Filtered By: Lifestyle
Lifestyle

The dog that follows me


  I was twelve years old in California when an English-American classmate found out I was mixed Filipina. Her response was prompt: “Filipinos eat dogs.”   “What?!” I replied.  

 
“My mom told me,” my classmate said, by way of fact-checking herself. “Filipinos eat dogs.”   I wasn’t yet old enough to understand the subversive way Jessica Hagedorn had titled her novel Dogeaters, and I knew nothing of the Filipinos placed on display at the Saint Louis Fair in 1904. I had only this sputtered response: “That’s—what?! No we don’t!”   If only I’d had as strong a comeback as the Chinese-American Restaurant Association’s in 1972. That year, Village Voice in New York City published a “satirical” article entitled, “Dobermans Are Delicious.” The article said, “Dogs are cooked and served in Chinese restaurants.” Funny. The 900-member Chinese-American Restaurant Association in NYC found this so hilarious, in fact, that it sued Village Voice for eleven million dollars.   A sympathetic—and, one imagines, slightly amused—Justice Samuel A. Spiegel presided over the contentious hearing. He asked the two parties, “Will it help if I and the lawyers have lunch in a Chinese restaurant to show that we are not afraid to eat there?”   The article says what happened next: “Ben Eng, vice president of the association who was one of a dozen members sitting in the courtroom, jumped to his feet and responded, ‘Yes.’” Village Voice agreed to print an apology for the story. The Chinese-American Restaurant Association withdrew the suit. And Judge Spiegel went to a ten-course luncheon. The Associated Press article doesn’t name which Manhattan Chinese restaurant it was, but Judge Spiegel ended his meal with a generous belch: “This was the greatest settlement I ever enjoyed.”   Chinese takeout is as routinely American as hamburgers now. But even while Filipino food steadily, happily gains visibility in America, I still find myself haunted by the low-blow dog accusation.   So I was a bit jarred when I visited Banaue in June 2011. I went to its public market to see what the late afternoon hawkers were vending. There was a power outage, so the fruit and produce vendors were using candles in the dim indoor space. But I saw the small, handwritten sign clearly for the homemade ulam there: ADOBONG ASO. Dog adobo.   I didn’t have my camera, but I was, in a way, grateful for that. I was sweating a bit. So, I thought, dog-eating does exist in some parts of the Philippines. What to do? What to tell Fil-Ams in seventh grade in California facing their tormenters now?   I fretted over whether I should even write about this, or if I should banish it from my memory. In acknowledging Banaue’s adobong aso vendor, would I downgrade the reputation of my beloved, undersung cuisine as a mysterious, unappetizing, unreachably “exotic” class of food?   I found one unexpected answer in Sarap, published in 1988—now, tragically, out of print. Edilberto N. Alegre and food anthropologist Doreen Fernandez—patron saint of any aspiring Filipino food scholar—wrote a series of meditative essays on Philippine food. Alegre’s chapter, “Pulutan: The Pleasure of Changing,” travels the universe of bar food: salted peanuts, garlic shrimp, oysters, and—there it was again: Dog. I paid special attention to the section entitled “DOG MEAT: The Case of the (Semi-) underground ‘Pulutan.’”   I expected Alegre to dismiss dog-eating as an ugly stereotype perpetrated on Filipinos by outsiders. He had, instead, a rousing defense that left me wondering.   “In towns where there is no explicit law against it, there is harassment from the police, local or national, or some supposedly civic-oriented groups. But many continue to relish dog meat. Part of its attraction derives precisely from its being kept underground. The sentiment is derived from the British- or American-imbibed idea that killing dogs (which are beloved pets in the Anglo-American countries) especially for their meat is an immoral, if not criminal, act of cruelty. But the eating of pork and beef is allowed. Thus, the Philippine attitude towards dog meat really has no basis in the democratic culinary tradition, in which animals are equally edible.”   I held this passage in my mind for a long while, poring over certain phrases, wondering how to digest them. No basis in the democratic culinary tradition, I thought. The British- or American-imbibed idea. I had always thought that my response to the dog-eater accusation should be “No. Disgusting. Never! We eat normal food like you!” I had never thought that eating dog could be defensible, much less a nearly anti-colonial act, within the context of a non-Western culinary viewpoint. I had never thought the answer could be, “Yes. Sometimes, we eat food that’s different from yours. And?”   In Sarap, Alegre went on to describe his visit to a popular underground restaurant in Caloocan at the time. It served dog meat and only dog meat. “The kaldereta is soft and just on the edge of being piquant.”   Despite Alegre’s praise, I did not cross the threshold into dog-eater in Banaue, and I didn’t search very hard for adobong aso carinderias in Metro Manila. I have heard rumors, but no specific locations, of this ulam in the capital. I doubt, and do not necessarily encourage, the future existence of a nationalistic movement to mainstream dog dishes in the Philippines, in open rebellion of Western tastes. I love dogs, and I’ve felt emotionally attached to more than one canine in my life. As much as I find Alegre’s defense tantalizingly defiant, the seventh-grader in me still feels sensitive about the dog-eater accusation, protective of the characterization of Filipino food outside the Philippines.   Months after my trip to Banaue, I was in a restaurant in Quezon City, sitting across from a mixed-race, Fil-Am undergraduate. He had spent some weeks of his summer in the Cordilleras helping to repair rice terraces. Over our dinner of fish sinigang and oxtail kare-kare, I asked him what he ate while he worked in the north. He said there wasn’t much food to buy where he was; barbequed pork, the occasional adobo. And there was aso.   “Yeah,” he said, “I ate dog. It was fine.”   He shrugged. I watched my fellow Fil-Am’s shrug carefully. There was his easy self-acceptance, his matter-of-fact lack of shame.   “The Filipino,” Alegre concluded, “acquiesces to what is available and innovates within the givens. Memory and tradition (or conditioning) pull us, tether us to our safe old worlds, but necessity and curiosity push us to venture into new worlds.”   I looked down at my rice and wondered. — HS, GMA News
LOADING CONTENT