This article was kindly contributed by an asawa celebrating his 10th year of marriage to a Filipina. He's got quite a background: free lance journalist, businessman, seminarian, and occasional rice-planter. This background has given him both an eye for the those cultural little nuances that so many people miss, as well as a talent for putting his observations down in words. I know you folks will enjoy it! – Bob

Maligaya Means It!
a guest article by R. Lee Otherson

Out of sheer gratitude for my own sheer existence my wife broke out my Father’s Day gift two days before Memorial Day. The legs were too long, the waist too tight, but there isn’t much you can do about it when someone loves you this much. When someone loves you this much, you are prepared to attend church dressed as the court jester. As I have, before she took it upon herself to be my own exterior decorator. But if I were part Malay, practically Spanish and fractionally Chinese, as she is, it would be a lot easier to be good at it.

As she is, there is much to be said and not enough room for it in a piece like this. I’m not a humorist so I don’t have to try at being funny: she was born in a poor village full of cousins half a kilometer from a narrow strait that pours into the Pacific at both ends, and looking across this strait to the next island among the seven thousand making up her country at the rows of broad-leafed banana trees and bamboo huts shaded beneath the noonday glare by coconut palms you squeeze, tighten, and tuck in your fortune to stay as long as you can and in my case that was three years which, unlike my pants, were not long enough.

In the Philippines, like life, you often do not know where you are going until you are halfway there. Here you do not know where you have been until you are halfway back. But if you ride the overcrowded, rustyhulled barko from Manila, say, to Mindanao it may stop along islands of all varieties, passing through a halfdozen dialects and to occasional ports of call or not at all, circuitously, your chief hope being the absence of ferrysinking weather. About halfway to where you are heading, you think, you can scan the map for the last port which may or may not be there, and if you can find it and remember the sun sets west you can see how far south it has been. Or you can ask, except that no one else on the boat knows where we are either, especially if they are heading for a second cousin’s distant fiesta, not to be confused with the distant cousin’s second fiesta, which is another one. The best way to avoid being sidetracked for weeks is to decline all ferryboard fiesta inviatations, especially the ones involving the most extraordinarily pretty sisters, worry about the weather, and even worry about Moro pirates to keep your mind off of fiestas. There will be plenty of fiesta where you are going in spite of everything Vatican II tried to do with the new calendar, of little effect.

Our village, which made me well-beloved and fiesta-famous as a patron saint, has about two dozen houses stretched astride footpaths formerly rice paddy dikes on high ground. Where we lived with six others in three rooms the roof was made of nipa grass banded together with thin-stripped palm bark and the floors were of bamboo slats lightly nailed into cocoa wood framing. The loovered shutters were always open, unless it was the rainy season, and as you looked out from the thatchroof porch full of orchid boxes and mr. & mrs. bougainvilla you could see the wavy green grain of rice paddies ridged by goatpath then away beyond that over tropical trees upslope toward the cloud-shrouded cone of an emerald volcano. The air is full of laughing children, silent gulls, women pretending to be squabbling and the roar of old sugar cane trucks bolting down the highway. (Ten years ago these trucks were nearly exclusively the remnants of a Japanese army motor pool abandoned soon after Mac Arthur hit Leyte, successively recannabalized, but they have since been replaced by the most recent vintage of similarly well-constructed Mazda and Toyota.) From there a dirt road comes toward you and on each side are the bamboo and nipa, or thinblock cement and corrugated tin roof houses, the road becomes a paddypath veering right around a duckpond then left straight ahead through the local-staff-of-life paddies all the way back to slightly higher ground again. Lolos and Lolas, Titos and aunties, their offspring and various animals in the semidomesticated condition line the avenue all thoroughly as loved as well as known and the nearest telephone, until recently, was a 4 kilometer ten cent taxi ride away. When anyone went anywhere it was always easy for you to guess where they were, and people knew where you were ahead of the people you just left, don’t ask me how.

Ask me how it felt sitting ringside table in a rickety coliseum full of men rumladen shouting ‘Pula! Putee! Pula! Putee!’ waving five peso notes yourself in Aussie hat with a seventy-five cent flask of the excellent Anejo-and-sawdust cocktail taking good odds on a rooster with talons ready to open a can of anchovies, or ask me how it felt that night singing the Regina Coeli strolling by candlelight with barefoot little girls wearing brown dusters as they toted our lady of mercy from house to house. Or ask me about the fiesta. But do not ask me how, through something resembling sheer admiration, a telephoneless megaphoneless society relays information about you faster than a speeding jeepney. The scientific explanation remains unknowable at this time. Probably it has something to do with feminine intuition. Which brings me back to my wife, who at this moment is probably osmosisizing whether I am wearing underwear or not.

As she was wont to osmosisize in the sala of her college boardmate’s cousin’s auntie over squid crackers and fresh calamansi, our first chaperoneless moment alone on a hot, windless day made windy by ceiling fan and pay-pay as decoratively wonderful as her flowerprint dress, matching.

“Look,” I said, “I do not know if it is proper for me to ask you this but I was wondering if we could go you know to a movie together or if maybe a nice restaurant or something?” (This is even a bigger mouthful in Cebuano than when done the normal, correctly constituted English way according to Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.)

But she beamed over at me vigorously smiling her fan, stopped waving then bent toward me, ever so slightly, and with the same indescribable charm she retains today quietly said:

“No! (Hee-hee).”

That was many hee-hees ago but from then on we heeheed it, successively, through three typhoons featuring nipa huts and their contents blowing down the highway like tumbleweed, one village fiesta disguised as a wedding, two near-altercations with leftist guerillas, four other village fiestas, one close call involving shipwrecks, the other fiestas of larger towns, their suburbs, a coup attempt or two, numerous funerals too tragic to mention, a couple of offers from gunrunners, the great month-long Fiesta of Christmas Thrice and the weddings of cousins, their sisters, and the birthday of everyone else. We farmed rice, geese, chickens, pigs, a cow, Papa Isco’s splendid fighting cocks, ran a small contraband dry cement business, went to grad school, bought then resold a jeepney bus and some pedi-cabs, built some new stuff for new family members to have their babies in, and generally speaking enjoyed the merciful typhoon rains and occasional earthquake, the latter made stoppable by making the bubble-blowing motor sound babies make; for great pigs, rolling under the earth in unease like the discontented upon it, respond to this with all the obedience accorded tradition in every other respect.

So my wife, owing to her keen sense of what is inevitable, controls most of the dough. The bana, or husband, brings it home and gives her all of it in the interests of intelligent distribution, usually in support of the local shrimp, pork, fiesta and textile industries. He may get an allowance for no damn good reason if he asks for it, so justifications are in order as a courtesy, no more. One must always show respect when it comes to allowances but only without an ironic sense of humor or oblique wittification when called upon to explain oneself, or else risk resembling true ingratitude. (When getting an allowance, for instance, it is not de rigeur to put in that you need a new ball and chain.) But what you get isn’t mere tokenism in the name of conjugal duty, either. All this from a woman who giggles and apologizes when she realizes she is being crabby.

Loyalty is the thing, royal loyalty in blood signature of deeds the way a conquistador swears filial obedience to Alphonso XIII gripping an image of the Crucified One. There is much suffering in life and we must be prepared to make sacrifices for our own salvation and that of others. Loyalty makes this joy complete, for we know we are ready to endure, with tears, the gift of life’s greatness. What happiness there is comes from knowing the duty through loyalty to and of those we love and who love us. Without this, which you can die for, you may as well be as dead on the outside as you are on the inside.

And so it is that hospitality toward all we own, are, and strange to is the greatest of all gifts you’ve been given and among the greatest gifts you can give: refusing to share thus is a crime against life. Or as my then and still young wife once asked, “Is not ‘selfish’ the name of a fish?” No, Ligaya, I said: selfish is not the name of another kind of fish. It is something else difficult to describe because a certain state of mind where only one thinks of oneself, and for you that is not possible.

It is not possible for you, your cousins, our children, and the other cousins comprising Tugas, Tanjay, Negros Oriental, any more than it is possible for you to attend your own funeral: selfish is a one man fishless fiesta of little fun, less friends, and no joy.

Joy is her name by the way; “Maligaya,” because she was named for her gurgling hee-hees the day she was born, sixteen years two months and nine days after my arrival’s tectonic wailing. That was ten years ago and after ten years the sixteen-year age difference sometimes closes to within a decade or yawns outward to a quarter-century. Generosity keeps one lovely, strong on the inside and young. Loyalty keeps you true, brave on the outside and prepared. There is no need to indemnify by logic, to become abstract, for life follows logic rarely, if ever, as rarely as logic flows from life. And nothing qualifies the fiesta more enjoyable and real than knowing you have successfully flirted with fate and faithfulness to life and love this goddess to the end.

Pants and all.