By Kathleen-Claire Resurreccion
“It is 1942 when the Japanese soldiers come to the town of Buguey. I live in the district of Maddalero in Buguey at the time. I was five years old,” Grandma says as she lays sprawled on her side around the head of her bed, thin sheets pooled around her feet. I sit cross-legged in front of her and sharing the warmth of her blankets. Grandpa is in the room, as well, sitting in the worn, wooden chair he’s had since arriving to Canada in 1995. He watches reruns of Judge Judy on low volume while diligently striping oranges of their rind and then popping each juicy crescent into his mouth. The room smells sweet with citrus.
“During the Japanese time, they come and collect rice for their food. They collect one kaban from each family. That is 50 kilos of rice. The rice that you eat ready to cook.” She toys with a rebel thread from the edge of her blanket, wrapping it around a gnarled finger. “We are very, very poor, but they take food from us. ‘Adda manok yo ken itlog? Do you have the chicken and egg?’ they ask us.”
I halted her with the flash of my palm. “Woah, wait, the Japanese soldiers knew Filipino?”
“Wen, but only a little bit. They only ask for food. If we do not give them, they beat a civilian.”
“Really? Just for a few chickens and eggs?” My brows shoot up to my hairline.
“Oh, they are very harsh; they are very bad!” Grandpa inserts as he starts on a new orange. Using the sharpened tip of his thumb nail, he pierces through the skin and into the vibrant flesh. “If they beat Filipino civilians, they are like beating an animal. There’s a lot of people, civilian people they kill.”
“You know, the Filipino boys,” Grandma interjected. “They do like that with the bayonetta.”
“Bayonet,” Grandpa corrects as she pantomimes a body being skewered on a sharp blade using her left index finger and the palm of her other hand. He continued, “For the small children, they will throw the baby up and let them fly and let them fall on the bayonet.” Strangely enough, textbooks images of the Holocaust start to take root into my head. Shivers run all across my skin. “You know my father, he used to tell us to be good boys and girls or else the Japanese get us.”
“There is Filipino and American guerrilla soldiers who come to tell us we should not go near the national high way because that’s where the Japanese soldiers are passing.” Grandma continues. “Maddalero was near the national high way. My family is very scared of the Japanese soldiers, so we have to leave Buguey. We go to Minanga, near Buguey. We walk, but sometimes we ride in a caribou. My father get a, a… what you call it – sled, where he put our things, our clothes, our food. We go to our relative’s house, but there’s no space so we go to live in the forest of Tapel that is beside Minanga. We stayed there for three years.” She ended with a dismissive tone.
“Years? In a forest?” I couldn’t mask the disbelief in my voice. I couldn’t even begin to imagine being eight-years-old and forced to hide out in a forest, of all places.
“Wen! My grandpa and my father make a tent or a – a small hut using palm trees and dried leaves from the palm trees and the leaves of big coconut trees and tall grass. The flooring is the hard bark of the palm tree; they cut into pieces, divide it, and they make the flooring. There is nine of us living in the hut – we are five in the family at the time, then my two aunties, then my grandma, and my grandpa.” She calculated, counting off her fingers. “It is very small, but as long as we are far from the Japanese, we are okay.”
“But how did you guys manage to survive out there for so long?” I accept a few orange pieces from Grandpa and chewed thoughtfully.
“We brought our rice and there are many natural vegetables in the forest like wild bitter melon, and there is also a market near Tapel where we go buy. We have little money and sometimes we give our things to get the food. My relatives give us food sometimes. They have lots of fish because they are fishermen, and my father go to them to get some food and clothes and mosquito net.”
Grandpa turns away from the escalating lawsuit battle on the screen to shoot a question to Grandma. She replies in turn and they have a rapid exchange in Filipino, some of which I understand but most flies over my head. Grandpa’s voice is deep and levelled where Grandma’s is sharp and almost shrill.
She shakes a head at one of Grandpa’s comments. “No, it is my relatives.” She addresses me once more. “My relatives tell my mom, ‘We are already leaving for Ballesteros. If you want to come, the boat is coming next week. Come live in our cottage and you can come get the ride and go to Ballesteros. The Allied Forces are there giving food.’ When my father and mom know this, we went to their house to wait for the coming back of the boat. The next week, the Japanese soldiers come. It is only seven o’clock in the morning. They look like…uh, they have thick lips and the eyes is like Chinese!” Grandma narrows her eyes and puckers her dusty rose lips, her face contorted as if she’d sucked a lemon. I chuckle despite myself. “And they are very white, their skin. Their uniforms are fatig.”
“Fatig?” I parrot.
Deep creases line her forehead. “It is, uh, the colour of brown.”
“Khaki,” Grandpa supplies.
“Yes, yes, khaki. The captain come to us and he carry a sable, a sword, a big one. He said, ‘Go! Taray, taray! Run, run! And come back at ten o’clock! Run away from here and come back at ten o’clock.’ I do not know why they say ten o’clock,” she admits with a casual shrug of her shoulders. “But it does not matter because we go to the sea shore of Tapel and there is the boat. It is like fisherman boat, wooden and with the sails. A fisherman come to get us and tell us that the Allied soldiers are already in Minanga, so we will stop in Minanga. When we go to the boat, I look up and see a plane go above us.” Using her forefinger, she followed an invisible airplane flying around her room. “It is silver and there was a star the colours of the American flag. That is when I know: we are safe.”