Journey to Jollibee
By J.p. Lawrence
Fact: my relation to my mother began with my birth. My relation to America began when she left the Philippines with a two-year-old son (that was me) and a freshly minted husband from Minnesota.
My mother once showed me photos of her first day in the snow. In the pictures, she’s this tiny woman in a big puffy coat with a hood surrounding a pretty face, squinting because of the glare off the snow all around her. She’s trying to smile but failing – her mouth hangs half open, as if she were in shock, as if to say, “What’s this?”
I think of her as I walk through the snow down Roosevelt Street in Little Manila, a Queens Filipino-American community. It’s my pilgrimage. My mission: eat at Jollibee, and take a photo for mother.
Fact: Jollibee is the McDonalds of the Philippines, with more than 1,804 stores worldwide and a billion dollars a year in sales. The wonders on its menu are as varied as excuses before a deadline: fried chicken, spaghetti, hamburgers, spam and rice noodles with shrimp and eggs.
For Filipino immigrants like my mother and me, to eat at Jollibee is to share in an inside joke. But unlike its American competitors, Jollibee retains a sense of heady whimsy – there’s an element of unpolished eccentricity surrounding the Jollibee brand, with its mascot with the oogly-boogly cartoon eyes and chef’s suit over a red and yellow striped bee bottom, looking ever so much like the love child of Chef Boyardee and a kidney bean.
I enter the store and all three cash registers have lines stretching almost to the door.
The line clears. I tell the man behind the counter I want palabok noodles and fried milkfish. The man, Filipino like everyone else in the store, rings up my order and tells me my number. I can’t hear him above the din, so I ask him to repeat it. He does. I miss it and ask again. He turns to one of his co-workers, says something in Tagalog to him, and then returns to me.
“Four-seven-four,” he says, slowly.
I feel as if I may have been insulted, but I’m unsure. I wait for my meal and listen to the voices of others around me – Tagalog envelops me, and I am filled with discomfort.
Fact: for most of my life, I never regretted that my mom never taught me Tagalog. She was always working, and there wasn’t much need for it. I was the only Filipino in my entire school, and I was learning English just fine anyway – television is a dogged teacher.
The only time, back then, that I regretted not knowing my native tongue was when food was involved, when my mother would call all the Filipino women in the tri-county area for a potluck.
They would gather in some kitchen to make pancit noodles, chicken adobo, lumpia rolls. And in the late afternoon, they’d call everyone into the living room, have a group prayer, and then they would nibble the spread with their children while their American husbands would gorge themselves and congratulate each other on marrying such good cooks.
The real treat for the wives was the chance to get together and gossip and speak Tagalog, with its high looping rhythms and doubling vowels. Oh! Gusta ko to! Sarap! Sarap!
I wondered, when I was younger, what they said, if they were talking about me, but as I grew older I learned to let their talk wash over me – it was their secret language. I had no right to intrude.
I stand by the drink machine and watch the bustle. The room is filled with brown faces. Many of them munch on Jollibee’s flagship item: chickenjoy, or fried chicken, served with gravy and a white half-orb of rice.
And then a Jollibee cook opens a vat and hoists out of the deep fryer a rack of chicken legs, eight chickenjoys by eight chickenjoys by four chickenjoys high. I watch in disgust as the cook leaves the legs hanging, dripping with grease.
Fact: The first time I ate at Jollibee’s, I was a teenage brat, a spoiled adolescent. When I was fifteen, my parents had saved enough money for us to go back to the Philippines for a month. That month and the two years I spent there as a babe are the only first-hand memories I have of the place.
But I’ll always remember the food. Fish for breakfast. Spaghetti with banana ketchup on top with chopped hot dogs for celebrations and birthdays. Chicken adobo, soaked in soy sauce, garlic, and vinegar, with bay leaves floating on the broth, while the chicken skin fell off the bone.
And then there was the lechon, the roasted suckled pork with crispy crackly golden skin that pops and tender white meat so moist that the only way to eat it is to let it linger on your tongue until it melts like milk chocolate in the recesses of your deepest, fondest memories.
Outside of the food, however, the whole month there I chafed at the strangeness of the place. All I wanted was to be home and play video games with my friends in America, away from all the dirty streets and squat toilets and the countless strange relatives who remembered me when I was just a child and were disappointed when I couldn’t remember back.
My order arrives. I get my food and sit down to inspect my meal. Palabok: thin rice noodles with garlic sauce, pork cracklings and parsley flakes, with slices of egg and tiny shrimp. Bangus: milkfish belly with rice, egg and a slice of tomato. Halo-halo: shaved ice with condensed milk, candied fruit and mung beans. My meal smells of seasoned oil. I feel nostalgic, sufficiently Filipino – but only for a moment.
Looking around the room, I find I have the most exotic food in the room. Everyone else is drinking Pepsi to wash down their fried chicken or spaghetti or hamburger with cheese. The teenagers next to me wear Yankee caps as they check their iPhones. A young boy, no older than eight, sits absorbed in his videogame, blissfully tuning out the sound of his mother talking to his father in Tagalog. Even the youthful go-getter in the advertisement near the doorway seems off. I look closer and find that he’s a Filipino bleached so white he’s reflective.
Fact: My mom always told me that one can always tell who’s Filipino – it’s in the roundness of the head and nose. And here’s another fact: sometimes I’ll be sitting in a clinic waiting room or standing in an elevator, and some old round white man, after staring for several moments, will tap me on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me – are you Filipino?” I’ll nod, and maybe I’ll smile. “I was stationed at so and so, you know,” he’ll continue. “I was in the Navy, serving on a ship down there.” That’s nice, I’ll respond, but I have nothing to say. What does he want me to do? Congratulate him?
Sometimes we’ll talk about food, and that will waste some time. But when we run out of foods we both like, we’ll fall silent – there is a limit to how much conversation can come out of what food is good, what food is also good and who made what food and where.
And sometimes this man will have with him a Filipino wife, and she’ll ask me if I speak Tagalog, and I’ll say no. And she’ll lean over to her husband, place her hand on his shoulder and nod. “He’s lost the language,” she’ll say, with a slight squint in her eyes and a frown that seems to to say, “What’s this?”
And each time I’ll kick myself for forgetting my language, because even that old Navy veteran who spent four months in a Manila whorehouse knows more about my culture than I do – all I have are fragments, vain facts, small memories gleaned second-hand.
I snap a photo of my food for mom. She’s still in Minnesota, making lumpia and chicken adobo out on the prairie. The shutter snaps.
I am a Filipino-American, in a Filipino-American neighborhood, and here I am – a tourist.
Fact: in modern America, a pilgrimage cannot be anything but a failure.
As seen in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal