I was excited to unbox this rather phony package.
It was a couple of months before it landed on the bookstore shelves. When I asked if the staff if they had this title, “Manila Envelope 4…” they kept pointing me to the supplies section. I didn’t know what the cover looked like and nothing on it said it was the Manila Envelope. I suppose I got lucky and stumbled upon it at a Fully Booked.
The damage was 699 bucks. I also bought the last volume and its pictures were pretty, but the binding was poor. The pages got disintegrated. That must be a metaphor.
One can’t help but frown upon the flamboyance of calling it the “best” contemporary Filipino novelists. “Contemporary Stories by Filipino Novelists” would have been fine, no matter what the “important precautions” say in the introduction. Some of the stories here would pale in comparison to something like Nick Joaquin’s Summer Solstice or Bienvenido Santos’ The Day the Dancers Came. But I bought it anyway, because I like reading supposedly well-crafted stories that with a proximity not only to where I am, but also to my heart.
Remembrance, Dean Francis Alfar. I immediately forgot about the monkey business of phony covers. Reading the first story is like the love I felt when I first swiped an iPhone. These words develop into their own dimensions, and for us here, it is a vehicle to peek at a collective soul. The Philippine president, cute as as a “Despicable Me” minion, recently delivered the fourth State of the Nation. He said, “Ang sarap maging Pilipino ngayon.” But he had all the wrong reasons to substantiate that feeling. It would have been true if he asked everyone to read this story. And this story is a wake-up call.
Reading next two stories didn’t make me proud to be a Filipino.
The Sky Over Dimas, Vicente Garcia Groyon. A kid from Bacolod masturbates through the EDSA revolution. As it touches upon the theme of apathy, I stir up some more faith in this book.
It was a sleepy ride through the next few stories until I’m snapped back to consciousness, to my annoyance, with how Lakambini Sitoy’s narrator coded her vagina as “my sex.” I was even more vexed with how the characters where christened after airports: Narita, Naia. I loved the stories in Men’s Rea but the new ones sound like the author started running out of material and losing her passions.
“The Terrorists Have Already Won,” Miguel Syjuco. Miguel Syjuco picks up where he left off from his Illustrado. He’s back in New York and he's:
1. Criticizing and stereotyping his fellow writers.
2. Walking fast and snorting coke with his fellow Ateneo Alumnae.
3. Being the writer with a very respectable way with words, an arrogant tone and a seeming lack of advocacy.
I honestly didn’t even bother to finish Katrina Tuvera’s story and I’m glad I wasted no time to get to Bino Realuyo’s With Love, Sandra, Queen of Fish Sauce. It’s one of the stories that make you genuinely proud to be Filipino. It’s about patis as a symbolism for a mother , a daughter, National Identity, as it seasons with the multi-cultural quality of New York. It’s told in the genuine tone of stories you would have read from somewhere like The New Yorker. The first paragraph goes:
“Goya seasoning never works for me. It gets the Puerto Ricans to salsa, but it gives me weak knees a woman my age can’t afford to have. We Filipinos need our own brands. Our bones grow from the nutrients our tongues bring, taste that only fish sauce can kick.”Bino Realuyo’s story is worth the price of the cover.
Clear, Jessica Zafra. She still writes like she did in Manananggal Terrorizes Manila: with a funny whininess, like she never grew up. And that is cool, unlike when she becomes a walking advertisement for National Book Store.
