Oxtail on My Mind

I HAVEN'T TRIED to forget about Filipino food, but it’s slowly happening.

Forgetting isn’t new for me. It’s effortless. There are great swaths of my past I don’t recall easily. I can remember the Duncan Hines jingle from the ’80s, but not the details of my day-to-day life as a kid. It’s easier for me to picture Lucy Ricardo cooking in her sitcom kitchen than my own mother making me dinner in the house where I grew up. I haven’t buried my memories intentionally, just misplaced them after years of disuse. But the pandemic and The Lockdown Life have made me reflect: how quickly I have assimilated to this new normal. I have to actively remind myself about “before,” when I wore clothes with zippers, rode trains sitting inches from strangers, hugged friends and shared popcorn from the same bowl. And as I dig further back, I unearth memories long forgotten in the archives. Like oxtail stew, a dish I haven’t tasted in a couple decades. And the more I remember, the more I miss it.

ASIDE FROM A WELL-WORN hoodie and Electric Light Orchestra’s album Out of the Blue, few things are scientifically proven to bring humans comfort as effectively as food does. Based on how much my credit card statements have thinned since The Lockdown Life began, I clearly relied on eating out as a frequent source of comfort. Now everything I eat, I cook myself. I’m home all the time after all, and my wife, a pharmacist, can’t telework (you can’t Zoom a flu shot). It makes sense for me to cook for us both, and I enjoy it. I’m competent in the kitchen. Michelin isn’t fitting my spatula for stars, but I also won’t make the average taster retch.

Since my wife is vegan, my meat consumption in The Lockdown Life has dropped to near nil. While she is strict in her own dietary choices, she isn’t overly proselytizing. She even bought me a chest freezer to theoretically store all the fish I would catch if I were any good at catching fish. But at the same time, she wouldn’t be thrilled to find blood stains on the counter leaking from the flank of something you’d feed at a petting zoo.

After nine months of eating vegan classics like cauliflower steak, it was my stomach that started me on this recent binge of nostalgia. Before falling asleep, I’d picture a slab of ribeye searing on cast iron or a rack of smoked ribs glistening with juice. And, as each dish for which I pined made me rediscover another, I dug deeper into the past, summoning memories of foods I hadn’t eaten since well before the pandemic started. Like kare-kare, oxtail stew, a particularly inconvenient craving because making it vegan would be sacrilegious and, sadly, I don’t even know how to cook Filipino food in the first place.

IT'S NOT JUST the food though. There are aspects of being Filipino I’ve either forgotten or just never knew. I have little blood family on this continent and then chose to move far away from the few I had. I moved to the whitest major metropolis in the nation and Filipino restaurants and markets are uncommon here. I married a white woman. I never learned to speak Tagalog (my parents discouraged it, fearing my accent would be another barrier to making it in America). You don’t have to know the language to eat the food, and yet I don’t even have the vocabulary for so many things I’ve lost from my diet.

Maybe I would make Filipino dishes if I’d learned cooking from my mother, but as a child I never cared to learn from her, and, as an overworked/underappreciated parent and an unenthusiastic cook, she didn’t try much to teach me. Growing up, Mama would claim I was picky, that I didn’t like leftovers. That’s not true now, nor was it likely true then. I just didn’t like her cooking in general. And if you start with something bad, giving it twelve hours to congeal in the fridge doesn’t usually improve it. But no one could question her effort, whether I appreciated it or not as her son. She didn’t have to be an expert cook to keep us nourished.

As I’ve remembered these foods from the past, I unearthed a memory that seemed so preposterous at first I had to re-examine it: In elementary school I’d wake up around 7:30 in the morning, and Mama would have already left for work. But there’d be a hot breakfast waiting on the stove for my sister and me. No cereal or Pop-Tarts for us, even if that’s what I wanted because that’s what white kids ate. Every morning a new batch of kanin and ulam. Rice and stuff that goes on rice. That stuff could be beef and broccoli or picadillo or a mung bean and pork soup called monggo that I especially didn’t like (she’d leave tomato skins in which would gross me out). I have no idea how she selected the menu or how long it would take to prepare. But every day, without fail, she made breakfast and was out the door before I was even awake. For comparison, in The Lockdown Life, I’m sometimes late for my 8:30 a.m. work start, and my commute is from my bed to my computer, a distance of maybe 30 feet.

SINCE SHE ALSO cooked dinner for me every evening, the math would show Mama prepared the vast majority of the Filipino food I’ve consumed in my life. But, because I didn’t like her cooking, as I reminisce over meals I miss, it’s not actually hers I’m thinking of. I’m remembering dishes cooked by aunties from celebrations gone by. These are very un-vegan fantasies.

As I drift off to sleep, I picture birthdays and holidays with cousins, grazing over the table, piling food on a Styrofoam plate. Cracking the ear off lechón

and dipping it into sweet and salty liver sauce. Ladling a bowl of dinuguan, a stew of pig’s blood, vinegar, and organs I couldn’t name, but each having their own necessary role in the balance of textures between chewy and squishy. Eating unripe mangoes like chips and guacamole, dipping the sour, green slices in a shrimp paste called bagoong, bright pink, the tiny black eyes of the crushed crustaceans still visible, looking back.

I picture these dishes of my youth steaming on an endless table. And in the middle, a giant pot of kare-kare. Hunks of oxtail simmering in a peanut broth with strips of tripe added for texture, bagoong dotting the greasy concoction, balancing the richness with a bright tang of salt and sea. All over a mound of white rice. A dish for celebration.

Yes, there are vegan recipes for kare-kare online, but I’m not buying it. It’s impossible to veganize connective tissue and meat off the bone. Nothing in the plant kingdom really approximates the spongy goodness of tripe. If food brings us comfort, it’s not simply because of the ingredients, but the memories a dish conjures. The flavor is layered with the familiar. Strip a cuisine of its tradition and you’re also skimming off that comfort.

Even if I looked up a “traditional” kare-kare recipe and made a pot just for myself, it wouldn’t be the recipe I remember. There’s something depressing about learning on YouTube what you should have learned from your own family. I’d rather stick with cauliflower steak and garbanzo beans twelve ways than fake something I’ve already lost.

IN NEW JERSEY, my mother struggles through her own version of The Lockdown Life. But if you look at the past couple decades, her present state seems more the inevitable conclusion after an accumulation of misfortunes, sorrows, and bad luck. COVID is just one more thing that’s strangled the circumference of her freedom.

First, in January 2000, my father declared the end of their marriage by disappearing one day while she was at work. Mama, already a timid driver on New Jersey highways, who’d grown distant from friends over the years and had few relatives nearby, now lost the one person who was most likely to drive her anywhere. Asian groceries where you could buy things like tocino or tuyo were beyond her driving range. I was away—my freshman year of college—already forgetting what it was like to be a son. I could have helped more, or even a little, but I didn’t.

Years later, some dental situation, nothing very serious from what I gather, led to the dentist pulling a few of her teeth. No malpractice; she requested this option rather than whatever else was offered because she feared the alternative would be more painful. It had the consequence, though, of relegating her to softer foods. No more bistek or chicharon. I don’t know when this all happened. I might have moved to Baltimore or Boston by then. I was deep into my forgetting.

Then, when I’d moved for the last time, settling down in Portland and ready to visit Mama for the first time in a year, she warned me as I waited to board my flight, “Anak, I don’t want you to worry but...I’m using a cane now.” The uneasy truce she had with arthritis had devolved to disability. The woman whose daily commute used to include three miles of walking through midtown Manhattan couldn’t manage a flight of stairs. A hip surgery became inevitable. My sister and I were excited for her though.

“I have a coworker who just got that exact surgery!” I said. “It’s only been six weeks and he’s already playing basketball. He’s not much younger than you but says he feels like he’s thirty again.” And she allowed herself to feel some of that hope, a risk she rarely dared. The surgery technically worked, but she swore one leg was shorter than the other and she couldn’t hide the bitterness that ate at her knowing this surgery worked for so many other people, but not her. The pain was lessened some, but by no means cured, and a cold fear crept in that she may never regain her ability to walk effortlessly again. She hasn’t and realistically never will. If COVID never befell us, she would still have to spend most of the day inside, lying down to manage the pain.

LIKE ME, SHE now eats very differently from the foods she knew all her life, though for very different reasons: fear of causing a fire if she forgets she left the stove on, weak or missing teeth, foods forbidden by the Arthritis Foundation as likely inflammatories (hint: if it’s delicious, it causes inflammation), debilitating leg pain if she stands more than five minutes.

Unlike me, though, she doesn’t need a pandemic to remember, over and over, the past. She might forget specific words or dates, but never forgets pain and hurt. On those events that stabbed her most severely, her memory is flawless. She rues and ruminates and regrets deeply. At her most despondent, she says to me in quiet shock, “Bakit ako pinaparusahan?” Why am I being punished?

“I don’t know, Ma.” I don’t. I could say all these tragedies and misfortunes are unrelated. I could say it happens to others too. I could say it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to say nothing because it’s worse to tell someone it’s not so bad when they know it is. So I just listen. I say I’m sorry, but never explain what for.

LAST WE TALKED she was in a decent mood, if still in her usual pain, the Jersey winter beginning to seep into her joints. “Your sister brought over nilaga she made.” It took me a second to translate in my head; it had been so long since I’d thought of this dish. Also starring oxtail, with cabbage and potatoes, and, at least the way Mama used to make it, whole peppercorns floating in the broth like spicy naval mines you’d accidentally crunch.

“I forgot how good oxtail is,” she says. It’s soft. She can chew it. I’m sure it’s on the list of forbidden foods, but she knows it’s worth cheating now and again.

WHEN MAMA COOKS now, it’s only for her or her cat. I’ve likely eaten the last meal my mother will ever cook for me. I can’t remember what it was. That last meal I do remember was Filipino fried rice, sinangag, a breakfast staple. Just yesterday’s hardened rice resuscitated with sizzling oil and a generous dash of garlic powder. Fried eggs, the yolks on the firmer side. Johnsonville breakfast sausage because she couldn’t drive to Asian markets that sold the more traditional longganisa.

I was likely between moves, flaming out in one city and landing back home for a spell to regroup and figure out where to rebuild next. She had everything cooked before I was awake. I remember it all being absolutely delicious. Maybe because it had been so long, it was like eating Filipino food for the first time.

BACK IN MAY, I bought my annual ticket to Jersey for Christmas. Plane tickets were so cheap, and December was so far away. There was time for the world to stabilize, heal. It could all return to what we remembered. Then 2020 became the first year in which I didn’t see my mother.

I’ll hold out hope for 2021. That we all hold on long enough to make the pandemic a memory we can choose to keep or bury forever. Next time I get to see my mother, maybe I’ll ask her to tell me if she has a recipe for kare-kare. See what she remembers. See what I can learn.

ARMIN TOLENTINO is a poet and the author of the collection We Meant to Bring It Home Alive. He once started a grease fire trying to season a wok.