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“Vì sao cô phải ở lại đây chịu mắng chửi như thế?”, chúng tôi không giấu được tò mò, bạo gan hỏi cô. “Ai sẽ nấu ăn cho các con?”, câu trả lời tuy nhẹ nhàng của cô nhưng nó hàm ý rằng nếu không có cô thì chẳng có ai làm mọi việc trong nhà, chẳng có ai chăm sóc cho mẹ con chúng tôi.
Cũng với câu hỏi ấy nhưng một lần khác, cô lại trả lời: “Cô biết đi đâu bây giờ…”. Câu trả lời này dường như tiệm cận gần hơn với thực tế đau lòng của Lola. Đến Mỹ là một việc điên rồ, trước khi chúng tôi kịp thở dài thì một thập kỷ đã trôi qua. Chúng tôi quay lại nơi cũ, thập kỷ thứ hai đã kết thúc. Tóc Lola đã rụng dần và bạc đi nhiều lắm. Cô biết được những người họ hàng ở quê nhà không nhận được sự giúp đỡ từ cô như lời hứa hẹn ban đầu và tự hỏi chuyện gì đã xảy ra với cô. Thế nên với cô, trở về quê nhà là một sự xấu hổ, tủi nhục.
Mà không về quê nhà, cô cũng chẳng biết đi đâu ở đất Mỹ này thật. Cô chẳng quen biết ai đây lại không có phương tiện để di chuyển. Điện thoại cũng chẳng biết dùng. Những thứ hiện đại như ATM, máy bán hàng tự động hay bất cứ thứ gì có bàn phím sẽ khiến cô đau đầu. Giao tiếp với những người nói quá nhanh sẽ khiến cô ú ớ, không biết nói gì và vốn tiếng Anh bập bẹ của cô cũng khiến người khác rơi vào trạng thái tương tự. Cô không biết sắp xếp một cuộc hẹn, chuyến đi chơi, điền giấy tờ hay gọi thức ăn… tất cả đều phải có sự giúp đỡ của chúng tôi.
Tôi cho Lola một thẻ ATM và dạy cô ấy cách sử dụng. Lần đầu, rất thành công nhưng lần thứ hai, cô ấy bị rối, đâm ra hoảng loạn, không bao giờ dám thử lại nữa. Tuy vậy, Lola vẫn giữ thẻ ATM bên mình bởi cô ấy xem nó như một món quà quý giá mà tôi tặng. Tôi cũng cố gắng dạy cô ấy lái xe. Dĩ nhiên cô xua tay từ chối nhưng tôi vẫn nhấc bổng cô lên mang đến xe hơi, đặt cô vào ghế lái. Lola từ vui vẻ đến sợ hãi, rồi nhanh chóng tháo chạy khỏi chiếc xe trước khi tôi kịp nói lời nào. Tôi cũng cố gắng vài lần sau đó bởi tôi cho rằng biết lái xe sẽ thay đổi cuộc đời Lola. Cô ấy có thể đến nhiều nơi, và nếu không thể chịu đựng mẹ tôi nữa, cô ấy có thể lái xe đi mãi mãi.
Bốn làn xe giờ chỉ còn hai, vỉa hè giờ chỉ còn đá sỏi. Mấy chiếc xe ba bánh giờ đi xen lẫn với xe hơi tạo nên một sự hỗn độn rất đỗi bình thường ở đất nước này. À, còn vài con trâu kéo mớ tre trên đường nữa. Vài con chó hay dê gì đấy thậm chí còn ngang nhiên đi lại trước mũi xe tải, trông rất thong dong… Tôi lôi bản đồ, tìm đường đến làng Mayantoc – điểm đến của chúng tôi. Tôi gõ gõ cái hộp nhựa, hối hận vì mình không mua một cái bình tốt hơn, bằng sứ hay gỗ gì đấy. Không biết mọi người nghĩ gì nữa. Tôi nghe nói chỉ còn mỗi người chị em gì đấy của Lola – bà Gregoria, 98 tuổi và trí nhớ kém lắm nhưng mỗi khi nghe đến tên Lola, bà lại bật khóc mà lại chẳng biết vì sao mình khóc.
Trước khi đi, tôi may mắn liên lạc được với một trong những người cháu của Lola. Cô ấy đã lên kế hoạch cho lễ tưởng niệm của Lola ở Công viên Tưởng niệm Mayantoc Eternal Bliss. Đã 5 năm kể từ ngày Lola qua đời nhưng tôi vẫn chưa nói lời tạm biệt cuối cùng – điều mà tôi biết chắc chắn sẽ xảy ra. Cả ngày tôi buồn bã nhưng không thể để Doods thấy mình khóc. Hơn cả sự xấu hổ về cách gia đình tôi đối xử với Lola, hơn cả những lo lắng của tôi về việc họ hàng của Lola ở Mayantoc sẽ đối xử với tôi thế nào, tôi cảm thấy nặng nề khi mất cô ấy, như thể cô ấy chỉ vừa qua đời một ngày trước đó.
Doods đưa tôi đến cao tốc Romulo để đến nhà ông tôi – trung úy Tom. Hai làn xe thành một, những viên sỏi giờ chỉ là cát bụi. Con đường mòn chạy dọc theo sông Camiling, nơi có những ngôi nhà trẻ nằm sát bên, và rồi những ngọn đồi xanh rì hòa lẫn với ánh nắng vàng vọt đã hiện ra phía trước. Đó là nơi mẹ tôi từng sống.
Đám tang của mẹ, tôi hết lời ca tụng bà. Những lời tôi nói là thật. Mẹ tôi đã rất dũng cảm và mạnh mẽ. Bà đã làm mọi thứ tốt nhất trong khả năng. Bà trông rất rạng rỡ khi hạnh phúc. Bà tự hào về những đứa con của mình và cho chúng tôi một ngôi nhà thực sự ở Salem, Oregon – một nơi ở cố định mà chúng tôi chưa bao giờ có. Tôi ước mình có thể nói cảm ơn mẹ một lần. Tôi biết, tất cả chúng tôi yêu mẹ.
Tôi không nói về Lola trong đám tang cũng như không đề cập đến Lola khi tôi ở cùng bà vào những năm tháng cuối đời của bà. Yêu mẹ đòi hỏi tôi phải có một tinh thần thép. Đó là cách duy nhất để tôi và mẹ có thể có mối quan hệ mẹ và con trai thực sự – điều mà tôi rất muốn, đặc biệt là khi sức khỏe mẹ xuống dốc vào khoảng giữa những năm 90. Tiểu đường, ung thư vú, bệnh bạch cầu cấp tính, tế bào ung thư lớn mạnh trong máu, trong tủy xương. Mẹ từ người phụ nữ mạnh mẽ trở nên mong manh yếu ớt chỉ sau một đêm.
Sau cuộc tranh cãi đỉnh điểm về Lola vào đêm đó, tôi hầu như tránh về nhà. Ở tuổi 23, tôi chuyển đến Seattle sinh sống. Thỉnh thoảng về thăm, tôi thấy có sự thay đổi. Mẹ vẫn là mẹ, nhưng không phải sự tàn nhẫn trước đó. Mẹ đã mua cho Lola bộ răng giả tốt, cho Lola một phòng ngủ. Cố gắng để Lola có thể định cư ở Mỹ một cách hợp pháp. Đó là một quá trình dài nhưng Lola đã trở thành công dân Mỹ vào tháng 10/1998 – 4 tháng sau khi mẹ tôi nhận được chẩn đoán bệnh bạch cầu. Và mẹ tôi sống được hơn 1 năm sau đó.
Trong suốt thời gian đó, mẹ và Ivan (người chồng sau của mẹ) nhiều lần du lịch đến thành phố Lincoln ở bờ biển Oregon, đôi khi Lola cũng được đi cùng. Lola yêu biển, được đến biển, quay trở về những hòn đảo là ước mơ của Lola. Tôi biết Lola chẳng thể nào hạnh phúc hơn khi mẹ tôi dần thoải mái hơn với cô. Một buổi chiều bên bờ biển hay 15 phút trong bếp cùng mẹ nhớ lại những ngày tháng cũ ở quê nhà, Lola dường như đã quên hết những năm tháng đau khổ của cô ấy.
Trước khi qua đời, mẹ đưa tôi hai quyển nhật kí bà viết về cuộc đời mình. Về những năm tháng học y khoa, cho đến khi đến Mỹ, trở thành bác sĩ thực tập… Mẹ viết rất chi tiết về từng đứa con và cảm giác tự hào, yêu thương chúng tôi như thế nào. Mẹ đã hy sinh hết mình cho hai ông chồng, cố gắng nắm bắt họ như những nhân vật phức tạp trong câu chuyện cuộc đời mình. Chúng tôi là những nhân vật xuất hiện có chủ đích, còn Lola là một sự ngẫu nhiên. Lola được đề cập đến như là một nhân vật phụ xuất hiện trong câu chuyện của ai đó, như: “Lola cùng con trai yêu dấu của mẹ Alex đến ngôi trường mới vào sáng nay. Mẹ hy vọng con sẽ nhanh chóng làm quen và không còn sợ hãi nếu phải di chuyển nữa…”. Hình như có hai trang về tôi nhưng lại không thấy đề cập đến Lola.
Một ngày trước khi mẹ mất, một vị linh mục đã đến thực hiện những nghi thức cuối cùng. Khi được hỏi muốn tha thứ hay được tha thứ điều gì, mẹ nhìn khắp phòng với đôi mắt nặng trĩu mà chẳng nói gì. Mẹ chẳng nhìn Lola rồi mở bàn tay đặt lên đầu mình. Mẹ chẳng nói gì nữa cả.
Lola đến ở với tôi khi cô đã được 75 tuổi. Lúc đó tôi đã kết hôn, có hai cô con gái, sống trong một ngôi nhà ấm cúng. Ở đây Lola muốn làm gì cũng được, chẳng còn phải phục vụ chúng tôi như trước. Đó là lần đầu tiên trong đời Lola và tôi biết để được như thế, cô đã rất đau khổ suốt mấy mươi năm qua.
Ở cùng Lola, cô ấy khiến tôi khó chịu vài thứ, chẳng hạn như cô ấy luôn bảo tôi phải mặc áo len để không lạnh (dù khi ấy tôi đã 40 tuổi). Cô liên tục than thở về bố tôi và Ivan, rằng bố tôi là một gã lười biếng, Ivan là một con đỉa bám lấy mẹ tôi. Cô ấy kiểm tra thùng rác để đảm bảo chúng tôi không vứt đi những thứ còn dùng được. Cô ấy rửa và dùng lại khăn giấy cho đến khi chúng rã ra trong tay…
Cô ấy tích cực nấu bữa sáng dù cho chúng tôi phải vắt giò lên cổ chạy cho kịp giờ vào mỗi sáng. Cô ấy dọn giường, giặt quần áo, lau dọn nhà cửa. Ban đầu tôi nhẹ nhàng bảo: “Lola, cô không cần phải làm thế”, “Lola, chúng con sẽ tự làm”, và đến khi tôi quá bực: “Lola, đó là việc của hai đứa nhỏ”. Cô ấy bảo được rồi và vẫn tiếp tục làm. Cô ấy thậm chí còn khiến tôi tức điên lên khi đứng ăn trong nhà bếp hay dọn dẹp mỗi khi tôi bước vào phòng.
Sau vài tháng như thế, tôi biết mình phải nói chuyện với Lola: “Con không phải bố. Cô không phải nô lệ ở đây”. Nghe những lời ấy, Lola cố gắng hết sức để kềm nén sự xúc động. Tôi nhẹ nhàng hôn lên trán cô rồi bảo: “Đây là nhà của cô. Cô ở đây không phải để phục vụ chúng con. Cô phải nghỉ ngơi, được chứ?”. Cô bảo được rồi và vẫn quay lại dọn dẹp. Thực tế thì cô ấy không biết mình phải nghỉ ngơi bằng cách nào vì gần như cả đời việc của cô là phục vụ. Thế rồi tôi phải tự khuyên chính mình, phải thả lỏng. Nếu cô ấy muốn nấu bữa tối, hãy để cô ấy nấu rồi cảm ơn và dọn dẹp. Tôi phải liên tục nhắc nhở bản thân mình: để cô ấy được thoải mái.
Một đêm về nhà muộn, tôi thấy Lola đang ngồi chơi đố chữ, chân gác lên ghế, TV thì bật. Một tách trà đặt sát bên. Cô ấy nở nụ cười tươi và sáng choang (nhờ hàm răng giả) rồi quay trở lại với câu đố. Có tiến bộ đấy!
Cô ấy trồng hoa hồng, tulip và vài loại phong lan nào đó ở sân sau. Cô ấy dành cả buổi chiều để chăm sóc chúng. Cô ấy đã biết thăm hỏi hàng xóm, nhưng ở tuổi 80, khi bệnh viêm khớp tồi tệ hơn, cô ấy phải đi lại bằng gậy. Đi qua phòng ngủ của Lola, tôi thường nghe thấy những bài hát dân ca Philippine phát ra từ đó. Một cuộn băng lặp đi lặp lại. Tôi thậm chí còn biết cô ấy đã gửi tất cả tiền mà tôi và vợ cho cô ấy – 200 USD một tuần – về cho những người họ hàng ở quê nhà.
Một chiều nọ, tôi thấy cô ngồi ở sân sau, nhìn chằm chằm vào bức ảnh ai đó ở quê. “Cô muốn về nhà sao Lola?”, tôi tò mò. Tay mân mê, vuốt nhẹ bức ảnh, Lola khẽ khàng gật đầu.
=Vậy là sau sinh nhật lần thứ 83 của Lola, tôi mua vé cho cô ấy về Philippine. Một tháng sau đó tôi đến để đón cô quay lại Mỹ – trong trường hợp cô ấy muốn thế. Thật ra, chuyến đi này còn là dịp để Lola xem sau nhiều năm, cô có còn cảm giác thân thuộc như xưa hay không. Rồi cô ấy đã tìm thấy câu trả lời: “Mọi thứ không còn như trước”. Trang trại cũ biến mất, ngôi nhà chẳng còn, bố mẹ, hầu hết anh chị em đã qua đời. Những người bạn ấu thơ còn sống thì trở nên xa lạ. Gặp lại họ thật tuyệt nhưng mọi thứ không còn như xưa. Cô ấy vẫn muốn trải qua những năm tháng cuối đời ở đây nhưng giờ thì chưa sẵn sàng. “Về với khu vườn của cô thôi”, tôi bảo, “Ừ, về nhà thôi”, Lola ngậm ngùi đáp lời.
Lola đã chăm sóc hai cô con gái của tôi hệt như cách chăm sóc anh chị em tôi khi bé. Sau giờ tụi nhỏ tan học, cô ấy sẽ nghe lũ trẻ kể chuyện và lao vào bếp nấu nướng thứ gì đấy cho chúng ăn. Không giống như vợ chồng tôi, Lola rất thích mỗi phút giây của những sự kiện, buổi biểu diễn ở trường. Dù không thể tham dự hết nhưng lần nào có mặt, Lola cũng được ngồi ở hàng ghế đầu.
Đi chơi đâu chúng tôi cũng dắt cô ấy theo và không chỉ những lúc đi chơi đâu, trông Lola giờ đây thực sự hạnh phúc.
Lola thậm chí còn tự học đọc chữ nữa. Nhiều năm liền, bằng cách nào đó Lola đã học cách phát âm chữ cái, giải những câu đố về từ vựng. Phòng cô ấy đầy những câu đố như thế. Mỗi ngày, Lola xem tin tức, cố gắng nghe và nhận biết từ ngữ. Cô tìm hiểu thêm trên mấy tờ bào và cố tìm ra ý nghĩa của chúng.
Suốt 12 năm Lola sống ở nhà chúng tôi, tôi có rất nhiều cơ hội để hỏi Lola về bản thân cô ấy, để cô ấy có thể kể về bản thân, về cuộc đời mình – điều tôi luôn muốn biết từ khi còn bé. “Lola, có bao giờ cô phải lòng ai đó chưa?”, tôi không giấu được sự tò mò. Lola cười rồi kể về chuyện tình của cô ấy khi mới 15 tuổi. Đó là một anh chàng điển trai tên Pedro ở nông trại gần nhà cô khi trước. Họ thu hoạch lúa cùng nhau suốt nhiều tháng liền rồi cô nảy sinh tình cảm. “Cô thích anh ta”, cô chậm rãi trả lời và rồi là một khoảng lặng… “Sau đó thì anh ta chuyển đi…”.
Cũng suốt những năm đó, tôi hiểu được rằng Lola cũng muốn điên lên khi mẹ tôi thô lỗ suốt những năm tháng sống cùng nhưng cô ấy vẫn rất nhớ mẹ tôi.
Thỉnh thoảng, khi Lola còn trẻ, cảm giác cô đơn đã khiến cô ấy không ít lần rơi lệ. Tôi biết cô ấy mong mình có được tấm chồng nhưng cô bảo với tôi rằng nhìn thấy những ông chồng của mẹ thì cô lại thấy cô đơn cũng không phải là điều tồi tệ. Cô ấy chẳng nhớ bất kì ai trong hai người chồng của mẹ. Có lẽ cuộc sống của cô ấy sẽ khá hơn nếu cô ở lại Mayantoc, kết hôn rồi lập gia đình như chị em cô ấy. Nhưng nó cũng có thể tệ hơn, ai có thể biết được.
Không ai trong chúng tôi chuẩn bị cho cái chết quá đột ngột của Lola.
Cô ấy lên cơn đau tim khi đang trong nhà bếp nấu bữa tối, còn tôi thì chạy ra ngoài làm vài việc vặt. Khi trở lại, cô ấy đã đau một lúc lâu rồi. Một vài giờ sau đó ở bệnh viện, trước khi tôi có thể chấp nhận mọi chuyện đang xảy ra, cô ấy đã ra đi – lúc 10 giờ 56 phút tối ngày 7/11. Tâm trí hoang mang, tôi chẳng nhớ được gì nhưng bọn trẻ đã bảo tôi rằng, Lola chết cùng ngày, cùng tháng với mẹ tôi, cách nhau 12 năm.
Vậy là ở tuổi 86, Lola đã ra đi. Tôi vẫn còn có thể nhìn cô ấy trên chiếc giường bệnh. Tôi nhớ mình đã nhìn vào những viên thuốc kế bên người phụ nữ nhỏ hơn cả một đứa trẻ này và nghĩ về cuộc đời của cô ấy. Cô ấy đã từ bỏ tất cả những ham muốn riêng để phục vụ, cống hiến hết mình cho chúng tôi, một sự trung thành tuyệt vời. Cô ấy đã trở thành một nhân vật được kính trọng trong gia đình đông đúc của chúng tôi.
Tôi mất vài tháng để dọn dẹp những vật dụng của cô ấy trên tầng gác mái. Tôi tìm thấy những công thức nấu ăn cô cắt ra từ mấy quyển tạp chí vào những năm 1970 – thời điểm cô ấy bắt đầu học đọc. Những quyển album có hình mẹ tôi, giải thưởng của anh chị em chúng tôi – những thứ chúng tôi thường vứt đi còn cô ấy thì cất giữ. Tim tôi như vỡ vụn khi thấy những tờ giấy báo đã vàng úa mà tôi đã viết từ rất lâu rồi. Lúc đó cô ấy chẳng biết đọc nhưng vẫn khư khư cất giữ chúng như bảo vật gia đình.
Chiếc xe của Doods chở tôi đến một căn nhà nhỏ, xung quanh là ruộng lúa xanh ngắt một màu như kéo dài bất tận. Xe đỗ xịch, tôi chưa kịp ra khỏi xe thì mọi người đã kéo nhau ra khỏi nhà ngó nghiêng. Doods bỏ dây an toàn, ngả ghế, đánh một giấc sau chuyến đi dài. Tôi quẩy túi lên vai, hít một hơi thật sâu rồi mở cửa bước ra.
“Đường này”, giọng nói dịu dàng vang lên, dẫn tôi đi vào căn nhà ấy. Có khoảng 20 người, già, trẻ có đủ nhưng hầu hết là đã khá lớn tuổi. “Lola đâu”, một giọng nói vang lên. Tôi chưa kịp định thần thì trong phút chốc một phụ nữ trung niên nở nụ cười, là Ebia – cháu gái Lola. Thì ra đây là nhà cô ấy. Cô ấy lại ôm tôi, rồi hỏi lại: “Lola đâu?”. Tôi mở túi, đưa chiếc hộp nhựa cho cô ấy. Trịnh trọng cầm chiếc hộp trên tay, cô ấy nhìn quanh rồi lại hỏi: “Lola đâu?”. Có lẽ mọi người ở đây không quen với việc hỏa táng người quá cố. Tôi đã không mang tro cốt của Lola đến sớm hơn vì tôi không chắc mọi người ở đây vẫn còn quan tâm đến cô ấy.
Nhưng rồi Ebia vẫn ôm khư khư chiếc hộp trong lòng, chậm rãi cúi xuống, đặt trán lên chiếc hộp và bắt đầu khóc. Vai cô ấy rung lên từng đợt và tiếng khóc ngày càng thảm thiết hơn, hệt như tiếng khóc của Lola lúc bị bố mẹ tôi mắng chửi mà tôi từng nghe vào những năm còn bé.
Tôi chưa kịp tiến đến an ủi Ebia thì một người phụ nữ đã vòng tay ôm Ebia, rồi cả hai bắt đầu khóc. Và rồi những người còn lại cũng khóc theo suốt 10 phút sau đó. Thẫn thờ nhìn khung cảnh đau thương quanh đây, tôi không nhận ra, nước mắt mình cũng đã rơi từ khi nào.
Nhìn vào chiếc túi trống rỗng mà trước đó đã đựng tro cốt Lola, tôi biết mình đang mang cô ấy về đúng nơi thuộc về.
Alex Tizon passed away in March. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note.
The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.
After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.
At baggage claim in Manila, I unzipped my suitcase to make sure Lola’s ashes were still there. Outside, I inhaled the familiar smell: a thick blend of exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet fruit and sweat.
Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname “Doods,” and we hit the road in his truck, weaving through traffic. The scene always stunned me. The sheer number of cars and motorcycles and jeepneys. The people weaving between them and moving on the sidewalks in great brown rivers. The street vendors in bare feet trotting alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts. The child beggars pressing their faces against the windows.Doods and I were headed to the place where Lola’s story began, up north in the central plains: Tarlac province. Rice country. The home of a cigar-chomping army lieutenant named Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The family stories paint Lieutenant Tom as a formidable man given to eccentricity and dark moods, who had lots of land but little money and kept mistresses in separate houses on his property. His wife died giving birth to their only child, my mother. She was raised by a series of utusans, or “people who take commands.”
When the Spanish arrived, in the 1500s, they enslaved islanders and later brought African and Indian slaves. The Spanish Crown eventually began phasing out slavery at home and in its colonies, but parts of the Philippines were so far-flung that authorities couldn’t keep a close eye. Traditions persisted under different guises, even after the U.S. took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (“helpers”) or kasambahays (“domestics”), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep.
Lieutenant Tom had as many as three families of utusans living on his property. In the spring of 1943, with the islands under Japanese occupation, he brought home a girl from a village down the road. She was a cousin from a marginal side of the family, rice farmers. The lieutenant was shrewd—he saw that this girl was penniless, unschooled, and likely to be malleable. Her parents wanted her to marry a pig farmer twice her age, and she was desperately unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom approached her with an offer: She could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned 12.
“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.
“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.
Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed, and dressed my mother. When they walked to the market, Lola held an umbrella to shield her from the sun. At night, when Lola’s other tasks were done—feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, folding the laundry that she had washed by hand in the Camiling River—she sat at the edge of my mother’s bed and fanned her to sleep.
Seven years later, in 1950, Mom married my father and moved to Manila, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32‑caliber slug to his temple. Mom almost never talked about it. She had his temperament—moody, imperial, secretly fragile—and she took his lessons to heart, among them the proper way to be a provincial matrona: You must embrace your role as the giver of commands. You must keep those beneath you in their place at all times, for their own good and the good of the household. They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.
Dad was allowed to bring his family and one domestic. Figuring they would both have to work, my parents needed Lola to care for the kids and the house. My mother informed Lola, and to her great irritation, Lola didn’t immediately acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she was terrified. “It was too far,” she said. “Maybe your Mom and Dad won’t let me go home.”
We landed in Los Angeles on May 12, 1964, all our belongings in cardboard boxes tied with rope. Lola had been with my mother for 21 years by then. In many ways she was more of a parent to me than either my mother or my father. Hers was the first face I saw in the morning and the last one I saw at night. As a baby, I uttered Lola’s name (which I first pronounced “Oh-ah”) long before I learned to say “Mom” or “Dad.” As a toddler, I refused to go to sleep unless Lola was holding me, or at least nearby.
I was 4 years old when we arrived in the U.S.—too young to question Lola’s place in our family. But as my siblings and I grew up on this other shore, we came to see the world differently. The leap across the ocean brought about a leap in consciousness that Mom and Dad couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make.
Lola never got that allowance. She asked my parents about it in a roundabout way a couple of years into our life in America. Her mother had fallen ill (with what I would later learn was dysentery), and her family couldn’t afford the medicine she needed. “Pwede ba?” she said to my parents. Is it possible? Mom let out a sigh. “How could you even ask?,” Dad responded in Tagalog. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?”
Mom would come home and upbraid Lola for not cleaning the house well enough or for forgetting to bring in the mail. “Didn’t I tell you I want the letters here when I come home?” she would say in Tagalog, her voice venomous. “It’s not hard naman! An idiot could remember.” Then my father would arrive and take his turn. When Dad raised his voice, everyone in the house shrank. Sometimes my parents would team up until Lola broke down crying, almost as though that was their goal.
It confused me: My parents were good to my siblings and me, and we loved them. But they’d be affectionate to us kids one moment and vile to Lola the next. I was 11 or 12 when I began to see Lola’s situation clearly. By then Arthur, eight years my senior, had been seething for a long time. He was the one who introduced the word slave into my understanding of what Lola was. Before he said it I’d thought of her as just an unfortunate member of the household. I hated when my parents yelled at her, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they—and the whole arrangement—could be immoral.
One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then 9, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said, as Dad stood over her and glared. Her feeble defense only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and I could hear her wailing, an animal cry.
“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said.
“Are you defending your Lola?,” Dad said. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said again, almost in a whisper.
I was 13. It was my first attempt to stick up for the woman who spent her days watching over me. The woman who used to hum Tagalog melodies as she rocked me to sleep, and when I got older would dress and feed me and walk me to school in the mornings and pick me up in the afternoons. Once, when I was sick for a long time and too weak to eat, she chewed my food for me and put the small pieces in my mouth to swallow. One summer when I had plaster casts on both legs (I had problem joints), she bathed me with a washcloth, brought medicine in the middle of the night, and helped me through months of rehabilitation. I was cranky through it all. She didn’t complain or lose patience, ever.
To now hear her wailing made me crazy.
In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.
I think Billy felt sorry for Lola. He’d rave about her cooking, and make her laugh like I’d never seen. During sleepovers, she’d make his favorite Filipino dish, beef tapa over white rice. Cooking was Lola’s only eloquence. I could tell by what she served whether she was merely feeding us or saying she loved us.
When I once referred to Lola as a distant aunt, Billy reminded me that when we’d first met I’d said she was my grandmother.
“Well, she’s kind of both,” I said mysteriously.
“Why is she always working?”
“She likes to work,” I said.
“Your dad and mom—why do they yell at her?”
“Her hearing isn’t so good …”
Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from. Whether we deserved to be accepted. I was ashamed of it all, including my complicity. Didn’t I eat the food she cooked, and wear the clothes she washed and ironed and hung in the closet? But losing her would have been devastating.
After each of her parents died, Lola was sullen and silent for months. She barely responded when my parents badgered her. But the badgering never let up. Lola kept her head down and did her work.
My father’s resignation started a turbulent period. Money got tighter, and my parents turned on each other. They uprooted the family again and again—Seattle to Honolulu back to Seattle to the southeast Bronx and finally to the truck-stop town of Umatilla, Oregon, population 750. During all this moving around, Mom often worked 24-hour shifts, first as a medical intern and then as a resident, and Dad would disappear for days, working odd jobs but also (we’d later learn) womanizing and who knows what else. Once, he came home and told us that he’d lost our new station wagon playing blackjack.
For days in a row Lola would be the only adult in the house. She got to know the details of our lives in a way that my parents never had the mental space for. We brought friends home, and she’d listen to us talk about school and girls and boys and whatever else was on our minds. Just from conversations she overheard, she could list the first name of every girl I had a crush on from sixth grade through high school.When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but the fact was that he deserted us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 years of marriage. She wouldn’t become a licensed physician for another year, and her specialty—internal medicine—wasn’t especially lucrative. Dad didn’t pay child support, so money was always a struggle.
My mom kept herself together enough to go to work, but at night she’d crumble in self-pity and despair. Her main source of comfort during this time: Lola. As Mom snapped at her over small things, Lola attended to her even more—cooking Mom’s favorite meals, cleaning her bedroom with extra care. I’d find the two of them late at night at the kitchen counter, griping and telling stories about Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, other times working themselves into a fury over his transgressions. They barely noticed us kids flitting in and out.
Doods was humming. I’d dozed for what felt like a minute and awoke to his happy melody. “Two hours more,” he said. I checked the plastic box in the tote bag by my side—still there—and looked up to see open road. The MacArthur Highway. I glanced at the time. “Hey, you said ‘two hours’ two hours ago,” I said. Doods just hummed.
His not knowing anything about the purpose of my journey was a relief. I had enough interior dialogue going on. I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. To make her life better. Why didn’t I? I could have turned in my parents, I suppose. It would have blown up my family in an instant. Instead, my siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly.Doods and I passed through beautiful country. Not travel-brochure beautiful but real and alive and, compared with the city, elegantly spare. Mountains ran parallel to the highway on each side, the Zambales Mountains to the west, the Sierra Madre Range to the east. From ridge to ridge, west to east, I could see every shade of green all the way to almost black.
Doods pointed to a shadowy outline in the distance. Mount Pinatubo. I’d come here in 1991 to report on the aftermath of its eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century. Volcanic mudflows called lahars continued for more than a decade, burying ancient villages, filling in rivers and valleys, and wiping out entire ecosystems. The lahars reached deep into the foothills of Tarlac province, where Lola’s parents had spent their entire lives, and where she and my mother had once lived together. So much of our family record had been lost in wars and floods, and now parts were buried under 20 feet of mud.
A couple of years after my parents split, my mother remarried and demanded Lola’s fealty to her new husband, a Croatian immigrant named Ivan, whom she had met through a friend. Ivan had never finished high school. He’d been married four times and was an inveterate gambler who enjoyed being supported by my mother and attended to by Lola.
Ivan brought out a side of Lola I’d never seen. His marriage to my mother was volatile from the start, and money—especially his use of her money—was the main issue. Once, during an argument in which Mom was crying and Ivan was yelling, Lola walked over and stood between them. She turned to Ivan and firmly said his name. He looked at Lola, blinked, and sat down.My sister Inday and I were floored. Ivan was about 250 pounds, and his baritone could shake the walls. Lola put him in his place with a single word. I saw this happen a few other times, but for the most part Lola served Ivan unquestioningly, just as Mom wanted her to. I had a hard time watching Lola vassalize herself to another person, especially someone like Ivan. But what set the stage for my blowup with Mom was something more mundane.
“That’s what happens when you don’t brush properly,” Mom told her.
I said that Lola needed to see a dentist. She was in her 50s and had never been to one. I was attending college an hour away, and I brought it up again and again on my frequent trips home. A year went by, then two. Lola took aspirin every day for the pain, and her teeth looked like a crumbling Stonehenge. One night, after watching her chew bread on the side of her mouth that still had a few good molars, I lost it.
Mom and I argued into the night, each of us sobbing at different points. She said she was tired of working her fingers to the bone supporting everybody, and sick of her children always taking Lola’s side, and why didn’t we just take our goddamn Lola, she’d never wanted her in the first place, and she wished to God she hadn’t given birth to an arrogant, sanctimonious phony like me.
I let her words sink in. Then I came back at her, saying she would know all about being a phony, her whole life was a masquerade, and if she stopped feeling sorry for herself for one minute she’d see that Lola could barely eat because her goddamn teeth were rotting out of her goddamn head, and couldn’t she think of her just this once as a real person instead of a slave kept alive to serve her?
The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. Never. Her voice was so guttural and pained that thinking of it even now, so many years later, feels like a punch to the stomach. It’s a terrible thing to hate your own mother, and that night I did. The look in her eyes made clear that she felt the same way about me.
The fight only fed Mom’s fear that Lola had stolen the kids from her, and she made Lola pay for it. Mom drove her harder. Tormented her by saying, “I hope you’re happy now that your kids hate me.” When we helped Lola with housework, Mom would fume. “You’d better go to sleep now, Lola,” she’d say sarcastically. “You’ve been working too hard. Your kids are worried about you.” Later she’d take Lola into a bedroom for a talk, and Lola would walk out with puffy eyes.
Lola finally begged us to stop trying to help her.
Why do you stay? we asked.
“Who will cook?” she said, which I took to mean, Who would do everything? Who would take care of us? Of Mom? Another time she said, “Where will I go?” This struck me as closer to a real answer. Coming to America had been a mad dash, and before we caught a breath a decade had gone by. We turned around, and a second decade was closing out. Lola’s hair had turned gray. She’d heard that relatives back home who hadn’t received the promised support were wondering what had happened to her. She was ashamed to return.
I got Lola an ATM card linked to my bank account and taught her how to use it. She succeeded once, but the second time she got flustered, and she never tried again. She kept the card because she considered it a gift from me.
I also tried to teach her to drive. She dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand, but I picked her up and carried her to the car and planted her in the driver’s seat, both of us laughing. I spent 20 minutes going over the controls and gauges. Her eyes went from mirthful to terrified. When I turned on the ignition and the dashboard lit up, she was out of the car and in the house before I could say another word. I tried a couple more times.
I thought driving could change her life. She could go places. And if things ever got unbearable with Mom, she could drive away forever.
Four lanes became two, pavement turned to gravel. Tricycle drivers wove between cars and water buffalo pulling loads of bamboo. An occasional dog or goat sprinted across the road in front of our truck, almost grazing the bumper. Doods never eased up. Whatever didn’t make it across would be stew today instead of tomorrow—the rule of the road in the provinces.
I tapped the cheap plastic box and regretted not buying a real urn, made of porcelain or rosewood. What would Lola’s people think? Not that many were left. Only one sibling remained in the area, Gregoria, 98 years old, and I was told her memory was failing. Relatives said that whenever she heard Lola’s name, she’d burst out crying and then quickly forget why.
I gave the eulogy at Mom’s funeral, and everything I said was true. That she was brave and spirited. That she’d drawn some short straws, but had done the best she could. That she was radiant when she was happy. That she adored her children, and gave us a real home—in Salem, Oregon—that through the ’80s and ’90s became the permanent base we’d never had before. That I wished we could thank her one more time. That we all loved her.
I didn’t talk about Lola. Just as I had selectively blocked Lola out of my mind when I was with Mom during her last years. Loving my mother required that kind of mental surgery. It was the only way we could be mother and son—which I wanted, especially after her health started to decline, in the mid‑’90s. Diabetes. Breast cancer. Acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She went from robust to frail seemingly overnight.After the big fight, I mostly avoided going home, and at age 23 I moved to Seattle. When I did visit I saw a change. Mom was still Mom, but not as relentlessly. She got Lola a fine set of dentures and let her have her own bedroom. She cooperated when my siblings and I set out to change Lola’s TNT status. Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration bill of 1986 made millions of illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty. It was a long process, but Lola became a citizen in October 1998, four months after my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. Mom lived another year.
I couldn’t forget so easily. But I did come to see Mom in a different light. Before she died, she gave me her journals, two steamer trunks’ full. Leafing through them as she slept a few feet away, I glimpsed slices of her life that I’d refused to see for years. She’d gone to medical school when not many women did. She’d come to America and fought for respect as both a woman and an immigrant physician. She’d worked for two decades at Fairview Training Center, in Salem, a state institution for the developmentally disabled. The irony: She tended to underdogs most of her professional life. They worshipped her. Female colleagues became close friends. They did silly, girly things together—shoe shopping, throwing dress-up parties at one another’s homes, exchanging gag gifts like penis-shaped soaps and calendars of half-naked men, all while laughing hysterically. Looking through their party pictures reminded me that Mom had a life and an identity apart from the family and Lola. Of course.
The day before Mom died, a Catholic priest came to the house to perform last rites. Lola sat next to my mother’s bed, holding a cup with a straw, poised to raise it to Mom’s mouth. She had become extra attentive to my mother, and extra kind. She could have taken advantage of Mom in her feebleness, even exacted revenge, but she did the opposite.
The priest asked Mom whether there was anything she wanted to forgive or be forgiven for. She scanned the room with heavy-lidded eyes, said nothing. Then, without looking at Lola, she reached over and placed an open hand on her head. She didn’t say a word.
Lola was 75 when she came to stay with me. I was married with two young daughters, living in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From the second story, we could see Puget Sound. We gave Lola a bedroom and license to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She could relax—and be free—for the first time in her life. I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.
I’d forgotten about all the things Lola did that drove me a little crazy. She was always telling me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch a cold (I was in my 40s). She groused incessantly about Dad and Ivan: My father was lazy, Ivan was a leech. I learned to tune her out. Harder to ignore was her fanatical thriftiness. She threw nothing out. And she used to go through the trash to make sure that the rest of us hadn’t thrown out anything useful. She washed and reused paper towels again and again until they disintegrated in her hands. (No one else would go near them.) The kitchen became glutted with grocery bags, yogurt containers, and pickle jars, and parts of our house turned into storage for—there’s no other word for it—garbage.She cooked breakfast even though none of us ate more than a banana or a granola bar in the morning, usually while we were running out the door. She made our beds and did our laundry. She cleaned the house. I found myself saying to her, nicely at first, “Lola, you don’t have to do that.” “Lola, we’ll do it ourselves.” “Lola, that’s the girls’ job.” Okay, she’d say, but keep right on doing it.
It irritated me to catch her eating meals standing in the kitchen, or see her tense up and start cleaning when I walked into the room. One day, after several months, I sat her down.
“I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” I said, and went through a long list of slavelike things she’d been doing. When I realized she was startled, I took a deep breath and cupped her face, that elfin face now looking at me searchingly. I kissed her forehead. “This is your house now,” I said. “You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. And went back to cleaning.
She didn’t know any other way to be. I realized I had to take my own advice and relax. If she wanted to make dinner, let her. Thank her and do the dishes. I had to remind myself constantly: Let her be.
One night I came home to find her sitting on the couch doing a word puzzle, her feet up, the TV on. Next to her, a cup of tea. She glanced at me, smiled sheepishly with those perfect white dentures, and went back to the puzzle. Progress, I thought.
She planted a garden in the backyard—roses and tulips and every kind of orchid—and spent whole afternoons tending it. She took walks around the neighborhood. At about 80, her arthritis got bad and she began walking with a cane. In the kitchen she went from being a fry cook to a kind of artisanal chef who created only when the spirit moved her. She made lavish meals and grinned with pleasure as we devoured them.
Passing the door of Lola’s bedroom, I’d often hear her listening to a cassette of Filipino folk songs. The same tape over and over. I knew she’d been sending almost all her money—my wife and I gave her $200 a week—to relatives back home. One afternoon, I found her sitting on the back deck gazing at a snapshot someone had sent of her village.
“You want to go home, Lola?”
She turned the photograph over and traced her finger across the inscription, then flipped it back and seemed to study a single detail.
“Yes,” she said.
Just after her 83rd birthday, I paid her airfare to go home. I’d follow a month later to bring her back to the U.S.—if she wanted to return. The unspoken purpose of her trip was to see whether the place she had spent so many years longing for could still feel like home.
She found her answer.
“Everything was not the same,” she told me as we walked around Mayantoc. The old farms were gone. Her house was gone. Her parents and most of her siblings were gone. Childhood friends, the ones still alive, were like strangers. It was nice to see them, but … everything was not the same. She’d still like to spend her last years here, she said, but she wasn’t ready yet.
“You’re ready to go back to your garden,” I said.
“Yes. Let’s go home.”
Lola was as devoted to my daughters as she’d been to my siblings and me when we were young. After school, she’d listen to their stories and make them something to eat. And unlike my wife and me (especially me), Lola enjoyed every minute of every school event and performance. She couldn’t get enough of them. She sat up front, kept the programs as mementos.
It was so easy to make Lola happy. We took her on family vacations, but she was as excited to go to the farmer’s market down the hill. She became a wide-eyed kid on a field trip: “Look at those zucchinis!” The first thing she did every morning was open all the blinds in the house, and at each window she’d pause to look outside.And she taught herself to read. It was remarkable. Over the years, she’d somehow learned to sound out letters. She did those puzzles where you find and circle words within a block of letters. Her room had stacks of word-puzzle booklets, thousands of words circled in pencil. Every day she watched the news and listened for words she recognized. She triangulated them with words in the newspaper, and figured out the meanings. She came to read the paper every day, front to back. Dad used to say she was simple. I wondered what she could have been if, instead of working the rice fields at age 8, she had learned to read and write.
I tried to get my sister Ling to ask Lola about her love life, thinking Lola would be more comfortable with her. Ling cackled, which was her way of saying I was on my own. One day, while Lola and I were putting away groceries, I just blurted it out: “Lola, have you ever been romantic with anyone?” She smiled, and then she told me the story of the only time she’d come close. She was about 15, and there was a handsome boy named Pedro from a nearby farm. For several months they harvested rice together side by side. One time, she dropped her bolo—a cutting implement—and he quickly picked it up and handed it back to her. “I liked him,” she said.
Silence.
“And?”
“Then he moved away,” she said.
“And?”
“That’s all.”
“Lola, have you ever had sex?,” I heard myself saying.
“No,” she said.
She wasn’t accustomed to being asked personal questions. “Katulong lang ako,” she’d say. I’m only a servant. She often gave one- or two-word answers, and teasing out even the simplest story was a game of 20 questions that could last days or weeks.
Some of what I learned: She was mad at Mom for being so cruel all those years, but she nevertheless missed her. Sometimes, when Lola was young, she’d felt so lonely that all she could do was cry. I knew there were years when she’d dreamed of being with a man. I saw it in the way she wrapped herself around one large pillow at night. But what she told me in her old age was that living with Mom’s husbands made her think being alone wasn’t so bad. She didn’t miss those two at all. Maybe her life would have been better if she’d stayed in Mayantoc, gotten married, and had a family like her siblings. But maybe it would have been worse. Two younger sisters, Francisca and Zepriana, got sick and died. A brother, Claudio, was killed. What’s the point of wondering about it now? she asked. Bahala na was her guiding principle. Come what may. What came her way was another kind of family. In that family, she had eight children: Mom, my four siblings and me, and now my two daughters. The eight of us, she said, made her life worth living.
None of us was prepared for her to die so suddenly.
Her heart attack started in the kitchen while she was making dinner and I was running an errand. When I returned she was in the middle of it. A couple of hours later at the hospital, before I could grasp what was happening, she was gone—10:56 p.m. All the kids and grandkids noted, but were unsure how to take, that she died on November 7, the same day as Mom. Twelve years apart.
Lola made it to 86. I can still see her on the gurney. I remember looking at the medics standing above this brown woman no bigger than a child and thinking that they had no idea of the life she had lived. She’d had none of the self-serving ambition that drives most of us, and her willingness to give up everything for the people around her won her our love and utter loyalty. She’s become a hallowed figure in my extended family.
Going through her boxes in the attic took me months. I found recipes she had cut out of magazines in the 1970s for when she would someday learn to read. Photo albums with pictures of my mom. Awards my siblings and I had won from grade school on, most of which we had thrown away and she had “saved.” I almost lost it one night when at the bottom of a box I found a stack of yellowed newspaper articles I’d written and long ago forgotten about. She couldn’t read back then, but she’d kept them anyway.
Doods’s truck pulled up to a small concrete house in the middle of a cluster of homes mostly made of bamboo and plank wood. Surrounding the pod of houses: rice fields, green and seemingly endless. Before I even got out of the truck, people started coming outside.
Doods reclined his seat to take a nap. I hung my tote bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and opened the door.“This way,” a soft voice said, and I was led up a short walkway to the concrete house. Following close behind was a line of about 20 people, young and old, but mostly old. Once we were all inside, they sat down on chairs and benches arranged along the walls, leaving the middle of the room empty except for me. I remained standing, waiting to meet my host. It was a small room, and dark. People glanced at me expectantly.
“Where is Lola?” A voice from another room. The next moment, a middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. This was her house. She gave me a hug and said again, “Where is Lola?”
I hadn’t come sooner to deliver Lola’s ashes in part because I wasn’t sure anyone here cared that much about her. I hadn’t expected this kind of grief. Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman walked in from the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her, and then she began wailing. The next thing I knew, the room erupted with sound. The old people—one of them blind, several with no teeth—were all crying and not holding anything back. It lasted about 10 minutes. I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face. The sobs died down, and then it was quiet again.
Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.
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