since I taught he same courses again and again over the years, I was hoping that the students would review the courses with me but it was not to be: I rarely see the same students again.
Full disclosure: although a resident of the US since 1970 I am a Filipino citizen carrying a Philippine passport. Teaching was my main purpose in visiting my country but it was a delight to see friends and relatives or whoever was left from clan and contemporaries. My close and dear colleagues from the University of the Philippines passed away the last few months, one after the other. Salvador Carlota, former dean of the college of law and editor of the Philippine Collegian, died early this year. https://alum.up.edu.ph/dean-salvador-t-carlota-1942-2024/. There was Temy Rivera, the most recent casualty of old age and illness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temario_Rivera. He had just written to say that Ed Labitag, https://abogado.com.ph/up-laws-ed-labitag-passes-away-abogados-pay-tribute-to-beloved-prof/my classmate in the college of law, had died from pneumonia when within a month another friend wrote that Temy had died from pancreatic cancer. Like Ed Maranan, Temy Rivera is one of my heroes: he had been an activist and rebel, a political prisoner during the Marcos dictatorship, a writer and intellectual, and he was also an esteemed friend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Maranan
Lolit and I spent a week at the ylang-ylang farm in BRGY Estipona, in Pura, Tarlac, with my brother Roland and his wife Vicky. Their house is 3-4 hours north of Manila. A small resort was being built in the large plantation for family outings an excursions. There’s already a fish pond for tilapia and catfish. Roland and Vicky took us on a day trip to Baguio City up in the north. A former hill station for US soldiers, Baguio is part of tribal lands. There’s a history of persecution, land-grabbing and “pacification” there. From the names of the places, you’ll hear suggestions of the colonial past: Burnham Park, Camp John Hay, Trinidad Valley. It’s true that the journey is as enjoyable as the destination when it comes to Baguio: the landscape changes from the Central Plains to the winding roads up in the mountain.
One day my friend Isidro Sia and I drove up to BRGY Jose Rizal, in Natividad, Pangasinan to see the Arboretum and meet up with its founder, my U.P. contemporary Vic Ramos. The trees had grown from the last time I was there more than a decade ago when I planted a foot-tall baby cupang tree by the pond. Now it is more than 20 feet tall, a giant among the 300 other indigenous trees.
After coming back from the Philippines on October 31, we were exhausted. We arrived at JFK just before midnight and by the time we checked out of immigration and customs, it was 3 AM. Lolit had come down with something. For a whole week she was indisposed, with bad digestive and flu symptoms. She announced that she was no longer going to travel! I took her to the doctor. Flu and Covid tests turned out negative. Whatever brought the illness quickly departed. She was surprisingly well in a couple of days. She had suddenly a bright outlook: Travel while you can, she said.
Not another visit to the Philippines or any another country? Well, I won’t entirely rule it out now.
I have not mentioned that Lolit and I stayed at Shangri-La Makati for a few days when we arrived in Manila. It has the kind of Orientalism that Edward Said would have critiqued. Faux Arabic scripts and calligraphy, golden giant pillars, slim waitresses in a kind of Chinese cheongsam. My first and last time to stay there.
Rene