The kindness of strangers

Thanks to our readers – many of whom are overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) – for the joyful letters they sent me about my column last week called “OFW Tales.” This week’s column is a kind of extension of last week’s. Although I may not be as fragile as Tennessee Williams’ character Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, I have also been the recipient several times of the kindness of strangers, especially when I was living abroad.

I was standing in a queue in front of a mall in New Jersey, in the freezing winter that now grips North America, when I felt hungry and began to eat my hopia. Behind me was a black woman in her forties, with the most gentle eyes, and when she saw me eating, she began to smile. I smiled back and we began to talk. Her name was Samantha and she was a nurse from Hoboken. Later, I offered her an unopened roll of hopia and she laughed: “Oh, I know that hope-pya,” she said, “Melanie, the Filipino nurse in our hospital bring that and they offer me, too. I love it.”

She asked me what am I doing and I said I am a graduate student at Rutgers University with a scholarship from Fulbright. Her lips rouged with red formed the letter O and her eyes widened. Then she asked if I wanted to stay in the US and I said “No,” although my university offered me a part-time job to teach Creative Writing and Freshman English Composition under a one-year scholarship extension. But I don’t know if Fulbright would allow it. She gave me a can of soya milk (“for your hope-yia”) and she prayed over me. This must have been a strange sight in secular America, a black woman with her hands forming a steeple over the head of an Asian man, praying over him in the midst of a bleak, bone-crunching winter. But I felt good afterwards and when my bus arrived, I waved goodbye to Samantha until she became a dot in the distance and was soon gone.

I had just watched an arthouse film in London and was walking out of the cinema when I met the woman in the box-office booth. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Now, when an Asian smiles at you in cold London or crazy New York, trust your instincts he or she must be Filipino. So I asked if she were Pinay and she said yes. “If I knew earlier you were a Filipino, I would not have asked you to pay,” Farrah said to me in Tagalog. I laughed and answered, “If that is the case, then your cinema won’t make money.” It was her turn to laugh, and then she said: “Don’t worry, you’re only the second Filipino I met who watches the art movies in this cinema. We’d rather watch the movies of Stallone.” And you’ve got it, she said Stallone with the proper Italian pronunciation.

It was 5 a.m. and I had just arrived at Gatwick station. A blast of cold met me as I left the airport to take the train bound for Victoria Station. It was my first trip to England and I knew nothing about coins or train cards. I walked to the train station, along with a woman in her early twenties who had boarded our British Airways plane when it stopped over in Hong Kong. The train was already there, warm and lighted, waiting for its passengers. I asked the young woman where I could buy my train card because all I had were paper bills. She smiled, fished for coins in her purse, and gave the exact amount to me. Then she taught me how to put them in the coin slot and pretty soon, we were climbing the train.

Fiona lived in an island in South Korea for a year, as a volunteer in a Catholic organization. She said she had worked with Filipinos there, and she only had glowing words for them. In her musical accent she said, “Your fellow Filipinos are warm-hearted. They always brought food in the office and offered me their a-dow-bo. It is so good!” Later, I gave her a necklace made by the T’boli tribe, with a stone that turned blue and green in the light. She didn’t want to accept it but I said, “It is for you because you are kind.”

And now in Kuala Lumpur, I have just finished writing a textbook in the big and quiet condominium unit of my fellow professor, Hazel, at The Saffron in Sentul, an elegant district whose streets are fringed with the greenest of trees. I stayed for three days and was about to leave today for Kajang, an old town near the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, where I now teach. Mariam, her maid, was delighted to learn my parents were from Bikol. And so when she arrived today to clean Hazel’s flat, she brought me a special gift. Wrapped in plastic sheets were ten balls of chocolate, tablea from cacao trees grown in Bicol, and five pieces of tuyo (dried herring).

She said in Bikolano, “My sister in Pasacao, Camarines Sur, made these chocolate by hand while these tuyo are from Naga City.” My first impulse was to ask how much but I swallowed my words down my gut, for I instantly knew she was giving them to me as a belated Christmas gift. In my broken Bikolano and her fluent one we conversed, and I told her I like my job at the university but at times I just want to go home, because I miss my sister and my partner, and the colorful chaos that is the Philippines. She told me that I am still adjusting to my life abroad and she herself has lived in Malaysia for almost a decade. “Don’t give up,” she said.

I thanked her for her counsel and her gift, because my late grandmother would prepare hot chocolate from tablea, and then she would pour the chocolate on the newly harvested rice and we would eat that with our dried fish fried to a crisp. Outside, another typhoon would be pounding Bicol again – with the wind howling and the rain lashing against our old house – but in that warm circle of home my grandmother and I were eating something like Babette’s feast.

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