Notes from the Favorite Uncle

Chapter 1: The Uncle Who Left the Island

To my dear nieces and nephews, scattered across Manila, London, California, Sydney, and whichever distant time zones you have wandered into by the time you open this book:

If you are holding these pages, two very specific things have occurred in our family history. First, I have finally succeeded in compiling my decades of typed notes, napkin scribbles, cassette memos, and old letters into something resembling a proper book, without deleting the whole file by accident or dropping my laptop into a pot of simmering green chile stew. Second, you have reached an age where you might be curious about why our family is the way it is, and why your Uncle Lalo lives in the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the trees do not bear mangoes, the wind smells of burning piñon wood, and a fine red dust settles over everything, including my morning cup of black coffee.

Let me establish a fundamental truth right at the start. I do not have children of my own. I never had a son to teach how to cast a bamboo fishing rod into the gentle surf of the Lingayen Gulf, nor a daughter to worry about when her car was late coming home. What I have instead is all of you. You are my living legacy, whether you asked for that responsibility or not. And because I am seventy years old, and sensible enough to know I will not be around forever to offer unrequested advice in the family group chat, I am putting these stories down where they cannot be scrolled past.

Think of this book not as a solemn lecture from an elder who claims to have everything figured out, but as a survival manual built entirely out of my own bad decisions, spectacular blunders, and luck I did not earn. If my mistakes can spare you even a fraction of the bumps, heartbreaks, and embarrassments I collected along the way, then every misstep of my life was worth it. I made the mistakes so you don't have to. That is the whole arrangement.

As I write these words, I am sitting at my heavy oak desk in my study in Santa Fe. It is autumn. Outside my window the sun is dropping toward the Jemez Mountains in the west, and behind me, to the east, the Sangre de Cristo range is doing what it was named for, turning the color of blood and then of terracotta and then of a deep bruised violet. On the wall beside my desk hangs a single framed photograph from October 1978. In that deckle-edged black-and-white picture, four young people are standing on a weathered wooden pier on the Lingayen Gulf. The tropical humidity in that photograph is so thick you can almost feel it sticking to your skin through the glass.

You know three of those four people as your parents. My brother Ramon, whom nobody has called Ramon since his baptism, is the one squinting. He is Monching to the world, and Papa or Tito Monching to you. Beside him is my sister Corazon, your Tita Cora or your mother, already standing like a schoolteacher at nineteen. The girl at the end, sixteen years old and laughing at something outside the frame, is my youngest sister, Dewi. The thin fellow in the middle with too much hair and a shirt collar the size of a manta ray is me.

In that photograph I am twenty-four years old. I am the eldest child. In our culture the eldest son is supposed to stay close to home, anchor the family house, look after the land, and take over the family's affairs when the time comes. Instead, I was the brother who packed two vinyl suitcases, boarded a Pan Am Boeing 747, crossed the whole width of the Pacific Ocean, and traded monsoons for mesa winds. Monching, Cora, and Dewi stayed. They held down the fort. They raised all of you in the soil where our grandparents lie buried, and then, one by one, most of you grew up and did exactly what I did, which I will discuss with you sternly in Chapter 7.

For many years a quiet voice in the back of my mind wondered if I had made a terrible mistake by leaving. When you are twenty-four, getting on an airplane feels like courage, ambition, and freedom. When you are seventy, looking back across forty-six years of distance, it sometimes feels like a gentle, slow-motion desertion. But life does not grant us a rewind button. It grants us perspective, and, if we are paying attention, a sharp sense of humor about the whole human comedy.

* * *

If there is one defining trait that runs through our family, it is resilience. But resilience is a word that people overuse until it sounds heavy, grim, and heroic. People talk about it as if it were made of cold iron or carved granite. In our family, resilience has never been made of iron. It has always been made of laughter, specifically the self-deprecating kind that arrives right after you have made a complete fool of yourself.

Your great-grandmother in Medan, my mother's mother, whom my mother called Nenek Rahma when she told us stories, used to say that a problem you cannot laugh at is a problem that owns you. My mother carried that sentence across the sea like a piece of jewelry. I saw her use it for the first time in 1960, when I was six years old.

My father had left his job as a shipping clerk a few years earlier to go into business for himself. His first venture was buying sea salt and dried fish along the gulf and selling them inland. He kept his entire stock in a wooden storage shed behind our house. That year a typhoon came in off the South China Sea, the river rose in the night, and by morning the shed was standing in brown water up to the door latch. Salt, as you may know, does not benefit from being submerged. Neither does dried fish, which becomes wet fish, and then becomes something that has no name.

I remember standing in the mud beside my mother while my father pried the door open. Everything he owned in the world of commerce was a gray soup. My father, who could talk for three hours about a bus ride, said nothing at all. My mother looked at the ruined crates for a long moment. Then she turned to him and said, in her quiet, level voice, "Well, Beto, at least we don't have to dust them anymore."

There was a silence. Then my father began to laugh. He laughed until he had to sit down on an overturned crate, in the mud, in his good trousers. I did not understand, at six, why this was funny. I understand now that it was not funny. It was a decision. My mother had looked at the worst day of their married life and refused to let it have the last word. That refusal got our family through storms, debts, an earthquake, a volcano, one son's departure, and my own magnificent career stumbles. I will tell you in Chapter 8 what that typhoon truly cost them, because I did not learn it myself until I was fifty-two.

* * *

Before we go further, you should know who these people were, because you carry their faces.

My father, Eduardo Punsalan, was called Beto by everyone, including the parish priest and the men he owed money. He was born in 1926 in our village outside Lingayen, in the province of Pangasinan. He was the life of every gathering. He was a man who could turn a thirty-minute trip to the market into a three-hour epic adventure involving old friends, political debates, and spontaneous musical performances. He owned a guitar with a crack in its belly that he claimed improved the tone. He believed that any problem in human history could be solved with a loud joke, a song, and a plate of garlic fried rice.

My mother, Nurhayati, was called Nia. She was born in 1929 in Medan, on the island of Sumatra, in what was then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia. She was his perfect foil: calm, observant, and gifted with a dry humor that could deflate my father's most inflated stories with a single sentence. She spoke rarely and missed nothing. Growing up between these two forces taught me that a marriage is not a merger. It is a long, affectionate negotiation between two sovereign nations.

We lived in a house built of hardwood and concrete blocks, with a tin roof that roared like applause whenever a monsoon rain passed overhead. I can still smell the damp earth after an afternoon downpour, the garlic rice frying at six in the morning, and the night-blooming jasmine outside the window of the room I shared with Monching. In those days we did not measure wealth by bank accounts. We measured it by how many people were at the table and how loud it got after the sun went down. By that measure we were millionaires.

Let me give you one evening, so you can see it. My father has gone to the market in Lingayen at four o'clock to buy a kilo of tomatoes. It is a walk of forty minutes each way. At six he has not returned. At seven my mother puts the rice on, without comment. At half past seven we hear him coming up the lane, and we can tell from the sound that he is not alone.

He comes through the gate with the tomatoes, which is to his credit. He also has with him a retired schoolmaster he has not seen since 1947, a man who sells roofing nails, and somebody's cousin from Tarlac who needs a place to sleep. On the way home he has settled an argument about a basketball game, attended the last ten minutes of a stranger's baptism, and agreed to stand as godfather. He has a new joke, which he tells before he has put down the bag. He has forgotten the onions.

My mother looks at the three guests. She looks at the pot, which holds rice for six. She does not sigh. She says, "Lalo, more water in the soup," and to the man from Tarlac, "You will want to wash your feet." By nine o'clock the schoolmaster is reciting poetry, the nail seller is asleep against the wall, and my father has the guitar out. My mother is sitting a little apart with her mending, not smiling, and every so often she says one quiet sentence, and the whole table roars, my father loudest of all.

I thought every house was like that. I was a grown man in another country before I understood that it was not, and that I had been raised inside something rare.

A word about names, since ours cause confusion. I was baptized Eduardo, after my father, and called Lalo from the cradle so that the house would know which of us was being shouted for. When I came to New Mexico, the Spanish speakers here informed me, with some amusement, that we had it backward. Lalo, they said, is the proper nickname for an Eduardo. Beto belongs to a Roberto or an Alberto. My father had been going about for fifty years under another man's nickname.

I wrote to ask him about it. He replied that when he was two years old, an aunt had come to visit from Manila, had mistaken him for his cousin Roberto, and had called him Beto for an entire week, and that it had seemed to everyone less trouble to keep the name than to correct the aunt. That is our family in one sentence. We would rather rename a child than embarrass a guest.

There were six of us at that table in the good years. My parents. Me, born in March 1954. Monching, born in 1956, who has been disagreeing with me ever since. Cora, born in 1959, who corrected my grammar before she lost her baby teeth. And Dewi, born in 1962 during a storm, which explains a great deal about her. At the head of the table, on Sundays and on any day when my mother was making something he liked, sat my father's father, Lolo Celo, of whom you will hear much more.

* * *

As you read through these pages, I ask you to keep three simple rules in mind.

Rule Number One: do not repeat my exact mistakes. Make brand-new, creative mistakes of your own. You have smartphones, artificial intelligence, and instant global communication. Your blunders should at least be technologically innovative. I once ruined a business relationship with a single badly translated sentence spoken out loud to forty people. You have the tools to ruin one in front of forty thousand. I expect great things.

Rule Number Two: remember where your roots are. You may live in London, San Jose, Sydney, or Quezon City, but the blood in your veins was shaped by people who survived islands, typhoons, volcanic ash, a world war, and poverty with their humor fully intact. One of your grandmothers crossed a sea for a man who dropped his paperwork. One of your great-grandfathers lost a negotiation to a goat. These are not small inheritances.

Rule Number Three: keep the family stories alive. When my time comes and I join our ancestors, it is your job to tell the next generation about the eccentric uncle who lived in the desert and wrote a book just to make sure none of you took yourselves too seriously. Tell it well. Exaggerate where necessary. Your grandfather would insist on it.

I should also tell you how this book is arranged, so that you may skip to the parts where you appear, as I know you will. I begin where we began, with a Sumatran girl and a Filipino clerk in a customs office in 1950. I go on to my childhood, which involved a great deal of mud. Then I tell you why I left, what I found in America, how I embarrassed myself professionally over four decades, and what it has been like to love all of you from nearly eight thousand miles away. Near the end there are two chapters that were hard to write. One is about the things your grandparents never told us. The other is about the things I got wrong that were not funny. I have put them near the end so that you will already like me by the time you get there.

A word about truth. Everything in this book happened. Not everything happened exactly the way I tell it. I am my father's son, and in our family a story is a living thing that must be fed. Where I have improved on the facts, I have tried to improve them in the direction of what it felt like. Your Tito Monching will tell you that I have several things wrong. He is entitled to write his own book.

Now pull up a comfortable chair, pour yourself something to drink, and let me tell you how this whole unlikely family actually began.

Chapter 2: Sumatra Meets Luzon

To understand who we are, you have to understand the improbable collision of two entirely different worlds that occurred in the spring of 1950 in the port city of Medan, in North Sumatra.

My mother, Nurhayati, whom everyone called Nia, was twenty-one years old that spring. She was a woman of quiet, composed dignity, with a sharp wit that she used sparingly, the way a careful cook uses saffron. Her family had lived in and around Medan for generations. In her mother's kitchen, food was a serious language of spice, depth, and patience. A dish that took less than three hours was regarded with suspicion.

My father, Eduardo, whom everyone called Beto, was twenty-four. He was a man of boundless, irrepressible optimism, a natural storyteller who could sell a broken bicycle to a fish. He had finished two years of commerce at a college in Dagupan before the money ran out, and he had talked his way into a job as a junior logistics clerk for an inter-island shipping firm that ran cargo between Manila, Singapore, and Medan. It was his first time outside the Philippines. He owned one good shirt.

How did a quiet Sumatran girl and a boisterous Filipino clerk meet? My mother was working at the counter of a municipal office in Medan that handled export permits. As my father told the story, with rising levels of dramatic exaggeration as he aged, he walked into her office to process the customs papers for a shipment of nutmeg, looked at the young woman behind the wooden counter, and immediately dropped his folder, spilling forty-two official forms across the floor.

The number of forms was thirty in the version he told when I was a boy. By the time he told it at my wedding it was forty-two. I have kept forty-two out of respect.

While scrambling on his knees to gather the paper, he looked up and offered what he believed was a charming, movie-star smile. My mother looked down at him, unblinking, and said in slow, clear Malay, the trading language that every clerk on those routes had to learn, "If you manage to pick those up without tearing them, sir, I might process your permit before lunch."

He tore two. She processed it anyway. He found reasons to return to that office eleven times in the following year, sometimes with cargo and sometimes, my mother claimed, with a folder of blank paper. They were married in Medan in 1952. In 1953 she boarded a ship with him and came to Luzon, and in 1954 I arrived to complicate matters. And thus began a forty-two-year cultural cold war that was fought entirely across our kitchen table, and ended only when my father died.

* * *

When my mother moved to Pangasinan, she brought very little. She brought two batik sarongs, a photograph of her mother, and a stone mortar and pestle, her cobek and ulekan, wrapped in a towel inside a rice sack. That mortar weighs about as much as a small child. She carried it herself down the gangway in Manila because she did not trust the porters. It sits on my kitchen counter in Santa Fe today, and I will tell you later how it got there.

She also brought an unwavering commitment to Sumatran culinary standards. My father, on the other hand, believed that vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, and bay leaves were the four pillars of human civilization, and that anything else was decoration.

Our household became a living laboratory. On Mondays my mother would spend six hours simmering beef rendang until the coconut milk gave up its oil and the meat turned dark and fragrant, filling the house with lemongrass, galangal, and turmeric. On Tuesdays my father would take over the stove and make a vast pot of pork adobo so heavy with vinegar that your eyes watered from three rooms away. On Wednesdays we ate what was left of both, on the same plate, and nobody said a word about it.

The first year was not easy for her, though she told us so only much later, and only in pieces. She arrived in a village where no one had seen an Indonesian. The neighbors were not unkind, but they watched. They came to the fence to look at the foreign wife. They remarked on how she tied her sarong and how she covered her hair to go to market. One woman asked her, slowly and loudly, whether in her country they ate with spoons.

It was Lolo Celo who turned it. My grandfather had been a widower for some years and had strong views on food, all of them local. For the first month he ate what his new daughter-in-law set in front of him with the expression of a man doing his duty. Then one Monday she made rendang. He took a mouthful. He put down his spoon. He sat for a moment with his eyes closed, and the family waited to learn whether there would be an incident.

"Beto," said Lolo Celo, "where did you say you found this woman?"

"In a customs office, Tatay."

"Go back," said my grandfather, "and see if she has a sister."

The next market day he walked through Lingayen telling everyone he met that his son had married a princess of Sumatra who cooked meat for six hours. Neither half of this was accurate. Within a month women were coming to the fence not to look but to ask. My mother gave them the recipe, honestly and completely, knowing perfectly well that none of them would stand over a pot for six hours, and that her reputation was therefore safe.

They debated everything. How much chile is too much chile? My mother believed there was no such thing as too much chile. My father believed chile should be a seasoning and not a weapon. How should rice be cooked? My mother wanted it dry and separate, each grain its own citizen. My father wanted it soft and a little sticky, so that it would hold together when you pressed it with your fingers. They never resolved this. There were years when we had two rice pots.

They did not share a religion, a first language, or a single childhood song. My mother had been raised in one faith and my father in another, and they settled the matter the way they settled the rice, by making room for both and declining to discuss it with the neighbors. They spoke to each other in a private mixture of English, Malay, and Pangasinan that no one outside the house could follow, and that we children absorbed without knowing it was unusual. My mother taught us Indonesian words alongside our Pangasinan, our Tagalog, and our school English. I was eleven before I learned that other families did not say terima kasih at the table.

Yet for all their endless debating, there was never any doubt about the deep and indestructible devotion between them. I once saw my father, who was afraid of nothing, wait forty minutes in the rain outside the market because my mother had told him to wait there and he was not certain she had finished. They taught us that love is not about finding someone identical to you. It is about finding someone whose differences make your world larger, more interesting, and considerably better seasoned.

* * *

Now I must introduce you properly to my father's father, Marcelo Punsalan, known to the whole province as Lolo Celo, and to the event our family still refers to as the Great Livestock Disaster of June 1968.

I was fourteen years old. Lolo Celo decided it was time I learned the noble art of commerce. He announced that he and I were going to the livestock market in Lingayen to purchase a healthy goat, which we would bring back to the house to manage the overgrown brush behind the kitchen.

Lolo Celo was seventy-two that year. He was a small, wire-thin man who wore a faded straw hat and went everywhere with a wooden cane that he used less for walking than for pointing. He considered himself a master negotiator. As we walked through the dusty, crowded market, surrounded by squawking chickens, squealing pigs, and shouting vendors, he gripped my shoulder and whispered, "Lalo, watch me carefully. Never show enthusiasm to a seller. Look at the animal as if it has personally offended your family."

We stopped before a vendor holding a medium-sized white goat with one floppy ear and a strangely calculating expression in its eyes. The vendor said the goat was named Baguio, after the mountain city, because it was cool-headed.

Lolo Celo inspected Baguio. He poked the goat's ribs with his cane. He squinted at its teeth. He shook his head with deep, theatrical disgust.

"This goat is frail," he declared loudly in Pangasinan, so the surrounding crowd could hear. "Its knees are weak. It will not survive the rainy season. I will offer you twenty pesos out of pure Christian charity."

The vendor, a seasoned market veteran, smirked. "Twenty pesos? Old man, this goat has the appetite of a tractor and the heart of a lion. Fifty pesos, or I sell it to the butcher."

For forty-five minutes they engaged in a masterclass of theatrical bargaining. They gasped in disbelief. They walked away from each other three separate times. They clutched their chests and called upon heaven as a witness. A small audience gathered. Someone brought the vendor a stool. Finally they agreed on thirty-two pesos. Lolo Celo counted out the money, looking victorious, and the vendor tied a frayed hemp rope around Baguio's neck.

We began our two-mile walk back to the village. Lolo Celo strutted down the dirt road, tapping his cane and explaining to me how his superior psychological tactics had saved the family eighteen pesos. What he failed to notice was that Baguio had no intention of being owned by anyone. Halfway home, as we were crossing a narrow wooden footbridge over a creek swollen with the first rains, Baguio simply stopped.

"Come on, goat," said Lolo Celo, and tugged the rope.

Baguio did not move. Instead, the goat leaned forward, calmly took the hemp rope in its jaws near Lolo Celo's hand, and chewed through the frayed fibers with three swift, methodical bites. The rope parted. Baguio turned around, offered a brief, cheerful "Maaah," and trotted at a brisk pace right back down the road toward the Lingayen market.

Lolo Celo stood on the bridge, holding a useless eight-inch piece of chewed rope. He looked at the empty road. He looked at me. I looked at him, trying desperately to hold in a burst of laughter that I knew would be the end of me. Slowly my grandfather raised his cane, pointed it at the retreating goat, and said with supreme dignity, "Well, Lalo. That goat clearly lacked discipline. Let us go home and tell your mother we decided to invest in poultry instead."

I asked him whether we should go back for our thirty-two pesos.

"And tell that man his goat defeated me?" said Lolo Celo. "Lalo, there are things more expensive than thirty-two pesos."

* * *

That evening at dinner, as my mother served a sour fish soup, Lolo Celo told the story of the goat. But he did not hide his failure. He turned it into a thirty-minute comedy routine, acting out the goat's unblinking stare, the vendor's stool, and his own foolish strut down the road. By the end of the meal my father was laughing so hard he was wiping his cheeks, Monching had fallen off the bench, and my mother was quietly putting an extra portion of rice on Lolo Celo's plate.

That was my first real lesson in resilience. When life chews through your rope and trots away with your thirty-two pesos, you do not sit on the bridge and cry. You walk home, sit down at the table, and turn the whole disaster into a story that makes the people you love laugh until their ribs ache. The loss is the same either way. The only thing you control is who owns it afterward.

Lolo Celo kept that piece of rope. I did not know this at the time. It turned up ten years later, and you will see where.

His humor stayed legendary throughout our part of the province. Even in his late seventies he had a razor-sharp mind and a heart full of mischief. He believed that seriousness was an illness that could be cured with a good joke and a warm meal. He had lived through a great deal that was not funny. He had been a grown man with children when the war came to Luzon, and the Lingayen Gulf, our gentle gulf where I learned to fish, was where the invasion fleets arrived, twice, in 1941 and again in 1945. He did not speak of those years in detail. He spoke instead of the rice he had hidden beneath the floor of the chicken house, and how the chickens had kept the secret better than his cousins did.

Watching him move through our town taught me something about authority. Men twice his size stepped aside for him, not because they feared him but because five minutes in his company improved their day. He settled disputes over land boundaries by making both parties laugh at themselves. I have sat in a great many meetings in my life with a great many important people, and I have never seen it done better.

He died in his sleep in 1975, at seventy-nine, in the house where he was born. I was twenty-one and away at university in Manila. I came home on the overnight bus. At the wake, the goat vendor from Lingayen appeared, older and stouter, and stood for a long time by the coffin. Then he came over to my father and pressed something into his hand, and left without eating. It was thirty-two pesos.

My father tried to run after him to give it back. My mother stopped him. "Beto," she said, "let the man win one."

* * *

I should tell you that she went back to Sumatra only once. In 1971 word came that her mother was failing, and my father sold a season's profit from the store to put her on a ship, with Dewi, who was nine, for company. They were gone two months. Nenek Rahma died while they were there, with her daughter beside her, which my mother counted as a mercy.

When they came home, my mother was quieter than usual for a long while. One evening I found her alone in the kitchen with her hands flat on the cobek, not grinding, just resting them there. I was seventeen and about to leave for university, and I asked what I had never thought to ask. I asked whether she had wanted to stay.

She considered it honestly, as she did every question. "The house was smaller than I remembered," she said. "My cousins were kind. They spoke to me carefully, as one speaks to a guest." She moved her thumb along the rim of the stone. "I have two rice pots here," she said. And then, because I plainly did not understand, "A person is from where she is needed, Lalo. Remember that when you go."

I did not remember it when I went. I remember it now.

I tell you these stories first because everything else in this book grows from them. I am half a Sumatran kitchen and half a Pangasinan market. So are your parents, and so, in smaller and stranger fractions, are you. In our home, difference was not an idea we studied in school. It was the smell of two separate pots on the stove, the sound of three languages in one sentence, and the daily evidence that two people can disagree about rice for forty-two years and still wait for each other in the rain.

When you find yourselves, as you will, in rooms where you are the only one who looks or sounds or eats the way you do, I want you to remember that you come from people who were very good at this. Your grandmother walked into a country where she knew one person, with a rock in a rice sack, and within ten years the neighbors were coming to her for advice. She did not do it by becoming like them. She did it by cooking better than they did and listening more than she spoke.

And when you lose your own goats, and you will, I want you to hear a small old man on a footbridge announcing, with enormous dignity, that the family has decided to invest in poultry.

Chapter 3: Mangoes, Mud, and Younger Siblings

I have a scar on my left shin, about three inches long and shaped like a comma. Several of you asked about it when you were small, and I told each of you a different story. I told Paolo it was from a shark. I told Tala it was from a duel. The truth is that it is from a mango, and behind the mango stands your Tito Monching, as he stands behind most of the injuries of my youth.

Our neighbor to the south was a widow named Aling Pacing. She had a face like a closed door and the finest mango tree in the district. It was a carabao mango, the long golden kind that the rest of the world has been trying to copy ever since. In April and May the fruit hung over her fence in such numbers that the branches bowed. She sold them at the market and guarded them with a slingshot, which she fired from her kitchen window with the accuracy of an artillery officer.

In the hot season of 1964, when I was ten and Monching was eight, my brother proposed a business arrangement. He had observed that Aling Pacing went to early Mass on Wednesdays. He had also observed that one large branch extended over the lane, and therefore, in his legal opinion, over public land. He would be the lookout. I, being taller, would climb.

I want you to notice the structure of this plan, because your Tito Monching has been offering me versions of it for sixty years. He has the idea. I take the risk. If it succeeds, we share. If it fails, I am the eldest and should have known better.

I climbed. I had four mangoes inside my shirt and was reaching for a fifth when I heard Monching say, in a small, strangled voice, "Kuya." Aling Pacing had not gone to Mass. She had a cold. She was standing in her kitchen window in her housedress with the slingshot drawn back to her ear.

I did not wait to be shot. I let go of the branch. On the way down, my shin found the broken stub of a lower limb, and I landed in the lane with four crushed mangoes inside my shirt and blood running into my slipper. Monching was already a small cloud of dust in the distance.

My mother cleaned the wound without a word, which was worse than shouting. She bound it with a strip of clean cloth. Then she went to the kitchen and began to cook. She cooked for five hours. At the end of it she put a covered dish of beef rendang into my hands, the best thing our house could produce, made with meat we could not really spare, and she said, "You will carry this to Aling Pacing. You will tell her what you did. You will not explain. You will not mention your brother. And you will ask her what work she needs done."

I limped next door with that dish like a man walking to his execution. I said my piece. Aling Pacing looked at me, and at my leg, and at the dish. She lifted the lid and smelled it. Then she said, "Your mother is a foreigner, but she is a serious woman." I swept her yard every Saturday for two months. On the last Saturday she gave me a basket of mangoes to take home, the first she had ever given to anyone, and she and my mother were friends until Aling Pacing died.

I have thought about that afternoon many times in my working life. My mother understood something that took me another thirty years to learn. An apology that costs you nothing is worth exactly that. She did not make me say sorry. She made sorry expensive, and she paid the larger share of it herself.

Monching, for the record, was required to eat no mangoes for the rest of the season. He says this was the greater punishment. He would.

* * *

You who grew up with air conditioning and paved roads should understand that the Pangasinan of my childhood had two seasons, dust and mud, and that mud was the more important.

The rains came in June. The sky turned the color of a cooking pot, the frogs began, and within a week the road in front of our house was a brown river with opinions. We went to school barefoot with our shoes tied around our necks, because shoes cost money and feet could be washed. The schoolhouse had a concrete trough by the door for exactly this purpose. I can still feel that cold water, and the shock of sliding wet feet into stiff leather.

Mud was also our amusement park. There was a rice field behind the house that belonged to Lolo Celo, two hectares that he had inherited from his own father, and in planting season it was a sheet of gray water and soft earth. We were sent out to help transplant the seedlings, which meant standing bent double in the paddy for hours, pushing each green shoot into the mud with your thumb. It is the kind of work that teaches you to respect a plate of rice for the rest of your life. I have never left a grain on my plate. Elena, my wife, used to say that I ate rice like a man settling a debt.

The field was plowed by a carabao named Heneral, a water buffalo of great age and greater patience who belonged to Lolo Celo and tolerated the rest of us. Monching loved that animal beyond reason. At seven he could climb up its foreleg and sit on its back like a small emperor, and Heneral would go on chewing as though nothing had landed on him.

In 1965 a cousin of ours was married in the village chapel. It was a large wedding. There was a procession from the bride's house, with the bride under a white parasol and a brass band of five men who knew three songs. Monching, who was nine, had been told to keep Heneral out of the way. He interpreted this instruction broadly. As the procession turned into the lane, there came from the rice field a sound like a wet mountain getting up, and Heneral emerged from the paddy, plastered to the horns in gray mud, with my brother on top, waving.

A carabao that has decided to walk somewhere cannot be discussed with. Heneral joined the procession directly behind the bride. He walked at exactly the pace of the band. He followed her to the door of the chapel, and there, having made his point, he lay down in the only puddle in the churchyard and went to sleep.

My father was asked to remove him. My father looked at Heneral, and at Monching, and at the bride's mother, and said, "Madam, in this province it is very good luck." He invented this on the spot. It has since become a real belief in our village. I have heard people repeat it who were not yet born that day. This is how tradition works, children. Somebody's father was embarrassed and had to say something.

* * *

I was five when Cora was born, in February 1959, and I remember being told that I was now a Kuya twice over, an older brother with a double load. Nobody explained what the load was. I worked it out by trial and error, mostly error.

Cora was a serious baby who became a serious child. She did not babble. She waited until she had complete sentences and then began issuing them. By four she had opinions about how I held my pencil. I taught her to read, and I am prouder of that than of anything I built in forty years of engineering. We sat on the front steps in the evenings with my school primer, and I ran my finger under the words, and one night she pushed my finger away and read the page herself. She looked up at me with an expression I have never forgotten. It was not gratitude. It was the look of someone who has been handed the keys.

She won the district spelling contest at ten. She taught grade school in Dagupan for thirty-eight years. If you are one of her children, you already know that she is still correcting my spelling, now by text message, across fifteen time zones. Last month she informed me that I had been misusing a comma since 1971.

Dewi arrived on a November night in 1962, and she arrived the way she has done everything since, at the worst possible moment and to great applause. A storm had come in that afternoon. By dark the river was over the road. My mother's pains began around eight o'clock, three weeks early, and the midwife lived on the other side of the water.

My father went for her. He borrowed a banca, a narrow outrigger boat, from a fisherman who thought he was insane, and poled it across what had been the main road that morning. I was eight. I stood on the porch holding a kerosene lamp, as I had been ordered to, so that he could find the house again. I held it for what felt like a year. Rain came sideways. Monching cried. Cora, who was three, told him to stop.

Then out of the dark came my father's voice, singing. He was singing so that we would know he was alive, and so that my mother would hear it through the wall. He came up to the steps with the midwife sitting bolt upright in the bow under a sheet of oilcloth, clutching her bag, furious. Dewi was born at a little past midnight, with the tin roof roaring and every lamp in the house lit.

Then came the naming, which was the fiercest battle of the cold war. My father had promised his late mother a Milagros. My mother had been waiting through three children and nine years for a name from her own shore. She wanted Dewi. They argued in whispers for two days so as not to disturb the baby, which is a difficult way to argue. On the third day the baby was baptized Dewi Milagros Punsalan, and my father went about telling everyone that it had been his idea to put the Indonesian name first.

* * *

I promised you that this book would be built out of my mistakes, so let me tell you about the first serious one. I was thirteen.

It was the town fiesta in Lingayen in 1967. There were stalls, a Ferris wheel that had been assembled by optimists, and more people than I had ever seen in one place. My mother had put Dewi's hand in mine at the edge of the plaza. Dewi was four. My mother said, "You do not let go of this hand." Then she went with my father to see about a debt he was collecting or paying. With my father it was often hard to tell.

I held that hand for an hour. Then I saw a man selling kites, the fighting kind with glass powder on the string, and three boys from my school were standing there, and I wanted them to see that I had money in my pocket. I let go of Dewi's hand to count my coins. I was going to take it again immediately.

When I looked down she was gone.

I will not try to describe those forty minutes to you. Those of you who are parents now have some idea. I ran through that plaza calling her name until my voice went. I looked under stalls. I looked, God forgive me, toward the river. The whole time there was a cold, clear voice in my head that said, you did this, you were given one thing to hold.

I found her behind a food stall on the far side of the church. She was sitting on an upturned crate between two large women she had never met, eating a plate of pancit with her fingers, entirely content. She had walked up to them and announced that she was hungry. She looked at my face, which must have been a sight, and said, "Kuya, they have noodles."

I picked her up and I did not put her down until we were home. And then I did the thing that I want you to remember. I told my mother. Nobody had seen. Dewi was too small to give a clear account. I could have carried that secret to my grave, and I very badly wanted to. But I had learned something from the business with the mangoes, and I went to my mother that night and told her that I had let go.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "You are telling me because you cannot carry it alone." I said yes. She said, "Good. Remember how heavy it was. That weight is what being the eldest means. It is not being obeyed. It is being the one who cannot let go."

She did not punish me. I almost wished she had.

I have let go of other hands since then, as you will read. But I have never again done it to count my coins in front of other boys, and I have tried, whenever I have dropped something that mattered, to say so out loud before I was caught. It is the only reliable method I have found for remaining someone you can stand to be.

* * *

Those were my years of mangoes and mud. We were not poor in the way that some of our neighbors were poor, and we were certainly not rich. After the typhoon took the salt business, my father opened a small store at the front of the house, selling rice, kerosene, soap, canned sardines, and anything else that could be bought by the sack and sold by the cup. It did well enough. My mother kept the accounts in a ledger in handwriting like a row of small soldiers, and there was a line in that ledger for school fees that was never once touched for anything else.

In the dry season I fished the gulf in the early mornings with a bamboo rod my father had cut for me, standing to my knees in water as warm as tea, with the fishing boats coming home in a line against the sunrise. I was good at mathematics and bad at sitting still. A teacher named Mrs. Soriano told my parents that I should be an engineer, and my father, who was not entirely sure what an engineer did, began telling people that I was going to build bridges.

Sometimes my father came with me. He was a terrible fisherman. He could not keep quiet, and he believed that fish responded to encouragement. One morning when I was twelve we stood in the shallows for three hours and caught nothing whatever, while a neighbor fifty yards down the beach pulled in one fish after another. I was humiliated. I wanted to move closer to the neighbor's spot.

"No, no," said my father. "Watch."

He waded over to the neighbor, empty-handed, and began to talk. He admired the man's catch. He asked about his bait, his children, his late father. He told a long story about a carabao at a wedding. Within half an hour the neighbor had given him four fish, out of sheer goodwill, and an invitation to a christening.

We walked home with the fish on a string. I said it was not the same as catching them.

"Lalo," said my father, "there are two ways to get a fish. You can be clever with the hook, or you can be good to the fisherman. I have never been clever with the hook." He swung the string. "You are clever. Your mother gave you that. Do not let it make you forget the other way."

I did forget it, for some years, at considerable cost. You will see.

I believed I would spend my whole life within sight of that water. I believed Monching and I would grow old arguing on the same porch. If you had told the boy with the bamboo rod that he would end his days in a desert seven thousand feet above the sea, where it snows, he would have asked you what snow was.

I am going to tell you next how that boy got on the airplane. But I wanted you to meet him first, on the front steps with a primer on his knee, with a healing shin and a baby sister's hand held very, very tight.

Chapter 4: The Departure (Trading Green for Red Dust)

Nobody in our family had ever left on purpose. My mother had left Sumatra, but she left for a person, which is a different thing. I left for an idea, and ideas are much harder to explain to your father.

Here is how it came about.

I went to Manila in 1971, at seventeen, to study civil engineering at the University of the Philippines. I was the first Punsalan to attend a university long enough to finish. My father rode the bus down with me and carried my bag across the campus himself, greeting professors he had never met as though they were cousins. Before he left he pressed twenty pesos into my hand and told me not to tell my mother, and when I unpacked my bag I found another twenty that my mother had sewn into the lining with instructions not to tell my father.

Those were unsettled years to be a student in Manila. Martial law was declared in my second year. There were curfews, and soldiers at the gates, and classmates who stopped coming to lectures and were not discussed. I am not going to pretend to you that I was brave. I kept my head down and my slide rule moving. I had a line in my mother's ledger to justify. But I will say that when you spend your youth in a place where the future has been narrowed by other people, you become very alert to any door that is standing open.

I graduated in 1976 and took a job as a junior engineer with the public works ministry, drawing flood control channels for rivers in Central Luzon. It was honest work and I was not bad at it. I rented half a room in Sampaloc. I sent a third of my salary home. On the last Saturday of each month I took the bus north, slept in my old bed beside Monching, and ate enough to last me until the next visit.

I must tell you about the last conversation I had with Lolo Celo, because I did not know that it was the last, and because he saw something that I had not yet seen myself.

It was Christmas of 1974. I was home from the university for two weeks. He was seventy-eight and had grown very light, like a kite, but his eyes were the same. We were sitting on the porch after the midday meal, and I was watching the road. A bus went by toward Dagupan and I turned my head to follow it until it was out of sight.

"There," said Lolo Celo. "You do that."

I asked him what I did.

"You look at the road." He pointed with the cane. "There are two kinds of Punsalan. Your brother looks at the field. He counts the sacks. He will die in the bed he was born in, like me, and be content. You look at where the bus is going." He nodded slowly. "Your father is the same, only he pretends otherwise. He went to Sumatra and came back with a wife and has spent twenty years telling himself that he is a man who stays."

I said I had no plans to go anywhere. It was true, then.

"Good," said my grandfather. "A man with plans is easy to stop. It is the ones who only look that you cannot do anything about." He closed his eyes against the sun. "When you go, do not go like a thief. Go out the front door, at noon, with a party. And come back the same way."

He was asleep a minute later. Four months after that I came home on the overnight bus for his wake.

By 1978 I was restless in a way I could not name. I spent my days designing channels to carry water away. Every drawing I made assumed that water was the enemy, that there was always too much of it. One evening in the ministry library I picked up an American engineering journal, two years out of date, and read an article about a place where the whole of engineering was the opposite. It was about the high desert of the American Southwest, where there was so little water that people had built their entire law, their villages, and four hundred years of quarrels around the sharing of a single ditch.

I read that article three times. I could not imagine it. A country where they measured rain in inches per year, and you could count them on your fingers. I had grown up in a house where we measured rain by whether the chickens were floating.

The author taught at the University of New Mexico. I wrote him a letter. I am still astonished that I did it. I wrote, in my best ministry English, that I was a young engineer from a country with too much water and that I wished to understand a country with too little. I expected nothing. Four months later an envelope arrived at the ministry with an eagle on the stamp.

* * *

The letter offered me a place in the graduate program in water resources, beginning in January 1979, with a research assistantship that would cover my tuition and pay me a small stipend. It did not cover the airfare. It did not cover the months before the stipend began, or a winter coat, or any of the hundred things that a person needs who is starting from zero on the other side of the planet.

I carried that letter in my shirt pocket for eleven days before I told anyone. I would take it out on the bus and read it and put it back. I was twenty-four years old and I was afraid of my father, not of his anger, which was brief and loud like a summer storm, but of his disappointment, which I had never seen and did not think I could survive.

I told him on the porch, on a Saturday evening in April 1978. He was restringing his guitar. I handed him the letter. He read it slowly, moving his lips a little, as he did with English. Then he read it again. Then he set it down on his knee and looked out at the road for a long time.

I had prepared arguments. I had figures on what an engineer with an American degree could earn. I had a speech about coming back in two years. I did not get to use any of it, because my father turned to me and said, "Where is New Mexico?"

I said it was in the United States, in the southwest, near the old Mexico.

"Is it by the sea?"

I said no. I said it was a desert, a high one, with mountains.

"A desert," said my father. "You are an engineer of water, and you wish to go where there is none." He shook his head slowly. "Lalo. This is exactly the kind of business decision I would make."

Then he laughed, and I laughed, and neither of us was really laughing. He put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he had when I was small, and held it there. He said, "I was twenty-four when I got on the boat to Medan. Your Lolo Celo told me I would be eaten by tigers." He said, "You will go. We will find the money." And then, more quietly, "But you tell your mother yourself. I am not a brave man."

I told you in the first chapter that I did not learn until I was fifty-two where that money came from. Remember that. It matters.

* * *

My mother was in the kitchen, grinding chiles in the cobek with that steady circular motion of her wrist that I can still hear. I told her. She did not stop grinding. She asked how cold it was there. I said I did not know, but that it snowed. She asked whether there were Indonesians. I said I doubted it. She asked whether there were Filipinos. I said there must be some. She asked who would cook for me.

I said I would cook for myself.

At that she stopped grinding, and looked at me, and there was on her face the nearest thing to despair I ever saw there. "You cannot boil water," she said. It was true. I was the eldest son of a house with a mother and two sisters, and I had never been allowed within arm's length of the stove.

So for the next six months, every time I came home, my mother taught me to cook. She was not a gentle teacher. She stood behind me with her arms folded while I burned the garlic. She made me grind the spice paste myself until my wrist ached, because she said a machine cuts and a stone persuades. She taught me rendang, and a simple fish curry, and how to make rice properly, by which she meant her way, while my father shouted corrections from the next room. He taught me adobo on alternate weekends, in direct competition.

I did not understand then what she was doing. I thought she was worried about my stomach. I understand now that she had made this crossing herself, twenty-five years before, in the other direction. She knew exactly what a person has in a strange country on a bad night. You do not have your language, or your weather, or anyone who knew you as a child. You have what your hands remember. She was packing my hands.

* * *

There was one other person I had to tell, and I have put it off in this chapter the way I put it off in life. Her name was Luz Aquino. She taught at the same school in Dagupan where Cora would later teach. We had been keeping company for two years, on those last Saturdays of the month, with the understanding of both families that we would marry when I was established.

I told Luz on the sea wall in Dagupan. I said I would go for two years and send for her, or come back. I believed it when I said it. She listened to all of it and then asked me one question. She asked, "Are you asking me to wait, or are you telling me that you are going?" I said they were the same thing. She said they were not, and that I should work out which before I left.

I did not work it out. I will tell you the rest of that story in the chapter on scar tissue, where it belongs.

* * *

The last weeks went quickly. There was a passport to get, and a visa, which meant standing for two days in a line outside the embassy on Roxas Boulevard with a brown envelope of documents held against my chest. There was a chest X-ray. There was a suit, made by a tailor in Dagupan from cloth my father chose, a brown so loud that I wore it exactly once.

The photograph that hangs on my wall was taken the Sunday before I left. My father had hired a photographer with a proper camera to come out to the pier. He wanted one of the four of us, his children, before the set was broken. Monching is squinting because he had told me that morning that I was abandoning him to run the store alone, and I had told him he was welcome to it, and we were not speaking. Cora is standing very straight because she was trying not to cry and considered crying in a photograph to be poor form. Dewi is laughing because my father, behind the photographer, was pretending to fall off the pier.

I look at my own face in that picture often. I look pleased with myself. I look like a young man who believes he is the hero of the story. I would like to reach through the glass and tell him to turn around and look at the other three, properly, for a full minute, because it will be seven years before he stands next to them again.

There was a despedida, a farewell party, the night before I left the village. My father roasted a pig he could not afford. The whole lane came. Aling Pacing brought mangoes, out of season, that she had preserved in syrup. The brass band from the wedding, now down to four men, played their three songs. My father sang until two in the morning, and at the end he sang the old love song he had used to court my mother, and she pretended, as always, not to be listening.

Late that night, when the guests had gone, my father came to where I was sitting on the steps and put something in my hand. It was a piece of frayed hemp rope, about eight inches long, chewed at one end.

I knew what it was before he told me. Lolo Celo had kept it in a cigar box for seven years, and my father had kept it for three years after that.

"Your grandfather told me to give this to the first one of you who went somewhere," my father said. "He said to tell you: things get away from you. That is not the important part. The important part is that you come home and tell us about it."

That rope is in the top drawer of my desk as I write this. It has crossed the Pacific six times.

* * *

We went down to Manila in a hired jeepney, all six of us and the two vinyl suitcases, one blue and one the color of weak coffee. My mother had packed the blue one herself. At the airport she told me what was in it: a jar of her sambal sealed with wax, a bag of dried chiles, candlenuts, a knob of dried galangal, and, wrapped in my underwear so that the customs men would not look, a small stone mortar. Not hers. A new one, half the size, that she had sent to Medan for. She had written to a cousin there six months earlier, the week I told her.

"When you grind," she said, "you will think of this kitchen. That is what it is for. The food is extra."

The Manila airport in 1978 was a low, crowded building that smelled of floor wax and jet fuel and other people's goodbyes. Families stood in clusters around their departing members like small funerals. My father, who had talked without pause for the whole drive, had gone silent. He kept adjusting the collar of my terrible brown suit.

When my flight was called, I embraced them in order of age, youngest first, the way we lined up for everything. Dewi cried openly and wiped her nose on my lapel. Cora shook my hand, then changed her mind and held on to me so hard that it hurt. Monching said, "Go on, then," and punched my shoulder, and then, as I turned away, said, "Kuya," and when I looked back he did not have anything else to say, which was the most he has ever said to me.

My father held my face in both his hands. He said, "Build something. And laugh. If you cannot laugh there, come home."

My mother was last. She did not cry. She straightened my collar, which my father had just disarranged. She said, "Do not write to me that you are fine. Everyone writes that they are fine. Write to me what you ate."

I have thought about that instruction for forty-six years. It is the wisest thing anyone has ever said to me about love across a distance. Do not send me your summary. Send me your Tuesday.

* * *

I had never been on an airplane. The Pan Am 747 seemed to me less like a vehicle than a building that had agreed to move. I had a window seat over the wing. As we climbed, I watched Manila Bay tilt and flatten, and then the green of Luzon, a green so deep it was almost black, the green of rice and coconut and mud, slid backward under the wing and was replaced by water.

I did what I imagine everyone does. I thought, I can still get off. Then I thought, I cannot get off. Then a stewardess asked me whether I wanted chicken or beef, and I discovered that I was weeping, quietly and steadily, into the brown suit, and that I was also very hungry. I had the chicken. I wrote that down for my mother.

We crossed the date line, so that I lived the same day twice, and I remember thinking that this was a poor omen for a man trying to move forward. We came down through fog into San Francisco on an October morning that was colder than any air I had ever breathed. I walked out of the terminal in my tropical suit with a suitcase in each hand and a piece of chewed rope in my pocket.

I had traded the green. I had not yet seen the red. Between them lay two months of washing dishes in a town called Daly City, a bus ride of a thousand miles, and the first great humiliation of my American life, which involved a waitress, a simple question, and a plate of chile.

Chapter 5: Chilis, Adobo, and Mispronunciations

My father had a friend from his shipping days named Isidro Macaraeg, whom we had been taught to call Tito Ising although none of us had ever seen him. He had jumped ship, more or less legally, in San Francisco in 1955, and he lived in a town just to the south called Daly City, in a narrow house on a hill that was inside a cloud. I do not mean this poetically. For the two months I lived there I did not see the sun. I had left the brightest country on earth and arrived inside a wet gray sock.

Tito Ising met me at the airport in a Buick the size of our house. He looked at my brown suit and said, in Pangasinan, "Who died?" Then he took me home, fed me rice and fried fish and a sour soup that nearly made me cry, and informed me that my assistantship did not begin until January, that nobody eats for free in America, and that he had found me a job.

The job was washing dishes at a diner on Mission Street owned by a Greek named Mr. Pappas. I had a degree in civil engineering from the best university in my country. I had designed flood channels for the government. For nine weeks I stood at a steel sink from four in the afternoon until midnight, scraping other people's eggs.

I want to tell you that I bore this with humility. I did not. I was insulted for the first three days. On the fourth day the cook, a large Mexican man named Chuy, watched me sulking over the sink and said, "Hey, professor. You know what the plate thinks about your diploma?" I said I did not. He said, "Nothing. It's a plate."

It is one of the more useful things I have been told. The work in front of you does not know who you used to be. I washed the plates. I got fast at it. By December Mr. Pappas had offered me a raise to stay, and Chuy had taught me forty words of Spanish, most of which I later discovered I could not use in front of my landlady.

* * *

I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Albuquerque in the first week of January 1979. It took a day and a night and most of another day. I watched America go past the window, and it kept being larger than I had been told. Somewhere in Arizona I woke at dawn and looked out, and the world had turned red.

I have tried many times to describe that first sight to people back home, and I have always failed. I came from a place where the earth is hidden. In Pangasinan you cannot see the ground for the things growing on it. Here the ground was the entire subject. It was red, and orange, and the pink of the inside of a shell, and it went to the horizon in every direction with nothing on it but small gray bushes placed at polite distances from one another, as if each had been told not to crowd. The sky was a blue I had no word for. There was so much of it. I remember thinking that a person could be seen by God from a very long way off in a place like this, and that it might make a man behave.

I got off the bus in Albuquerque into air so cold and so dry that the inside of my nose froze. I had never been dry before. In the first week my lips split, my knuckles cracked and bled, and I got a shock from every doorknob in the engineering building. Nobody had warned me about static electricity. I began to approach doors the way Lolo Celo approached a goat seller.

I rented a room from a widow named Mrs. Ofelia Trujillo, in a small adobe house on Lead Avenue with a wood stove and a crucifix in every room. She was perhaps sixty. She was five feet tall. She looked me over on the doorstep and asked whether I was Catholic, whether I drank, and whether I was Navajo. I said yes, no, and no. She said I looked a little Navajo. I said I was from the Philippines. She thought about this and said, "The islands. So you people were Spanish too," and from that moment I was a kind of distant relation.

* * *

Now I must tell you about the chile.

On my second day in Albuquerque I walked into a small restaurant near the university, sat down at the counter, and ordered the first thing on the menu that I recognized, which was eggs. The waitress, a tired woman with a pencil behind her ear, wrote it down and then asked me a question.

"Red or green?"

I did not understand. I thought perhaps she was asking about my politics. I said, "Excuse me?"

"Red or green," she said, more slowly, as one does for the foreign and the simple.

I had no idea what the question was about. But I had been raised by Beto Punsalan, who taught me that when you do not understand a question, you should answer it with confidence. So I smiled and said, "Yes."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she shrugged, wrote something, and went away. She came back with a plate of eggs buried under two sauces, one the color of brick and one the color of a rice paddy, side by side. I learned later that I had accidentally ordered what New Mexicans call Christmas. I also learned later that the question is asked so often in this state that it has since been made official.

Here I must confess to pride, because it went before a fall. I looked at that plate and I thought: I am the son of Nurhayati of Medan. I was weaned on sambal. I have been eating chiles since before I had teeth. There is nothing these people can show me.

I took a large forkful of the green.

Children, it was not that it was hotter than my mother's cooking. It was not. It was that it was hot in a different place. My mother's chile was a bright, sharp heat at the front of the mouth, like a slap. This was a slow, roasted, smoky heat that started at the back of the throat and walked downward, patiently, like a man with a lantern going down into a well. I did not cough. I would not give the waitress the satisfaction. I sat very still with water running out of my eyes and finished every bite, and then I ordered a second plate, because underneath the fire it was the most delicious thing I had tasted since I left home.

I wrote to my mother that night. I wrote, as instructed, what I ate. Her reply came five weeks later and contained a single sentence on the subject. "I am glad they have something."

* * *

My first attempt to cook for myself in America was a catastrophe that Mrs. Trujillo spoke of for years.

I decided to make my father's adobo. I had the chicken and the garlic. I could not find cane vinegar or coconut vinegar anywhere in Albuquerque in 1979, so I bought the only vinegar in the store, which was white and came in a gallon jug and was intended, I now believe, for cleaning windows. I could not find the right soy sauce, so I used what there was. I did not have bay leaves, so I used a dried leaf from a jar in Mrs. Trujillo's cupboard that looked similar. It was oregano. I used my father's proportions, which were designed for a different vinegar entirely.

The smell brought Mrs. Trujillo out of her bedroom with a rosary in her hand. She thought there had been a chemical accident. She lifted the lid, stepped back, and asked me in a careful voice what I had done to the chicken.

I explained that this was the national dish of my country. She tasted it. To her eternal credit, she swallowed. Then she said, "Mijo, sit down," and she took over my kitchen education where my mother had left off.

What followed was the best trade agreement I have ever been party to. Mrs. Trujillo taught me posole, and red chile sauce from dried pods, and how to roast green chiles over a flame until the skins blistered and the whole house smelled like autumn. She showed me where to buy apple cider vinegar, which is not right for adobo but is not a war crime either. In return, once I had the vinegar sorted, I made her a proper adobo, and then, on a Sunday in March, I unwrapped the small stone mortar, ground a spice paste the way my mother had drilled into me, and made her a rendang.

It took five hours. She watched the whole thing from a kitchen chair. When she tasted it she was quiet for a moment, and then she said something I have treasured. She said, "This is not from here. But it is from somewhere. You can taste that somebody's grandmother is in it."

That is the highest thing one cook can say to another. I wrote it to my mother, and she wrote back asking for Mrs. Trujillo's address, and the two of them exchanged Christmas cards for twenty years without sharing a language.

* * *

I must now address the matter of pronunciation, in which I was both criminal and victim.

The name of the city gave me trouble at once. I looked at the word Albuquerque and said every letter in it, as an honest man would. I said "Al-boo-kwer-kway" to a bus driver, who asked me to repeat it for his own enjoyment. The Jemez Mountains I called the "Jem-ez," with a hard J, for most of a year, until a classmate from the pueblo there took me aside and said gently, "It's HAY-mez, and my grandmother lives there, so please." An arroyo, which is a dry streambed and the central object of my profession, I pronounced as though it rhymed with "a boy-o."

Then there was the matter of my own particular accent. In most of the languages of the Philippines the sounds of P and F are close cousins, and when we are tired we mix them. In my first month I stood up in a seminar and referred, with great seriousness, to the "pour percent slope of the flood flain." There was a silence. Then a large Texan at the back said, "Could you say that again, pardner?" and the room came apart. I laughed too. There is nothing else to do. I practiced in front of Mrs. Trujillo's bathroom mirror every night for a month, saying "four fine fresh fish for Father," until she knocked on the door to ask whether I was praying.

On the other side of the ledger, almost no one in New Mexico could say my name. I was Lay-lo. I was Lah-lah. One professor called me Lolo for an entire semester, which means grandfather, and I was too polite to tell him. My surname fared worse. I received mail addressed to Mr. Pun-salad and Mr. Punsalon, and once, from the university housing office, to "Mr. L. Pulsation." I kept that envelope.

What I learned from all of this is simple, and I pass it to those of you who are living in other people's languages. Let them laugh, and laugh first if you can. A mispronounced word is proof that you learned it by reading, which means you were doing the work alone. And when someone gets your name wrong, correct them once, kindly, and then judge them only by whether they try the second time. The ones who try are your people. I have found them everywhere.

* * *

There are two more things I must tell you from those first years.

The first is about snow. It came in February, at night. I woke at some dark hour and the light through the curtain was wrong, a pale blue glow with no source. I looked out and the whole of Lead Avenue was white and silent, and things were still falling through the streetlight, slowly, like the ash from a cooking fire.

I went outside in my pajamas and my rubber slippers. I was twenty-four years old and I had never seen it. I stood in Mrs. Trujillo's yard with my face turned up and my mouth open. It was nothing like I had imagined. I had thought it would be like rain. It was like quiet, falling. I caught it on my hands and watched it vanish. I ate some. I am told I was laughing out loud.

Mrs. Trujillo found me there, of course. She stood in the doorway in her robe and watched me for a while without speaking. Then she went in and came back with her late husband's coat and his boots, and put them on me as if I were a child, and stood beside me in the yard until I had seen enough. Neither of us said anything. I wore that coat for six winters.

I wrote home about the snow at great length. My father wrote back asking whether it could be sold.

The second thing is about loneliness, and I will be brief, because it is not interesting. There were nights that first winter when I sat on the edge of that narrow bed and could not think of one reason I had come. I missed sounds. I missed frogs, and roosters, and my father's voice coming through a wall. The silence of the desert at night is total, and to a boy from a tin-roofed house full of people it felt like being struck deaf.

On those nights I got up, went to the kitchen, and ground something. I did not always cook it. I just stood there in a dead man's coat with my mother's stone under my hands, going around and around, and the smell of crushed chile and garlic would come up, and for a few minutes the kitchen on Lead Avenue was the kitchen in Pangasinan.

She had known. She had sent to Medan for that mortar the week I told her I was leaving, and she had known exactly what it would be for.

* * *

I was not entirely without my own people. In my second month Mrs. Trujillo mentioned, in the tone of someone reporting a rare bird, that there were Filipinos at her parish, nurses at the hospital. The following Sunday I went to Mass with her and stood at the back, and afterward a small, round woman in a white cardigan looked at me across the churchyard, narrowed her eyes, and called out in Tagalog, "You. Whose child are you?"

That was Remedios Tolentino, a surgical nurse from Batangas, known to the entire Filipino population of Albuquerque, which at that time numbered perhaps sixty, as Tita Remy. She had me placed within four minutes: province, town, father's name, degree, marital status. She informed me that I was too thin and that there was a gathering at her house that afternoon. It was not an invitation. It was a ruling.

I walked into that house and the smell stopped me in the doorway. Garlic, vinegar, fried fish, rice in a cooker the size of a drum. There were thirty people in three rooms, speaking five languages of the islands at once, and every one of them was a nurse, or married to a nurse, or the child of one. Somebody put a paper plate in my hand. Somebody else asked whether I could fix a carburetor. A man was tuning a guitar. I stood there with my plate and my eyes stinging, and Tita Remy said, not unkindly, "Yes, yes. It happens to everyone the first time. Eat."

I went every Sunday for two years. They found me a secondhand car and a dentist. At Christmas they put on a full Noche Buena at midnight, with a roast pig that had been driven up from El Paso in the trunk of a Chevrolet, and Mrs. Trujillo came as my guest and brought tamales, which were set down between the lumpia and the pancit as though they had always belonged there.

I tell you this for those of you living abroad. Find the Tita Remy. There is one in every city on earth. She will be at the back of a church, or behind the counter of a small grocery, and she will ask whose child you are. Tell her. You will not be a stranger again.

I finished my degree in the spring of 1981. I had meant to go home. I had a ticket priced out. Then a professor mentioned that a small engineering firm in Santa Fe needed someone who understood water, and I drove up to see it in a borrowed car, sixty miles north and two thousand feet higher. I came over the last hill in late afternoon, and the town lay below me, low and brown and the same color as the earth, with the mountains behind it going red.

I told myself it would be two more years. You may have noticed that I am telling you this from a desk in Santa Fe.

Many years later, in the summer of 1987, my parents came to New Mexico for my wedding, the only time either of them ever left Asia after my mother's crossing. I took them to that same restaurant near the university. The waitress asked my father, "Red or green?" He looked at me. I kept my face still. And my father, who had never heard the question in his life, beamed at her and said, "Yes."

My mother ordered the green, tasted it, and asked the waitress, through me, whether the cook was feeling unwell, because it was very mild.

They stayed three weeks. My father was sixty-one and had never seen a desert, and he treated New Mexico as a personal gift. On his second day I lost him on the Santa Fe plaza. I found him an hour later sitting on a blanket under the portal of the old governor's palace, beside a silversmith from one of the pueblos, an elderly man who was selling bracelets. They had no language in common that I could identify. My father was demonstrating something with his hands that I recognized as the goat chewing the rope. The silversmith was laughing so hard he had to put down his tools. When I came up, my father said, "Lalo, this is my friend. His grandson is also an engineer. I have invited him to the wedding." He came, too, and brought his wife.

My mother was quieter about it, but she missed nothing. She walked through the old part of town looking closely at the adobe walls, and at last she pressed her palm flat against one and said, "Mud." I said yes, mud and straw, dried in the sun. She nodded slowly, with something like approval. "They build their houses from the ground they stand on," she said. "And they share their water by turns, and they put chile on everything." She looked at me. "You did not go so far, after all."

Chapter 6: The Fine Art of Professional Blunders

I worked as a water engineer in northern New Mexico for forty-one years. In that time I designed culverts, flood channels, small dams, and irrigation works across six counties. A good many of them are still standing. I am going to tell you almost nothing about those, because nobody ever learned anything from a culvert that worked.

Instead I am going to tell you about the times I was wrong. I have selected five, from a large field of candidates. I have chosen them because each one taught me something that I could not have learned by being right, and because I would rather you heard about them from me than from your Tito Monching, who has his own versions.

The firm that hired me in 1981 was called Kessler and Ruiz. It had eleven employees and occupied the upper floor of an old building off the Santa Fe plaza, above a shop that sold turquoise to tourists. Mr. Ruiz had died some years before and survived only on the letterhead. Mr. Kessler was very much alive. Harold Kessler was a tall, stooped man from Nebraska with enormous hands and a voice like gravel in a bucket. He had built airfields in the Pacific during the war. In my interview he asked me where I was from, and when I said Pangasinan, on the Lingayen Gulf, he was silent for a moment and then said, "I came ashore there in January of 'forty-five. It was raining." He hired me that afternoon. I have never known whether it was my qualifications or the rain.

The Eleven Thousand Dollar Culvert

My first real project of my own, eight months into the job, was a culvert under a county road north of Española. A culvert is a pipe that lets a stream pass beneath a road. It is the humblest structure in civil engineering. It is also the one most likely to kill someone if you get it wrong, because when a culvert is too small, the water does not wait politely. It goes over the road, or through it.

You size a culvert by estimating the largest flood it must carry, and you estimate the flood from tables of rainfall. I did my calculations. I checked them twice. The drawings were issued, the contractor ordered the pipe, and the wooden forms for the concrete headwalls were built on site. The pour was scheduled for a Thursday morning.

On Wednesday night I was lying in bed, and I was thinking, of all things, about home. I was thinking about the typhoon that took my father's shed, and how the river had risen in a single night. And a small cold thought arrived, in the way they do. It said: which column of the table did you use?

I got up. I drove to the office at eleven at night and let myself in. I found my calculation sheets. I had taken the rainfall for a storm that comes once in ten years. The county standard was the storm that comes once in a hundred. I had sized that pipe for a comfortable shower. In a real flood, the kind that comes off those hills perhaps twice in a lifetime, the road would have gone, and whoever was on it.

I sat at my drafting table until two in the morning doing it again. The pipe needed to be nearly twice the size. Everything was wrong: the pipe on order, the forms already built, the excavation already dug.

Now I will tell you honestly what went through my mind, because that is the purpose of this book. I thought: no one will ever know. The hundred-year storm might not come for fifty years. I will be retired, or dead, or in the Philippines. I thought about the money I was sending home every month, and what my father would say if I lost this job. I thought about being the foreigner who could not read a table. I sat there with my own mistake in front of me, and I very much wanted to put it back in the drawer.

Then I thought about a plaza in Lingayen, and a small hand I had let go of to count my coins.

I was waiting on the stairs when Harold Kessler came in at six thirty. I told him standing up, before he had his coat off. I showed him the sheets. He read them at his desk for what felt like an hour. He picked up the telephone and stopped the pour. He called the pipe supplier. Then he did some arithmetic on a pad, turned it toward me, and said, "Eleven thousand dollars. Forms, labor, restocking, and a week's delay. Give or take."

In 1982 that was more than half my yearly salary. I said I would pay it back out of my wages. I meant it.

He looked at me over his glasses. "No, you won't," he said. "I just spent eleven thousand dollars training you. I'm not about to let some other firm get the benefit." Then he said the thing I have repeated to every young engineer who ever worked for me. He said, "Son, a man who hides an eleven thousand dollar mistake will someday hide a million dollar one. I can afford the first kind. Nobody can afford the second. Now get out of my office and go check everything else you've touched."

I checked everything. It took me three weeks of nights. I found two smaller errors and reported those too.

That culvert is still there. I drive over it sometimes. In the summer of 1998 a storm sat on those hills and delivered very nearly the hundred-year flood, and I went out the next morning and stood on the road and watched brown water roaring through the pipe with a hand's breadth to spare. I stood there a long time. I was thinking about Harold, who had been dead six years by then, and about how close I had come to the drawer.

Here is the lesson, and it is the most important professional advice I have. The mistake is never the thing that ruins you. Everyone makes the mistake. What ruins you is the second decision, the one you make alone at two in the morning, about whether anyone needs to know.

The Ditch

My second blunder was not one of arithmetic. It was one of manners, which is worse.

Northern New Mexico is watered by acequias. These are irrigation ditches, dug by hand, some of them more than three hundred years old, each one shared by the families along it. Each ditch has its members, and each elects a boss called a mayordomo, who decides whose turn it is to take water. It is the oldest form of government in the state. People have been baptized, married, and very nearly murdered over those ditches.

In 1984 the state sent our firm to a village in the hills near Chimayó to propose improvements to their acequia. I was given the assignment. I was thirty years old. I had a master's degree and a set of colored slides. I stood up in the village hall in front of perhaps forty farmers, most of them old enough to be my father, and I explained to them, with diagrams, that their ditch was inefficient. I told them how much water they were losing through seepage. I recommended that they line it with concrete. I believe I used the phrase "modern methods." I spoke for forty minutes.

When I finished, nobody clapped. The mayordomo stood up. He was a man of about seventy named Don Eusebio Baca, thin as a fence post, with his hat in his hands. He was very polite. He thanked the young engineer for coming so far. Then he said, "I have only one question. Have you ever cleaned a ditch?"

I said I had not.

"Our fathers dug this one with wooden shovels," said Don Eusebio. "The water that you say we lose, it goes into the ground, and the ground gives it to the cottonwoods and the wells, and to the neighbor downhill who has no right to the ditch but has an orchard. It is not lost. It is only not ours." He turned his hat around in his hands. "On the second Saturday in March we clean the ditch. Every family sends a man with a shovel. Perhaps the engineer would like to come, and afterward he can tell us about the concrete."

I went. I was too ashamed not to. I dug from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, in a line of men and boys, clearing a winter's silt and willow roots out of two miles of ditch, and by noon my hands were open blisters. Nobody mentioned my slides. At the midday meal the women brought out beans and chile and tortillas, and I sat on the ditch bank eating beside a boy of twelve and his great-grandfather, who had cleaned the same stretch for seventy years.

And I understood, sitting there, that I had seen all of this before. I had stood bent double in Lolo Celo's rice field pushing seedlings into the mud with my thumb beside my whole family. I knew what it was to share water. I had simply forgotten it the moment someone handed me a diploma.

I went back to the office and tore up my report. The one I wrote instead recommended repairing two headgates and leaving the rest alone. I cleaned that ditch every March for the next eleven years.

I should mention that Don Eusebio had a granddaughter who taught second grade in Santa Fe, and that she was one of the women carrying tortillas that day, and that she looked at my blistered hands and laughed out loud. Her name was Elena. I will come back to her.

The lesson: before you tell people how to improve something, find out what it is for. And if they hand you a shovel, take it. You will learn more from one day at the bottom of the ditch than from a year at the front of the room.

The Announcement

My third blunder took four seconds and was witnessed by forty people.

By 1986 I spoke a working Spanish, assembled from Chuy's kitchen vocabulary, Mrs. Trujillo's prayers, and what I could dig up of the Spanish words that are buried in my own languages. I was proud of it. That year I was asked to present a flood study at a public meeting in a village in Rio Arriba County, where most of the older residents preferred Spanish.

I arrived late. I had taken a wrong turn and driven twenty miles up the wrong valley. I walked into a full hall, went to the front, and wished to apologize graciously. I wished to say that I was very embarrassed.

There is a word in Spanish that looks exactly like "embarrassed." It is embarazado. I stood before forty farmers and their wives, placed my hand upon my chest, and announced with great sincerity, "Estoy muy embarazado."

That word does not mean embarrassed. It means pregnant.

There was a pause in which I could hear a clock. Then an old woman in the front row said, quite loudly, "Felicidades," which means congratulations, and the hall collapsed. Men were holding on to each other. Someone asked when I was due. Someone else asked who the father was.

I had about one second to decide who I was going to be. I could feel my face burning. Every instinct told me to go stiff and carry on with my slides as though nothing had happened. And then I thought of Lolo Celo on the footbridge with eight inches of rope in his hand.

I bowed. I said, in my poor Spanish, "Thank you. It was a great surprise to me also." And then I gave my presentation, and I will tell you that it was the most attentive audience I ever had. They approved the flood study unanimously. For years afterward, whenever I drove through that village, somebody would come out of the store to ask after the baby.

The lesson is your great-grandfather's, not mine. When you have made a fool of yourself in public, you have a very brief opportunity to get in on the joke. Take it. People will forgive almost anything in a person who can laugh at himself, and almost nothing in one who cannot.

The Wrong Arroyo

My fourth blunder cost nothing but three days and my pride, and I include it because it is my brother's favorite.

In the summer of 1988 I was sent to survey a dry streambed called the Arroyo Seco for a small flood dam. Now, arroyo seco simply means dry creek, and you should know that in New Mexico this is about as distinctive as naming a boy Juan. There are a great many Arroyo Secos. I had a map, a truck, a young assistant, and total confidence.

We drove out, found a sign that said Arroyo Seco, and set up. For three days, in July, my assistant and I surveyed that streambed from the road to the foothills. We drove stakes. We took four hundred measurements. I filled a field book with the neatest figures of my career.

On each of those three days a rancher sat on the tailgate of a pickup on the ridge above us and watched. He did not wave. He did not come down. He simply sat there in his hat, for hours, observing two men work in the sun.

On the afternoon of the third day he drove down, got out, and handed me a thermos of coffee. He was about seventy. He looked at our stakes for some time. Then he said, "I been trying to work it out, and I can't. What are you fellas building?"

I told him, with some pride, about the flood dam for the county.

He nodded. "Which county?"

I named it.

"Well," he said, "that's forty miles east. This here's the other Arroyo Seco." He screwed the cap back on his thermos. "I figured you knew something I didn't."

I asked him, when I could speak, why he had not told us on the first day.

"You had a lot of equipment," he said. "You looked like you knew what you were doing."

I have thought about that sentence more than about most of what I learned at two universities. I had a master's degree, a theodolite, and a government map, and I had not once thought to walk up a hill and ask the man who lived there what the place was called. I was being clever with the hook. My father could have saved me three days with a single conversation about the rancher's cattle.

The lesson: an hour of asking is worth three days of measuring. And never assume that the quiet person watching you work is impressed. He may only be waiting to find out what you are doing on his land.

The Firm with My Name on It

The fifth blunder was slow, and it was the only one that was not funny at all, so I will tell it quickly.

Harold Kessler retired in 1989 and died in 1992. The firm was sold to a larger company in Albuquerque, and I found that I did not like working for people who had never met the farmers. In 1996, at forty-two, I left and opened my own office: Punsalan Hydrology, two rooms on Cerrillos Road, myself and a draftsman and a part-time bookkeeper.

I was a good engineer. I was a terrible businessman, and I had inherited the condition. I had my father's optimism without my mother's ledger. I took every job that was offered. I bid low because I was afraid of having no work, and then I did each job more thoroughly than I had been paid to do it, because I could not bear to do otherwise. I hired two more people before I had the income to pay them. I did not send invoices on time because asking for money made me uncomfortable.

By the winter of 1998 I owed the bank sixty thousand dollars and was paying my staff out of my own savings. I did not tell Elena. I told myself I was protecting her. I see now that I was doing exactly what I had been tempted to do with the culvert. I was putting it back in the drawer.

She found the bank letters in January. I will not record that conversation. She was not angry about the money. She was angry that I had sat across the breakfast table from her for a year carrying it by myself. She said, "You told Harold Kessler about eleven thousand dollars within eight hours. You could not tell your own wife about sixty in twelve months?"

I had no answer. I still have none, except that it is easier to confess to a boss than to someone whose good opinion is the whole of your life.

Elena took over the books that week. She was a schoolteacher, not an accountant, but she had a quality my mother had, which was that she wrote down what was true. We let two people go, which I hated. We sent out every invoice I had been too shy to send. It took us four years to clear the debt. The firm survived, small and solvent, until I closed it in 2022 and gave the files to the state.

The lesson took me two tries to learn, which is why I am giving it to you twice in one chapter. The culvert taught me to confess my mistakes at work. The firm taught me that the people who love you are owed the truth sooner than the people who pay you, not later. A trouble you hide from your family does not protect them. It only makes sure that when it finally arrives, it arrives with a lie attached.

* * *

That is five out of forty-one years. There were others. I once sent a letter intended for my brother to a county commissioner, in which I described the commissioner. I will leave those for Monching.

I want you to notice only one thing before you turn the page. In each of these stories I was rescued by someone who had every right to finish me off and chose to teach me instead: a Nebraskan, a mayordomo, an old woman in the front row, a rancher with a thermos, my own wife. You will be on the other side of that table one day, with some frightened young person standing in front of you holding their mistake. I ask you to remember what you would have wanted.

Chapter 7: The Uncleship (Love Across Oceans)

There is no word in English for what I am to you. "Uncle" is too small. In our languages there is Tito, which is closer, because a Tito is not merely your parent's brother. He is a member of the board of directors of your childhood. He has voting rights. He may correct you in public, feed you without permission, and be told things your parents are not told.

The difficulty is that a Tito is supposed to live down the lane. He is supposed to be the house you run to when your father is being unreasonable. I have had to do the job from the far side of the largest ocean on earth, across a gap of fifteen hours, with the tools available at the time. I have come to think of it as an office, like a judgeship or a lighthouse. I call it the uncleship. This chapter is my report on how I have discharged it.

* * *

In the beginning the tools were paper and patience. A letter from Santa Fe to our village took between three and five weeks. A reply took the same. This meant that every conversation I had with my family in my first years abroad ran on a delay of about two months. I would write to ask how my father's cough was, and by the time the answer came, he had recovered from that cough and acquired a different one.

Telephone calls were for emergencies and Christmas. Our house did not have a telephone until 1983. Before that, a call meant that I wrote ahead with a date and an hour, and the whole family walked to the municipal telephone office in Lingayen and waited on a bench. It cost me nearly a day's wages for ten minutes, and the line sounded as though we were all speaking from inside separate tin cans at the bottom of the sea. My father shouted, on the theory that America was far away. Everyone took a turn. Each person said the same four things: Are you well, are you eating, is it cold, when are you coming home. Then the operator cut us off and I would sit in Mrs. Trujillo's hallway holding a dead receiver, more homesick than before I had called.

What saved us was the cassette tape. Somewhere around 1980 my father discovered that he could talk into a tape recorder for an hour and mail it for the price of a letter. This was a dangerous thing to put in the hands of Beto Punsalan. He sent me a tape every month for fourteen years. He narrated the news of the lane. He interviewed my mother, who answered in single words. He held the microphone up to the roof so I could hear the rain. He sang. On one tape there are eleven uninterrupted minutes of a rooster, because he had set the machine down to go and see about a customer and forgotten it.

I have a shoebox of those tapes in my closet, and a machine that still plays them. Some of you are on them. Paolo, you are on the tape of March 1985, aged eleven months, shrieking, while your grandfather announces that you are singing. I played it at your wedding and you have not forgiven me.

* * *

The other great instrument of the overseas uncle is the balikbayan box. For those of you raised abroad who have only received them, let me explain it from the sending end.

A balikbayan box is a cardboard carton about the size of a small washing machine. You fill it over the course of several months with everything America has that home does not, or that home has but which tastes better for having crossed an ocean. Then you tape it until it could survive re-entry from orbit, and you send it by sea, and two months later it arrives in the village like a visiting dignitary.

There is an art to packing one. Corned beef and Spam go at the bottom, for ballast. Chocolates go in the middle, wrapped in clothing, so that they arrive merely bent rather than liquid. Soap and toothpaste fill the corners, and everything will smell slightly of both, including the chocolates. You must include something for every single person in the household and for at least six who are not, because the box will be opened in front of the whole lane, and the cousin who gets nothing will remember it at your funeral.

I got it wrong at first. My first box, in 1982, I packed like an engineer, with what I thought they needed: a set of good wrenches for my father, a pressure cooker, vitamins. My mother wrote back, politely, that the wrenches were very fine. Cora wrote back, less politely, that Dewi had cried, because she was nineteen years old and every other girl with a brother abroad had received blue jeans.

So I learned. The box is not about need. They were managing before you left and they are managing now. The box says: I walked through a store on the other side of the world and I saw this and thought of you, specifically you. From then on there were blue jeans. There were also, in every box for thirty years, three pounds of New Mexico piñon nuts for my mother, who had developed a taste for them, and a ristra of dried red chiles, which she hung in her kitchen and called "the weak ones."

* * *

I went home for the first time in December 1985. Seven years. I will tell you in another chapter why it took so long, and I am not proud of the reasons.

Nobody warns you what it is to return. I had been carrying a picture of home in my head, perfectly preserved, and I walked into it and nothing matched. The road had been paved. The store had a refrigerator and a fluorescent sign. My father's hair had gone white, all of it, as if someone had dusted him with flour. My mother came up to my shoulder. Had she always come up to my shoulder? Dewi, whom I had left as a laughing schoolgirl, was a nurse in a white uniform, engaged to be married. And in the front room, in a rattan crib, was a person who had not existed when I left.

That was Paolo, your cousin or your brother, Monching's first, twenty months old, with my father's eyebrows. He looked at me with deep suspicion. I was a stranger with a strange smell who had made his grandmother cry. I held out my arms and he screamed.

I had come loaded like a mule. I had brought a remote-controlled car that cost me a week's pay. He would not touch it. He would not come near me for four days. On the fifth morning I was sitting on the front steps, the same steps where I had taught Cora to read, peeling a mango with my pocket knife, and I felt a small weight lean against my arm. He had come out on his own. He did not want the car. He wanted the mango.

I cut him a piece. He ate it and held out his hand. I cut another. We sat there for an hour and went through three mangoes without a word. And I understood, with juice running down my wrist, the first principle of the uncleship, which is that you cannot purchase your way in. Presents are fine. But a child does not love the person who brings the box. A child loves the person who sits on the steps.

It was a hard lesson for a man who lived fifteen time zones from the steps.

* * *

So I worked out other ways to sit there. Let me tell you some of them, and you will each find yourselves.

When Paolo was fourteen he wanted to leave school and work in the store. Monching was in favor, I am sorry to say. I wrote Paolo a letter every week for a year. I did not tell him to stay in school. I asked him to send me the store's accounts each month and explain them to me, because I claimed to be thinking of investing. He had to learn bookkeeping to do it. Then he had to learn why the margins on rice were so thin, and then about suppliers, and one day he wrote to tell me that the store was run all wrong and that he would need a business degree to fix it. He has one. He has also turned his grandfather's rice and kerosene store into a company with eleven delivery trucks, and he still sends me the accounts.

Isabel, in 2010 you were twenty-three and newly qualified as a nurse, and you told the family at Christmas that you had taken a post in London. I was on the telephone. I heard the room go quiet behind you, and then your father's voice, raised. I knew that silence. I had caused one exactly like it on a porch in 1978. I asked you to put him on. I said, "Monching, do you remember what you said to me at the airport?" He said he did not. I said, "You said, go on, then. Say it to her." He hung up on me. But he drove you to the airport. You told me afterward that he punched you on the shoulder.

Miguel came to me in the summer of 2006, the year he turned eighteen. He had been sent to California at sixteen to finish school with his father's sister, and Cora had decided, from the other side of the ocean, that California was making him soft and that a season with his uncle in the desert would repair him. He arrived with a skateboard and a low opinion of Santa Fe. I put him to work as my rodman, holding the survey pole in arroyos in July. In the third week I decided to teach him to drive my old truck, which had a manual gearbox, in a dry arroyo bed where he could harm nothing. I am a water engineer. I had checked the sky. There was one small cloud over the mountains.

You all know how this ends, because Miguel tells it at every gathering. He stalled the truck in soft sand. While I was explaining the clutch for the ninth time, that one small cloud did what clouds do in New Mexico in July, twenty miles upstream, and I heard a sound like a train. We got out and up the bank with perhaps a minute to spare. We stood there and watched a wall of brown water take my truck by the nose, turn it around, and carry it sixty yards down the arroyo, where it lodged against a cottonwood.

I had spent twenty-five years warning the public never to enter an arroyo in monsoon season. I had written a pamphlet on it. Miguel looked at the truck, and then at me, and said, "Tito, was that the ten-year storm or the hundred-year?"

I have never been prouder of a nephew. He had been listening. He is an engineer himself now, of the software kind, and he tells me that the principle is identical, which is that the system always fails at the moment you are explaining to someone how safe it is.

Tala, you sent me your architecture thesis in pieces, at two in the morning Sydney time, with messages that said only "is this stupid." It was never stupid. It was a design for housing on a flood plain, raised on posts like our grandparents' houses, and I sat at this desk with tears in my eyes because you had never lived in such a house and had drawn one anyway. I marked up your drainage plan in red. You ignored half my comments, and you were right to.

Rahma, when you were small you were the only one who would stay in your grandmother's kitchen. In 2019, when you had your own restaurant, you flew to Santa Fe for one reason. You wanted to cook on your Lola Nia's cobek. We made her rendang together, five hours, and you corrected my technique twice, and you were right both times, and when you tasted it you stood very still. I knew what you were tasting. I told you what Mrs. Trujillo said to me in 1979, that you can taste that somebody's grandmother is in it. That stone is yours when I am gone. It is written down. Do not let your cousins argue.

And Benjie, the youngest, the one who was born the year I turned forty-four and who has never known a world in which you could not see your uncle's face on a telephone. It was you who created the family group chat and named it "Punsalan Global Headquarters," and added me before I knew what it was, so that I woke one morning to two hundred messages and believed someone had died. It is you who sends me photographs of fish from the bottom of the sea near Sydney with the caption "relative?" You have no idea, any of you who came late, what a miracle that little screen is to a man who once waited five weeks to learn whether his father's cough was better.

* * *

The uncleship has its dark watches too. Let me tell you about one, so that you understand what the distance is made of.

On the sixteenth of July, 1990, in the late afternoon in Luzon, there was an earthquake. It was one of the worst our island has known. I heard about it on the radio in my truck, driving to work in the early morning, and the announcer named three cities, and one of them was Dagupan. Cora was teaching there. Dewi was at the hospital there. Dagupan is built on river sand, and when the earth shook, the ground itself turned to liquid and buildings sank into it upright, like spoons into porridge.

I knew exactly what that meant. It is called liquefaction. I had studied it. I could have drawn you the diagram. And I sat in a truck by the side of a road in New Mexico, a civil engineer who understood precisely what was happening to the ground beneath his sisters, and I could not do one single thing.

The telephone lines were down for three days. I did not sleep. Elena sat up with me. On the third night she found me in the kitchen at four in the morning grinding dry rice in my mother's small mortar, around and around, because my hands had to do something. On the fourth day a call came through, and it was my father, shouting as always, and he said, "Everyone is alive. The school has a crack. Dewi has not been home in three days because of the injured. Your mother says to tell you she is not afraid." Then the line went.

Eleven months later a volcano that had slept for five hundred years woke up not eighty miles to the south of them and covered the middle of Luzon in gray ash. I heard about that on the radio as well.

This is the part of leaving that nobody describes to you when you are twenty-four. It is not the missed birthdays. It is that the people you love go on being in danger, and in joy, in real time, and you learn of it afterward, by radio. You become a person to whom the most important events of your own family are reported.

I say this to the four of you who have gone abroad. I am not telling you to go back. I would be a hypocrite, and besides, the world is different now and you can be on a video call in thirty seconds. I am telling you to count the cost honestly, as I did not. And I am telling you to make the call on the ordinary days. Do not save it for the earthquake.

* * *

I will set one good night against that bad one, so you do not think the distance is only loss.

In December 2020 nobody could travel. You will remember that year. I was sixty-six and alone in this house, and it was the first Christmas in my life that I had expected to spend without another human being in the room. I had decided not to mind. I had bought a small chicken.

At a quarter to nine in the morning on the twenty-fourth, which is nearly midnight in Luzon, my telephone began to make a noise I did not recognize. It was Benjie. He said, "Tito, open your laptop and click what I sent you. Do not touch anything else."

I clicked. The screen filled with small squares, and in each square was one of you. There was Monching in the front room of the old house, too close to the camera, so that I had an excellent view of one eyebrow. There was Cora with her reading glasses on her head, telling everyone they were on mute. There was Dewi in her hospital scrubs, on a break. Paolo in Manila with a baby on his knee. Isabel in London in a paper hat, about to leave for a night shift. Miguel in San Jose with his own two little ones climbing on him. Tala in Sydney, where it was nearly three in the morning on Christmas Day and she had stayed up for it, wrapped in a blanket. Rahma had her telephone propped against a pot in a restaurant kitchen.

There were nineteen people in fifteen squares on four continents, and every one of them was eating. Monching held a plate up to the camera. "Kuya," he shouted, exactly as our father used to shout into the telephone in Lingayen, "can you see the ham?"

I could see the ham. Somebody had a guitar. They sang, badly, with the sound arriving at different times from different countries, so that it was less a carol than a kind of weather. I sat at this desk with a small chicken and I laughed until I had to take off my glasses.

I thought of my father, walking the whole family to the telephone office to shout for ten minutes down a line that cost me a day's wages. He would not have believed that screen. Then again, he would have taken to it immediately and none of us would ever have got a word in.

I said in the first chapter that I would speak to you sternly about your own departures. Here it is, and then I will stop.

When Miguel left, and then Isabel, and then Tala, and then Benjie, I watched my brother and sisters go through what my parents went through, and I had no right to say a word, since I was the one who had cut the path. Monching said to me once, on a bad night, "You taught them that it could be done." He did not mean it kindly.

But I have thought about it a great deal, and here is what I believe. A family is not a place. I used to think it was. I used to think I had left the family when I left the lane. But my mother carried hers across a sea in a rice sack, and she made a second one out of a foreign kitchen, and the two were joined at her and nowhere else. We are not from Pangasinan, children, though I love every muddy inch of it. We are from each other.

So go where your work is. Go where your life is. But be someone's steps. Every one of you has, or will have, a small suspicious person somewhere in this family who does not yet know you. Do not send the remote-controlled car. Go and sit down and peel the mango, and wait.

Chapter 8: Things My Parents Never Told Me

My mother died in November 2006, at seventy-seven, in the house with the tin roof, in the season of the storms. I was there. I had been there for three weeks. I will say more about that in the next chapter, but I want you to know at the outset that I was there, because for a long time it was the only thing I had done right.

After the burial, when the nine days of prayers were finished and the last of the visitors had gone, the four of us sat down to do what children do. We opened her cabinet. It was a tall narra-wood cabinet in my parents' bedroom that none of us had ever been permitted to open. As small children we believed it contained gold. As adults we assumed it contained linens.

It contained linens. It also contained, on the bottom shelf behind the good tablecloth, a large square tin that had once held Danish butter cookies. Every Filipino household has one of these tins, and none of them has ever held cookies. Usually it is sewing thread. Dewi lifted it out and said, "It is heavy for thread."

What I am going to tell you in this chapter is what was in that tin. There were four things. Each of them was something my parents had decided, together, that their children did not need to know. I have gone back and forth for years about whether to tell you, and I have concluded that I must, because each one changed my understanding of who they were and of what I owed. You should know what your grandparents were made of. It is not what we thought. It is a great deal more.

The First Thing: The Bangles

At the top of the tin was a small brown envelope, soft with age, containing three pawnshop tickets from a shop in Dagupan. They were dated September and October of 1960. The items were described in a clerk's faded handwriting: gold bangle, woman's, with engraving. Gold bangle, woman's. Pair of gold earrings with red stones.

None of the tickets had been redeemed.

We sat and looked at them. It was Cora who understood first, because Cora understands everything first. She said, "1960. That is the year of the typhoon. The salt."

I have already told you the story of the storage shed in this book. I told it the way I had always known it, as the story of my mother's joke. Well, Beto, at least we don't have to dust them anymore. I told you it was my family's founding lesson in laughter, and so it was. But I was six, and I did not know what a six-year-old does not know, which is that my father had not owned that salt and dried fish. He had bought it on credit. He owed a lender in Dagupan for all of it, at the kind of interest that men charge when banks will not lend.

My mother had come from Medan with her wedding gold. In her family, as in many families across that part of the world, a bride's gold is not decoration. It is her own, her security, the one thing that belongs to her and not to the marriage. Her mother had put those bangles on her wrists the morning she was married. I do not have a single memory of my mother wearing jewelry, and I had never once wondered why.

Monching, who was the one who stayed, and who therefore knew things, filled in the rest. Our father had not asked her. He had been planning to sell the house lot. She had gone to Dagupan alone on the bus and come back with the money and put it on the table and said nothing. He wept, Monching said. Our father, who laughed at everything, put his head down on the table and wept, and she stood behind him with her hand on his hair.

And then I remembered the fish soup. For what must have been two or three years of my childhood we ate fish soup, a thin sour broth with small fish from the gulf and whatever greens grew by the fence, most nights of the week. I remember liking it. I remember my mother saying that it was good for our brains, and my father declaring it the food of champions and asking for more. I thought we ate fish soup because we were a family that loved fish soup.

We ate it because it was nearly free. I caught some of those fish myself, with the bamboo rod, before school, and thought I was playing.

There is no bitterness in this for me. I want to be clear. I had a happy childhood, and I now know that it was built for me deliberately, by hand, by two people who were frightened and broke and decided that their children would not be able to tell. The joke in the mud was not instead of the grief. It was on top of it. She made the joke on a Tuesday and pawned her mother's gold on a Thursday.

So I must correct what I told you in the first chapter. I said that in our family resilience is made of laughter. That is half of it. The other half is what you do quietly, afterward, when nobody is watching, and never mention again.

The Second Thing: The Letter from Singapore

Below the envelope was a letter, typed, on the stationery of a shipping company in Singapore, dated March 1965. It was addressed to my father. It was from a man who had been his supervisor in his clerking days, who had since risen in the world, and it offered Eduardo Punsalan the position of assistant manager of the firm's Manila-Singapore freight desk, based in Singapore, at a salary that was, I worked out later, about six times what the store was earning.

Stapled to it was a carbon copy of his reply. My father's English was formal when he wrote it. He thanked his old friend with all his heart. He said that the offer honored him more than he could express. And he said, "I regret that I cannot accept. My wife has already crossed one sea for my sake and has made her home among my people. I will not ask her to begin again among strangers a second time. My children are at school and my father is old. I have decided that I am a man who stays."

I read that letter standing up, and then I had to sit down.

You must understand what this meant to me. For twenty-eight years I had carried my leaving like a stone in my shoe. I had told myself that my father could not understand it, because he was a man who had never wanted to go anywhere, a man perfectly content with his store and his guitar and his lane. I thought I had ambitions that he simply did not have. I had, God help me, felt a little sorry for him.

He had stood at exactly the crossroads where I stood. He had the letter in his hand, as I had mine in my shirt pocket. He was thirty-nine, with four children and a debt just barely behind him. And he chose the other road, and then he put the letter in a cookie tin and never spoke of it.

And thirteen years later, when his eldest son came to him on the porch with an envelope from America, he did not say, "I had my chance too, and I gave it up for you." He could have. It would have stopped me. I would never have got on that airplane. He knew that. So he said, "This is exactly the kind of business decision I would make," and he laughed, and he put his hand on the back of my neck.

He kept silent so that his sacrifice would not become my debt. He wanted me to choose with a free hand, as he had. I do not know a greater courtesy that one man can do another. I have tried to do it for you. When Isabel left, and Tala, and Benjie, I thought of that carbon copy, and I kept my own counsel about what it costs.

The Third Thing: The Deed

The third thing was a legal document, four pages, on the long paper that notaries used. It was a deed of absolute sale, dated the fourteenth of August, 1978. It recorded the sale, by Eduardo Punsalan, of a parcel of rice land of two hectares, more or less, inherited from his father Marcelo Punsalan, to a buyer in the next village.

It was Lolo Celo's field. It was the field where I had planted rice with my thumb, where Heneral the carabao had slept in the mud with Monching on his back. It had been in our family for four generations.

August of 1978 was two months before I boarded the airplane.

I had asked my father, more than once, where the money for my passage had come from. He had said, "From the store. Your mother is a genius with a ledger." I had accepted that, because I wanted to. The airfare, the money for the first months, the terrible brown suit, the stone mortar sent for from Medan: it had all been that field.

I looked down the page to the signatures. There was my father's, with its flourish. There was the buyer's. And there, on the line marked for the witness, in a careful young hand, was the name Ramon Punsalan.

Monching was twenty-two that August. I looked across the bed at my brother. He was fifty by then, gray at the temples, with our father's eyebrows. He was looking at the floor.

"You knew," I said.

"He needed a witness from the family," Monching said. "He told me I was not to tell you. Not ever. He said if you knew, you would not go, or you would go and it would be poison to you."

I thought about the photograph on the pier, taken that October. I had always believed my brother was squinting because we had quarreled, because I was leaving him to run the store. I had thought him petty. He was twenty-two years old and he was standing next to me for a photograph, knowing that our grandfather's land had been sold so that I could go, sworn to say nothing, and I was grinning at the camera like a fool in a brown suit.

He had carried that for twenty-eight years. He carried it through every visit home when I arrived with my boxes and my American shoes. He carried it when I did not come in time for our father. He never once threw it at me, not even on the worst night we ever had, and he had every right.

I said, "Monching, I am sorry." It was not enough. He shrugged, which is his way, and said, "It was good land. But it was Papa's to sell." Then he said, "Go on, then," and I understood for the first time what he had meant by it at the airport.

I will tell you what I did about that field. I could not leave it. In 2007 I went to the family that had bought it and asked to buy it back. They said no, politely. I asked again in 2009. In 2011 the old man died and his sons, who had jobs in Manila and no wish to plant rice, agreed. I paid a good deal more than it was worth, and I have never spent money with more satisfaction.

I did not put it in my own name. I had no right to it. It is held in the names of the six of you, jointly: Paolo, Isabel, Miguel, Tala, Rahma, and Benjie. Monching's family farms it and keeps the harvest. You cannot sell it without all six signatures, and I chose that on purpose, knowing you, so that it will never be sold. You are, each of you, the owner of one sixth of two hectares of excellent mud. Go and stand in it at least once. Take off your shoes.

The Fourth Thing: The Ledger

At the very bottom of the tin, under everything, was a stack of school notebooks, the cheap kind with a multiplication table printed on the back cover. There were nine of them, held together with a rubber band that crumbled when Dewi touched it.

I opened the first. It was my mother's handwriting, the small upright soldiers I knew from the store ledger. It was ruled into columns, like accounts. The first column was a date. The second was a place. The third was a list.

The first entry read: October 1978. Airplane. Chicken, bread roll, a small salad he did not finish, coffee.

The second: October 1978. Daly City, house of Isidro. Rice, fried fish, sour soup. He cried a little, he says from the steam.

I turned the pages. February 1979. Albuquerque. Eggs with red and green chile sauce, two plates. March 1979. He has made rendang for the landlady. It took five hours. She said a grandmother is in it. Then, underlined once: He ground it by hand.

Do not write to me that you are fine, she had said at the airport. Write to me what you ate.

I had done it. For twenty-eight years, in every letter, and later on every telephone call, I had told my mother what I ate. I thought it was a small ritual between us, a private joke, a way of filling the awkward first minute. She had written down every word. Nine notebooks. Twenty-eight years of her son's dinners, in columns, with the dates. When I had written that I ate standing up, there was a small mark in the margin. When I had skipped a meal there was a longer mark. In 1985, the entry for the green chile stew I cooked for a schoolteacher named Elena was followed by a single word in Indonesian that I had to ask a cousin to translate. It means "at last."

In 1998 and 1999, the years I was hiding the failing business from my wife, the entries get short. Sandwich. Sandwich. Coffee only. Beside one of them she had written: Something is wrong. He will not say. I had told my mother nothing. I had lied cheerfully to her for a year, across eight thousand miles of ocean, and she had read the truth off a list of sandwiches.

This was the thing that undid me. Not the gold, not the land. I sat on my parents' bed with those notebooks in my lap and wept like a child, and my brother and sisters let me.

I had believed that I left her. I believed that for half my life. But she had never let me go at all. She had found the one thread that could stretch across an ocean without breaking, and she had held her end of it every day for twenty-eight years. She could not see my face or touch my forehead for fever. So she built an instrument out of the only data she could get, and she read it more accurately than any doctor.

* * *

There was one thing more, which I nearly missed. When Dewi turned the empty tin over to shake out the dust, we saw that something was written on the inside of the lid, in pencil, in my mother's hand. It said, in Pangasinan: For the four of you. Open it together. Do not quarrel.

She had known we would find it. She had arranged the contents, I am now certain, in the order she meant them to be read, with the notebooks at the bottom so that we would come to them last. My mother never told us these things in her life. But she did not intend them to die with her either. She simply chose her moment, as she chose every word, and her moment was the one afternoon when she could be sure that all four of her children would be sitting on the same bed.

We did not quarrel. Cora took the pawn tickets, because she was the one who understood them first. Dewi took the letter from Singapore; she says it explains our father to her. Monching kept the deed, which was his by right of having carried it. And I was given the nine notebooks, and brought them home in my hand luggage, and held them on my knees across the Pacific.

Those were the four things. I have had eighteen years to think about them.

My parents were not simple people. I grew up believing that my father was a cheerful man without a care and my mother was a quiet woman without a wish. The truth was that he was a man who had given up a great deal and decided never to make anyone pay for it, and she was a woman who had given up more and kept an exact account, not of what she was owed, but of how we were.

I do not think they were right to hide all of it. I have told you in this book that I believe in confessing early. I wish I had known about the field before I spent my first American paycheck on a record player. I wish I had been able to thank my father for it to his face. That silence cost something too.

But I understand the love in it. And so I have made my own choice, which is to tell you everything. That is what this book is. It is my cookie tin, opened while I am still alive to answer your questions. You will not have to sit on my bed after I am gone, reading my handwriting, wishing you could ask what I meant.

Ask me now. I am usually awake by five.

Chapter 9: The Scar Tissue Chronicles

I have been funny at you for eight chapters. I am aware of it. Humor is the family trade, and I am good at it, and it is also, I have come to understand, a very fine place to hide. A man who can make a room laugh at his blunders is seldom asked about the ones that are not amusing.

A doctor once explained scar tissue to me. He said it is not the same as the flesh it replaces. It is tougher and less flexible, and it has no feeling in it. But it is what closes the wound, and without it you would not have lived to complain about the scar. I have three or four of those that are not on my shin. I am going to show them to you now, plainly, without jokes, because I promised you a survival manual, and you cannot navigate by a map that leaves off the rocks.

Luz

I told you that I left a young woman named Luz Aquino on a sea wall in Dagupan in 1978, with a promise to send for her or come back in two years. I told you she asked me whether I was asking her to wait or telling her that I was going, and that I said they were the same thing.

For the first year I wrote to her every two weeks. Long letters. I described the snow and the red earth and the chile. She wrote back in a small neat hand about her pupils and her mother's health, and at the end of each letter she asked, lightly, whether I had any news about plans.

I never had any news about plans. That is the truth of it. I had plans for my thesis. I had plans for the summer. I had not made a single inquiry about what it would take to bring a wife to America, because some part of me knew what I had not admitted, which was that I had already gone, and that the life I was building did not have her in it. I was not in love with someone else. It was worse than that. I was in love with the leaving.

A decent man would have written and said so. I did not. I did the cowardly thing, which is the thing that feels kindest at the time. I let the letters get shorter. Every two weeks became every month. I blamed my studies. I let six weeks go by, then eight. I told myself that I was sparing her, that it would fade naturally, that she would understand without my having to say it. What I was sparing was myself, the discomfort of one hard letter.

In the spring of 1981 my mother wrote, in her usual sideways fashion, at the end of a paragraph about the price of rice, that the Aquino girl had married a pharmacist from Urdaneta, and that it had been a nice wedding. That was how I learned that I was released from a promise I had never had the courage either to keep or to break.

I did not see Luz again until 2006, at my mother's wake. She came with her husband. She was a grandmother by then, gray and composed. She took both my hands and said she was sorry about my mother, who had always been kind to her. And then, because she was a better person than I was, she said, "I waited three years, Lalo. You could have saved me two of them with one page."

I said that I knew, and that I was sorry, and that I had been sorry for twenty-five years. She nodded. She said, "Good," and went to sit with Cora.

Here is what I want you to take from it. When you know that the answer is no, say no. Say it early and say it yourself. Silence is not gentle. It only hands the other person the work of ending it and the burden of wondering what they did. I have seen some of you do this to people, with your unanswered messages and your slow fading away. You have a word for it now. In my day we had no word, but it was the same sin, and it cost a good woman two years of her youth.

Seven Years

I told you that I did not go home until December 1985, seven years after I left, and that I was not proud of the reasons. Here they are.

For the first three years the reason was money, and that was honest. A student's stipend does not stretch to a ticket across the Pacific. But I finished my degree in 1981 and took a salaried job, and by 1982 I could have gone. I did not go in 1982. I did not go in 1983, or in 1984.

I told my family it was work. I told myself the same. The truth had three parts, and I did not look at any of them directly for a long time.

The first part was pride. I had left with a party and a roast pig, the first Punsalan to go to America, and I had it fixed in my head that I must return as a success. I did not yet own a house. I drove a truck with a cracked windshield. Each year I thought, next year I will have more to show them. I was waiting until I was impressive enough to deserve my own mother.

The second part was Luz. I did not want to walk through Dagupan and be looked at by people who knew.

The third part I am least proud of. I was afraid that if I went home, I would not come back. I knew what that kitchen smelled like. I thought that one evening on that porch, with my father's guitar and the frogs starting up, would undo the whole seven years of work it had taken to become someone who could live in the desert. So I stayed away from the people I loved in order to protect a life I had built for the purpose of making them proud. Read that sentence again. It is exactly as foolish as it sounds.

What ended it was a cassette. In the autumn of 1985 my father sent his usual tape. He talked for forty minutes about the store and the neighbors. Then, at the very end, his voice changed. He said, "Lalo. Your mother has stopped asking me when you are coming. For six years she asked every month. Now she does not ask. I thought you should know that this is worse." And the tape ran out.

I bought the ticket the next morning. Do not wait until you are impressive, children. Nobody at home is keeping score but you.

My Father

This is the hard one. I have written it four times.

My father died on the ninth of March, 1994. He was sixty-eight. He had been singing at a neighbor's birthday the night before. He woke early, told my mother he had a pain like a hand squeezing, sat down in his chair on the porch, and was gone before Monching could get the jeep started. It was his heart. It was quick. Everyone has told me that it was quick, as though that were the part I was asking about.

Monching telephoned me. It was four in the afternoon in Santa Fe. I remember that I was standing in the kitchen and that Elena took the pot off the stove without my asking.

Now, here is what I did.

I was, that week, the expert witness for a group of acequia farmers in a water rights hearing before the state. Eleven families, including some of the same men I had dug beside for nine years, were in danger of losing their claim to the ditch. The hearing was set for the eleventh of March. My testimony was the heart of their case. Their lawyer told me, when I called him that evening, that a delay could be requested but might not be granted, and that if it was not, they would very likely lose.

I told Monching I would come in two days. I told him I had to testify first.

There was a long silence on the line. Then my brother said, "He is your father." I said, "I know. Two days. Wait for me." He said they would keep the wake as long as they could.

I testified. I was good. I was on the stand for five hours and the families kept their water. I am told there are grandchildren irrigating those fields today.

And while I was on the stand a spring storm came down out of Colorado. By the time I reached Albuquerque that evening, the airport was closed. It stayed closed until the next afternoon. I missed my connection in Los Angeles, and the next flight to Manila with a seat was a day after that. I sat in airport chairs for the better part of two days in the suit I had worn to court.

In our country, as you know, we keep our dead at home, and we wait. The family will hold a wake for a week or more so that the children overseas can arrive. Monching held it for seven days. On the seventh day the priest and the heat and my mother's exhaustion decided the matter, and they buried my father in the churchyard beside Lolo Celo, with the brass band, down to three men now, playing their three songs.

I arrived at the house on the morning of the eighth day. I came up the lane with my suitcase and saw the chairs being stacked, and the awning coming down, and I knew.

My mother was sitting on the porch, in his chair. She looked at me. She did not say anything unkind. She never in her life said anything unkind to me. She said, "You are tired. Have you eaten?" I wish she had struck me.

I went to the churchyard alone. The earth was still raw. I am not going to tell you what I said there.

I have had thirty years to argue this case with myself, and I have argued both sides brilliantly. Eleven families. Their grandchildren. He would have told me to stay and finish the job; he said "build something." The storm was nobody's fault. All of that is true. And none of it touches the plain fact, which is that my father was dead, and there was one thing left that a son could do for him, which was to stand there, and I decided that something else was more urgent. I chose a meeting. It was an important meeting. They are always important.

Three weeks after I returned to Santa Fe, a letter came from Monching. It was the only letter he has ever written me. It was one page. It said that he had stood at the door of the house for seven days telling every neighbor and cousin that his brother the engineer was on his way. It said that he had closed our father's eyes and washed him and chosen the coffin and paid the band. And it said: "You send boxes. You have always sent very good boxes. We did not need a box. We needed you to carry one corner."

I did not answer it for four months, because there was no answer.

What I did, in the end, was the only thing I could think of. In February 1995 I closed my desk and went home for six weeks, for the first anniversary, when the year of mourning ends. I did not bring a box. I worked in the store. I opened it at five in the morning and I carried sacks of rice and I did what Monching told me, and I slept in my old bed in the room we had shared. For the first two weeks he barely spoke to me. In the third week he began to complain about my stacking, and I knew we would be all right. On the anniversary we went to the churchyard together, and afterward we sat on the porch and he poured two glasses of gin and said, "Papa would have told the judge a joke and left for the airport." I said, "I know." He said, "You have too much of Mama in you. You stay to finish the ledger." It was the kindest thing he could have said. He meant it as an insult.

Twelve years later, when my mother began to fail, I did not wait to be telephoned. Cora said, in passing, on an ordinary call, that Mama was sleeping a great deal. I was on an airplane in four days. I was there for three weeks before she died, and I was holding her hand, and so was Monching, and we each carried a corner.

That is the lesson, and I paid a great deal for it, so please take it at a discount. There will always be a hearing. There will always be eleven families and a deadline and a very good reason. The work will make its case with numbers. The people you love will not make a case at all. They will only ask if you have eaten. When you get the telephone call, go to the airport. Send your apologies from the gate.

Elena

I have said very little in this book about my wife, and you may have noticed. It is not because there is little to say. It is because she is the part of my life that I find it hardest to make into a story.

You knew her, most of you, as Tita Elena, the small woman with the loud laugh who sent you birthday cards in three languages and taught Miguel to make tortillas. She was Don Eusebio Baca's granddaughter. She laughed at my blistered hands on the bank of a ditch in March of 1985, and I spent the next two years finding reasons to drive to that village. We were married in June 1987, in the old adobe church there, with my father telling the story of the forty-two forms to a hundred people who had never heard of Medan, and my mother and Elena's grandmother seated together at the head table, comparing chile without a language in common.

We had twenty-nine years. We wanted children. I told you at the beginning of this book that I never had a son or a daughter, and I said it lightly. It was not light. It did not happen for us, and there came a year when we understood that it was not going to. We grieved that together and then we stopped speaking of it, and we poured what we had into her second-graders and into the six of you. If you ever wondered why your aunt in America remembered the name of every one of your teachers, that is why.

She died in February 2016. It was an illness, and it was not quick, and I will leave it there. I was with her. I had learned that much.

What I want to confess to you is what I did afterward, because I did it to you.

I went silent. I had built a whole theory of life around laughing at misfortune, and it failed me completely. There was nothing in that house to laugh at. I stopped answering the telephone. I let the family chat pile up unread. Benjie, you sent me a message every Sunday for a year, a photograph or a joke or just "Tito?", and I did not answer one. Cora wrote to me on paper, as she does when she is serious, and I put the envelopes in a drawer unopened. I told myself that I did not want to be a burden. I was sixty-two years old, and I was putting it back in the drawer again, exactly as I had with the culvert and the bank letters and Luz. It turns out a man can learn a lesson three times and still fail the fourth examination.

It was Monching who ended it. In March 2017 there was a knock at my door in Santa Fe at seven in the morning. My brother was standing on the step. He was sixty years old. He had never been on an airplane in his life. He had flown for twenty hours, changed in two airports where he could not read half the signs, and taken a shuttle bus up from Albuquerque with a duffel bag and a plastic container of dried fish that had somehow passed customs.

I said, "What are you doing here?"

He said, "Carrying a corner." Then he looked past me into the house and said, "It smells like nobody cooks in here. Where is Mama's stone?"

He stayed five weeks. He complained about the cold, the dryness, the altitude, the chile, and my stacking of the dishes. He made fish soup. We sat in the evenings and did not talk much. On his last night he said, "You came home and carried rice for me. Did you think I had forgotten?"

So that is the last thing in the scar tissue chronicles, and it is not really a mistake. It is a correction. I told you that our family's resilience is made of laughter, and then I told you it is also made of what you do quietly afterward. There is a third part. Sometimes you cannot laugh, and you cannot do anything at all. When that day comes, the resilience is not in you. It is in the person who gets on the airplane. Let them in. And when it is your turn to be the one on the step, with a bag in your hand, do not telephone first to ask whether it is convenient.

Chapter 10: The Unwritten Map for the Next Generation

When I was a young engineer I believed in maps. I believed that if you surveyed carefully enough, and drew accurately enough, you could set down on paper everything a person needed to cross a piece of country. I spent the first half of my career making such maps, and the second half learning what they leave out.

A map will show you the arroyo. It will not show you the cloud twenty miles upstream. It will show you the ditch, and not the three hundred years of arguments that keep the water running in it. The most important things about any piece of ground are known only to the people who have walked it, and they are passed along by mouth, on a ditch bank, over a plate of beans.

So I cannot give you a map of your lives. Nobody can, and you should be suspicious of anyone who offers. Your country is not my country. I have never had to raise a child, or find work in a world where a machine can write a letter, or choose among a hundred possible lives on a screen. What I can give you is what Don Eusebio gave me: the things I learned by walking it. I have collected them here at the end, in no particular order of importance, so that you can find them again without rereading the parts where I am covered in mud.

There are ten. A grandfather of mine would have said that ten is too many and that a man who cannot say it in three has not thought hard enough. But I am an engineer and I like a margin of safety.

One. Write what you ate.

My mother's instruction at the airport is the best advice in this book, and it was hers, not mine. Do not tell the people you love that you are fine. "Fine" is a door closing. Tell them one true small thing about your day: what you had for lunch, what the weather was doing, the name of the dog downstairs. A life is made of Tuesdays, and you cannot love someone from a summary. Those of you who live far apart, send each other your Tuesdays. Photographs of your dinner are perfectly acceptable. Your grandmother would have filled a notebook with them.

Two. Tell on yourself, and do it early.

You have now read about a hand let go at a fiesta, an undersized culvert, a failing business hidden for a year, and a silence after a death. They are the same mistake wearing four different hats. Each time, the thing itself was survivable. What did the harm was the drawer.

So here is the rule. When you have done something wrong, or something has gone wrong that you cannot fix, you have about one night to decide who you are. Go to the person who needs to know, standing up, before they find out. Say it in one sentence, without the explanation. The explanation can come later, if anyone asks for it. You will be amazed how often the person across the desk turns out to be a Harold Kessler. And on the occasions when they are not, you will still be someone you can stand to share a room with, which is not a small thing over seventy years.

Three. Make your apologies expensive.

When I stole Aling Pacing's mangoes, my mother did not make me say sorry. She spent five hours and the family's meat making a dish I had to carry next door with a bleeding leg, and then I swept a yard for two months. When I failed my brother, I did not write him a beautiful letter. I carried rice.

An apology is not a feeling you have. It is a cost you bear. If it costs you nothing, the other person knows it, and they are right to remain unimpressed. Find out what was lost and put back as much of it as you can, with your own hands, and leave the speeches out.

Four. When you know the answer is no, say no.

I took two years of a good woman's life because I could not write one hard page. Do not fade away from people. Do not let your silence do your talking. If you are leaving a job, a friendship, or a love, say so in words, kindly and promptly, and let them be angry with you. Their anger is a far smaller thing than their waiting.

Five. Take the shovel.

Before you improve anything, find out what it is for, and find out from the people who have been keeping it alive. This goes for ditches. It also goes for companies, marriages, in-laws, old neighborhoods, and the way your mother has always arranged her kitchen. The young and educated are forever arriving with slides. I was one of them. If someone older and poorer than you asks whether you have ever cleaned a ditch, the correct answer is, "No. When do we start?"

Six. Get in on the joke.

You are going to make a fool of yourself. You will do it at work, at a wedding, in a language you only half speak, and very probably on the internet where it will be preserved forever. When it happens you will have a moment, no longer than a breath, in which you can either go stiff with dignity or bow and say, "It was a great surprise to me also."

Bow. Every time. Lolo Celo lost thirty-two pesos and a goat and got forty years of dinner invitations out of it. The loss is the same either way. The only thing you decide is who owns the story afterward, and it had better be you.

But remember what I learned from the cookie tin, which is that laughter is the top layer and not the whole structure. Make the joke on Tuesday. Then, on Thursday, quietly, do the hard thing that the joke was covering for.

Seven. Go to the airport.

When the telephone call comes, go. Do not finish the hearing. Do not wait for a better fare. There will always be eleven families depending on you and they will always be real. Go anyway, and apologize from the departure gate.

And do not save your traveling for the funerals. I have crossed that ocean more often for the dead than for the living, and it is exactly backward. Go for the weddings. Go for the graduations and the baptisms and the ordinary Christmases. Go for no reason. The people you love should not have to die to get a visit from you.

Eight. Be someone's steps.

A child does not love the person who sends the box. A child loves the person who sits on the steps and peels the mango and is in no hurry. There are small people in this family now, and more coming, who do not know you yet. Some of you are aunts and uncles already, and one day you will be the eccentric elder in a far country that they are told to telephone.

Do it better than I did. Learn the names of their teachers. Ask them to explain their accounts to you. Let them stall your truck. And when they tell you, at twenty-three, at a Christmas table, that they have taken a job on the other side of the world, be the one voice on the line that says, "Go on, then."

Nine. Learn one dish from each shore.

I am serious about this. Every one of you is to learn to make your grandfather Beto's adobo and your grandmother Nia's rendang, properly, the long way, by hand. I have written out both recipes and given them to Rahma, who will not let you take shortcuts.

It is not about the food. Your grandmother sent a stone mortar across an ocean in a suitcase of underwear because she knew that on the worst night of my first winter I would have nothing left of home but what my hands remembered. You are going to have such nights. Everyone does. When yours comes, I want you to be able to stand in whatever kitchen you find yourself in, in whatever country, and make the room smell like the house with the tin roof.

And when you cook these dishes for someone you love who comes from somewhere else, as most of you will, let them put their own chile in it. Elena's grandmother put red chile from Chimayó in my mother's rendang at our wedding supper, and my mother tasted it for a long time and then asked for the recipe. It was the nearest thing to a truce the cold war ever saw, and it took two grandmothers to arrange it.

Ten. Come home and tell us about it.

This is the last one and it is Lolo Celo's. Things get away from you. Goats, land, years, people. That is not the important part. The important part is that you come home, wherever home has got to by then, and sit down at the table, and tell the rest of us what happened.

I mean this exactly. I want you to tell each other the truth about your lives. Not the version for strangers. Tell each other about the jobs you lost and the marriages that are difficult and the money that ran out. You are scattered across four continents and you will be tempted, every one of you, to send home only the good photographs. Do not. We are a family that pawned the gold and made a joke about dusting. We can take it. We have always been able to take it. What we cannot take is not being told.

* * *

You will notice some things I have left off the list. I have given you no advice about money, because you have read Chapter 6 and know better than to take any from me. Ask your Tita Cora, who inherited the ledger. I have given you none about faith. Your grandparents managed two under one tin roof for forty-two years by the simple method of respecting each other and not discussing it with the neighbors, and I have nothing to add to that. And I have given you none about whom to love or whether to marry or have children. On those questions an old man's opinion is worth exactly what you paid for this book.

I should also warn you that some of what I have written is probably wrong. I do not know which parts. If I did, I would have taken them out. Lolo Celo was certain that goat had weak knees. Use your own eyes. Where my advice and your own experience disagree, trust the experience, and write me a letter explaining where I went astray, so that I can enjoy the argument.

That is the map, such as it is. Now there are a few practical matters, and then I will let you go.

The first is the rope. The eight inches of chewed hemp that your great-grandfather carried home from a footbridge in June of 1968 is in the top drawer of this desk, in the cigar box it came in. By his instruction it goes to the first one who goes somewhere. I have decided that this now means the next one. Whichever of you, or of your children, is the next to pack two suitcases and leave for a place the family has never been, the rope goes with them. Paolo is to keep it in the meantime, since he is the eldest and the one who stayed, and those who stay should hold the things that are waiting.

The second is the field. You own it. I have told you. Go and stand in it.

The third is the cobek, which is Rahma's, and the cassettes, which are Benjie's because he is the only one patient enough to copy them onto whatever comes after the telephone, and the photograph on the pier, which is to go back to the house with the tin roof and hang in the front room, where your Tito Monching can squint at it.

The fourth is the Corner Fund. I have never been good with money, as you know, but I have been careful for the last twenty years, and there is some. Most of it I have put into one account with one purpose. It pays for airplane tickets. If any member of this family, anywhere, needs to get to a funeral, a wedding, a birth, a sickbed, or simply home, and cannot afford the fare, the fund pays it, and nobody is to ask them why or to be paid back. Paolo and Tala hold the signatures, one who stayed and one who left. I have named it for what your Tito Monching said on my doorstep. I missed carrying a corner once, for the sake of a meeting and an airline schedule. None of you is ever to miss one for the sake of a fare.

The fifth is me. I have given this some thought, as a man does at seventy who lives alone at altitude. I have lived in the green and I have lived in the red, and I belong to both. So I wish to be divided, as I have been all along. Half of my ashes are to stay here, under the piñon tree on the hill above the village near Chimayó where Elena is, within sound of the ditch. The other half are to go home. Take them out on the Lingayen Gulf in a banca at sunrise, when the boats are coming in, and put them in the water where I used to stand with a bamboo rod.

Do not be solemn about it. If the wind changes and I blow back into the boat, which given my history is likely, I expect at least one of you to say that I clearly lacked discipline.

* * *

It is nearly dark now. I have been at this desk since noon. The mountains behind me have gone through their colors and settled into black, and there is one light on in the valley, somebody's kitchen. In an hour I will go into mine. I am going to make rice, my mother's way, dry, each grain its own citizen. I will tell you about it in the group chat.

I look at the photograph on the wall. Four young people on a pier, in a light so thick you could wring it out. I know now what each of them was carrying that day. The girl at the end is laughing because her father is pretending to fall into the sea. The girl beside her is refusing to cry. The boy who is squinting has just witnessed the sale of his grandfather's land and been sworn to silence. And the one in the middle, with the ridiculous collar, knows nothing at all. He thinks he is leaving. He does not know that his mother has already tied a thread to him that will hold for twenty-eight years, that his father has already paid for the ticket with a silence, that his brother is already carrying his corner. He does not know yet that he will lose them, and fail them, and be forgiven by them. He does not know that he will end up richer than any of them imagined that day, with six heirs on four continents and two hectares of mud.

For a long time I looked at that picture and saw a desertion. I look at it now and I see something else. I see a family practicing. We were practicing how to be far apart. My mother had done it first, and she taught the rest of us without ever saying that it was a lesson. We turned out to be very good at it.

So here is my whole inheritance, children, in one sentence, and you may forget everything else in this book. I made the mistakes so you don't have to. But you will make them anyway, new ones, splendid ones, and when you do, come home and tell us about it.

Now go and call your mother. Tell her what you ate.

With all my love, and a little red dust,

Your Tito Lalo

Santa Fe, New Mexico, autumn 2024