* * *
As usual, you’re getting ahead of yourself, but there isn’t enough road in the world for how ahead of yourself you need to get. You need to get so far ahead of yourself that by the time you reach yourself, you’re a different person.
You end up getting so far ahead of yourself that you land in Nashville, Tennessee. You’re twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two. You have a nursing degree, a long-distance older boyfriend, and an H1-B visa. Your clothes are polyester, and most of your teeth are removable. You think you’re going to lose the accent you speak English with, but you won’t. Not ever.
You and a group of other Filipino nurses are hired to work at the Nashville General Hospital under the care of Meharry Medical College, which you learn is one of the preeminent historically Black medical schools in America. All your life, you’ve been dreaming of America, singing its lyrics and combing its style into your hair. But now the prospect of meeting actual, real-life Americans makes you apprehensive; you remember some of the crueler stories you heard back home, from the older generation who’d gone to work in the sugarcane or asparagus fields on the West Coast and returned broken-bodied and bitter, or never came back at all.
To your relief, you’re treated kindly, with a kind of semipaternal, semiflirtatious warmth. Most of the doctors and managers in the hospital are from upper-middle-class Black families, and early in your visit, you and the rest of the Filipino nurses are invited to the house of one of Meharry’s bigwigs, Dr. Garnett, the Director of the Division of Neurology, Chief of the the Neurology Service, and Director of the Neuro-Diagnostic Laboratory at Hubbard Hospital. The house is enormous, like something out of a Sampaguita Pictures set. You thought you’d seen the end of houses like this by leaving the Philippines. One more thing you’re wrong about.
Doctor Garnett and his wife, Louise, both mestizong-itim and wearing matching pale yellow dress shirts, ply you with iced tea in blown-glass tumblers that you hold with trembling hands, terrified of breaking something so precious. They tell the nurses not to hesitate to come and seek them out should they find themselves in need, or even just homesick. It must be hard to be so far from home, Louise soothes. Your parents must miss you terribly.
Your parents don’t miss you at all, as far as you can tell, given that you haven’t seen or heard from your father in two years and you only talk to your mother once a month, usually to give her a heads-up about the money you’ll be wiring her. You try to think if anyone in your life has ever told you they missed you.
The only person who might miss you, though he hasn’t said it that way, is Doctor De Vera. Not Doctor De Vera: Apolonio, Pol, your boyfriend, you remind yourself, the word still stiff and pinched like a shoe you haven’t worn enough times to break in properly. Before you left the Philippines, you ended up lettting him take you to the movies, and then you let him take you to bed. The stories were. Accurate. You were ready for the affair to be over the minute you left for America, but he was the one who asked you, naked between your open legs and smiling, if you’d ever heard of letters. If you’d ever heard of the telephone.
So you talk on the phone once every few weeks. He’s not as good on the phone as he is in his sporadic but effusive letters, most of which you don’t really understand. He shifts freely between Tagalog and English, writes a lot of flowery musings on love and faith, distance and time. All of his letters are written on his personal stationery, and every silken, onion-thin page has the same header. In cursive script: APOLONIO CHUA DE VERA, M.D., F.P.O.A. Below it, in smaller, elegant capitals: FELLOW, PHILIPPINE ORTHOPEDIC ASSOCIATION. FELLOW, WESTERN PACIFIC ORTHOPEDIC ASSOCIATION. ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY. TRAUMATOLOGY. CRIPPLED CHILDREN. PHYSICAL MEDICINE AND REHABILITATION.
He says I love you about a dozen times per letter, says he longs for you and he falls asleep dreaming of you in his arms, but he never says the words I miss you. You never say it, either.
It’s all going well, better than you ever thought it could, until one week just after your payday you call his house in Dagupan, and a woman answers the phone.
A year earlier, you might have been shaken, but your newfound American confidence inspires you to ask for Pol in English. And it’s in superior English that the woman tells you: I’m Doctor De Vera’s wife. Who’s calling?
This is a lie—she isn’t his wife, just another girlfriend, dressing for the position that she wants. But you don’t know that then. You hang up the phone, and before you know what you’re doing, you drink almost an entire bottle of Chivas Regal and wait to die.
You don’t die, but your roommates are shrewd enough to hide every bladed object in the apartment you share together, a fact that shames you more than having broken into the communal and as yet untouched bottle of Chivas Regal that all of you pooled your money together to buy, a gesture to treat yourselves for all the long hours. You pass out mumbling, but nobody understands you. You wake up, groggily ask for water and some food, but nobody understands you. It’s only when you sober up that you remember none of your roommates speak Pangasinan.
When the babaero calls the dorm, you tell your girlfriends to hang up on him. You send him one letter to say it’s over: it takes you forever to write the letter, in English, checking all of your spelling and grammar, getting the other nurses—whose English isn’t much better than yours—to check all of your spelling and grammar again. You work on it so long that the letter you end up with bears no resemblance to the letter you intended to write; by taking out so much of your bad grammar, you’ve taken out most of your feelings, too. Now it’s nothing more than a cool and polite good-bye, a last kiss from a mature woman, nobody you’ve ever been. There’s only one mention of the other women he’s been fucking, and even that is courteous: you wish him well with all of his other putas, but you’re done being one of them. The letter, in the end, sounds a lot like the babaero.
A few months after the Chivas Regal episode, you’ll learn about job openings at hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area. More and more of your siblings back in Mangaldan are starting to talk about immigrating, their applications for U.S. citizenship via your father under way, so your idea is to share an apartment together somewhere out there, where you’ve heard there’s good weather, more space, more jobs, and even more Filipinos. Eventually you get a job offer from San Jose Medical Center, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly after that, you get another job offer from the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, also in the Bay Area. The nursing shortage that brought you to Tennessee in the first place seems to exist in California, too.
Now you have a choice. San Jose Medical is in the South Bay, where you’ve heard most of the Filipinos live, along with Daly City just south of San Francisco. The Veterans Hospital, on the other hand, is in Palo Alto, a moneyed white neighborhood you won’t be able to afford to live in, so you’ll have to commute—but it pays much better than San Jose Medical. However, if you choose the Veterans Hospital, you can’t work at any other hospital; it’s a government hospital, and it’s illegal to work elsewhere when you’re a federal employee.
You take both jobs. You prefer the Veterans Hospital, despite the commute, despite the precarity of your position there. The pay is good and the wealth of the area means the facilities are kept clean. The benefits are more than decent, and you can afford to get a new pair of dentures that fit your mouth so well that you almost, almost forget that you’re wearing them. San Jose Medical Center, on the other hand, is in a rougher part of San Jose, and most of the patients are young men: Black, Mexican, Filipino, and Vietnamese, often with gunshot wounds. You learn about the fights between Mexican and Filipino gangs, young boys who could be your little brother, coming in with their faces bludgeoned, their bellies shot through. Many of the nurses have to be accompanied by hospital security guards to their cars every evening. The stress of working there takes a toll on you; after a month, you get Bell’s palsy. You’re not the only nurse in the hospital to be afflicted with the condition, wh
ich is usually temporary if it’s treated in time. You’re particularly vigilant, taking prednisone and doing the exercises so your face looks like your face again as soon as possible.
This is when Atse Carmen comes to live with you, there in your apartment in Milpitas, on a tourist visa that’s about to expire. She’s a messy, loud roommate, leaves her creams open in the bathroom and her panties strewn on the floor. Around this time you also find a local Catholic church attended by a mostly Filipino congregation, over on Abel Street. You and your siblings were all raised Catholic, even though your mother was a well-known bruha and faith healer in Mangaldan. In your family, Catholicism was a simple cult of personality: everything was about the Virgin. But you find you can’t really attend Mass in Milpitas with Carmen at your side—Carmen, who attracts too much attention, yawns loudly during the sermon, often leaves with some tito’s phone number. Anyway, you don’t love attending church during the day; the Sunday morning crowd in particular tends to be a social outing for the middle-class Filipino community in the larger South Bay, Filipinos in pearls showing off their cars and bags and plaintive kids. When you start spending hours worrying about your outfit every Saturday evening, you stop the Sunday church visits. Instead, you come by every now and then late at night on your way home from work—around midnight, when no one’s there, often not even the priest. Still in your stale nurse’s uniform, you slip into the last pew, pray a few Hail Marys, and try not to fall asleep on your knees.
When Carmen’s visa does expire and she’s still there for another month, another year, you start to freeze every time you see a police car in your rearview mirror driving home. After a couple of years with you she moves out to live in San Francisco with some tisoy named Dante, a handsome kid from a wealthy family who send their son money for rent and food, which he spends on beer and driving to the casinos in Reno. Dante doesn’t have a green card either. The romance only lasts for about a year; Dante gets deported shortly after beating Carmen with a two-by-four plank, sending her running barefoot out of their studio apartment into the streets of the Excelsior district in the middle of the night, ending up hiding underneath a parked car in the next neighborhood, still in her negligee. The next morning, the owner of the car crouched down to see Carmen there, fists clenched even in her sleep.
All of this you learned two days after the incident, with Dante already in police custody, and Carmen back at your door in Milpitas, half of her face and upper arm purple, one suitcase, no wheels. She opened her mouth, but before she could kill you dead with shame by having to do something as unthinkable as explain herself to her younger sister, you rushed to let her in.
You get Carmen a job as a nursing assistant at San Jose Medical, working in the emergency room, like you. Shortly after she starts working, her own Bell’s palsy starts up. You tell her about all the exercises she needs to do, give her the medicine, but to your chagrin, Carmen is careless about her rehabilitation, doesn’t do all the exercises. The nerves and muscles in her face never quite recover; the palsy becomes permanent. Carmen takes it all in her usual stride, turns the whole ordeal into a vivacious joke. She’s still beautiful, maybe even more so than before, and the distinctive force of her beauty now makes your worship of her prior allure seem trifling and childish. Still, you’ll be unmoored by the loss for years. Carmen’s face was the yardstick along which you’ve measured so much of your life; you don’t know what to do without it. Actually get to know who your sister is, maybe. But that seems unthinkable, too.
* * *
Eventually your mother, your remaining siblings, and a few remaining friends talk you into going back to the Philippines for your first visit since you left. It’s a few months after martial law has been lifted, a few months after the two Filipino union leaders were gunned down in Seattle City Hall. Everyone back in the Philippines—your old friends at the University of Pangasinan, your old friends still working at Nazareth, everyone who’s heard the gossip from the nurses back in Tennessee—everyone assures you that the babaero isn’t around, he’s still in Jakarta, you won’t run into him, just come, just come home.
Your family thinks you’re living in a giant house, not an apartment, and they don’t know how far Milpitas is from San Francisco, the glamorous red-bridged seaside city they picture in their heads. Since arriving in California you haven’t been to the beach once. Your family doesn’t even know that you and Pol have broken up. Your mother never even approved of Pol, anyway; not because he was a babaero—nothing special about that—and not even because he was close to the Marcos family, but because he was so much older than you, divorced, no kids. Who could trust a man like that, your mother seemed to think. A man with baggage. You’ve just turned twenty-nine years old, your accent still hasn’t left, and you’re starting to understand what it means to have baggage. Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.
So you go. It’ll be your first time returning to the Philippines not as a Philippine citizen, but as an American citizen. You were naturalized just that year, so you’re not even a toddler American yet, still a baby. You had to renounce your Philippine citizenship, which was easy enough, but to your surprise you found you couldn’t bear to throw away the passport, its distinctive brown-black cover, the shining letters, and your young face in it, still imminently recognizable. The only thing that’s different is the way the Philippine border guards treat you when you’re going through customs with your new blue passport, like the look a hero gives to the kontrabida at the end of the film. Like that’s exactly what you are: an enemy of life.
Atse Carmen can’t go with you, of course, but she helps you pack the balikbayan box, full of children’s clothes, new sandals, bedsheets, lotions, perfumes, alcohol, macadamia nuts, chocolate. On your first day back, after the long bus ride from Manila to Pangasinan, you go with your sister Rufina to the night market in Calasiao to get fresh puto, like you’ve always done, and it almost feels like you never left. Only when you ask the vendor if they’re all out of pandan flavor, the woman behind the stand smiles at you and replies, in English, that they have a new batch, if you just wait a moment, ma’am.
No one has ever called you ma’am, certainly not in the Philippines. Startled, you continue to speak to her in Pangasinan. The woman continues to reply in English. In the tricycle on the way home, you ask Rufina what that was about.
Rufina says, They can tell you don’t live here anymore.
You look down at yourself, the clothes and tsinelas that you borrowed from Rufina because everything you brought from California was too heavy for the weather. When you look up, Rufina’s shaking her head, with the face that’s looking more and more like your father every day, so much so that when you first saw her waiting for you in the airport in Manila, something in your chest clamped down in self-defense.
It’s not the clothes, she says.
Rufina will be the last of your siblings left in the Philippines, just one year younger than you, the only exception to your parents’ three-year conception rule. She’s already over twenty-one, too old to be immigrated through your father’s imminent citizenship. She’ll never go to college, will continue working instead on the farm, bringing vegetables to market, the same as your mother. You’ll have to be the one to file the petition for Rufina. Sibling to sibling petitions take more than twenty years. The rest of your siblings—Gloria, Boyet, Lerma—are under twenty-one and thus young enough to come to America as the children of a U.S. citizen, once your father’s petition is approved.
Rufina always tells you that you don’t have to do anything, that she has no real desire to go to America, that she likes the life she has. It’s like listening to someone speak to you in another language. You brush off her words and continue filling out the paperwork.
A couple of weeks into your visit, two nurses from Nazareth General Hospital come to visit you in Mangaldan. They inform you that the director of
the hospital has heard that you’re back in the country and wants to see you. There’s a car waiting for you. It’ll be the first time you’ve ever been personally escorted by car anywhere.
The director of the hospital took a liking to you back when you were an intern there, liked how tough you were with the doctors and how tender you were with the patients. She’s the daughter of the first woman to practice medicine in Dagupan City, and her mother delivered half of the babies in Dagupan from 1927 until World War II. In 1961, less than ten years after you were born, the current direktora took over her mother’s clinic and along with her husband, turned it into Nazareth General Hospital.
Years later, when your first daughter is born in California, you contact the direktora. Over the crackling long-distance line, heart in your throat, you ask if she would do you the honor of being your daughter’s ninang. The direktora, after a moment of startled silence, warmly accepts, says she’d be happy to be the godmother, and thanks you for asking. You grip this victory in your fist like pesos. You have fake teeth, you sold chico and mung beans by the side of the road, no one in your family ever had a car, your Tagalog still has Pangasinan holes in it, your fluency in English is a recurring dream that always cuts off just at the crucial moment—but. You’ve given your first child something like a pedigree, and no one can take it from her.
But for now, you get into the car. Waiting for you at the hospital is the direktora, whom you’ve always just called doktora. She greets you, kisses you on both cheeks, and then instead of asking you out to a fancy lunch like you were kind of hoping she would, knowing that it would be her treat, she says: Just talk to him. You don’t know what she means, until you enter the nurse’s break room and waiting for you inside is the babaero.
America Is Not the Heart Page 3