The Baguio We Know
Baguio is in the Heart, Stomach and Liver
At the start of our classes in Grade IV, we were asked to write the obligatory essay, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" and one of my classmates simply wrote, "I spent it in Baguio City because it is the Summer Capital of the Philippines." He was scolded but he was a hero in our hearts.
Baguio writers had to face this conundrum whenever they write about home. Variations to this theme would be, "How I Spent My Life Writing about the Summer Capital" or "How My Politicians Spent my Summer Capital" or as Luchie Maranan wrote in her monologue, "Baguio is the summer capital because it feels like summer all year round."
Members of the Baguio Writers Group re-wrote their "HISMSV" for "The Baguio We Know (Anvil Publishing)" which was launched last September 3 to a packed crowd at the National Bookstore in SM Baguio.
The 17 contributors ranged from Cecille Afable, younger than the city by 7 years, to 22-year-old Enrico Subido who wrote about a secret fishing pond in John Hay where he was transformed into Calvin sons Hobbes. Afable, who edits the Baguio Midland Courier, the oldest local weekly in the country, gives us recipes of Ibaloi dishes like pinoneg (blood sausages) and binga (farm snails) as cooked by her unschooled mother, Josefa Carino, but whose name now graces the oldest public elementary school here.
In writing about Baguio, these 17 writers seem to have located Baguio not only in their hearts but in their stomachs and livers as well. Baboo Mondonedo being a gourmand migrating to Baguio and discovering and loving highland food.
"My first classrooms were canaos. Here is where storytelling took place, where legends and family trees were passed on to the young," she wrote in "Food Lover's Story."
Dinggot Conde-Prieto charted a precise and funny Google Earth of our youth, from the long-lost bazaars, cafes and restaurants to the hidden bars with no stools where you get a half-shot of cheap gin just to warm you up.
“With the wings Baguio had given me. I test the winds of the world,” Dinggot bravely announced.
Padmapani Perez followed it up with her wonderful how-to, “Notes on the Self on Drinking.” Memorize this when you go up to Baguio to drink.
“Tell them how drinking in the thickness of Baguio fog lifts curtains, cements friendships, that drinking is the happy ending that we all seek after a long, hard day of honest work,” Perez wrote.
Martin Masadao wrote about his Lola Felicia's strawberry jam production where he and the other children watch the eternal stirring of the strawberry jam. It was during the actual cooking when things stopped stirring and the old women started telling stories to them about the war in the city. Masadao's tribute to her Lola is part of a unpublished book of essays about cooking and growing up in Baguio and Kalinga which he wrote on his PDA and now can not recover.
The poet Tita Lacambra-Ayala could be one of these women with war stories, having been raised in Baguio during the wartime. Wild sunflowers bloom in Ayala's essay as they hid the Japanese or gold ores and later becomes the artists' emblem when she came home decades later with son, Joey Ayala.
Included also is Merci Dulnuan's “Holy Wednesday Exercise and Reflection” to remind us that Baguio is not only a spirit center but a spiritual one.
Scott Saboy mused about cutting the only “pine” tree worth cutting – the concrete one at the top of Session Road.
Karla Delgado, an international magazine editor and now teaching literary nonfiction at Ateneo, does a Jim Halsema (the international AP editor who wrote about his alma mater, The Brent Book) by writing about her Special Education Class of 1979. She interviewed former classmates and parents about her public elementary years for the gifted.
Grace Subido, the book editor, wrote in Baguio Filipino, which like the city, is a mismash of many other languages. Hers is Filipino, Pangasinense, Ilocano and English with Ilonggo and Spanish. It couls be funny and vulgar to some but comprehensible to any Baguio resident.
“At kung tinatanong ako ngayon kung ano ang aking unang wika, ang sagot ko na lang ay “love” ...o “laughter” ---o “alcohol,” Subido wrote.
Arnold Azurin, who edited the 1991 Cordillera Ani issue for the Cultural Center of the Philippines which is a forerunner of this book, also wrote about drinking and dining with friends in the city interspersed with anthropological musings on the gold veins that runs through the city, Benguet cowboys and the American “dun ker” tribe.
Rolando Tolentino, the current dean of UP Mass Communications, makes it a point to come to Baguio during the sem break and realized he had a lot of baggage with him like the OFWs, call center industries and the ukay-ukay globalization.
Pia Arboleda and Candy Torres, in separate essays, talked about coming to live in Baguio because of love. One left reluctantly while the other one vowed to stay.
In the end, Baguio writers are like my elementary classmate, writing inwardly because the Baguio we know is the Baguio we have become.
posted by Unknown at 8:18 PM
3 comments
bother to measure him? There were claims he was
zippo said,
August 23, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Sad news about Juan Miguel Vazquez. He was my fraternity brother, albeit older, at the Order of Utopia of the Ateneo Law School which he joined in 1981 as part of Batch Lakas Loob.
Condolences to the Madrigal-Vazquezes especially to Tita Ising. Losing 2 children in less than a year…
Z
Mangaranon said,
August 23, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Sad — very, very sad.
fatima153 said,
August 24, 2009 at 1:21 am
Generally bad news comes before good and very bad news comes before very big good news, all within a 12-month period. In this case, all steps cleared to a big inheritance?
l*ding said,
August 24, 2009 at 2:10 am
condolence to judith. she is indeed a young widow…
The EQualizer said,
August 24, 2009 at 2:11 am
“For all the vaunted wealth of the family…
Truly, What is the Meaning of Life???”
http://www.biblesociety.ca/free_scriptures/escriptures/ecclesiastes3/ecclesiastes3.html
Cousin Paz said,
August 24, 2009 at 2:42 am
A friend of mine who is an expert in triathlons said that a man of his age should not have joined the Ironman. I guess he did because he was a friend of the organizer. Really sad….
jeremiah said,
August 24, 2009 at 6:58 am
this is truly a sad time for the clan. my lola would have grieved with them if she were still around.
Leader said,
August 26, 2009 at 7:16 am
i just hope with their great wealth they pay those poor people who trusted their name in investing for their future in perma insurance…
Thundernut said,
August 26, 2009 at 6:27 pm
A few days ago Eunice, now Ted.
larry leviste said,
August 28, 2009 at 2:03 am
The Meaning of Life, let me speak from experience….
Eternal life is OUR TRUE life, this passage on earth is a temporary way of LEARNING to LOVE God and ourselves as we love OTHERS in equal measure.
Death is only a PORTAL, a veil we part and ENTER into FOREVER.
Diego Jurado said,
August 30, 2009 at 4:59 pm
My mother told me the attending mourners were yelled at by the widow: “you wanna see him one last time, there he is, take a good look, and get out!!!”
larry leviste said,
September 1, 2009 at 2:47 am
She has really lost it, DAW.
There were many witnesses at the wake.
tambo said,
September 2, 2009 at 5:37 am
strictly family only interment, well, it was respected, no one went..
they had to change the barong three times, it was getting soiled by mysterious fluid.
the embalsamador was baffled until some probincianos said that in their place it meant something was awry with the deceased.
Jules said,
September 2, 2009 at 8:01 am
Maybe the embalming process
was done the improper way -
’twas said that prior to embalming,
if the cadaver was stored in the freezer
for a period of time
it should be thawed properly
otherwise, remaining body water
will come out
^_^
Garganta Inflamada said,
September 2, 2009 at 2:56 pm
what
the is
posting of manner
now in form haiku?
poetic getting we
all are?
Jules said,
September 3, 2009 at 6:56 am
Hihihi G.I.
^_^
xOxO
gshaw said,
September 4, 2009 at 11:20 am
is it true that they were not happily married but they just had to stay that way
the widow bring an only daughter was very spoiled and got away with it.
and family feud is a normal thing in his family, the father causing trouble in his wife’s family ?
talagang tsismoso said,
September 7, 2009 at 6:47 am
Coktales by Victor C.Agustin
Ashes to asses
A RECENTLY widowed socialite did a most unusual, selfless act.
The grieving widow not only sought a face-to-face meeting with her late husband’s mistress and, instead of the feared violent confrontation, even gave the other woman an urn containing the ashes of the man they had both shared.
According to the grapevine, the mestiza wife only came to know of her husband’s secret passion after the man, who, like her, came from another de buena familia, suddenly passed away, leaving a number of incriminating text messages in his Blackberry unread and un-erased.
After recovering from the initial shock, the wife, still a looker even in her early 50s, worked up enough courage to check out the mistress, a fading sex bomb, right in her Salcedo Village condominium.
The sickening discovery of her husband’s double life was what apparently triggered a bizarre eulogy given by the wife during the necrological services, where one memorable line, as quoted by a banker, was “Don’t ask me if I am okay. That is an insensitive question.”
AnonyMiss said,
September 8, 2009 at 6:08 am
From http://cocktales.ph/ today:
Ashes to asses
September 08, 2009
A RECENTLY widowed socialite did a most unusual, selfless act.
The grieving widow not only sought a face-to-face meeting with her late husband’s mistress and, instead of the feared violent confrontation, even gave the other woman an urn containing the ashes of the man they had both shared.
According to the grapevine, the mestiza wife only came to know of her husband’s secret passion after the man, who, like her, came from another de buena familia, suddenly passed away, leaving a number of incriminating text messages in his Blackberry unread and un-erased.
After recovering from the initial shock, the wife, still a looker even in her early 50s, worked up enough courage to check out the mistress, a fading sex bomb, right in her Salcedo Village condominium.
The sickening discovery of her husband’s double life was what apparently triggered a bizarre eulogy given by the wife during the necrological services, where one memorable line, as quoted by a banker, was “Don’t ask me if I am okay. That is an insensitive question.”
fatima153 said,
September 17, 2009 at 10:56 am
Why do today’s women want to live the fantasy that any kind of love can beat testosterone’s need for younger flesh? In ancient Chinese custom when a wife turned 40 she had to bring a young girl into the household for her husband’s use, and replace her with others as the need arose. Painful, but that was facing the music and having a firm hand on damage control, the flow of any cash/goods to the mistresses and their own families, claims on the husband’s estate by kids out of wedlock, etc. Some of our own female forebears were known to ‘adopt’ their husbands’ ’street children’.
Among the upper class a prenup gives some protection and consuelo. But a wife must pretend shock/pain at hubby’s affairs to play down her own flings. People would wonder otherwise.
larry leviste said,
September 18, 2009 at 3:24 am
A line from the musical ” OLIVER “.
” Please sir, may I have SOME MORE ? “
isabella said,
September 18, 2009 at 2:29 pm
may I have a clue as to who is the aging sex bomb?
larry leviste said,
September 21, 2009 at 1:42 am
An update on Ruffa May and MIKEY please !
I have a scathingly sharp feeling THIS is truth to be told !