We were silent again for a while.
As a kid growing up in the Philippines I looked up to my Uncle Romeo
He said he wished he could do something, anything, for his country. How difficult could it be to make sure there was rice on every table?
I stared out the window at the barren trees.
The Teacher:
Non-Fiction by Robert Aquino Dollesin
It is a Sunday in late February, freezing cold with snow on the ground when my father pulls the big tan Impala wagon alongside the sidewalk in front of my Uncle Reggie's Lake Tahoe apartment. This morning we got out of bed early to make the two hour trip from Sacramento. My parents not only wanted to drop in on Uncle Reggie to make sure he was okay, but they also planned on spending some time in the casinos. My younger brothers and sisters stayed home with my grandmother. The only reason I am allowed to tag along is because I am fifteen. Old enough to fend for myself in case Uncle Reggie has to go somewhere.
We get out of the wagon. Unlike Sacramento, the Lake Tahoe air is crisp and thin, the sharp pleasant smell of pine everywhere. Carrying paper bags stuffed full of home-cooked meals in our arms, my parents and I trudge across the snow-covered yard. Last night my mother spent hours in the kitchen, cooking Filipino foods for my uncle. Even behind my closed bedroom door, I could smell the odors that filled the house. Wonderful, recognizable smells that made my stomach grumble. Knowing there'd be a feast of cooked meals sitting on the counter in amber-colored serving dishes, I almost climbed out of bed.
But this food is for Uncle Reggie. For nearly three years he's lived by himself. When the weather is decent, my mother forces my father to drive up. She worries that Uncle Reggie doesn't eat right. Next month though, all that will all change. His wife, Nadia, will board a plane in Manila on the seventeenth of March. After a long flight over the Pacific, she'll be met by us in San Francisco. It's been nearly three years since Uncle Reggie made that same trip. Finally, he'll no longer be alone. He and my Auntie Nadia – whom I've never met – will begin their new life together in the states.
My mother raps on the front door of the apartment. A few minutes later the door swings inward and Uncle Reggie's standing there in his bathrobe. He smiles broadly, leans forward, and plants a big kiss on my mother's pink cheek. She hands him the paper bags she's carrying, and when he steps aside we all hustle in out of the cold.
While we drop our paper bags filled with ready-for-reheating adoboe and sinigang onto the kitchen counters, my mother glances around the apartment. She frowns. “This place needs a woman's touch,” she says. My uncle peels back the foil from the top of one of the dishes on the counter. His eyes grow big and he says, “Ate –“ (which means big sister) “– you made rice cake.” He pinches off two fingers of the sticky dessert and crams it into his mouth.
My mother crosses the living room, swipes a finger over the surface of the television. “Do you ever dust in here?”
As I hand Uncle Reggie the cooked-meals from the paper bags, he arranges them on the wire shelves inside his small refrigerator. He shifts around the few things that currently occupy the shelves: a single loaf of bread, two cans of some potted meat spread with plastic tight over the lidless tops, the half-emptied jar of Dill pickles, and the half-gallon jug of milk with last week's expiration date stamped in blue ink above its handle. The shelves inside the small refrigerator quickly fill with the things we brought.
My father, meanwhile, clicks on the small black-and-white television sitting on a wheeled cart pushed against one of the living room walls. He fiddles with the antenna and turns the channel knob until a static-filled football game appears on the screen. As my mother points out thick cobwebs in the windowsill and the corners of the living room walls, he keeps quiet. Finally, my mother sighs the way she does at home when something we kids did or didn't do frustrates her. My father hushes her with a glare and the two of them sit down on the sofa.
My mother says out loud, “I hate to see what the bathroom looks like.”
Hidden by the refrigerator door, Uncle Reggie silently mocks her words and gives me a wink. He closes the refrigerator and says, “I planned on cleaning the bathroom this afternoon.”
“Sure you did,” my mother says. A second later she adds, “Anyway, next month Nadia will be here so you can finally start living like a normal person.”
Uncle Reggie doesn't say anything. He looks away, stares at the door.
His silence carries. “What's wrong?” my mother asks, glancing over her shoulder. Her tone is softer, more concerned.
Uncle Reggie shrugs. “I hope she doesn't hate that she won't be doing the same thing here that she does in the Philippines.”
“She might not be able to become a nurse right away,” my mother says. “But in time, she'll get a degree that the hospitals here will accept.”
My Uncle Reggie nods. Then, just noticing he hadn't yet changed out of his bathrobe, he blushes. “Aye,” he says, “I'm still wearing this?” He heads out of the kitchen and toward his bedroom.
The bedroom door closes. My father, very sternly says to my mother, “Why can't you leave him alone? Quit bugging him about his place.”
“Oh, yeah,” my mother replies. “I keep forgetting. Men are men. Just like when I got back home after spending a month in the Philippines. Made me wish I'd stayed away forever.”
When he comes back into the living room, Uncle Reggie's got on a pair of jeans and a white button-up shirt with green stripes. He plops down in orange wing-chair by the window, directly across from the sofa my parents and I are sitting in. For a while he and my mother exchange news about their brothers and sisters – my aunts and uncles – who are still in the Philippines. Over the next few years these uncles and aunts will each leave the country that bore them and and emigrate across the Pacific to America. One by one they'll step off the big airplane in San Francisco and be driven up by my mother and grandmother to Lake Tahoe, where they'll begin their new lives. This is an exciting period for my mother. Her American citizen had allowed my grandmother to come with us when we left the Philippines five years earlier. And now, the rest of the family will have a chance at stability and prosperity.
Although my father is also from the Philippines, he was born an American citizen. His father, my late grandfather, was a Philippine Scout during World War II. Except for his father, who died several years back in Okinawa, my father has only one surviving family member. A brother now living in San Francisco. The rest of his family – his mother, one older brother, and five older sisters – were all shot by the Japanese during the war. Each time one of my mother's family members arrives on American soil, my father celebrates the occasion. More than anyone I have ever known in my life, my father places an importance on family unmatched by anything else in this world.
Two hours later, after having finished off half the rice cake and a quarter of a casaba cake while reflecting with my mother on the past and optimistically projecting the many possible futures of his own life, my uncle stands up and insists my mother and father get going, hit the casinos, have some fun.
While my folks are out, Uncle Reggie and I pass the time looking through his old photo album. He flips through the album, filling me in on the photographs. I stare a long time at one picture in particular, a black-and-white of my uncle when he was a boy. In the photograph, he stands in the middle of a dusty road, holding my mother's hand. My mother is just twelve then. Still a young girl. It's hard for me to believe that just three years from when this photograph was taken, at the same age I am now, my mother would be married, pregnant with me growing inside her.
Uncle Reggie continues to turn the pages of the album. He points to and describes various images. We come across a picture where he is in front of a blackboard, a wooden pointer in his hand. He has on a white shirt and black tie. Uniformed students fill the classroom behind him. Half the students have their hands raised to ask questions. In the picture, my uncle -- the teacher -- beams with a kind of pride I’ve never noticed on his face since he’s been here in America.
When I was still a young boy living in the Philippines, during a period in my life when I neither cared nor understood the history of the country, Uncle Reggie used to pull me aside during gatherings at my grandmother’s house. He'd tell me stories of the country's history, often speaking of his own personal hero, Jose Rizal, the champion of the people. My uncle would sit me down and force me to listen to his rhetoric regarding the country’s never-ending struggle for independence. He’d spend hours lamenting the country’s occupation by the Spanish, the Japanese, and the Americans. How these periods in the country's history had left the archipelago forever dependent on outsiders.
Eventually, though, during those boyhood lectures, I’d sneak away from Uncle Reggie, sneak off to play with my cousins., who'd have a hell of a fun time teaing me for having been tapped by Uncle Reggie, caught in his web, forced, my many cousins always said, to listen to Uncle Reggie's bullshit.
My mother told me Uncle Reggie went to university in Manila, but I never knew until today, after seeing the photograph of him in the classroom, that he actually finished college. For a short while, he even taught in one of the city high schools. For some reason, I see this revelation as fitting. He always was enthusiastic about teaching.
Uncle Reggie shows me photographs of his wife, Mae. She is beautiful; a petite, scholarly-looking woman. Most of the photographs of Mae are in hospital corridors..
I ask Uncle Reggie, “Does she like being a nurse, Uncle?”
He grins, proudly, and replies, “She likes helping people less fortunate than herself.” He pauses. “I’m so proud of her,” he says.
When we finish looking through the photo album, Uncle Reggie puts it away. He glances at the small alarm clock on the end table next to the sofa. “Hungry?” he asks.
“Starving,” I say.
We get up and go into the kitchen. Uncle Reggie pulls out the adoboe my mother had cooked last night. He transfers some from the dish onto plates and covers the plates with napkins before placing them into the microwave. While the microwave heats the meal, I pull the jug of milk out of the refrigerator, grab a glass from the cupboard and fill it with milk. I sip it and immediately spit the white liquid out into the sink.
“What's wrong?” Uncle Reggie asks.
“It's sour,” I say. “The milk is bad.”
That's when Uncle Reggie says, “Why don't we walk over to the 7-11 on the corner, grab a fresh jug.” He turns off the microwave and we throw our coats on.
Outdoors, it is getting dark. The wind has picked up and as we trudge over the hard-packed snow, the wind blows through my visible breath and strikes my face. Uncle Reggie says he misses the warm rains of the Philippines. He wants to know if I remember how it rained so often back there. “I do remember,” I say. “I hated it almost as much as I hate the snow.”
“Almost?” he says, smiling.
Halfway to the 7-11, I lose my footing on the icy sidewalk and fall onto my butt. Uncle Reggie laughs, offers his hand. I take it and pull hard. He comes down on top of me, I buck him off. Still laughing, we both slip and slide as we try to get up. Finally, bracing ourselves against the frozen steel of a parked car, we brush the snow off our clothes.
We start again toward the 7-11. “This time next month,” Uncle Reggie says. “She'll be here. I hope the snow melts by then.” Finally, we cross the parking lot and I follow my uncle through the store entrance. Along with a blast of warm air, the smell of brewing coffee hits me. As I stomp the snow off my shoes on the doormat, I'm glad to be out of the freezing cold. I tell Uncle Reggie I'm going to pour myself a cup of hot coffee. He says he wants one too.
As I make my way to the coffee, an older gentleman wearing a green smock emerges from a doorway leading to a back room. He wipes his hands on his smock and says out loud in a clipped accent that sounds to me as if he's mocking my uncle, “Re-gi-nald!. You brown fuck, what the fuck you do-ing in my store? Shouldn't you be pushing your big broom or scrubbing some stinky ca-si-no toilet?”
Shocked from hearing this, I whirl at the coffee stand and glare at the man, who's now behind the counter, his palms flat on its surface, grinning wide. I want to tell him my uncle's a teacher, his wife a nurse.
But my uncle, now standing in front of the whirring coolers with a jug of milk in his hand, says, “Dutch. You white piece of garbage. Did you use the North shitter on the lower floor at Harrah's last night? I had to plunge my arms into the bowl all the way to my elbows to pull out a turd so big it could only have come out of you.” Uncle Reggie holds up the milk jug. “Bigger than this fucking milk even.”
Dutch laughs. “Milk?” he says. “Can't you wait till your wife gets here?”
Uncle Reggie laughs, too. He comes up to the counter with the milk in his hand. He says, seriously now, “Dutch. Think you can still get her a job as a housekeeper at Harrah's when she gets here?”
Dutch straightens behind the counter. He pops my uncle's shoulder with the flat of his palm. “Got you covered, buddy. Don't worry about it.”
My uncle nods. “Thanks, Dutch. I'll owe you big time.”
“You keep working on your credentials,” Dutch says. “Make a good life for you and the Missus.”
“I will.”
I bring the two cups of coffee up to the counter. Uncle Reggie says, “This is my nephew.”
Dutch nods. “Good man, your uncle,” he says. “Damn good man.”
We stay a while, finish the coffee. When we leave the 7-11 it's already dark out. I don't say much during the walk back, just hold the jug of milk and tread cautiously across the icy ground.
Just as we reach the front door of my uncle’s apartment, my parent’s car pulls up. The horn honks, twice, then my folks get out of the vehicle. We all go into the apartment together.
Inside, at the kitchen counter, my mother re-heats some of her cooking.. My uncle and father sit across from one another at the dinette table. I listen as they talk in reflective tones about the Philippines, about how someday they both conditions improve, makomg it feasible to go back.
From the kitchen counter, my mother glances up and tells them to quit brooding on the past. She shakes her head and says, “That country‘s in shambles. People kill each other for a kilo of rice. No. We’re never going back there if I have any say about it. Our life‘s here now.”
My uncle leans across the table, he whispers to my father. “Good thing she won't have any say about it, huh?”
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