Spring 2021 Short Fiction Prize Finalist
Mom had this distant relative, a Tita, who lived up in San Francisco, where all the rich, artsy Filipinos lived. My Ninang Sampaguita, or Godmother, was appointed, I have long assumed, by mere unceremonious and banal agreement, although my mother would often swear my Ninang was there at my christening, standing on her trotters and leaning on my Tito DJ, who I know for sure wouldn’t be caught anywhere near a church, let alone a pig unless he was sinking his teeth into one.
Pig? Well, yes. I know it may be difficult for Westerners and most, if not all, Americans to understand, but some animals can walk and talk and be Ninangs and Ninongs and spirits and gods and major league baseball players and presidents and hold all sorts of societal significances. At the very least, as much as any human can. At the very least, enough to persuade the ignorant and uninitiated into becoming devout vegans.
But just as humans can be inhuman, so too can an animal be “not” an animal. And so, too, can an animals be very much what they are.
Ninang Sampaguita once visited us at my childhood home in Eagle Rock, a little town nestled between the downward laps of Glendale, Pasadena, and Echo Park. Back then, it was where newly immigrated Filipino families moved to stay close enough to Los Angeles to make it to work and far enough away to avoid the rampant disparity between the rich and the poor they knew all too well back home.
I was seven when Ninang Sampaguita’s gold BMW crept up our driveway. Behind the wheel were the thin, folded limbs and sagging cheeks of her lifelong driver, Junpei (she pronounced June-Pea), a tall, amorphous frog in a bowler hat. In the back seat, her black, wide-brimmed sunhat stopped at her oblong sunglasses, her snout held high, her triple chins cascading into inverted arcs, plump and plugged at a piercing pearl necklace, Ninang Sampaguita basted. When their car came to a halt, Junpei got out first, amazing us with his height (it was the first time seeing someone seven feet tall), and stood straight, one arm going rigid at his lapel, the other flourishing fingers around her handle before opening her door with great pomp and ceremony. Spilling from the door were three different furs, a pudgy ankle bursting from a two-strap, diamond-studded slipper, a sharply tipped cane crowned by a polished gold handle and stubby clawed fingers, and finally, Ninang Sampaguita herself, adorned in a black, layered and flowy dress that couldn’t hide the fact that she was a giant pig, struggling to stand on her haunches.
“Don’t stare!” Our mother whispered to my sister and I and pinched our shoulders before addressing our guest. “Tita Gita!”
We stayed stunned where we were as our mother advanced, momentarily confused by how our mother was acting and who she was calling to. In public, our mother, although loving, was often seen as the quiet type. When I lived in her house, many of my girlfriends would remark that my mother did not like them simply because of this unintentional frigidity. However, in private, she did not refrain from knocking on the door to my room and asking after them all, nor did she ever refrain from remarking on what she thought of them or anybody, whether it be good or otherwise.
And, in the case of Ninang Sampaguita, she had a lot to say. Before that moment, besides Ninag Sampaguita, there were names our mother used for her when talking to others on the phone or to our father over the dinner table. Most of the time, it was Baboy Bruja. Never was it Tita Gita.
“Mila!” The pig spoke. Junpei was at her side, hopelessly trying to stabilize her.
My mother awkwardly came in for an embrace which Ninang Sampaguita awkwardly could not return. When she was finished, my mother turned a trembling smile back at us. “These are my kids.”
“Stupendous. Kids.” Our Ninang said matter-of-factly, as if she were double-checking items purchased on a receipt.
Junpei’s long arms quietly guided my mother in his place at my Ninang’s side and retrieved two large bags from the trunk. He approached us until he was towering before our feet, his eyes like the sun and the moon on opposite corners of his wide smile, silently staring down at us. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My sister trembled. She would later remark to me that she had peed herself a little.
Just as Junpei dropped the bags and stretched out his webbed hands to either murder us or tussle our hair, our Ninang brought them to a halt with her bellowing voice. “June-pea, mahal. Tama na yan. Leave the children alone and wait in the car, my dear.”
Junpei’s hands obediently receded, and he bowed to all of us before quietly whisping his long body back to the car like hairs released to the wind.
My mother struggled to keep her Tita up. Cheek to cheek now, she was leaning into Ninang Sampaguita’s entire weight as she tried to speak. “What did… You bring, Tita?”
“Food for my ananak. Only the best.”
My sister and I looked in the bags and were met with blue Tupperware of sweet and savory smells. To my surprise, it was homemade and not take-out from some fancy restaurant.
“Tita, you didn’t have to. We have food.”
Ninang Sampaguita oinked but none of us dared to acknowledge it. “Susmariosep. Give your food to the cat. This is the good stuff. Boy, girl, carry those inside.”
“Anthony and… Bethany.”
We nodded and did as we were told, although I wasn’t sure if our mother was asking us to do as our Ninang asked or correcting her. Nevertheless, by the time we dragged the heavy bags to the kitchen and came outside again, our mother and Ninang were still nowhere near the front door. By the time the three of us got Ninang Sampaguita inside, Junpei had finished a cigarette, coolly smothering and keeping the spent end in a tiny box he kept in his breast pocket.
The three of us caught our breaths before closing the front door. We watched the thin giant stuffed in his tiny car, his knees above his head. “Would your driver like to come inside to use the restroom? San Francisco’s a long way from LA. Maybe he’d prefer to—.”
“Oh no.” My Ninang squealed from her chair at the dining table. She would stay there for the entirety of her visit. “He’s fine where he is.”
Of my mother’s anecdotes about my Ninang Sampaguita, the one that I remember the most is one that correlates with my favorite memories of my father. Before Dad died, we never ate out. Dad always cooked, slaving away for hours in the kitchen on pancakes, pepperoni, and tomato sandwiches for lunch and some kind of Filipino dish for dinner. It was important to him that we remembered where he and Mom came from when we returned home. It was important to him that we at least got to know what it tasted like.
Unfortunately, although we appreciated him for the effort, nothing Filipino he made ever tasted right. Compared to the stuff we ate at Filipino restaurants and relatives’ birthday parties, Dad’s just weren’t any good. He made Sinigang sweet, the Chicken Adobo bland, and even figured out a way to make instant champorado inedible. Some things were so bad I often perceived them as a test to my parent’s marriage, a test of whether I would choose Mom over Dad in the divorce. My sister says she always loved the food and is often brought to tears just thinking about it, but my memory always found her face twisted like our mother’s and mine, her tears different from the reasons they were meant for now.
Despite this lack of culinary prowess, there was one dish that my father knew how to get just right. For the longest time, my sister and I thought that our father had simply lucked out and his happenstansual alchemy had finally paid off. The smells of sauteing garlic and onion, accompanied by the loud hiss of freshly tenderized and cut-up cubes of pork, signaled its inception, so you would imagine our surprise when our mother told us who taught our father how to make it, let alone how.
The lid came off and the black stew bubbled as my father stirred the pot. Cancer would take his bladder and then the rest of him a year later. Doctors told him he was lucky to still be alive, but back then he was nothing but smiles. “It’s made with pig’s blood!” He explained, expecting our mouths to drop, but we had eaten dinuguan several times before, except it wasn’t like this. It never tasted so amazing.
“They know, Papa.” Our mother said beside him as my sister and I stood on our tippy-toes to get a good look at our feast. “Why don’t you tell them who taught you to make it?”
My father lifted the stirring spoon to his mouth before mixing it back in. His lips smacked into a frown. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Come on, now, Papa. Tell them about how the pig taught you how to cook pig.”
“I’m cooking, Mama. You tell them. I’m the cook. You’re the storyteller.”
My sister and I ran off laughing to the dinner table. My mother followed us, knowing the best way to keep my father happy was to eat everything he made and to tell the stories for him.
“Your Ninang Sampanguita taught your father how to make chocolate meat!”
Our sister and I giggled and groaned.
“Ew. Isn’t that a canidlism?” I said, having, by then, only watched the basket scenes of The Silence of The Lambs through the gaps between my fingers.
“Cannibalism.” My mother corrected.
“Cannibalism.” My sister repeated and stuck out her tongue.
I nudged her with my shoulder, and Mom quickly gave us a look before it became anything more. “In the province, when Papa and I got married, we couldn’t afford a feast. So, I asked your Ninang baboy bruja for her help. She asked, ‘ananak, is your husband a good man?’ I said, ‘Yes, very, Tita.’ So, she said, ‘good, then he will make the food himself. I will provide what he needs but only God helps those who help themselves.’ And I said, ‘Talaga, are you saying you’re God?’ and she laughed and laughed, saying, ‘I might as well be nanaman!’
“When I told Papa about it, he said he would do whatever it took. So, we got married and Papa and I went to visit the baboy bruja again. I said, ‘We’re married na. He’s a good man. Will you help us?’ And your Ninang stepped out of her house and out through her door, another pig, and another pig, and another pig stepped out after her until there was more baboy than we could count. Your father and I were amazed. Papa was especially grateful but also worried. He said, ‘Tita. Oh, thank you! But how can we cook all these pigs in time? The reception is tomorrow!’
“And when he said this, your Tita frown at me and curled back her ears. The pigs squealed. Weee-wee-wee! She shouted at Papa over their screams. ‘What do you mean? I called them here to help you, bastos!’”
My sister and I stared dumbly at our Ninang has she huffed and drooled at the table. Immaculately strewn together in front of us was each of her dishes haphazardly platted by my mother last minute. It was hard to imagine a pig, let alone one person making so many things of such high caliber. Besides the obvious pot of snow-white rice, there was a savory-smelling pork adobo, glistening lechon kawali, a pile of pork lumpia, and, of course, the dinuguan. To my surprise, it looked and smelled just like my father’s.
“Don’t be shy,” she huffed. “Dig in.”
“You first, Tita.” My mother said.
“No. The cook always eats last.”
Her smile faultering, my mother gestured for my sister and I to begin, so we each got up and stepped around them, filling our plates with everything on the table. When we finished, we returned to our seats and didn’t pick up our forks and spoons until our mother finished making her own plate.
“What are you waiting for? I want to watch my ananaks eat.” Our Ninang said, her front arms on the table, adorned in gold bangles, each pudgy finger garnished with diamonds.
I looked down at my plate, the smells and my empty stomach beckoning me to consume everything there that I saw, but all I could think of was how wrong I thought this was. Surely, I thought, someone would notice the gruesome irony in this moment. A pig serving us pig. Surely, no one would eat this, if not out of moral obligation but out of human decency.
But, before I could throw my dish to the ground in defiance, I heard the steady clacks of a spoon and a fork and the quiet tears of my mother fall upon her plate. I looked over at Mom, her face a ruin of the months that followed her husband’s death, and I realized only then why she was crying, why my Ninang had come.
“Eat na.” she swallowed, her eyes closed, her mouth still full, “It tastes just like Papa.”
And when I brought the first spoon-full to my mouth and the others that followed in quick succession afterwards, I could taste the blood mix everything together so seamlessly. I could taste my father, my mother and everything my Ninang had given us.
Looking over into the black pool for seconds and thirds and fourths, I thought I could see my father sweating around huge pink masses in its reflection. Working away at dish after dish together with them, he could feel all their eyes on his back. All the judgment to what he had said to those who had only come to help. At the table, I could feel the same shame reaching out to me from the bottom of the bowl.
Afterward, my mother asked her to stay. “Just a little longer, Tita Gita. Let us feed you too!”
However, Ninang Sampaguita smirked from the back seat, her Junpei ready to close her door for her. “Ay. Trying to make me fat? It’s impossible. Let’s go. Bye for now.” She said, raising her snout and her glance away from us as the car door shut. With a bow, Junpei crouched into the driver’s seat and backed out and away from our home. As I watched her leave, I savored the last bit of her still on my tongue and didn’t waste it on any sort of goodbye. Instead, in the end, I swallowed it and made it a part of me. ⬥
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