EVERY OUNCE OF COURAGE by ELIZABETH ANN BESA-QUIRINO

 MAILEEN HAMTO Reviews

Every Ounce of Courage: A Daughter’s Reflection on Her Mother’s Bravery by Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino 

(2023)

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It is estimated that the Second World War claimed the lives of over one million military and civilian folks in the Philippines. Renowned food blogger Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino’s family is among the survivors of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942 through 1945, a tragic episode in the country’s history mired by brutality and savagery. In her memoir Every Ounce of Courage, Besa-Quirino focuses the spotlight on her mother, Lourdes “Lulu” Reyes Besa, who served as a volunteer for relief and humanitarian efforts during the war. A serendipitous phone call from Robert Dow – an American soldier who survived the Philippine theater – inspired the author to pore through family archives and uncover her mother’s story. 

Lulu grew up in opulence and privilege as part of Manila’s most prominent families. As the eldest daughter, she also bore immense responsibility for her widowed mother, Lola Nena, and younger siblings. During the war, Lulu leveraged her family’s social status to gain the trust of the “Kempei- tai,” the Japanese military police during the occupation. Organizing other Manila socialites, Lulu gained access to the prisons to provide food, medicine, and even spiritual counsel to the detained Filipino and American soldiers. 

Filipinos are often lauded for their courage and resilience amid hardship and turmoil. As I read Every Ounce of Courage, I reflected upon how my grandparents’ generation endured the trauma of war. The Besa family had considerable resources that provided a semblance of protection from the atrocities of war. But even their wealth could not prevent one of their own from being captured and tortured in Japanese war camps. While rumors of espionage abound,  Lulu was determined to do what she can to alleviate the suffering of others in the midst of chaos, violence, and death.    

There is more to the book than stories of agony and struggle. Best-known for her sumptuous Filipino recipes, Besa-Quirino adeptly infuses her passion for gastronomy as she tells stories from her family’s experiences before, during, and after World War 2.  While the matriarch, Lulu is the main focus of the book, readers also get to know the entangled lives of the Besa-Quirino clan. The memoir underscores the values of kapwa: interdependence and connectedness. The book reveals as much about the author as it does about her mother, Tito Bobby, Tito Willie, Tita Helen, Lola Nena, and others. For the fortunate and persistent, there is life after war. However, like other Filipino families who survived the war, pain and heartache are felt generations hence. It's a good thing there is always food that brings comfort and healing.

*****

Maileen Hamto was born in Tondo, and raised in Sampaloc, Manila. As a part of the vast global Filipino diaspora, she has called Texas, Oregon, and Colorado her home for the last 32 years. Her late maternal grandparents, Victor and Placida Dumelod, were elementary school children when World War 2 broke out. While they were still alive, neither spoke much about how they suffered during the Japanese occupation, but the rupture and trauma were evident. Maileen recalls being reminded by her Lola – lovingly called “Mommy” – to hasten with finishing her meal, lest the Japanese soldiers came.   

OPEN FOR INTERPRETATION by ALICIA BLANDO, M.D.

 MAILEEN HAMTO Reviews

 Open for Interpretation: A Doctor's Journey into Astrology by Alicia Blando, M.D.

(She Writes Press, 2023)

 

 

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Healing wisdom and traditions expand outside the confines of scientific knowledge. With her training in Western medicine, Alicia Blando, M.D., shares her journey in exploring the divination arts to find meaning in her personal life and service to her patients. The physician was a young trainee in New York during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Blando, who emigrated as a child with her family from the Philippines, discusses her Catholic upbringing and singular focus on academic success in telling the story of using astrology to make sense of one’s past and predicting life circumstances. 

 

Blando’s style of writing is straightforward, relatable, and engaging, as she shared her reflections on preserving cultural legacy and identity as a U.S.-trained physician. Life transitions led her to question the limitations of her medical training and go deeper into the self. She chronicles her journey of discovery through learning and traveling to Peru, Belize, and Bolivia to solidify her understanding of the spiritual path. In addition to astrology, Blando also explored the practices of shamanism, numerology, psychic reading, tarot reading, channeling psychic energies, palmistry, and more. As she broadened her understanding of esoteric traditions, she also expanded her understanding of multiple healing modalities. While she primarily treated her patients with Western medicine, she nurtured a curiosity about Indigenous healing practices. With intentionality, she began integrating complementary medicine into her healing practices.

 

I read Blando’s memoir from the lens of my Protestant upbringing in a Roman Catholic country. I fully understand the limiting beliefs that come from a Christian point of view. In my experience, the all-embracing spiritual practices of our people involve casual astrology, faith healing, plant medicine, the use of oils and concoctions, spells and prayers, and other Indigenous modalities. This memoir is enlightening for anyone curious about a medical doctor’s inquiry about divination practices. Blando relays her triumphs and challenges in clinical care, meaningful serendipitous interactions, and life-changing friendships. In investigating different types of knowledge, Blando applies a rational approach to understanding the psychic or medium’s intuitive skills and offers tangible concepts and rules related to astrology. As a fellow Filipino-American, I appreciated Blando’s candid musings about our shared cultural backgrounds, particularly her discussion about unyielding gender expectations. Her story proves that one can cultivate varied interests while maintaining the integrity of one’s life purpose. She extends a challenge and invitation to find what speaks to our hearts and minds and pursue our curiosity.

   

*****

 

Maileen Hamto was raised in a close-knit, insular Protestant church in Catholic Philippines. For more than 16 years, Maileen attended Thursday and Sunday services in a church where one has to note attendance by turning over a name card and where women sat separately from the men. Choir members wore white robes. The pastor recited prayers tearfully, with eyes closed. Spending a lot of time in her Lola’s (Mommy) house, she relished the scent of sampaguita garlands adorning the Santo Niños. She found it remarkable that Mommy also kept a statue of a fat, happy Buddha in her kitchen. The experience of being uprooted from the homeland inspired Maileen to embark on a lifelong journey of decolonization, to unlearn her colonial mindset. Through friends and lovers, she is grateful to learn about Sufism, Hinduism, and Ordo Templi Orientis. She is a longtime student of Buddhism, primarily in the Theravada tradition. As she expands her understanding of how Buddhism spread across Asia, the magical practices of Vajrayana offer a curious string. 

 

 

WILDFLOWERS by BEVERLY PARAYNO

 JUSTINE VILLANUEVA Reviews 

Wildflowers by Beverly Parayno

(Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2023)

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The Women Will Be Alright: On Beverly Parayno’s Wildflowers

If I had to choose the one scene that best represents Beverly Parayno’s collection of short stories, it is the last scene in “Rescue,” when Cherry finally leaves her commitment-phobic boyfriend. “She climbed into the driver’s seat. She put the car in reverse, inched forward, reversed, inched forward, many times over until she got herself out of the tight spot.” This is essentially what all the women protagonists do. And though Parayno leaves us at the end of most of her stories with women who seem like they have utterly failed or have been beaten down for good, I don’t despair. Their stories contain reasons to hope that they will be alright.

 

In the opening story, “Saviour,” we meet the child Lourdes whose father physically and verbally abuses her. Lourdes’ mother, grandparents, and even the cops who go to their house in response to a call from the neighbors, could not save Lourdes from her abusive father.  Yet, despite the bleakness of the situation, Parayno gives us hope. Violence festers behind closed doors. But if Lourdes keeps the windows wide open, “someone out there would be listening”, neighbors bearing witness, keeping perpetrators accountable. For Lourdes’ sake, I hope she keeps her windows open. 

 

In “Housecleaning,” Crescencia is raped by her employer who later murders his wife. At the end of the story, cameramen shout at Crescencia for her testimony.  We don’t know what she will say. Will she tell her truth? Will anyone believe her? But these are not what concern Crescencia most. Instead, she worries about where to find another job to feed herself. As in “Saviour,” it seems that Parayno once again leaves the protagonist in a dire spot. But again, as in “Saviour,” there is hope, there is something that might allow Crescencia to rise out of this bad spot. And it is the same something that previously brought her work when she was fired from her job: the network of domestic helpers who band together and who lend other domestic helpers a hand. For Crescencia’s sake, I hope the network of domestic helpers will once again take her in. 

 

We see a similar source of collective help in “Surrender.” Christine meets a group of Filipino Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs) during her stay in Cork for her graduate degree. Christine feels she does not belong in the academic setting, and she experiences outright exotification and anti-Asian racist treatment. Her one hope of belonging is to host the OFWs for a boisterous dinner at her flat. And though this never happens, at least she recognizes the medicine in this hope. For Christine’s sake, I hope one day she will host fellow Filipinas, maybe not in Cork but somewhere else, and feel that sense of belonging.

 

In “Balikbayan,” Jacqueline helps her aging father sell his ancestral land in the Philippines. The transaction is fraught with issues about ancestral ties. In the end, the sale goes through and though we regret the family’s loss of connections to the land, there is hope that connection can still happen through the renewed relationships between Jacqueline and her cousins. For Jacqueline’s sake, I hope she continues to reconnect with her cousins.

 

In “Wildflowers,” the heart of this collection, we see Ruth at her low point, anxiously waiting for a phone call from her on and off boyfriend. We sense her drudgery, her surrender to her lackluster pursuit of money and stability, her disconnect from fellow beings and the world. But then she meets the elderly artist who led quite a life out of the ordinary. We find out that Ruth, herself, has an unexplored passion for art, paint, color, images, and creating something on the canvas. “What she really wanted to do, without knowing how to articulate it or even admit to herself, was paint. Her fear of exposure had led her to do everything but paint: study other artists, subscribe to art magazines, go to museums, interview other artists.” For Ruth’s sake, I hope she will eventually come to her art and reconnect with the beauty around her.

 

All these women are in the driver’s seat, navigating that space in the middle of reversing and inching forward. There is hope for all of them, for all of us!, if we are related to a collective—the neighbors, the helper network, the OFW group, the cousins, and the extended family—and if we have art in our lives. The women will be alright. We will be alright.

 

*****

Justine Villanueva traces her ancestral roots to Bukidnon, Philippines where she was raised until she immigrated to the United States when she was 17. She now lives in the Patwin-Wintun homeland (Davis, California) with her husband and two sons. Justine's creative work focuses on decolonization, social justice, and connecting with the living Earth. She writes children's books and is the founder of Sawaga River Press, a nonprofit press that publishes children's books featuring Filipino children and their experiences in the diaspora. She runs her own law and real estate office. She loves to dance.