Top Quotes: “In The Country” — Mia Alvar
Background: Alvar is a Pilipina American who uses the medium of first-person storytelling to analyze the Pilipino diaspora. Through these nine stories, I learned so much about the Philippines and its issues, why so many Pilipinxs live abroad, and what this lifestyle is like for them and for those who are left behind. She is an AMAZING writer — this is the best storytelling I’ve ever read and quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read! I was completely engrossed in each of these raw, rich stories. Highly recommend!
A Pilipino American returns home to the Philippines to visit his estranged and dying father, currently being painstakingly cared for by his submissive mother — whom his father had spent their entire marriage abusing.
“It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.”
“Whenever I saw classmates copy each other’s homework or make faces behind their parents’ backs, I thought of my father, and how he too must have started small on the path to worse.”
A Pilipina’s husband gets a job in Kuwait and she moves with him, quickly becoming bored with life as a housewife in their fancy house and getting a job caring for a rich woman’s daughter — who has severe mental and physical deficencies but whose mother is certain has the potential to achieve greatness.
“That must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality.”
“When [my new Pilipina domestic worker friend] learned I was — as she saw it — a rich woman, she retreated so quickly from small talk to bows and helpless apologies. Servitude had become a habit and a posture of her body.”
A group of Pilipina domestic workers in Bahrain do their best to welcome a strange, flirtatous, and vastly unappreciative newcomer who wrecks chaos in their lives.
“As children in the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn’t have its second, secret, ‘shadow,’ family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely.”
“We’d met our husbands in high school, in college, at our first jobs. They’d waited for us, more or less patiently, when we were virgins who imagined sex as the great typhoon that would destroy our grades, our futures, and our reputations. They studied business and engineering so they’d never have to work the soil or serve a master. Our mothers’ sad, hard lives had taught us just how much a man’s good looks and silky voice were worth.”
“Now we had something better than lovers. We had companions. Providers. Sex with these men hadn’t ended, but it was quiet, civil, and grown-up, a world away from dirt floors or one-room tenements.”
“I fell asleep hearing all my brothers and sisters being conceived.”
A boy in the Philippines living with a disability and with a very sexually active mother strengthens his bond with the beloved town doctor, befriends a girl living in a slum, and uncovers a horrible secret about his life.
“In one ear and out the other. You don’t let the things they say affect you, do you?”
“Sometimes, when I passed the foot of the stairs, I’d catch a gust of perfumed air or a flash of eastern sunlight as a guest opened my mother’s door and then closed it behind him.”
“My mother looked weary, the lines and hollows of her face sharper than usual. I remembered then that she could become grumpy and delicate around holidays and festivals — times of year that even her most devoted guests spent with their wives and children.”
A Pilipina working as a maid in New York City to support her family and her hometown falls in love with a surprising man and experiences the devastation of 9–11 firsthand.
“I always thought that once we bought the land, I’d go home for good. But once those 1.6 hectares were paid for, the dirt floor needed wood; the tin walls needed cinder blocks. Of course, a house that sturdy should also have faucets and a flush toilet. And even when the house was finished, there was always family to think about. Pepe ran off, but others came to need things in his place. Cousins had babies, who grew up to go to private school and college. Aunts and uncles got sick, needing medication. And when they died, it cost money to bury them. Then there was the larger family: the village, and they knew about you too. The church could use a new roof after Typhoon Vera tore it off. Who else could they depend on? Not the sweet plantation daughters who ended up dancing go-go at Manila bars. Not the men who gave up looking for jobs in the capital and hunted scraps from garbage dumps instead.”
“Doesn’t it ever get heavy, Esmerelda — the weight of the world? I think having no one to lean on you is worse.”
A Pilipina’s beloved and girl-crazy brother goes to work in Saudi Arabia to support his new family as she falls in love in her own way.
“Servant work has turned from what she once did for a living to who she is for life.”
“She holds a grudge against the world for defaulting on its promises to beautiful women. It didn’t occur to me that I’d been counting on similar promises, made to smart girls who studied hard.”
“Congratulations! Now you know what it’s like.” “To change my major?” “To fall in love. I always wondered who it would be. What boy could keep up with the toughest girl I know? I should have guessed: it wouldn’t be someone for you. At least not a living someone. It would be Shakespeare, and Jose Rizal, and te Katipunero outside the student union.”
“Love’s a miracle, not a disaster. Who should it would be easy, or convenient? But if you can’t sacrifice everything for love, what else is there? And time and money — yes, love does take. You’ll learn that quick.”
“His ideas for his girls, their childhood — much like campus life and for me — seemed to have originated somewhere far outside the lives of anyone we knew. The movies, maybe.”
“At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and riyal contributions, converting them on a calculator to pesos, which I doled into envelopes. We matched cassette tapes, photographs, and cards to the amounts and put them in a straw tampipi box. Then we took the Jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tony I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas. Aging mothers squinted hard at Andoy, as if they could blur their own sons into being. Wives and girlfriends perked up in his presence. Children gaped at the stranger they were told to kiss because ‘he knows your father,’ and I even recognized myself in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money. I saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother’s health and cheerfulness told them their own beloved boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life to back to his friends in Jeddah.”
A timid Pilipina nurse organizes a strike and meets a fearless journalist before they eventually face the devastating consequences of martial law together.
On leaving the Philippines: “Your mother gets sick, you don’t leave her for a healthier mother. She’s your mother!”
“To the question of children, she would say: ‘No man I know strikes me as worth repeating.’”
“To her he was as original as Adam. Near a colony of tin shacks by the Pasig River, she watched him rescue a basketball from mud and shoot hoops with half-naked children. Hours later he stood at an Ateneo podium in his best barong, to accept a medal for alumni who had done the school, and the country, proud.”
“They’re all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they’re told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and their legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table. They name their sons after themselves and never once worry about those sons’ fingernails.”
