How to survive as a nouveau poor

How did you write “Riverrun,” your first novel?

People ask me that in my FB and Twitter accounts, as well as email inquiries. Like many first novels, mine is an autobiographical work, which began as a series of short stories and vignettes. I worked on it when I received an International Writing fellowship at the Hawthornden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland. For one month I wrote a draft of my novel, fortified by the killer breakfast of Scottish ham, sausages, buttered toast and two eggs.

The distance and the coldness, for it was April and spring had just begun, was the tonic I needed to write a novel about a faraway and tropical country, about growing up gay in a military air base during a colorful and chaotic dictatorship.

During a writing break I went to the John Smith Booksellers in Edinburgh and read an interview with the great Margaret Atwood. When asked what terrified her the most, she answered, “An empty page, just when I am beginning to write my latest novel.”

And so it was with me as well, as every morning I sat down after breakfast and wrote my novel in longhand. I did not rent the manual typewriter, for they were charging one British pound per day. I wrote 10 pages a  day, and in 30 days I had finished 300 pages.

I further revised the novel when I stayed with my sister in Los Angeles for one summer, and did final revision at the English Department of Rutgers University, where I received a Fulbright Scholarship. Dr. Carol Smith read the manuscript and must have liked it, because she offered me a teaching position at Rutgers the next school year.

This, then , is an excerpt from “Riverrun.”

How does a mother survive the nightmare of poverty, or in her case, lower-middle-class poverty?

1. Every morning, repeat this line after waking: we’re better off than a million others. At least we have fried fish and tomatoes for breakfast. Then rise from bed, wash your face and mouth, proceed to pour vegetable oil into the frying pan. Usually during cool mornings, the lard would have congealed. Get a tablespoon, scoop the lard and let it rest on the bottom of the pan. Let the lard sputter and quiet down. Now the lard is hot and you can begin frying the tuyo (dried fish).

2. After frying the tuyo, flatten a head of garlic, throw into the pan, and then follow this with last night’s cold rice. Sprinkle with salt to taste.

3. Wake up the only child, now a teenager having his share of rebellion. Tell him to wash up and then sit before the breakfast table. Fill him with rice enough to last until snack time, and then give him his allowance of 10 pesos per day.

4. Buy minced meat, not whole meat. Use the minced meat sparingly, just enough so your mung-bean stew would smell of meat. Buy a big bagful of mung bean, and let a bowl of it stand overnight in water. The bean sprouts could be cooked the next morning, mixed with garlic, onion, tomatoes, soy sauce and calamansi juice.

5. Look around in your work place. Check what item was not yet being sold. In the elementary school where I teach, almost everything was already being sold: sweet meats of tocino and longganisa, clothes and decorative items of angels painted pink; insurance plans, funeral service and memorial-park lots, even underwear and bra. I sold Tupperware, like I did in the 1960s. It was like returning to an old love. My sales pitch: these lunchboxes would save you money in terms of cheaper, home-cooked food, in the short run, and hospitalization, in the long run: the canteen sells overpriced slabs of sodium and cholesterol.

These plastic glasses could contain calamansi juice you had squeezed right in your very kitchen. No soda, no false orange flavors, no coffee, no tea: just pure, natural citrus good for bones (ours are beginning to ache from age and this horrible inflation) and teeth (the stronger the better, for the inflation rate would still go up before it went down, and we would need stronger teeth for the chattering to come).

6. On the way home, I would ask for cassava leaves from Mareng Mely who lived around the corner. She thought I would give them to the children in the neighborhood, to play with. They would break the stems into inch-long strips, the tough skin hanging on, and the strips of stem could be turned into instant necklaces, with the star-shaped leaves as pendant. But no, the cassava leaves could be simmered in coconut milk flavored with shrimp paste from Pangasinan. It reminded me of what my parents ate in World War II. First, snakes and the trunks of bananas, and later, cassava leaves and whatever else we could forage from the forest.

7. Bring home the nutribuns, those bread hard as rocks distributed to school children by the Nutrition Foundation under the sponsorship of the First Lady. Bring these rocks home, use a hammer to break them down into bits, soak them in a basin of water. When sufficiently soft, pour half a small can of condensed milk, and then add sugar. Pour the mixture in your old pans, then steam. After 30 minutes, lift the lid (the steam blurring your very face), set the cans on a basin quarter-filled with water, to cool. Then put in the ref (heaven help us this 15-year-old ref would not break down, not now, Lord), and the morning after, serve as breakfast to your dear but now-rebellious teenager, in case he has already gotten tired of having fried fish every morning.

8. Night. Draw a deep, deep sigh (a mother is a lifeline and the rope should not break). My husband is working thousands of miles away, in deepest, hottest Riyadh. The miles spread between us like a desert. My heart thuds heavily in my chest. I did not know how I survived the separation, the distance a stone in my throat.

Then I would repeat numbers one to eight when morning comes through, again.