On Journal Writing and Recording Resilience

It lay in a corner of a glass cupboard display. It was 1989, and it cost me the only monetary note I had in my pocket. The coveted item that I purchased was a spiral notebook—I have already filled my previous spiral notebook with a year’s worth of entries and only had a few pages remaining.

I have just completed three months of my fifth grade level in another elementary school after we changed homes again—I attended the first seven months of the same grade level in an Anglo-Chinese school in a town that was approximately an hour jeepney ride from my mother’s hometown. I was under my aunt’s care—something weird happened with my parents in 1988.

During that period of naivety, I discovered writing words to form sentences: mimicking sentences from what I read, checking verbs from the pocket dictionary that my mother gave me, and writing those words legibly and in an orderly fashion on the paper notes I can get my hands on as my family could no longer afford to buy me notebooks to waste in sketching my favorite Japanese robots. Although I have had experienced muse earlier before that, the darker side of inspiration influenced me to grab the pen and paper so I can record the changes I was not expecting: the absence of explanations, my grandmother crying, the long silences of my mother when she arrived by her lonesome to my grandfather’s home, the news that we will no longer return to our apartment in Manila, the awkwardness of my being and scant guidance.

The difficult part of that period of transition was the bullying. As compared to my previous classmates in the now defunct grade school in an ancient university in Sampaloc, my new classmates were more, how can I say, xenophobic?

My accent was strange with my new classmates—years of studying in an English-speaking environment in a grade school plus the influence of the metropolis’ trendy lifestyle—and this must have conveyed a feeling of indifference: they chastised us, me and my brothers, for speaking in such an accent and accused us of being elite.

As the months go by, I got to adjust to my new language—I adapted and was now fluent with the intonation of my new academic brethren in the rural metropolis. I even learned to speak basic Cantonese as it was a Chinese school after all—much to the delight of my Chinese school teacher who also owned hardware that seems to thrive on luck.

But it was all temporary. My uncle had to transfer to a new work assignment. Since I was under my aunt’s care, I had to move as well—what choice does a kid have? Before I experienced my first heartbreak, this parting with my new chums was the hardest.

Bullying seems to be an ethos in terms of campus camaraderie, as I had to repeat the same ordeal all over again. It was during this time that I comprehended the concept of prejudice. Although I had adapted the norms of the previous school I was in, the kids in the suburban capital of that island considered it still lacking the conformity required on their territory, or as what the girls would say, funny. But I persevered—I discovered empathy as my new classmates have difficulties far harder than what I was going through.

Before termites consumed that long-forgotten spiral note journals, I got to read my entries one last time—that was before I embarked on a ferry boat to try my luck in earning a living beyond the outer realms of the what used to be home. It was not about the nostalgia of recalling past ordeals that made me appreciate the contents of those entries, but imprinting the value of resilience in the innermost notes of my heart.