APIA-nionated | The Sound of My Dad
I got the calls in the middle of the night. The first one was from Dad’s phone. I picked up right away but as soon as I answered the phone, the call dropped. I texted Dad to see if he had meant to call; it was odd for him to call so late at night, especially since I was in California and he was three hours ahead on the east coast. Rather than a text back, I soon got a second call from an unknown number in Maryland. It was the hospital telling me that Dad had passed away.
“WHAT?!?!” I screamed, before throwing my phone across the bed. I thought, how could he be dead when he just tried to call me? I don’t know what other sounds came out of my mouth after that, only that I tried to bury them in a pillow. It was late and I didn’t want to wake up the kids with my grief. They would hear enough of it in the coming days and weeks. Fortunately, my partner picked the phone back up and got all the necessary information from the hospital.
Dad was being treated for cancer at the National Institute of Health when he died. My family and I had just visited the week before to celebrate the holidays with him. I already had a ticket to go back and see him later in January, to stay with him at NIH again, but rather than another week of care-giving in the hospital, the trip would be for the funeral.
My sister and I, with the help of our stepmother and other relatives, arranged the funeral mass and memorial service. We decided to decorate the memorial venue with pictures of Dad from throughout his life, which meant digging through his belongings to find the best ones. The process felt like opening a time capsule and being struck by the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of a distant time. Who was this man, my Dad, who looked so dashing in a leather trench coat and fedora, this guy laughing and smoking a cigarette surrounded by his barkada, this young boy with his arms around his brothers on a farm in some province in the Philippines?
Our stepmother asked us which of Dad’s things we wanted to take for ourselves. Living with my partner and our three kids in a small, already-cluttered house across the country, I knew I couldn’t take much. I had to choose the essentials. It was like packing an emergency kit, and after residing in earthquake country for more than a decade, I had gotten pretty good at asking myself, “Which things are irreplaceable?”
What caught my eye, and my heart, were Dad’s guitars. When he died he had two in his possession: a classical guitar, the typical deep brown kind with nylon strings; and an acoustic guitar, a dark blue, steel-stringed Yamaha. I grew up hearing Dad play that classical guitar. I can still picture him in the 2-bedroom condo where we lived after he and Mom divorced, laying in his bed with one leg crossed over the other as he plucked the tune of “Forbidden Games” for me when I couldn’t sleep. My sister and I watched a lot of horror movies growing up, and in addition to the thrill they gave me, they also seriously messed up my sleep. In the dark, my overactive imagination couldn’t help but picture Freddy Kreuger’s knife fingers creeping up the side of the bed.
If the classical guitar comforted me when I was lying awake and scared at night, the Yamaha guitar served a very different role in my life. Dad was gifted the Yamaha by his father, my Lolo, and he let me borrow it for a time during college. Those days I was idealistic and thought I could teach myself guitar just like Dad had. The Yamaha looked so sleek and refined in its hard case, like you could take it anywhere and you would command everyone’s attention. It represented the kind of artist I wished I could be: self-motivated and self-taught, not needing any external validation, just content to be making art. Sadly, I never managed to teach myself guitar, so I eventually gave the Yamaha back.
I didn’t have room for both guitars, so I was torn: take the fancy one with the hard case that would be easier to transport, or the classical one that looked so bare, almost vulnerable, in its stand?
The choice seemed symbolic of the dilemma I faced as an adolescent. At eleven years old I started attending boarding school in Switzerland, across the Atlantic from my family. I learned to speak several European languages, studied art history through field trips to Florence and Vienna, and grew up learning life lessons like how to use a tampon from peers instead of parents. Going to boarding school also meant packing up and changing rooms every year. I became like the steel-stringed Yamaha, refined and independent and easy to transport.
But I was also emotionally volatile at that time, as most pubescent youth are, and my mental illness was starting to emerge in ways I couldn’t understand nor control. Beneath the refined exterior was a suicidal young girl who felt bare and vulnerable like the classical guitar. During the day I moved through the world holding it together within a hard case. At night I listened to Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor–songs reminiscent of the ones Dad played–to help me sleep. I felt divided between these two versions of myself.
In the years we attended boarding school, my sister and I only came home for Christmas, spring, and summer break. One particularly challenging year, I had to come home early for Christmas. The impending winter, the stress and anxiety of soon being plunged into darkness, was taking its toll on me. Despite lacking the mental health resources that we have now, Dad helped me the best he could. When I got home he called the closest relative he knew who happened to be a psychiatrist, to see what she suggested. He even accompanied me on the grueling, often discouraging search for a regular therapist.
I think Dad also struggled with depression, even though I know his generation didn’t have the words for it. Something about the way his voice softened when I explained what I was feeling, or even the way he played guitar sometimes, told me he understood the weight of that darkness. According to one of Dad’s brothers, my Tito Erich, Dad was bullied until the fourth grade. Tito Erich said it wasn’t until Dad taught himself guitar that the bullying stopped. Maybe playing guitar was Dad’s superpower. He used it to fight off bullies, to help his daughter sleep, and possibly to soothe his own inner sadness.
Since I spent most of my adolescence abroad, I knew very little about Dad’s personal life, who his friends were, what he did for fun. My ignorance became even more apparent at Dad’s memorial.
“Did you know that your dad was in a band?”
I only vaguely remembered hearing about some band called Kalesa, his band. They played at the memorial, performing a version of “So Long Frank Lloyd Wright” that swapped Dad’s name for Wright’s and “engineer” for “architect.” Dad was a civil engineer; at least I knew that much. But I never realized how much music was a part of his life. During the memorial, one of my Titas even gave a speech about him that ended with “Make sure there’s always music in your house! There must be music!”
Before Dad died, I didn’t even know what a kalesa was: a horse-drawn carriage dating back to colonial times in the Philippines. And who was that barkada from the photos? Apparently they were all part of a musical theater group. Only after he died did I learn that Dad was one of the co-founders of QBd Ink, a production company in the Washington DC area that focused on the stories of Filipino-Americans. Recently I found “The QBd Ink Story” archived on the Asian American Theatre Revue website. The “Story” reads like a mission statement of sorts: “There is a stronger commitment among us to develop a theatre more relevant to our culture as Filipino-Americans and as Filipinos living in America. We feel a need to have our particular story told and to articulate the collective memory of what gave birth to our present communities.” Mission statements like these might seem commonplace now, but this was the 1990’s.
Since I came back to the US so infrequently in the 90's, I have only fuzzy memories of that time: Dad saying that he was working on a musical, that the best place to recruit Fil-Am singers was at karaoke bars, that he’d been hanging out with various Titos and Titas at restaurants like Little Quiapo. Maybe once I saw laying around the condo a program for Hacienda, a musical about the People’s Power revolution written by my Tito Rodney. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was, after all, on my way to becoming a more “refined,” i.e. Europeanized, young lady, and there was no space to learn about People’s Power or other parts of my cultural heritage.
I don’t regret my upbringing. I know that attending boarding school in Europe afforded me certain privileges and made me the person I am now. But sometimes I wonder what my teenage depression would have looked like if I’d been surrounded by more stories of my Filipino-American culture. Would I have felt differently if, instead of watching The Magic Flute or Madame Butterfly, I grew up watching Dad sing and play guitar with his barkada, relating stories like the one about the time Filipinos overthrew a dictator?
My Tito Rodney, who also co-founded QbD Ink, died in 2013. At the funeral, Dad played guitar while one of Tito Rodney’s daughters sang a Kalesa song, “Where Are You.” I couldn’t attend the funeral, so one of my cousins sent me a video of the performance. In it, I see Dad holding up his classical guitar at the front of the church while the daughter sings. Shortly into the song, her voice trembles before she breaks down and cries. Dad slows his guitar playing until he eventually stops. Then he reaches out a hand and holds the daughter’s shoulder to comfort her until she’s ready to continue.
Whenever I am overcome with grief — when I cry because my sister and I can’t watch reruns of Quantum Leap with our Dad on his birthday, because my family and friends can’t sing karaoke with him, because he won’t be able to taste his grandkids’ spectacular bakes — whenever I break down because my Dad is gone, I try to imagine him the way he was in that video: holding his guitar with one hand and reaching his other hand out to comfort me.
So which guitar did I take, the classical or the Yamaha? Like most of us living in diaspora, torn between two cultures or identities, I took what I could of both. The classical guitar is the sound of my childhood. It’s the sound of being tucked in at night as James Taylor reassures me that I’ve got a friend. It’s the sound of maple seed pods falling from our condo balcony like the notes of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair.” It’s the sound of my Dad that will resonate with me for the rest of my life. I took the classical guitar but I put it in the Yamaha’s hard case. The hard case will help me carry the legacy of Dad’s music. It will protect the more tender parts of my childhood and allow me to be bare and vulnerable as I gradually unfold into the artist I wish to be.
This piece is published in a series responding to APIA-nionated’s Spring call for pitches: personal essays that share your experience unravelling a loose thread of your personal history with objects — a rabbit hole down your mother’s letters, heirlooms lost and found, documenting activism through protest signs, etc.
