Prologue—How It All Began
I ran after my brothers and their friends—empty cans in their hands—as they rushed to a pond to catch tadpoles. They filled their cans with water from the pond and dropped the tadpoles into the cans. What they did with those tadpoles, I would never know. Later in the afternoon, they flew kites when the wind was good. Or they rode astride a water buffalo that took them across an open field behind the few houses in the neighborhood.
They refused to take me on those little adventures—I was a girl, wore dresses, and could never keep up with them. That was what they said as they ran faster so I couldn’t catch up. I was unhappy at being excluded. Who wouldn’t be? But I had, by then, started to learn to live with being alone.
I spent my first six years with adults—my Lola (grandmother) and her two young unmarried daughters—in a town eight hours by slow train from the big city where my parents lived. Having no one my age to play with, I conjured up an imaginary playmate who stayed with me until we no longer needed one another. I had a big brother who kept my mother’s hands full as she took care of him and worked to secure a permanent position as a teacher.
In my Lola’s little town, no family owned a television to entertain them. But on occasional nights, sweet and sentimental tunes accompanied by a guitar pierced the dark silence just below the closed window in my aunts’ room. The serenaders were young swains courting one or the other of my pretty aunts who, if they liked these suitors or how they sang, invited them into the living room. There, singing went on for another hour or two. My youngest aunt who had a nice voice and knew some English songs was always invited to sing.
Like the adults, I stayed up for those soirees, sitting with Lola on the steps of the stairway to the bedrooms. Out of sight of the serenaders and my aunts. Lost, as much as the adults were, in the beguiling strains of what I learned later were love songs. I had heard many of those songs in previous serenades, and heard them sung again in later ones.
My parents took me back when I was ready to go to elementary school, although I continued to spend summer vacations with Lola. I met my brothers—three of them by then—for the first time. To ease the transition to a new, and for me at the time, a strange, maybe even threatening environment, I learned to draw, initially by copying images of objects in picture books. Things like fruits, flowers, cups and glasses. Figures didn’t lag far behind. And soon, they claimed most of my drawing time.
Maybe it was from those preteen years of solitary innocence that I began to see myself as a spectator of life. I became more convinced of it as I spent time alone in my room, hearing the boisterous playing and feuding from the adjacent room shared by my brothers.
Across the years, I watched them play and fight, and the only time I remember going with them—when they ignored me—was when they flew kites, those light as the wind inanimate birds my brothers fashioned from colored paper and bamboo sticks. I filled my solitude by drawing and playing the serenades I remembered in my head.
In those early years, I lived within walking distance of the Pacific Ocean. You stare at that extensive expanse of blue long enough, and you can’t help wondering what’s beyond that seemingly infinite space.
I wasn’t alone in my curiosity about that imagined faraway world. Left to entertain myself, it was probably inevitable that I eavesdropped as my mother revealed her dreams to her relatives and friends. My mother dreamt of sailing across oceans to visit places that promised so much more than the island we lived in. Maybe her dreams were imprinted from the accumulated legacy of more than 400 years of domination by Spanish and American conquerors. Dreams that needed translation into some version of reality.
For her, that reality meant living in the United States, visiting Spain, and later, seeing as much as she could of the rest of the world. She talked about her dreams often enough that they became my dreams as well. Dreams that, for me, morphed into a near-obsession when I read English-language fiction[1] that kindled a desire to see its varied settings.
My mother realized her dreams in her forties, coming to the United States, first as a student pursuing a master’s degree in education, and shortly thereafter, as an immigrant when my father retired from the military as an officer with a pension. Applying for immigration usually takes years, but it’s expedited in certain cases, e.g., having relatives who are American citizens, or being a WWII veteran, like Dad.
That monthly pension was to be put in a kitty for travel. Or for necessities, if money got tight. But they both found jobs in California, maybe thanks to their facility with English and their former professions in the native land (Mom was a teacher and Dad, an army lawyer). So, when the time felt right for them, they toured Europe and Asia.
I didn’t wait until I was forty to discover what lay beyond Pacific shores. Shortly after getting an undergraduate degree at twenty-one, I was accepted to two American graduate schools. One, in Michigan, came with an offer of a scholarship. But it had a price—returning to teach at a university in the Philippines for about ten years. The second university, in Hawaii, offered a graduate assistantship, no strings attached.
For me, the choice was clear. Hawaii would be less of a shock than Michigan, and better than that, I could do whatever I wanted after grad school.
Grad school, particularly for a foreign student, required dogged concentration that curtailed social life. But it also needed relief. For me, that relief came from doing art. It wasn’t so much the finished drawings as it was the process of making them that helped sustain me through the stress of graduate school.
After a couple of years in Hawaii, I completed my graduate program in Illinois, interspersed with hours of doing pencil sketches in between writing term papers, a master’s thesis, and a dissertation.
Later, during breaks from regular jobs, I completed a year’s worth of art classes—some theory and history, and a little more on art technique and creation. My media expanded from pencil to oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, and lately, digital art apps.
Though I sold a painting once, I’ve never made money from art. I love looking at art, and time passes quickly and pleasurably whenever I draw or paint. But maybe, I was not driven enough and events didn’t align to steer me towards a life devoted to profitable art production.
Those years of drawing since I discovered the fun of making marks on a piece of paper convinced me that everyone has what the authors of Your Brain on Art call an Aesthetic Mindset. It’s up to you to nurture it and let it serve you in any way it can. Actually, I’d go further and propose that since Art is a form of language, it’s also built into your genes.
After my first full-time job after graduate school, I went with a friend on a cheap packaged tour to Europe during which I wrote my first travel journal. And it was during that three-week tour that I learned to be “in the moment”—to cast my full attention on what I was looking at.
I think it was inevitable. Gazing at masterpieces of art (a Praxiteles statue, for instance; or centuries-old architecture) as well as ruins of old civilizations (Pompeii) fired my imagination and evoked awe and wonder for what was before me. They made me reflect on what they meant to me (and all of us) and my (our) relationship to the world and history around us. For example, while touring Pompeii: I have always thought that across centuries, civilization has progressed. Now, I’m no longer so sure. And: Two thousand years from now, what would be left to show of our own modern civilization?
By now, I’ve lived in and visited many places, much of it with Rich (my husband): Asia and Europe and a bit of North Africa. In subsequent European travels, we’ve often ended up in Paris. Twice, we stayed six months, the longest the Schengen agreement allows visitors to stay in countries within the Schengen area (unless you’ve obtained a specific visa like a student visa, for instance). One of those six-month sojourns was spent entirely in Paris where I became something of an observer-wanderer. A flâneuse, as the French would say.
I kept reading. Initially, books, journal articles, and research papers necessary for my education and my job. When I needed a little respite from life, I read fiction—world literature that ranged from Austen to Dostoevsky (who ignited my first existentialist crisis in my late teens). I found words are great containers—for adventures, memories, and stories; even for art.
***
You can’t follow all your dreams. But you can take a detour.
At the beginning of high school, I knew I wanted to keep writing. Maybe, I thought it would give me the best chance to go places, see what I wanted to see, and write about it. So, when I was in my senior year, I asked my parents (who held a tight rein on the moolah) if I could major in journalism.
But they said, “No way! The only real careers that would earn more than enough to live on are in science. Why not chemistry?” (They thought I liked chemistry because my teachers entered me in a citywide secondary-school chemistry competition. But I placed second and missed out on a four-year scholarship.)
I complied for a year or two. But chemistry was probably not a good choice. Waiting for chemicals to burn or react with solvents so I could identify them tested my patience, and I was often unsuccessful at this task. I decided—deviously—to fail physics on purpose to convince my parents the physical sciences weren’t a good fit for me. (I felt too mortified to fail a chemistry class.) This strategy didn’t work.
I changed tactics. How about psychology? It’s science, I insisted, showing them that the curriculum for a psychology degree at the university I was attending required science and math courses (physiology, biochemistry, a higher math class) that I had already taken as a chemistry major. A lot of the credits I’d earned so far would still count. They agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure my “Fail” in physics did influence them.
Psychology wasn’t my first choice, but one must compromise. It turned out to be intriguing, and encouraged by my university adviser, I applied to graduate schools in the US (presumably, to get a job in the field of psychology, one must go to graduate school). And I met Rich.
Right after grad school, I was hired to research and evaluate mental health programs. My job required a lot of writing. Academic writing. That is, I would hair-split, use big words, and sound obscure. Not a good thing if you want to sound like a normal person.
Then, I discovered haiku in the pages of a used book I bought for a dollar while browsing in a local bookstore. So, I wrote a few that I showed to my co-workers (like me, mired in hair-splitting and consumed by big words). I was surprised at their enthusiasm. Everyone immediately tried their hand at haikuing, and for weeks, we circulated our creations—which ranged from serious to funny—among ourselves. It was done in fun. We all needed a break from big words.
[1] English was the language of instruction starting elementary school when I was a child in the Philippines.
