Barfly for Tuesday, November 5, 1996
HERE'S ANOTHER blast from the past to keep you occupied. Enjoy—I hope!
CALL IT unusual (or, to be even kinder, “charming”) if you will, but I love hospital food and plane food. They usually mean that I’m being babied by nurses with the gentleness of Mother Teresa and the persuasiveness of Madonna, or that I’m flying off someplace nice and pleasant at somebody else’s expense, away from real work. It doesn’t matter to me that the vegetables are soggy—I hate veggies, anyway (parents, keep this column away from your kids)—and that, given the usual airline choice between the chicken and the fish, you find that either one has a way of tasting like the other.
I enjoy the efficiency and the quitude of the whole process—no real decisions to make, no special etiquette to mind, no burdensome conversations to keep afloat, no tabs to deal with on the spot. (Not everyone, of course, feels the same way I do. When he was alive and on his way to another film festival abroad—he didn’t like going out of the country all that much, truth to tell—director Lino Brocka habitually brought along his own packed dinner of adobo.)
Hospitals and planes provide a unique insularity you won’t find at the office or even at home. Dining reduces itself to plain and simple sustenance, without the invasive annoyance of a waiter badgering you for your choice of salad dressing. I hate complications, and can be relied upon to focus on the essentials, and to get the essential business over and done with as quickly as possible. (I’m also the guy, by the way, who thinks of the ocean as one big bathtub; once respectably wet, I towel up and head for the shade of the nearest bar.)
Some other Pinoys, I recently remembered, enjoy the airborne cutlery even more than the food—so much so that they make it easier for the poor flight attendant who has to collect the meal trays and clean up after everyone, by not leaving her too many soiled dishes to worry about. On our flight to Kai Tak, I was savoring the last scrap of beef caught between my teeth when, from behind me, I overheard this conversation between the attendant and the nice old lady seated in Seat 29F.
Attendant: “Uh—could I have the little plastic bowls back, please?”
Woman: “Which one?”
Attendant: “The ones that had the salad, and the dessert—”
Woman: “What? We don’t have to give those back, do we?”
Attendant: “I’m, uh, I’m afraid you do.”
Woman: (Muttering an oath.) “Oh, all right, you can get them from my friend over there!”
I turn my head by this time, and see her pointing to her confederate—another well-dressed matron on her way, most likely, to a shopping spree in Mong Kok. With much grumbling and sighing, the missing samples of late 20th-century Chinese plastic art are located and returned.
A Pinay friend of ours recalls another time when, during a company conference held in Hong Kong, the hotel manager took her aside to plead for the return of the silverware (and some of the carpets) which had miraculously disappeared from the Pinoy delegates’ rooms. The manager comforted her with the reassurance that the Filipinos weren’t the worst offenders by far in this department, but rather some citizens of a South Asian country I whose people I won’t collectively malign with a positive ID, who would cart away TV sets and mirrors at check-out time.
If you think that’s less than charming, then you probably weren’t on this planet yet when--during the salad days of the turboprop—my relatives and fellow islanders routinely stuffed the PAL cutlery into their bags at the conclusion of every onboard luncheon. Am I calling them thieves? Of course not; I love these people, and they were only doing what they thought was the thing to do. Surely the ticket price included the paltry cost of a souvenir? Maybe it should.
SPEAKING OF food, “devastated” is the only word I can think of to describe my state of being upon discovering that my favorite Ma Mon Luk outlets—the old one in Cubao and the new one along Katipunan, possibly among many others—had shut down. I’d made a ritual of treating myself at Ma Mon Luk to a large bowl of noodles and a special siopao—the scrumptious one with the maalat na itlog in its flavorful heart—at least a couple of times a month for the past twenty years. I knew the Cubao waiters and they knew me; Demi wasn’t even a first-grader when I introduced her (screaming and kicking; she wanted a burger) to the place. I remember when my father took my mother and me to the Quiapo branch after, say, a movie at the Ideal Theater; they served the sweet-smelling chicken in raised aluminum platters.
My mother’s not grieving. “It was dirty,” she said when I told her the news, voicing perhaps a popular but (to my mind and palate) irrelevant suspicion. All I know is, it was old, it was good—and now it’s gone.