GEMMA NEMENZO, editor of Filipinas magazine has published a memoir called “Heart in Two Places” recalling her childhood in the Philippines and life in the United States. Here’s a snip from her foreword:

MY MOTHER WAS A MYTHICAL CREATURE to me in my childhood. Aloof and ethereal, she was always engaged in mysterious activities related to the excitement of the revolution; palatable, even if not quite comprehensible, to a child’s mind. She returned home late and left early in the morning, and I was fascinated by the small clues of her existence. Late at night I would be awakened by the sound of her typewriter in the next room, the rhythmic banging then a whir as the typewriter shifted to the next line,and I would drift back to sleep, the sound comforting as a lullaby. The next morning I would go to her room and examine the remnants of her words, mirror images left behind on the back of the carbon paper she used to make duplicate copies of her writing, unfinished pages where the last sentence would be shrouded under a line of x’s before being discarded. I would stare at the pictures of her in the living room, captivated by the smile on her face or the distance in her eyes, as I tried to imagine more secret details about her. In her third grade class picture, big-headed with a pristine bowl haircut and a mischievous grin, she sat in a shortskirt and knee stockings, distracted and gazing past the camera, waitingto become the woman, effortlessly beautiful and infinitely mysterious.

When we moved to America, the drastically different context created the negative image of her—like film held up to the light, everything white was black and people stared back at you with hollowed out eye sockets and pupils disconcertingly perched at the center. In the Philippines I excused her as being above the tedium of daily chores as she spent mostof the day out, doing activities of immense importance while the maids and our beloved yaya attended to the cooking and cleaning and fetching us from school. In California I blamed her for never learning how to cook and for feeding us a repetitive cycle of ground beef with peas and baked chicken, neither delicious nor reminiscent of the Filipino food we loved so much. But also while she’d been an aloof and distant mother,built around tales and imaginings, in America she became, if not entirely attentive as she single-handedly juggled jobs and kids, certainly engaged. Between arguments and long stretches where she worked ceaselessly, were the days we spent scouring the Asian food stores for queso de bola and pan de sal for Christmas, poring over old pictures retelling shared memories, and laughing at our failed attempts at making torta or biko.

Over the years, as we—my mother, baby sister, older brother, and I— went through the awkward and sometimes painful and humbling process of settling into immigrant American life, she managed to create in our messy little house full of books and laundry and located in some banal suburban neighborhood, our own world where nothing is mysterious and everything is communal. Instead of waking up in the morning to artifacts of her, she would be there, with a pot of champorado on the stove and giggling on the phone with one of her friends, still beautiful, but this time real.

The book is published by Anvil Publishing Inc.
8007- B Pioneer Street Barangay Kapitolyo, Pasig City 1600 Philippines
Telephone: 02-637-5692 / Fax: 02-637-6084

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