Day 8: Olongapo City

This was the day I had waited years for. For the first time, we would see for ourselves the place where my mother and father met, the place where our grandmother—Nanay—had lived for perhaps 30 years.

Our second cousin—Gigi—greeted us in the parking lot of a strip mall on the edge of town. First we get a massage, she insisted, so we had massages and jasmine tea in the flickering candlelight and low-lit lamps of a second floor suite. The incense was sweet, the literature on homeopathic remedies and eastern medicine piled high on the coffee and end tables, on the register counter.

We toured the city. The bars and clubs of Rizal and Magsaysay Drives were long gone, especially after the Filipinos voted to take back Subic Bay Naval base from the Americans. It’s now an industrial and tourist zone—the military buildings of Old Cabalan have been converted to hotels and casinos, not all of which survived the global Pandemic of 2020. We stayed on Waterfront Rd., in the presidential suite of the hotel. When Gigi wants something …

Gigi was Nanay’s favorite. She was a young girl when Nanay was in her prime. They went to restaurants and movies together, and Nanay really gave her everything. Well, Gigi grew up right there in Olongapo. She told us stories: Nanay would ask if she wanted to see a movie. “Yes,” Gigi would say. Then Nanay would finish her solitaire game and away they would go. “Or when her tenants would fight with their neighbors or friends, Nanay would threaten to throw a pot of boiling water on them if they didn’t stop.”

When Nanay came to us she was highly private, trapped in a white man’s world dominated by my father, and only escaped it when the older man who hired her as his housekeeper proposed. We were ancillary to Nanay. Only after our parents divorced did we start to learn anything about her, and then it was limited.

The Subic Bay waterfront monuments are dedicated to soldiers who had been POWs, slaughtered by friendly Allied troops who sank Japanese military vessels regardless, and often without knowing, who was actually on board. There is the worker’s monument, and the monument honoring the twelve senators who voted out the Americans. A mile down the road was the dock where ships like the USS America, my father’s carrier, would dock. From there, he would get a jeepney at the Spanish Gate, and from there to Mom’s Club or the Whiskey A-Go-Go. Mom’s Club—the place where my mother was a cashier and my father decided he would like to go short time with her—is long gone.

We took Gordon Ave. around the perimeter of the city, through East Bajac Bajac. I wondered where pinatubo was.

“You’re on it,” Gigi said. “It’s a long slope from the volcano to the sea.”

Nanay’s house was a string of three apartments where her female tenants lived with a sari-sari at the end. She lived in a shack behind them. The whole place is gone, and a restaurant stands where Nanay grew vegetables and herbs and fruit to sell in her sari-sari. Lost to history is the room where my mother fed my father “the old fish heads and rice” soup, as he called it years later.

Even White Rock Beach—where they used to walk together, before my father ignored the U.S. Navy and then the local magistrate, both of whom warned him against marriage— was no longer accessible to the public. Every last vestige of Nanay’s, mom’s, dad’s places were lost to us.

Except the Spanish Gate, where a young man who thought he had all the answers boarded the jeepney that changed his life in October, 1968.