The Secret Son

By K. Robicheau

K. Robicheau's The Secret Son takes a deep dive into family drama when Julia travels to her grandfather's funeral at a seaside hacienda in Mindanao, a Philippine island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885042123

Book preview

Contents

K. Robicheau: Author’s Note

Prologue

Julia

Papa is Dead

The Arrival

The Funeral of Don Gregorio

What We Do Next

San Tomas Legal Aid Clinic

Nando

What We Don’t Talk About

The Search

Baby Doll’s Fan Club

Fernando’s Recovery

Cousins

Return to the Beach

The Heirs

Inheritance

Fiesta

Acknowledgements

K. Robicheau: Author’s Note

Family. For many of us they are our world. But as time passes, we seek out individuality and independence and then spend a great deal of time and effort trying to escape and get away. Then we become disillusioned and spend the rest of our time trying to go back.

My childhood was in the Philippines surrounded by a large extended provincial family that spent every weekend, holiday, and summer together. We lived through political, social, and family upheaval while managing to have the best parties, thanks to dancing and karaoke. My cousins were my first friends and playmates.

Fast forward to Los Angeles 2022 and our world is traumatized from pandemic and isolation. I see the past in retrospect but filtered through a global cultural lens. I see most of us anchorless and anxious, devoid of relations and fiestas. I wrote this story to relive and remember the joyous chaos of family events, filled with eccentric characters.

In this book, Julia’s life is a mess. She is in a disastrous relationship with no career, no education, and no plans. Then she must attend her grandfather’s funeral in Mindanao. This brings her parents and her back into the family fold. Julia is now surrounded by tios, tias, cousins, and servants she never knew but who now all play a role in helping Julia navigate new experiences. Everyone knows your business, and everyone meddles. The walls have ears and nothing remains secret.

This book features the family activists with environmental and social causes, the politician uncle with his government retinue, and the movie star mother with her clamoring fans. It features Marga, the cousin who becomes Julia’s best friend and ally. It features Nando, who must choose between love and his mother’s dreams of US immigration for him. And it features an inheritance to fight over.

While still processing loss and sorrow, Julia discovers new relationships in the setting of a coconut hacienda and coral reefs. She sees her family struggle to maintain its traditions and social standing while trying to stay relevant to a changing world. Everything is new and ripe to be explored. She connects and reconciles with her past and reimagines her future.

This book is for the reader who travels through the written word. We see, hear, savor, and smell a small town in Mindanao. The reader is drawn into the extended family drama with its familiar twists and tension, to come away with connections to people we all remember and love.

I hope you accompany Julia and her family on their journey of discovery in her ancestral home and they ultimately find what matters.

Prologue

The Philippines is an archipelago of over 7,600 islands—the exact number depending on the tide. Subject to earthquakes that topple buildings and typhoons that blow off roofs, its people are accustomed to the occasional and unpredictable wrath of nature. This is the root cause of a culture of fatalistic outlook.

Bahala na! Filipinos said whenever the situation looked bleak. Let God figure it out! This saying can be applied to almost anything.

Trying to find the Spice Islands during the age of exploration, Magellan discovered the Philippines but soon died in battle over there. In the 1540s, Spain claimed sovereignty, naming the country after King Phillip II. But Spain had many colonies in the New World. No one knew where the Philippines was, and when they found out, no one wanted to go there.

The country suffered typhoons, earthquakes, and unbearable heat. If you looked for it on a map, it was in Asia. You couldn’t get farther from Spain, and you would be surrounded by heathens.

Spain offered as much land as one could ride through on horseback in one day to prospective colonizers willing to make the precarious journey over a misnamed Pacific Ocean. A few of these land grants survived intact into present times. Even halved, quartered, and divided into fractions, these estates were large. Through the years, these remained in the hands of the wealthiest few, yet the landless who lived there for as long as could be remembered are the ones who tirelessly worked the soil.

In the early 1900s, an opium-trading British vessel in Hong Kong shanghaied a young man from Fukien. In Manila Bay, the young man jumped ship. He established himself in the Filipino-Chinese business community and had himself baptized Anastacio Ong, a respectable Christian man who quickly mastered Spanish, English, and a couple of Filipino languages.

A little over a decade earlier, in 1898, the United States won the Spanish-American War. Americans woke up to a gain of territories they knew nothing about. One of these territories was the Philippines that had just recently proclaimed its independence from Spain. The Philippines welcomed American interference believing the enemy of my enemy is my friend. When the Filipinos realized the Americans were not leaving, there was yet another war, the Philippine-American War of 1899.

Filipinos learned that the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, just with more complex motives.

By the time Anastacio Ong was making his fortune in Manila’s Chinatown, the United States had already firmly established control over the country. It wouldn’t be until after World War II, when Manila became the most heavily bombed city in Asia, that the Philippines was allowed independence.

In 1915, the news arrived in Manila that the owner of a ten-thousand-hectare hacienda was about to lose his life. The local townspeople in a municipality of Mindanao were holding him hostage for impregnating a number of the local girls.

Anastacio hurried to secure passage on the next ship sailing south and, upon landing, sent word through local Chinese businessmen that he had arrived to resolve the situation. With his linguistic skills, Anastacio persuaded the furious locals to release the bruised and battered Spaniard to him in chains for transport to incarceration in Manila. With the promise of never returning and on condition that he deeded his land to Anastacio Ong, the Spaniard was released and never seen again.

Questioned about what happened to the Spaniard, Anastacio said, How would I know? I have no idea where he could have gone. He was grateful to me for securing his freedom.

The newly landed Anastacio found to his delight that because of favorable trade status with the United States, the prices of sugar and copra had gone through the roof. Copra is the end product of the coconut. Copra is rich in oil and has many uses from cooking to cosmetics and animal feed. The coconut tree lives for one hundred years and supports three generations of farmers who have little to do except wait for the nuts to mature and sell them.

Anastacio planted as many coconut trees as he could. He married a local Filipino woman and gained the trust of the residents. Living on the edge of a jungle, he also contracted smallpox, anthrax, and the usual tropical diseases. One of those diseases must have eventually rendered Anastacio infertile as he only fathered one child, Gregorio.

As the sole heir, Gregorio had everything he wanted: a beautiful Spanish mestiza wife, sons, and thousands of hectares of coconut-producing land. Then the price of copra fell, land taxes kept increasing, and the government instituted a levy specifically on coconut farmers.

At one point it cost more to grow a coconut than to sell it.

As if to make matters worse, Gregorio’s sons were not increasing the family wealth but instead depleting it.

Knowing this brought him no comfort: The first generation makes the wealth. The second generation grows the wealth. The third generation spends it. The fourth generation has nothing left.

Chapter 1:

Julia

Julia watched the monitor’s lights blink and beep. The tiny baby slept through it all, fists clenched and eyes shut tight. His little chest rose up and down. An air hose taped to his tiny throat whooshed oxygen in and out.

The little girl with curly pigtails tapped on the glass. Hi baby.

A hand held on to her wrist. Don’t do that. You’ll disturb him. He needs to rest and get better.

She breathed on the glass, then drew a heart in the frost. Get better baby, so I can take you home and play with you. She whispered while she drew more hearts. I know how to take care of babies. I can sing to you. I can tell you stories. I know lots of—

Shhh. Julia! Be quiet. This is a hospital, said the woman with gray hair and a pink cardigan.

You’re not my mommy. Julia’s lower lip quivered.

"I know, hija. I’m sorry but your mommy is very sick. And your daddy is worried. So, please be quiet or the nurses will tell us to leave." The older woman gently pulled the child away from the glass.

I want my mommy and my daddy! The little girl’s eyes welled up with tears. It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m going to be five years old.

Really? The woman bent her head to be level with Julia’s.

Mommy said I could have a party. Julia put her mouth to the woman’s ear and whispered. Maybe my baby brother can come to my party?

"Hija, probably not tomorrow. The woman stood and slowly shook her head. We can celebrate your birthday when he is well enough to come home.

But my birthday is tomorrow. Julia insisted tugging on the woman’s cardigan. If we wait, it won’t be my birthday anymore, and I want him to see my birthday cake.

"Hija, even if your birthday is tomorrow, we can have a party anytime. Next week, next month."

But my birthday is tomorrow. After tomorrow, it’s not my birthday! Julia whined, now stretching out the cardigan’s sleeve.

A nurse in scrubs approached them. Ma’am, visiting hours in the neonatal unit are over. Please exit.

The woman took Julia’s hand, extricating her sweater from the childish grasp. Okay, we have to go. Don’t cry. Let’s pray to Jesus and ask him to please make your brother get better right away. Come let’s go. The older woman walked Julia outside the neonatal unit.

Bye-bye baby. I’ll miss you. Large tear drops fell.

Mrs. Romero? Julia asked the older woman.

"What is it, hija?"

Can you help me pray to Jesus to make my baby brother get well?

Of course. Mrs. Romero leaned forward so that she and Julia put their heads together. They closed their eyes and clasped their hands to their chests, standing just outside the neonatal unit.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen, they whispered.

Dear Jesus, please help Julia’s baby brother get better very soon, prayed Mrs. Romero.

And I promise I’ll be a very good girl, added Julia with eyes shut very tight.

Amen.

Amen.

Julia, that was very nice. Mrs. Romero nodded.

Mrs. Romero. My mommy and daddy are coming to get me soon so we can be a family with my baby brother.

Mrs. Romero just smiled, a tear descending her cheek.

Mommy and Daddy didn’t come home for a long time. Julia did not have a birthday party when she turned five. Nobody talked about baby brother. As she grew up, sometimes Julia wasn’t sure if she ever really had a brother. It didn’t really make a difference if she was good.

* * *

An air conditioner hummed in the semidarkness.

Julia’s eyes flew open. Well, one eye—the other was glued shut with mascara and sleep. Gingerly trying to separate her thick lashes apart, she became keenly aware the room was spinning, and she had no idea where she was.

Focus, focus. Through the pale light, she saw dingy walls and a fire sprinkler on the popcorn ceiling. Brown blackout curtains and a faux walnut dresser were the clues. I’m in a shitty motel room. She reached out to feel the body next to her. There he was, a tall, well-built man, feet hanging off the bed and one arm flung over her waist.

Oh fuck!

Julia picked up the muscular arm and wiggled out from under it.

Fighting nausea, she grasped for the plastic water bottle on the bedside table. It was empty. She tried to recall if she drank it all the night before, or maybe early that morning. Still smelling like Bulgari and bile, she staggered to the bathroom, naked.

I feel like death warmed over. Motel tap water poured in the sink, and she gulped handfuls even if it tasted like fluoride and chlorine. She pushed her thick bangs into her comically matted hair, tall and stiff from natural hair gel. Black smears lined her swollen eyelids. Great. I look like an Asian Brigitte Bardot.

She paused by the bathroom door holding on to the knob to steady herself. I can’t do this, Brad, she mumbled to the half-asleep man wrapped in sheets on the bed.

I can’t be dating a married man. She sobbed and grabbed the bottom edge of the sheet and blew her nose into it. I’m breaking up with you! I don’t ever want to see you again; you lied to me!

Hey! Wait, wait a minute. What brought this on? Brad rolled over, wrapping the sheets around his chest.

When we got together, you told me you were getting a divorce. And I believed you. It made sense to me. Why would a man cheat on his wife if he wasn’t already planning on leaving her? Hah! I was wrong. She inserted one earring then the other. Apparently, men cheat on their wives because they can. Stupid me—I let you.

"Sweetheart! Darling, don’t say that.