I am back in Calle Balic-balic. The street still winds gently from Galas in Quezon City to Sampaloc, Manila, as it has done so for a few hundred years. Sadly it has been stripped of its evocative name and is now known simply as G. Tuazon.
My grandparents’ house still stands at the end of G. Tuazon, which merges abruptly with the block-long Castaños. My parents and us six kids lived at Castaños from the mid-50s to 1960 in a two-story, two-bedroom, wood and concrete, sturdy apartment. It was still a clean, safe and quiet neighbourhood. Close friends and relatives lived nearby in freestanding houses and maintained a sense of community and common history. It was a softer, gentler Manila, displaying no great wealth, but no grinding poverty either.
Our grandparents, aunts and uncles lived just across the street in a big house faintly Spanish in flavor, with floors made of thick hardwood planks and high ceilings. For a time, a garden managed to survive in this urban setting — a leggy guava tree with small but sweet fruit, two lanzones trees that never bloomed, pink and lavender myrtle shrubs, potted palms, Chinese jasmine, an aggressively scented dama de noche and the more modest sampaguita.
We played in this garden and out on the streets, watched carefully by our elders. Sometimes groups of young boys would stage games to stake out and defend their “territories” with hardly any loss of blood or real physical damage. Children played and listened to the radio; only a few families had black and white television sets. They did their homework and prayed the rosary. We were strictly bidden to be home by Angelus. It was a simple life.
My dad was a real Manileño, but practiced as a “doctor to the barrio” for almost a decade in the dusty rural town of Calauan, Laguna. Manila was, for me, a place to visit and see the sights, but not home, the way Calauan was. I was a student at the town’s only school, a public school, where my classmates, sons and daughters of tenants and farm workers, wore wooden clogs called bakya or went barefoot to school. I was happy enough, one of the doctor’s kids, busy planting pechay, catching tilapia, chasing chickens, being chased by a flock of turkeys, and playing in the plaza with friends.
Suddenly I was in Manila, enrolled as a student at Our Lady of Loreto College, one of many middle-class girls clad in well-pressed, immaculate, blue-and-white uniforms and shiny black patent or charol shoes. My mother took us shopping to the Gregg Store in Avenida Rizal to buy those shoes that lasted and lasted until you outgrew them and had to buy another pair, of almost exactly the same design and material.
Ready-to-wear was unknown, and our clothes and school uniforms were custom-made. Mat’s was the most popular dress shop located in nearby Legarda, where my mom spent hours poring over US catalogues and magazines. Mat would rip out the seams of my older sister’s and aunts’ dresses and remake them to fit me. I was aggrieved, wearing these hand-me-downs, well-cut and flattering but still hand-me-downs in my mind. I was overjoyed when Mat finally made my own clothes from yards of blue and yellow fine linen.
My young aunt’s balloon skirts were so huge that they ate up three to four yards each. I remember watching their skirts twirling around and around when they danced the boogie with clean cut young men. Young girls like me wore custom-made cotton panties and slips or “camison”. Our laundry woman starched our underwear and ironed them until they were so stiff, they could actually stand on their own. They were the bane of my life.
I loved to watch movies at Rosie’s, which was located a few steps away in Bustillos. There was no air conditioning, but lots of bedbugs. The treat meant, however, a lot of work for both my mother and our laundry woman. We were chaperoned by an aunt. We were given old newspapers, with strict instructions to use them to cover the wooden benches before we actually sat down. For a few hours we were in heaven. Back home, our mother would ask us to strip down and put our clothes in tubs filled with strong soap and water. Off we would go then to take long baths. Our mother, who was a PGH nursing graduate, was always extremely clean and hated all such bugs.
Another favourite treat was Sunday lunch at a Binondo restaurant.
My father always ordered corn or nido soup, ampalaya con carne, fried chicken Chinese style, sweet-sour pork, pinsec prito and other standard Chinatown fare. My mother preferred the appetizers — platters of thinly sliced asado and pata, pickled green papaya, century eggs, and seaweed. We children got our own Binondo treats — sweet Haw Flakes that looked like red cards or coins, salty champoy, hopia baboy or monggo, ampaw — while my mother got her favourite candied dates. It was a happy time for us all.
I did not know then that another child, also born in 1948 like me, was growing up less than 100 feet away, in another apartment on Arenas Street off Calle Balic-balic. He was Edgar, the son of the owner of a grocery store in Bustillos, located right in front of the twin churches of Sampaloc. His family moved to Quezon City, to Barangay Paraiso, around the same time that my family moved to our own home in Sta. Mesa Heights. He studied in Ateneo. I landed in my parents’ alma mater, UP. Thus my real story and life-mission began.
It was a fluke of fate. I don’t remember ever meeting Edjop in Calle Balic-balic, but years and years later we would meet and work together for a few years, organizing workers of Metro Manila. It was martial law and we were both part of the underground anti-martial law movement. We ended up living together in quite a few houses, together with his wife and other activists. Ed went on to Mindanao where he was shot and killed by the military, and his name is now inscribed on the wall at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani.
I survived those dark days of martial law and I am back at Calle Balic-balic, still hopeful that in the future, things will change and there’ll be a better life for us all. This time, surely, I am back for good.
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