Member-only story
THE NARRATIVE ARC
Trying to Make a Living as an Artist
Pursuing art despite a financially-challenged background
Our story starts not inside a grand old house, whirling with socialites and art critics, unlike many artist origin stories — because neither old money nor white-collar parents raised this artist — but on the hard, wooden seats of a school theater in the foggy mountains of Benguet, in the Philippines.
It’s 2008 and the resident theater group of a Catholic university is performing Beauty and The Beast: The Musical for roughly one hundred pesos ($2) a ticket — PHP 80 ($1.40) for students — and our sixth-grade class is buying. With my daily pocket money of five pesos ($0.088) after bus fares and the financial mindset of a jeepney driver’s eldest son, I was reluctant to spend such a fortune.
I did the math: 80 pesos is worth one night of gaming at a computer rental shop, or a luxurious meal of cheeseburger and fries with an upsize at McDonald’s. It’s also 80 pesos I’d have to source from my savings: Money I scrimped by filling my stomach with water from the school’s drinking fountain, skipping recess, and the leftover sales of the discarded bottles, tin cans, and corrugated iron sheets I hustled at junkshops. In those days, happiness meant playing Defense of the Ancients (DoTA) with…
