Life in the Heart of Cebu City:: A Returning Immigrant’s Memoir

By Lillian Cui Garcia

Life in the Heart of Cebu City: A Returning Immigrant’s Memoir is a sequel to An Immigrant Goes Back Home to Cebu (2021). In that previous memoir, she revealed how, as she was retiring from her senior instructor’s position at a community college in Canada in 2012, she took to heart the persistent call of home from Cebu in the Philippines and decided that Cebu is her spirit place where she’d stay around for retirement. This meant, however, that she had to give up continuous and readily available access to the medical health care provided by Canada’s social safety net to which she had contributed and enjoyed as a provincial government employee for more than 30 years.

Despite losing this advantage, she has set herself up to regain a foothold in a place where she knows her belonging is not questioned as she makes practically livable and pretty her brand spanking new condominium in the heart of Cebu City in the past year and a half. She recounts how her new living arrangement has provided a convenient jumping board for engaging with friends and acquaintances from the past and present as well as planned and serendipitous engagements with people from all walks of life. Interwoven in these narratives is her rather disconcerting recognition of the widening gap between the rich and the poor and that between the emergent middle and the lower classes.

Nonetheless, grateful that she is not on the needy end, she recounts with optimism the first concrete steps in her self-assigned project to build a permanent food bank depot and lodging house for poor students in a now run-down city area where she once lived during her student days. Underlying this apparently workable enterprise are reminiscences of her parents giving to others often at so much cost which they lightened up somehow with a metaphor about the talisay, a tropical almond tree’s fruit which could be found along beaches as rivers carry them into the sea usually after a storm: “No matter how small the talisay is, it still could be shared if there’s a will to do so.”

On this note, the author also pays undying tribute to the good-hearted overseas donors who share their talisay to fund the feeding programs and other community projects she has operated with her husband since 2008. Gratefully, she recognizes their empathy for the condition of the poor back in the Third World who, unlike the First World’s poor, have meager access to social assistance, if at all available.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669864608

Lillian Cui Garcia

The author earned her B.A. in the Social Sciences (summa cum laude) and M.A. in Anthropology, both from the University of San Carlos in Cebu, Philippines, where she’d taught sociology and anthropology courses for 10 years. She was a recipient of the American Field Service, Ford Foundation, and Fulbright scholarships before her migration to Canada in 1978. She worked as a researcher/policy analyst with the Alberta provincial government before moving to Terrace, British Columbia where she taught at the Coast Mountain College for 18 years. Retired from teaching in 2012, she has since run with her husband, Anecto H. Garcia, the Roberto and Vicenta Cui Foundation for Cebu’s poor. She has self-published four memoirs available from Amazon and more than a hundred bookstores worldwide: A Teacher Between Worlds (2019), Family Journeys Through Peaks and Valleys (2020), An Immigrant Goes Back Home to Cebu (2021), and On Writing and Publishing (2021).

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INTRODUCTION

And Why Am I Here?

In the summer of 1982, four years after Anecto and I migrated to Edmonton in Canada with our 7-year-old daughter, we took a 2-week unpaid leave from our jobs (Anecto with an insurance company, I with the Alberta Government) so we could attend his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration in Cebu. The previous year, we started saving money for our fares and shopped around for sale items from various stores that we could pack in our airline baggage allowance for six suitcases: chocolates, biscuits, nuts, portable household items, branded clothing and accessories, cosmetics, purses and the then-coveted but prohibitively priced Hush Puppy loafers for special male relatives. Anticipating more expenses for eating out in restaurants and other gifts (cash and in kind), we had our Visas ready.

Anyway, we didn’t have to worry about hotel and food costs because we were staying at the well-appointed manse of Anecto’s older brother, Dr. Lamberto (Ambet) Garcia Sr., who had become one of the most prominent gastroenterologists in the Philippines in less than 2 years after he left his successful medical practice in Chicago so he could be with family in Cebu.

One Sunday afternoon, as we snacked on baked cassava cake and fresh buko (coconut) juice in his well-manicured lawn, Ambet spontaneously gave us a pitch about coming back home for good: There are still birds that tweet up there on the trees. Indeed, looking around his Bermuda grass-sodded yard, I could see brown mayas (a species of small swallows) fly and then perch on the branches of the century-old caimito (star apple) trees laden with fruits.

Nevertheless, I also noted at the entrance of his driveway through its half-open gate shabbily dressed children (some little boys without pants) playing haphap (blind man’s bluff) and I hinted a complaint, But look at those poor kids! Ambet said he had a regular feeding program for them: We give them, you know, food that they’re used to.

He didn’t sound apologetic about what struck me as a rich man’s dismissive statement. Come to think of it now, he wasn’t being supercilious; he was just being candid telling us he did his share helping the poor in a way that addressed their basic needs. For that matter, he had his helpers regularly distribute packs of rice and sardines to these poor. Moreover, how could I ever think of him as discriminatory towards the lower class when he respectfully provided pro bono medical services to my mother, relatives, and neighbors because he knew they were living on a tight budget while he dutifully treated but charged fees to his high-end patients? Mama deeply appreciated his affectionate consideration; consequently, Ambet was the only name other than mine that I heard her utter during the summer of 2005 when I visited her in Manila as she was dying from diabetes complications. When a new doctor would come to her bedside, she’d ask me, "Is that Ambet, ‘Day (Young Girl)?" She’d then be more willing to have an intravenous injection she’d started dreading, if I told her the doctor was Ambet’s friend.

And how’s this for an evidence written in stone that Mama’s prominent, rich doctor was not a classist? When it came to giving the dearly departed a final loving recognition in the rather class conscious graveyard practices in Cebu’s cemeteries, Ambet etched a lesson in egalitarian manifestation of gratitude for those who had taken care of him. I take note of this every time I visit the amply sized Garcia family graveyard. For, contrary to the customary non-inclusion of household servants in a rich family’s burial ground, he interred the remains of his and my husband’s old nanny beside the graves of his parents in a cemetery popularly patronized by the higher class. Then, as he had the names of his parents engraved in stainless steel on the marble stone top of their graveyard plots and on a row of columbary, he also emblazoned on these two spots his nanny’s name --- DIDING. Up to now, I have yet to know of another memorial for a servant given equal billing with her master and mistress.

Sadly, however, about thirty years after our first balikbayan (home-visiting migrant) trip to Cebu in 1982, Ambet passed on, but not before he left Anecto and me an incentive to go back home for good as Anecto was retiring from teaching culinary arts at a community college in northwestern Canada and I was also winding up my teaching with the social science department at the same college. As president of the Garcia family corporation, Ambet saw to it that a three-bedroom apartment would be built in a city suburb to accommodate us. There we comfortably lived in what I’d tell him was his magnum opus as a builder.

But 14 years later, enticements of living right in the city center with all its conveniences for us septuagenarians, made us decide to buy a condo unit in a high rise building in the heart of the ever inviting Cebu City. And talk about Ambet’s handing over the mantle. In this setting, we have more opportunities to be involved in both community outreach programs for the poor and social activities with the better-off class. Unexpectedly, these concurrent engagements have imbued our regaining a foothold in Cebu with challenge, joy and fulfillment.

Presently, for instance, looking down from our unit’s balcony on the 28th floor, I could see the expanse of a burgeoning metropolitan area with low and high-rise concrete buildings. Yet still, easy to spot here and there are about six slum areas most of which have houses with roofs of rusty galvanized iron. Momentarily, the generic compassion that I start feeling for the unseen faces of the poor below my perch becomes a tad unsettling as I go down the lobby on my way to lunch at the adjacent mall’s food court.

I see Jovelyn from the housekeeping unit. Just about 20, she’s 5 feet and rather chunky but sturdy. She greets me a lilting Good morning, Ma’am. I ask her whether she and her workmates had the seeds of the ripe mangoes (Anecto and I had the mango cheeks) and the bowl of left-over stewed pork soup (just the broth because we ate all the spare ribs) I sent down to the concierge’s backroom the previous night. Walking me to the exit door, she said softly: For sure, Ma’am. Better than having plain rice with just salt sprinkled on it.

I had a little smile for their trusting me enough to eat food I’d passed on to them, and then it widened as I passed by Ian, the bellhop at The Alcoves door. He told me the teabags and the bottled lemonsito (native lemon) juice I gave him soothed his tonsillitis. My pleasure in hearing this, however, turned into a wave of soft sadness after I said, Honey in tea helps too, and he made a rejoinder, But honey is too expensive, Ma’am. I stopped my eyes from filling as I told him, I’ll split with you half my bottle later. I didn’t hear him say thank you but I saw his eyes glisten a bit.

My pity for Ian’s lack of money to buy honey, which I’d bought without thinking of its price, was blown away by the lilting invitation of the food court kiosk vendors that I buy their dishes. I ordered the steamed kangkong vegetable, sauteed ground pork with potato chunks, and half a cup of rice. I skipped ordering a fruit juice drink because I had in my bag a fridge-cooled bottle of boiled water I’d poured from Mama’s yellow glass water pitcher that I’ve used since I moved in to the condo. As pleased as I was for my sticking to a habitual frugal and healthy decision-making, I also felt grateful that I am not poor and I could buy my favourite food when I want to. I manifested this gratitude by putting some portions of the dishes I’d ordered on a spare saucer (which I’d asked from the food stall server) so I could offer it to the first busboy who’d pass by Anecto’s and my table. Teofanes said a cordial thank you and smiled as I also thanked him for accepting it. Comfortable with this spontaneous interchange we’ve been doing for some 2 years, he secured the saucer in his cart and told me he was having it for lunch. Some busboys and I have a mutual understanding that it’s better that they enjoy the clean food I can spare instead of dump it as a table left-over into their carts’ garbage pouch.

An elating case in point: My half-pound lechon meal for 200 pesos had no left-over because I shared some sweet, soft pork meat pieces with at least two busboys that passed by my table. I also gave them the lamas (green onion and lemon grass cooked inside the roasted pig) but I kept all the perfectly browned crispy skin pieces for myself. Cecilio, an old, thin floor sweeper, more than thanked me for his share: That really helps us through the day. Jason, a 30-something busboy, appreciatively told me that the lechon made him think of Christmas. Because of these unembarrassed comments, I now automatically think share before I dive into my food.

Now then, with the same spirit of enjoyable partaking, I invite you, my dear Reader, to peruse this memoir’s 32 essays I’d written between March 2021 and December 2022. These are about the joys and challenges of settling into a brand spanking new condominium in a high rise in the heart of Cebu City starting in December 2020 to date. They show how people from both the better-off and underprivileged social classes touch each other’s lives spontaneously or in planned ways that give joy or at times cause slights and injuries.

I have interwoven into these stories remembrances from my middle-class parents giving and helping others even as they had to provide for their immediate family with limited resources. These are complemented by narratives of my recent interchanges with both the rich and poor in Cebu that inspire expanding one’s capacity to light and create joy. Nonetheless, to make the telling full, I’ve included accounts of incidents that somehow turned unpleasant and sad.

Manifestly, this memoir is a long letter of love and gratitude to my parents; for, these magnificent giants on earth gave me first-class education and other opportunities far more than their middle-class resources could afford. Hence, I can definitely say that they primarily made possible my coming back home to a comfortable retirement.

Then, too, grateful that I am not on the receiving end, I write this in praise of appreciative though at times abrasively grabbing receivers of a needed hand as they eke out a living.

Also, I’d like to share with givers a reminder about softening cavalier terms and rough edges in the course of giving. As the famous slapstick comedian Charlie Chaplin once counseled to smoothen the scratches from the barbs of a skit, Kinder and gentler work better.

PART I

The Call of The Alcoves from the Heart of the City

CHAPTER 1

From a Memory-Laden Apartment to a Brand Spanking New Condo

Since June 2007 up to late December of 2021, for our retirement vacations, Anecto and I had rented the three-bedroom apartment his brother Ambet had built for us in the Garcia family compound on Salinas Drive, Cebu. It was made a more joyous place when Jack, our only grandson, came with his single-parent mother to live there for 5 years while she was engaged in her movie production enterprise. This unexpected opportunity to be an involved grandparent encouraged Anecto, who had retired 5 years earlier than me from his culinary arts teaching job at Terrace’s community college, to stay 11 months of the year at the apartment to support Ayna’s career plan. Fortunately, a high-end culinary arts school offered him a teaching job.

In the meantime, I opted to work 5 more years towards full retirement from teaching criminology, sociology, and anthropology at the same college to pay off our house mortgage. Hence, we agreed to have what the sociologists have labeled as a live-apart-together arrangement. I’d stay about 9 months of each year by myself in Terrace and spend Christmas and summer vacations with them in Cebu.

The briefness of my yearly Cebu stays was compensated with the privilege of becoming a part of Ambet’s extended family. (Ambet had already made my mother part of his family as he gave her pro bono medical services in all the years we’d stayed in Canada.) This ad hoc extended family system worked better because we had two separate but neighboring houses. Hence, life in Cebu was hunky-dory and full. But then, Ambet died from a stomach blood disorder in March of 2014. So much for that one compelling reason for our coming back to Cebu, I lament continuing to miss him up to now.

As memories of my beloved brother-in-law, peeping from nooks and crannies of the apartment he had built for us, started to become faint, the assailing smell of otherwise delicious fried dried fish from the squatters’ dwellings attached behind the compound’s fire wall became more profuse. Worse was the yucky stench from their improvised sewage disposal. These two competed in blowing away my appetite for my otherwise delectable east-west breakfast mix of hot dark chocolate mix, budbud (steamed glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaf) topped with naturally aged Australian cheese, and one cheek of a golden ripe Guadalupe mango (not the second rate Mexican variant).

To escape these unpleasant smells, while Anecto was at school, I’d quickly have breakfast and then take a 20-minute taxi ride to Ayala Mall. There I’d have lunch, buy groceries, and window shop for women’s wear and household ware. As I saw the few high-rise condominiums nearby this mall, which had become my favourite, I recognized two immediate advantages from living in one of them: (1) spare myself from inhaling gas fumes from going back and forth my apartment and the mall, and (2) get away from the unbearable stink flowing into the apartment from the adjacent squatter area.

Reinforcing my nascent relocation goal was the availability of a condo unit at Park Point, a premier complex at the Ayala Business Center. One muggy afternoon in February 2017, after lunch at Ayala Mall’s food court, I stopped by its lower floor realty station. Elle, the realtor, talked me into buying a two-bedroom unit on the 14th floor of the Center’s Park Point premier condo building.

It was a cakewalk of a sales talk for Elle as I was quite gung-ho about viewing the suite with Anecto. We easily agreed we could get a mortgage from our bank in Terrace equivalent to 15 million pesos with our then 22-year-old log house there as collateral.

A week later, we sat down with Elle to sign an offer to purchase. She mentioned we had to pay a compulsory fee of 3 thousand pesos each month for membership in the City Complex, an exercise place in consortium with the Park Point Condominium project. My immediate reaction came as much from my Scrooge-like inclination as from a genuine altruism: We can’t pay for something we don’t use. We can use that money for a month of our snack pack (sardines, crackers, and juice) distribution at Redemptorist church on Sundays. If we can be exempt from that fee, we will buy the unit. Respecting my position, Elle went to the higher-ups but was told there were no exceptions. Consequently, we backed out on our offer to purchase.

Quite disappointed, I resigned myself to putting up with the stink at the apartment wafting in from the squatters’ place; anyway, I consoled myself, there was the air-conditioned Ayala Mall refuge. But as life is good with surprises, it unfolded some more with an early birthday gift for me. A few months later in November, I accidentally talked to another realtor at a show home in Ayala Mall, pre-selling what she said was a premiere condo development right beside the business center --- The Alcoves.

I jumped at my second chance of getting away from the old apartment’s stinky surrounding. First, we asked if there were compulsory gym fees. None, she said, because the new complex has three swimming pools and an exercise room independent of the city complex gym system. That started the ball rolling towards reviving our Canadian bank mortgage. Hence, we advanced a reservation for a one-bedroom unit pre-selling at 11 million pesos. I quickly adjusted my privacy claim for a bedroom all to myself and reset my mind ready to share a bedroom with Anecto after more than 20 years of a mutually satisfying bed-divorce.

Fortuitously, while we were making an offer to purchase for the one-bedroom unit early in January 2018, I got an unexpected call from our realtor-property manager in Vancouver telling us that the condo we owned there, which we bought for $220,000 in 1999, could sell for $678,000 in the hot British Columbia real estate market. This was not only amazing timing but the amount was a mysterious equivalent in Philippine pesos that would cover the price of a two-bedroom unit at The Alcoves.

Two bedrooms! I saw my privacy sensor flash Buddha-emerald green. Relieved that I was keeping my own bedroom, I insisted that Anecto should get the bigger master’s bedroom as I was but too happy to settle in the smaller second bedroom of this little Shangri-La accommodation in the heart of our beloved city of Cebu.

Making our new accommodation treat more delightful was our being able to arrange that Ambet’s daughter-in-law would be our negotiating realtor so she could get the commission. In doing this, I felt our gratitude for Ambet’s providing us