Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo

      In Iloilo, the family lived on Lopez Jaena Street. In front (from left) are Norman, Emilie, Jan, Nathan and Caren. Behind are Lillian, Mom and Ryan (1956).

      (Susan)

      IN 1960, THE family moved to 538 Second Street in San Beda Subdivision, a short walk to the two schools my other siblings attended—San Beda College for the boys and Holy Ghost College for the girls. Like the Calvert School in Iloilo, our parents made sure these were schools known for discipline and academic excellence. And like the Calvert School, the tuition was beyond the family’s means.

      538 Second Street was a two-story wooden house reminiscent of the airy houses built by the Americans during their colonization of the islands. The second floor was rented out to the Lee family, who were Chinese-Filipino; the first floor was our home. It had three bedrooms, each blessed with large windows with cast-iron grillwork. Its bathroom was dark and musty; a single bulb would cast enough light to occasionally expose a spider as huge as a man’s hand. The paint peeled, the floors were uneven, and the house itself seemed old and weary. Though it was unappealing, the house had one outstanding feature; it was surrounded by a yard, large by Manila’s standards. Trees stood sturdily every few meters, often laden with fruit—guava, cacao, mango and star apple.

      The old house acquired the rural qualities of its new occupants. With the family came a host of pets befitting a farmhouse—ducks, dogs, a turkey, turtles, cats, parakeets, and the occasional hens and roosters. Clotheslines, thick wires suspended from erect metal T-posts, were installed along the width of the house. Close to the stone walls that surrounded the old house, we tended a vegetable patch with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and the crawling, purple-veined alugbati, a popular vegetable on Panay Island. Behind the house, an outdoor kitchen evolved consisting of huge, thick aluminum pots propped up by construction bricks and firewood on the side, ready for camp-style cooking. Here, my mother and the laundry woman she hired would squat for hours either fanning the flames or doing the laundry, their skirts tucked between shin and thigh.

      It was in this house where my mother expertly managed the household. Although my father’s salary was considered a sizable income, it was barely adequate to support a family of 12. It was my mother’s role to bear and rear children, and to provide my father her unconditional support. At the end of each work period, my father surrendered to her his brown pay envelope with his entire salary in it, as it was then the norm among married couples. As spouses and as parents, they had fixed functions—he was the breadwinner, she was everything else.

      (Nathan)

      OVER THE YEARS, prices of goods and tuition rose steeply, and Dad and Mom could hardly make ends meet. Mom often wracked her brains thinking of ways and means to save or earn a little money, and to put food on the dinner table. Somehow we never missed a meal. Well, not exactly. I usually brought tuna or cheese pimiento sandwiches to school but the bread was so inferior and light that I often felt hungry again after an hour or two.

      When the family was really hard up, we were down to eating rice and eggs, day in and day out. The rice was bought at the market, but the eggs were a different story. Our Aunt Toyang, my father’s sister, had a modest poultry farm and she sold eggs to Mom at a very low price. There was very little money for buying eggs, but Mom was too proud to ask if she could have them for free. Instead, she asked to buy the abnormal eggs and the rejects—eggs with cracked shells, eggs without shells, extra-large eggs, extra-small eggs, eggs with reddish spots. Aunt Toyang just gave them to her, insisting that these were of no commercial value anyway. Sometimes an old White Leghorn chicken came with the eggs.