FilAmHistoryMonth Notes Day 14: "to adjust to the cold, we get eczema" (paraphrasing a fellow Pinoy regarding us island people adjusting to cloudy S.F.)
(a rough start of a poem)
In passing at the university where I work,
a fellow Pinoy is holding a burrito
presumably to eat in the office (because these days,
we eat alone outside, or in lonely offices, or
appropriately spaced by 6 feet), and I comment,
noticing he is not wearing a jacket
and it's something in the 60s, and I'm layered
in boots, wishing I had more scarves around me:
"Aren't you cold?" I ask, shocked.
I say, "we really adjusted to a different climate!"
and he says, "well, but as a tradeoff, we got eczema."
I laugh, partly because I have eczema too, a scaly ailment
that is so itchy, I've literally wanted to be out of my skin.
I start riffing on how our people (because of course,
when you see another one of YOUR people, in the midst
of many people in San Francisco, you MUST reflect
on all our people on the Islands and elsewhere)
somehow adjusted from wearing tsinellas and tank tops
to bundling up in sleeping-bag-thick parkas
like it was no big thing, but really, they're thinking
"malamig na! sobrang lamig!"
I think the symbolic image of a Daly City Filipino
is an elder in a puff-jacket, hood, and a little plastic bag
twined around the fingers (that delicate grasp
so well-mastered in the Philippines). I laugh,
because we all know our blood runs warm
and we'd rather be shuffling around slowly
on unpaved roads, the palm and banana leaves swaying,
a big plate of fried rice and bangus, a cracked-open
coconut with both the juice and the meat ready to eat,
and a mango criss-cross cut to plunge your teeth into.
Here we are in San Francisco, the clouds grey
and cumulus, puffing round the white sun like our jackets.
Making a home in a place so far from home
is a skill, no, is a superpower
we have mastered over generations.