When sedation and the lingering embrace of painkillers could no longer hold me and I was summoned from the liminality where death and sleep converse, my mother forced a hard-boiled egg down my throat. I want to say that the little egg almost made it to the centre of my core, that it gave me the sustenance and care my mother thought I needed. It traveled about halfway down my esophagus and then relentlessly clawed its way out of my mouth.

*

An existentialist like Sartre would say that the egg defined its purpose before it was even born, so it doesn’t really matter which came first. In the most prominent book of his oeuvre, Being and Nothingness, Sartre posits that “existence precedes essence.” I wanted to believe in his philosophy that proudly proclaims: “that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” It was a while before I came to understand that his logic, like most Western thinkers, depended on binaries.
One evening in October 1946, Sartre stood before an audience at the Club Maintenant in Paris, declaring that man “is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing — as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” I wish it were all that simple.

*

Before I was born, my father was a master mariner of a ship which traveled the world. He told me he wanted to become a man of the sea again, to cross waters with no bounds. As Sartre puts it, my father was a man entitled to “free choice.” I remember the day my father applied to a marine organization in Vancouver. He came home with his certificate rolled up. His qualifications went unrecognized even if he willed the opposite. He hasn’t talked about any ocean dreams since.

*

I still find myself wondering: how could a white man tell me anything about existence? How could he know what it feels like to choke on things that were supposed to nourish you? How one’s own skin could be a remnant of war? How a war could happen and leave wounds on those who came after it?
Existence, I now tell myself, is more like water — unfixed and precarious. Sartre wrote words about a world that was black and white. I am neither of those things.

*

I remember trying to make sense of his theories that tried to convey sincere truth — reason, as some might describe it. A reason for being. I hung onto every sentence, both resentful and hopeful, longing to find a hint of myself in between those margins. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book The Gay Science, professed that human beings should “become who we are.” Yet, as a woman who has always existed in the margins, I knew that others like me did not always have that choice.

*

When my eyes grew tired from reading and searching, I continued through the world these philosophers knew. You write what you know. And so, as I write this, I sift through Western philosophy, explanations, and metaphors; Sartre and Nietzsche; frameworks of existence and knowledge. Theories that can’t, in all their logic, teach me how to know life without knowing the war that came before it.

*

Some truths are harder to swallow than others. The egg that my mother made me consume refused to be held down, so it forged itself into a scram bled concoction of gastrointestinal juices onto my pillow, right beside my face, as if to mock me. I’d like to think that’s not what happened. I was so high on morphine that I was on some otherworldly time.

*

To be fair, my mom had a right to be worried. After ten hours of watching the hands of a clock waltz by at the Children’s Hospital, the first words that spilled out of my surgeon’s mouth when he came out of the operating room were: “She lost a lot of blood.” Not knowing if he was referring to her or to me, my mother felt the blood drain from her face. Water came before words and before she could dislodge an utterance of gratitude from the back of her throat, tears sealed her lips, speaking for her.

*

According to an article from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, “[s]coliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine” and “idiopathic scoliosis,” which I was diagnosed with, “comprises 80 percent of all cases.” Until today, the cause of this type of scoliosis remains unknown to healthcare professionals. The only cure is to be fixed through corrective surgery.

*

Staples and stitches are meant to hold things together, but the scar that’s left will always be a visible reminder of where things were torn apart. The scar that ran straight down my back marked how twisted I have felt beneath the surface. The wounds and scars on my parents, however, often remained in visible. They surfaced during moments of silence; in hospital waiting rooms, after every job rejection, and at times where they tried to speak and were not understood. My parents knew how to mask pain by not speaking about things. It did not occur to them how an opioid, like morphine, could erase every moment of past and future pain, how painkillers could be beneficial for their daughter. They saw no point in temporarily relieving something that would occur again.

*

My parents didn’t believe in taking drugs to relieve pain. They didn’t believe in philosophy. But they believed in dreams. They believed in the dream of a promised land. And so I guess that’s why we found ourselves in Canada chasing a dream in a white ‘96 Toyota Sienna.
The thing about this dream — the bright, evanescent Canadian Dream — is that it disappears on the horizon as soon as you give the pedal a little gas. People who weren’t born in Canada, like my parents, could always reach for it but never quite grasp it. My parents dreamed of success in Canada so they could have enough money to send back home. They mailed letters overseas, envelopes filled with care and cash, meaning to touch home even if every passing year here took them further away from it.

*

My parents always gave, they never took. When the funds were low and they had to close down their restaurant in 2012, they wrote home without attach ing a cheque. There were no messages from overseas after that year. I fear that, somewhere along the way, cash was misconstrued for connection.

*

Because my spine wouldn’t conform to a state that is perceived as normal, surgeons cut into my back and drilled rods into each vertebrae until each ligament learned the sweet language of acquiescence. Living crooked was not the correct way to live, so doctors and their institutions bent my spine until my whole being understood this. My parents thought this would help me. In some ways, it did. My parents, like the titanium fused into my back, kept me straight. I always had to be in order and never out of line; my parents saw success as a bridge that followed a direct path. For some time, I walked on that bridge, never quite understanding what kind of labour their hands had to endure to create it.

*

After my surgery, I had long periods of rebellion. I would sneak out in the middle of the night because I felt safer with friends who I thought under stood me. In high school, I failed my provincial exams on purpose. My parents dreamed of me becoming a doctor. I wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t see how passing a calculus test would benefit that. I still remember coming home after school, seeing her. My mother, crying, gasping, holding onto the staircase. She didn’t know who I was. I’m not sure when I decided to step off that bridge, why I severed the connection between us.

My parents believed in dreams because they saw them come true on screen. I suppose that’s what happens when you spend a significant part of your early years watching state-censored national television. The Marcos Regime imposed martial law in the Philippines from 1972 to 1986. My parents were
teenagers. Ferdinand Marcos was a dictator, but the Philippine press at the time refused to admit that. Speaking out against the president would result in being silenced, exiled, or erased from any form of official documentation that proved you existed. Surviving depended on how well one could follow the rules, even if those same rules were different the next day. My parents learned how to follow institutional orders before they knew how to care for themselves.

*

Ferdinand Marcos was merciless, but his wife, Imelda Marcos, was ruthless. She embodied the national dream for women: elegant, ostensibly subservient, and filthy rich. She devoted herself to pageant culture like Catholics devoted their faith to a man that was nailed to a cross. Both of these instances base their notions of truth on a fabricated spectacle. A Washington Post article published in 1994, entitled “In Manila, The Beauty Pageant that Turned Ugly,” recalls when “Manila police rounded up more than 270 street children in late April,” which prompted a national Human Rights investigation before the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The American newspaper details what Philippine media outlets failed to mention at the time: “that a similar roundup occurred before Manila hosted the Miss Universe pageant in 1974 under the authoritarian rule of then-President Ferdinand Marcos.” It was “[h]is wife, Imelda,” the article states, who “had walls built to hide squatter colonies.”

*

Three years before the operation for my scoliosis, my mother enrolled me into the local pageant for girls in the Filipino community. I still remember how awkwardly the dresses hung on my uneven shoulders, how the crown I practiced wearing would find its way onto the floor whenever I tried to walk with grace. Without much success, I tried to follow the steps of those that walked before me. My spine was deviant. I knew I could never be who my parents wanted me to be. No amount of rehearsals could teach my body how to conform to the standards that were set. I couldn’t understand why my mom, so desperately, wanted me to embody the beauty queens she watched growing up.

*

The first crown Imelda Marcos claimed was when she won the title for the “Rose of Tacloban’’ in 1949. She gained her second one when she claimed state power and national notoriety as the First Lady. Her crown might as well have been weaved from thorns, placed on her head by the blood-smeared and battered hands of her people. After the Philippines had undergone two years of censorship, Imelda would ensure that her country still had a dream to believe in. In 1974, Imelda brought the Miss Universe pageant to Manila, the first country in Asia to host the competition. The Philippines went on to produce five Miss Universe champions after that. This was a dream, Imelda thought, that her citizens could buy and watch from home. Confidently professing on behalf of the nation, she dictated from behind a TV screen: “Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.”

*

It did not matter that the rest of the nation lived in abject poverty, that journalists would go missing, that martial law activists who protested would not make it home. It did not matter because, according to Imelda and Ferdinand, these people were not real, they were not seen.

A report from the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2018 attempts to document the undocumented: “Students. Labor leaders. Farmers. Members of the clergy. Teachers. Most of them were young activists in their teens, others in their 40s and 50s.” People who, according to the article, “disappeared in the dark days of the Marcos regime, never to be heard from again.” An earlier report from 2012 states that the Marcos dictatorship is behind the “1,838 cases of enforced disappearances” and “[o]f this number, 1,147 are still missing, 435 have surfaced alive, and 256 were found dead.” These people — their truth, their reason for being — did not elicit the Marcos’ idea of beauty. To be considered beautiful, you first need to be seen, but in being seen, you also risk being a target.

*

Beauty pageants, as I happened to find out, were more than just the visuals. Beauty pageant philosophy concerned itself with politics, history, nation hood, and wealth. It was about claiming victory with pride, watering your roots with worldly validation with hope that something might grow out of wounded motherlands. To win one of these things was to make sure that the rest of your family could eat for the years to come.

To win meant that you could escape the unknowability that death and poverty brought. To win was to put yourself on a map and actually see where you could belong. Winning meant security; that’s all my parents ever wanted for me.

*

Donald J. Checki, a journalist for The New York Times, wrote an essay in 1972 entitled: “President Marcos: Another Pacific Dictator.” His writing reflects on the “plight of the Filipino,” an occurrence he witnessed whilst working as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines. He asserts that the “knowledge of the massive wealth which Marcos accumulated since he has been in office has only served to stoke the fires of discontent.” The article includes a passage from Checki’s diary that makes note of the whispers that
were circulating: “[t]alk of revolution” and “perhaps even revolution itself. It is coming, and it will be bad, bloody, a lost cause.” After years of political turmoil, silent assassinations, and the disappearance of billions in national banks, the people of the Philippines had enough.

*

Over a mid-afternoon telephone call from his office in Washington, Senator Paul Laxalt, confidant and close friend to President Reagan, advised Marcos to “cut and cut cleanly.” Marcos, on the other end of the line, let the words wash over him. On the other side of the world, Laxalt’s words hung in the air and evaporated into darkness. It was the middle of the night. Silence was the only thing that stood with the Marcoses. One night, in 1986, a revolution happened during the early days of February. Ferdinand and Imelda fled the country by the next morning.

*

My parents choose not to tell me about their memories of this point in history. To trace memory is to unfold a dream and memorize all its creases. When neither can directly translate the other, their fragments must mediate their meaning.

*

I’ve always thought about how you could leave a place, take all your belongings, but never truly be free from the things you tried to leave behind. And I suppose that’s how a dream can shed the shadows that haunt you. They follow you wherever you go. Do you discern truth by seeing or feeling? I’m still trying to figure out what’s more real.