'Home Is Where by Ligaya Fruto\r'

'The young lady sat tensely on the edge of the Consulate bench, her show c arfully devoid of materialisation. The bird-of paradise pattern was meretricious on her aloha shirt, the thong sandals looked s extolnly on her honorariumt, and on her head, riding the loose curls, was perched a macro hibiscus flower. Her hands were tightly fisted in the pockets of her old jeans as she listened to the neartime(a) woman seated so integrityr the pass shop clerk’s desk. She looked at the woman, accordingly at the clerk, with one eyebrow slightly raised(a). Too round(prenominal) movies, the clerk opinion amusedly as he listened to the older woman talk.\r\nHe smoothed the mountain pass performance that she handed him and read: Benita Medina gross sales, natural in Narvacan, Ilocos Sur, in 1908. On the back, in the space for names of persons to chase the passport applicant, he read: Lucille Sales, born in Wailoku, Maui, Territory of Hawaii, on June 14, 1931. ‘Your l ittle girl is going to the Philippines with you, Mrs. Sales? ” the clerk asked. â€Å"Of course she is going with me. ” The woman said, bit to the young lady on the bench. The girl looked back at her, and the two locked st ars for a long moment slice the clerked fid tieed with the written document.\r\nShe gave these to the clerk and the latter leafed through them with some interest. He glanced quickly at the woman as a copy of divorce decree appeared in the batch. He checked the names on both(prenominal) documents, past studied the remaining papers. A break certificate showed the old Philippine Commonwealth seal, and adjoining to this were two thick photo copies of the girl’s consanguinity certificate. â€Å"You can see I was born hither,” the girl spoke up. â€Å"I am an American citizen. I can non go to the Philippines. I ordain non go! ” â€Å"Oh yes you are going,” the amaze’s example shook a little. You are coming cl ass with me. ” â€Å"This is my home,” the girl said. â€Å"I am an American citizen. I leave live here on the whole my life. ” â€Å"You are a Filipino,” the mother’s demonstrate flushed, then paled. â€Å"Your father and I are Filipinos. You and I are going back to our artless.\r\nWe are going home. ” Home, the girl thought, and her hand moist inside her pockets. Where was it? For her it was here, where the roads provoke between the mountains and the sea, where the breeze was cool while the insolate was hot, where flowers grew by the roadside and never seemed to die, such ws the continuity of the earth’s ichness. The sea was gentle, the lawns were smooth, and the people . . . At the thought of her friends, the girl’s young pose worked a little. She did not k outright what the Philippines looked the like. She had no persuasion of the people. Her mother said that they were her own people, plainly she felt up no kinsh ip. â€Å"I will not go,” she thought desperately. â€Å"I will not go to the Philippines, I am an American citizen.\r\nThe Philippines is so far away, and those who let from there get to such terrible things to record about the war. I won’t go. My mother can’t make me go. The woman looked at the girl, and a dull ache began to throb in her temples. What an unnatural child, she thought sadly. She seemed to feel no love of home at all. She herself never stopped view of it: fields of rice glistening to the sun: tobacco plants maturing in the heat: nipa houses hidden in bamboo groves. The people talked her language. They are the same fresh tilt from the creeks and cooked carabao meat in the animal’s blood. They worked in the fields. At night they gathered about the looms, the women weave and listening to the talk of the men.\r\nThat was home, where one could belong and not feel like a stranger who, upright passing through, must leave a fee of toil and heartbreak, then pass over even out-tempered more foreign roads. The clerk looked first at the mother, then at the daughter query lazily what thoughts kept them silent. â€Å"How long have you been here? ” he asked the woman. â€Å"Nineteen years,” she replied. â€Å"I came with my married man in 1928. He worked for an experimental station. ” â€Å"Did you live in Maui just before Lucille was born, sixteen years ago? Why are you going back to the Philippines at one time? The clerk asked with some interest.\r\nThe woman clasped her handbag. She glanced at her daughter, then turned to the clerk, her paler face flushing a little in embarrassment. â€Å"I have always wanted to go back,” she said softly. â€Å"And now that my husband and I . . . Besides, I have the funds . . . ” The clerk nodded understandingly. He took up the batch of papers before him and examined the divorce decree. Extreme mental cruelty, it said, and a smile almost escaped h im. The phrase in some way seemed absurd. He looked at the woman with overt interest, wondering what type of a man she had married.\r\nPerhaps a man with some education, for it was plain that the woman had schooling. He noted the sureness of the handwriting on the cover form. Her speech, too, was not the pidgin English that most plantation category employed. â€Å"The women here. ” The woman burst out, as though in spite of herself. â€Å"Ah the women here . . . ” Her face showed her disdain. She remembered with acute abject the young bride who had accompanied her husband to this land fo promise, and the almost unbearable homesickness which had made adjustment not only to a new husband but to new surroundings so pitifully difficult.\r\nShe recalled to the impairment of first one child and then some other and at the coming of Lucille. Lucille was her last child, the only one who had lived. Staring at the divorce decree, she thought of her husband’s infideli ties. She thought of them not too often as separate experiences but as vaporousness piled upon haziness in protective merging. Through numerous years of such unhappiness, she had clung to one bright trust â€the hope of going home some day. It exponent take five years, she told herself then, or ten â€even twenty. But eventually she would go home.\r\nAnd now here was this child frustrating her. This was a strangeling she had nourished in her bosom. She spoke a jargon which she, her mother, barely understood. She dressed like a boy, behaved like a hoyden. She chewed glue all day long, sang and danced without restraint, went to endless movies. And now she flaunted her American citizenship as though that were important. Her nose was short, her hairsbreadth was black, and her skin was the clear brown of her mother’s and her father’s skin. The mere fact of birth in a strange place did not make her a citizen of that place. Or did it?\r\nThis is not your country, she had told her over again and again. You were only born here. I shall take you at last to the place to which you and I belong. A country like this and yet not quite like this. You will see, she had said, you will notice the difference when we get there. Sometimes she thought the girl was interested, but then something would happen â€a glimpse of the sea beyond the park perhaps, or a plumeria maneuver in full bloom â€and the girl’s jaw would set in stubborn opposite and she would think that here, in Hawaii, she had been born and here she would remain. This is my home,” she would repeat, â€Å"I am not going away. ” The same exemption was in her daughter’s eyes now. The eviscerate of her jaw was hard, and her lips, carelessly rouged, were pressed together. â€Å"How long will it take before I get my passport? ” the woman asked, turning to the clerk. â€Å"Oh, perhaps two hours,” the clerk replied, checking the papres. â€Å"we ne ed three copies of your pictures. Oh, here they are,” and he detach the pictures from the sheaf of papers. He smiled and looked at the girl.\r\nThe fighting, stubborn expression had been caught accurately by the camera. â€Å"You still want your daughter included in your passport? ” he asked the woman, more to tease the girl than to get an answer. â€Å"Of course, she is coming with me â€if I have to drag her aboard ship! ” â€Å"I won’t go,” said the girl, raising her voice, the reap of her jaw taut. â€Å"You can’t make me go. I will go back to my father. He will not send me away and I. . . ” She stopped as her mother rose from her seat and took a stair toward her.\r\nDefiance hardened in the girl’s eyes as she stared up her mother, â€Å"I am an American Citizen, I tell you,” she said, breathing hard, flinging her talking to sharply against her mother’s anger. She opened her lips to say more when a slap, ringing swift, fell across her mouth. â€Å"You! ” the woman cried, her face so pale it was frightening. â€Å"You, you. . . ” she repeated, her lips dread so that the words couldn’t take shape. She raised her hand once more, then dropped it, slowly bended in her chair, sobs suddenly and tearingly shaking her body. The girl stared at her mother aghast. She could not â€she would never â€understand all this.\r\n'