Year 2007

New Short Story: The OFW2





My name is Ramon OFW; I’d like to keep my name simple because there is nothing very significant in a name. If I were named Alexander the Great John Wayne and I were neither Alexander the Great nor John Wayne, I’d still be nothing to most of you. My nationality is Filipino, OFW stands for Overseas Filipino Worker. Oh, stop shaking your head now, c’mon. You say you already knew somebody like me eh, of course you do, there is an OFW living a few blocks down in your neighborhood. And he already told you his tale. Baghdad is bombed and an OFW is among the casualties. You call a Nurse and a Filipino young woman comes to your bedside. Pick up a karaoke bar in Japan and a Filipino waitress serves you. Take a cruise and a Filipino cleans your cabin, and arranges your towels too. Ok, we OFWs are everywhere. I know, I know, you’d be bored to hell if you’d hear another OFW tale, but listen: What I’m going to tell, though it may not be different from other OFW tales, is an original version. As I say in the Philippines, this is my one and only, my virgin, my first time story. You will enjoy this story the way you enjoy cracking the first nut of the first harvest of peanuts. With one caveat -- No polished words here, no convoluted statements similar to a composition written in a chateau down the Riviera, accompanied by Mr. Webster and Mr. Thesaurus, no sir, I can not regale you with words that render this a complex, profound piece. My accent doesn’t betray me. I never lost my accent despite my many years of living in this foreign land, and foreign land to me means a country outside of the Philippines, which I had only seen 3 times for the past eighteen years. My tale is just like me – average in height, brown in skin with a face, oh how to describe my Filipino face? Depending on your exposure to different nationalities, I can be Hispanic or Asian. One time I was mistaken for being Jewish. Now, that’s stretching a bit. I really don’t care how people consider me. I can be Swedish to some for all I know. Or African.

Minus my attempt to beautify my story, what will come out, really, is my Filipino-accented story. How shall I begin then?

It is so cliché and so X-generation to start my story with my birth in a small town that was a tropical splendor with billions of stars at night, that’s another stretch, in fact, it’s not true. I mean -- it’s like writing my resume starting with name and address and age and hobbies, c’mon, you don’t write your curriculum vitae that way anymore. So, let me be kind to you. I’d spare you of all those tiny like spells that connoted significant meanings to my birth such as the sun rising, the earth trembling, the winds blowing equalizing my ushering to some power that segued its way to a future spectacle, though, if you were to listen to my mother, bless her soul, she would convince you with all her might that I’d be the future Messiah if only Nostradamus read his kabala signs correctly. Not!

This is really I or me: Ramon OFW, now standing in front of my kitchen table, peeling onion as ingredient for my sinigang. There is nothing worth noting here, except, maybe, my way of thinking while doing this. Even the simple task of peeling an onion assumes a metaphoric epiphany in my brain. Yeah, I seem to always ‘see the light’ with even the most mundane thing I do. I ruminate for the moment: What is my life but an onion? I peel the old layer, sometimes two layers to reach the white inner core of the bulb. If I’m not too careful I’d get irritated in the eyes and cry (and along these lines, I somehow hear a background music, you know, that song that says smoke gets into your eyes…whatever), and finally, here is the real deal - I conclude with something like, I peel my onion the way I peel my OFW life (quite dramatic no?), layer by layer until what’s left is the minuscule piece of me to be sliced over and over again.

I may be putting too much meaning to my metaphoric onion epiphany but isn’t that the truth sometimes?

I am nothing but an ingredient; take for example the heart of the banana tree now in my hand. The fruits grow out of its peeled layers, which means, it takes a peeling to give way to new bananas. Then I slice what’s left of it and there it goes to the boiling water. Followed by fresh sweet potato curly tops, peeled radishes, fresh leaves of spinach and tomatoes. Add salt. And don’t even get me started with tamarinds (I am using the preserved sinigang powder – which I hate) because preparing and converting tamarinds into a sinigang flavor takes an entirely different action and different meaning. You boil the sour fruit, pick it out when soft and then grind it and grind it and grind it with a spoon before throwing it all back to the casserole. Yup, I am generally ruthless when it comes to cooking like these chunks of pork meat thrown and immersed in the boiling water under the canopy of colorful slices of tomatoes, radishes, green fresh spinach, onion in a pressure cooker.

Just like my life.

Now it’s all a matter of waiting for my food to be ready. I walk back to my sofa, sit and turn on the TV. As usual, I don’t watch TV but I like the clicking of the remote control. Changing channels is my most favorite sport right after running. Try it. When your vision slide from one channel to the next in split seconds, the images become cartoon-ish, a new language is formed (ya-eh-do-bu-ki-eng-ya-ti-ko-lu), and it gives me so much comfort. I can change things like TV channels. If I can do it with my TV I can do it with my life.

And here I begin the sad part of my story. I don’t know, but a story should always be sad somewhere. That’s alongside my Filipino upbringing’s theory and practice. Which includes some time-tested formulas like - a drama film should be filled with screaming and howling, the greater the howling, the more chances of winning an acting award. A novel or a story must always have suffering to pave way for martyrdom and heroism; it goes back to good ol’ Christianity and Rizal’s Noli and Fili. Yeah, at this point, it is only right to give you the sadness necessary in this story.

Perhaps in this paragraph I’d start telling you the lonely life of cooking alone as an OFW in the USA. This is the point when I’d turn this tale into some biography accompanied by cinematic hysteria and tear-jerking lines. This is exactly the paragraph when I start that ‘sad movies make me cry’ part.

Heck, why should I do that? I’m tired of the sadness and the struggle and the boring drama of working abroad. Isn’t it so pathetic to make a choice in life and then demand everybody’s tears for me, pity on me, create universal lessons and myths around me? Darn, that’s the utmost form of selfishness. I looked at my sinigang and felt so confined in my little world and drama. I turned away from it. I left the kitchen and got into my car. I drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken.