another side of paradise

At first, you are allowed to pet the pig: mud and shit-stained lying on the grassless dirt your father has called home. It reeks but you breathe through it, convincing yourself it is a friend. Maybe because you have been white-washed. Maybe because you are in your vegan era, five months into your Youtube-filled plant-based recipes. Under the afternoon Philippine sun, the sweat from your palms molds into the pig’s filth. You want to remember to wash them after.

Your little cousins follow you, foul-mouthed as ever at seven-eight-nine years old. You ask, What do you want to name it? And they tell you, Only Americans do that. You continue to pet the pig as it walks away from you, its one leg tied with a rope to the mango tree, oblivious to its fate.

The next morning, instead of the cockadoodledoos that wake you, it is squealing squirming screaming pleading, coming from the swine you believed was a friend. It is a whole house away, but you can hear it feel it see it, sprawled out on the steel table from your backyard which you now use to drink gin from 7-eleven with your childhood friends.

You keep your eyes closed, trying to focus on the whirring of air blowing on your face. In the vast darkness, you can see your uncle gashing at its neck with a bolo knife while your much older cousins hold each side of its legs (the rope no longer intact from its squirming). Its legs tremble like one would after a lobotomy.

The screams last for three hours, from fatal shrills to mere echoes, until around midday when the tropical sun illuminates the reek of death coming from the swine’s open stomach. You leave your air-conditioned bedroom because you cannot bear it anymore. They have left you sleepless and horror-stricken. You wonder, when has your home become a slaughterhouse?

You find yourself walking to the backyard, placing yourself behind the sweat-filled men clamoring about the recent cock fight, about who won the bet while disembodying the swine. You roll your eyes. They like to see poor chickens attacking each other for entertainment. The men gather buckets on each side to catch the pooling blood around the steel table. Four empty, red biscuit buckets, faintly labeled HAPPY TIME ASSORTMENT, will be filled with blood to the brim. Someone will boil all of it, one bucket at a time, to make a whole pot of dinuguan – a dish comprised of the pig’s blood turned black, stewed with lemongrass, ginger, and the swine’s shoulder – which everyone, including you, will devour in its clumpy juices.

Another bucket, shallow and bleach-stained, which your housekeeper uses every Saturday to wash your dirty laundry, is kept for its intestines. Some of it will go into the stew, the rest will be barbecued. You remember your next-door neighbor selling it after school in the fifth grade before America existed in your bones, and you have engulfed the string-like meat like it was candy.

You think about cutting yourself open and have someone compare the length of your intestines to the pig’s. Its intestines wrap around your uncle’s arms, bare and bloody, on and on and on. You wonder if it was long enough to be wrapped around an entire body the way serpents do. The pig is dead enough to stop its tremble. You watch them take its liver, stomach, and lungs, and swallow the lump in your throat. You do not know if you want to cry or throw up. Your tiny cousins watch next to you, awake and unfazed.

You forget that before America, you heard swine chickens goats turkeys pleading, and slept right through them. You forget that your father had gone to countless cock fights to feed you and your brothers.

In a matter of hours, you will watch your uncles, aunts, housekeepers, and neighbors work together to gather the charcoal, keep the fire going, and stick a pole in the pig’s throat all the way to its bottom. They will twirl the stick around, the pig spinning aimfully until it is entirely smoked and crispy on the outside, its juices pooling over the burning coal underneath.

They will plate the lechon with an apple in its mouth in the middle of the table, combined with a bountiful of dishes to welcome you and your family back to a place that was once your home. Everyone will gather to pray, but their mouths will eye the lechon, thinking about which piece to pick on.

You will take a picture and send it to your American friends. When you see them again after your vacation, you will boast about your sixteen-hour flight, and how jetlagged you are but that the food on the plane was surprisingly not bad. You will casually segway into the fact that you have watched people kill a pig in front of you. They will ask and gasp and grimace, and you will scrunch your face in disgust, in a grievance. But for now, you will take your own plate, put a piece of the lechon’s skin, feel the juices cover your lips, and fill your mouth with rice, quietly bewitched by its taste.