By Noreen Ocampo
This book review will also be published in the forthcoming Marías at Sampaguitas Issue 6: Memory
Where to begin?
Maybe here:
My mother was picking green beans in our backyard while holding a large silver bowl. It had been a couple of hours before dinner, the sun splashing a deep orange across her face and hands.
I know those green beans, the silver bowl. My mother does the same, harvesting the long, long beans in the early morning. We will have more than enough for dinner, with extra servings to tuck into the bottom of the freezer and still some leftover to bundle up for any cousin or auntie who visits. One summer, a sudden swarm of weeds overtakes our backyard, and a man comes by to spray our grass with harsh chemicals. I sneak a glance from the window and watch him pause to study the long beans, captivated.
Or here:
My father’s sister warns, “Maybe we will go hunting for smurfs. Be careful. They live here, in the trees,” she points with her puckered lips.
My father alternates between calling them elves and goblins—I was never quite sure. But I know, too, that they live in the trees, especially in overgrown, less populated areas. I know, too, that we should be careful, even in places that we think are ours. I don’t have many memories of my own father’s sister, but I imagine she would have taken me hunting for duwende as well. I hear they sometimes live in the drain. Before pouring hot water into the kitchen sink, my father and I chant, bari bari bari.
No, here:
I placed my hand on Lolo’s plaque. What I desperately wanted to experience as sadness was simply the lost feeling of never getting to know a man I would never meet.
It rained throughout our last night in the Philippines, the time we visited after my Lolo passed. I had begun menstruating and immediately showered, even though my parents warned I would get sick, and, as predicted, woke in a feverish sweat. That night, I laid in bed, lamenting. Then a trio of what sounded like slow knuckles against the windowpane thundered behind my head. I tore through the house, darting past my cousins eating siopao, frantically searching for my mother. I don’t remember if she said this sadly or with a laugh: I guess your Lolo wanted to say goodbye.
Here:
I chose to run at sunset until it was completely dark, something I had never done before by myself. In America, women are taught to never walk alone at night as you ran the risk of rape or assault. But in Murujuga, no such dangers existed.
In Mississippi, I sometimes walk from a friend’s apartment complex back to mine at night. It is not quite like Murujuga; sometimes cars careen past at dangerous speeds, and sometimes there are boys who want to see if they can make your heart race. But for me, too, being in Mississippi is like leaving, in that for the first time, I am away from everything and everyone that has made me afraid to be seen. The boys here are not the boys I was afraid of. I am free in a way that I have never been, and I like to think I’m becoming someone new, someone better.
All of this is to say that Elsa Valmidiano’s collection, The Beginning of Leaving, is a required read: it is necessary and urgent in every way one could want. Between discussing topics such as the Filipino American experience, immigration, family, labor, sexual assault, abortion, and more, The Beginning of Leaving leaves no stone unturned and invites us to go back if we need to, to return and sit a little longer until it’s time to go.
For me, reading this collection was often like peering into a mirror, which is intimidating and scary—but healing, generative, and important. There are few other writers with whom I would find sharing this experience—or rather, these experiences—so powerful, and even fewer whom I would trust as much as Valmidiano to take me through this journey. Each time I encounter and return to her work, I feel seen in new ways and find myself changed. The Beginning of Leaving is no different; it is a collection of work that makes you turn inward and acknowledge all that you have persisted through, one that inspires you to come to the page and write—and be gentle with yourself as you do.
About Our Contributor
Noreen Ocampo (she/they) is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her collection Not Flowers won the 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest, and her work can also be found in Sundog Lit, Salt Hill Journal, and Alien Magazine, among others. She holds a BA in English from Emory University and currently studies poetry in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. She enjoys transparent things, ice cream, and the little tags connected to most tea bags. Say hi on Twitter @maybenoreen!
THE BEGINNING OF LEAVING, by Elsa Valmidiano, releases July 28, 2023 from Querencia Press.
About the Book
Elsa Valmidiano’s The Beginning of Leaving is a hybrid collection of journalistic prose and lyrical essays, weaving a personal examination of how leaving not only reflects a picture of immigration and the diaspora, but how migration through generations compels any individual to honor the Motherland we left behind, and acknowledge whose land we now inhabit and have adopted as our own. In these essays, leaving is not simply a finite act but a process of resistance, reconciliation, and release-from a Motherland, a childhood, War, a body, a mindset, a painful past, or shame. Within this collection is a reflective and immersive travelogue as well as bildungsroman of a woman who is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. As she travels from her ancestral barrios in the Philippines, to the suburbs of LA, to the High Desert of California, and finally to the Australian Outback in Murujuga, themes of heartbreak, family, trauma, and race are intimately interwoven inside discussions surrounding gender expectations, as well as Motherland values versus adopted homeland values.
ISBN 978-1959118480
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