Ticket To Freedom

Bombon is my version of Disneyland—only so much better.

Bombon is a small town in the Bicol province of the Philippines, where I spent most of my childhood afternoons wandering rice fields, exploring irrigation canals, catching fish, climbing trees, and discovering places near and far—only heading home at dusk. Bombon lives in the realm of fantasy, fun, friends, freedom, and the unforgettable.

Instead of roller coasters, castles, princes, and princesses, I with my siblings and friends, rode carabaos, chased ducks and chickens, collected bucketfuls of snails, played in the clear stream beneath the mangrove trees, and built castles from rice stalks. One of my favorite games was racing my friends to the top of the mango tree, picking ripe fruit, eating it there while teasing one another. From the top, swaying with the wind, I could see the town of Magarao, a more industrialized place a few miles away. Up there, I felt like I was at the top of the world.

My favorite spot was the guava tree behind our house, right at the edge of the rice field. It felt safe. I was free to be myself—alone, content. After every rain, especially after a thunderstorm, I couldn’t wait to climb it. Storms always brought ripe guavas. I would settle between branches strong enough to hold my weight, eating the juiciest fruit as the tree swayed gently in the wind.

Sometimes I watched the farmers below me, walking slowly behind their carabaos as they tilled the soil and prepared the fields for planting. From my place in the guava tree, time felt unhurried. Everything felt enough.

I come from generations of farmers and vendors. My great-grandparents planted crops and sold produce in the town market instead of going to school. The highest level of education in their generation was second grade. None of my grandparents had formal schooling either. Leonora, my paternal grandmother, went the farthest — she finished elementary school. I remember sitting with her as she wrote letters to government officials, asking for light posts along the alley leading to our house from the main road or for a hand-pumped well in our part of the neighborhood. She cared deeply for our community and showed me what a good citizen looks like.

My maternal grandmother, Milagros, never learned to read or write. She was abandoned by her mother as a baby and raised by her father and stepmother. Years later, my mother taught her how to write her name so she could sign my parents’ marriage contract. She learned only the first four letters: M-i-l-a, Mila.

My grandparents shined shoes, sold peanuts and cigarettes on the streets of Naga, washed other people’s laundry, gave massages, and took whatever work they could find. One of them became a traveling construction foreman, following jobs from place to place and leaving my grandmother at home with their eight children for months at a time.

My father was the oldest of the eight children. He contracted polio at one year old, which made walking difficult. He loved sports — and still does — but spent his life on the sidelines, cheering for friends and favorite teams. As a child, he climbed two mountains and walked nearly two miles each way to get to school. The distance didn’t bother him. Hunger did. Sitting in class, listening to lessons on addition and subtraction, he daydreamed about food. He stopped going to school in second grade.

My mother, the second eldest of nine children, graduated from elementary school because of the kindness of her teacher. She had missed many days of school due to hunger and the lack of money for projects. One day, her teacher came to their home and gave her a chance to take the final exam, promising that if she passed, she could still graduate. My mother was given a week to review her classmates’ notes. She passed — and earned one of the highest scores in her class.

But poverty — and her responsibilities as an older sister — forced her to leave school after elementary. She began working instead, selling peanuts on buses to help feed her siblings.

Both of my parents knew what it meant to live day by day, meal by meal. They knew hunger. They knew what it felt like to pick up trash around the schoolyard because there was no money for class projects, while other children sat in the shade learning multiplication. They watched some of their classmates finish elementary school, graduate high school, move into concrete houses instead of nipa huts with leaky roofs, and eat full meals every day.

My parents met at work. They made apa — sweet ice cream cones. They woke up at 4 a.m. every day and worked until 4 or 5 p.m., with only an hour break for lunch. Sickness or flooding in their workspace were not excuses. They had to keep working to put food on the table. When they got married, they shared one dream — their biggest dream: to send all of their children to school. Not just to school, but to college. Education was the way out.

My mother was 16 when she got married and had me at 18. I was the eldest of three. I became the family’s golden ticket out of poverty. I was going to be the perfect daughter — the one who would deliver my family from hunger, from want.

I was born to be the heroine.

In the summer of 1987, my parents took me to the neighborhood daycare held in Teacher Shanang’s nipa house. She was the oldest, wisest, kindest grandmother you could imagine. I sat on a long wooden bench outdoors with the other neighborhood children, under the shade of a giant mango tree, beside pigs and goats, and learned my first letter—the letter A.

That day, I became the symbol of hope for my family.

A ticket to freedom.

I was also a six-year-old child.