Chinese-Filipina Asian-American short story, 'Pinay' - by N.L. Belardes

I just submitted this Chinese-Flilipina Asian-American short story that I wrote last weekend to a literary journal... Much of the research was done through interviews as I wanted to learn more about what it was to be Asian growing up in a small Central California town. The story is loosely based on my research. Any real-life parallels are merely fictitious in nature... feel free to leave comments.


Pinay
by N.L. Belardes


Dogfights are always worse than cock fights. I never cared about the roosters. They would primp themselves, puff up their chests and tail feathers and walk in a strut. It wasn’t much different than the way I walked each Saturday onto the football field my cousins had made in the grape vineyard. I was proud to be a girl who could block, tackle and carry a ball. I hadn’t learned to kiss back then. I learned to hit; and I could hit hard, so hard that sometimes boys went home crying.

Roosters don’t cry. They do sometimes make strange gasps as they go from majestic birds to angry avian fighters, tearing each other’s eyes out, with feathers flying in every direction, endless squawking, and beaks jabbing into feathery flesh like hoes raking into the onion-filled earth.

Yet, those fights never bothered me. When they began in the dirt of the abandoned almond orchards, I stood with my hand over my mouth and giggled, often thinking about blowing up cats’ asses with firecrackers and seeing their tails stand straight up. The roosters were no different. They seemed to explode in a feathery ball of plumage during their fights to the death. And yet I giggled. I would get angry stares from Tatay and Papa and still giggle. In those days I would cause so much trouble giggling at cock fights and making cats run and scream the way farm cats do when they howl from having a red ass and burnt tail.

During the dogfights Papa would hand me his money. So would every other greasy hand in the orchards. These were the old men who wanted to see the young girls dance the hula auna with coconuts and grass skirts made of tapa. They would give us young girls money just to see us shake and dance. But we didn’t care so much. What was swinging a few grass-shaking moves, hips swaying for one dollar or ten dollars? In a little migrant town in the 1980s like Delano, California, that was a lot of money.

During the dogfight they wanted me to run money back and forth while they stood and cheered for their favorite dog to rip the throat right out from another. I stopped giggling at such horrible moments. Besides, it was much work just to take the money from Papa and all those men before each fight. You had to gather the money on time or bets weren’t laid. And that meant bets weren’t paid. Tell that to a drunken old Filipino farmworker when you’re just thirteen years old. “Here’s the money little girl. Take it. Now run it to the keeper and tell him one hundred dollars on cousin Louie’s Doberman. That dog has a mean streak and he’s going to kill that damn pit bull once and for all.”

The pit bull he was talking about had a particularly dirty habit of tricking dogs into attacking and diving low. Extremely smart and agile, it would go barreling toward another dog, only to get the unwary enraged animal to expose a juicy neck for the pit to lock onto with its powerful jaws. It did that time and again, crushing throats and ripping and biting in such a calm ferocious manner that people like my uncle Boy had grown red in the face from losing so much money. My stomach was already churning. I could see my uncle seething, but I just turned to my father who had placed a fifty-dollar bet on the Doberman. “Tatay, that Doberman won’t win against the pit,” I said.

“Don’t you tell me how to bet, Neneng. You take my money and place it right or I will hang you on a hook. Now go! Before it is too late and I miss all my winnings!”

And so I did. I ran and gathered money and names. I knew all the names. We Filipinos know everyone in our immediate culture of weddings, funerals, Filipino days at the parks, sporting events and so on. I just had to remember the amounts, and to try not to get into trouble with the money keeper. The money keeper might as well have been a beekeeper he had so much sting and venom. It was as if he had been born in a beehive himself. Physically, he was an old man with one good eye. He looked as squat and mean as the pit bull and he never trusted me not to keep some of the money for myself. “How much did you take this time? Let me see your tiger eyes,” he would say. I knew him as one of the dirty coconut men. So I looked at him straight in the eye for only a second then ran off to another part of the orchard. “You take one dollar,” he yelled. I did. I don’t know how he knew that. But he never chased after me even though I kept stealing.

I just knew this dogfight was going to be just as violent as other dogfights. How could dogs grow so mean? Why did so many Chinese, Filipinos and Monguls of the valley love to see such hatred between beasts? I overheard Papa says the fieldworkers were angry at Chavez for letting down the Filipinos and Asians, that fieldworkers bottled up their hatred during each long workday, and let out their emotions between the spirits of two angry animals. Perhaps that’s why such battles were so violent. Dogfights are a terrible tearing of flesh, where there are gaping holes and exposed bones; muscle and arteries pump blood onto each dog’s coat, making them both reddened beasts that many drunken red eyes scream at while spilling beer and whiskey in a terrible sight of blood lust.

I stood and waited for the latest fight that I knew I would watch. Although the fights made me sick, I never threw up. Not like my brothers. They couldn’t handle the sight of so much blood as well as animal and gambler screams: the dying, the cheers, the anxiety and energy of animal and man. The roar could almost shatter eardrums.

My brothers couldn’t pluck a chicken or gut a fish without crying about blood and exposed stomach lining the entire time. Tatay watched them and I knew he felt ashamed. I’ve seen him shrug his shoulders and wander off to be with grandpa who was a soldier in World War One. Papa was a descendant from his family who fought the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. He grew to respect the Americans, Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders; they were the cavalry who liberated his family so they could move west to the farmlands of California, where there was no hope as a migrant, but eventually, after World War One, work for him as a cook; that set our family apart from other Asian families, because we depended less on hardened seasons of gathering fruits and vegetables from the land.

Papa was more patriotic than the very colors of the American flag. He told me once, “Neneng, my debt is to America. Yours should be too.” I don’t know if he taught that debt to my Tatay. He hardly spoke to Tatay at all. They were like ghosts passing by each other although we lived in the same house. At least, I never heard him say it. Instead, Papa would go drink, play mahjong and chess with the other old timers. He wouldn’t tell anyone his war stories about how he came to America. I had to find out through a drunken old man he called his war buddy. I tricked him one day while doing the hula auna into telling me about how he and grandpa went to Europe to see a country of dying Europeans. He said, “We all dreamed of America and of being rich businessmen.” They never fulfilled that dream. I often wonder if it is the way American culture is. Culture enters culture. People just want to live day to day and sometimes forget risks and who they are when submersed in the grand delusions of society. They allow themselves to be swallowed.

The pit bull and the Doberman face-off began more than twenty yards apart. Already there was blood from the fights earlier in the day that coated dirt, grass and the base of a stand of nearby trees. A German Shepard lay in a heap fifty yards away. I watched as several of my cousins poked sticks at it while one drunken old man stood by crying for the ghost of this now dead animal.

The owners stood with bulging muscles. They tried very hard to hold their animals from ripping into each other’s flesh. No, the leashes weren’t released. Not yet. These animals were held back so they could snarl, drool and grow more hateful of each other. They hollered in maddening yelps while their owners struggled to hold them back. We all waited. The dogs and the old men were most impatient, while the owners simply knew that the angrier the dogs became, the more ferocious their attack. Even Papa paced.

I was just happy that during such anticipated pre-fight moments that no old man looked at me as if they had just seen me perform the tinikling, a dance much like the hula auna with just as revealing coconuts on us girls as any of our dances. I wore a football jersey and didn’t feel like being thought of as a girl just then. Most of the time I preferred to be one of the boys.

Yet, I loved to dance. I could move more graceful than most butterflies, let alone the girls in dance class who seemed far too fragile to sway their hips. Most of the time I wanted to beat them up too. But they didn’t seem like they could take my forceful spirit coming down upon them and their pink world.

I hated talent show and speech competitions. I had trouble speaking English anyways. So getting into discussions with the old men was sometimes difficult. I almost had a stutter the way I spoke and got tongue-tied; my tongue couldn’t form all the letters of the alphabet the way normal people would speak. What did I care? That’s what speech therapy was for. My mother had put me into the pageants, She insisted on screaming at me when I wouldn’t take the pageants seriously. She knew I dreamed of football during moments I should have been dancing with candles on my head. “Why can’t you be more like Elvis!” she yelled more than once.

Why couldn’t I? Because I was not him. I was me, a little Chinese-Filipina girl who could shake with the coconuts on. But I was no singer, and I reminded mother time and again, “But I’m not male. And I can’t sing like Elvis. Just let me do the rock-a-hula the way I know how.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she would argue, get offended and grab me by the collar. “You’re not pretty anyways. You’re terrible and won’t amount to anything like your brothers, even though you look like a boy. They could be Jailhouse Rock Elvises if they wanted to. Besides, none of them ever killed their piano teacher.”

I always laughed when she said this. I had taken piano lessons and after the third lesson my teacher died of a heart attack. She held it against me ever since. “My brothers are afraid of dead fish and chicken bones,” I argued back every time. I could beat both of them up and sometimes did. I even added their friends to my football game day poundings. We’d go playing football at our prized Saturday field, and in between snapping the heads off gopher snakes, we played some rough football. And if anybody groped me and didn’t tackle me clean, I would give them a sharp fist to the gut. I wanted to be treated like a boy, though I learned that crybaby girls got their way more often than not. I learned how to cry and get my way when we were losing. I would turn on the tears and the boys would say, “What’s wrong Neneng?” And I would cry that they hurt me. The next thing they knew my team would be winning again and I was running into the end zone with another touchdown to my credit.

I thank Papa for teaching me football skills. It wasn’t so much that he was young and could throw a ball. In fact, he was ancient. He was as carved and eroded as the hills of the Southern San Joaquin Valley. His brittle grey hair and yellowed eyes shown with a timeless energy that spawned in the Philippines many years before. I imagined him on some distant island, running after American horses, maybe swimming in a river and eating fish in a seaside town while a war raged. “You have fight in you, Neneng,” he said staring at me as if remembering. “More than any of those boys you have the fight of a soldier. That is your Pinay pride. You take it to them and they won’t know what to do with your sharp fist and fast legs. Always be the same no matter how old you are: a sharp fist and fast legs. Football is just one way for you to show your skill at conversation with the world around that will always try to talk down to you. Break down those around, then push ahead as hard as you can. If done at the right angle even a pyramid will fall, and you will still be standing with that football in your arms.

“Remember my granddaughter, my Neneng, that I was a Filipino soldier in World War One. That was many years ago. It was a time to be proud in America and in the Philippines. It was a time to be free. It was adventure, and America was a window to opportunity, though an oppressive opportunity because there were few Asians in the American military. We may not have much today, but we have a freedom of life that can be found in reflections on the strength of our culture. The dirty old men who watch you with the coconuts aren’t always as dirty as you think. They see in you a heritage of dying culture. In you hides the energy of that culture; even in the moments of old smiles at grass skirts. We were young ourselves once. Yes?”

When the dog owners let go of the dogs the pit bull immediately pulled its old trick on the Doberman, taking a quick leap. Thinking it could come up from beneath and disembowel the pit bull, the Doberman ran and lunged as if to take a lower position on the smaller dog. Right away I knew what was coming. My stomach lurched and I stepped back to lean against a tree to try not to throw up.

In the same moment the pit bull sidestepped the Doberman’s attack. While doing so it twisted into a position that brought the Doberman’s neck right against the pit’s terrible jowls. Using the Doberman’s momentum in a massive flip, the pit locked its jaws around the Doberman’s neck but held firm. By digging its wide feet into the ground, the larger dog’s body kept moving over the pit while its neck snapped right in two. In an instant the pit shook its head in violent victory while blood poured and squirted in a moment so terrible that I felt light-headed.

As the pit bull stood panting, a cheer went up from the crowd, the field spun, and I wanted to vomit. My head spun as I looked up and saw into the dog’s eyes. I felt its anger and saw into its terrible blood breath where a portion of the Doberman’s neck still rested on its tongue.

As the owner came over, the dog seemed to smile greater than ever before. This was the pit bull’s moment. It stared at me and I felt its mad pleasure in killing the Doberman. The owner smiled to himself and at the dog for another victory.

But then as he began to hook the leash the smiling dog’s face turned terrible. It lunged in my direction and barked, spitting blood. The owner stepped forward and hit the dog ferociously. Instead of the animal cowering, it turned and locked onto his hand, instantly crushing bones, and causing the man to scream and drop to his knees. He kicked and panicked, but the dog wouldn’t let go.

It was then I saw my aged Papa pull a knife so quickly that I almost missed it by blinking in my vertigo. He slowly walked toward the beast, who saw Papa, released the hand and began one of his fake lunges. I screamed. I knew that dog’s every move. Worse, I had seen the smile in the dog’s eyes. I knew the dog was up to its tricks and would try to kill Papa. I cried out and fell to my knees as the dog made a quick feign to draw Papa off balance.

But Papa knew the dog’s moves and simply anticipated its lunge. As the dog did so he calmly jammed his knife into the dog’s throat then pulled forward, releasing the dog’s jugular and airway in one sweep. The beast gasped, suffocated and fell. Papa then stepped back as it kicked and thrashed for a moment before dying.

Months later, after the dogfight between the Doberman and pit, my grandpa died. He stared at me and smiled one afternoon. That evening he was dead.

Tatay kept a chest in the garage full of the tokens of an American-Filipino soldier’s life. I found myself constantly hiding out in the garage after his 21-gun-salute funeral. I would sneak in, open the chest and take out Papa’s old soldier hat. I would smell it and wear it. I would stand real straight like a soldier would. And then I would dance the rock-a-hula like I was moving on an island far away, tucked in a breeze of waving fronds and smiles.

Once, my Tatay caught me doing my dance around Papa’s old chest. He would never speak of Papa, and he rarely spoke to him when alive, so he couldn’t understand why I moved the way I did wearing an old soldier’s hat. For him to see me this way he was terribly offended. “You are worse than the clouds of Delano blackbirds that shit on the farmland and then eat the fruits,” he yelled then hung me on a large coat hook near the front door. There I hung, unafraid. I stuck my tongue out at my brothers when my Tatay wasn’t looking. He knew better than to beat me. It only made me tougher. He already knew I could beat up every boy in the neighborhood. He just wasn’t sure whether to be proud or not.

“Tatay! Neneng stuck her tongue out at me!” my youngest brother yelled.

At such moments Tatay would strangely side with me as I hung there on a wall. “Be quiet. You deserve more than a mocking tongue for being afraid of fish guts.”

“But Tatay!”

“I said silence!”

And I would go on sticking out my tongue until I got bored and imagined myself once again on that island and dancing in Papa’s hat.

A few days later we all got in the back of an old Chevy pick-up truck and headed to grape vineyards on the furthest edge of town. I was sick to my stomach and the smell of grapes were especially pungent. We drove along a two-lane road and stopped. “Everyone out!” Tatay said. “Today you are fieldworkers. Go gather grapes.” I knew the grapes weren’t ours to take. But I heard Tatay mutter, “Chavez can’t help us so we take to help ourselves in this world.”

I picked handfuls and without washing them, shoved grapes into my mouth, hoping my stomachache would feel better. I puked at the taste and smell but made sure no one saw me. After all, I always was the tough boy in the family, girl or not.

Later that day my stomach still hurt, but I joined a football game anyway. I couldn’t run as fast as usual, but did crush one of my cousins with a vicious hit. I giggled, “Sorry,” as he ran off crying. I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t help that I was so strong, so tough in gymnastics, tumbling, dancing and street fights. I had the strongest legs in the game.

“You’re carrying the ball on the next play,” my cousin Eddie said. He was the quarterback and was distressed about my meanness. “You shouldn’t have hit Bong so hard.”

“What did I do? I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone,” I said.

“Well you are carrying the ball now because they’re going to try to get back at us anyway.”

“Oh fine. I can take a hit. You’re such whiney boys.”

“Fine. On three.”

We lined up as June bugs sailed over our heads toward a sea of grapes and blackbirds. I stared from the backfield into a glorious future of spinning, weaving, and celebrating touchdowns; I thought of crushing my opponents with my elbows as I knew I could make my way into the sunset of the Delano countryside like a pigskin-carrying hero. This was my football, and my own time to be the soldier in a personal war against boys, against fields and small town dreams.

The ball was hiked and pitched back. I caught it and lowered my shoulder, pushing forward into the pyramid of bodies waiting to tackle me. I grunted, twisted and spun around tackles. I lowered into a feigning move not much different from that old pit bull as I wanted to rise up explosively toward the endzone.

And then I was hit. It was the same cousin I had leveled. He had snuck back onto the field and darted in on a cheap shot leveled at my kidneys and back. The hit knocked the breath and ball from me; I tumbled into the powder of San Joaquin topsoil like a putrid grape with a mouthful of dirt.

Slowly I stood up among the smiles of boys who were all happy to see me crushed for once. As they stood there I gasped for air and felt a moisture between my legs that hadn’t been there moments before. I began to whimper, this time for real. “Now you have done it!” I cried! “I have internal bleeding!” I stood up but fell down, light-headed, and wanting to die. A few cousins helped me back to my feet as I sobbed, bent over. I looked down and could see wetness had built up between my legs as I felt a terrible pain to my abdomen.

“Don’t die Neneng!” One of my cousins yelled.

“I didn’t mean it,” squealed Bong. His eyes had turned red. We were all filled with dirt in our hair, hands and clothes. The June bugs tried to land on us we were so much like the earth that day. As my cousins carried me off the field I began to feel like I would die there in a game where I had lost the ball; where because of my smiles and pinay pride my blood would spill like the pit bull’s into the agricultural lands of the valley.

A few days later my cousins all laughed at me. “You’re a girl after all, Neneng,” Bong laughed. “Internal bleeding…”

My mother looked at me and smiled. She seemed to understand something about me as I left the room to the garage. Inside I opened Papa’s old trunk and pulled out his hat. I took a long breath as if smelling his hair, the war, the island, the blood, the dog, and the steel of his knife. I held the hat to my heart and felt so much more than him there in the darkness. I closed my eyes so tight I saw the colors of my own tears and then the light of a sunset over vineyards and islands. I saw the youth of an island culture and Americans walking among them, and people swimming in rivers where fish swam in brown waters and old men laughed and caught them. I saw the women too. I saw their dark hands moving in front of their soft faces and jet-black hair: some straight and some curved, but tied up around their heads showing off lovely necks, full lips and smiling eyes. They didn’t all wear grass skirts but all danced by the riverside while the men swam. Children ran and swung bamboo as if about to lose control in a war of youth among converging cultures. There the children ran near river waters so smooth and inviting that you could hear two young lovers talk while dangling their feet in the lapping of such shores. Only, I could barely understand them.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Friday, March 03, 2006. You can leave your response.