Broken English
To me she was Grandma Lola.
Lola in Tagalog, in the official language of the Philippines, means “grandmother.” But English can’t replicate how “lola” conveys so much more. It effuses a warmth of love that this pitiable language I’m writing in struggles to convey.
Tagalog is a much more emotive language. And Lola thus means more than just grandmother — it means the woman who holds your face and pinches your cheeks when you’re young. It means the woman who sends you $5 every Christmas when she’s barely able to pay for food. It means the small but bristling with energy woman who in the course of hours making lumpia can convey — in silence — more than you’ll ever know in years of sights and sounds.
So calling her “Grandma Lola” was a bit repetitive. But as the son of a white father and a Filipino/Chinese mother, “Grandma Lola” fit. She was the confluence of all of the worlds I came from. Even though in some ways I was an affront to her traditional sensibilities, the son of a Southern California surfer and a Filipino nurse, she smiled warmly when I would whisper to her in broken Tagalog.
“Mahal na mahal kita,” I would mouth at her in a poor impression of the language. I knew I meant to say “I love you so much,” but I’m sure the words flowed out of my mouth broken and with the wrong accents. Lola after all spoke at least 3 languages other than English, and every time I tried to mouth out her precious Tagalog or regional Ilocano I winced on the inside expecting her to replicate the same sense of distrust or at least dismay.
But she would smile. She humored my broken and futile attempts. “Your Tagalog so good,” she would warmly lie at me in broken English, “you getting better.” Lola knew that my mother didn’t teach me Tagalog growing up — largely in the hopes that I would embrace English. Like some of my other first generation cousins I was supposed to be a standout — to exceed beyond simply being an “immigrant” and take control. That meant mastering English. And in some ways, that meant embracing being an American more than it meant being a Filipino.
Not speaking Tagalog was thus a matter of course. Sure, I picked up the basics of Tagalog and Ilocano. When Lola’s daughters (my aunts or Tita in Tagalog) I would watch them and learn how they spoke. I walked out of my childhood with a weird, broken understanding of Tagalog and Ilocano, enough to curse or effuse anger but not enough to properly convey love.
Still, that didn’t matter to Lola. Despite Lola having lived through the Japanese occupation and being immensely distrustful of outsiders, she forgot I was half white. When she would cradle me as a kid as I tried in vain to mouth the words to say “I love you” in Tagalog she would change the subject.
“Are you doing well in school?” she would ask. “Do you get good grades? Will you be engineer when you grow up?”
The last one was the weirdest to me. Engineer was a complex term. To me it meant someone that builds technology and changes the world. To her, it meant someone paid well enough that they wouldn’t starve. That they could feed their family. And as cold and dark as that sounds, to a woman who lived through a time of incredible famine where her friends were raped or killed the ability to feed ones family was the only thing that mattered.
We often joke about how Filipinos ask each other “have you eaten?” But the reality is that this is a term layered in deep history. When the Imperial Japanese Empire starved the Philippines to feed their war machine, the Filipinos turned to desperate measures. Feeding one’s family became the only thing that mattered, and my grandmother and grandfather went to terrible extremes to survive and feed theirs — and questions about eating became really a question about one’s livelihood and whether they were going to be able to support themselves and others.
“Yes Lola, I’ll be an engineer when I grow up,” I would smile at her. I told her this through college, through dark times myself where Lola’s $5 or $10 from Christmas bought me enough food to feed me a few days when I didn’t have money to feed myself. And when I graduated I told her I made it. “I’m an engineer now, Lola,” I smiled at her when I came home to Seattle to visit. “I’m going to be okay.”
But in her misty eyes and old age that didn’t seem to resonate. To her, I still was too young to support myself. I kept getting Christmas gifts from her that at first I felt were just her being my grandmother. When I talked to my mom in Seattle I found that Lola didn’t know that I graduated college. She had alzheimers and dementia. The latter warped her memory, so that every time I saw her I was always still the 8 year old kid trying to mouth to her in broken Tagalog, “I love you so much.”
Going back to Seattle became more painful, but I continued to see Lola after I graduated college. She met my girlfriend, Jean, during one of our family reunions. And though Lola’s dementia and alzheimers was taking hold she grabbed Jeans’ and and pressed it to her face — the warmest physical connotation that one can show in Filipino culture for trust and love.
“She is beautiful,” she smiled at me. “But are you okay Andrew? Are you eating? Are you going to be an engineer when you grow up?”
“Yes,” I smiled at her even years after I left engineering behind for venture capital. “I’ll be an engineer. Mahal na mahal kita Lola.”
Lola’s dementia started to get worse and I started to lose years of our interaction. Eventually I wasn’t in college anymore: I was a high schooler. As her mind rejected the reality of the future, I became a younger and younger version of myself. Soon it was no longer about whether or not I would become an engineer — it was what I wanted to do when I went to school, when I grew up.
When I last saw Lola it was too much. I didn’t want to keep pretending I was still in college, or in high school. I whispered at the end the same thing I would keep telling her in my broken Tagalog: “mahal na mahal kita lola” — I love you so much.
She smiled. “I love you Andrew. I’m glad you remember me.” I couldn’t take it. To hear Grandma Lola say that, when she was forgetting all of the things she meant to remember, meant the world. Late that night after I saw my friends in downtown Seattle, I went home and cried alone. And even now — even writing that phrase — I find all of the bottled up emotion I’ve been trying to hide with Grandma Lola’s death surging out like a tidal wave.
I’ll always remember you Lola.
Mahal na mahal kita. I love you so much.
