"DREAMS" : AASIA Journal Fall 2016

Why I Dream of Trees Jennifer Fergesen When I first saw Capiz, the scenery was at once wholly alien and familiar, like the halfremembered backdrop of a thousand childhood dreams. This was the landscape of my mother’s childhood, after all, the place she hated so much it invigorated her to struggle and claw and to earn scholarships and corporate visa sponsorships all the way to America. My mother escaped so thoroughly, in fact, that she could eventually afford to send her daughter to a prestigious liberal arts college, which could in turn afford to send that daughter to work with an NGO back in that very Capiz. Far below the rutted mountain roads I bumped across on motorbike rides between the NGO’s beneficiary villages, rivers crisscrossed a lush patchwork of rice fields, mango orchards, and palm-studded forest - bluer blues and greener greens than my suburban eyes had ever rendered. How, I wondered on every motorbike ride, could someone devote all the energy of her youth to leaving that world, only to raise a daughter who dreamed of returning to it?

I tried to ask her on our laggy weekly calls, pressed into a corner of the village internet cafe. I described those mountain walks, hoping to spark idyllic visions of an out-of-doors childhood, the kind I read about in Heidi and Girl of the Limberlost. To my description of the fields and rivers, my mother offered stories of working until her back ached alongside her tenant-farmer grandparents, of scrubbing sheets as upstream as possible from the water buffalo.

It was only after months in Capiz, learning the provincial dialect Ilonggo that my mother forgot, that I realized the foreignness of my view of the land. For all my preoccupation with “nature,” I could not find an Ilonggo translation for the word. On those mountain walks to remote farms, my guides called the scrubby land we macheted through not “nature” but “búkid.” Bukid, the analog in the dialect of capitalcity Manila, has the fairly straightforward translation “countryside,” but the Capizeños I asked gave a more nuanced and varying definition to búkid. Everyone agreed that búkid was distinct from katalunan (wilderness), but the consistency ended there. Some said búkid was any land that someone owned, specifically referring to the borders of the old haciendas that once dominated the country. Most narrowed their definitions. Depending on which Capizeño you ask, búkid could mean cultivated fields, the uncultivated land between the fields, the hilly land that belongs to a hacienda but is too steep to farm, or any land that you can walk through without a machete. Outside of búkid is the katalunan, the realm of unpleasant creatures such as kapre (tree-dwelling giants) and aswang (fetus-eating vampires).

My determinedly Americanized mother never hinted that her nightmares included these creatures, but even now she maintains a distaste for anything resembling the “wild” and refuses to hike or fish or swim in lakes when my father drives us into the woods in the summer.

My father drives us into the woods because his father drove him into the woods, and by his own recollection those trips are as close as he ever got to “nature.” Nature was something far away from his boyhood home in the sprawling new suburbs of the Midwest. It was something he saw on television, in programs like Tarzan and Disney’s True-Life Adventures. He might catch a glimpse of its power when a blizzard or heat wave blew into town, but then his mother would flick on the forced-air heating or the central AC so that the events outside the double-glazed windows felt as distant as the Technicolor ones on the screen. Nature seemed equally removed from the family’s dinner table. In those days my grandmother’s cooking adhered to mid-century Midwestern technique, which relies largely on white 36