LAST week, a power interruption precluded this column from appearing on its usual page.
This week, we take off from the week before last: Canada.
Are we in Canada? Not just yet, but our good friend Kaloy Medina (Carlos Medina, PhD), wife Ronnie, and son Theo are. They left Baguio in the early 2000s, if I remember correctly, with the promise that they will buy me my first slice of apple pie in Canada when I get there.
See, Kaloy, when he was still at SLU, would order like three apple pies at a time from my mother's home bakery. I once asked him why so many at once, thinking the answer would be along the lines of “I just want a lot around at any given time,” or maybe, “I order for my neighbor, too.” But no. The answer was, “Because Theo eats one whole pie at a time.” How's that for growing boys with healthy appetites. In my son's case of a healthy appetite, a whole pizza pie is what he eats at a time.
So one fine day, there I was sending a text blast to the “sukis” for apple pie, ube jam, brownie, and cake orders. The text back from Kaloy was not his usual “Please deliver three apple pies on Friday.” It was that he and family were in Manila, leaving for Canada in a few hours. And that apple pie and coffee in Canada were on them when I got there.
I wished them Bon Voyage, and since then, Kaloy and I have kept up on email.
A recent email to me was that he was going to snail mail me what totaled to a goody package that would include his latest book and CDs. The package arrived in all that July rain, and I finally made it the post office one wet Baguio afternoon to claim my package.
I read the book before listening to the CDs. It is titled Brampton Stories 1, and contains five short stories, four of which are set in Brampton: first, “The Prospect,” second, “The In-Law,” third, “The Student,” and fourth, “The Neighbour.” The fifth story, “The Souvenir,” happens in Baguio. It is a Baguio story, hah!
While the stories are fiction, I sense much fact in them. There is that Brampton is Canada's ninth largest city and is located some 32 kilometers northwest of Toronto, which is the capital of Ontario. Brampton's population is roughly 500,000. Of that population, 40 percent are South Asian in a “visible minority” of 67 percent. Given these, whites are now the minority in Brampton. Of the Brampton population, majority speak English as a first language.
A check bears out the above data as it does what we all know, that the Kama Sutra is ancient, many scholars making it to be more than 2,000 years old and others to older, and that December 25 is not Jesus' real birthday.
The Brampton stories drop us straight into multicultural, multilingual Brampton with its many Englishes and its international cuisine. From where we glimpse an arranged marriage between an Indian couple in which the wife is abused, and the marriage ends in divorce.
From where we glimpse a Filipino woman's religiosity challenged by her daughter-in-law's religious scholarship. We glimpse the many Englishes spoken, or English misspoken, depending on whose point of view. A once white neighborhood where white is the new minority.
(to be continued)