Maya Cui
Maya Cui, on her good days, was a vibrant woman with a great penchant for artful cussing and an even greater penchant for younger men. They came to her in droves; her expertise as a surfing instructor wasn’t the only thing that made her popular.
People ask me about it all the time, and I always tell them that I never resented it—my mother’s promiscuity. I think some part of me, even as a young girl, admired her freeness, her “liberation”.
That’s what they call “loose women” over there, in the Philippines: Liberated. It’s a ridiculous euphemism for “slut”; a “liberated woman”. “Liberated” means something “bad”, which should tell you about the state of feminism over there.
You’ll have to excuse the overuse of inverted commas. My early adolescence was full of them.
Though I idolized her, my mother and I never really got along. We argued when we talked. Our temperaments were too different. I was too ambitious for her. I read too much. I talked about the wrong things. I asked too many difficult questions. I fussed too often, about what she thought were the most inane things. We often misunderstood each other. Ingrid, my little sister, born four years after me, was our medium.
Ingrid was more my mother’s type. Ingrid, like our mother, moved around in bursts of boundless energy, ricocheting off the walls from activity to activity. She swam, she surfed, she browned like the boys our mother taught to surf or snorkel. Ingrid was made in the image of our mother.
But on her dark days, usually around monsoon season, my mother and I eased into a kind of complicit silence. I understood her silence, when Ingrid could not. I understood how her energy could invert itself like that; how it turned nervous instead of elated; how she could sit inert in a dimmed room for hours on end, doing nothing but smoking and staring into space. I didn’t have a word for it, and I didn’t know why I understood, but I did. We kept our distance as if we were strangers then, my mother and I, but when she surfaced from the depths of her bedroom (only when she needed to), we exchanged looks and in them said what we didn’t have the words to.
Much later, after Ingrid and I had both taken short courses in psychology, we would have a name for her cycles: seasonal bipolar disorder. The two of us would spend some evenings smoking—a sick habit we both inherited from our mother (though I hear Ingrid finally quit)—and point out the symptoms and signs. The way she would suddenly break into song or a little dance; the way she could never find her things; the way she could go for days, in the summer, with only four or five hours of sleep under her belt.
The binge eating, when what we called the “-ber” months rolled around (brrr). The way she sat there.
Ingrid and I never discussed, although I know that we were both thinking it, the possibility that her death wasn’t an accident at all. Maybe she meant to drown herself in that shallow pool. Maybe she knew that nobody would notice until it was too late, since we were all having too much of a good time doing karaoke. There are a lot of maybes, really, but they’re useless now. I could maybe all I want, and I could guess at the answers, but it wouldn’t make a difference.
The earliest memory I have of my mother, if I’m not imagining it, is of her on the deck of a ship, holding my hand. I see flashes of her blue skirt and of her dark hair in the wind like flags while she tries to keep her balance. It’s raining, and windy, and the waves I think are tossing the boat around like a rubber duck in the bath.
Another memory is of her telling me that the criss-cross of scars on her left wrist were from a window that crashed on her hand when she was trying to shoo a pigeon away. The pigeon, she said, was trying to pluck the seeds out of her garden.
My mother wasn’t a poet, but the pigeon and the garden were perfect (and accidental) metaphors for her illness. She worked hard for her happiness. She tilled the earth. She sowed the seeds. But something with wings came every monsoon season and, sobbing, plucked each one out.
Recollections
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Irene (DELETED 3180)
- Posts: 25
- Joined: 25 Aug 2012, 21:04
Re: Recollections
Niels Silje
It was like that, every year, until the year my mother died. Long story short, she got blind drunk and drowned in a kiddie pool, even though she was an athlete. I was twelve years old. Ingrid was eight. We hadn’t seen our father, Niels Silje, since she was three and I was seven. Neither of us really knew how to react when he showed up at our doorstep in Siargao.
He looked red as a cooked lobster, as foreigners usually do in tropical, sun-filled climates. The skin around his neck was soft and moist, and he kept pulling at the collar of his Lacoste polo shirt as if it were trying to choke him. He had two huge Balikbayan boxes of Duty Free chocolates and candies, and identical Barbie dolls for Ingrid and I. Our maternal grandmother called him, he said. He was a very busy man, he explained. He was a doctor in Copenhagen. He had a new family, but he was willing to take care of us. He was going to make sure we had the money to pave our own ways – have good lives.
That summer, as a consolation for our mother’s death, our father took us to Copenhagen for a summer vacation with his new family. He had a daughter, who was five, and a young wife. All three of them were blonde and fair and tall. Ingrid and I were complete foreigners; we weren’t even part of their home. We didn’t understand their sing-songy language. There were entire chasms of language, culture, and time between all of us, which we awkwardly tried to swim through, to no avail. Still, there was some form of affection in all of that confusion, and we all ended up liking each other towards the end of the summer. Ingrid and I even got Lise to call both of us “ate” (ah-te)—Filipino for “big sister”.
After that, our father became a vague point of reference in our lives. He wired us money once, sometimes twice a month. The exorbitant exchange rates made possible by the consistently terrible economy (first under the Estrada and then the Macapagal-Arroyo administration) allowed Ingrid and I to live in some form of luxury for a while. We moved to Manila when I was sixteen so I could study at the University of the Philippines – Diliman, while Ingrid went to high school at U.P. High. Our grandmother in Siargao died during my third semester at U.P., and our father flew to the Philippines to visit again.
The year I graduated my father, convinced that my Filipino degree in Anthropology would give me nothing in the way of gainful employment, shipped me off to Bath, England, where he got his degree. I studied Nutrition for three and a half years, and in between semesters I visited Copenhagen. Those years, my father’s marriage to Britt was slowly and surely disintegrating; Britt, my father discovered, had been cheating on him with a man from Cartagena, Spain. They kept a correspondence through letters on the internet. My father, the Luddite, had no idea about these emails, until his more technologically savvy friend happened to stumble across some poorly encrypted files in a hidden folder. Nobody bothered to ask why the friend was snooping around in the family PC.
I can’t say I was ever very sympathetic. Even though he kind of made up for abandoning us and I thought I had forgiven him, watching his marriage go on self-destruct seemed like karmic retribution.
In 2009, instead of going the route of medicine and becoming a nutritionist like my father wanted, I went to France and studied cuisine and patisserie for nine months at Le Cordon Bleu. In the meantime, I lived with a bunch of artists in a commune (here is where I met the man who, two years later, would become the catalyst for the most important change in my life). My father disapproved. I liked that he disapproved. I liked that he disapproved of my moving to Manhattan, and then of my marriage to Elias Zabat, and then of my being an author instead of a doctor, of my becoming a nouveau (/nouvelle) nomad. Later, my father’s disapproval would spur me on gleefully to a little city in Ontario, Canada.
It was like that, every year, until the year my mother died. Long story short, she got blind drunk and drowned in a kiddie pool, even though she was an athlete. I was twelve years old. Ingrid was eight. We hadn’t seen our father, Niels Silje, since she was three and I was seven. Neither of us really knew how to react when he showed up at our doorstep in Siargao.
He looked red as a cooked lobster, as foreigners usually do in tropical, sun-filled climates. The skin around his neck was soft and moist, and he kept pulling at the collar of his Lacoste polo shirt as if it were trying to choke him. He had two huge Balikbayan boxes of Duty Free chocolates and candies, and identical Barbie dolls for Ingrid and I. Our maternal grandmother called him, he said. He was a very busy man, he explained. He was a doctor in Copenhagen. He had a new family, but he was willing to take care of us. He was going to make sure we had the money to pave our own ways – have good lives.
That summer, as a consolation for our mother’s death, our father took us to Copenhagen for a summer vacation with his new family. He had a daughter, who was five, and a young wife. All three of them were blonde and fair and tall. Ingrid and I were complete foreigners; we weren’t even part of their home. We didn’t understand their sing-songy language. There were entire chasms of language, culture, and time between all of us, which we awkwardly tried to swim through, to no avail. Still, there was some form of affection in all of that confusion, and we all ended up liking each other towards the end of the summer. Ingrid and I even got Lise to call both of us “ate” (ah-te)—Filipino for “big sister”.
After that, our father became a vague point of reference in our lives. He wired us money once, sometimes twice a month. The exorbitant exchange rates made possible by the consistently terrible economy (first under the Estrada and then the Macapagal-Arroyo administration) allowed Ingrid and I to live in some form of luxury for a while. We moved to Manila when I was sixteen so I could study at the University of the Philippines – Diliman, while Ingrid went to high school at U.P. High. Our grandmother in Siargao died during my third semester at U.P., and our father flew to the Philippines to visit again.
The year I graduated my father, convinced that my Filipino degree in Anthropology would give me nothing in the way of gainful employment, shipped me off to Bath, England, where he got his degree. I studied Nutrition for three and a half years, and in between semesters I visited Copenhagen. Those years, my father’s marriage to Britt was slowly and surely disintegrating; Britt, my father discovered, had been cheating on him with a man from Cartagena, Spain. They kept a correspondence through letters on the internet. My father, the Luddite, had no idea about these emails, until his more technologically savvy friend happened to stumble across some poorly encrypted files in a hidden folder. Nobody bothered to ask why the friend was snooping around in the family PC.
I can’t say I was ever very sympathetic. Even though he kind of made up for abandoning us and I thought I had forgiven him, watching his marriage go on self-destruct seemed like karmic retribution.
In 2009, instead of going the route of medicine and becoming a nutritionist like my father wanted, I went to France and studied cuisine and patisserie for nine months at Le Cordon Bleu. In the meantime, I lived with a bunch of artists in a commune (here is where I met the man who, two years later, would become the catalyst for the most important change in my life). My father disapproved. I liked that he disapproved. I liked that he disapproved of my moving to Manhattan, and then of my marriage to Elias Zabat, and then of my being an author instead of a doctor, of my becoming a nouveau (/nouvelle) nomad. Later, my father’s disapproval would spur me on gleefully to a little city in Ontario, Canada.
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Irene (DELETED 3180)
- Posts: 25
- Joined: 25 Aug 2012, 21:04
Re: Recollections
Elias Zabat
But let me talk about Elias, first. It’s funny. By some twist of fate most of the men who have made a tremendous impact in my life have had names that begin with the letter ‘E’. I met Elias in Corfu in the summer of 2008, after I received my diploma in Food with Nutrition. He was handsome and cultured, and much older than me. I was twenty-three and he was already forty-three. (Here I will beg you, my dear reader, not to saddle your narrator with references to Greek mythology, even if it is tempting.)
I met him while I was visiting with older friends. My Jacques Guignol—my mentor—father of my muse—rest his soul. His wife, Aradia Guignol—who in a way was also my mentor—bless her soul, too. Dominique Guignol, their son, who I didn’t talk much to. Elias, who was a friend of Dominique’s, was our host. The morning we met, I had been out on the beach with Aradia, collecting clams to cook for dinner. Elias had been away that evening, unable to greet us when we arrived because he was “doing something”, he said cryptically to Dominique over the phone.
“You look like Aphrodite coming out of the sea,” he said to me in heavily accented English. He was lying. I looked like a drowned rat. My hair was wet, my eyes were red from sea salt, and my arms and the back of my neck were burned from the high sun. But I laughed, even though I knew he was lying. It was a good lie, and Elias was a good liar.
“I believe that there are very distinct differences in the way the sexes think,” Elias said over lunch: goat cheese, olives, bread drenched in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, red wine, and pomegranates. “Women writers write about different things than men. Women writers write about love, about emotions. They are creatures of emotion, of earthiness. Men write about politics, about governance; men occupy the mind.”
I was twenty three and naïve, and hadn’t yet begun to develop my own mind about things, least of all about sex and gender. Aradia was another story.
“********!” boomed out of her expansive bosom. “Where did you get such quasi-romantic ideas? Emotions are of the mind. You think—you feel—not with your **** or your heart for god’s sake, but with your mind!”
Elias tried to laugh and brush the topic aside to save face, but Aradia went on.
“It’s ridiculous! This mystic hogwash about dualism—separation from the feminine and the masculine. It’s entirely backwards. When you speak of the female mind you might as well speak of the female liver. It is not an organ of sex. Our differences are impositions by culture, by tradition. Which isn’t in itself an evil thing. But when that prevents us from seeing that we are all human beings under it all—that in essence we feel and think and are alike—then that’s just—“
Jacques coughed and patted Aradia’s hand. “What she’s trying to say is—“
”He knows perfectly well what I’m trying to say. Don’t explain for me.”
“I’m going to go for a swim,” Dominique, red-faced, said, as he left the table.
I didn’t know how to react. Part of me wanted to laugh. Aradia’s victory was clear and settled over me like a warm glove. Part of me, the part that was already enamored with Elias and his antiquated ideals, reached out and touched Elias with her forefinger on his wrist. “But let me play the Devil’s Advocate to Aradia, for fun,” I said, unaware that I was setting the tone for our entire relationship. “Maybe there’s something to this whole sex thing.” My finger lingered on his wrist bone. “All that testosterone in the male mind, after all, must cloud a man’s better judgment.”
My affair with Elias lasted, on and off, for two years. He was married. He and his wife separated, then got back together, then separated, then got back together. All the while, Elias and I met intermittently throughout the years, in crowded, glamorous cities we could get lost in, and get lost together. I had other lovers and so did he, but when we were together we were Together. Our moods complemented each other. Our arguments were explosive and ended in hours of lovemaking. In the end, he divorced Sofia in 2010, a few months after I moved to New York City after living in Paris for a year. Not many weeks later, he asked me to marry him and I accepted.
Elias bought a space in Manhattan and set up a restaurant. For a while, we led an idyllic life. I worked in the kitchen as the head chef, he ran the books. We lived in a spacious, well-lit apartment covered from wall to wall with books. We had a cat he named Nabokov. We were ridiculously, blissfully in love.
And then we weren’t. Then we were fighting all the time, throwing dishes at each other. We became violent, and then we became cold. Living together—and living together honestly—wasn’t working out for us. We started out as illicit lovers. The excitement kept us together. And besides, I was young. I had changed too much in two years. I wasn’t the woman he met in Corfu, he said, that was his problem. My problem, I told him, was that he was the same man.
So, we divorced. Quick, quiet. To this day we remain friends and we check in on each other now and again, but only every few months or so. The last I heard of Elias, he was back with Sofia, but having an affair with a young man from Brunei.
Some people just never change.
But let me talk about Elias, first. It’s funny. By some twist of fate most of the men who have made a tremendous impact in my life have had names that begin with the letter ‘E’. I met Elias in Corfu in the summer of 2008, after I received my diploma in Food with Nutrition. He was handsome and cultured, and much older than me. I was twenty-three and he was already forty-three. (Here I will beg you, my dear reader, not to saddle your narrator with references to Greek mythology, even if it is tempting.)
I met him while I was visiting with older friends. My Jacques Guignol—my mentor—father of my muse—rest his soul. His wife, Aradia Guignol—who in a way was also my mentor—bless her soul, too. Dominique Guignol, their son, who I didn’t talk much to. Elias, who was a friend of Dominique’s, was our host. The morning we met, I had been out on the beach with Aradia, collecting clams to cook for dinner. Elias had been away that evening, unable to greet us when we arrived because he was “doing something”, he said cryptically to Dominique over the phone.
“You look like Aphrodite coming out of the sea,” he said to me in heavily accented English. He was lying. I looked like a drowned rat. My hair was wet, my eyes were red from sea salt, and my arms and the back of my neck were burned from the high sun. But I laughed, even though I knew he was lying. It was a good lie, and Elias was a good liar.
“I believe that there are very distinct differences in the way the sexes think,” Elias said over lunch: goat cheese, olives, bread drenched in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, red wine, and pomegranates. “Women writers write about different things than men. Women writers write about love, about emotions. They are creatures of emotion, of earthiness. Men write about politics, about governance; men occupy the mind.”
I was twenty three and naïve, and hadn’t yet begun to develop my own mind about things, least of all about sex and gender. Aradia was another story.
“********!” boomed out of her expansive bosom. “Where did you get such quasi-romantic ideas? Emotions are of the mind. You think—you feel—not with your **** or your heart for god’s sake, but with your mind!”
Elias tried to laugh and brush the topic aside to save face, but Aradia went on.
“It’s ridiculous! This mystic hogwash about dualism—separation from the feminine and the masculine. It’s entirely backwards. When you speak of the female mind you might as well speak of the female liver. It is not an organ of sex. Our differences are impositions by culture, by tradition. Which isn’t in itself an evil thing. But when that prevents us from seeing that we are all human beings under it all—that in essence we feel and think and are alike—then that’s just—“
Jacques coughed and patted Aradia’s hand. “What she’s trying to say is—“
”He knows perfectly well what I’m trying to say. Don’t explain for me.”
“I’m going to go for a swim,” Dominique, red-faced, said, as he left the table.
I didn’t know how to react. Part of me wanted to laugh. Aradia’s victory was clear and settled over me like a warm glove. Part of me, the part that was already enamored with Elias and his antiquated ideals, reached out and touched Elias with her forefinger on his wrist. “But let me play the Devil’s Advocate to Aradia, for fun,” I said, unaware that I was setting the tone for our entire relationship. “Maybe there’s something to this whole sex thing.” My finger lingered on his wrist bone. “All that testosterone in the male mind, after all, must cloud a man’s better judgment.”
My affair with Elias lasted, on and off, for two years. He was married. He and his wife separated, then got back together, then separated, then got back together. All the while, Elias and I met intermittently throughout the years, in crowded, glamorous cities we could get lost in, and get lost together. I had other lovers and so did he, but when we were together we were Together. Our moods complemented each other. Our arguments were explosive and ended in hours of lovemaking. In the end, he divorced Sofia in 2010, a few months after I moved to New York City after living in Paris for a year. Not many weeks later, he asked me to marry him and I accepted.
Elias bought a space in Manhattan and set up a restaurant. For a while, we led an idyllic life. I worked in the kitchen as the head chef, he ran the books. We lived in a spacious, well-lit apartment covered from wall to wall with books. We had a cat he named Nabokov. We were ridiculously, blissfully in love.
And then we weren’t. Then we were fighting all the time, throwing dishes at each other. We became violent, and then we became cold. Living together—and living together honestly—wasn’t working out for us. We started out as illicit lovers. The excitement kept us together. And besides, I was young. I had changed too much in two years. I wasn’t the woman he met in Corfu, he said, that was his problem. My problem, I told him, was that he was the same man.
So, we divorced. Quick, quiet. To this day we remain friends and we check in on each other now and again, but only every few months or so. The last I heard of Elias, he was back with Sofia, but having an affair with a young man from Brunei.
Some people just never change.