Selected Works
The Salt Price
Grand Prize winner in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (2013)
When something evaporates, disintegrates, in the waving heat of the sun, salt is what is left behind—white sheets spread on crumpled beds, crystals crusting over burnt skin. Perhaps it is to salt we shall return, not dust. There, nestled deep in the world’s salt deposits, scientists have uncovered the fossils of mastodons and men.
“We came home to ashes,” Isabelita Vinuya told photographer Hannah Reyes Morales. One wouldn’t know it, for all the green.
…
The Tagalog language refracts the word pagdadala, the act of burden bearing, in different ways; a variation in the way it is said is a variation in nuance. The word struck Filipino psychologist Edwin T. Decenteceo as “a model for viewing the life experiences of the Filipino.” Framed by his Pagdadala model, “the Filipino is then revealed as committed to his or her tasks, responsibilities and relationships, taking these to their destinations, crawling on hands and knees if needed.”
Salvation, Salvaged
Literary criticism in CNN Philippines
It’s the end of May. The air is thick and still, but clouds are threatening a downpour. Habagat was unseasonably early — it usually arrives in June. We have so much rain in this country that we give them different names, know their characteristics, distinct like personalities.
Filipinos don’t think about the weather much. That is, until it starts to rain. Then it becomes all we can think about, all we can hear, as it pours down relentless on clay tiles, corrugated metal, nipa grass. If our homes are safe, we’ll think of those whose homes aren’t; wonder whether any coastal villages or informal settlements are flooding, or being swept away. We’ll worry that our lights will go out; that our water will stop running. What the death count will be.
So far, there have only been scattered showers. Ambon-ambon lang.
Dark Mountain
Part I: A Ship Appears Part II: A Fathomless Frontier
A two-part essay on UNESCO Heritage Site, Tubbataha Reef, in Grid Magazine
A hundred miles off the coast of Palawan, in the middle of the Sulu Sea, marine park ranger Segundo Conales sits in a kubo, drinking 3-in-1 coffee.
“In October, we caught a big fishing vessel. It had travelled here from Iloilo,” he tells me in Ilonggo, a language as soothing as his smile, which reaches up to his eyes and makes his whole face glow. For the past 23 years Seg has kept watch over a sprawling underwater world known as Tubbataha. A life spent in the blues of sea and sky has left him with a disposition as golden and smooth as his skin.
Home to 360 or nearly half of the coral species in the world, 600 species of fish, 23 sharks and rays, 13 dolphins and whales, 100 kinds of birds, and last but not least hawksbill and green sea turtles, Tubbataha is the Philippines’ only true coral atoll, which is a coral reef that forms around the sunken mouth of an extinct volcano. It’s also one of the oldest and biggest marine sanctuary in the Philippines.
Dear Hija (an Open Letter to the Filipino You Might Be)
Personal essay in CNN Philippines
The day after President Duterte signed the Anti-Terrorism Act into law, you read about what happened to the 15-year-old girl from San Juan, Ilocos Sur, who filed a case against two policemen from her hometown whom she claimed raped her. Accompanied by her father and male cousin, Fabel Pineda went to the police station in Cabugao, a nearby town, to tell her story. She told them that the two cops had arrested her and her girl cousin for being out past the government curfew imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then the cops raped them. Feeling unsafe, she asked the Cabugao police to accompany her going home. The request was denied. Riding on the back of her dad’s motorcycle, she was shot five times by gunmen riding tandem. Her dad and cousin were left unharmed.
Sometimes We Forget
Lyric essay in Hippocampus Magazine
He kneads my belly like he does every night. He thinks you’re his mama, you tell me, your face a pixelated screen from sixteen hours away. I pulled him out of a wall more than a month ago, a tiny thing, a bag of fur and bones and not much else, eyes just opened and already suffering from mange, crawling with fleas. His rolling purrs are in time with his pushing paws and it feels like waves. The house is quiet and thick with sleep, but, like cats, you and I no longer keep regular hours.
Sixteen hours is the time difference between here (Manila) and there (L.A.). You’ve been there for six months, now, to work, to save up for our future. I’m trying to hold onto our present, here.
How the Ocean Shaped a Surftown
Travel essay in National Geographic
The east coast may have the dawn, but here in San Juan, La Union, we get the sunsets. Cumulus clouds pile high over the horizon as waves obliterate themselves on the sand, turning into a mist, making everything glow.
Along the shoreline, giant orbs made from bamboo, recycled plastic, and steel rise into the sky, like a spaceship ready for takeoff. Created by Filipino artist Leeroy New, Mebuyan’s Vessel is an outdoor artwork originally commissioned for the 2020 Burning Man festival. Because of the pandemic, it touched down here, instead.
Girl From North Country
Profile on Solana Perez, the first Filipina to join the Mongol Horse Derby, in Grid Magazine
When I first rode him, I thought, ‘Shit, I don’t think I can control this guy’.” It’s just after sunrise and Solana Perez is driving us through the winding mountain roads of Baguio City in her beat-up pickup, still coated in ashfall from the Taal Volcano eruption. We’re heading to Itogon, Benguet, to catch a wild horse. Sol, a 25-year-old Baguio-born artist, is referring, of course, to her first love, a horse named Viper.
Typically, a patient spends three hours at most in the emergency room of any given hospital in the Philippines. That changed, said Dr. Faye Garcia, 31, chief resident of Emergency Medicine at The Medical City after the Department of Health (DOH) announced the first local transmission of COVID-19 in early March.
Suddenly hundreds of patients were flooding the ER. The Medical City is at the heart of one of Metro Manila’s pandemic hotspots. Isolation tents were put up outside the hospital. They overflowed. Patients sent home with mild symptoms returned to the ER unable to breathe.
“I have patients who have been [in the ER] for seven days,” Garcia said. “Now I know [the patients’] names. I talk to their families.”
She remembered a man asking her to deliver a letter to his wife in isolation. Garcia couldn’t tell him that his intubated wife was in no condition to read.