Four Funerals and a Wedding: The First Funeral (Part I)

I was a happy child, and even if I’ve seen gray clouds, I had a happy, well-provided for childhood. I was well adjusted and could deal with much of what came my way when I was young, so much so that probably, to my classmates then, it never really seemed that I was lacking something. Truth is, my parents separated when I was probably a little over one year old and certainly barely able to remember how it was to have a father in the house. Of course, precocious classmates noticed that my father never showed up in school, which was obvious since the school’s population was quite small and each grade level had only two sections with a little less than 30 students each.

So, when precocious classmates started asking where my father was, I threw the ball at my mom, who wittingly came up with an answer. She told me to tell them this:

“Nasa Hong Kong,
kasama si King Kong,
nagtatanim ng kangkong.�

And so, equally precocious little May, in pigtails and all started blaring to the world the “would pass as a limerick� answer.

As I vaguely remember much, I was told that I used to ask where my father was. My mom would tell me he’s in heaven and I would go on to ask for his phone number. When I was seven, I met my father not in heaven but several meters above ground, on the top deck of my uncle’s building.

I’ve always known my father is Chinese, which makes me a tsinoy. Even if he wasn’t around I knew my paternal grandparents (see Shoe Blues blog below), my father’s brother, his wife and my first cousins, and I must say I was well-loved by them. My Angkong’s love for me must have been so powerful that it was conveyed to me, without words, when he slipped on my feet the first piece of those little red shoes. I remember myself admiring those shoes as they stand slanted inside my shoe cabinet.

I vaguely remember his funeral.

Perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually long for a father. I could understand but couldn’t accept why me and my sister could visit him in his upholstery store and show him our medals from school but he couldn’t do anything much. He wasn’t in the house, he didn’t call, and didn’t speak to our mother. And then, there was a woman, about ten years older than me and my sister who loathed us, spat at us, when we passed by in front of her furniture store. She said, “pwe, ang papangit!�, a remark which froze me as that was the first time, in all ten years of my life, that someone showed such anger and spite towards me. My sister, feistier than me, retorted, “mas pangit ka!� and I couldn’t agree more. That incident drove my mom to call my dad on the phone, angrier than I’ve seen her angriest and bewailing how we were treated. My Tita Rosa, my Uncle Tiong Kim’s wife and their daughter, Ate Katyn rushed to my mom’s side, and expressed anger over what happened. It was that incident and several others which eventually led me to find out where my dad was all along when I thought he was *really* in Hong Kong.

Angkong and Ama were originally from Fookien (Amoy), China. It was where my papa, Chua Tiong Kong and his elder brother Chua Tiong Kim and youngest brother Chua Tiong Te-a were born. While they were still young and after the fall of the Nationalists led by Chiang-Kai Chek, Angkong went to Manila and established a business in Marikina. He adopted the surname “Magante�, married a Filipina, whose name I forget, and became one of Marikina’s prosperous owners of shoe factories. Meanwhile, Ama and her children were still poor and also dreamed of setting foot in the Philippines. Ama, as evidenced with her very tiny feet, bound by cloth since infancy, was from a wealthy family but everything was taken away by the communists. Soon enough, in the 1950s, Tiong Kim set sail to Manila, learned to speak very fluent English (though still with the Mr. Shoo-li accent) and fraternized with affluent people. Shortly, Tiong Kong or Kong-a, Tiong Te-a or Te-a, along with their mama were also in Manila. It was never unknown to them that Angkong was already the patriarch of the Magante family, and apparently, all of them embraced their predicament, if only to stay longer and hopefully find a better life waiting for them in Fei-lu-bin guo. While the Magantes stayed in Marikina, the Chuas struggled in Binondo, Juan Luna and in Sampalucan, Caloocan, then a bustling furniture making district, who has among its pioneers, a self-made businessman and former farmer from Pandi, Bulacan, Leoncio Sandel.

Leoncio, at that time was one of the most, if not the most successful businessmen in Sampalucan. His factory was biggest and had the most number of people in his employ. He was married to the very industrious and frugal Basilia who complements the jovial and amiable character of Lucio. They had three daughter, Patricia, Lourdes and Erlinda, my mother, who was the only one who married among the three. Lucio and Basilia had one fault – they failed to foresee, or most likely, refused to acknowledge their mortality. They didn’t want their daughters to marry. They kept their daughters atop a then considered “high rise� three storey building, secluded and protected from any unworthy suitor. But no fortification can deter Kong-a, who upon laying his eyes on my mother, persistently pursued her, ligaw intsik, climbling over fences and roofs just to see her.

And so they were married. My father even had to be christened at our parish before the wedding cause he was Buddhist. I do not know why or how he became Teodoro Tan but that was his name that appears on my birth certificate. Tsinoys would know why and how he was “transformed from Chua or Choi to Tan or Chen.

My mother’s fairy tale ended just as Ms. Spain, Amparo Muñoz’ fairy tale as Miss Universe 1974 started. Taking advantage of the influx of tourists due to the Philippines’ hosting of the Miss Universe pageant, mother and daughter tandem, abandoned by my father at her daughter’s birth to escape his fixed marriage to his cousin, slipped into Manila and rained on Rapunzel a.k.a. my mom’s parade.

To make the long story short, my mom wouldn’t hear of any Magante-like arrangements and refused to take part in what she perceived to be a harem.

And so I found out that, all along “Hong Kong�, where my father supposedly was, was even less than a kilometer away.