Before I Forget

I WAKE UP to the sound of the helicopter’s blades chopping the air.

Sangley Point is a name that’s been mentioned at least once in your grade school textbooks. It was once a place for the Spanish to trade with the Chinese, then a naval base for the Spanish and the Americans. It was eventually turned over to us in 1971.

Big military trucks, airplanes, and large ships were all around us in Sangley. It was a naval station and an Air Force base, after all, and it definitely looked like it. Men and women in uniforms were everywhere—enlisted men in jumpsuits, officers with all sorts of pins on their uniforms, men riding motorbikes in their camouflaged pants.

But we would see them go inside our homes and take off their uniforms and wear their pambahay. They were our neighbors and our own parents. There was nothing unsettling about the loud chopper noises and the blaring sirens. It was the same as the shouting we would hear from the sabungan on Sundays; they were all just sounds of our every day.

I moved a lot when I was younger.

I was born in cool, comfy Baguio where my grandparents were born. Then my family drifted to alienating, noisy Manila, where I spent most days inside our apartment, looking at the street for my father’s sedan. We eventually ended up at Sangley Point, which was at the tip of the peninsula of Cavite City.

It was in Sangley that I finally rooted myself in a place without fear of leaving as soon as I had grown comfortable. Friendships are easily made when you’re young, but it was another thing to keep and hold them.