Hapag-kainan, dibdib
[Not linking to the original entry, so I’m cross-posting instead the essay I wrote about food for Potluck #2.]
My language is one that eats and is eaten. If one is to speak to me of comfort and discomfort — speak to me of food.
“Balut,” you say. “That’s disgusting, too.”
It is yet another conversation our chat room has somehow wandered into, talking about exotic food. I don’t say — at this point it doesn’t even occur to me to say it — that the food you call exotic is food I have eaten at one time or another; food I would readily eat if asked; food that I consider a special treat; food that I regularly eat and take comfort and joy in. I don’t say anything, really. I listen to you laugh about it and express your disbelief and astonishment that anyone would want to regularly eat balut.
I bite my tongue. (It is a familiar taste by now, tongue and blood.)
Months from now, when I have drifted away from you and learned, slowly, how to speak with a voice I never knew I had, you will talk about balut again, and I will smile to myself to hide the gritting of my teeth, and I will say, you know, I consider balut a delicious treat. What does that make me?
Wait, you will say. We’re speaking at cross-purposes. I don’t tell you we’re speaking in different tongues.
Because this too is language, the speech of my mouth and lips and tongue, to gullet and belly and loins. This is how I open my mouth. Swallow.
When I was preparing to visit my partner in Melbourne I asked her whether their household stocked rice, and if it was all right for me to cook it regularly. She understood why I was asking — when she was here to visit me we had rice almost every day. Not all people do, though. Understand, that is.
Let us not speak of how I’ve seen and heard people talking about how rice grains appeared to them: tiny white maggots, Mia, aren’t they? Or how I’ve been asked how I could stand eating rice every day, every meal. Let us not speak of the laughter that comes with it, because how strange to have such a staple in one’s diet, how little imagination it showed, how boring it must all be. (I suppose, someone once said, eventually you get used to the taste.)
But I wonder at the question. The assumption of monotony and lack of imagination: how are we content with the same thing, over and over? (Thrice a day if we are among the lucky few. Once a day, or less, with a viand of salt if we are not.) Rice every day? Every meal?
And how to answer, really. How to explain: the essential nature of rice, how it completes meals; the way it feels in the mouth, rounding out sharp flavors and pulling tastes into some sort of ineffable harmony. How it serves as the foundation of the act of eating, something that cannot be shaken, because it does not change with wind or the tides of seasons or fashion. (Don’t we want more? I am sometimes asked; as if in wonderment at a tradition of less. How does one say, to reach for earth is as noble as it is to reach for the stars. How does one say, pinanganak ako sa ilalim ng ibang langit.) The simplicity of it, rooted in the mouth as is my tongue.
For rice is of the earth, is of us; is of our land of river and sea and green plains and mountains splayed open to the sun. Is as much part of me as my skin like a maya’s feathers and my narra-sheen hair; as my tongue of suka and patis, sili and toyo; as fingers that pick at butong-pakwan and lanzones and rambutan. As a mouth that slips from kanin to kain, the words connected, separated only by a single breath of sound.
Palay, bigas, kanin, tutong, bahaw — they’re just a handful, grains cupped in the palm, each word for a different aspect of it, one phase shifting to another in this cycle of growing and living and eating. Each one for a different way of knowing: the experience of watching palay stand golden and green in the sun, unhusking it into the currency of bigas, lifting a lid in a cloud of fragrant steam to feast one’s eyes on the round embrace of grains; rice toasted gold and brown and black in the burning of the pan, rice left cold and uneaten like a lumpen heart.
How am I to say it, when I am asked? The language of my food is a language of rice. Like the sound of a mouth opening — nga, and again — it’s vital to me, something I swallow every day along with the heat and the light and the dusty air lit by the beat of maya’s wings.
I find comfort, I sometimes say, in sharpness. When I think of peace I think of silence and the golden, arid light of a summer afternoon spent on a street shaded by trees, surrounded by a crowd of strangers and yet utterly, blissfully alone as I bit into manggang hilaw spiked with rock salt and siling labuyo, then closed my eyes. The tang of the hot salty sourness seethed between my teeth, making me shiver.
This is peace: the intensity of it, flavor focused to a single point stabbing into one’s tongue until the breath comes long and dry through your nostrils and salt stings your eyes. This is peace, inhaling past gritted teeth, opening your mouth to draw air over a tongue rubbed raw by salt and sili, the taste sinking into your wounds. The unforgiving acid of green mango, gripping you until you can think of nothing but sourness, until the world is a world of green mangoes, dry and sharp, and leaves sucked clean of all moisture, and the smell of dust on the streets; and you look up into the trees above you and give yourself over to the sun and heat and unbearably pure sky of summer.
And then you inhale, open your eyes, and take another bite. Across the vendor’s stand someone else, like you, is holding a stick on which is pierced a pale green cheek of unripe mango, heavy with salt and red rings of sliced labuyo. Your eyes meet. This too is peace: recognizing the same tears in a another’s eyes. Suddenly you are no longer strangers. Your language has no need of words, only tongue.
Ang sakit ng dila ko.
I work in a job that demands long hours. Sometimes I arrive home late enough that most gates have been closed, and streetlights blink sleepily at me in orange exhaustion as I stagger to our house. And sometimes, when I get home, I’m greeted by a bowl on the dinner table, with two or three balut eggs in it, still warm to the touch.
Balut, my parents say, is a strengthener. It invigorates the tired spirit and replenishes lost reserves of energy with its savory broth — the sort one wants more of, more and more and more, because its deliciousness is not just sarap but also lasap and linamnam — and rich yolk and the tender meat of the chick.
And it is incomparably good, the eating of it an exercise in delectation: finding which side of the egg to crack, crooking a finger past bits of eggshell to make a hole through which one can drink the juices of the balut, sucking greedily as if the shell contained the most exquisite soup. Then opening it, to find the duckling curled up against the vivid gold of the yolk; eating either, or both, in salt, in vinegar, in sili, in huge bites, in small bites determined to make it last as long as possible. There is a word for it: sinisimsim, savoring and sucking and eating it up, to the very last morsel. Balut is too rich to eat more than two or three in one sitting. It’s a heady feeling, the dizzy richness of it coursing through your veins.
There have been shows — I have seen them — and countless sites, and all sorts of lists featuring the eating of balut as an act of bravery, an overcoming of fear and disgust — as if courage could be proven by consuming what to some people is a day-end treat, or a forbidden pleasure, or a thing common and ordinary and tasty and beloved, or livelihood to be earned inside newspaper-padded baskets under the light of oil lamps and cries of Baluuuuuut! Sometimes I see them and my heart aches, because it is easy, isn’t it, to revile that which you do not understand, and in so doing scorn tongues lapping at the broth, the gentle crunch of bone between teeth. Our lexicons are just different, I tell myself. They just don’t know.
(The smell or the taste of it, or the warmth of it sliding down one’s throat, or the way people can sometimes buy balut for a child who’s coming home late, drained by the work of the day, and keep it warm for her, all those hours of waiting.)
For me, balut means love.
There is a passage in Rizal’s Noli that has stuck, no matter how much of the other parts of the novel have fallen away from the memory of the students who had to learn it while in school. The difference between types of hot chocolate. In one of its witty, incisive asides the Noli deals with the distinction between tsokolate a, weak and watery and served to inferiors, and tsokolate e, rich and thick and served to those whom the frayle wished to honor. Centuries later, and the distinction, if not the political nuances behind it, has remained; countless restaurants feature tsokolate e on their menu, proudly touting it as made the traditional way: generously, with native tablea.
On nights when I can’t sleep, I often go down to the kitchen to make tsokolate e. It is a task meant only for the patient, because those whose hands are too used to the gratification of instant hot chocolate will find a different sort of movement here, stirring in slow and steady circles with a batirol as the tablea melts into simmering water. Making tsokolate e is simple, but not quick. It defeats expectations of convenience.
But think of it: standing before a stove, wooden stirrer in hand, scent of cocoa wafting up in silent white curls; stirring over and over again, water and chocolate whispering in circles. Sometimes I ponder whether what makes tsokolate e — our tsokolate e, no longer that of the two-faced frayles — real is the act of making it, the choice to expend effort on it rather than going a quicker and easier way with other drinks. The choice of waiting and working. Because it’s worth it.
Because that is what tsokolate e is: time, and the memories of beans drying in the sun, and slow, patient motion, over and over, until a rhythm of water and chocolate and heat sings itself into being. Because that is what food, too, means to me: effort gradually bearing fruit, the deepening of flavor; the comfort in choosing food and cooking and eating and holding close to my heart the ineffable certainty of a good end. Because food may not erase the taste of blood but it can wrap around it, enfold it and turn it into something that can be lived with and rejoiced in and claimed. Because food becomes, in the end, me, standing amidst the dark quiet of night, stirring tablea into simmering water.
This is as much my food as the grains of chocolate hot on my tongue. My fingers around a wooden handle, my face drinking in the steam and heat. What I swallow, what I eat, this is part of the speech of my body; becomes my body, becomes blood and skin and bones, becomes part of the same tongue that licks chocolate smear off my lips, that rolls joyously around balut and rubs itself against green mango and salt, that holds and is held by rice, that speaks to you in a language that is mine and yet not mine, saying, Kausapin mo ako.
Kumain tayo.
