When she was eighteen years old, Mila Cavite had her first kiss. She was working in Manila at the time as a house maid, while another young man worked as a cook in the same house. He walked her to her quarters one night after work, and just before leaving he kissed her on the cheek. Shocked with complete embarassment and fear, she hit him on the face and he ran away. The young man courted Mila for four months after that, slowly winning her affections and stripping away her shyness, but she never was kissed by him again because she moved back to Himokilan before it was the appropriate time in their relationship. Yet still, nearly forty years later, Mila fondly remembers him as her very first love.
Having just eaten breakfast, Mila tells me this at the kitchen table during our morning ritual of talking over cups of warm brews – hers coffee, mine tea – as we wait for the sun to bring light into the house and to the island so we can start the day.
I am constantly curious about details of Mila's life, and I can tell she likes to share them with me. Its not often that someone finds her life anything but ordinary, because she is surrounded by the ordinary and always has been. But understand that Mila is not ordinary herself, at least not in my eyes considering her counterparts on Himokilan. To me, she is the sort of woman who doesn't seem to quite fit into the life she owns. In school, Mila never made it past grade four, but she speaks English more fluently than anyone on the island; while she never lived outside of Himokilan for more than five years total, three of them consecutive, she has an understanding of American and foreign culture that catches me with my jaw open at times in complete astonishment of her knowledge; and while she has never had real work, except for those few years outside of Himokilan as a house maid, she has always somehow supported her brothers and sisters, as well as her own children, during their times of financial hardship.
To meet her on the street in some mainland town, never would you place Mila as a woman leading a rural island life. Her personality is far too witty, far to modern, and far too strong to be anything resembling many of the other small-town folk I know here. She is an enigma, to put it simply. More eloquent descriptors fail me at the moment, but it is worth noting that she is, by far, the strongest and most admirable woman I have met in the Philippines, and I truly respect her. It bears repeating that I have no idea,
no idea, how she is the woman she is considering the circumstances of her life.
She takes a slow, labored sip of coffee. Her eyes point toward the undadorned wall across from her and she looks right through it. Sitting across from her, my back to the same wall, I try to catch her stare, but its obvious that other memories from her time spent in Manila are returning to her, illuminated by those thoughts of her first love. When she speaks again, I'm not quite sure if she is knowingly telling me a story, or if she is unknowingly just thinking out loud.
“You know, Katarin, when I work for my German employer, he want me to go with him back to Germany. His children love me, his family love me, and I love them. I want to go, but I can't go because of my responsibility to my brother.”
I press Mila, I ask her what responsibility she owed her brother. Her eyes leave the wall and meet mine, as if she forgot, for a moment, I am there. “My brother is
sick, Katarin.” She always calls me Katarin. She emphasizes the word 'sick,' as if she can't understand why
I don't understand.
Sick how? I ask. “It is because he is stabbed. He is riding the Jeepney in Manila, and, what do you call that
bu-ang? Ah, a crazy man
stab him. He stab my brother in his stomach, and my brother is in hospital for five months. You know what Katarin? It is my responsibility to
help my brother.”
In some random turn of events that ordinarily only happens in a ridiculous action/mystery/romance movie, my host mother was forced to decide between moving to Germany, a sure promise of prosperity for herself and her family, or staying behind to tend to her brother in the hospital.
I don't even need to bother explaining the rest. Knowing where Mila is now, the story writes itself: she stayed in Manila because of her responsibility to her family.
Seven months ago when I arrived in the Philippines, I wouldn't understand her logic. If I were in the same situation, my own upbringing and culture would tell me to leave, to follow a dream and pursue a career that would leave me and, possibly, my whole family in greater financial standing. Of the 80-some-odd million Filipinos, I would guess that nearly all of them would sacrifice anything – I mean
anything – to have the opportunity to work abroad. But now, knowing the fraction of culture here that I do, I understand as best I can that sense of responsibility that Mila felt for her family. As the oldest child, the first born, her unwritten duty since birth has been to care for all of her family members. In her youth, her duty was toward her brother when he was stabbed, or any of her other younger siblings. Now, as an adult, it is to her aging mother, as well as her own children who fall on hard times.
But Mila doesn't need to tell me this right now at the table, because I have here lived long enough to now understand. She doesn't pity herself, either, but I know she will always wonder what life would have been had she left to Germany. She says with a poetic eloquence, “You know, Katarin, I am so lucky that God gave me this fighting spirit, because if he does not give it to me, I will have died of a broken heart.”
She smiles and takes another drink of her coffee. She then asks me, probably for the ninth time, why it is that so many older American men often marry Filipina women, but why very few American women marry Filipino men. And so I explain to her my interpretation of this twisted reality, and she listens to me with her lips curled in a gentle smile, as if I have the intersting things to say.
