The guy who retrieves my shoes from the back of the store is a cheerful young man who introduces himself as Marvin. Mar-bin, with the accent. After meeting so many Filipino nannies in the garden this summer, I've come to recognize Filipino-Italian when I hear it, but I ask just to be sure. "Sei Filipino? Are you Filipino?" When I tell him that I'm a half-Filipino from San Francisco, he switches from Italian to English and we chat about his family, his situation: he is 24 and has been working in this very shoe store for seven years - since he was 17! It's been here for forty years, he informs me proudly, and is one of the best stores in the city. It's beautiful, I agree, with a glance around the brightly lit mahogany interior and admiring its carpeted floors with new interest. Marvin is here with his whole family, who moved here to Turin from a small village two hours south of Manila. "When is the last time you visited the Pilipines?," he asks. (I've noticed that native Filipinos always ask, "When is the last time," not "Have you ever?") Never, I tell him, disappointed in myself. I explain that my grandparents came over in the 40s and didn't want any of us to visit while they were alive. He encourages me to go, says it's so beautiful and everyone is so friendly. I ask him if he likes it here, and he says with a smile, "Oh, yes! This is a great job. I'm sorry to lose my English, though, since I speak mostly Italian here." He speaks Tagalog with his family at home. "I learned Italian in just a few weeks when I first started. You know us Filipinos: we're adaptable. We can go anywhere, live anywhere where there's work." And bring the whole family!
I like that: being reminded that my flexibility, adaptability, can be attributed to an entire people. My grandparents sure did it when they took the long ship voyage from the Islands. Maybe I'm doing it now. We Filipinos are adaptable, always have been; finding love, contentment, and home wherever we can be of use.
Working my way toward the cashier, one of the two older women also working in the store chime in, in Italian: How nice to be from America! (My friend was with me.) We do the usual schpiel, we're from California, here to be nannies, just finished school, graduated in blah blah from blah blah, looking for an experience. Yes, Turin is nice; yes, our families are nice. No, not yet fluent in Italian - but we're comfortable in conversation. Then she comes back to my and Marvin's talk, You know, I'm not from Turin, either. I'm actually French. And you girls are lucky now that you can live here-- well, of course it's different for Americans. She grew up on the Cote d'Azur, France, and went to Africa after university. There she met the man who would become her husband, a Piedmontese who then brought her to live here in Turin. The beginning was hard, she tells us, arching her eyebrows but keeping her voice even, the way that many women do when talking about hurts they put away a long time ago. The neighbors called me Signora Straniera, Mrs. Stranger (Foreigner), for months after I arrived. Not by my husbands name, but by the fact that I wasn't from Piedmont! It was rude, really hard. I told him that I didn't like it and asked him why they didn't just call me his wife. Why he didn't speak up for me. He just said, "I piedmontesi sono così. That's just how people are here." Aubrey and I are quiet, sympathetic. She takes off her glasses, wipes them briskly. It's hard to discern any French in her Italian, but I know my ear is untrained. Anyway, now it's easier. It's not so strict - she is German, he is American, English - the world is more mixed. We are all everywhere. It's wonderful. The other saleswoman chimes in to ask about Obama, and we talk about his victory, about Michelle (who the Italians don't seem to like very much, for her outspokenness and, er, unconservative choice of Inauguration Day garb), the economic crisis, and the fact that the UK has already begun to manufacture doll versions of Obama's daughters.
Time flies, and I politely interrupt our chat to request that we ring up the shoes. I'll probably think about this Wednesday morning conversation every time I wear them. Marvin asks me to stop in whenever I pass by so he can practice his English, and I tell him he must teach me some Tagalog. He says a phrase in Tagalog, and one of the women laughs, What an impossible language! I could never learn it. As we walk out I hear him explaining to her, in Italian, that it's actually quite easy because, like Italian, it's pronounced the way it's written. I think about a quote I read in Chaim Potok's Book "The Chosen," about how each scholar must begin by understanding his own history, and how little I know about the Philippines. I wrote a report about it in third grade, back when Wikipedia didn't exist and I had to lug oversized atlases home from the Contra Costa County Civic Library to research my family's country. Then I remember this language program called "Tagalog On Site" that someone once told me about, and I look up the website when I get home. Despite the fact that their website doesn't seem to have been updated since 2006, I'm already beginning to imagine a new trip, perhaps for the summer of 2010:
http://www.tagalogonsite.org/tos_program.html
Hey! There are two Filipinos right there!
No comments:
Post a Comment