"PERIMETER CHILD" by CRISTINA QUERRER

 Perimeter Child

By Cristina Querrer

 

For years, I’ve been carrying this quietly. I’m only now finding the words for it. At times it feels like I’m speaking into open air, but maybe that’s how a dialogue begins. 

In this essay, I look at Vietnam beyond the battlefield, at what followed military personnel home and settled inside military housing, inside families, inside me as a Filipino American kid growing up at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. 

From a military brat’s perspective, I shift the focus from battlefield narratives to what lingered at home: silence, volatility, and the unspoken strain that followed fathers and mothers back from war. I offer a vantage point rarely documented, widening how we understand the war’s impact across generations. 

My formative years were spent not in American cul-de-sacs but inside the perimeter fences of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, with brief returns to Maryland and California that felt less like homecomings than like stepping into someone else’s script. I am half Filipino and half Dutch American, which meant I stood on both sides of the fence and was never entirely claimed by either. 

I am technically early Gen X, a late-sixties child whose childhood unfolded in the humid stretch of the 1970s and whose adolescence arrived in the neon pulse of the 1980s. When people describe Generation X, they reach for shorthand: latchkey independence, institutional skepticism, dry humor, MTV glow, analog childhood followed by digital adulthood. In hindsight, we were raised in the remains of Watergate and the shadow of Vietnam, under Cold War tension that threaded conspicuously through national life. I did not know those words then. I did not know policy or scandal or doctrine. What I knew was mood: how adults carried themselves, how silence thickened at a dinner table, how something unspoken lingered after the television went dark. 

The war had ended on paper, but it had not left the houses. It lingered at the kitchen table long after the uniform was folded away. It showed up in the scrape of a chair against tile, in the crack of a plate breaking and the minute of silence that followed. Bottles of whiskey and San Miguel lined the counter before dusk. Ice broke in thick glasses. Some nights the television glowed with no one watching. Some nights it snapped off, and the room tightened. 

There were fathers who woke before dawn and did not return to sleep, fathers who flinched at the backfire of a jeepney outside the gate, fathers who drank past the point of conversation. There were fathers who stared through the slow rotation of the ceiling fan as if it carried something only they could see. No one said depression. No one said aftermath. The word PTSD had not yet entered our houses. What entered instead was silence, sometimes shouts and eruptions. 

We were children inside that weather. We had no language for what we were absorbing, only a sharpened sensitivity to tone, to the difference between easy quiet and tight quiet. Some of my peers remember only the strong bonds, the friendships, the sense of belonging to something larger. Those memories are true. So is the undercurrent: the awareness that fathers had seen something we could not see and were carrying something we could not help carry. We did not know the phrase secondary trauma. We only knew how to be careful. 

At Clark, larger narratives were not abstractions delivered by news anchors. They wore uniforms. They flew overhead. They stood in formation that shaped the day. Schedules governed us all. The flag rose with mechanical certainty. America was not simply a place, but a presence carried across oceans, and when it settled somewhere, it altered the air. I recognized patterns long before I had language for them. 

The base felt orderly, almost rehearsed, while beyond its gates the world moved differently. Tin roofs caught the sun. Jeepneys rattled past. Market voices rose and fell. Then there was the stretch everyone knew about: the bars, the neon, the narrow street where women leaned in doorways and music spilled onto pavement still warm from the day. Prostitute Alley, though no one called it that in polite conversation. It was part of the map whether we admitted it or not. I understood enough to feel the imbalance in the air, to sense what moved between doorways and uniforms, how the glow of those streets fed the base in ways no one named aloud. 

I learned to see the seam between those worlds, to notice who moved freely and who measured their steps, who occupied space easily and who lingered at its edges. You grow up quickly in that landscape, not through revelation but through adjustment, by reading a room before entering it, by sensing when laughter is light and when it strains. Belonging depended on where you stood. 

Because I was not immersed in suburban mall culture or television archetypes, I did not anchor myself to the same markers as many of my Gen X peers in the U.S. 

I was adjacent but never absorbed. That distance made me observant. It made me deliberate. It made loyalty something chosen rather than assumed. For example, when teachers asked us to stand and recite the pledge, I did, but I was already aware that the flag meant something different inside the gate than it did beyond it. I felt pride, but I also felt distance. Loyalty was something I examined quietly. 

When the 1980s arrived and adolescence tilted toward synthesizers and drum machines, toward post-punk edges and early electronic textures that felt intimate and metallic, I felt the pull of something that matched the in-between I had already been living. We were a bridge generation: born analog and stepping into digital, remembering rotary phones while learning to navigate screens. Alongside that, early hip-hop found us too: cardboard flattened on concrete, breakdancing crews spinning under borrowed light, rhythm moving through bodies that wanted something uncontained. It was invention without permission. 

The stereotype of Gen X as apathetic never fit. The independence I absorbed was alertness, not indifference; discernment, not disengagement. Growing up inside a military infrastructure while living overseas created a layered awareness of country, identity, and how systems operate while people move within them. To stand inside a structure and slightly outside it at the same time is to develop skepticism and imagination. When no single narrative fully contains you, you begin to build your own.

 

Opposite of Continue 

 

But it will come—

the going to sleep, 

the opposite 

of continue. 

 

I have lived 

through their faults, 

their assaults 

on my being. 

 

But aging— 

it is something 

so unjust. 

 

I have learned 

to love these imperfect souls 

throughout my life.

 

And now— 

waiting to 

watch their 

perfectly creased hands 

let go of me— 

 

a starvation, 

mainstays of abandonment, 

unparalleled to none.

 

Clinging on 

with my own 

vein-infested hands— 

 

makes me 

never want to see 

an old photograph again.

 

~

 

Daddy, I Forgive You

 

For saying
you never wanted
to see me again

that summer afternoon
in Florida—

heat rising off the pavement
the way it did
outside Clark Air Base
when I was a child.

 

And that I would never
see you alive again.

 

The call came
while I was shelving books

in the library,
alphabetizing other people’s stories

while mine
was breaking open.

 

For telling me
you were not
my biological father

 

though you were
the only one
who carried me

through commissaries
and base housing

 

the only one
who taught me

how Americans
say goodbye.

 

For hating
my husband

 

because he was dark brown
or because

you saw something
I refused to see.

 

You loved
my children—

 

your grandkids
with their impossible mix
of bloodlines

 

though near the end
you grew strange
with them.

 

Now I understand.

 

The mind loosens first.
Memory drifts.

 

And the men who came back
from war

do not always
come back whole.

 

So, I forgive you

 

for the silence
for the anger
for the things
we inherited

 

from places
we never chose.

 

~

 

Archipelagic Question

 

And still I ask:

Is this the moment the map divulges—
or only traces the coastline?

 

The page opens
like another ocean.

 

Verdant islands
scattered across it
as if someone dropped
a handful of names
into water.

 

I search for the one
that is supposed
to be mine.

 

But the map
only offers outlines.
A border of ink.

The suggestion
of arrival.

 

No grandmother's house.
No coconut tree
leaning toward the road.

No stories
that crossed the Pacific
before I did.

 

Only the archipelago
broken into pieces
the way memory is.

 

Centuries of ships
have passed this way.

Galleons, carriers,
airplanes filled
with people leaving
and leaving again.

And still
the map refuses
to confess

 

which shore
will claim us

 

or whether
we were meant
to live forever

 

between islands.

 

 

*****

 

Cristina Querrer is a Filipina American poet and visual artist whose interdisciplinary work explores diaspora, archival memory, and the afterlives of history. She is the author of By Astrolabes & Constellations (Agave Press, 2019) and the forthcoming poetry collection Disobedient Archives: A Radical Catalog (Iron Oak Editions, 2027). Her poems, essays, and visual art have appeared in literary journals, publications, and exhibitions in the United States and internationally.

Drawing in part from her upbringing near Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Querrer’s work often reflects on migration, military history, and the complex inheritance of diaspora. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between poetry, visual installation, and research-driven projects that engage archives, memory, and cultural narrative.

Querrer holds an MFA in Creative Writing, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts, and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS), reflecting her long-standing engagement with archives and narrative preservation. She currently teaches writing in Connecticut while continuing her studio practice and releasing electronic music on streaming platforms under the artist name CQ.