Skinning a Cat to Better Know my Lola

After a couple hours of catching up at her kitchen table, I walk to the staircase to signal to my lola that I’m ready to go to sleep for the night. This ascent became an hour-long sojourn, as my lola exercised her talent to speak for ages, turning old family photographs on the wall into stories that filled both of our heads. Thus, my lola and I begin our slow crawl up the stairs and roughly forwards through time. 

“My dad had big ears,” she informs me, pointing at the photograph of the big-eared man. “He would have lived a long life if not for the Japanese.”

I ask her what happened, although she has told me condensed versions of the story as a child. 

She tells me that just a few days before American liberation, five hundred Filipino government workers were gathered, killed, and burned. 

“If your hands are behind your back, see,” and she pulls herself up with some effort and mimes her hands tied behind her back, looking down at me from a step above.

“They would line you up and shoot you.” My little lola is above me and solemnly pointing a finger gun at my head. Sitting on the step below her in my polar bear pj’s, I stand in for my great-grandfather at his 1945 execution.

I’m an ameteur historian, which means I’m a myth- and meaning-maker in training. In my history research methods class this spring, we discussed the purpose of a historian. They’re a lot like a court jester, their job being to make observations and represent the world they witness in a digestible way. My job, much like any story-teller or story-listener, is to extract meaning because without extraction of meaning, there is nothing. 

My lola is a God-driven woman. She’s a social butterfly and story-teller, with her finger solidly on the pulse of seemingly every family and church community-related fresh information stream. If someone is born, she knows. If someone dies, she knows. If anything of note happens to that someone in between those two events, she knows. She is a nurse who briefly left her baby in the Philippines to build a life an ocean away, crying the duration of the flight to Michigan. She tells me that my 3-year-old dad cried upon their reunion, not recognizing the stranger that was his mother. While he was growing up in the United States, my dad would remember his mother, but eventually lose his ability to speak her first language.

There is some kind of shifty disconnect of both age and culture that I can almost push through to fully see and know my lola, but I feel its resistance bouncing me back. I’m hoping that studying history can help me understand her, and my relation to her more. Last year when I visited my friends and family in Michigan, she explained the three A’s of marriage that a church friend had taught her. 

With my friends and I as her captive audience, all gathered around her kitchen table, she tells us that marriage is about attention. She has to speak loudly over the television my lolo is watching in the neighboring room. 

“When your spouse is talking to you, listen. You might think it’s nagging, but if they are telling you, it must be important.” The sage pauses for her congregation. Isaiah and Arron kindly offer her contemplative “hmms,” and I consider my nearly deaf lolo, who promptly lost or broke every set of hearing aids that came his way.

Next, she impresses upon us the necessity of affection. As she begins to lecture us on intimacy, my lolo cuts her off. 

“Bah, stop it, Neng. It’s not proper.”

She stops it, laughs, and teaches us about appreciation. “If they do something good, you must let them know. Otherwise, they will not know that you have noticed what they did, and will not think you care, you know.” She nods as she speaks, acknowledging the wisdom of her own words.

I had to take a Google dive to remember the three As of marriage for this essay, because I mostly remember her gestures and laughing as she performed for us, always an entertainer and hostess.

---

Another step up the stairs reveals a much younger version of my lola.

“You look like me!” I tell her, admiring the familiar eyes looking back at me. “I think you’re prettier."

“No, no, we both have thick eyebrows. You are pretty, too.” Her face now wields two tattooed eyebrows, her natural ones having faded away over the years.

This step also has a photo of some Philippine Mountain whose name doesn’t stick in my head. A letter is taped to the back of the frame, and I gently unfold it. A relative had written tenderly to my Lola, her Tita Neneng, expressing gratitude and love. The letter was dated in the 1970s, and signed off with the word “ingat.”

I ask my Lola, “what’s ingat?” She lets me know that it means to wish health and well being.

---

In the same kitchen table conversation with my lola, Isaiah, and Arron, the topic of humor came up.

“Am I funny, Lola?” I ask her.

Her lips immediately purse and her tattooed eyebrows scrunch together, head shaking rapidly back and forth.

“No. No, no,” and Arron and Isaiah shake with laughter, barely keeping themselves on their seats.

I expected a no, because I’m unfortunately and regrettably an entertainer and hostess, too, and a no would be funny for our guests. Still, I didn’t expect it to come that quickly and definitively.

“But your brother is funny. He has a gift, you know. You are better at being serious,” she explains. And then she said something to the effect of God giving different gifts to different people as I wrestled with the notion of my 13-year-old brother, whose punchlines usually revolve around chicken butts, and who considers poop to be peak humor, being funnier than me.

A brief, serious, caveat because I’m also sensitive and defensive — a few months later, looking up at all 5 feet and 3 1/2 inches of me, she informed me that I’m blessed that God made me tall. I’m hoping that these interactions with my lola, taken together, mean that I’m conditionally tall and funny.

---

Another step up displays a mourning poem and a photo of my lola’s mother that was used in her funeral.

“She lived a long life until the car crash,” she tells me.

I ask her what happened. I vaguely knew about her mother’s death, but no one told me that my Lola had been the one driving.

“I felt guilt and depression for a long time after,” she says. 

I have built my lola up to become a story in my head, a mythologized being of strength. I envision her as existing outside of me, someone I observe, but can’t quite grasp completely. Her opening up in this moment, this unprecedented vulnerability, was spoken simply as a continuation of our family’s story. Her softness, her smallness, helped me grasp her a little bit better. 

I remember sometimes crying to my dog, Ivy, during the year I lived with my grandparents to finish my senior year of high school because my family had moved to North Carolina. On one such occasion, my lola tried to comfort me. 

“I don’t know how to help. You know, Americans are more open with feelings, but Filipinos, we hide it. You have more practice with how to deal with your emotions. I envy that,” she told me.

---

Another step and we’re in the 80s, as announced by my dad’s mullet. There are also photos of him as a child with his German Shepherd, Tiger. My lola smiles at the photos with Tiger, and tells me that when my dad was young and would get punished, he would then go out and punish Tiger. I can imagine Tiger offering comfort as my dad’s confidant and friend in an occasionally emotionally-distant home. Maybe my dad had trouble reconciling his feelings with his learned emotional guarding. Or this image of my dad is just a projection of my own year spent with my grandparents as I cried to Ivy because I felt alone and felt guilty for feeling alone. I should have been grateful to live in a loving home, but it was a home with culture and age gently snipping away at threads of connection that would have helped us express that love. Either way, I felt like I could grasp my dad a little better in that moment, too.

---

Sometimes, cat skinning is a universal punchline. We explored this possibility in my history research methods class, and I understand now that the myth of a French village skinning the cat of a landlord’s wife can help explain the odd cultural disconnect I experience with my lola. In class, we talked about how a village community collectively skinned the cat of an oppressive landlord’s wife after the landlord demanded that they rid the area of small pests. Judging from my own lived experience, cat-skinning is not something I’d be on board with. Upon gaining some insight into the village’s experience, I understood the punchline. I would be so in on skinning that pampered cat for group expression of protest at greater injustice at play. I can see how skinning a cat might serve the greater good. I might not have all the context that would let me shatter our disconnect and fully grasp the person that my lola is. Sometimes, the pieces missing that would bridge our understandings seem absurd, but if she were to skin a cat, I’d like to think I would give her the benefit of the doubt.

All of these stories should be taken with a grain of salt, touched by my own flawed and introspective perspective. A historian, like my lola and any story-teller and story-listener, is a myth- and meaning-maker because experiences shouldn’t mean nothing at all. My honorable, flawed, and admirable lola and our journey up the stairs impresses upon me that touching, telling, and mucking up our collective narratives is a lovely and necessary expression of agency that I’m proud to be a part of.