#850 Old Girl- Mia Alvar

#850 Old Girl- Mia Alvar

Behind every great man is a great woman, they say. This may be true. Behind every average man may also be a great woman too. And what about a thoughtless, self-centered, unrealistic man? Yup, a great woman is likely there as well. The “old girl” of this story is the wife of an aging politician/professor. They grew up together in Manila. She was being educated in the United States and on her way to getting higher degrees when she jumped at the chance to marry him. She would never stop putting him and her family first.

He was a senator back home, one that was jailed by opposition powers. He may have been corrupt himself, but he endured his punishment with her help. He always had big plans, that she would have to clean up when they went awry. As a politician he always worried about appearances, where she again would have to anticipate his needs and clean up after his messes or his mistakes. Always supportive, and never bitter. She has a good family after all. Now, soon after his bypass surgery he want to run the Boston Marathon, so she goes along, knowing somewhere along the line she will need to be there to pick up the failed pieces.

“A marathon is like a marriage: the long haul, the ups and downs, the tests of endurance and faith, the humbling, undiscovered country. Even entering with eyes wide open…guaranteed nothing, only injuries you couldn’t predict, potholes an pitfalls and dark hours no sane person would sign up for willingly.”

Notable Passage: “Life is a test…and those who study well can lick it.”

Rating: 8-8-7-8- Total= 31

#821 Esmeralda- Mia Alvar

#821 Esmeralda- Mia Alvar

Esmeralda is a domestic worker from the Philippines. She has several jobs, one of which is working in one of the top floors of the World Trade Center’s north tower. On the day the towers were brought down, she does everything she can to get down there to look for her lover. She knows he’s there, but cannot get close enough. It is a prayer.

“You pray by heart the way you plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other.”

On one hand this is a story about two people comforting each other at times of great need. Love born of despair doesn’t last, but when one dies in the middle of it, at the peak of the love story, that’s where it stays.

Notable Passage: “I like novels that are long enough to age you while you read them.”

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 31

#793 The Virgin of Monte Ramon- Mia Alvar

#793 The Virgin of Monte Ramon- Mia Alvar

Danny Willson, Jr. was born with deformed legs. His mother told him they were the honorable legacy from his hero grandfather, an American solider that lost his legs while helping to liberate the town from the Japanese. He was satisfied with this answer and satisfied with his old fashioned wheelchair that was an “heirloom” from the same grandfather.

Whether created by legacy or a doctor’s mistake was something he wouldn’t discover for some time. What he did know was that his deformity caused him to be mocked by his classmates. This derision he took well, but wished above anything that it would stop. Enter a new girl in his class, Annalise. She was a native, poor servant girl that helps her mother clean Danny’s house sometimes. She was different, and began being a new target for the childish sneers.

“I had longed for the day when my schoolmates would find a new target, a victim other than me. Now that she was here—a girl, who seem unfazed by the teasing—I felt none of the relief I’d expected. I felt only shame at my own school-yard weakness and a deep curiosity about this girl they called the Negrita.”

They were serendipitously paired for the coming festival dance, one they wouldn’t actually be able to take part in. She also had health problems, and this helped them become much closer. They were both imperfect and broken, but to each other that made them the same. Their friendship did not go unnoticed by his mother who was a snob without cause: “Another outcast only the Messiah of Monte Ramon can love.”

The truth about his defective legs came to light and changed his perspective on a great many things. But he still doted on Annalise.

“It seemed possible for the first time that the defects of our bodies—mine, Annalise’s, anyone’s—were errors of nature. Caused and cured by science, nothing more.”

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#765 Shadow Families- Mia Alvar

#765 Shadow Families- Mia Alvar

A group of Filipino woman have a social club together while living with their husbands in Bahrain. This is where the jobs are, and they live a good high-society life. The untold reality of being separated from your home and culture is the split that can occur as travel back and forth puts strain on families.

“As children of the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn’t have its second, secret “shadow” family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely.”

When a young, brash, aloof woman joins their clique things get interesting. She wears the latest expensive clothes without a husband and will only speak broken English eschewing her native Tagalog. Of course, this causes the rest of the group to gossip and resent this new girl. The rift becomes permanent when she appears one day pregnant and announces that the father is one of their husbands. 

That doesn’t fly in an Arab world, so she was removed from sight. The woman are relieved but eventual come to wonder how much hypocrisy they were guilty of back then.

Notable Passage: “We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth.”

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#737 Legends of the White Lady- Mia Alvar

#737 Legends of the White Lady- Mia Alvar

The Legend of the White Lady is a story told in the streets of Manila. The details change, but something awful happened to a white woman during WWII and now she haunts all men around a few blocks downtown. Alice is visiting Manila for the second time and has heard this story from a cab driver that has one of the ladies white lace gloves as “proof” she exists.

Alice is here for work. She is a late twenties model with an all-American look. She cant get much work in NY because she isn't exotic enough, and lately she hasn’t been looking for work because she is depressed. Her best friend, also a model died of a stroke and Alice is feeling her mortality. She is lonely and more than ever feels like a freak, being taller than most people around her, and like the ghost, her white image stands out.

Her model gig has some snags after she is attacked late at night by a senile woman who mistakes her for the ghost (or something like that), and as she mulls retirement, wonders what else she has to offer the world.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

Sally is a Filipina woman living in Bahrain with her husband. He works in the oil fields and she is a special education teacher. His new student is a special needs child with extreme physical deformity and mentally under developed. Her name is Amoush and she has been brought to Sally by a very rich mother seeking a miracle. She needs Sally to be Annie Sullivan to her daughters Helen Keller.

While development does happen slightly and slowly as Sally knew it would, no miracles will happen despite the lavish gifts given and the hope rendered. The mother shows a level of human frailty while also deluding herself. Sally is caught  between resenting the riches of this woman and feeling sympathy for her humanity. 

Out in the world, there is class warfare being waged. Despite its prevalence and relevance to her life, it always seems to stop at the door of her teaching Amoush. Whether she is ever able to live in this world with any degree of normalcy or not, she is a miracle, as are all children

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#681 The Kontrabida- Mia Alvar

#681 The Kontrabida- Mia Alvar

A man travels home to Manila for the first time in ten years. He has been in America working as a pharmacist and sending home remittance to his enfeebled father. His father is now dying so he made the trip. He is loving and protecting of his mother, who he feels has been oppressed and subjugated by his overbearing and sometimes violent father. In fact, he sees the same violence is himself. This is why, he tells himself, that he hasn’t had children.

“Anytime a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn’t risk repeating his life.”

His father dies while he is there, perhaps due to some of the medicine he brought from his hospital. He sees different sides of his mother than he ever has, she has more strength than he’s ever known.

This is the first story in Alvar’s 2015 debut collection, In The Country.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31