In her latest book, part memoir and part biography, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, Monica Macansantos writes fifteen richly textured essays about her father’s legacy both in her writings and in the kitchen where she finds his continued presence as she recreates his recipes that he’s developed over the years. The collection is at once a coming of age of a writer and a foray into what it means to live in other people’s imaginings of being Filipino.
When Monica’s father, a poet, suddenly passes in their hometown in Baguio City, Philippines, Monica is away in New Zealand finishing up her doctoral program. She tries to replicate his nurturing domesticity in the way he tends not just to the food he made but the attention to his art as a poet, dedicating his life to careful observation of not just the external landscape, but his own internal one. Each essay catalogues seemingly unrelated events that connect evocations of her father’s presence.
Set in disparate locales and events such as a decaying mansion in Baguio City, a visit to Monica’s paternal grandparents’s house in Iligan City, a deadly landslide in an Itogon village in the aftermath of Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines, to renting an apartment in Wellington and a traumatizing encounter that ends up in a police station in New Zealand to name a few, each carefully crafted scene takes the reader into experiences with incisive observation and resounding realizations of lives lived in quiet moments and encounters.
I spoke with Monica over email about her father’s legacy as an award-winning poet in the Philippines, the experiences of dislocation, but also what drew her to explore writing about food, memory, and loss while becoming a writer.
Cherry Lou Sy: Until reading your book, I didn’t realize that there was a tradition of creative writing instruction in the Philippines. You’ve studied creative writing elsewhere—in New Zealand for your doctorate and in the United States for your MFA at the prestigious Michener Center, no less. How are these programs similar? How are they different? Do you think that one is more useful than the other?
Monica Macansantos: There’s one program that connects all three, and it’s the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Creative writing instruction in the Philippines was pioneered by Edith and Edilberto Tiempo, both products of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Though it had some limitations, the education I received in the Philippines gave me a formal discipline that I brought with me when I studied creative writing abroad.
Some of my mentors at the Michener Center were products of Iowa or had taught at Iowa, but the rules of formalism were applied more loosely in our workshops and there was more room to apply political or contextual readings to a text. It was at Michener that I learned to loosen up a little–this is what Tomaz Salamun used to tell me at our poetry workshops! I also found it refreshing that we weren’t beholden to literary theory in the same way that Philippine creative writing programs had become since the ‘90s–I could hone my voice on my own terms, whether or not Roland Barthes thought I was alive or dead.
The poet Bill Manhire founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in New Zealand, which also modeled its workshops after Iowa’s and maintains connections with the Iowa program. In my PhD program we had no coursework and were mostly on our own, which I enjoyed as it gave me some independence. We met every six weeks for workshops, and they expected us to respond to our classmates’ questions about our work during the workshop itself. They talk about unsilencing the workshop these days, but I believe it has to be handled correctly, or else you’ll have the writer feeling that they constantly have to defend themselves instead of sitting with the feedback they get. As PhD students we also had to write a critical study on top of our creative thesis, and though I love writing criticism, there’s just something about the academic approach that sucks the joy out of it.
I’ve benefited from all three, but there’s a special place in my heart for the Michener Center.
CS: I really resonated with your qualms against the notion that “there is no such thing as an original idea” in how education is practiced in the Philippines. Before moving to the United States from Baguio City when I was thirteen, I also felt quashed by the focus on rote memorization as the primary mode of instruction. What do you think happened? Why is there such a focus on memorizing and regurgitating the same information?
MM: I remember our national hero, Jose Rizal, complaining about his schooling at Letran and the Universidad de Santo Tomas in his novel, Noli me tangere, for the same reasons you mentioned. He believed that the rote memorization produced robots who couldn’t think on their own and were quick to obey. I believe that colonialism, specifically Spanish colonialism, played a role in centering rote memorization as a mode of instruction, because it created loyal subjects who accepted authority at face value. If you believe that all knowledge is handed down and unchangeable, you can’t just rise up and challenge an authoritarian leadership. The persistence of rote learning shows our own struggles to transition to a mature democracy after we gained our independence, because our teaching methods don’t reflect a desire to create a democratic society.
CS: You spoke about the cronyism of literary circles in the Philippines. Do you think that writers in the Philippines can change? In your estimation, are elitism and cronyism still part and parcel of the Filipino literary scene?
MM: I should mention that not all writers in the Philippines play along with the cronyism of elite Philippine circles—some have been outspoken opponents of it, my father included, and their careers have suffered as a result. Those who quietly refuse to play along just don’t get the same career breaks that others do. It’s probably this that has scared other writers into obedience. That being said, when the essay you referred to first came out in TAYO Literary Magazine back in 2015, it resonated with many and was widely shared. But I witnessed the same old patterns falling back into place shortly after the essay’s initial publication. Lately, a few young writers have been positioning themselves against the old guard, which would have been a good sign if they also weren’t forming elite, cronyistic cliques of their own. Like the traditional gatekeepers they claim to oppose, they also expect slavish obeisance from those whose careers they choose to support, while going after those who don’t fall in line with vicious social media campaigns. So I don’t know—things are changing slowly because the world is becoming a smaller place and the Philippines isn’t as culturally isolated as it used to be, but more needs to be done.
CS: Some of the most traumatizing events in the book occurred while you were in New Zealand. How has this impacted you?
MM: For one, it didn’t stop me from falling in love with Aotearoa New Zealand! I made good friends during my time there and had some beautiful, life-changing experiences apart from deeply unpleasant ones. And because it’s a country that’s dear to my heart, I also felt it right to confront its racist underbelly and contribute to the conversations taking place about colonialism and racism in Aotearoa. Like many small countries, New Zealand can be welcoming and kind, while also being racist and xenophobic. The incidents I wrote about taught me to stand up for myself, because the individuals and institutions who refuse to recognize your humanity will put in the effort to make you feel small. A lot of immigrants become convinced of their smallness without being fully conscious of it, and I learned that to keep my self worth intact, I had to fight back.
CS: In the essay “A Shared Stillness,” you talked about how your paternal grandfather Lolo Manding’s learning Japanese during WWII was an act to be seen as human by imperial Japanese soldiers. Was this unusual? Do you think this time influenced your grandfather and how he raised his children?
MM: From what I know, Imperial Japan took over our school system during their four years in the Philippines and Nihongo became a required subject. I don’t think that many Filipinos learned to speak it well (as this was a hostile takeover), but my lolo Manding, being very good with languages, became a fluent speaker of Nihongo. The Philippines has had a complicated relationship with Japan: although their occupation was particularly brutal and those who lived through it maintained very hostile feelings toward Japan, there were also Japanese living in the Philippines before the Pacific War, many of whom were respected members of the community. My lolo also hated what the Japanese did during the war while liking the Japanese who came to visit the schools he administered—take note that there was a lot of soft power that Japan exerted in Asia after the war. He wasn’t a collaborator by any means, but in our long experience of colonialism, it became part of our culture to learn the colonizer’s language to survive. My lolo also spoke excellent English and taught his children to do the same, like many parents in the Philippines who emphasize English fluency when raising their children.
CS: I am fascinated by your father’s connection with Yeats. Do you know how this came about?
MM: I never got the chance to ask him about his first encounter with Yeats, but I assume that he read Yeats’s poetry as an English major in college. I think he read Yeats’s work more closely when he was in graduate school, studying poetry with the Tiempos at Silliman. He used to tell me that Filipinos had a kinship with the Irish—both cultures maintained a connection with the spiritual, and folklore occupied a prominent place in our cultures and literatures. When I was at the Michener Center, I took a class on Irish Postcolonial Literature, and could see how writers and artists from both Ireland and the Philippines found their voice in response to imperial subjugation. Ironically, it was the American colonization of the Philippines that perhaps enabled the works of Yeats to reach readers like my father. But my father found vital connections between his experiences and Yeats’s own reckonings with British colonialism, and he wasn’t oblivious to how American colonialism had fostered this connection.
CS: You mentioned that you admire the writing of Eudora Welty and Katherine Mansfield. Do you see them as representative of your time in the U.S. and New Zealand, respectively? Just as your father seems to have found kinship with Yeats, do you have a similar feeling with these two writers?
MM: I wouldn’t necessarily say that Welty and Mansfield are representative of my time in the U.S. and New Zealand, since I have other favorite writers from both countries. But they evoke experiences of my time in Texas and New Zealand that remain meaningful. Though I’d read Welty’s biography before moving to Texas for graduate school, it was in Brigit Kelly’s “Poetics of the Novel” class that I was properly introduced to her work, and I was so intrigued by the way she used language to render a scene the way a Cubist painter would. She reminded me of some Anglophone Filipino writers (Wilfrido Nolledo is a good example) who took risks in a language that was really their borrowed tongue to create new realities for us. Nolledo’s like our Barry Hannah, and I fell in love with Southern writing since it spoke to my Filipino sensibilities. The lushness of their descriptions, the obsession with class and oppression, the fascination with outcasts–as a Filipino writer, all of that spoke to me, and then Welty, Hannah, and Faulkner led me to Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and more writers from the American South.
As for Katherine Mansfield, it was only during the COVID-19 lockdown that I got into her work. That’s when I saw that she was also writing the kind of stories I wanted to write: they take their time to ground themselves in their settings while getting to know the people who populate them. If Welty’s a Cubist, Mansfield’s an Impressionist. As a Filipino who has written about my homeland while living abroad, I can relate to Mansfield’s desire to get away from her homeland’s small mindedness, while establishing the distance she needed to fall in love with her country all over again.
CS: In the essay that deals with the indigenous Igorot that live in Ucab in Benguet, you mentioned that it was a thirty-minute jeepney ride away from where you live in Baguio City. Growing up, you had an aversion to them because of how society viewed them as being uncouth. It wasn’t until the tragedy after the Typhoon Mangkhut, where over a hundred people died that you took interest in visiting this place. What do you think accounted for this change of heart? Do you think that your experiences abroad contributed to this?
By the way, when I was looking into the landslide, I encountered this article from the BBC calling the Igorot miners “artisanal” and somehow this word felt triggering. Were you primarily seeing how the national news was covering the tragedy or did you also see international coverage like that of the BBC report?
MM: My change in attitude towards the indigenous peoples of the Cordillera occurred long before the Ucab mining disaster of 2018, and long before I lived abroad. In high school, I had classmates and teachers who’d say disparaging things about Igorots (a term used to collectively refer to indigenous Cordillerans), but I also had Igorot friends who talked about their traditions with pride, making me ashamed of the prejudices I harbored. I once used a slur directed at Igorots without knowing what it meant (I’d only overheard people using it, and just assumed it meant “dirty” without knowing it was used in reference to Igorots), and one of my Igorot classmates confronted me about it. When I went to UP-Diliman for college, my awareness expanded even further, thanks to professors who included Cordilleran history and culture in their lectures. I actually encountered much more prejudice from my Manila-born classmates towards Igorots, and this made me angry on behalf of the Igorots I knew from my hometown.
I decided to visit Ucab mainly due to my frustrations with the way the tragedy was being covered by the Philippine media. I’d just returned home from living abroad, and I found that the media was oftentimes dismissive of the victims’ reasons for working in small-scale mining operations. I found the victim blaming simplistic and dehumanizing. At the same time, thanks to activists like Ermie Bahatan and Leonida Tundagui who were posting about the tragedy on Facebook, I was beginning to get another perspective of the disaster. Because of my past experiences with anti-Igorot racism, I felt I had to do my part to help correct the injustice. This was where my experiences abroad came into play, since they gave me the courage to get out of my comfort zone. And so with Professor Ester Fianza, I took the trip to Ucab to cover the story myself.
It’s my first time to hear the word “artisanal” to describe small-scale mining! In the Philippines, it’s called “kamote mining”—kamote literally means yam, but in Philippine slang it means “bootleg” or “unregulated.” But if you read my essay, there’s more to “bootleg” mining than what official reports make it out to be.
CS: In your last essay, you mentioned that the “Americans posthumously made (Jose Rizal) the national hero of their new colony, hoping to teach us the concepts of Western democracy through his example.” Because I left the country at a young age, I remember learning in school that it was the Filipinos who chose Rizal to be the national hero instead of Emilio Aguinaldo or Andres Bonifacio, the other revolutionaries. What do you make of this choice?
MM: I should probably qualify what I wrote in my book about Rizal: though Americans recognized him as the national hero of the Philippines, it was because he was already widely recognized as the national hero by Filipinos. As our colonizers, they just made it official, and he didn’t have any say in it because he had been executed by the Spanish by then.
I understand why they’d choose him over Bonifacio, or Aguinaldo who led a guerrilla war against them: we were their experiment in American democracy, and who could better set an example for their new colonial subjects than a cosmopolitan Filipino gentleman who had traveled around the world and engaged with the European ideals of Enlightenment? However, as I mentioned in my book, I think even Rizal would have struggled with their appropriation of his legacy. As you may have guessed, I’m a huge fan of Rizal, since he provided the intellectual backbone of the revolution and gave us a sense of nationhood with his writings, while actively engaging with the ideas of the outside world and refusing the temptations of nativism. He’s one of the best satirists I’ve read. I think that if Filipinos were to find a way forward, we could emulate Rizal by rejecting parochialism while also being unashamed of who we are.
CS: Again, in your last essay, you wrote, “The far-reaching educational system the colonial government implemented remade us in their image, and though it made education more accessible, I wonder if it also awakened in us a lust for the invisible promises of the future, which we attempt to reach for again and again by obliterating our past.” Which past are Filipinos obliterating? What lust for the promise of the future do you think were awakened in Filipinos? How do you see this connected with the continuing political crises in the Philippines?
For Filipinos, I feel like we are emulating our former colonizers, while preventing ourselves from building our own story as a nation.
MM: By writing the essay, “Disappearing Houses,” I was hoping to process an uncomfortable observation I’ve made about Philippine society, which is this tendency to look towards the future and its empty promises while wiping away all traces of the past. It’s a tendency I suspect we inherited from the Americans, whose fascination with novelty (in my opinion) stems from perhaps an imperialistic desire to remake oneself and forget past mistakes and sins.
For Filipinos, I feel like we are emulating our former colonizers, while preventing ourselves from building our own story from the experiences we’ve shared as a nation. Perhaps it’s a past that’s filled with humiliation due to our experience of colonialism and dictatorship, which is why we choose to look forward instead of back, but this way of thinking prevents us from planning a future for ourselves that’s informed by our present and past. In the essay, I write about how it’s so easy for us to get rid of old structures that contain the past lived experiences of a community, replacing them with bland commercial buildings that purposefully erase these experiences, and thus obliterate our shared sense of community. I feel that we as a society have lost our way because we keep erasing our own roadmap. In other words, we’ve lost the plot.
CS: Is there anything else you would like to add now that you weren’t able to while working on your essay collection?
MM: Well you know how the writing process goes—there are so many more stories we wish to tell, which is why we move on to the next book.
