Filipino-American

Those high lunches needn’t matter
If you are of businessman’s age
Anyway he enjoyed creating food
drifting across the Fragrant Nation
— Allen Ginsberg

Jose Rizal was a poet and national hero of the Philippines. In one of his travel writings, upon embarkation to Spain, he mused that foreignness was a nostalgia of home. His books liberated a country, but cost him his dear life. At the Heritage Garden in Iao Valley, there lies a bronze statue of Rizal found after passing a clearing of bamboo trees and a winding stone pond... Bushwick, Brooklyn is a beatnik neighborhood of bards, sculptors, open-studio artists and immigrant foodies. When I used to live there, my place was an elevator-sized walk-up with exposed high ceiling, hardly any room for one, but a kindred friend from grad school visited and she had to stay with me (she came all the way from Laguna, Philippines, no coincidence the birthplace of Rizal). We reminisced back to when we were study-mates, when she would always comment that my food was emotional (I had cooked for her all the time back then). She was my first New York City reunion, and we had made a castle of this tiny shell I called my home for her good time. On the Staten Island Ferry I covered her eyes with my hands, standing behind her against the wind, and when I told her: "Now," and gently opening her eyes... the Statue of Liberty was floating in front of her like a cloud. That awesome moment with her had been more than seven years ago, yet I still see it in my mind vividly. I remember weeks later sending her an e-card with a 2x2 photo of the two of us at that very spot, and below I quoted a poem from Langston Hughes to express my feelings: 

           So since I'm still here livin',

           I guess I will live on.

           [but] I could've died for love -

           [for all that you know...]

At the prep school in S. Korea I was the American teacher. At the arts high school in the Philippines I was the Filipino-American poet, the writer-in-residence whom the faculty and students welcomed home. I am still connected with several of my best students from that teaching sojourn decades ago. One in particular I am to this day letter-writing with, akin to distance teaching, although she has already followed my footsteps as educator and mentor... and a full circle has been delivered to the legacy of poetry ever since. She addresses her letters to me with this salutation: "Dear Captain." For a surreal second each time I read her letters, I glimpsed Rizal enduring the sea in a haze. In the late 19th century, I was on the ship with him, seeing him... like my heart.