![]() ![]() ![]() Still Paz is hungry, even as she fills her cup with dollars from the Golden State, while she continues to support her family. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness. You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it you don't need to emigrate to America to feel what you already felt when you were ten, looking up at the rickety concrete roof above your head and knowing that one more bad typhoon would bring it down to crush your bones and the bones of all your siblings sleeping next to you or selling fruit by the side of the road to people who made sure to never really look at you, made sure not to touch your hands when they put the money in it. Paz makes her way by fending for herself, her unrelenting grit her only weapon as it takes her to Baguio City for college, back to Dagupan City where she meets her future husband up until she makes it to America.įueled by a need to prove herself, to be seen as more than just a probinsyana from Pangasinan, and at the same time be her family’s anchor from thousands of miles away, Paz braves Tennessee until she reaches California. ![]() This line echoed as I read about the beginnings of Paz (short for Pacita) who grows up in Pangasinan, mired deep in poverty, the wailing a yearning of a young girl’s absolution from hunger, from suffering, from inconspicuousness in a family of six. ![]()
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