Jamie Uy The Aubergine Autobiographies

The Aubergine Autobiographies

An Excerpt Jamie Uy

Later, after I was photographed in the parade by The New York Times, wearing a translucent pineapple fiber blouse and no bra, clutching a rainbow Maria Clara fan and waving a holographic sign—PILIPINX PRIDE—my ninangs and ninongs back in Baguio all shook their heads, saying that they knew this would happen. Each of my relatives had a different explanation of where my parents went wrong. It was all those Charice Pempengco CDs. The fact that I hadn’t competed in the barangay’s beauty pageant like the rest of my batchmates. Or all those afternoons spent placing bets for my Lolo on cockfighting. My favorite explanation was that I was cursed by my father’s disappearance—why else would I be born with a birthmark the shape of an enormous eggplant on my face? That’s how my second cousin found the photo, after all. He frequented internet cafes to get decent WiFi, this time for a school report on American democracy, and after clicking on The New York Times homepage, he spotted my side profile. He turned to the cafe owner and innocently asked, Hey, isn’t that Ate Aubergine?

My mother told me all of this over a Viber call, one hand stirring Spam fried rice while the other loosened her curlers. There was no mistaking that it was me. She was preparing for a neighbor’s christening party and dreading the inevitable comparison of everyone’s daughters. I threw my head back and laughed, watching her nostrils flare in exasperation. In the pixelated video, my celebrity mark looked less like a bruise and more like a fun Instagram filter.

When she was pregnant with me, my mother, who sold Purefoods hot dogs at a sari-sari store, had a craving for tortang talong so intense that she was often late opening the store. In the early mornings, she spent hours frying eggplant omelets for breakfast. She bought so many eggplants that Tita Mel at the wet market started selling them in bulk for a discount. My poor father, a truck driver who delivered fresh onions and bananas to air-conditioned supermarkets in fancy SM malls, got so sick of tortang talong that he found comfort with a woman at the food court. Her specialty was luscious, creamy champorado with salted dried fish. When I was born—as the story goes—my mother gazed upon the gigantic purple mark covering my left eye and nose, wept, and went to the priest immediately. What have I done wrong, she wailed, to give birth to this daughter with a tortang talong on her face? My father took the cash from the shortbread-container-turned-sewing-tin and ran away with the champorado woman. My mother never touched eggplant again. The nurses had to call her and ask when she would pick me up from the hospital. They took pity on me, feeding me extra infant formula that was about to expire. Tired of addressing me as Patient #6801, the head nurse, a drag queen who dreamed of opening a hair salon, was flipping through a glossy magazine in the break room when a magnificent autumn hue from a Revlon Color Silk advertisement caught her eye. And so I was named Aubergine with no cruelty. When my mother arrived at last, the entire neonatal intensive care unit gave me a strawberry pink onesie as a goodbye present. * * * In the way that you can sometimes tell the fate of a child from their face, I became a cautionary tale—of what, I don’t know exactly. The bad grain of mountain rice, the secondhand sandal that snapped in half, the calamansi juice that was too sour. Because the other Mary Immaculate School girls giggled around me in the bathroom, I developed the habit of holding my bladder just before the jeepney ride home. When I forgot my eraser,

no one would lend me their spare, so my math tests were always scratched with mistakes. When the Benedictine nuns weren’t looking during the mass, the bravest passed me drawings of big fat eggplant girls when we held hands for the Our Father prayer. I knew I was ugly, the way I knew my birthday and why my mother often mustered no effort beyond freezing a macaroni salad with leftover chicken for the grand event. My only saving grace was that I was smart and on a scholarship. So even before I became the ghost overseas who sent Gap clothes every Christmas to her family, I knew that I couldn’t stay in my hometown. Quite simply, I longed for a less purple existence.

* * * There were only two girls I adored in Baguio. The first was a girl three years older than me, the valedictorian of her class. She could recite Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere by heart. When she spoke at assemblies, her voice didn’t wobble and her lilac hair ribbon shone. I was drawn to her cute button nose and the way her fingers fluttered when she hummed the national anthem. She always had a cheese sandwich cut into dainty triangles—no crust—and a whole can of Pringles for lunch (if the rumors were true, her father was an army official). I fell in love with her like she was the patron saint of lost girls. I would linger in the library during lunchtime and trace her cursive signature on the borrower’s cards in the back of the mildewy Nancy Drew paperbacks. When we stood in line for the morning assembly, she walked down the line, inspecting our skirt lengths, the whiteness of our socks, and our scrubbed fingernails. Part of my heart flopped helplessly like a caught milkfish whenever she stood in front of me. I wanted to do something drastic, like wear black or cut the sleeves off our stupid uniforms, just to get her to touch my clothes and tell me, This is not allowed. Eventually, this girl grew up and became a seamstress or a secretary, married the son of a cement company chairman, and the improbability of my desire faded.

The second girl was harder to get rid of. Her station was right beside mine at the Mountain Maid Training Center, where we packed the nation’s top-selling ube jam, along with peanut and cashew brittle, angel cookies, and lengua de gato. What I remember of our affair was Anchor butter and granulated sugar. On my first day, when I sealed a jar wrong and the sticky jam spilled all over the floor tiles, she leapt up and brushed away the glass pieces, crinkling a dimpled smile. She had very curly hair and a burn mark on her inner right thigh, which made me think she would understand me. We took to having merienda together, and she escaped her drug-dealing brothers to sleep over at my cramped house, watching terrible teleserye and whispering gossip about the Good Shepherd Convent sisters until dawn. She wanted to be an actress. One night, we were drinking San Miguel beer and I could smell her shampoo. We were sixteen. I was complaining about my hips. Aubergine, she said so earnestly, so sweetly, ang ganda mo. I couldn’t tell if she was rehearsing, so I believed her. I kissed her and her chapped lips tasted like the first mangosteen of the world and she never spoke to me again. We decided to leave the Philippines in the same year; a wild coincidence. Much later, I realized she had become a domestic helper for a Saudi princess. Occasionally I would scroll past her photos from her travels with the princess to Switzerland or Singapore on my Facebook timeline.

Of course, I dated other people in New York City. There were many white men, often with bowties and postgraduate degrees in assholery, that I put up with just so they could pay for my dinners. I spent more on paint and fabric than groceries, so I ordered enough meat on these dates to last me a week. I ignored their eggplant emoji texts and brought back leftovers to my dingy Queens rental with no heating. Part of me was still suspicious that I had made it to the United States in one piece—after creating giant surrealist murals for the parks department in Baguio, being “discovered”

during a national game show segment, and an apprenticeship with Philippine National Artist Benjamin Cabrera, I had somehow won a Fulbright. No one, least of all me, comprehended what this meant, so I worked myself into existence. I had fever dreams about a retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art that included, among other things: an interactive diamond-encrusted Magic Sing! karaoke set with my father’s purported top hits, a multi-day live performance piece where nude dancers laid down on marble altars with neon purple halo-halo dripping over them, a gallery filled floor-to-ceiling with cordillera weaving tapestries of every eggplant species on the planet. In my desperation, I dated every woman who was remotely interested in me. Helen, a serious computer scientist who took me to a palm reading near Coney Island and gave me amethyst crystals for dissolving negativity. Esperanza, a polyamorous biologist researching the purple palawan crab, who had a healthy obsession with the clitoris. Lin, a chain-smoking tattooist who designed for a feminist collective distributing sanitary pads with Marxist quotes. Every relationship sprouted and died once springtime hit Central Park. I never brought them to Filipino eateries in Jackson Heights, out of the unshakeable fear that tortang talong was on the brunch menu.

When I matched with Jasmine on Tinder, I didn’t expect that she was Filipina. Or that she was a documentarian. She’d grown up overseas, in Dubai, and was shooting Filipino-American restaurants for a Netflix feature on Asian cuisines. She rocked a buzzcut, a newsboy cap, and an anti-Trump, anti-Duterte rhetoric. We met at a live jazz bar in Chinatown, and Jasmine recommended the butterfly pea cocktail, which arrived with sparkling vodka ice-cubes and naturally, edible flowers. “It’s so pretty,” she marveled when the ice melted. Sunset in a glass. The indigo beverage matched my birthmark, which I left un-Photoshopped on Tinder after too much deliberation.

“You’re so pretty,” she repeated again and again as she undressed me in the Hilton hotel room. Unlike other artists I dated, who wanted permission to videotape weird fruit sex for their dissertation, or for me to play a mail order bride in their play, or to shoot uncomfortable blow-up portraits of my birthmark in an underfunded university’s darkroom, Jasmine knew when to stop and hold the camera elsewhere. Which is why I let her, and no one else, press her fingers to the orchid welt that had doomed me and poisoned my parents’ marriage.

After I met Jasmine, I didn’t plan on returning to the Philippines. I had missed so many birthdays and funerals that my head spun trying to traverse the provinces of time. I was encouraged by the academic dean to take a research trip to refresh my artistic inspiration. Would I tour the Chocolate Hills? Or the caves of Puerto Princesa? I was asked via email to edit a book about art during the climate emergency, and because of my oeuvre included organic materials and archipelago motifs, it was assumed that I could adapt the right syntax to talk about the apocalypse sensibly. All I could think about was how much it cost for skin graft surgery, which would maybe replace my eggplant with the flesh from my ample buttock, and the crisis of my aging mother not understanding the drift that Jasmine was my fiancé and not simply my very good kaibigan.

I went to Pride with Jasmine dressed to the nines as a gay astronaut, nationless and happy, floating on an inflatable unicorn. The next day, gravity came back down. Jasmine was asked to join an urgent assignment in Metro Manila for CNN about the prison cells in the worsening drug war. Her face was ashen. I drove her to John F. Kennedy International Airport and watched the little purple tag on her luggage

vanish past the terminal gates. We Facetime fucked every night, and she printed out the photo of me in The New York Times to brag about to the best boys and steadicam operators.

One day, after filming the wake for the victim of an extrajudicial killing, Jasmine called me and demanded that I fly to the Philippines. She described the baby chicks these sisters had put on their brother’s casket—according to superstition, each peck was supposed to knock on the murderer’s conscience. As she stared at these soft animals, the Grim Reaper’s fuzziest pets, she thought about how we had put off our wedding until after it was safe.

“Nowhere’s safe,” she said, urgently. “Honestly, a volcano could erupt tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised. I want to be with you. Let’s get married now, while you’re on sabbatical.”

It was the perfect opportunity. The friend of a client’s uncle gave us a lastminute slot for a small affair at The Manor at Camp John Hay. The Pride photos had made my mother face the inevitable, and she acknowledged the ground before her very reluctantly, only nodding when I offered her a slice of the tasteful Earl Grey lavender wedding cake Jasmine’s sister had baked.

The summer of our honeymoon, all the ube jam in Baguio turned white, and my mother lost her memory. She started asking if my father had remembered to pack pandesal and a fresh sando for the long drive back from Manila. She no longer bothered dyeing her hair, the top of her head turning into snow. She went to church several times a day because she’d forget she attended the previous service. Having no heart to deny an old woman the Eucharist, the communion ministers gave her the holy

bread so often I half-expected her bones to glow with the Lord’s calcium. Jasmine began interviewing potential live-in nurses.

One day, as my mother shuffled across the market, arm cradled in mine, she got a whiff of something and froze, utterly entranced by the sizzling of blackened eggplants. I asked what was wrong. She was so very hungry, she said as the past peeled between us, and wanted tortang talong more than anything. Then she pursed her lips and looked at me like I was a mosquito she was trying to catch. And who are you, she asked. Meanwhile, the Good Shepherd nuns made a statement on ABSCBN News that climate change was real and pollution was making it impossible to harvest enough violet-colored yams ...

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