Or, “Seventh Senseless: The UnManila Girl Diaries.” Part 1 of 2.

The funny thing about growing up in Quezon City, Metro Manila is this curious, implacable sensation that no one is from here — or so it seemed to me. So many people I interacted with, from my childhood nanny to school friends and classmates, to teachers and service workers and drivers, to my very own parents, seemed to be from somewhere else. Or if not, they had strong ties to other places through ancestors. Rizal. Pampanga. Bulacan. Quezon. Leyte. Zamboanga. Everyone’s heart and mind and tongue are from anywhere but here. 

Pleasant View

In 2000, the streets of Pleasant View in Tandang Sora were narrow, with thin yellowish houses pressed side by side. I remember men sitting at their front doors and smoking in the afternoons, tossing scraps of bread to stray dogs. Women in dusters swept dirt from their house-fronts into the gutters, bantering with their men and each other. Small children with bimpos tucked at their necks raced up and down the street, temporarily dispersed by harsh cries from their minders whenever the sound of an engine rumbled around the corner. 

One of my few vivid memories of this place was when I was four years old. Ate Neng, our cranky old nanny (she felt old, though back then she must’ve been no older than twenty-nine), was watching me and my younger brother, while our older brother was at school and mother and father were at work. Ate Neng was a thin frowny woman from Siquijor, with strong hard hands that could pin your arms tight against your sides and twist your ear until your eyes watered. She must have been in a rare whimsical mood that day. She looked at the pouring July-monsoon rains outside the window and had a stroke of inspiration. With a washbasin and Johnson’s bar soap in hand, she bundled me and little brother out the door in the fine morning cloudburst, and it was then I remember bathing beneath the sky for the first time. I was dancing in the rain, my brother giggling, soap suds running off our shoulders. The neighbors passing by with fond looks at the naturalness of children reveling, bodies bare and trusting in a universe without strangers.

I have other, dimmer memories of having playmates of all ages, with names I’ve forgotten by now, popping in and out of their townhouses as we messed around. I remember sauntering into another house one day to meet my neighbor’s newborn baby, all solemn, feeling very big and grown-up as I was introduced to little Francesca as her ate. I remember getting Lemon Squares or Choco Stix pressed into my hand by kindly ales or manongs of the house as I went. 

Those memories are fainter than they should be. The names and places are lost to time and neglect. My family rarely revisited this chapter of our lives, either physically or through conversation, in the twenty-two years since we moved away.

Subdivision 2

In the mid-2000s, our parents moved with us three children and our then live-in nanny to a bigger house in another subdivision, just a few kilometers away by car. My mother and father, sans kids and nanny, still live there today. I suppose I knew we never moved geographically that far away — we still did our groceries in the exact same mall – but it might as well have been thousands with how we never did go back to or even pass by Pleasant View again (the absurdly privatized residential planning of Metro Manila being what it is). It seemed that those neighbors were just neighbors. I don’t believe my parents kept in touch with anyone from Pleasant View, and seeing how they interact in their current one, they wouldn’t keep in touch with any of our current neighbors either if they moved away. Neighbors are just neighbors, after all…aren’t they?

Our quality of living, in terms of house size and space and aesthetics, had certainly been upgraded. Unlike in Pleasant View townhouse, the street in Subdivision 2 was almost wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably. The new house had a garden surrounded by a fence, big enough for little eight-year-old me to ride my bike around in, and fall over and skin my knees in luxurious privacy. There was a pond with koi fish and window boxes with luscious ferns. The master bedroom had an anteroom. In addition to “anteroom,” the word “lanai” entered my vocabulary at the time, because the new house had one.

Yet I sensed the meaning of our moving to a higher-income neighborhood. Walls and buffers I’d never known before were suddenly commonplace. The spacing between houses, the tall cement fences enclosing the lots, even the people visible on the streets. No longer did I see neighbors milling around almost instantly when I stepped out on the street. Adult neighbors weren’t friendly or familiar with me, and didn’t whistle me and my brothers over to give us ice candy on a hot summer day. The neighbors with children didn’t push us together to play, while they chatted on monoblock chairs until afternoon darkened to blue evening and my parents came home from work.

In fact, the neighbors on the street were a very different sort. The person most often seen outside any given house was always working, sweeping leaves or trimming grass or washing the car. They would not be the owner or the owner’s child or relation, but a live-in helper. The difference in the way owners and helpers spoke and dressed, and often even their countenance, was unmistakable.

Most houses had such a helper, including ours. These were the folks that kept the streets busy, swapping gossip in the evenings and even trading gifts at Christmas on behalf of their owners, who’d rarely see (and were maybe even avoiding) each other. On occasions you saw the actual homeowner coming out through their gate, it was usually to get straight into their SUV and drive somewhere else. All busy, property-owning adults who didn’t hang about, always with a better place to be than here.

I grew to be twelve, sixteen, twenty years old in this place, and I never saw any small children bathe in rain on the streets. Innocent and naked, loved and casually looked after by all. I didn’t realize this until later, but at some point in my youth, it felt like a cycle had been broken.

Elementary

About three years ago, as a fresh new couple, my partner Boo and I went for a spring bicycle ride through the Flemish town he’d gone to high school in. As we passed by the handsome red brick campus, Boo joked that it was the only secondary school that would take him after they kicked him out of both primary schools in his hometown (it was more complicated than that, but spare you the details). This meant he’d then had to travel by bus or bicycle a grand total of seven kilometers, one-way, between home and school – a perfectly average distance for a Belgian child, as I later looked up. A trip lasting about 25 minutes point-to-point, in this context. That’s not an insignificant time, but then…

It got me thinking for the first time in a while how far I had to travel for school during my elementary days. It’s not a topic I like to dwell on, kind of a sensitive subject in fact, because it gave me and my parents (definitely mostly me) a lot of grief. In elementary, my parents had put me up in a private girls’ school in Pasig for god only knows what reason, believing they could sustain the daily 1-hour-ish drive during rush hour to bring me there and back.

After just one year, my father gave up on that, and the next school year, eight-year-old me took a taxi every day to school with Ate Neng. She would bring me to school at 7AM and return at 4PM to pick me up, the poor lady, and we’d wait a half hour or more to flag down a taxi – for a round-trip of about three hours every day. That was also a disaster, so for five school years after that (until I finally did the sane thing and transferred), I took the school bus service. That had a predictable schedule at least, and having other girls to yap with on the daily journey made it bearable, though I was on the road for over four hours on bad days. I lived the farthest away of everyone, so I was always picked up first at 5:30 AM and dropped off last at 6:00 PM or later. Needless to say, I was an awfully tired kid and didn’t have much time to consider hobbies. I traveled for school about 14 hours a week, meaning that months’ worth of my preteens were spent on the road. Endlessly transiting between that big, white school in the South and that big, golden house in the North, ensuring I was never really of either.

Just how far was the geographic distance, though? For the first time ever, I looked it up. The fastest route between my home address and my elementary school is exactly 13 km. Somehow I always knew there was something extra unlucky about it.

A urban micro-tragedy, a piece of the puzzle

This essay began as a simple, curious recollection of a few major Places in my childhood, and the thread of dissatisfaction that wove through my upbringing in the heart of Metro Manila, and my constant (now fulfilled) urge to “get out.” For a long time, I had an urge to downplay my experiences since I know that for all the difficulty I described, I was definitely born to a middle-class family of good means, whose fortunes even improved as I grew older. Most of the problems I experienced were not from personal finances, but infrastructural — like the culture of car dependence on decaying roads, the privatized residential planning, the lack of good public school options.

It doesn’t matter if my case isn’t typical, or even that it had more charms than most others did. I can quote statistics on poverty and hunger in my city and country until I’m blue in the face, and try to ignore what I went through specifically. But I don’t want my story to go unspoken, just because I’ve been made painfully aware that it’s not typical, and because I desperately want for reasons to appear typical. This urban micro-tragedy is still a piece of the bigger puzzle, and I intend for all of us who care, out here, to complete it.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

love, your unmanila girl