Tabios, With the S

The Knife on the Nail

The frost cloth goes on after dark, and it goes on the way Apong says, or it does not go on at all.

"Not like a bedsheet," he tells me from the back step. He is wearing two cardigans, one buttoned over the other, and a knit cap my sister brought him from a hospital gift shop with a cartoon pelican on it. "Like a sail. Leave room. The leaves need to breathe or they cook themselves."

The tree is a malunggay, which my coworkers at the dealership in Lodi call moringa when they see it in the grocery store in powder form, in little plastic tubs that cost eleven dollars. In my grandfather's backyard in south Stockton it is a ten-foot stick with feathery branches, grown from a seed that came across the Pacific in the pocket of a cousin's barong in 1979. It should not survive here. The Central Valley gets tule fog in January and a hard frost every few weeks in February, and a malunggay is a tree for places where the ground never goes white. But it has survived forty-seven winters, because every one of those winters somebody in this family has gone out with old sheets, then with burlap, and now with the white frost cloth I buy at the farm supply store, and wrapped it.

For most of my life that somebody was Apong. Now it is me.

I build the sail. Four bamboo poles at the corners, the cloth tied at the top so it tents, a brick on each corner at the bottom. In the porch light the whole thing glows like a small ghost standing in the dirt beside the chain-link fence. Apong watches every move and says nothing until I am finished, which is how I know I did it right.

"Okay," he says. "Now it can sleep."

He is one hundred and four years old. He was born in February of 1922 in a barangay in the hills east of Laoag, in Ilocos Norte, in a house with a floor of split bamboo that you could see the chickens through. He was a Philippine Scout in the United States Army before the Second World War started, and he was on Bataan when it ended for the men who were there. After the war he came here, to Stockton, to a neighborhood that does not exist anymore, and he bent over in the asparagus fields of the Delta for thirty-one seasons, and in the summers he went north to the salmon canneries in Alaska, and he married a Mexican girl from the south side named Chela Ybarra whose family thought he was too old and too dark and too quiet, and who stayed married to him for fifty-four years.

He tells it shorter than that. If you ask him what he did with his life, he says, "I cut grass." He means asparagus. He has a joke that asparagus is only a grass that somebody decided to charge money for.

---

Inside, the kitchen smells of menthol rub and garlic rice. My Tita Perla is at the table with her folder.

Everyone in the family knows the folder. It is a red accordion file with an elastic cord, the kind a lawyer carries, and it has lived on my aunt's lap or in her car for nine years now. In it are copies of every piece of paper that has ever had my grandfather's name on it: his naturalization certificate, his discharge, two pay stubs from a cannery in Naknek, his marriage license, a letter from the Veterans Administration from 1991 that says, in three paragraphs, that they are unable to locate a record, and a stack of forms with sticky notes on every page in my aunt's tidy capitals. She was a clerk in the county recorder's office for thirty years. She understands paper the way Apong understands frost.

"They wrote back," she says when I sit down.

"Who did?"

"The committee. The medal people." She slides a printout to me. "They want a corrected service number or a second sworn statement from someone who served with him. One or the other."

"He's a hundred and four," I say. "Everyone who served with him is—"

"I know what everyone is, Nonoy." She uses the name Apong gave me, which only she and he still use. It means something like *little boy*, and I have been taller than everyone in this kitchen since eighth grade.

The medal is the Congressional Gold Medal, which Congress awarded in 2017 to Filipino and American soldiers who served in the Philippines during the Second World War. There is one gold medal in a museum in Washington. The families get bronze copies, three inches across, in a box, at ceremonies that happen in community halls and veterans' buildings wherever the men or their children happen to live. Tita Perla started the application the month the law passed. Most of the men it honored had already died. The ones still living were in their nineties, and the volunteers who ran the program were trying to find them before it was too late, going through church bulletins and obituaries and old lodge rosters, calling numbers that had been disconnected for years.

They found Apong easily enough. The problem was not finding him. The problem was proving him.

"It's the name," Tita Perla says. She has explained this to me before, but she explains it again, because explaining is how she keeps from getting angry. "When Bataan fell, the units burned their own rosters so the Japanese couldn't use them. After the war the Army put the lists back together from memory and from whatever survived. Somebody typed him as *Tabio, Severiano*. No S on the end. Extra A in the middle. And two numbers transposed in the serial."

"So he's in there."

"Somebody is in there. Somebody who doesn't exist, with a service number that belongs to nobody. And my father, who does exist, isn't."

From the living room comes the sound of the television, a Filipino channel through the satellite box, a variety show where the hosts shout at each other affectionately. Apong does not watch it. He likes the sound in the house. He is in his chair beside the heater with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his stomach, and he could be asleep, but he is not, because when Tita Perla says *doesn't exist* he says, without opening his eyes:

"I exist. Tell them I am in the kitchen."

---

On the wall of the garage there is a nail, and on the nail there is a knife.

I go out to look at it before I leave, the way I have since I was small. It is an asparagus knife: a steel shaft about as long as my forearm, with a wooden handle worn pale and smooth where his palm held it, and at the far end a flat chisel blade with a notch cut in it like a fish's tail. You push it down into the dirt beside the spear at an angle and twist, and the spear comes up clean, cut below the ground where it is white and tender. You do that a few thousand times a day. You do it bent at the waist, walking, because if you kneel you are too slow and if you stand you cannot reach.

When I was nine I asked him why he kept it.

"So I remember to stand up straight," he said.

I did not understand that for a long time. Now that I am twenty-eight and fix tractors for a living and know what it does to a body to spend the day folded over an engine bay, I understand it a little.

The garage also holds his old Ford pickup, which nobody drives, and four plastic bins of my grandmother's Christmas decorations, and a bandurria in a hard case on the top shelf that I have never once heard him play. Beside the door there is a calendar from a Filipino grocery on Charter Way, still turned to the month my grandmother died.

---

The recordings started because of my sister.

Liezl is a nurse at the county hospital in French Camp. Two years ago, when Apong had pneumonia and spent eleven days there, she came home after a night shift and sat on the end of my bed in the apartment we were sharing then and said, "Nolan, he's going to die and we don't have his voice."

"We have videos."

"We have videos of him blowing out candles. We have him saying *okay, okay, enough*. That's not his voice."

So I bought a small digital recorder, the kind journalists use, silver, with a clip on the back. I clip it to his cardigan when he's in the mood and I ask him questions. Sometimes he answers them. More often he answers some other question, one I didn't ask, from sixty or eighty years ago, and I let him go. When I get home I move the files over and put them where the whole family can hear them, labeled with the date and where we were sitting and what he was wearing, because Liezl says that matters later.

There are forty-one recordings now. The longest is an hour and twelve minutes. The shortest is nine seconds; it is him saying, in Ilocano, a sentence that none of us understood until a cousin in the province translated it as *the rice is burning, why is nobody watching the rice*.

Tonight before I leave I go back into the living room and crouch beside his chair.

"Apong. You want to talk tomorrow?"

He opens one eye. "About the paper."

"About anything."

"The paper is about my name," he says. "So we talk about my name."

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room, the chair by the heater. February. He is wearing the pelican cap.*

Severino. That is my name. Not Severiano. Severiano is a different man. Maybe he is a good man, I don't know him.

My mother named me for the day. In the old way you look at the calendar of the saints, the one that hangs in every house, and you take the name of the day the baby comes. So I am a day in February. My sister Loniang, she was a day in February also, two years later. Our mother said she was tired of thinking.

Tabios is from my father. His father, his father. In Ilocano we say the name is the house you carry. You can lose the land, you can lose the carabao. The name you carry on your back.

At Fort McKinley, the first day, the sergeant reads the list. He says, *Tabio*. I don't answer. He says it again, louder. I don't answer. He comes and stands like this, in front of my face. I say, Sir, there is no Tabio here. There is Tabios. With the S. The S is my grandfather.

He made me run around the field. Two times. But after that he said it right.

So I don't know who wrote it wrong after. Somebody who never met my grandfather.

Lafayette and El Dorado

Saturday, I take him downtown.

Getting Apong into my truck is a process with eleven steps, and he narrates each one as if he is teaching it to a new hire. The walker to the curb. The walker folded. The left hand on the grab handle above the door. The right foot on the running board, which I installed for him last year, chrome, from a parts catalog. The count of three, which is in Ilocano, *maysa, dua, tallo*, and which he expects me to say with him. Then the lift, which is mostly me and partly him, and then he is in the seat, breathing like a man who has climbed a hill, and pulling the seatbelt across himself with a look that says he would have done it all alone if I had not been in the way.

"Where," he says.

"Lafayette Street. You said you wanted to see it."

"I said that?"

"Last week. On the recording."

He thinks about this. "Then I want to see it."

---

Stockton sits at the end of a ship channel that runs seventy-some miles inland from the Golden Gate, which surprises people who think of it as a farm town. The port is to the west, with its cranes and grain elevators and the long white sheds where my father worked as a longshoreman for thirty-four years. The Delta spreads out beyond that, a thousand miles of levees and sloughs and peat islands that sit below the level of the water around them, and that is where the asparagus grew, and still grows, though less of it now.

Downtown is a grid of older brick and newer parking lots. We drive east on Charter Way and north on El Dorado, and at Lafayette Street I pull over beside a curb with dry grass growing out of the cracks.

The Crosstown Freeway is above us. It is a concrete ribbon on round pillars, four lanes, the traffic on it loud in a flat, steady way, like surf that does not break. Underneath it is shade and chain-link and a few cars parked crooked in the dirt.

"There," Apong says. He points at a pillar.

"What was there?"

"The barbershop. Next to it the pool hall, next to it the restaurant of the Visayan man whose name I forget. Upstairs the hotel. I lived upstairs one winter, the first winter. Room with a sink. Four men. Two beds. We took turns."

He points at the next pillar.

"Dance hall. Taxi dance. Ten cents a dance, the girls. We were not supposed to go, the old men said, waste of money. Everybody went." He moves his finger. "Over there, the Chinese store. Over there, the hall where the lodge met. Over there, I don't know. Something. A shoe repair."

For most of the twentieth century, from the 1920s on, this was the biggest community of Filipinos anywhere outside the Philippines. People called it Little Manila. The young men who came over before the war, thousands of them, most of them Ilocano like my grandfather, worked the crops in the Delta and the valley in a circuit that followed the seasons, and in the winter, when there was no field work, they came back here, to these few blocks around Lafayette and El Dorado, where there were hotels with rooms they could afford and restaurants that cooked their food and barbers who cut their hair the way they wanted it cut. They wore sharp suits on Sunday, the old pictures show it, wide-shouldered, double-breasted, two-tone shoes. They were called manong, which means older brother, and later, when they were old men and still bachelors because the law and the times had made it almost impossible for them to marry, everybody's older brother.

In the 1960s and 70s the city cleared most of the neighborhood for redevelopment and the freeway. The hotels came down. The barbershops came down. The people scattered, to the south side and the east side and the suburbs, and the pillars went in.

There are a few buildings left. A woman from the historic-site group walked my class through them on a field trip when I was in fifth grade, and I remember being bored, and I remember the brick, and I remember that she cried a little in front of us at the end and I didn't know why.

"I was ten," I tell Apong. "When I came here with school. Why didn't you ever bring me?"

He watches a pickup truck pull out from under the freeway and drive off with a mattress in the bed.

"Nothing to see," he says.

---

That night, at my apartment, I open the map.

It's one my aunt began and I have been adding to. It shows the whole world in that soft colorless way, oceans gray, land beige, and on it are pins for every place my grandfather lived, worked, served, or stood long enough to remember. Each pin can hold a few lines of text and a photo and a recording. When you zoom out you can see the shape of his life as a constellation spread across a Pacific that he crossed three times by ship and four times by air.

There's a cluster in Ilocos Norte: the barangay, the market town, the school. There's a pin at Fort McKinley, outside Manila, where he trained. There's a dense knot on the peninsula of Bataan. There's a line of pins north up the mountains of the Cordillera where he walked in 1945. And then, on this side, there is Stockton, and the Delta islands, and Naknek, Alaska, and a single pin in Los Angeles that Tita Perla added with a note that just says *1997, the park*.

I drop a new pin at Lafayette and El Dorado, under the freeway. I title it *First winter, 1947*. I attach tonight's recording. In the description field I type what he told me, the barbershop, the pool hall, the Visayan man's restaurant, the room with a sink and four men and two beds.

Then I sit back and look at it for a while.

It's not much of a pin. It's a dot on a concrete shadow. But I think about my kids, whenever I have them, and my sister's daughter Amihan, who is eight months old and has my grandfather's ears. I think about one of them opening this map one night years from now and zooming in on a freeway and finding, under it, a barbershop.

---

The next morning I call my father.

My dad's name is Rogelio. Everybody calls him Boyet. He retired two years ago and has since become a man who power-washes things. Driveways. Fences. Other people's driveways. When I call he is in the middle of power-washing his neighbor's patio, and I can hear the machine going in the background, and he does not turn it off.

"He talked to you about the hotel?" he shouts.

"He said four men, two beds."

"He never told me that."

"Did you ask?"

The washer cuts out. There is a silence on the line long enough that I check to see if we've lost the call.

"You don't understand how it was," my father says. "With him. Growing up. He didn't talk. He came home from the field, he washed, he ate, he went to sleep. Saturday he fixed something. Sunday your Lola took us to her mother's house on the south side and we ate pozole and everybody spoke Spanish and he sat in the corner with a beer and smiled at people. That was him. I thought he was just a quiet guy who cut asparagus."

"He was a Philippine Scout at Bataan."

"I know that now. I knew it then. It was like knowing he had a scar. You don't ask a guy about his scar." The washer starts again. "Anyway. Your aunt says you're recording him."

"Every week."

"Good," he shouts, over the noise. "Good. Somebody should."

He hangs up before I can ask whether he wants to hear any of it.

---

**From the recordings**

*My truck, parked on El Dorado Street under the freeway. A Saturday in February. Engine running for the heater.*

The bus came from San Francisco. I had one suitcase, cardboard, and a paper with the address of my uncle Andres. Uliteg Andres. My father's younger brother. He came here in 1929, before I was in school. All my life he was a photograph on the wall in a white suit, standing by a car. Not his car. Everybody took that picture by somebody's car.

So I get off the bus, it is raining, cold rain, not like home. And there is an old man waiting by the station wearing a big coat. Small man. Bent a little. I think, no, that is not Uliteg Andres, Uliteg Andres wears a white suit.

He says my name. *Severino.* With the S.

I didn't know him until he said it. Twenty years in the fields, that is what happened to the white suit.

He took me to the hotel. Upstairs. He said, Tomorrow you rest. Next day, I take you to the camp. You will hate it. Everybody hates it. After one month you will not hate it, you will only be tired, and tired is better.

He was right. He was always right, that uncle. Except about the Seals. He loved the San Francisco Seals, and they always broke his heart.

The Boy in the Campaign Hat

There is exactly one photograph of my grandfather in uniform, and for most of my childhood I thought it was a picture of someone else.

It is small, the size of a playing card, with a deckled white border. A young man stands in front of a whitewashed wall in khaki shirt and trousers, the shirt pressed so hard the creases look like they could cut paper. On his head is a campaign hat, the wide-brimmed kind with the four dents pinched into the crown that you see on drill sergeants and park rangers. He is not smiling. His chin is up. His ears stick out from under the brim exactly the way my niece's ears stick out from under her sun bonnet.

He looks about sixteen. He was nineteen.

On the back, in pencil that has gone silver, someone wrote *Ft. McKinley, Aug. 1941*. The handwriting is not his.

The photograph lives in my aunt's red folder in a plastic sleeve, and a scan of it lives on the page Tita Perla built for him, which is where most of the family now sees it. The page has his name at the top, spelled correctly, and his dates, the first one filled in and the second one blank. Under that is the photograph, and under that are the other pictures we have of him, which are many, because after 1947 he was photographed at every wedding and baptism and birthday on two sides of a big family. There's a timeline in short entries. There are scans of his discharge and his naturalization and the 1991 letter from the VA. There's a space for the medal, a gray square with a dotted border, that has been empty since Tita Perla made the page in 2018.

"I keep thinking I should take that square off," she tells me. "It's like a chair at the table for somebody who isn't coming."

"He's coming," I say.

"The medal or him?"

We are in her house in Lincoln Village, which is the nice part of north Stockton where the streets curve around little lakes. She lives alone, has since my uncle passed. Her dining room table is covered in paper in tidy stacks, each stack weighted with something: a stapler, a coaster, a cut-glass candy dish with no candy in it.

"Show me where it went wrong," I say.

---

She starts with the Philippine Scouts, because she says I have to understand who they were before I can understand why nobody can find him.

The Scouts were Filipino soldiers in the regular United States Army, she explains, going back to the early 1900s. Not the Philippine Army, which was the Commonwealth's own force. Not the guerrillas, who came later. The Scouts were American regulars with Filipino enlisted men and mostly American officers, and they were good, very good, the best-trained troops in the islands. They wore US Army uniforms. They drew US Army pay, less than the Americans, but a fortune compared to anything a boy could earn in a barangay in Ilocos Norte. Thousands of young men applied for every opening. You had to be fit, and literate, and you had to know someone, or be lucky, or both.

"He was lucky," Tita Perla says. "He says he was lucky. He also says he was the best shot in his town, so."

In 1941 the Army expanded the Scouts as war came closer. My grandfather went in that summer and ended up in the 57th Infantry Regiment at Fort McKinley, outside Manila. In December the Japanese attacked. By January the American and Filipino forces had pulled back into the Bataan peninsula. In April they surrendered.

"And then the paper," she says.

She shows me. Units on Bataan destroyed their own records before the surrender, burned or buried their rosters and files so the enemy couldn't use them. Some of the paper survived in hidden places. Most of it didn't. After the war the Army rebuilt its lists of who had served from what it could find: surviving documents, testimony, the men's own statements when they were processed out. It was a huge job, done quickly, by clerks typing names they had never heard spoken.

"Here." She lays a photocopy on the table. It's a page from a reconstructed roster, columns of names, rank, serial number, status. Two-thirds of the way down, her fingernail rests under a line.

TABIO, SEVERIANO. PVT.

"And here." A different paper, his 1946 discharge, which he kept in a cigar box for forty years. *TABIOS, SEVERINO*. The serial number on the discharge and the serial number on the roster have the same eight digits. In a different order. The fourth and fifth are swapped.

"So the discharge proves it."

"The discharge proves somebody named Severino Tabios was discharged," she says. "The roster proves somebody named Severiano Tabio served on Bataan. What I need is a piece of paper that proves they're the same man. And the first time I sent it in, a nice young person in an office I've never seen wrote back and said the documents were *inconsistent*."

I look at the two papers side by side, the name with the S and the name without, and for the first time I understand that my aunt has spent nine years arguing with a typo.

---

There is another thing about the gray square, and it takes her a while to tell me.

"He didn't want it," she says. "When I started. He said no."

"Why?"

She gets up and makes coffee, which is how Tita Perla stalls. She makes it in a stovetop pot she brought back from a trip to Manila decades ago, and while it gurgles she stands with her back to me.

"You know about the Rescission Act?"

I don't, really. I know the words.

She tells me. In 1946 Congress passed a law that took away the veterans' benefits that had been promised to the soldiers of the Philippine Commonwealth Army and the recognized guerrillas, the men who had been called into American service by President Roosevelt in 1941 and fought under American command. Two hundred thousand men, more. The old Scouts, the regulars, like my grandfather, kept their status. The others didn't. For sixty years the men who'd lost it petitioned and marched and testified and grew old. In 2009 a fund finally paid the survivors a lump sum. By then most of them were dead.

"Some of his friends were Philippine Army," she says. "Some were guerrillas, in the mountains, with him, later. He had the paper and they didn't. He felt..." She pours the coffee. "In '97 he went down to LA on a bus with the old men from the lodge. They stood in a park for a week. Some of them chained themselves to a statue. He didn't chain himself, he was seventy-five and your Lola would have killed him. But he went. He stood there."

"That's the pin on the map. *1997, the park.*"

"That's the pin."

"So when the medal came—"

"He said, give it to them first. The ones who never got anything. When every one of them has one, I'll take mine."

"But they're all—"

"Yes," my aunt says. "That's what I told him. They're all gone, Papa, most of them. And he said, *then their children*."

She sets the coffee in front of me. It's strong enough to strip paint.

"It was a man's granddaughter who changed his mind," she says. "A man named Atong Ulep, from his company. They were on the march together. I'll tell you about her another time. Drink your coffee."

---

Before I leave, I go to the page and look at the photograph again on my phone, the boy in the campaign hat. I zoom in until the grain breaks up into dots. His hands are at his sides, thumbs along the seams of his trousers, exactly the way a drill sergeant would have taught him. There is a smudge on his left cheek that could be a flaw in the print, or dust, or something on his face that day.

I add a caption to the photograph, which until now had none. I write: *He was told to stand still, and he did.*

Then I take it off, because it sounds like something you'd read on a plaque. I write the date and the place instead, and *57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts*, and then, after thinking about it, *Tabios, with the S*.

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room. Late February. Rain all afternoon. He has a cup of ginger tea he is not drinking.*

The test for the Scouts was in Laoag. Many, many boys. Some walked two days to come. They line us up in the school yard and a doctor looks in our mouth like a horse. He listens here, and here. He makes us read from a paper. Then a sergeant makes us run.

I did not think I would be chosen. My shoes were from my cousin, too big. I ran with my feet like this, holding them. But I could read. Our teacher in the barrio was a lady from Vigan who studied in Manila under the Americans. Very strict. She made us read every day out loud, in English, standing up. So I could read better than the town boys. That was why. Not the running.

When they gave me the uniform I did not know how to wear it. The leggings, the hat. A Scout from Batac, older, three years in, he showed me. He said: The hat is the most important. You dent it like this. Four. Like a mountain with four sides. If the dents are not right the sergeant will see it from the end of the field.

The pay was more than my father made from the farm in one year. I sent almost all of it home. My mother bought a carabao. A young one. She named it after me.

I am not joking. She named the carabao Severino. When I came home in 1942 it was big and strong and it did not know me.

Naimbag a Bigat

Here is the full list of Ilocano words I knew on my twenty-eighth birthday.

*Apong*, which is what we call him, and which means grandparent. *Manong* and *manang*, older brother and older sister, which I learned from hearing old men addressed. *Pinakbet* and *dinengdeng* and *bagnet*, because they are food. *Naimas*, delicious, because you say it about food. *Mangan*, to eat, because of food. *Wen*, which means yes, because Apong says it fifty times a day, quietly, under his breath, agreeing with the television or the weather or something he's remembering. And *Nonoy*, which is not even Ilocano, it turns out, it's used all over the Philippines, so I don't get to count it.

That's eight words. Six of them are about eating.

I figured this out in the break room at work, of all places, because one of the younger guys in the parts department, a kid named Efraín whose family is from Oaxaca, was on the phone with his grandmother in Mixtec. He talked to her for ten minutes, easily, laughing, and when he hung up I asked him how he learned it, and he looked at me like I'd asked how he learned to walk.

"She raised me," he said. "My mom worked. What else was she going to talk to me in?"

I drove home that night thinking about who raised me. My mom and dad, in English. My Lola Chela on Sundays, in Spanish and English mixed together, which is why I can order food in Spanish and understand my Mexican cousins' jokes about half the time. And Apong, who for my whole childhood said maybe a hundred words a week to me, all of them English.

I asked him about it the next Saturday.

"Why didn't you teach us?"

He was peeling a mango with a paring knife, in one long spiral, the way he does, so the peel comes away in a ribbon that you could hang on a wall.

"Teach what?"

"Ilocano."

He kept peeling. "Your father went to school in 1966. First day, he says something to the teacher, *wen*, like that. Yes. Teacher puts him in the corner. Your Lola, when she was small, they hit her hand with a ruler for Spanish. She told me this. So we said, okay. English. The children will speak English and nobody will put them in a corner."

"That was a long time ago."

"Yes." The ribbon of peel dropped into the sink. "And then it was too late. A language is like that tree outside. If you don't keep it warm, the frost comes."

---

He agrees to teach me. His conditions are three.

One: we do it at the kitchen table, not the living room, because the kitchen is for work and the living room is for resting.

Two: I am not allowed to write anything down until I can say it right. "If you write first," he says, "you will read it in English and say it in English. The paper lies. Listen to the mouth."

Three: when he is tired, we stop, and I do not argue.

The first lesson is two words. *Naimbag a bigat*. Good morning.

I say it. He winces.

"Again."

I say it again.

"You are saying *big*. Like big truck. It is not big. It is *bi-gat*. And the *a* in the middle is nothing. It is a little door between the words. You walk through it, you don't stop and knock."

I try twenty times. He corrects my vowels, my stress, my *g*, which apparently I make too hard, in the back of my throat like a cough. Somewhere around the fifteenth try, Tita Perla comes in with groceries and stands in the doorway listening, holding a bag of rice on her hip, and she doesn't say anything, but when I glance up her eyes are wet.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing." She puts the rice down. "He used to say that to us. In the morning. Before school. *Naimbag a bigat*. Then he stopped."

"When?"

She looks at Apong. He is studying his hands.

"I don't remember," she says. "Sometime."

---

The tree is open on my laptop when I get home. Not the malunggay. The other one.

My aunt started this one too, years ago, mostly so she could keep my Lola's side straight, because the Ybarras are a large family with four cousins named José. It starts with Apong and my Lola near the middle and branches downward through their three children: my aunt Perla, my father Boyet, and my uncle Ernie, who died in 2015. Then the grandchildren, eight of us. Then the great-grandchildren, which so far is only Amihan, with a little silhouette where her baby picture should go because Liezl hasn't uploaded one she likes.

Upward and to the left, though, the tree does something I hadn't really paid attention to before. It climbs back across the Pacific.

Above Apong are his parents, whose names are Mariano and Basilia, with no photographs and dates that are just years. Beside him is his sister, Apolonia, who stayed in the barangay and kept the land and died in 1999. And down from Apolonia comes a whole second family, people I share blood with and have never met. Her children. Her grandchildren, one of whom, a woman named Rosalina, everybody calls Manang Saling, and who, according to her entry, runs a small store in the same barangay my grandfather was born in. Her son Rodel. His daughter Kristel, fifteen, whose profile picture shows her holding a stringed instrument shaped like a teardrop, smiling hugely, in a white blouse with puffed sleeves.

Two branches. The Stockton one and the Ilocos one. On the screen they connect at a single point, at Apong and his sister, two names side by side, and then they fall away from each other in opposite directions like water parting around a rock.

Somebody in Ilocos has been keeping their side up to date. There are photos from a wedding last year. There is a baby, born in December, a boy, Rodel's son. There's a note on Apolonia's entry, written in English with a few Ilocano words I can't read, that I translate with a dictionary site, slowly. It says, more or less: *She waited for her brother every year. She kept his room. She would not let anyone else sleep in it.*

I read it four times.

Then, before I can lose my nerve, I send a message to Kristel. I keep it short because I don't know what she reads in. I say I'm Severino Tabios's grandson in Stockton. I say I'm trying to learn Ilocano. I say I like her instrument.

At six in the morning my time, which I figure out is ten at night hers, she writes back.

*Naimbag a bigat, Manong Nolan!!! It is a bandurria. I play first bandurria in our school rondalla. Lolo Seve is famous in our barangay. Do you know his room is still here?*

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen table, after the lesson. Early March. The radio is on low, a Stockton station playing oldies.*

The line at Abucay. January. It was the dry season, so the fields were brown, the rice was cut. We dug in along a road and an old irrigation ditch. Sugar cane in front, high. When the wind moved the cane you didn't know if it was the wind.

I will tell you what I can. Not everything. Some things are only for me and the men who were there, and they are all gone, so those things will go when I go. That is okay. That is how it should be.

We held. For many days we held. The Japanese came at night, mostly. We were very tired. Hungry already, because the food was cut to half, then less than half. The Americans were hungry too. Everybody was hungry the same. That I remember. Nobody ate better than anybody.

My friend Doroy, from Dingras, he was next to me in the ditch. He talked all the time. When he was scared he talked more. He told me about his girl, about her mother's cooking, about the rooster he had that won eleven fights. Every night a different rooster story. I said, Doroy, how many roosters do you have? He said, only one, but he is a busy rooster.

We laughed. In that place. You laugh, or you can't stay.

On the ninth day, maybe the tenth, they told us to pull back. We pulled back. We left the ditch. I carried his rifle part of the way because his hands were shaking. I never told anybody that. Now I told you.

Bending Season

The asparagus comes up in the Delta in late February, when the peat soil warms, and it comes up fast, so fast that in a hot week a spear can grow seven inches in a day. A field has to be cut every morning, every single morning, from the end of winter until early summer, or the spears open into ferns and are worth nothing. That is the whole economy of it. The plant does not wait. You go out at first light, every day, in the cold, in the rain, in the fog that sits on the islands like wet wool, and you cut.

I know a man named Arne Brekke who farms eleven hundred acres on Roberts Island, mostly tomatoes and corn now, and a little asparagus his father planted that he doesn't have the heart to pull out. I've rebuilt the transmission on two of his tractors. When I call and ask if I can come cut with his crew for one morning, he's quiet for a second, then he laughs.

"You want to do it, or you want to watch it?"

"Do it."

"Bring gloves," he says. "Bring two pairs."

---

I take the knife off the nail the night before. I don't ask Apong, and then at the last minute, standing in the garage with it in my hand, I go in and ask him.

He's in bed already, propped up on three pillows, wearing the pelican cap. He looks at the knife and does not answer right away.

"It's dull," he says.

"I'll sharpen it."

"Not on a wheel. On a stone. By hand. Then the strop. The belt from the closet, the old one." He closes his eyes. "Don't bend from your back. Bend from here." He touches his hip. "Your back is a rope. Your hip is a hinge. Ropes break."

So at eleven at night I'm in my grandfather's garage, under a hanging bulb, working the notched blade of an asparagus knife over a whetstone he kept in a coffee can full of oil, and then over the leather of a belt he wore to my parents' wedding. The edge comes up bright. When I'm done the knife looks different. Not new. Awake.

---

It's still dark when I get to the field. The crew is eight people, all men but one, all Mexican, and they've been doing this for years. The one woman is named Toña and she's maybe sixty and she walks faster than anyone. The foreman, Rigoberto, looks at me, at my brand-new gloves and my rubber boots, and at the knife.

"Where'd you get that?"

"My grandfather."

He holds his hand out. I give it to him. He turns it over, runs his thumb along the handle where the wood is worn into a shallow channel.

"Old one," he says. "They don't make the handle like this anymore. Your grandfather was a cutter?"

"Thirty-one seasons."

"Filipino?"

"Yeah."

He nods, and hands the knife back to me with a little more care than he took it. "My dad worked next to Filipinos when he came up. In the sixties. He said they were the fastest cutters he ever saw. He said they used to race."

"Race?"

"For money. Down the rows. And they'd sing." He grins. "My dad said the singing was terrible."

---

Here is what I learn by eight in the morning.

The rows are long, a quarter mile, and the spears come up at random intervals and random heights, and you have to look at every one and decide in less than a second whether it's tall enough to cut. Too short, leave it. Too tall, it's already going woody and you cut it anyway and throw it away. You carry a box or a sled. You walk bent. You push the knife into the soil beside the spear at an angle and give it a little twist, and if you do it right you feel the spear let go under the ground, a small soft give, and you lift it out with your other hand, white at the bottom, green at the top, cold and squeaky against your glove.

If you do it wrong you cut the crown, the root, and you've killed next week's spears. I do this three times in the first ten minutes. Rigoberto comes and stands over me and doesn't say anything, which is worse than if he had.

The fog lifts around seven. The sun comes up flat and orange over the levee, over the line of cottonwoods along the slough, and the whole field turns gold, and steam comes up off the black dirt, and for a moment it's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Then my lower back starts to scream.

Toña passes me. She's on her second row; I'm halfway through my first. She doesn't look at me as she goes by. She says, in Spanish, kindly enough, "From the hip, mijo."

By eight I'm done. Not done with the row. Done. I straighten up and something in my spine makes a noise like a stick breaking, and I stand in the middle of a field on Roberts Island with my grandfather's knife in my hand, looking at a quarter mile of black dirt I haven't finished, and I think: thirty-one years.

He did this for thirty-one years. Every morning from February to June. In the 1940s and 50s, before anyone had a plastic sled, before the good boots, before portable toilets in the fields, before there was any law requiring water or shade. He did this after Bataan. After whatever happened on Bataan, which I still don't know the whole of. He came here, to this, and he did it every day, and then he came home and washed and ate and slept and didn't talk.

I think: no wonder.

---

Rigoberto gives me a ride back to my truck on the tailgate of the crew pickup. The crew are drinking coffee from thermoses and eating breakfast, burritos wrapped in foil, and Toña hands me one without asking if I want it. Egg, potato, chorizo. It's the best thing I've ever eaten in my life.

"You should tell your grandfather you did good," Rigoberto says.

"I didn't do good."

"No," he agrees. "But tell him anyway. Old men like to hear it."

---

That afternoon, at the kitchen table, I tell Apong the whole thing. The crown I cut. The fog. The sun coming up. Toña saying *from the hip*. The foreman's father and the races and the terrible singing.

He listens to all of it. When I get to the singing he laughs, a real laugh, the first in weeks, a dry wheeze that turns into a cough that makes me get up and get him water.

"It was terrible," he says when he can talk. "We sang the old songs. From home. The love songs. For the girls who were not there." He sips the water. "We sang to the asparagus."

"Why?"

"To stay awake. To keep the rhythm. To make the row shorter." He sets down the glass. "To stay a person. In the field you are a back and two hands. When you sing, you are a man from somewhere."

I take out the recorder and clip it to his cardigan, and he lets me, and then he doesn't talk about the field at all.

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen. The same afternoon. He is holding the asparagus knife in his lap. He asked for it.*

The surrender was April ninth. They told us at night. Nobody believed it. Then we believed it.

I will tell you about the walking. Only some.

It was very hot. The dust from the road was white, it got in your eyes and your teeth. We walked from Mariveles, north. Many, many men. Filipino and American, all mixed. Many already sick. The fever, the stomach. We had no food in a long time.

The guards were mostly in trucks, or walking beside. Some were cruel. Some were only tired, like us. I say that because it is true, and I want you to have the true thing, not only the story people like to tell.

What I remember most is the water. There were artesian wells by the road, water coming up from the ground, cold. Men tried to go to it. I don't want to say more about the wells.

In one town, I don't know the name, a woman was standing in her doorway. Old lady. When the guard turned, she threw something. It hit my chest and fell, and I caught it. Rice. Rolled in a banana leaf, a little ball, this big. I ate half. I gave half to Doroy. He said, Seve, a busy rooster would have eaten the whole thing. Even then he made a joke.

I never knew her name. Eighty years I am thanking that old lady. When I get to the next place, wherever it is, she is the first one I look for.

Fourteen Strings

The case is black pebbled leatherette over plywood, with brass latches gone green and a handle that has been replaced at some point with a loop of yellow nylon rope. It's shaped like a fat teardrop. When I bring it down from the top shelf of the garage, a spider the size of a quarter walks out of the seam along the bottom and across the back of my hand and drops to the concrete and disappears under the Ford.

I don't open it in the garage. I bring it into the kitchen and set it on the table, and Apong, who is sitting at the end with his tea, goes very still.

"Who said you could take that?"

"Kristel," I say. "In Ilocos. She plays first bandurria in her school's rondalla. She asked if you still had one."

"She asked that?"

"She said everybody in the barangay knows you played."

He doesn't say anything. I take this as permission, which it probably isn't, and undo the latches.

---

The bandurria inside is smaller than I expected, about the size of a mandolin, with a round soundhole and a flat back and a short neck. The wood of the top is pale and fine-grained, with a darker band around the edge where someone inlaid strips of contrasting wood like piping on a cushion. The back is darker, almost red. There are fourteen tuning pegs on a flat headstock, seven to a side, and there were once fourteen strings, in six courses, but now there are nine, and all nine are rusted the color of dried blood, and two of them have snapped and curled up like the tendrils on a vine.

There is a pick in the case. It's made of tortoiseshell, or something that looks like it, a narrow triangle worn smooth on one side. And in the little compartment under the neck there is a folded square of paper, which I don't open, because Apong has put his hand out.

I give it to him. He unfolds it. It's a photograph.

Eight men in white shirts and dark trousers, sitting and standing in two rows in front of a curtain with a painted backdrop of palm trees and a moon. Each holds an instrument. Two bandurrias, like this one. Two bigger ones that look like a cross between a bandurria and a guitar. A guitar. And one enormous thing at the end, held upright like a cello, that turns out to be a bass. The men are young, mostly, in their twenties and thirties, with pomaded hair. One of them, front row, second from left, is my grandfather. He's grinning. He has the bandurria held up against his chest the way you'd hold a baby.

At the bottom someone has printed in white ink, in neat block capitals: *SAN JOAQUIN RONDALLA, 1953*.

"Who are they?" I ask.

He touches each face with one fingertip, left to right.

"Oscar. From Cebu, he was the only one, everybody else Ilocano, but he played octavina better than anybody. Melchor. He drove a truck for the produce company. Me. Pepe. Pepe was the leader, he wrote the parts. Big Lito. Small Lito. They were not related, they just had the same name, so. Celso on guitar. And this one." The bass player. "Florentino. He had to carry the bass everywhere on the bus. He used to say he would be buried in it, it was big enough."

"Was he?"

"No. Cremated. Sacramento, 1981." He puts the photograph face down on the table. "They are all gone. I am the last one."

I wait, and he doesn't say anything else, so I ask, "What did you play?"

"Everything. Dances. Weddings. Baptisms. The Rizal Day program in December, every year. The hall on Lafayette Street on a Saturday night, when there was money for a band." He picks up the pick, turns it over. "And kundiman."

---

I know kundiman the way I know most things about my grandfather's culture: by its outline, by the name, by having heard it in the background at parties without paying attention.

Kundiman are love songs, old ones, from the Tagalog tradition, that spread all over the islands. Slow. In a minor key, usually, that turns to a major key partway through, so the song starts in longing and ends in something like hope, or acceptance, or a stubborn decision to keep loving anyway. They were sung under windows. A young man and his friends would gather outside the house of the girl he was courting at night, and play, and sing, and if her parents approved, a light would go on.

"In Stockton there were no windows," Apong says. "No girls. We played kundiman to each other. To the radio. To the pictures of the girls at home."

He picks up the bandurria, finally. He holds it the way he holds it in the photograph, upright against his chest, and he puts his fingers on the neck and draws the pick across the rusted strings.

The sound it makes is awful. Flat, dead, buzzing, with one string so far out of tune that it sounds like a cat stepped on a key. He winces. Then he does it again, more slowly, one string at a time, listening, his head tipped down toward the soundhole. Then he puts it back in the case.

"Too old," he says. "Both of us."

---

The woman who runs the youth rondalla at the Filipino community center out on the east side of town is named Nenita Basa, and she's seventy-one, and when I bring the case into her rehearsal room on a Tuesday evening she makes a noise like I've walked in carrying a puppy.

"Where did you *get* this?"

"It's my grandfather's."

"Who's your grandfather?"

"Severino Tabios."

"*Manong Seve?*" She clutches the edge of the table. "From the San Joaquin group? The old ones? He's still alive?"

"He's a hundred and four."

She sits down. Around us a dozen kids between about ten and seventeen are tuning their instruments, bandurrias and octavinas and laúds and guitars and one bass taller than the girl who plays it, and the room is full of that fizzing, uncoordinated, string-plucking sound, like a hive. Mrs. Basa doesn't notice it. She's looking at the bandurria.

"My father played with them," she says. "Not in that photo. Later. In the sixties. After some of the old ones died. He used to talk about Manong Seve. He said your grandfather had the best tremolo in the valley."

"What's a tremolo?"

She shows me. She takes a bandurria from a girl in the front row, and she holds the pick loosely and moves it back and forth across a pair of strings so fast that her wrist blurs, and the single note she's playing stops being a note and becomes a sustained shimmering ribbon of sound, like light on water. The kids stop tuning. When she finishes, nobody says anything.

"That," she says, handing the instrument back. "That's how a bandurria sings. It can't hold a note on its own, the string dies. So you keep hitting it, very fast, very soft, and it sounds like it's holding. Your grandfather could do it so smooth you couldn't hear the pick." She looks at the case again. "Leave it with me. I know a man in Vallejo."

---

The man in Vallejo is a luthier named Jun Ocampo who works out of a converted garage behind his house and who, over the phone, says the bandurria is *probably from Cebu, probably 1940s or early fifties, probably jackfruit and mahogany*, and that he can have it back in three weeks. It costs me $340. I don't tell anybody what it costs.

While I wait, I scan the photograph from the case. I put it on my grandfather's page, below the boy in the campaign hat, and I type the names under the faces in order, left to right, the way he gave them to me: *Oscar, Melchor, Severino, Pepe, Big Lito, Small Lito, Celso, Florentino*. I don't know their last names. I add a line: *Anyone who knows the last names of these men, please add them.*

Four days later Mrs. Basa does. She adds six of the eight. Within a week someone I've never heard of, in Sacramento, adds the seventh: Florentino's. He's a grandson. He writes, under the picture: *I have never seen this. Thank you. He told us he played bass but we thought he was making it up.*

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room. Second week of March. Late afternoon, low sun through the blinds. He has the rondalla photo in his lap, face down.*

Camp O'Donnell. At Capas. We came on the train, the boxcars, then we walked again. Inside the wire there was not enough of anything. Not enough water. Not enough shade. Not enough medicine. Not enough men who were well, to help the men who were not.

Every day many died. That is true and I will say it plainly one time. The sickness. Dysentery, malaria. Men were dying who had lived through the fighting, and it was the water and the hunger that killed them. Not a bullet. That is the thing I could not understand then and I still cannot.

Doroy got sick in May. The fever. I sat with him. He was not talking anymore, and that was how I knew it was bad, because Doroy always talked.

On the last night he woke up. He asked me for his mother. I said she is not here, Doroy, it is me, Seve. He said, Tell her I was not afraid. I said I will tell her. He said, Tell her about the rooster.

I helped bury him. We had a detail for it. I knew the place. I said I would tell his mother.

I never did. When I got out, I was sick also. I went home, I went to the mountains, then America. Every year I said, this year I will write to Dingras. Every year I did not. Eighty-four years. I have a lot of years of not writing.

So. That is one thing I did not do.

What He Will Not Eat

There are three foods my grandfather refuses.

The first is asparagus. In thirty-one years of cutting it he never once ate it, and he won't now. When my Lola was alive she used to make it for herself in the spring, roasted with lemon, and he would sit across the table from her and watch her eat it with an expression of mild betrayal. "I know where it has been," he would say. My Lola would say, "So do I, viejo, I married it."

The second is canned corned beef. He won't say why, and nobody in the family pushes. Liezl thinks it has something to do with the war. Tita Perla thinks it has something to do with Alaska. My father thinks he just doesn't like it.

The third is any meal where rice is left in the pot at the end.

That one isn't really a food. It's a rule. If you cook rice in my grandfather's kitchen you cook exactly what will be eaten, and if you misjudge and there's rice left, he will eat it, cold, with his fingers, with a little salt, standing at the counter, before he lets you put it in the refrigerator. When I was a teenager I thought this was disgusting. I watched him do it once when I was sixteen, and I said something smart, and my Lola took me by the elbow into the backyard and told me, in Spanish, very quietly, that if I ever said anything like that again she would personally put me on a plane to Capas so I could walk there.

I didn't know what Capas was. I looked it up that night. I never said anything about the rice again.

---

March is still frost season, but there are warm afternoons now, and on the first one above seventy degrees I take the cloth off the malunggay to let it get some sun. Up close, the tree is ugly in a hopeful way. The bark is pale and soft and scarred where the cold has bitten it back over the years. The branches are thin and drooping. But at the tips of them, under the cloth, new leaves have come out: tiny, round, bright green, arranged in feathery fronds like a child's drawing of a fern.

"Pick," Apong says from the back step. "The young ones. Only the tips. Not too much. Leave it something."

I fill a colander.

Liezl is here with Amihan, who is eight months old and has recently discovered that she can make a noise like a garbage disposal, and does so constantly. My sister is going to make dinengdeng. She has made it before, from a video, and it came out wrong, she says, and Apong agreed it came out wrong, and she's decided that this time she's going to make it while he watches, and he's going to tell her what she did wrong as she does it, and she's going to write none of it down.

"Because he says the paper lies," she tells me.

"He told you that too?"

"He tells everyone that."

---

Dinengdeng is the simplest food in the Ilocano kitchen, and possibly in the world. You boil water. You add bagoong, which in Ilocos means fermented fish, not the shrimp paste everybody else uses, a gray-brown sauce of tiny anchovies that smells like the bottom of a harbor and tastes like the whole ocean concentrated into a spoonful. You add whatever vegetables you have. Squash flowers, if you have them. Bitter melon, sliced. Long beans. Eggplant. Okra. The leaves of the malunggay go in at the very end because they cook in seconds. If you have a piece of leftover fried fish or grilled pork you put that in too, broken up. That's it. It's a broth. It's a soup made of whatever the garden and the yesterday gave you.

Apong sits at the kitchen table and watches Liezl like a judge at a cooking show.

"Not so much water."

She pours some out.

"The bagoong goes in when it boils. Not before. Before, it gets angry."

She waits.

"Now. Not that much. Taste. Okay. A little more."

"You said not that much."

"Now I am saying a little more."

The smell fills the kitchen, briny and green and sharp, and Amihan, in her high chair, stops making the garbage-disposal noise and stares at the stove with her mouth open.

"She likes it," I say.

"She's smelling the ocean," Apong says. "Her body remembers. Four generations, but it remembers."

When the leaves go in, the whole pot changes color, to a deep jade, and he says, "Off. Now. Off," and Liezl turns off the burner, and the soup is done.

---

He eats three spoonfuls. That's all he eats now, most days, a few spoonfuls of something soft. His doctor says it's normal. His doctor says a man of a hundred and four does not need much fuel.

But he holds the bowl after he's done eating. He holds it in both hands, under his face, and breathes the steam. He keeps doing it all through the rest of our meal, his eyes half shut. I think he's falling asleep. Then I realize he's not. He's somewhere else. He's following the smell back somewhere, the way you'd follow a rope hand over hand in the dark.

"When I came home," he says, "in 1942. From the camp. My mother made this. Only this. No fish, no meat. There was nothing. Only the bagoong and the leaves from the tree by our door. And a little rice." He tips the bowl and looks at the broth. "I was so thin she cried. I ate it and I was sick. Too much food, after no food. Then the next day, again. Again. A little more every day. She fed me like that for one month. Like a baby. Then I could eat."

Liezl has stopped eating. She's looking at Amihan.

"So," he says. "This is not a soup. This is how you bring somebody back."

---

After dinner, while Liezl gives Amihan a bath in the kitchen sink, which Apong insists on because, he says, that's where babies in his house have always been bathed, he asks me for the recorder.

"Not for the stories," he says. "For her."

"For Amihan?"

"For when she is big."

I don't quite understand, and then I do. Tita Perla told me about this a few months ago, and I forgot. You can record a message and seal it, so it opens on a date you choose, years from now. The person it's for will get it then and not before. You can't take it back once it's set. It just waits.

I clip the recorder to his collar. I bring him a glass of water. I ask him when he wants it to open.

He thinks.

"When she is eighteen," he says. "No. Twenty-one. At eighteen nobody listens to anything."

"Okay."

"And go away. Go in the other room. This is not for you."

So I go into the living room and sit on the couch, under the framed print of a carabao in a rice field that's hung there since before I was born, and I listen to my sister singing to her daughter in the kitchen in English and Spanish, the old lullaby our Lola sang to both of us, and under that, faint, my grandfather's voice talking to a baby who won't hear it for twenty years.

I can't hear the words. I don't try to.

When he calls me back in, he's done. He hands me the recorder. I set the message to open on Amihan's twenty-first birthday, in the summer of 2046. I give it a title. He tells me what to call it.

*For Amihan. From your Apong Lakay, who knew you a little.*

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen, after the dinengdeng. The dishes are in the sink. Amihan is asleep in her car seat on the floor at his feet.*

They let the Filipino prisoners go in the second half of that year. Not all. Some. The sick ones first, many of them, because they were dying too fast, and the families came, and there was a paper you signed. I signed. I was sick. Fever every other day.

My father came for me. He walked from Ilocos, most of the way. Some rides on carts. He found me in a crowd of skeletons. I didn't know him at first. He knew me.

We went home slow. Two weeks, three. We slept in houses of strangers, people who opened the door and said, Come in, eat. Everybody had nothing and everybody gave something. Camote, boiled. A little rice. One night a family killed a chicken for us, their last one, I know it was their last one. I couldn't eat it. My father ate it, so they would not be ashamed.

When we came up the road to our house, my mother was standing outside. She knew we were coming, somebody told her. She was standing by the malunggay tree. She did not run. She stood. And when I came close she put her hand on my face, like this, and said, *Ay, anakko*. My child.

Then she went inside and made the soup.

Daly City in the Fog

Atong Ulep's granddaughter lives in Daly City, on one of those streets of identical stucco houses that climb the hills south of San Francisco in rows so tight and so pastel that from the freeway they look like a box of chalk spilled down a slope. The fog comes in off the ocean every afternoon and sits on the hilltops. In March it doesn't always leave.

Her name is Charmaine. She's in her forties, an accountant for a hospital system, and she meets me at the door in slippers and a cardigan with a mug of coffee already poured for me.

"You look like him," she says.

"Like Apong?"

"Like the picture of him my lolo had. The one in the hat." She steps back to let me in. "Come in, it's freezing. Daly City in March. Every Filipino who moved here from Manila in the seventies thought they'd made a terrible mistake."

---

Her house is warm and smells of garlic and floor polish. On the mantel there's a carved wooden carabao and a framed photograph of an old man in a barong at what looks like a ninetieth birthday party, surrounded by children. On the wall above the couch, in a shadow box with a blue velvet backing, is a bronze medal three inches across, on a stand, beside a small folded card and a black-and-white photo of a young soldier.

"That's his," Charmaine says. "We got it in 2019. He'd been gone sixteen years by then. My mom accepted it. She cried so hard she couldn't read the card."

The young soldier in the photograph is thin, wide-eyed, with a crooked grin and a campaign hat pushed back on his head at an angle no drill sergeant would have accepted. He looks like trouble. He looks like the kind of friend you'd want next to you in a ditch.

"He told me about your grandfather," Charmaine says. "When I was little. He called him *the serious one*. He said, In our whole company there was only one man who never got in trouble, and it was Seve Tabios, and it made the rest of us look bad."

I laugh. "That sounds like Apong."

"He said he'd never have survived the march without him."

I stop laughing.

"I don't know what that means," she says. "He never said more. My lolo was like yours. Funny about everything except that. But that's what he said, and he said it more than once."

---

Three years ago, she tells me, she heard through the family grapevine that Severino Tabios was alive and turning a hundred and one, and that his family had applied for his medal, and that he'd refused it.

"I drove out to Stockton," she says. "I didn't call. I just showed up. Your aunt answered the door and thought I was selling something."

She sat with him in the living room for two hours. She brought him a photograph of the medal on her wall. She told him that her grandfather had spent most of the nineties helping other old men from the lodge fill out their claims, men who'd been Philippine Army or guerrillas and had lost everything in 1946, and that he'd sat at kitchen tables all over the Bay Area with a typewriter and a pot of coffee, and that near the end, when he was sick, he'd said, *I wish Seve was here, Seve would know what to say*.

"And your grandfather looked at me," she says, "and said, *Atong never needed me to know what to say. He always had too much to say*. And then he laughed. And then he asked me if my lolo's medal had his name spelled right."

"Was it?"

"It was. And your grandfather said, Okay. Then I'll take mine. If they spell it right."

---

That's when she found the affidavit.

She'd gone home after the visit and called your aunt — my aunt — Tita Perla — and heard about the typo, the roster, the transposed numbers. And she remembered that her grandfather, when he applied for his own recognition in the nineties, had had to file a sworn statement describing his service. It was in a box. Everything was in a box. Her mother, it turned out, had saved every piece of paper her father ever touched, in a series of men's shoeboxes, labeled by decade.

She brings it out now. It's in a plastic page protector, two pages, typed on a typewriter with a ribbon that was getting tired, so the letters fade from black to gray across each line. Notarized in San Mateo County in 1994. At the bottom, a signature, shaky and enormous: *Fortunato M. Ulep*.

She points to the second paragraph.

*On or about April 9, 1942, I was taken prisoner with other members of my company, including Pvt. SEVERINO TABIOS of Nagpatpatan, Ilocos Norte, with whom I had served since August 1941 and with whom I enlisted on the same day at Laoag. Pvt. Tabios and I marched together from Mariveles to San Fernando, Pampanga, and were confined together at Camp O'Donnell until my release. Pvt. Tabios was known to me personally and I would recognize him today.*

And under that, a line I didn't expect:

*Pvt. Tabios's Army serial number was one number after my own, since we were processed together.*

And there, in typewriter digits, are both numbers.

His, and Apong's.

Correctly.

---

I sit on the couch in Daly City with the page in my lap and the fog pressing against the window, and I read it over and over. One number after my own. Because they stood in line together at a school in Laoag in the summer of 1941, two boys from neighboring towns in borrowed shoes, and a clerk gave them consecutive numbers, and one of them went home and remembered it for fifty-three years.

"I called your aunt that night," Charmaine says. "She cried on the phone. Then she said, *It's not enough*. She said they'd want the original, or a certified copy, and it had to go with a new letter, and a corrected form, and—" She waves her hand. "You know your aunt."

"I know my aunt."

"She sent it in a year and a half ago. Then they wrote back and asked for something else. Then something else." She shrugs. "She told me last week they asked for a *second* sworn statement. As if there's anyone else left."

"There isn't."

"No." She takes the page back, gently, and looks at it. "But there's this. And this isn't nothing. They just need someone to say so out loud."

---

I drive home on 580 over the Altamont Pass in the late afternoon, the hills on both sides that particular electric green they turn for about six weeks every spring before the heat browns them, and the wind turbines along the ridge turning slowly against a sky that's clearing as I head east. I have a certified copy of Atong Ulep's affidavit in an envelope on the passenger seat. Charmaine had it made for me at a shipping store on the way out. She refused to let me pay.

When I get to Stockton I don't go home. I go to Tita Perla's. I give her the envelope, and she says, "I already have this," and I say, "I know, but now I have it too," and she looks at me strangely, and then she hugs me, which my aunt does maybe once a year.

That night I scan the affidavit and add it to Apong's page. I put it right below the 1953 rondalla photo and right above the empty gray square. In the description field I write: *Sworn by Fortunato "Atong" Ulep, 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, San Mateo County, 1994. Processed together at Laoag, 1941. Serial numbers consecutive.*

And then, because it's true, and because I want somebody fifty years from now to know it: *He never forgot his friend's number.*

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room. A Sunday in March. My father is here, which is rare. He is sitting on the couch, not in the frame of anything, listening.*

After I was well I went to the mountains. Many boys from our town went. There were Americans who did not surrender, they stayed in the mountains with Filipino soldiers, and they organized. Later it was called USAFIP, North Luzon. For us it was just the mountains. Just walking, carrying, waiting.

I will not tell you the fighting. There was fighting. I will tell you the mountains.

Cold at night. I never knew a Filipino could be cold. Pine trees, like here in the Sierra. Fog in the morning, in the valleys, white, like a lake you could walk on. The Igorot people, the mountain people, they helped us. They knew every path. They carried food on their backs up trails where I had to use my hands. They were very strong and very quiet. They did not have to help us. They did.

In 1945, in June, there was the pass. Bessang. That was the last big one in the north. After, it was mostly over.

Boyet, you are sitting there like you are at a funeral. I am not dead. Sit up.

That is all about the mountains. Next time, I tell you about Alaska. Alaska is a better story. Nobody shoots at you in Alaska. The mosquitoes only.

The Northern Pins

On the map, my grandfather's life has a shape like a slingshot: a dense handle in Ilocos and Bataan, a long stretched band across the ocean, and then, on this side, a fork. One prong is Stockton and the Delta. The other prong goes straight up, two thousand miles north, to a cluster of pins on the shore of Bristol Bay in Alaska, at a place called Naknek.

Tita Perla put those pins in years ago based on a pay stub and a memory. They have names like *Cannery (summer 1948?)* and *Bunkhouse* and *Where he saw the bear*. There's no recording attached to any of them. The *Where he saw the bear* pin has no description at all, only the title. When I ask her about it, she says, "He told the bear story once at Thanksgiving in 1994 and never again. Ask him."

So I ask him.

---

"Every summer," Apong says. "Twenty-two summers."

We're on the back step, the warmest place in the house on a sunny afternoon in late March, and he's wrapped in a blanket my Lola crocheted, granny squares in orange and brown and avocado green. In front of us the malunggay is fully out of its cloth now, leafing hard. Between us on the step is a plate of turon, banana and jackfruit rolled in lumpia wrappers and fried with brown sugar, which my mother sent over and which he has not touched.

"When asparagus finished in June, you went to Alaska. The contractor, he was Filipino also, he took your name in the spring. You paid him something. In June you took the bus to Seattle and in Seattle you got on the ship. Four days, five days north. Everybody sick on the boat. Then Naknek."

"What was it like?"

He thinks.

"Light," he says. "All night. You go to sleep, it's light. You wake up, it's light. The first year I couldn't sleep at all. I put my shirt over my face. The old manong in the next bunk, he laughed at me. He said, *Ading*, you were in a war and you can't sleep because of the sun?"

---

He tells me about the work. The salmon came into the bay in July, in numbers so huge the fishermen's boats sat low in the water with them. The fish came to the cannery dock in tenders, and from the dock they went up a chute into the processing line, and the line ran around the clock while the run lasted. Filipino crews did most of the hardest jobs. They worked the machine that took the heads off. They worked the slime line, cleaning out the fish by hand with spoons and knives in cold running water, hour after hour, standing in rubber boots on a wet floor. They filled the cans. They worked sixteen hours, eighteen hours. Then they slept in a bunkhouse built on pilings over the mud with the tide coming in under the floor.

"The Filipino bunkhouse here," he says, drawing on the step with his finger. "The Japanese bunkhouse here. The Chinese, before, here, but by my time not so many Chinese. The Italians and the Scandinavians, the fishermen, over here, in the good houses. The white bosses up on the hill. Everybody separate. Separate mess halls also. We had a Filipino cook. He made adobo from salmon heads." He shakes his head at this, but it's a fond shake. "Very good, actually. Very good. You wouldn't think."

"Did you like it?"

"No." He considers. "Yes. It was money. One summer in Alaska paid like four months of asparagus. And there was no foreman screaming, *faster, faster*. The fish came, you worked. The fish stopped, you slept. Very honest. The fish don't lie."

---

The bear was his fourth summer, he says. 1951.

He went for a walk on the tundra on a rare day off, by himself, which you were not supposed to do. A mile from the cannery, maybe more. He wanted to see something that wasn't a fish. The tundra in August is spongy, red and gold and green, with tiny berries in it, low blueberries and something else, cranberries maybe, and ponds everywhere reflecting the sky, and no trees at all, and the light going on and on.

He came over a little rise, and there was a brown bear eating berries about fifty yards away.

"Big," he says. "Big like your truck."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. I stood. It looked at me. I looked at it." He opens his hands. "In the war, I was afraid many times. Many times. But always of men. This was different. This was not a man. It was not angry. It was just big, and hungry, and I was something small at the edge of its eating."

"And then?"

"Then it went back to eating. And I walked away. Slowly, slowly, backwards, like you leave the room of an important person." He picks up a turon finally and examines it and puts it back down. "I sat by a pond and I cried for one hour. I don't know why. I didn't cry in the camp, I didn't cry in the mountains. I cried because of a bear eating blueberries."

I don't say anything. I don't know what to say.

"I think," he says, after a while, "it was because nobody was trying to kill me. For the first time in ten years. Even the bear, the bear didn't care. Nobody cared. I was free." He shrugs. "Okay. That's the bear."

That night I add his words to the *Where he saw the bear* pin. In the description I type, *Nobody was trying to kill me*, and then I delete it, and then I type it again, because it's what he said.

---

He met my grandmother because of a wedding in 1955, and because of the rondalla, and because of a cousin of hers named Rafaela who married an Ilocano labor contractor and needed a band.

My Lola's family were from Michoacán by way of the railroad and the south side of Stockton. Her father came north in 1926 to lay track for the Western Pacific and stayed for the tomato harvests, and sent for her mother and the two oldest boys, and Chela was born here in 1934, the first one in her family who was American by birth. She worked summers on the line at a tomato cannery near the port, and she was twenty-one when the San Joaquin Rondalla played at her cousin Rafaela's wedding in a rented hall off Charter Way, and she was standing near the stage when the second bandurria player, who was thirty-three and had a very serious face, looked up from his tremolo and saw her and lost his place.

"He missed eight bars," my aunt says. She tells this story the way the family always tells it, word for word, a story that has been polished smooth by retelling like the handle of the knife. "Pepe glared at him from across the stage. And then he found his place again. And at the break he came over to her and he didn't say anything. He just stood there. And she said, in English, *You missed some notes*. And he said, *I know. It was your fault*."

The rest of the courtship took two years. Mexican and Filipino families in Stockton lived side by side in those days, worked side by side, married each other more often than either side's elders were happy about. Her father objected to Apong on every possible ground: age, money, language, the fact that he wasn't Mexican, the fact that he went to Alaska every summer and might not come back. So Apong came to the house every Sunday and sat on the porch. That was all. He sat on the porch with his hat in his lap, saying nothing, while the family ate inside, and after an hour or so he got up and went home. For a year.

"Then one Sunday," Tita Perla says, "her father came out on the porch with two beers. And he gave one to Papa. And they sat there and drank them without a word. And then her father said, in Spanish, *If you make her cry, I'll find you in Alaska*. And Papa said, in Spanish, *If I make her cry, I'll tell you where to find me*."

They married in 1957. On the family tree, under my Lola's photograph, there's a note Tita Perla wrote: *Marcela Ybarra Tabios. Spoke Spanish, English, and enough Ilocano to win every argument.*

---

**From the recordings**

*The back step. Last week of March. He has finally eaten half a turon. There is sugar on his cardigan.*

You want to know about your Lola. Okay.

The first time I saw her she was wearing yellow. A yellow dress with little white flowers. Her hair was up. She was standing by the stage with her arms crossed like she was waiting for someone to disappoint her.

I was playing. It was a kundiman, one of the old ones, very slow. I looked up. And I forgot where I was. Not like a joke. Truly. I forgot. I forgot the song, I forgot the hall. For a second I didn't know if I was in Stockton or in Laoag or in the mountains.

Then Pepe kicked my chair.

She said I missed some notes. She was right. She was always right. Fifty-four years, she was right ninety percent. The other ten percent I let her think she was right.

She learned some Ilocano. Only the important words. *Saan*, no. *Wen*, yes. *Agsardengka*, stop it. *Uray no*, even if. She used *uray no* better than me. *Uray no you are tired. Uray no it is raining. Uray no you don't want to.*

When she was dying, in the hospital, at the end, she said to me, in Ilocano, *Saanka nga agbuteng*. Don't be afraid. I don't know where she learned that. I never taught her that.

That is enough about her. I want to go inside now.

One Number Before Mine

The man from the medal committee calls on a Wednesday while I'm under a compact tractor with my arms full of hydraulic hose. I let it go to voicemail. When I listen to it on my lunch break, sitting on an upturned bucket behind the service bay with a sandwich, the voice is gravelly and patient and slightly too loud, the voice of someone who spent a career shouting over engines.

"Mr. Tabios, this is Ray Galvez, I'm a volunteer with the recognition project, I've been working your grandfather's file with your aunt. I've got an idea. It's a little unusual. Call me back."

I call him back.

He tells me he's seventy-six, a retired Navy chief, born in Vallejo, and that his own father was a Philippine Army private on Bataan who lost his benefits in 1946 and spent the rest of his life trying to get them back. "Didn't make it," he says, matter-of-factly. "Died in '88. So I do this now. I've done about four hundred families. Your grandfather's file is the most annoying one I've ever had, and I mean that as a compliment to your aunt."

"What's the idea?"

"The board wants a second sworn statement from someone who served with him. Right?"

"Right. And there's nobody."

"There's one person," Ray says. "There's always one person in these things. Your grandfather served with Fortunato Ulep. And Fortunato Ulep served with your grandfather."

I don't get it.

"The Ulep affidavit says, I served with Severino Tabios, here's his number, it's one after mine. What if Severino Tabios swears the same thing back? I served with Fortunato Ulep, here's *his* number, it's one before mine. Without looking at the Ulep paper. From memory. In front of a notary."

"He's a hundred and four."

"So he either remembers it or he doesn't," Ray says. "If he does, you've got two men who never saw each other's statements, thirty-two years apart, who agree to the digit on which numbers they were handed in a school yard in 1941. If that's not proof that these two men were in the same line on the same day, I'll eat my cover."

"And if he doesn't remember?"

"Then we've lost nothing," Ray says, "and I'll think of something else. I always think of something else. Ask your aunt."

---

I don't tell Apong what it's for. That's Ray's suggestion, and Tita Perla's, and it feels like a kind of lie to me, but I understand why. If he knows that everything depends on it, he might freeze. He might get angry. He might decide that it's beneath him to prove himself to a typist.

So on Saturday, at the kitchen table, I just ask him about Atong.

"The serious one," I say. "That's what Atong called you. To his granddaughter."

Apong snorts. "Atong called everybody something. He called me the serious one, he called our sergeant the potato, he called the lieutenant Mister Cloud because he always had his head in the sky. He had a name for every person." He smiles. "He was a pain in my neck."

"Charmaine said you processed together. In Laoag."

"Same day. Same line." He nods. "He was in front of me. He kept turning around and talking. The sergeant hit him with a clipboard."

"Do you remember your numbers?"

He looks at me, and something in his face changes. Not suspicion, exactly. More like he's being asked to recite something he learned in school, and he's checking whether he still can.

He closes his eyes. His lips move. Then he says eight digits. Then, after a pause, he says eight more.

"Mine," he says. "Atong's. One before. Because he was in front, talking."

I've got the Ulep affidavit in my pocket, folded in quarters. I don't take it out. I don't need to. I've read it enough times by now that I know the numbers too.

They match. Both of them. Every digit.

"Why?" Apong says. "Why are you looking like that?"

---

The notary is a young woman named Tiffany who drives a small white hatchback with a magnetic sign on the door and does house calls for hospice patients and old people who can't get to a bank. She has a rolling briefcase and a small embossing seal in a velvet pouch and the kind of calm, bright, unflappable manner that makes me think she's sat at a lot of kitchen tables where something important was happening.

She asks Apong to state his name.

"Severino Tabios," he says. "With an S."

She writes it down. She asks him to raise his right hand. He does it slowly, his hand shaking, and holds it up, palm out, at shoulder height, the way he must have done in 1941. She reads him the oath. He says, "I do."

Then Tita Perla, who has typed the statement exactly as Ray dictated it to her over the phone, with blanks where the numbers go, slides the paper across the table and asks him to fill in the blanks himself. In his own hand.

He takes the pen. His handwriting is enormous and wavering, and the digits slope downhill across the line, and it takes him nearly four minutes to write sixteen numbers. Nobody says anything the whole time. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside, a neighbor's dog barks twice and stops. My father, who has come for this, stands in the doorway to the living room with his arms crossed and his jaw working.

When he's done, Apong signs. *Severino Tabios*. The S at the end is big and looped and emphatic, a little tail on it like a fishhook.

Tiffany presses the seal into the corner of the paper. It makes a small crunching sound, like stepping on frost.

"There you go," she says brightly. "All official."

Apong looks at the raised circle in the paper. He runs his thumb across it, feeling the bumps.

"Took a long time," he says.

---

It goes in the mail on Monday, certified, along with the certified Ulep affidavit and a cover letter from Ray that runs a page and a half and which Tita Perla lets me read. It's the most furious polite letter I've ever seen. It uses the phrase *with the greatest respect* four times, and each time it means the opposite.

Four days later, Tita Perla calls me at work.

She doesn't say anything at first. I hear her breathing. Then she reads it to me, the whole thing, in her county-clerk voice, every word including the reference numbers and the signature block, and only at the very end, at *we are honored to confirm*, does her voice crack.

The ceremony is set for April ninth.

"That's six days," I say.

"It's the anniversary," she says. "Of the surrender. They call it the Day of Valor in the Philippines. It's a national holiday. Ray says the committee does a ceremony in Stockton every year on the ninth, and they'll add him. He'll be the only living veteran there." She's crying openly now. "Nonoy, he'll be the only one."

That night she changes one thing on his page. She doesn't take down the gray square with the dotted border. She leaves it where it's been for eight years, under the affidavit and the rondalla and the boy in the campaign hat, and inside it, in small plain type, she writes: *April 9*.

Within an hour there are comments under it from people I didn't know were watching. Charmaine. Mrs. Basa. Florentino's grandson in Sacramento. Kristel, from Ilocos, who writes only a row of exclamation points and then, a minute later, *Lolo Seve!!! Ay apo!!!* And one from Manang Saling, her grandmother, in Ilocano, which I copy out and carry to Apong the next morning, and which he reads with his lips moving, and then hands back to me without translating.

"What does it say?"

"It says your Ilocano is not good enough yet to know," he says. But he's smiling.

---

In the six days that follow, my family turns into a small, intense, quarrelsome event-planning company.

There is the question of what Apong will wear. My mother wants a barong, the formal embroidered shirt, sheer as onion skin, worn untucked. Tita Perla wants a suit. My father, unexpectedly, wants him to wear a uniform, and when it's pointed out that he hasn't owned one since 1946, goes quiet and then says, "Then the hat. He should at least have the hat."

There's no hat. The campaign hat from the photograph was lost in the war, along with everything else.

I call Charmaine.

"He should wear it," she says, before I've finished asking. "Lolo's. It's in the closet. It's been in the closet since he died. He'd want it on a head."

There is the question of the food. This is not really a question. Every woman on both sides of the family has been planning food since the moment the news came, and the menu has grown to a size that would feed a battalion: pancit and lumpia from my mother's side, tamales from the Ybarra cousins, Tita Perla's adobo, which is darker and more vinegary than anybody else's, a whole roast pig from a guy in Manteca. And bibingka. My Lola's cousin's daughter, Tita Bining, who is half Ilocano and half Mexican and has been to every family event since 1975 with a tray of bibingka, will bring bibingka. That is settled, and it was settled before anyone asked.

There is the question of who will speak. Apong says nobody. Ray says somebody has to. Tita Perla says she will, and then says she can't, and then says she will. My father says nothing.

And there's the question I keep coming back to, lying awake in my apartment at night with the traffic going by on Pacific Avenue.

Doroy. The promise he didn't keep. The family in Dingras who were never told.

I want to say something about it. I don't know to whom.

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen. The day after the notary. He asked to talk. I didn't ask him anything.*

You took me to Lafayette Street. I said, Nothing to see. That was not true. I want to correct.

When they tore it down, I was there. I went to watch. Many of the old men went. We stood across the street. It was 1960-something, the first ones, the hotels. Then later, the rest, for the freeway.

The machines took the front wall off the hotel first. Then you could see inside the rooms. Like a dollhouse. Wallpaper. A calendar on a nail. A mirror. A sink. You could see where every man had lived, all at once, open to the street. Then the machine took the rest.

Uliteg Andres was dead already. He lived in that hotel twenty years. His room was the third floor, the corner. I watched it go. I didn't feel anything. I felt like the bear was eating blueberries and I was nothing at the edge.

Then afterward, a long time afterward, at night, I felt it.

Everything I came here for was on four blocks. The barbershop, the hall, the restaurant, the men who talked like my father. The city decided it was blight. That was the word in the paper. *Blight*. Like a disease of plants.

We were not a disease. We were the ones who cut their asparagus.

Okay. That's what I wanted to correct.

Bibingka at the Hall

The ninth of April comes up clear and windy, the sky scrubbed pale blue, the valley oaks in the park across from the hall throwing shadows that jump around on the grass. The wind has been coming in off the Delta all morning, smelling of wet peat and cut grass, and it has pushed a drift of last year's oak leaves and a few paper napkins from somebody's picnic up against the hall's front steps.

The hall is a low cinderblock building on the east side with a flagpole out front and a mural along one wall of rice terraces and a carabao and a jeepney and, for reasons nobody can explain to me, the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside it's one big room with a stage at one end and a kitchen at the other and a linoleum floor polished so hard it squeaks. Folding chairs in rows. A podium with a microphone. Two flags on stands, the American one and the Philippine one, the blue and red and white with the golden sun and three stars. Along the wall under the windows, tables covered in white paper, already filling with food under foil.

We get there an hour early because getting Apong anywhere takes an hour.

---

He's wearing a barong. My mother won. It's the pale ecru of pineapple-fiber cloth, with embroidery down the front in white thread, fine as frost on a windshield, and under it, because he's always cold now, a white undershirt and a thermal undershirt under that. Dark trousers. Black shoes my father polished last night at our kitchen table for forty-five minutes.

And on his lap, in the wheelchair, held in both hands, Atong Ulep's campaign hat.

It's old felt, the color of dry grass, with a brown leather band and the four dents pinched into the crown. There's a water stain along one side of the brim. Charmaine brought it in a hatbox this morning and handed it to him without a speech, and he looked at it and turned it over and touched the inside band, where there were initials inked in faded blue, *F.M.U.*, and said, "His head was bigger than mine. He was always proud of that."

He won't put it on. He holds it.

---

People come in. More than I expected. Then more than that.

Both sides of the family. The Tabios side, which is us, a couple dozen of us in all. The Ybarra side, my Lola's people, which is much bigger, four generations, a whole wave of aunties and cousins and babies and teenagers in their good clothes looking at their phones, and old Tío Memo, my Lola's last living brother, ninety-one, on a walker of his own, who parks it next to Apong's wheelchair and grips Apong's hand and says something in Spanish I don't catch that makes them both laugh.

Mrs. Basa and her youth rondalla, twelve kids in white blouses and shirts, carrying their instruments in cases in front of them like trays. Charmaine and her mother and two of her kids. Ray Galvez, who turns out to be a big square man with a white crew cut and a Navy windbreaker, and who comes straight over and kneels next to the wheelchair so he's at eye level with Apong and shakes his hand with both of his and says, "Sir, I'm honored," and Apong says, "You are the one with the letter," and Ray grins and says, "Yes, sir, sorry about that," and Apong says, "No. It was a good letter."

Florentino's grandson from Sacramento, a heavyset guy in his fifties in a basketball jersey, who stands at the back, alone, holding a printed copy of the rondalla photograph.

And then, at about ten minutes to eleven, the door opens and Rigoberto the foreman walks in, followed by Toña, carrying a foil pan, followed by three more of the asparagus crew in clean jeans and pressed shirts, still smelling faintly of the field.

"You came," I say.

"You said a Filipino cutter was getting a medal," Rigoberto says. "Thirty-one seasons. That's a long time to bend over." Toña hands me the pan. Tamales, still warm. "For your grandfather," she says.

---

The ceremony itself is short. That's on purpose; Ray told us that a hundred-and-four-year-old man has about forty minutes in him before he needs to lie down, and they've built the whole program to fit.

The rondalla plays the national anthems. First the American, then the Philippine. On bandurrias and octavinas and guitars and a bass, the American anthem sounds strange and lovely, delicate, like it's being played on a music box in another room. The Philippine anthem is a march, brisk and bright, and the kids play it like they've played it a thousand times, and some of the older people in the room sing along under their breath, and at the end of it I look over and see that Apong's lips have been moving the whole way through.

Ray speaks for four minutes about the Philippine Scouts and Bataan, and about the Commonwealth soldiers and guerrillas who served beside them, and about how long it took. He doesn't make a speech of it. He just says the facts in order, the way you'd read a list of parts. When he gets to 1946 his voice tightens a little and then steadies.

Then a retired Army colonel, a woman in her sixties who flew up from Monterey, whose own grandfather was a Scout in the 26th Cavalry, reads the citation and opens the box.

The medal is bronze, three inches across. On one side, two soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder, one Filipino and one American. On the other, words, and a design I can't see from where I'm standing. She holds it up so the room can see it, and the light from the high windows catches it, and it glows like something warm.

Apong is supposed to receive it sitting down. Ray told him that. The colonel told him that.

He hands me the hat.

"Up," he says.

My father is on his other side before I can move. We each take an elbow. *Maysa, dua, tallo.* And he stands. It takes a long time. His knees shake. His breath comes in short pulls. The whole room stands up with him, the chairs scraping across the linoleum, two hundred people on their feet in total silence. When he's up, he straightens. He straightens further than I've seen him straighten in years, his chin up, his shoulders back, his thumbs along the seams of his trousers, which I can see because I've let go of his elbow, and so has my father, and he's standing on his own.

The colonel puts the medal in his hand. She says, quietly, "Thank you for your service, Private Tabios."

He looks down at it. Then he looks at her.

"Tabios," he says. "With the S."

"Yes, sir," she says. "With the S."

---

He doesn't make a speech either. But when he sits back down, he asks for the microphone, and Ray brings it, and he holds it too close to his mouth, so it pops, and he says something in Ilocano.

It's four or five sentences. It's slow and very clear. Behind me, Tita Bining, who's half Ilocano, makes a small sound. Mrs. Basa covers her mouth with her hand. I catch maybe one word in five. I catch *Doroy*. I catch *Atong*. I catch a word that might be *baket*, old woman.

Then he says, in English: "This is for the ones who were not here to get one. I am only holding it."

And he gives the microphone back to Ray and sits there with the medal in one hand and Atong's hat in his lap, and the room doesn't know what to do, and then somebody starts clapping, and then everybody is.

My father leans down to me. "What did he say?" he whispers. "In Ilocano?"

"I don't know."

"You've been learning."

"Not enough."

My father looks at his own father for a moment. "Me neither," he says.

---

Afterward there's the food.

The tables under the windows hold everything. Pancit in foil pans, the noodles glossy, studded with shrimp and slivers of carrot and cabbage. Lumpia, the thin crisp ones, stacked like firewood. Tita Perla's adobo, almost black, with the bay leaves floating in it. The roast pig from Manteca, its skin lacquered and crackling. Two enormous pans of tamales, the Ybarra ones and Toña's, side by side. Pots of rice. A tub of fruit salad with condensed milk.

And at the end of the last table, on its own, Tita Bining's bibingka.

They're round, maybe six inches across, each one baked on a circle of banana leaf that's browned and crackled at the edges where it curls up around the cake. The tops are golden and puffed and split a little, glistening with butter, and scattered with grated coconut and sugar and slices of salted duck egg, red-orange at the edge. Tita Bining made forty of them. She bakes them in pans lined with leaves, in an ordinary oven, and then she finishes them under the broiler for the char, because she says there isn't a clay oven left in all of San Joaquin County. Steam comes off them when you tear one open. The smell is rice and coconut and the green, toasty, almost tea-like smell of the leaf.

She brings one to Apong on a paper plate. He hasn't eaten solid food in two weeks.

He breaks off a piece with his fingers. A piece the size of a postage stamp. He eats it.

Then another.

The family, standing around with their own paper plates, watches him like he's a bird that's landed on a windowsill. Nobody says anything. He eats half the bibingka in tiny pieces, very slowly, while the conversation in the room goes up and up in volume, and the kids from the rondalla tear through the lumpia like locusts, and Tío Memo tells Ray Galvez a long story in Spanish that Ray, it turns out, understands perfectly, and somewhere near the stage Toña is laughing with my mother.

When he's done, he wipes his fingers on the napkin, carefully, each one.

"Too sweet," he says to Tita Bining.

Her face falls.

"Perfect," he says. "Too sweet is how it should be at a party."

---

I recorded the whole ceremony. I have it all: the anthems, the citation, the chairs scraping when the room stood, the pop of the microphone, the four or five sentences in Ilocano. That night I put it with the others, and I set the medal photo in the gray square on his page, finally, where the dotted border used to be. Then I sit at my kitchen table until after one in the morning with headphones on, listening to those Ilocano sentences over and over, trying to pick out the words, and getting maybe one in four.

---

**From the recordings**

*His bedroom, that night. Very late. He called me in. He is lying down with the medal box on the blanket.*

They asked me what a medal is for. The young lady from the newspaper, after. She was very nice. I didn't answer her. I'll answer you.

A medal is for the people who remember. Not for the one who gets it. I already know what I did. I was there.

It's for your children, so they open the box and ask, What is this? And somebody has to tell them. That's what it's for. It's a question that sits in a drawer and waits.

The ones who should have had it first. Doroy. The boys at the wells. The Philippine Army boys who walked next to me and then went home and lost everything in '46 because of a paper. The old lady with the rice. They are in the box too. I put them in.

You heard what I said, in the hall. In Ilocano.

You didn't understand.

That's okay. Someday you will. Go to sleep. You have work tomorrow. Tractors don't wait, like asparagus.

Five Lines on an Envelope

The bandurria comes back from Vallejo the week after the ceremony, and it's a different instrument.

Jun Ocampo has cleaned it and oiled it and replaced all fourteen strings, the high ones bright steel, the low ones wound in copper so they gleam a soft rose color. He's reglued a seam along the bottom that had opened, and fitted new tuning pegs that match the old ones so closely I can't tell which are which. He hasn't refinished it. "You don't refinish something like that," he told me on the phone. "You'd be sanding off his hands." So the top is still pale and fine, with the darker band of inlay around the edge, and there's still a worn spot below the soundhole the size of a thumbprint where my grandfather's pick hand rested for thirty years and wore through the varnish to the bare wood.

I bring it to the house on a Sunday. Apong is in his chair. I open the case on the coffee table in front of him and I don't say anything.

He looks at it. He leans forward, slowly, and puts out one finger and touches the copper of the lowest string, and it hums, very faintly, a low note that seems to come from the floor.

"Tune it," he says.

I can't. I don't know how. So he tells me, string by string, course by course, humming each note, his voice thin and wavering but right on pitch, and I turn the pegs until the strings match him. It takes twenty minutes. When we're done he holds out his hands, and I put the bandurria in them, and he settles it against his chest the way he held it in 1953.

He finds the pick in the compartment under the neck. He puts his left fingers on the frets. He draws a breath.

He tries the tremolo.

It's not there. His wrist won't do it anymore. It's stiff, and his fingers shake, and what comes out is a stuttering series of separate plucks, not a ribbon, more like rain starting on a roof. He tries again. Same thing. He stops.

He plays one single note instead, and lets it ring until it dies.

Then he holds the instrument out to me.

"Take it home," he says.

"I'll bring it back next week."

"No. Home." He makes a small motion with his chin, toward the west, toward the window, past the window, toward something a long way away. "Home home. To Kristel. She plays first bandurria. A bandurria should be with someone who plays first."

---

I had already bought the ticket. I hadn't told him yet.

I bought it the night of the ceremony, at two in the morning, after listening to those four or five Ilocano sentences for the eleventh time. San Francisco to Manila, Manila to Laoag. Leaving the first of May. Two weeks. I used most of my vacation and part of next year's, and my boss at the dealership, a dry old Norwegian named Leif who has never once in six years asked me a personal question, looked at the request and then looked at me and said, "Your grandfather's town?" and when I nodded, signed it without another word.

When I tell Apong, he doesn't look surprised.

"Perla told you to go," he says.

"Nobody told me to go."

"Then Liezl."

"Nobody."

He thinks about this. Then he holds out his hand. "Paper," he says. "And a pen."

I find an envelope in the kitchen, the back of a gas bill, and the pen from the junk drawer that has the name of a dental office on it. He puts the envelope on top of the Philippine variety-show magazine on his lap, for a desk, and he writes. It takes a long time. He writes five lines, numbered, in his huge downhill handwriting, half in English and half in Ilocano. When he's done he folds it twice and gives it to me and tells me not to read it in front of him.

I read it in my truck in his driveway.

*1. Loniang. Tell her about the medal.*

*2. Dingras. Doroy Cabanilla's family. Tell them what he said. I will make a recording.*

*3. Sleep in my room. One night only.*

*4. The bandurria to Kristel.*

*5. Ask Saling what I said at the hall. Learn it there. Not here.*

---

The trip needs a lot of planning and I have three weeks. Most of the planning happens on the tree.

I've been spending time on the Ilocos branch since that first message to Kristel. I know them better now, the way you can know people from their pictures and their notes. Manang Saling, who is fifty-six and wide and wears her hair in a tight bun and is never photographed without something in her hands: a spatula, a baby, a sack of rice, a broom. Her husband, who died some years ago; there's a dark frame around his picture. Their son Rodel, thirty-four, who drives a tricycle and farms tobacco on a few hectares that used to be Apolonia's, and has a habit of pointing at the camera in every photo as if he's about to make a joke. His wife, Lyn, a schoolteacher. Kristel. The baby boy, Jayjay, round-faced and furious-looking in every picture.

What I need from the tree is Doroy.

He isn't on it. He's not family. But I've learned that the people in Ilocos use the notes on our tree the way the old men in Little Manila used the bulletin board at the barbershop: for everything. So I write a note on Apong's entry, in English, and Kristel translates it into Ilocano under mine.

*Does anyone know the family of Doroteo "Doroy" Cabanilla of Dingras? He was a Philippine Scout who served with Severino Tabios in the 57th Infantry and died at Camp O'Donnell in 1942. Severino has a message for them.*

For five days, nothing.

Then Manang Saling writes back. Kristel translates.

*I asked at the market. The fish seller's mother-in-law is a Cabanilla from Dingras. She says Doroy had a younger sister named Josefa who married and had children. One of them is still alive. Baket Pacita. She is seventy-six. She lives in the old house. She says the family always said Doroy went to America after the war and forgot them. Should I tell her?*

I read it three times. *Went to America and forgot them.*

I take it to Apong. I translate it for him, which is backwards, since he can read it himself, but his eyes are bad now and he lets me.

He's quiet for a while when I finish.

"That's what they thought," he says finally. "Eighty-four years. That he left them."

"Yes."

"That's my fault."

I don't answer that. I don't know how.

"Tell Saling yes," he says. "Tell her to say a man is coming from Stockton. Severino's grandson. Tell her not to say why. I want them to hear it from my voice."

---

My father drives me to the airport.

It's two hours to SFO in the dark, and for the first hour he doesn't say anything, which is normal for him. We go over the Altamont in the early gray, past the turbines turning slowly against a sky that's just starting to lighten, and down into the East Bay, and over the bridge with the city ahead of us in the fog.

On the bridge, he says, "I want you to ask something for me."

"What?"

"In the barangay. Somebody old. Ask them what he was like. Before." He grips the wheel. "Before the war. When he was a kid. When he was my age, younger. Before he was the guy in the corner at your Lola's mother's house with a beer. I never knew that guy. I want to know if he was ever—" He stops. Tries again. "If he ever talked. If he was ever loud. If he ever sang anything except to the asparagus."

"Okay."

"I should have asked him myself," my father says. "Forty years ago. Thirty years ago. When he could have told me."

"He can still tell you."

My father shakes his head, not to disagree, exactly. "Not that guy," he says. "That guy's gone. I need somebody who knew him then."

At the curb he gets out to hug me, which he never does, and then he hands me a paper bag. Inside there's a roll of quarters, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a framed five-by-seven photo of Apong and my Lola at their fiftieth anniversary, both of them laughing at something off to the side.

"For Loniang," he says. "For the grave. So she can see who he married."

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room. The evening before I fly. His voice is tired. This is the message for Doroy's family. He asked me to stop the recording twice and start it again. This is the third time.*

My name is Severino Tabios. From Nagpatpatan. I was a Scout, 57th Infantry, with Doroteo Cabanilla, your Doroy. We enlisted the same summer. We were in the same company on Bataan and at Abucay, and in the march, and in the camp at O'Donnell.

He did not go to America. He did not forget you. I want to say that first. He died at O'Donnell in May of 1942. Of fever. I was with him. He was not alone.

He talked about you every night. His mother. His sister, Pepang, I think he called her. His girl, whose name I am sorry I forget. His rooster, which won eleven fights.

At the end he asked me to tell his mother that he was not afraid. And to tell her about the rooster.

I did not come. I am sorry. I was sick, then I went to the mountains, then I went to America, and then it was too long, and then I was ashamed that it was too long. That is the truth.

He was not afraid. That is the message. Eighty-four years late. Forgive an old man.

My grandson will bring you this. His name is Nolan. He is a good boy. His Ilocano is terrible.

The Tricycle from Laoag

The heat in Ilocos in May has a texture. When the airplane door opens at Laoag it comes into the cabin like a body, thick and dry and smelling of dust and diesel and something sweet and burnt that I'll later learn is sugarcane being cooked down somewhere for vinegar. By the time I've crossed the tarmac to the terminal my shirt is stuck to my back. By the time I've got my bag and the bandurria case off the carousel, I've stopped noticing, because Rodel is standing outside the glass doors, pointing at me.

He's exactly like his pictures. Thirty-four, compact, in a basketball jersey and flip-flops, with a wide grin and a finger aimed at me like a pistol, and the first thing he says, in English, is, "Manong Nolan! You are so *tall*! Lolo Seve was small! What happened?"

"My Lola was tall," I say.

"Ah! The Mexican!" He grabs my bag before I can stop him. "Come, come. Mama has been cooking since four o'clock this morning. If you don't eat everything she will cry, and then she will be angry that she cried, and then she will make you eat more."

---

His tricycle is a red motorcycle with a covered sidecar bolted to the right side, painted with the name of a basketball team and, across the front of the roof, the words *KING OF THE ROAD* in silver script, which Rodel tells me he didn't choose: the tricycle came with it from the man he bought it from, and repainting costs money, and anyway, he says, it's true. The sidecar is built for two small people or one medium one. I fold myself into it with my knees against my chest and the bandurria case on my lap. Rodel straps my duffel to the roof with bungee cords. We pull out into the traffic.

Laoag at night is loud and gold and moving. Jeepneys in every color, chrome horses on their hoods and names and slogans painted along their sides, playing music I can hear from three lanes away. Tricycles everywhere, weaving between them like fish. Motorcycles with whole families on them, father driving, mother sidesaddle behind, a toddler wedged between. Street food on every corner: skewers of something on charcoal grills, the smoke going up gold in the streetlights; a woman frying empanadas in a wok of bubbling oil, bright orange pockets with the edges crimped, which Rodel says are the best thing in the whole province, and that we will come back for, and that I am not allowed to eat any empanada in Manila because Manila empanadas are a lie.

We pass a huge old bell tower on a plaza, made of brick and coral stone, enormous and dark against the lit-up buildings, tilted slightly, and with its bottom half sunk into the ground.

"It is sinking," Rodel says over the engine. "Every year a little more. Since a long time. When Lolo Seve was a boy you could walk in the door. Now, you have to bend." He laughs. "Like asparagus!"

I don't know how he knows about the asparagus. Then I realize that everyone in the barangay probably knows about the asparagus. That the Ilocos side of the family has been hearing about Stockton for eighty years the way we've been hearing about Ilocos, in fragments, at second hand, with gaps.

---

Out of Laoag, the road climbs gently east into darkness. The lights get farther apart. Rice fields on both sides, which I can't see but can smell, a green wet smell under the dust. Then tobacco, tall plants in rows, pale in the headlight. Then, on the right, a long low building with smoke coming out of its roof and a sweet, rich, leathery smell pouring out of it into the road.

"Curing barn," Rodel says. "Tobacco. Ours is next week."

After forty minutes the road turns to concrete, then to gravel, then into a cluster of houses under trees. Dogs bark. A rooster, confused by the headlight, crows at nine o'clock at night. A single streetlight on a pole lights up a basketball hoop with no net, a small concrete chapel with its doors shut, and a house with a wide front window covered by a steel grille, with a painted sign above it: *SALING'S SARI-SARI STORE*.

Behind the grille, under a fluorescent tube, are shelves to the ceiling. And in front of the shelves, filling the window, waving with both arms, is Manang Saling.

---

She is shorter than me by a foot and a half. She takes my face in both her hands, the way Apong described his mother doing, and pulls it down to her level and looks at it for a while, tilting it left, then right, like she's checking a melon.

"Kasla ni Apong Seve," she says. Then, in English, for me: "You look like him. In the ears."

Then she lets go of my face and starts crying, and then she gets angry that she's crying, and swats at her own eyes with the back of her wrist, and then she drags me through a side door into the house behind the store, where there is a table, and on the table there is enough food for twenty people.

---

I find out over the next hour that Manang Saling does not believe in conversation before eating, during eating, or for a short period after eating, so we eat in near silence, the whole household: Saling, Rodel, his wife Lyn, Kristel, the baby Jayjay in a plastic high chair, two neighbors who seem to have come over just for this, and a very old man in a sleeveless undershirt at the end of the table who nobody introduces and who stares at me unblinkingly while eating with his fingers.

There's bagnet: pork belly that's been boiled, dried, and fried twice, so the skin is puffed and blistered and crackles under your teeth like glass, with a dipping sauce of vinegar, chopped tomato, and onion. There's a pinakbet, the Ilocano kind, small bitter melons and eggplant and okra and string beans stewed in fish bagoong with no squash at all. There's grilled fish. There's a green-papaya salad. There's rice, a lot of rice, and a tall pitcher of iced water with a cloudy plastic lid. There's a bowl of the dark sugarcane vinegar that I smelled at the airport, with chilis and garlic floating in it.

Every time my plate gets half empty, Saling refills it. When I try to stop her, she pretends not to understand English.

When finally I can't eat any more, I lean back and put my hand on my stomach and say, carefully, the way Apong taught me: "Naimas."

The whole table stops. Saling looks at me. The old man at the end looks at me.

Then everyone, all at once, starts laughing.

"What?" I say. "What did I say?"

"You said it right!" Kristel says, delighted, pounding the table. "You said it like Lolo! You said it like an old man from 1940!"

---

After dinner, Kristel takes me to the room.

It's at the back of the house. The house, I learn, is the same house, or partly the same: the old bamboo-floored house Apong was born in was rebuilt in concrete in the 1970s and enlarged since, but one room at the back was kept, the old room, with the old floor. It's small. It has one window with wooden jalousies instead of glass. There's a narrow wooden bed with a thin mattress and a woven mat on top of it, and a mosquito net folded up and tied to the ceiling with a string, and a small wooden chest at the foot of the bed. On the wall, a framed photograph of a young man in a campaign hat.

The same photograph. Our photograph. The boy at Fort McKinley, his chin up, his thumbs on his seams. A copy, a little more faded than ours, in a cheap gilt frame.

"Lola Loniang put it there," Kristel says. "When he went to America. Nobody slept here after. Only when he came in '79, for the funeral, he slept here. Then nobody again." She looks at the bed. "Mama says you will sleep here one night. Lolo Seve wrote it to her. One night only. Not tonight. Tonight you sleep in Papa's room, Papa sleeps outside."

"I can't make him sleep outside."

"He likes it," Kristel says. "It's cooler."

---

That night, lying on a mattress on Rodel's floor under an electric fan, listening to frogs and a television somewhere and the far-off whine of a motorcycle, I open the map on my phone.

I zoom in on the barangay. Tita Perla put a pin here years ago, from a satellite picture, roughly in the middle of the cluster of roofs. *Birthplace. House where he grew up.* There's a recording attached, one of mine, from February, in which Apong describes walking to the river every morning with two cans of water on a pole across his shoulders.

I move the pin. Not far. Maybe forty meters, to the right roof, the one I'm sleeping under, with the old room at the back. Then I add a second pin, out front, by the road. I title it *Saling's Sari-Sari Store*. I don't add a description yet. I don't know enough yet to describe it.

Then I lie there and listen to the frogs.

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen, Stockton. Back in February. One of the first. I didn't know yet how to ask good questions. He answered anyway.*

Every morning before school, water. The river was down the hill, maybe one kilometer. Two cans, kerosene cans, square, cleaned out. A pole of bamboo across here. You walk down empty, it's easy. You walk up full, it's not easy.

My mother was waiting by the door. She checked how full. If I spilled too much, I went back.

After school, the carabao. After the carabao, homework, by the lamp. After homework, sleep. In the morning, water.

By the door there was a malunggay. Same as Stockton. Not the same tree. The grandfather of the tree. My mother picked the leaves every day for the pot. When we had nothing else, we had that tree. It doesn't care if you are poor. It grows anyway.

My sister Loniang was smaller than me. She followed me to the river every morning. She carried a little can, this big. Like a cup. I told her go home, go home. She never went home.

She was like that her whole life. You tell her go home, she stays.

Tingi

By my third morning, I'm working the store.

Nobody asks me to. I come out at six with a cup of instant coffee, the three-in-one kind from a sachet that comes already mixed with powdered creamer and so much sugar it's practically a dessert, and Manang Saling is already behind the grille, counting change into a plastic tray, and there's a line of four kids outside waiting to buy bread, and she looks at me and points at a stool beside her. So I sit.

A sari-sari store, I learn, is not really a store. It's a window. Saling's is the front room of the house, maybe ten feet by twelve, with a counter across the middle and a steel grille from counter to ceiling with a gap at the bottom just wide enough to pass money and goods through. Behind the counter, floor-to-ceiling shelves made of planks and cinderblocks hold a little of absolutely everything, and none of it in large amounts.

That's the point. That's the word Saling teaches me the first morning: *tingi*. It means selling by the piece. Nobody in the barangay has the cash to buy a whole bottle of shampoo, so Saling sells it in single-use sachets, a few pesos each, strung on long strips that hang from the ceiling like streamers: shampoo, conditioner, laundry soap, coffee, powdered milk, soy sauce, ketchup, all in shiny little pillows of foil. She sells cigarettes by the stick, from an open pack. Cooking oil by the cup, poured from a big drum through a funnel into a small plastic bag that she ties with a twist. Rice by the kilo from a sack, measured in a dented tin can. Sugar by the scoop. Eggs by the egg. Phone credit by the peso, which she loads onto your number from her own phone with a series of texts.

In the mornings the kids come for pandesal, the soft little rolls that a bakery in town delivers on a motorcycle at five-thirty in a plastic tub. Then the mothers come, for one egg and one sachet of coffee and a little oil for the day. Then the men on their way to the fields, for cigarettes and a cold soft drink, which Saling pours from the glass bottle into a plastic bag with a straw, because the bottle has a deposit on it and she has to keep it. Then the old women, who come mostly to sit on the bench outside under the awning and talk.

And everyone, every single customer, stops at the window to look at me.

---

I'm an event. I knew I would be, but I didn't know how much. On the third morning, I hear Saling explain me nineteen times. I start to understand the explanation by the fifth time. *Apo ni Apong Seve. Taga-America. Stockton.* Grandson of Apong Seve. From America. And then something else, longer, with laughing in it, which I'm pretty sure is about my Ilocano.

They try me out. They say things to me through the grille. Simple things, slowly, smiling, watching to see what I'll do.

"Kumusta ka?"

"Naimbag," I say. Good. And then, because Apong taught me this too: "Sika?" And you?

Delight. Applause, sometimes, literally, from the old women on the bench.

By noon Saling has me handling money. She teaches me the numbers by having me count change out loud. *Maysa, dua, tallo, uppat, lima.* One, two, three, four, five. I already knew up to three, from getting Apong into the truck. Above ten, the Ilocano numbers mostly give way to Spanish ones, which surprises me and which my Lola's family would find hilarious. *Beinte. Treinta. Singkuenta.* I'm good at those. When a man asks how much for a stick of cigarettes and a soft drink and I tell him in Spanish-Ilocano without thinking, *Beinte-dos*, he looks at me like I've done a magic trick.

I learn *mano*, how much. I learn *adda*, there is, and *awan*, there isn't. *Adda itlog?* Is there egg? *Awan.* There's none. I learn *agyamanak*, thank you, and then *agyamanak unay*, thank you very much, which the old women make me say over and over, laughing at how I say the *unay*, until I get it right.

I learn that I should say these things, not write them. Apong was right about that. I tried writing a few on a scrap of paper on the first afternoon, and when I read them back I said them wrong, the way the letters wanted me to, like an American reading a menu. When I just listen and repeat, they stick. The language is in the mouth. The mouth remembers what the paper forgets.

---

There's a notebook under the counter. It's spiral-bound, gray, with a cartoon cat on the cover, swollen with humidity, and every page is covered in Saling's handwriting in columns. Names on the left. Numbers on the right. Some numbers crossed out.

"Lista," she says when she catches me looking. "The credit."

Half the barangay buys on credit, she explains. They pay when the tobacco is sold, or the garlic, or when someone sends money from Saudi or Dubai or Hong Kong or California. She knows every family's harvest and every family's remittance. She knows who's sick, who's pregnant, who's getting married, who's fighting with whom. She knows whose son failed his nursing board exam and whose daughter passed hers. The store is a bank and a news desk and a counseling office and a lost-and-found. People leave messages with her for other people. People leave packages. A woman leaves a sleeping baby on the counter for twenty minutes while she runs to the clinic, and Saling keeps it there among the sachets, patting it absently while she makes change.

"You run the whole barangay," I say.

She waves her hand. "I sell eggs." Then she smiles. "And I know who didn't pay for them."

On the inside of the notebook's back cover, in older ink, faded almost to nothing, there's a line in different handwriting. Spidery. Small. I ask what it says.

Saling looks at it for a while before she answers.

"*This store was built with my brother's money from the fish in Alaska. Long life to him and to his wife Chela.*" She closes the notebook. "Lola Loniang. She wrote it when she opened. 1962."

---

The very old man from the end of the dinner table comes every afternoon at three and sits on the bench outside. His name is Lakay Gorio. He's ninety-three. He wears the same sleeveless undershirt every day, or one exactly like it, and a pair of shorts, and rubber sandals, and he carries a walking stick made of a single straight piece of bamboo that he doesn't seem to use for walking, just for pointing. He's lived in the barangay his entire life. Saling tells me he was the only boy of his age who didn't go to Manila or Hawaii or America or Saudi. He stayed, and farmed, and outlived everyone.

On the fourth afternoon I come out and sit next to him on the bench with my recorder.

He points his stick at it. "Ania dayta?" What's that?

"For my Apong," I say. "In Stockton. So he can hear you."

He considers this. Then he nods once.

Kristel comes to translate. She sits on an upturned bucket at our feet with her knees drawn up.

I ask the question my father asked me to ask. What was he like? Before?

Lakay Gorio laughs. It's a startling sound, high and cackling, and he slaps his own knee with the flat of his hand.

He talks for twenty minutes. Kristel translates in pieces, laughing too.

He was loud, Lakay Gorio says. Seve Tabios was the loudest boy in the barangay. Gorio was eight or nine and Seve was eighteen, nineteen, and all the little boys followed him around. He sang everywhere, at the river, in the fields, walking home. Badly! He couldn't keep a tune to save his life until somebody gave him a bandurria, and then he could play anything but still couldn't sing it.

And at weddings, Lakay Gorio says, there was the *dallot*, the old Ilocano sung poetry, verses made up on the spot, men and women trading lines back and forth, teasing, flirting, arguing in rhyme. And Seve Tabios was the best at it of all the young men. Not the best singer. The best talker. He could make up a verse about anyone on the spot and make the whole wedding fall down laughing, even the person he was teasing. Even the bride's mother.

"He was a joker," Kristel translates. "Lakay says he was the funniest person he ever knew. He says, *What happened to him in America, did they take out his tongue?*"

I tell Lakay Gorio that the war happened. That the camp happened.

He stops laughing. He nods slowly, his stick across his knees.

He says something, short and quiet.

"He says, *Yes. The war took a lot of the loud ones,*" Kristel says. "*Some of them it took all the way. Some of them it took the loud out of and sent home the rest.*"

---

That night I call my father. It's early morning in Stockton. He picks up on the first ring, like he's been waiting.

I play him the recording. All twenty minutes. Lakay Gorio's high cackle, the slap on his knee, Kristel translating in her quick bright voice. *The loudest boy in the barangay. The best at the dallot. He could make the bride's mother laugh.*

When it's over, there's silence on the line.

"Dad?"

"I'm here."

"You okay?"

"He was funny," my father says. His voice sounds odd, thick. "He was a *funny* guy."

"Yeah."

"I never knew he was a funny guy." A pause. "Send me that. The whole thing. I want to play it for him."

---

**From the recordings**

*The back step, Stockton. Late March. He was talking about Alaska, then this.*

Every summer, the money from Alaska, I sent most of it home. Money order, from the post office in Naknek. Loniang wrote me back, every time. Short letters. She was not a writer. *Received. Thank you. The carabao is sick. The rice is good this year.*

In 1961 she wrote: *I want to open a store. A small one. In the front of the house. Then I don't have to walk to town to sell, and the people don't have to walk to town to buy.* She asked could I send a little more that summer.

I sent everything that summer. Your Lola was very angry with me. We had two babies already, Perla and your father. She said, You are sending our money to buy shampoo for strangers in Ilocos. I said, They are not strangers. They are my barangay.

She didn't talk to me for three days. Then on the fourth day she said, Okay. But you tell your sister to put my name on it.

I don't know if she ever did.

The House in Dingras

Dingras is half an hour south and east of the barangay by tricycle, through tobacco and rice and then a long straight stretch of road lined with acacia trees so old and so wide that their branches meet overhead, making a tunnel of green shade that drops the temperature ten degrees the moment you enter it. Rodel slows down in the tunnel. He says the trees were planted by the Spanish, or the Americans, or somebody's grandfather, depending on who you ask. Carabao graze in the fields on either side, gray and mud-caked, with white egrets standing on their backs.

I've got the recorder in my shirt pocket and a small speaker in my bag. I've listened to Apong's message forty times since I left Stockton. I know it by heart. I know where his voice catches, and where he stops to breathe, and the place near the end where he clears his throat before *Forgive an old man*.

I'm more nervous than I was at the ceremony. More nervous than I've been about anything I can remember.

"They don't know why you're coming," Rodel says over his shoulder. "Mama only said, a man from Stockton. They think maybe you are selling something. Or you want to buy land."

"Great."

"Or maybe you want to marry somebody." He grins in the side mirror. "Baket Pacita has a granddaughter who is a nurse. Single."

---

The house is on a side street near the old church plaza, one of the old ones, the kind Apong described from his boyhood. A ground floor of thick stone and lime plaster, painted white long ago and stained gray and green with mold since, with small barred windows. A second floor of dark wood that overhangs the street, with a row of sliding windows across the front made of small square panes of flattened capiz shell, translucent, like frosted glass the color of milk. Half the panes have been replaced with plywood. The roof is corrugated iron, rusted to the color of cinnamon.

There's a family waiting on the front step. Seven or eight people. A middle-aged man and woman, a few younger adults, a couple of kids. And in a plastic chair in the middle of them, in a housedress printed with blue flowers, with her white hair pulled straight back and her hands folded on the head of a cane, a tiny old woman with an expression so exactly like Tita Perla's waiting-for-an-explanation face that I almost laugh.

Rodel speaks first, in Ilocano, a long introduction. I hear *Tabios*. I hear *Stockton*. I hear *Seve*. The family exchanges looks. Nobody's face changes much.

Then the old woman says something to me, directly. Short.

Rodel translates. "She asks, What does Severino Tabios want with the Cabanillas?"

---

They bring me upstairs. The second floor is one big room with a floor of wide dark planks polished to a gloss by generations of bare feet, so smooth they feel almost soft. Light comes through the capiz windows soft and white, like light through paper. There's a long narrow table, carved chairs, a cabinet with glass doors full of china and photographs. A ceiling fan turning slowly. On the wall, a row of framed portraits in black and white: stiff couples in formal clothes, babies in christening gowns, a young man in a graduation cap.

And one, smaller than the others, in a frame of plain dark wood: a young man in an undershirt, grinning like a maniac, holding up a rooster with both hands, its feathers puffed out, its eye glaring at the camera.

I stand in front of it. I can't move.

"Doroy," I say.

Behind me the room goes quiet.

Baket Pacita has been helped into a carved chair at the end of the table. She looks at me. She says something.

"She says, How do you know that is Doroy?" Rodel says.

I turn around.

"Because of the rooster," I say. "He won eleven fights."

---

I explain, with Rodel translating, and Baket Pacita's grandson, a young man named Jomar who works at a bank in Laoag and speaks good English, translating over him when Rodel gets tangled. I tell them about the 57th Infantry. About the line at Abucay and the irrigation ditch and the sugarcane. About the rice ball the old woman threw. About O'Donnell. I don't say much about O'Donnell. I say the camp was bad, and many men were sick, and Doroy got the fever in May.

Then I tell them that Severino Tabios recorded a message for the family of Doroteo Cabanilla, and that I have it with me, and that I would like to play it, if they want to hear it.

Baket Pacita says something. Jomar says, "She says, Play it."

I take out the speaker. I set it on the table. I press play.

---

Apong's voice fills the room.

It's strange to hear it here, in this place, coming out of a small plastic box onto a table that's probably older than he is. It sounds thin and far away and very old, and also completely itself, the particular cadence of it, the pauses, the slightly too-careful way he pronounces English words he learned from a teacher from Vigan eighty-five years ago.

*My name is Severino Tabios. From Nagpatpatan. I was a Scout, 57th Infantry, with Doroteo Cabanilla, your Doroy.*

Jomar translates quietly, a sentence behind, into Ilocano.

*He did not go to America. He did not forget you. I want to say that first.*

Baket Pacita's hands tighten on the head of her cane.

*He died at O'Donnell in May of 1942. Of fever. I was with him. He was not alone.*

Somebody in the room makes a sound. One of the women. She puts her hand over her mouth.

*His sister, Pepang, I think he called her.*

"Josefa," Baket Pacita says out loud. Her voice is rough. "Pepang. Ni Inang." My mother.

*His rooster, which won eleven fights.*

There is laughing then, a small, wet, startled laugh that goes around the room, and Baket Pacita laughs too, and then she isn't laughing.

*He was not afraid. That is the message. Eighty-four years late. Forgive an old man.*

*My grandson will bring you this. His name is Nolan. He is a good boy. His Ilocano is terrible.*

The recording ends. The ceiling fan goes around. Outside, in the street, a tricycle passes with its radio playing something bright.

---

For a while nobody says anything. Then Baket Pacita talks, on and on, through two refills of the water pitcher, and Jomar translates in a low voice, sometimes stopping, sometimes having to start again.

Her mother, Josefa, was nine when Doroy went into the Scouts. Doroy was her favorite person in the world. He taught her to whistle. When the war came, and then the surrender, and then no news, the family waited. When the Filipino prisoners started coming home in the second half of 1942, Josefa went to the road every afternoon to watch. Every afternoon for months. He didn't come.

After the war, somebody from the next town told the family a story: that a Cabanilla from Dingras had been seen in Manila in 1946, getting on a ship for America. Maybe it was Doroy. Maybe it was a cousin, or a man with the same name, or nobody at all. But the story stuck, because it was better than the alternative. Doroy went to America. Doroy was alive. Doroy was making money in California and had forgotten them. The family was angry at him for eighty years. It was easier to be angry.

"My mother never believed it," Baket Pacita says, through Jomar. "Until she died, she said, *My brother would have written*. Everybody told her, Stop it, Pepang. He forgot us. Men go to America and forget." She looks at the speaker on the table. "She was right. He didn't forget. Nobody wrote because there was nobody to write."

She asks me to play it again. I play it again.

The second time, she listens with her eyes closed.

---

Before I leave, Jomar asks if I can do something.

He's seen Apong's page. Saling showed it to them all, on her phone, after I arrived, and he's looked through it: the boy in the campaign hat, the rondalla, the affidavit, the medal. He asks whether Doroy can be there too. Not as family. As a friend.

So at the long table, with the family standing around me, I take a picture of the photograph on the wall, the young man and the rooster, and I put it on Apong's page beside the affidavit from Atong Ulep. I write: *Doroteo "Doroy" Cabanilla of Dingras, Ilocos Norte. 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts. Served beside Severino Tabios at Abucay. Died at Camp O'Donnell, May 1942. He was not afraid.* Jomar reads it over my shoulder and corrects my spelling of Dingras, which I somehow got wrong, and tells me to add the rooster, so I do.

Then they record a message back. All of them. Baket Pacita first, then the others, one by one, in Ilocano, into my recorder, passing it hand to hand around the table like a bowl of rice. I don't understand most of it. I don't need to.

---

**From the recordings**

*The kitchen in Stockton, the next evening there, the next morning here. Liezl played him the Cabanillas' message and recorded what he said after. She sent it to me in the barangay.*

Pacita. Josefa's daughter. She sounds like her. I never met Josefa as a big girl. Only as a small girl, running after Doroy at the fiesta, wanting her whistle.

She said, We forgive you, Manong Seve. She called me Manong. I am not her manong. I am old enough to be her father. But okay. I take it.

Liezl, wait. Don't stop it. I remember something.

The girl. Doroy's girl. I said I forgot her name. I remembered. In the night, I remembered. Her name was Undang. From the same street. She had a mole here, by her mouth. He said it was the most beautiful mole in Ilocos.

Tell Nolan to tell them. Undang. Maybe they know what happened to her. Maybe she married somebody and had ten children and was happy. I hope so.

I hope she was happy. He would want that.

First Bandurria

The rondalla practices in a classroom at the high school in the town center, on Thursday afternoons after the last bell, with the jalousie windows cranked all the way open and two electric fans on the floor turned up to high and doing almost nothing against the heat. There are sixteen kids. Bandurrias, octavinas, laúds, guitars, and a bass that a skinny boy of about fourteen plays standing on a wooden crate so he can reach the top of the neck. Their teacher is a man named Sir Ronaldo, which is what the kids call him, *Sir* and his first name, the way students in the Philippines call all their male teachers, a slight bald man in a short-sleeved white shirt who conducts with a pencil.

Kristel sits in the front row, first chair, first bandurria. She has a school instrument, plywood, scratched, with a crack in the top that someone has repaired with a strip of clear packing tape on the inside.

I'm sitting on a chair at the back of the classroom with the case across my knees.

I'm supposed to wait until the end. That was the plan, Kristel's plan, made at the dinner table last night with great seriousness: I would wait until they finished rehearsing, and then I would bring the case to the front, and then she would open it. She wanted it to be a surprise for the others. She told me not to let anyone see the case. So I'm holding a big black teardrop-shaped case on my lap in the back of a room full of rondalla players, and every one of them has turned around at least four times to look at it.

---

They rehearse for an hour. I've never heard a rondalla play live this close, and it's nothing like I expected.

I thought it would sound quaint. It doesn't. It sounds like a whole orchestra made of light. The bandurrias carry the melody, high and silvery, and all of them play tremolo on the long notes, so the melody shimmers and holds the way Mrs. Basa showed me in Stockton. The octavinas play the same line an octave lower, warmer, with a woody hum. The laúds fill in harmonies. The guitars play the chords, chugging along underneath, and the bass, the skinny boy on his crate, thumps out a heartbeat. It's bright and fast on the dance pieces, so the whole room seems to tap its foot. And on the slow pieces it turns tender, almost unbearably, every instrument breathing together.

They play one of the slow ones last. It's a kundiman. Sir Ronaldo says its name, but I don't catch it. It starts in a minor key, slow, the bandurrias carrying a melody that rises and rises and falls back, like someone climbing a hill and stopping to look at something they've lost. Kristel plays the lead. Her tremolo is quick and fine and so smooth that, like Mrs. Basa said about Apong's, you can't hear the pick at all. Halfway through, the music turns, the minor goes major, and the melody climbs again and this time doesn't fall, and the whole room seems to brighten, like a cloud moving off the sun.

When it ends, Sir Ronaldo lowers his pencil and doesn't say anything for a second.

Then he looks at the back of the room. "Okay, Kristel," he says in English. "Go get your present before they all die of curiosity."

---

She opens the case on the teacher's desk with all sixteen kids crowded around her. When the lid comes up there's a collective intake of breath, and then everyone is talking at once. They want to touch it. Sir Ronaldo won't let them. He comes forward himself and studies it without touching it, then bends close to the soundhole and peers inside, and then looks up at me.

"This is old," he says. "Very old. Where is it from?"

"Stockton, California," I say. "But before that, I don't know. My grandfather bought it in 1949."

"No, it is from here. From the Philippines. The wood. And look at that." He points at the worn spot below the soundhole where the varnish has gone, the bare-wood thumbprint. "Look how much he played."

Kristel lifts it out of the case. She holds it a moment against her chest, the way Apong held it, the way the young man in the 1953 photograph held it, and then she sits down in her chair and puts her fingers on the neck and plays the first phrase of the kundiman again.

The sound is different. The school bandurria was bright and a little thin. This one is warmer, deeper, with a kind of glow in the low notes, like the sound has been aged. When she gets to the long note at the top of the first phrase and goes into the tremolo, the note doesn't just hold. It blooms.

The kids go dead quiet.

She plays the whole kundiman through, alone, on her great-great-grandmother's brother's bandurria, in a hot classroom in Ilocos, eighty-five years after he left. I stand behind her with my recorder held out in front of me at arm's length, and my hand is shaking a little, and I hope it doesn't show on the recording.

When she's done, she doesn't look up. She keeps her head down over the instrument for a while, her hair hanging down around her face. Then she wipes her face with her wrist and says, in English, to the bandurria, not to me, "Agyamanak, Lolo Seve."

---

I send the recording to Apong that night.

Liezl plays it for him the next morning in Stockton, and later she tells me what happened. He listened to the whole thing in his chair with his eyes closed. When it ended, he said, "Again," and she played it again. And then again. On the fourth time, he started moving his right hand on the arm of the chair, small and fast, side to side, and Liezl didn't know what he was doing, and then she realized: he was doing the tremolo. Along with Kristel. In the air.

"He was playing with her," Liezl says over the phone. Her voice breaks. "Nolan. He was *playing*."

---

On Saturday, Saling takes me to Lola Loniang's grave.

The cemetery is on the edge of the barangay, on a low hill. In Ilocos the dead aren't buried in the ground much; they're placed in tombs above it, concrete boxes, some plain and some painted, some stacked in walls of niches like apartment buildings, some standing alone as little houses with roofs and doors and tiled floors where families can sit. Bougainvillea grows over everything, magenta and orange and white, spilling down the walls. Goats wander between the tombs eating the grass. There's a breeze up here that doesn't reach the barangay, and it smells of dry grass and hot concrete and the sea, faint, from far away to the west.

Loniang's tomb is a small white house with a green roof and a tiled step in front. Her name is painted on the front in blue letters. *APOLONIA TABIOS VDA. DE RAMOS. 1924–1999.* There's a vase on the step with plastic flowers in it, bleached by the sun.

Saling sweeps the step with a broom she's brought. She sets out fresh flowers, real ones, marigolds and a few white sampaguita. She lights a candle in a glass, which is what everybody does here, the way you'd leave a light on for somebody coming home late. Then she stands back and looks at me.

I take out the photograph my father gave me at the airport. Apong and my Lola at their fiftieth anniversary, laughing. I set it on the step, leaning against the tomb.

And then I don't know what to do.

"Talk to her," Saling says, in English. "She is listening."

So I try. I start in Ilocano, with the words I have. "Naimbag nga aldaw, Lola Loniang." Good day. "Siak ni Nolan." I am Nolan. "Apo ni—" grandson of— and then I run out. I look at Saling. She doesn't help me. She just waits, the way Apong waits at the kitchen table when I'm reaching for a word, the way you'd wait for a child learning to walk across a room toward you.

So I switch to English and tell her the rest. I tell her about the medal. About the gray square on his page that waited eight years and isn't gray anymore. About the ceremony, how he stood up when he wasn't supposed to, how he said *with the S*. I tell her he's a hundred and four and still sharp, still stubborn, still corrects everybody's grammar. I tell her about the malunggay in Stockton that's been wrapped every winter for forty-seven years. I tell her that I'm sleeping in his room tomorrow night, one night only, like he said.

I tell her he's sorry he didn't come back more.

When I'm done, Saling nods, and says, "Okay. Now she knows." And she picks up the broom.

---

**From the recordings**

*Living room, Stockton. Early April, before the ceremony. I asked him why he only went back once.*

1979. My mother died. I went. Your Lola came with me. Her first time. She was afraid of the food. Then she ate everything.

I stayed three weeks. Loniang cooked every day. She kept my room. Same bed. Same mat. She would not let anybody sit on it. I said, Loniang, this is crazy, I am almost sixty years old, I have a house in America, I have a room. She said, This is also your room. When you come home, you sleep here.

When I left, she walked with me to the road. Like when we were small and she followed me to the river. I said, Go home, Loniang. She stayed. Until the car was gone, she stayed.

That is why I didn't go back. You want the truth? That's the truth. Not money. Not the airplane. I could not do the leaving again. Each time you go home is also one more leaving. I had done enough leaving.

So I sent money and I stayed in Stockton and I let her keep the room. That was a selfish thing. I know it.

When you sleep there, tell her I'm sorry. And tell her the bed is too hard. It was always too hard.

The Pass and the Room

Rodel wants to take me to the pass. Saling says it's too far. Rodel says it's not that far. Saling says the tricycle won't make it up the mountain. Rodel says he'll borrow his cousin's pickup. Saling says his cousin's pickup has no brakes to speak of. Rodel says the brakes are fine, they just need to be pressed early. This goes on through all of breakfast, in Ilocano, with me catching every fifth word, and at the end of it Saling throws up her hands and says, in English, for my benefit, "Okay! Go! Die in the mountains like your Lolo almost did!" and goes to open the store.

We leave at five the next morning in a gray pickup with a cracked windshield and a dashboard covered in stickers. The brakes, I discover on the first downhill, need to be pressed very early indeed.

---

It takes four hours. South along the coast, the sea on our right, flat and silver in the early light with small outrigger boats pulled up on the black sand. Past Vigan, where Rodel slows down so I can see the old Spanish streets with their stone houses and capiz windows and the horse-drawn carts waiting for tourists. Then inland, east, up into the Cordillera.

The road climbs in switchbacks. The air changes. It gets cooler, then cold, really cold, so I have to dig a sweatshirt out of my bag. The rice paddies give way to steep slopes terraced into narrow stepped fields, then to forest. Pine trees. Real pine trees, tall and straight, with the sun coming through them in long dusty bars, and the needles thick on the ground, and the smell of resin coming in through the open window so strongly I can taste it. It smells like the Sierra. It smells like the drive up to Lake Tahoe that my family made every summer when I was a kid. I remember Apong in the passenger seat of my father's van on those drives, his window rolled down, saying nothing, breathing.

I never asked him why.

Fog lies in the valleys below the road, white and dense and perfectly flat on top, exactly like he said, like a lake you could walk on. Here and there a ridge sticks up out of it like an island.

---

The pass is high, a saddle between two mountains, and there's a memorial there now: a monument on a hilltop, a small park with paths and benches and a marker explaining the battle in Filipino and English. The marker says that in June of 1945, Filipino guerrilla forces of the USAFIP, North Luzon, took the pass after months of fighting, opening the way into the valley beyond, in one of the last major battles of the war in the northern Philippines.

That's all it says, more or less. It doesn't say who carried the food up the trails. It doesn't say how cold it was at night. It doesn't say anything about a twenty-three-year-old from Nagpatpatan, three years out of O'Donnell, who had already been through more than any person should go through and was still there, still walking, still carrying.

We're the only people there. Rodel buys two bottles of water and two packets of crackers from a woman with a cooler at the parking lot, and we sit on a bench and look out at the mountains, rows of them, blue and then bluer and then gray, going away to the east.

"Lolo Seve was here?" Rodel asks.

"He was here."

"What did he do?"

"He doesn't talk about it."

Rodel nods. He doesn't seem surprised. "My Lolo also," he says. "Lola Loniang's husband. He was a guerrilla. Different group. Same mountains. He never talked. When he died, my father found a box under his bed with a pistol in it, no bullets, wrapped in a shirt. Nobody knew. Nobody ever knew he had it."

We sit there. A hawk circles below us, over the valley, riding the air coming up off the slopes.

I take out my phone and drop a pin. I've had a pin near here on the map for months, approximate, from a book Tita Perla found. I move it to where I'm sitting. I title it *Bessang Pass, June 1945*. I add a photo of the view: the ridges, the fog in the valley, the pines. For the description, I write what Apong told me: *Cold at night. Pine trees, like here in the Sierra. Fog in the morning, in the valleys, white, like a lake you could walk on. The mountain people helped us. They did not have to.*

I don't add anything about the fighting. He didn't give me anything about the fighting. That's his.

---

When we get back to the barangay, after dark, sunburned and stiff and with the pickup's brakes making a sound like a goose being stepped on, Saling is waiting at the store window with news.

She's found Undang.

It took her three days and every customer in the barangay and a long text exchange with a cousin of a cousin in Dingras. Undang's full name was Florinda Agcaoili. She was Doroy's girl. When he didn't come home, she waited four years, and then in 1946 she married a farmer from the next barangay named Pedro, and they had eight children, and she lived to be eighty-eight. She died in 2010, in her sleep.

Saling hands me her phone. There's a photo, sent from a granddaughter: an old woman at a birthday party, in a pink blouse, with a paper crown on her head, laughing so hard her eyes have disappeared. There's a small mole beside her mouth.

"The granddaughter says she was very loud," Saling says. "She says, *Lola Undang laughed at everything. She sang all day. She was the happiest person in our family.*"

I send the photo to Liezl, with a message: *Tell Apong she was happy*.

---

That night I sleep in his room.

Kristel has made up the bed for me: the thin mattress, the woven mat on top, a clean sheet, a pillow that smells of the sun from being aired out all day on the roof. She lets down the mosquito net from its string on the ceiling and tucks it under the edges of the mattress, all the way around, carefully, the way somebody must have done for him when he was small. The jalousie window is cranked open a few inches. Outside, frogs. A dog. Somewhere a radio playing an old love song very softly.

On the wall above me, the boy in the campaign hat.

I lie on my back. The bed is extremely hard. Apong was right. It's like lying on a table.

I say it out loud, in English, because I don't have the Ilocano for it. "He says the bed is too hard. He says it was always too hard." I wait. Then I tell her the rest: "He says he's sorry. He couldn't do the leaving again." And then, because it feels like the right thing to do, "But I came. And the bandurria came. And Kristel's going to play it. So some of him came home."

I don't hear anything. I don't expect to. But I lie there listening to the frogs until the radio down the road goes quiet, and I'm not lonely at all, which is strange, in a strange room in a strange country, seven thousand miles from my own bed. I feel like someone has been expecting me for a long time and is relieved that I finally showed up.

At some point I fall asleep. At some point a rooster wakes me, at about four-fifteen in the morning, right under the window, enormously loud and clearly very pleased with himself. I lie there in the gray dark under the net and think about Doroy's busy rooster and laugh out loud, alone, in my grandfather's bed.

---

In the morning Saling sits me down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, real coffee this time, brewed, dark, from beans grown in the mountains we drove through yesterday.

"Number five," she says. "On your list. What he said at the hall."

She has the recording on her phone; I sent it to the family weeks ago. She plays it. His voice, slow and clear, with the pop of the microphone at the start. The four or five sentences.

She translates them, one at a time, and makes me repeat each one.

The first, roughly: *This is not mine. I am holding it for the others.* Then the names: *Doroy. Atong. The old woman who threw the rice.* Then: *For my sister Loniang, who kept my room.* Then the last two, which she says more slowly, looking at me.

*My grandchildren do not speak our language. That is my fault, not theirs.*

*When one of them can say to me in our words that I have come home, then I will know that I did.*

She stops the recording.

I sit there. I can't say anything. I had been getting one word in four.

"So," Saling says. "He wants you to say it. To him. In Ilocano."

"Say what? What are the words?"

She tells me. It's two words. It's very short, because in Ilocano a whole sentence can fit inside one word, and this one does. *Nakaawidkan, Apong.* You have come home, Apong. Saling makes me say it twenty times, then thirty, until the *aw* is right, and the *k* is soft, and I stop saying it like an American reading a menu.

"Again," she says, every time. "Again."

I don't write it down.

---

**From the recordings**

*Kitchen, Stockton. Early March. He was tired. This was at the end of a long session, after I'd turned the recorder off and he told me to turn it back on.*

The day the war ended for me, I didn't know it was the end. Nobody told us. We came down from the mountains in September, walking. Somebody had a radio, somebody heard. Japan surrendered. The officers said it was finished.

I didn't feel anything. I kept walking.

We came out of the trees onto a road above the coast. And I saw the ocean. The sea to the west, the water going all the way out flat, blue, with the sun on it. I had not seen the ocean since Bataan. Three and a half years. I stopped on the road. The other men kept walking. I sat down on a rock.

I sat there until night. I watched the sun go into the water. I thought: Over there, very far, is America. And Doroy is not going to see this. And Atong is somewhere, alive or not, I don't know. And I am sitting on a rock looking at the water.

Then I got up and walked home. My mother was at the door, again. The malunggay was there, again.

That's all. Turn it off now. I'm tired.

Nakaawidkan

I land at SFO on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of May, and the first thing I notice, walking out of the terminal into the wind, is that I'm cold. Sixty-two degrees, and I'm cold. Two weeks in Ilocos and my body has decided that anything under eighty is winter. I stand at the curb in a sweatshirt with my hands in my sleeves, shivering, waiting for my father, and laugh at myself, and think about a twenty-five-year-old from the barangay getting off a bus in Stockton in the rain in 1947 with a cardboard suitcase, looking for a man in a white suit.

My father pulls up in his truck. He gets out to hug me again. Twice in one month. I may have to start keeping track.

"How is he?" I say.

My father takes my bag. He doesn't answer right away. He puts the bag in the bed of the truck and closes the tailgate and checks the latch twice.

"Smaller," he says. "He's been waiting for you."

---

We drive straight there. I don't go home first.

The house on Laurel Street looks the same. The chain-link fence. The cracked driveway, which my father has power-washed to an almost unnatural cleanliness in my absence. The garage door open, the Ford inside, the nail on the wall, empty, because the asparagus knife is in my duffel bag, rolled up in a T-shirt, where it's been for two weeks. I took it to Ilocos. I didn't tell anyone. I don't really know why. I showed it to Lakay Gorio on the bench outside the store, and he held it and turned it over and tested the edge with his thumb and said something to Kristel that she wouldn't translate, and then gave it back to me with both hands.

In the backyard, the malunggay is enormous.

I stop in the driveway and stare at it. Two weeks of warm weather, and it's exploded. It's twelve feet tall now, maybe thirteen, its branches thick with feathery green fronds all the way down, so dense you can't see the trunk. There are small cream-colored flowers at the tips of some of the branches, clusters of them, smelling faintly sweet, and bees working them. I've never seen it flower. Not once in my life.

"Started last week," my father says, beside me. "Your aunt took about a hundred pictures."

The frost cloth is folded in a neat square on a shelf in the garage, with the four bamboo poles leaning in the corner beside it. Somebody has written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the top of the folded cloth, in Tita Perla's capitals: *NOV*.

---

He's in his chair in the living room, by the heater, which is off. He's wearing the pelican cap. He's smaller, my father's right, in some way I can't quite name, like the chair has gotten bigger around him. His hands are folded on his stomach. His eyes are closed. The TV is on, the Filipino channel, the variety show, the hosts shouting at each other affectionately.

Tita Perla is in the kitchen. Liezl is on the couch with Amihan, who's ten months old now and pulling herself up on everything, and who looks at me with deep suspicion, as if trying to remember where she's seen me before.

I don't say hello to anyone. I go straight to his chair and crouch down beside it, the way I always do, so I'm lower than him, so he's looking down at me.

His eyes open.

He looks at me. He doesn't say anything. He's waiting.

I had planned this. On the plane, for fourteen hours, I had planned it. I was going to say good afternoon first, in Ilocano, *Naimbag a malem*, and then tell him I was back, and then tell him about Saling and Kristel and the bandurria and Lakay Gorio and the pass and the room and the rooster, and *then*, at the end, when the moment was right, I was going to say it.

I don't do any of that. I just say it.

"Nakaawidkan, Apong."

The *aw* comes out right. The *k* is soft. I don't say it like an American reading a menu. I say it the way Saling said it to me thirty times at her kitchen table in the barangay, with the coffee going cold between us, until I could say it without thinking.

He doesn't move. For a second I think I've said it wrong. Then I see his eyes.

He takes one hand off his stomach. He puts it on my face, on my cheek, the way his mother did when he came up the road from Capas, the way Saling did to me at the store window the night I arrived. His palm is dry and light, like paper, and cool.

He says something in Ilocano. It's short. It's slow.

And I understand it.

Not because I've learned that much Ilocano in two weeks. I haven't. But because I know these words. Because they're simple, and because I heard them every day in the barangay, at the store window and the dinner table and the bench outside, over and over, until they sank in under my skin without my noticing.

"*Wen, apok,*" he says. "*Nakaawidak.*"

Yes, my grandchild. I have come home.

---

Behind me, Tita Perla has come out of the kitchen and is standing in the doorway with a dish towel pressed to her mouth. Liezl is crying on the couch, holding Amihan, who has decided this is an emergency and is crying too, at the top of her lungs. My father is in the front doorway, very still, with his keys still in his hand.

Apong takes his hand off my face. He looks at all of them, one after the other. Then he looks back at me.

"Your *k* is still too hard," he says in English. "A little."

And then he laughs. That dry, wheezing laugh. And everybody else does too.

---

Before dinner I unpack my duffel on the living-room rug. Under the asparagus knife, rolled in my T-shirts, is the blanket Saling pressed on me at the airport: cotton, woven on a neighbor's loom in the next town, white and indigo, squares inside squares inside squares, so that the pattern seems to turn if you look at it too long. *Inabel*, she called it, and made me say it back.

Apong runs his thumb along the edge where the weft turns. "Binakol," he says, naming the pattern. "My mother had one on her bed. You count, to make it. Like the rondalla. Everybody keeps the same time or it goes crooked." He spreads it over his knees and keeps it there all evening, and when Liezl brings him the crocheted one instead, he waves it away.

---

Later, after dinner (dinengdeng, which I cook, with leaves from the tree, and which nobody writes down), my father does something I have never seen him do.

He sits on the floor next to Apong's chair, cross-legged, like a kid, and plays him the recording of Lakay Gorio.

The whole twenty minutes. The high cackle. The slap on the knee. Kristel's quick voice translating. *The loudest boy in the barangay. The best at the dallot.* My father watches his father's face the whole time, the way you'd watch a pot to see whether it's going to boil.

When it gets to the part about the bride's mother, Apong starts to laugh. Not his wheezing laugh. Something else, something from lower down. He shakes his head and covers his eyes with one hand.

"Gorio," he says. "Gorio, that little liar. It wasn't the bride's mother. It was the bride's *grandmother*."

My father leans forward. "Do one," he says. "Papa. Do one now."

"One what?"

"A dallot. Make one up. About somebody here."

Apong studies him with his head tilted, the way he studies a frayed wire. Then he sits up straighter in his chair. He clears his throat. He looks around the room, at all of us, and his eyes settle on my father, and they narrow, and something comes into them that I have never seen there before, that I've seen only in one photograph, of a young man grinning in a white shirt in 1953 with a bandurria against his chest.

He sings. In Ilocano. Four lines. His voice is thin and cracked and absolutely, totally off-key, Lakay Gorio was right about that, but the rhythm is perfect and the words come out quick and sure, and Tita Perla, who understands some Ilocano, gasps and then shrieks with laughter and doubles over in the kitchen doorway, holding onto the frame.

"What?" my father says. "What did he say?"

Tita Perla can't talk. She's laughing too hard. She waves her dish towel at him helplessly.

"He said," she finally manages, wiping her eyes, "he said, *My son washes every driveway in the city, / and the neighbors' driveways too, / but if he washed his own ears once in forty years / he might have heard me talking to him.*"

My father stares at his father.

Then he starts to laugh too. And then he puts his head down on the arm of the chair, and I can't tell anymore whether he's laughing or something else, and Apong reaches over and puts his hand on the back of his son's head, and leaves it there.

---

The messages take another week.

He wants to record them for everybody. Not just Amihan. All of them. The great-grandchildren who exist and the ones who don't yet. Kristel's baby brother Jayjay, in Ilocos, who is a great-great-grandnephew, and whom Apong insists counts. Rodel and Lyn's next baby, if there is one. Liezl's next one. Mine.

"You don't have any kids," I tell him. "I mean, I don't."

"You will," he says. "Or you won't. If you don't, the message waits forever, and nobody is hurt."

So we do it. Every evening for a week, after dinner, I clip the recorder to his collar, and I bring him a glass of water, and I go into the other room, and he talks. I don't listen. I don't try to. When he calls me back in, he tells me who it's for and when it should open, and I set the date, and I give it the title he tells me, and then it waits.

*For Jayjay, when he is twenty-one. From his Apong Seve in Stockton, the brother of his great-great-grandmother Loniang, who kept my room.*

*For the first child of Nolan, on their eighteenth birthday. From the great-grandfather who taught your father to say good morning.*

*For whoever is the youngest Tabios on February 18, 2072, which is my one hundred fiftieth birthday. Open it at the table. Make dinengdeng first.*

And then, on the last night, a short one. He lets me stay in the room for this one. He tells me who it's for. He tells me to set it to open in twenty years.

He says it's for everybody. For the whole family, both branches, Stockton and Ilocos, everyone on the tree. Whoever is there to hear it.

---

The tree has changed while I was away. Kristel added a photograph of herself with the bandurria, in the front row of the rondalla, mid-tremolo, her face fierce with concentration. Saling added a photo of the store window with the notebook open to the back cover, to the spidery line in Lola Loniang's handwriting. Jomar, from Dingras, asked if the Cabanillas could link to us, not as family, as *friends of the family*, and I said yes, and now there's a thin dotted line running from Apong to a young man with a rooster.

And Tita Perla added a note to my Lola's entry, under *Spoke Spanish, English, and enough Ilocano to win every argument*.

The note says: *The store in Nagpatpatan was built with her money too. She wanted her name on it. It took sixty-four years, but now it is.*

---

**From the recordings**

*The living room. Late May. The last of the messages. He let me stay. The heater is off. Through the back window, the malunggay, in flower. To open in May 2046.*

This is Severino Tabios. With the S.

I don't know who is listening. Maybe you are in Stockton. Maybe you are in Ilocos. Maybe you are someplace I never heard of. That's okay. Our family was always going someplace.

I want to tell you three things. Then I'm finished.

One. I was a soldier, a long time ago. I was not a hero. I was a boy who stood where they told him to stand and didn't run. Some days that is all courage is. Standing where you are and not running. You can do that too. You don't need a war. You can do it at a kitchen table.

Two. I was a farmworker for thirty-one years. I cut asparagus that I never ate. I put fish in cans in Alaska. I am not ashamed of this. Nobody should be ashamed of work that feeds people. Stand up straight after. That's all.

Three. We have a language. It almost got lost. It got cold. My fault, a little. Somebody wrapped it up and kept it alive through the winter. Your grandfather, maybe, or your great-grandfather. His name is Nolan. He didn't know how either. He learned late. That's okay. Late is still learning.

If you don't know it, learn some. Just a little. Enough to say good morning. Enough to say thank you to an old lady who gives you something when you are hungry. Enough to tell somebody, when they come back from far away, that they are home.

*Naimbag a bigat.* Good morning. That's all it takes to start.

Okay. I'm finished. Somebody make the soup.