Tales from a Mindoro Childhood
We’d always hover on the line between doubt and complete faith when it came to Dad’s stories.
Growing up, the Philippines sounded very magical and mysterious to us, his Filipino American children, who were more familiar with baseball and barbecues, than the tikbalang or aswang. How much of it was it true? How much was hearsay?
“Did you believe that growing up, Dad? Do you still believe it today?”
We’ll never know, he’d always answer. But these are the stories he remembered from his childhood.
There was Lolo Sinto, the village baker. “Yan, nakakatulog na hindi namamalayan." Dad claimed Lolo Sinto would climb a tree and he would fall asleep up there.
There was the village healer. If you came home with a fever, the elders would automatically ask, “Who did you meet along the way? Did you talk to someone? Sinong nakabati sa ‘yo?” And then they would bring you to the old man so that he would lick his thumb and rub his saliva on your forehead to cure you.
Another neighbor had an anting-anting, everyone assumed. He had fallen out the window, but survived the fall. He must have had some kind of a charm on his person.
And then there was Minyang, the talk of the village. The folks whispered that she was not from town—possibly an engkatada or a mangkukulam. Bewitched, somehow. She was the wife of someone in the village. And she was extraordinarily beautiful but had strange behavior. It was said that she bathed at night in the river and that she could talk to crocodiles.
Dad would share his own kind of brushes with the unexplained, which we loved to hear about. (But never on a Friday. My dad would say we aren’t supposed to talk of those things “because they'll be listening." So as a family, we knew to stay off those types of topics on Fridays, no questions asked.)
As a young boy in Mindoro, my dad had quite an idyllic childhood. Out in the outdoors all the time. Swimming in rivers. Exploring without anyone hovering over him. Comfortable with animals and nature, as his parents had a few horses and cattle on their land. He was the type of kid who always begged to go on trips with his father, who went from village to village as a community volunteer to help with inoculations. My dad always described the distance in terms of walking days. Sometimes, it’s a whole day's walk or half a day's walk. Most of the time, they would go on foot, but sometimes they would be on horses.
On these little road trips, Dad explained, you have to be mindful of your surroundings. In a strange town, you don't know who to trust. If an acquaintance invites you into their house, don't eat what they offer you without checking what they're feeding you. Make sure that it has a face, like a fish, so you can see what it is. Otherwise, it could be something you don't know—like some kind of creature.
Walking in the woods, it would be dark and there’d be unexplained noises. Perhaps they were nature sounds. When he’d ask his father “What's that sound? Is that a bird I see up there?”, his father would admonish him not to look up. My dad would look up anyway. He told us, “I know that what I saw wasn't a bird. I can't explain what it was.”
As a kid, he never really went back to ask "What did I really see?" He just left it at that. Dad took these incidences matter-of-factly. These things exist in the world and you don't question them—deep was his respect for the natural world. If you hear strange noises at night, they belong to the things that live there and you let them live there. If you see animals that looked like dogs but are too oversized to be dogs, he’d exist with that and not question it.
In fact, he would warn us, you must be careful of things you see out in nature. If you see a herd of goats on their own, leave them alone. He insinuated that they might belong to someone not human.
I only saw that side of him firsthand in the probinsya. He never talked like that elsewhere, even if we were at a beach in Melbourne or out camping in the States.
When my kids were young, I knew it was very important for us to travel to Mindoro together. I'd never been to my dad’s province before. So I told my dad, “Let’s go!” From Manila, it’s as easy as taking the bus to Batangas pier and then taking the ferry to Puerto Galera. We went without reservations, no place to stay, no itinerary. My kids and I had our backpacks. Dad had a duffel bag just large enough to hold a change of clothes and a towel in one hand and, in the other hand, he had a bottle of wine. At 5AM.
We lost my dad a few months ago. At his memorial service, my daughter shared some memories from that trip. He taught them how to catch little crablings on the sand. On walks on the beach, he talked to the fishermen like he knew them, asking them about the catch of the day. He was very comfortable with the locals.
I remember a few things from that trip too.
I saw the Mindoro boy from his stories. He was very much in his element. He cautioned us not to point at things that we didn't understand. Don't point at things like mountains. If there's a colorful bird, we must avoid drawing attention to it because it might not be a bird. Don't point at it. Let things be.