To Alexis Tioseco, on His 32nd Birthday
Alexis Tioseco, Rotterdam, January 2007. Photo courtesy Chris Tioseco.
Dear Mr. Tioseco,
This December I went to Vancouver to meet your family for the first time. I had talked to your brother Chris a lot on Skype, and when he met me at the airport, I said out loud, “You’re so handsome in person!” He smiled a bit uncertainly. I’ve read that your friends see Chris and gasp because you look so much alike. I can’t say this for certain because I never met you. But I would guess that you and your siblings look like no one else in the world, except each other.
Remembering what your brother showed me in Vancouver, I think of the basketball courts, and I think of the window.
The window in East Vancouver: Chris showed me that, too, at the old green house. Sometimes your brothers and sisters would forget the key, and as the bunso, you were the only one small and skinny enough for them to pour through the narrow front window. I think about your father uncomfortable in Canada, and your mother laughing and struggling to straighten her back at the end of the day, with so many kids, and you, opening the door, small and triumphant, to let your older siblings in.
The video store where you and your siblings rented movies, Champlain, is still open. Chris reports that it even smells the same. To me it’s an agreeable, musty, old-carpet smell. There is the same tab system with green stickers for the movies. And your mother’s name, with your old address, is still in the store’s computer. Chris checked.
Bettina said she remembered you in the basement at the blue house, starting video after video late into each night. She remembered you falling asleep at all hours of the day, because there was so much to watch into the small hours of the morning.
When your father took you and Chris back to the Philippines more than a decade later, basketball was how you soothed yourself, and improved your Tagalog, during your lonelier moments trying to navigate the newness of your birthplace. You found your rhythm. You found your friends, you found your DVDs, you found Batang West Side, and you chose to stay.
Your mother drove me to C&L, the Canadian movie warehouse where you would buy stacks of Criterion Collection DVDs. I looked along the Criterion shelf at the movies I’ve watched, the directors Sherad Anthony Sanchez and Pia Faustino and Erwin Romulo and John Torres told me you would have wanted me to see; Bergman, Costa, Haneke, Tarkovsky, Godard, Truffaut. I paused at Nika’s favorite, Jules et Jim.
In a restaurant where you loved the chicken fingers, your sister Paola told me that when she was younger, she once saw a family with an Asian father and a white mother. She thought it was a strange sight, at first, but then she realized: That’s us. That’s our family. She felt a startling sense of identification, of first-time self-recognition.
She and Bettina and Leo and Chris and your mother worried for you, even though you had chosen the Philippines with the full force of love your father had for it. They secretly hoped you and Nika might compromise and resettle in Vancouver one day, since its peace and open greenspace and bodies of water are sibling to Ljubljana, Slovenia. But when you and Nika visited them together for the first and last time, in December 2008, there was a rare Vancouver snowstorm.
Your mother said you had always been good at math, calculating tax in your head as a boy when you stood at the counter—as adept as her own father, a math professor. She said with your unusual, quiet refusal to ever do any harm, she thought you might become a priest. When you first began sending your essays on Filipino film to your family, your mother called your writing a beautiful shock.
Paola said you were particularly proud of one answer you had given a Filipino TV host, when you started guesting at Studio 23 and Media in Focus to advocate for the filmmakers you loved and the National Film Archive you knew should exist. The host had asked what your whole family asked, after your father died: Why stay in the Philippines?
You had a lot of answers. But you liked this one the most. “If everyone who can ever help the country leaves, what’s gonna happen?”
*
People ask me why I’ve chosen your story, why I’ve chosen to map the dimensions of your life, and its unjust end, and the movies you loved, when I never met you and Nika Bohinc, when it is such a personal, sensitive story, for so many around the world who loved you, when there are no easy answers, when the arc of this arrives at only an open, incomplete conclusion, for now.
I admit I still feel apologetic about it. I still feel, at moments, like a mere intruder. But I still feel I must try. I cannot leave it.
The way you and Nika died tore you completely from the context of how you lived your lives. I wanted to try, in writing, in my own small way, to return you to your context. And I wanted to try to explain something of our Philippines, in all its woundedness, its incompleteness, its openness, its cruelty, its complexity. Even if the country defies any answers at all, I want to keep asking the questions.
The University of Iowa gave me the resources and the time. That is why I have traveled to Quezon City, Ljubljana, and Vancouver, over the past three years, and why I have wondered, alone in my apartment in Iowa, how to do some measure of justice to you and your work.
In Vancouver, I met with your brothers and sisters and cousin and mother in Leo’s living room. Makulit was there—the dachshund Paola said you put in her lap, in your house at Times Street, to console her after your father died in 2006. Mak keeps your mother company during the week now. Your family says Mak no longer chews the underwiring of cars.
The resemblance, and the continuing bond, between all of you, is rare.
At the end of my interview with them, I asked your family what you might have thought of what happened to you and Nika. Paola answered first.
“I don’t think he would have held it against the whole country,” she said. “But he would have been heartbroken that he wasn’t able to protect Nika.”
“He gave the Philippines the best of what he had,” your brother Leo said. “And it took him.”
*
If you were here, Mr. Tioseco, I would have liked to tell you this:
When I first heard about you, I did not yet register that you had died. I only wanted to talk to you. I think I would have laughed in identification and disbelief at your t-shirts: Italian Stallion, complete with a galloping horse. Everyone Loves an Italian Boy, complete with an illustration of a pizza slice. Another Fil-Italian? There aren’t many of us, and you and your siblings are, perhaps, some of the only Filipino Chilean Italians in the world.
I sensed that there were parallels we lived, perhaps, in a country still fiercely struggling to define What is Filipino?—but that you, during your life, had chosen your place more readily in the Philippines. I was still unsure about the country my mother had left behind. Your Tagalog was, by all reports, far better than mine; the language was your lifelong project, where I still feel shy and ashamed to try it. You had a backbone, and a focus, that I would have liked to learn from. At Cibo or Sentro or Baang Coffee, I would have wanted to ask you, directly, the questions I am asking in my work about you and Nika.
What do we owe a difficult homeland? If our first impulse is always one of love, what do we risk? And how do films, of all art forms, forecast the stories of our lives?
I wonder what you might have said. As I write, I refer often to what you have already said.
Does a place mean more than a person? you asked Nika.
I would have liked to ask you: Does a person sometimes mean a place? Can a place mean a person?
To begin this small, to know one life alone completes the world.
One of our favorite poets, Eric Gamalinda, wrote those lines. They feel true enough.
*
I don’t know if I would have been able to keep up with your minute-by-minute running commentary on deep, poetic, truly-independent films. Your siblings say they struggled with this, too; Chris laughed when I said how hard it was to follow some of the movies. Though I spent my college years working at an independent movie theatre, I never developed anything near the lifelong language and devotion for film that you and Nika had. In this sense I feel a bit apologetic to you both.
But I would have liked to talk to you about the letter form. I also like writing essays as letters, letters as essays. I would have longed for an editor as smart and invested in me as the one you found in Erwin Romulo.
In writing your biography, and tracking the horror of your case, in a birthplace that owed you far better, I worry that whatever I produce will inevitably be a weak, incomplete imitation of you and Nika. That I won’t really contain how funny you were, or what you really thought about Lav Diaz, or what made you angry, or how steadily you pushed and supported the filmmakers you believed in and loved.
I wish this work were not necessary. I wish I had, instead, merely met you and Nika somewhere in Quezon City, at a film screening or a music venue or a restaurant with mutual friends. I wish you were still here to write the rest of your own story.
But I hope to approach the effort with the commitment of the filmmakers you championed most, during your life, in this story about your life. I will do my best.
Happy thirty-second birthday, Alexis. I would have liked to meet you, in a different kind of Philippines, some other way.
Sincerely,
Laurel Fantauzzo