While I was a prolific letter writer during my teenage years, my choices of pen pals were not always wise. Of course, it took a while to dispense of my one prison pen pal, but I finally managed to confine my correspondence to one nice German girl who sent me wonderful photos of her home in Bavaria and from vacations to Spain. There were also some one-offs written with Patricia, my sister from another mother. We would write prank letters to my sister at USC, including love letters from an illiterate baseball player and a thank you note from someone in the Bay City Rollers.
My father, who was responsible for depositing the family mail at the post office, had often made comments on the volume of mail I had been sending, also noticing the time I doused his Old Spice on an envelope addressed to my sister. Somewhere in between the letters, my softball trophy and the evenings I spent listening to the San Francisco Giants on the radio, my father decided that it was time for me to start shopping on the mail order husband network.
On a warm sunny day during a slow San Francisco summer afternoon, my father summoned me to his darkened bedroom where he stood by his pink dresser drawer that had rosaries draped across the large mirror. He pulled out a letter, motioned for me to sit on his bed and watched as I reached into the flimsy par avion envelope with its red and blue stripes. I pulled out a photo of a 20-something Filipino gentleman wearing a maroon suit and purple tie who smiled at the camera, a curled fist resting under his clean shaven chin.
“What do you think?,” my father asked.
Instead of responding, I pulled out the letter and began to read. I stumbled across different phrases that seemed to have been pulled from a mail order introduction primer. “…I am from a very poor town….” “…I graduated from nursing school and was almost at the near top of the class….” “…money does not grow on trees here…” “…I am romantic….” “…I am in love with you…” “…I would love to come to the United States as your husband…”
“Write him a letter back,” my father suggested, “but don’t tell your mother.”
Of course, telling my mother was not a consideration if I valued my father’s life.
When I was a child, I remember that our Filipino relatives were regular recipients of money that we could not afford to send, as our family was already poor and living off the graces of our Filipino neighbors. The relatives were also demanding that my parents begin sponsoring family members who wanted to immigrate to the Unites States. All of this infuriated my mother who, in desperation to move to the Unites States, followed my Merchant Marine father home from the bus stop and married him a week later. My mother eventually decided to cut off all contact with my Filipino relatives, including the family members who had lived as strawberry workers down in Watsonville. I went from visiting a large group of Filipino relatives every month or so to only seeing them once a year, eventually never seeing them again until initiating contact with them when I was in my twenties.
My mother’s hatred of Filipinos also manifested itself into insuring that my sister and I would have no trace of the culture in our lives. In arguments with my father, she referred to Filipinos as lazy, uneducated monkeys. She also yelled at me over my easy going mellowness, which she interpreted as being Filipino laziness tendencies She hammered her sentiments with so much force that I began to feel ashamed of being Filipino, only taking comfort in knowing that I looked like Japanese.
Unfortunately, the unending rows with my mother that seemed to begin and end with something to do with Filipinos began to isolate my father, who was already over 60-years-old. He had begun living a life apart from the rest of us, becoming this sad stranger of an old man who only came home to eat, watch television and sleep. He was too intimidated to give us any instruction on when to sleep, eat or do homework in case my mother would get mad, becoming an invisible parent whose input was only necessary when my mother needed for him to agree on something.
When I was 12, I remember seeing my father outside of a Market Street movie theater he had exited. He seemed a different person, wearing a linen suit, sunglasses and a hat, looking confident as he chatted in front of the theater with a friend. I walked up to him and said hi, and my father invited me to a late lunch at the Woolworth counter. He was so different from the sad, shriveled man who remained hunched over in his green velvet swivel chair at home, cowering whenever my mother decided to go on another tirade. My father treated me to an open-faced turkey sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes, a Woolworth special, and we discussed our mutual love of Kung Fu movies. He began to rattle off a long list of movies that he recommended I watch, and then we took the bus home together. For that moment, he was the charming Zacarias, a dedicated bachelor who probably led a happy life before my mother swept in to push him towards old age and isolation. I hung on to that memory for as long as I could. Even after he gave my name and address to these mail order husbands, I could neither insult nor break his heart my father’s heart by telling him how I, a girl who had never dated, felt about getting unsolicited letters from some desperate paramour in the Philippines.
I had my own little girl dreams of marriage, and it went against everything I observed in my own parents. I wanted love, stability, no arguments and plenty of chatter, and the disconnected marriage of my own parents, whose arguments fizzled into cultural insults, were not something I envisioned for myself. I was so content with holding off marriage for as long as I could, especially if the candidate were to be picked from a table covered with photos of strange young men professing their eternal love. No one does that in the Disney world.
I never told my mother about the letters, of course, and I politely returned each letter from the husband candidates by outlining my personality in the most outrageous terms. “…my only use for a husband would be to milk a cow that lives 40 miles away, and I do not have a car…” “…if you do not play for the San Francisco Giants, I am afraid that I cannot continue this conversation… “…No…”
Eventually, my father understood that I was not interested in the whole mail order husband thing and the letters stopped coming. He had a heart attack not long after, and that inspired him to speak to candidly to me about how he saw dead people. Somehow, as my little teenage world began to rebel against convention and normalcy, there was something embarrassingly cool about having a father who was just weird.
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