My Adobo

You know a country is poor

when its poorest families

are still served by maids.

From this impoverished

beginning, my mother

was raised—a woman

who learned how to cook

only as an immigrant—

a mother who raised

a daughter without teaching

her how to cook

because she had yet to learn.

I am that daughter who first

excelled in the culinary arts

by memorizing the phone

numbers of a city’s

best take-out diners.

Today, adulthood brings

me to the kitchen mostly

for adobo, a stew from meats

—chicken, pork, or beef—

immersed in black peppercorns,

garlic, soy or fish sauce, and

vinegar—a sauce used since

the 16th century to preserve food

amidst tropical heat.

To be honest, I prefer other dishes

of my birthland: lumpia, kare-kare,

dinardaraan. But I mostly cook

adobo because it is rare

in Philippine history: it has never

been colonized by its British, Spanish,

Japanese, and American colonizers.

To be colonized is to be poor.

Indigenous—Never Colonized—

how I wish this was true elsewhere!

My country retains impoverished

pockets—here and there, the poor

scavenge amidst garbage heaps

for food in a practice called

“pagpag,” a word first associated

with dust. Thus, adobo is my

second learned Filipino

recipe. The first was salted

mangos, where I felt the rightness

of diluting sweetness with salt.