When I was born, my father was pushing 50. I didn't watch him age. He was always old, while the rest of us, including my mother, generations behind him. I don't remember seeing him with black hair. It was alway gray, thick and full. Bataan, that memory, was part of our daily breath and bread. It had a life of its own, like a member of our family who only cared to show up whenever it wanted. Our house (a rented apartment) in Manila was full of traces of World War II.

The late literary critic and professor Leonard Casper was from my father’s time.  He was two years older than my father, born 1921.  Both served during World War II.  Theirs was a generation of men that I understood from having “grown up” in Veterans Hospitals in Manila and New York City.  I was surrounded by them as a child, one thing I never really questioned as I was born when my father was pushing fifty.  They were all just wise, old men.  And one by one, they left.

Suffice to say, I don't know much about my maternal ancestry. What I know about my lineage came from my father. There are tons of history there. A landowning family from Oas, Albay, the home of the last names that start with the letter R. All Rs in one place. Mother History's hand trick.

Poker Realuyo 2010-2025 For over a decade, I took a month off from my FT job and wrote in the Caribbean.  In my 20s, I was trying to...