The People I Come From

I am from the South. I am from the Philippine South, to be exact, and the Philippine South is different from the Philippine North or the Philippine Middle. The North has the urban cities; the Middle has most of the tourism, but the South has banana trees and mango farms and rice fields for backyards.

The South is nasty, but not in a bad way. It’s that kind of get your fingernails dirty, feet in the mud and head in the sky kind of nasty. We eat with our hands, strategically dabbing the rice into the meat until it sticks, then we form it into a ball and pop it into our mouths. In the South people wear plastic flip flops until it thins and flattens and the hole that connects the plastic to the foam gets stretched out to the point that people will have to buy new ones. In the south we wax our wooden floors with hollowed coconut halves we got from the coconut trees outside. In the south your neighbor can climb a 60-foot coconut tree, and you didn’t know that until you looked outside your window one day and saw your neighbor climbing a 60-foot coconut tree.

In the south rickshaws are the main methods of transportation. A rickshaw is a bicycle with an attached carriage for passengers, and it’s all powered by a person who has really toned calves. For 5 pesos you can get yourself anywhere in town, but if you want a motorized rickshaw then it’s double the price. In the south the children run barefoot on fertile black soil, and some of the families live in bamboo stick houses with nipa grass thatching for roofs.

When the Spanish came they slapped Spanish surnames on most of the people in the North, but they must have forgotten about some of the people in the South. I am living proof of that. Funny little quick story about my native surname: My last name is Mabanag, spelled M-a-b-a-n-a-g, 7 letters, 3 syllables – not that hard. But apparently it is to some people, especially my 8th grade principal who pronounced it “Manbang” as I walked the stage in my middle school graduation ceremony. And since my first name is Vianna (like Vienna sausages), then my nickname in high school became Sausage Manbang. I was a living breathing questionable porn category for a little while. It’s ridiculous and I hate it. But it gave me that story to tell so I also very much love it.

From my father’s side, my great grandfather was a senator and started a legacy of attorneys within the family. This served my family well except for that one time in the 70’s during the Marcos dictatorship when all the lawyers in my family got imprisoned because of martial law.

My mother is Chinese and Filipino. I don’t know much about her mother, only that she was an opinionated accountant who once confronted my mother’s pregnant elementary school teacher who stabbed my mother in the head with a fork when she didn’t answer a math question right. A lot of elements in that story make no sense at all, so I must have heard it wrong. But a little part of me believes it, because after all, it is the South.

My mother’s father was a Muslim man. They get a bad rep there, but I heard that he was a kind man who worked with his wife to make ends meet. My grandparents had my mother pretty young so they had to send my mother to live with someone else for a while until they could put food on the table. When they finally retrieved my mother, she didn’t recognize them and my grandmother wept.

I’ve never met my maternal grandparents but I think we would’ve gotten along pretty well. There is a picture of my grandmother in a blue dress that I stared at way too much when I was younger. When I look at it I wonder what she would’ve thought of me.

When the Spanish colonized the Philippines in 1521 I like to think that they forgot about the South. I like to think that the South was too much for them to conquer, that the grass was too wild and the land was too mystic. The animals were too comfortable and the people were too resistant. I like to think that everything in the South rooted themselves to the land and never broke hold.