In the Country

'Superb' Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

Mia Alvar

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780749808
• Subtopic: Literature General

‘Her diamond prose sparkles so brightly and cuts so deeply’ Celeste Ng

Shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize

Shortlisted for the John Leonard Prize

Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction

With nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories, Mia Alvar vividly gives voice to the exiles, emigrants and wanderers of the Filipino diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, her powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home, and marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

In the Country

1971

She called the strike on a Monday, the busiest day of the week. As strikes go, hers was poetry. Eighty nurses, their brown hands clasped around the Self-Sacrifice statue on the lawn outside of City Hospital. The chairman of the board’s white face, turning even whiter when he came out of his car and saw them. Milagros could have lived on that rush forever.

That morning, June 21, their cause was a simple one. At City Hospital, the native nurses, like Milagros, earned less than the American ones. Forty centavos to the peso, if you did the math; less, in some cases, if you weighed education and experience, skill and seniority. When she learned this, months before, Milagros had simply asked her own boss for a raise. I think you’ll agree from my performance reviews that I deserve one. Her boss liked her well enough to talk to her boss, who talked to her boss’s boss. A message of hand-tied sympathy came down. “I know it looks bad,” said Milagros’s boss. “But we’re talking two different standards of living. Take transportation. You ride the jeepney to work, correct? Four pesos round trip? Americans love their cars, and they’re too tall to stoop under the jeep entrance. Gas costs a fortune these days, and what about Christmastime? You’re where you need to be; they fly seven thousand miles or more.”

The math made some sense. But then Milagros went home, to the apartment whose rent she’d helped pay since she was old enough to work, and shouldered all on her own since college; the apartment she shared with her mother, who washed clothes for a living, and her brothers, and their wives and children. Her mother said, “You have a job.” (Her own brothers should be so lucky.) “Don’t waste your time wanting somebody else’s slice of pie. Be happy.” Good advice, for anyone in this life. But the numbers nagged, like a stitch in Milagros’s side. What if she wanted to drive a car to work? Travel at Christmastime? Live in a place of her own?

She started small, with crumbs of gossip. “I heard,” she whispered to a colleague, as they washed their hands together at a scrub sink, “Peggy Ryan pulled in twenty thousand pesos last year, even without a master’s. Know anything about it?” She stepped lightly around her co-workers’ squeamishness: about money, about Americans, about advanced degrees.

The story bled from nurse to nurse like dye. They met for lunch at a carinderia around the corner from City Hospital.

“I’ll just talk to my supervisor,” said one nurse. “Can’t we all?”

“I tried that,” said Milagros. “They don’t listen to one woman, by herself.”

So they voted, three to one, to start a union, with Milagros at its helm. Together they wrote memos, scheduled meetings, made jokes at the negotiation table. The greenest American does better than I, because I am brown. The chairman of the board liked that one. The chairman was fond of Milagros, he said. Impressed with Milagros. The chairman laughed Milagros and her little union right out of the conference room.

Milagros Sandoval, Registered Nurse, twenty-two years old, had no road map from there. Her mother was a laundress. Her father had hopped farm to farm for work. Growing up, Milagros learned to keep her head down, her boat steady. In college she had never joined a single protest. Maoists or Marxists, Young Patriots or Christian Socialists or Democratic Youth, were only obstacles on her campus course from class to job to library. All those long-haired, picketing boys and girls—that was how she thought of them, as children, next to her—blocked her path and made her late; their chants on land reform and U.S. bases sounded like nursery rhymes, like games for kids who never had to work. In 1969, her senior year, those kids accused the President of bribing and bullying his way to a second term, news that felt as far from Milagros as Armstrong’s moon landing. She couldn’t call those classmates for advice now. They had not exchanged numbers at graduation, and probably they would not even know her name.

But she was a quick study: Milagros Sandoval hated nothing in the world more than feeling like a beginner. She learned how to pitch nonbelievers who didn’t want to cause trouble. Buzzwords—worth and equal work—set the air crackling. When in mid-June yet another meeting went south, and ended with the chairman patting Milagros on her white cap, the union voted on its best last resort.

Refusal to negotiate in good faith, she keyed into a borrowed typewriter that night.

On strike until an agreement is reached.

It was not about the country yet, though hand grenades at Plaza Miranda two months later would send gurney after blood-soaked gurney into City Hospital. A year later still, strikes would be against the law altogether.

June 21 came before all that. June 21 was about these nurses, the value of one human’s sweat against another’s. And yet Milagros felt her world grow a few sizes, while the city, street, and small apartment where she grew up shrank. Until the union she’d thought no further than her own degree, her own job, her first proud payday, when she brought home eggs, bread, beer, and chocolate to her mother and her unemployed brothers.

Family, those waiting at home, turned out to be a sticking point, when union meetings lasted late into the night.

“My children need me,” said the older, married nurses.

“The union needs you too,” said Milagros.

“My children will forget what I look like,” they said.

“But this is how you want your children to remember you.” To Milagros it was a beautiful thought: the rules suspended for a time, toddlers subsisting on Cheez Whiz sandwiches and staying up late to watch their mothers on TV. Even Gloria Gambito, whose husband didn’t want her working in the first place, dared to bring her three-year-old daughter to the picket line, a STRIKE ’71 T-shirt reaching her ankles.

Jaime Reyes, a reporter for the Metro Manila Herald, came to City Hospital on the twenty-second. On his way to Ermita, to the Congress Building, a tip had reached him from the hospital. When he introduced himself—“Jaime Reyes,” he said; “call me Jim”—Milagros was holding too many things. A picket sign, a clipboard, a megaphone. She moved to shake his hand and dropped the picket sign. Not on purpose, not like a lady in bygone days dropping a handkerchief, but it may have looked that way because Jaime Reyes, call him Jim, was handsome. Tall and lean, like an athlete, with the slightest wave in his black hair. Seeing him, Milagros wished she knew more about makeup. She’d kept her hair as short as it had been in high school: wash and go.

Jim stooped to help her with the picket sign and read her Pentel-penned slogan aloud: CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$. He gave her a look of amusement, or reverence, or both. “EXPAT$,” he repeated, tracing the dollar sign in the air with a finger. “That’s good.” Their palms met as he returned the sign, hers a little damp.

“How did you find out?” Jim asked. “About the wage gap, that is? I can’t imagine this was public information.”

“A friend in Payroll tipped me off,” Milagros said, laughing. “This is my Pentagon Papers, I guess.”

That made him smile again, in his amused and reverent way.

If she had ever joined a campus protest, she might have known of him. Jim Reyes had been a fixture at those picket lines, interviewing the long-haired marching children. But because she rarely opened a newspaper, she had never read his stories of the First Quarter Storm or the jeepney workers’ strike, his forecasts that the paint bombs and broken car windows and Molotov cocktails would backfire. Proof of a state of emergency. Exhibits in the President’s case for staying on in the palace past his legal term limits. Martial law—like the word cancer, in those days: widely murmured, barely understood. Least of all by someone like Milagros, who would have taken Jim’s warnings, if she’d read them, as just another reason to skip the campus picket lines altogether.

Her ignorance made the other nurses giggle. “I called him here,” Janice Mendoza, fresh out of college, admitted. She’d met Jim at a rally on Mendiola Bridge the year before, when students tried to storm Malacañang Palace. “I was just swept up in what my friends were doing. But I kept his card. In case anything else should happen, he told us. Anything that he should know about.” Other nurses recognized him from TV. Movers and Shakers, a weekly who’s-who program not unlike a cockfight or a beauty pageant (Manila and its obsession with crowning champions, and ranking the Best and First and Most) had featured Jim one Sunday. Youngest Staff Writer ever at the Metro Manila Herald (Oldest, Most Prestigious daily in the city). “He skipped two grades,” said Yvette Locsin, “and finished Ateneo at eighteen.” “He’s from up north, an Ilocano,” said Asuncion Flores. If Milagros watched Movers and Shakers, she too would have heard about the first time he’d smelled newspaper ink and decided, at the age of five, that one day he would be a journalist. About the scholarship that brought him to high school in Manila, where he worked his way up from paper route to mail room at the Herald. She too might have held her breath when the interviewer asked after Jim’s bachelor status, seen Jim shake his head and laugh, embarrassed; maybe at the picket line she’d have checked his left hand, like the other nurses, to see if anything had changed.

Instead, she met him for the first time on the grass in front of City Hospital, where he asked, under the bronze statue, if she’d considered greener pastures. “Saudi Arabia needs nurses,” he said. “So does America. It’s a booming market abroad. People making three, four times what even Peggy Ryan does here.”

But Milagros never wanted to leave Manila. Even as a young girl with no money she had wanted to stay here. In the same way she had ridden out high school calculus and college chemistry: she thought that she could crack Manila, that if she worked at it enough the city would reward her; only sissies quit. She stopped herself from saying this to Jim. Talk of mastery, ambition, had no place on a picket line. A union leader had to talk of solidarity. Everyone rising together, not racing to the top.

“Migration’s not for me” is what she said. “And Saudi Arabia’s no excuse for shabby treatment at home. ‘Love it or leave it’ is not a sound workplace policy.”

“But don’t you think,” Jim pressed, “given the chance, that all these nurses would leave City in a heartbeat, for a land of milk and honey? Sidewalks paved with gold or diamonds, depending on whom you ask? The chubby envelopes they could send home?”

“I don’t think so,” said Milagros, deciding she could speak for them. “Your mother gets sick, you don’t leave her for a healthier mother. She’s your mother!”

He gave her that amused, reverent look for the third time. It seemed they weren’t so much on the same page as in the same paragraph or sentence, even from that first day.

February 6, 1986

Milagros’s mother has an idea. “Tell me what you think,” she says.

“Let me guess,” says Milagros, who hasn’t left the house for weeks. “I should go shopping. I should treat myself to a fancy dinner and cocktails with some friends. A massage and a manicure at Aling Betchie’s salon. At the very least, get out of bed, go outside, take a walk and get some air. Am I right, Ma?” Tragedy has freed her from good manners; she doesn’t care how her words land.

“Those are good ideas too,” says Milagros’s mother. “But I was thinking something else. And you don’t have to lift a finger for it. See, shortly after Jaime . . .”

Milagros lets her stutter. She’s through helping people say it.

“Shortly afterwards, you know, I registered to vote.”

“You?” It’s been three months since the President, feeling heat from both the opposition and Washington, D.C., made his announcement on TV. A snap election. Milagros wouldn’t have bet on her mother noticing. Her mother, who has voted as often in her life as she’s read Russian novels or listened to Italian opera. “I didn’t know you cared, Ma.”

“I don’t, really.” Her mother laughs shyly, touches Milagros on the cheek. “But you do, iha. I registered for you. I know it’s hard for you to get out of this bed—I can’t imagine. For all the bad luck I’ve had in my life, knock wood, none of my kids . . .”

She still can’t say it. Milagros shuts her eyes.

“What I mean is, rest here for as long as you’d like. But I know this matters to you. You haven’t missed an election since you married. So tell me who you want, and I’ll vote for you. All right? Even better if you remember how the paper looks, and where I shoul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Kontrabida
• The Miracle Worker
• Legends of the White Lady
• Shadow Families
• The Virgin of Monte Ramon
• Esmeralda
• Old Girl
• A Contract Overseas
• In the Country
• Acknowledgments