Sara Elisabeth Morabe Murphy

Here is the church, here is the steeple

Sara Elisabeth Morabe Murphy

I’m finding it challenging to listen to a playlist full of desert music while trying to write about being in the Philippines. It feels false. Like an unnecessary photo filter, posturing and insisting on dusty yellow orange hues on top of color that didn’t need correcting. The only thing that doesn’t feel wrong is the stream of constant movement that this music conjures up. The movement is constant outside the window in both memories.

I pulled these songs together specifically for solo road trips, and hearing them again now I can see the creeping rose dawn and blurred mesquite without even having to close my eyes. I don’t remember what music I would have been listening to in the Philippines, aside from crackly karaoke speakers at open air bars or brassy fiesta performances at night in the Tanay town square. I’m sure I was trying to conserve my iPod battery life as much as possible and besides, it would have been rude to listen to my headphones in the car, even on longer trips between provinces and it would have been inconceivably disrespectful to pull them out in a tricycle trip. It’s ok to drown everything out when you’re driving alone and want to take breaks from wherever your mind takes you without having asked you in the first place. It’s ok to lean on a playlist when you’re stuck inside your apartment during a pandemic and want to try to steer your mind back to the country your family left but kept coming back to. Alternative transportation. It’ll still get me where I’m trying to go.

So I sit here in three places at once. I’m in my car two years ago in June speeding south down Highway 5, alone and waiting for the sun to come out hot and keep me company. I’m on my couch and it’s April we’re still sheltering in place for however many days and I’m actively summoning memories of driving to and through Cavite. It’s January 2011 and I’m in an air conditioned car looking at the blue green brown blur of trees, of the sky, of the place my grandparents were born, of a fragile jumble of houses on the edge of the sea and the outskirts of town, of the smoke of burning garbage. I’m in these three places but I’m most focused on the last, I’m honing in on being halfway through a trip halfway around the world, on the jeepney chrome and all the old churches with all their old steeples, on the fields and malls and farms and factories, on the faces of people who look like my

family because they are, on the faces of people who look like my family because this is the place my family is from this is the place my family left behind.

Yesterday I casually referenced Cavite on the phone with my mom. Made a joking reference to how lucky we each were to be able to shelter in place safely. I was trying to cheer her up, trying to make light while also reminding myself it could be worse. “And it’s not like we’re hiding under the floor during World War II” I said out loud, to the woman whose mother and aunts had actually done that. I said it in an attempt to be self-deprecating, to remind us how comparatively good we had it. But my chest is heavy with hot wet shame today remembering that I probably drove by that house. I saw the places my family hid. I saw the trees at the edge of the fields streak by as my mother continued narrating, “this is the edge of the town they were born in, this is near the house they lived in, oh and here is their church here is their house, here are the trees they had to climb to hide from the soldiers, near here is the good bakery with the good pasalubong with the good sapin sapin.” I made a casual reference to wartime family history, during a pandemic where the word “unprecedented” has since lost meaning and heft due to overuse. We don’t have enough synonyms for the unimaginable, the unfathomable and so we use what we have and do our best to make it make sense.

With some bitterness, I recognize that my grandparents and great-aunts and uncles probably didn’t consider their circumstances to be “unprecedented.” There is a recent enough legacy of hardship and loss in the Philippines that whatever they experienced during World War II was likely a more painful (and immediately dangerous) set of circumstances familiar to the last several generations before them. New flags same plotline. Like a bunch of sad love songs, the protagonists have different names but the general story remains the same. My desert songs are full of twangy guitar and fresh air and an echo that mimics the widest, starriest open spaces, the opposite of what it probably sounds like to squeeze your body under the floorboards, pressed against your sisters while fighting your lungs to slow shallow breaths and contain your heartbeat inside your body, your mestiza blood once again threatening to give you away. Here is the church here is the steeple open it up and find all the people.

What could it have felt like for my grandmother to survive, to be one of the first to be able to leave, thanks to the bureaucratic rubber stamp benefits afforded a Filipino family with an easily traceable American branch of their colonized tree? I only know the narrative my grandfather gave about standing on that ship as it sailed into the San Francisco Bay, but I imagine them both with lungs

full of fresh, cool fog. I know she loved the water, that she would take her kids out to the aptly-ifunimaginatively named Ocean Beach, thanks to my favorite aunt sharing that favorite memory. I wonder if my grandmother missed the sticky heat of her childhood, I wonder if she ever tried to chase it down. In between raising kids and helping her siblings and parents transition into America and church and divorce and drunks and her famous pancit and being the hub of our whole family, did she miss the heat, one of the few things that San Francisco can never ever provide? Did she miss being warm, even decades after leaving the Philippines? I can piece best guesses together, when I think of her and feel wistful. I can weave stories in my mind, when I’m untangling the shame I feel the day after having made jokes about what she had to survive.

I can imagine her warmth, I can feel it when anybody speaks about her. And today I wonder if they recommended the desert at any point, the way doctors did decades before to people whose lungs were also failing. But a different disease. From now. From then. In this highly unlikely overlyromanticized scenario, I imagine the doctors suggesting the dry heat as palliative care, once her lungs couldn’t take any more of her second husband’s secondhand smoke. In this alternate fantasy I imagine my beautiful grandmother -- the one I barely remember because I was so young when she died, the one who survived so much until she didn’t -- leaving this cool grey coastal city behind. I see her moving faster than the sun, central valley fields and trees streaking by, unprecedented expanses of life ahead of her.

Sara Elisabeth Morabe Murphy (she/her) is a Filipinx-Irish American writer who lives in San Francisco but was born and raised in the East Bay. She is an alumnus of U.C. Berkeley by way of Laney College and when she isn’t working to expand SFMOMA’s digital engagement and reach, she is usually reading, writing, feeling guilty about not reading and writing more, or drinking coffee. Find her on Twitter at @heysaramurphy.