Culture of Fear - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

I’m not from the Philippines, nor have I ever been to visit, despite the pressures of my great-aunt, known only as Nana, and my grandmother. It doesn’t seem as cultured as Europe or as artistic as Tibet—just hot and ominously frightening. When I was little, I was told stories of various Filipino creatures of the night—the aswang, who assumes the form of a human being and even marries, but eats corpses at night, and the manananggal, witches who disassemble themselves and send their thread-thin tongue into sleeper’s unaware ears and noses to devour their innards. These were different than the vampires and werewolves of America, which I was familiar with and knew could be overcome, captured or killed with silver bullets and crucifixes. Filipino beings were darker and foreign, undanted by charms, holiness or courage. They were angry, not to be reasoned with or bribed. And these creatures seemed to exist in equal quantities and force to real people in the Philippines.

Superstitions abound in the Filipino culture. Even in the enlightened, Americanized home that I grew up in, my mother propagated folktales. If my sister and I didn’t wake up and get ready for church early enough, the devil was sitting on our eyelids. If we didn’t let her blowdry our long hair after we took baths, and chose to go to bed with wet tresses, we would find ourselves blind when we woke up in the morning. If I bit my cheek and it bled, someone was thinking about me. And she hadn’t even invoked any of the monsters yet.

The list is endless and the assortment frightening. After I was told about the tiyanaks—monsters who assume the form of tiny children in order to lure you into the woods, then revert to their original forms to devour you—I wasn’t able to hold my baby cousins for a month. A monster becoming a man or woman seemed permissible and understandable; grownups were often cruel. But a small child was innocent, and seemed to me should be exempt from this horrible impersonation. If you couldn’t trust a baby, you couldn’t trust anyone. I, in fact, put my own two-year-old brother in the deep freezer with his arms zipped inside his sleeper for a minute or two, partly because I thought it was funny, partly to see if he was a tiyanak. He yelled quite a bit, but didn’t turn into anything other than a crying boy. I let him out, deluged with protests from my sisters that I was going to kill him. You can’t trust anyone.

Filipinos are seen as the happy-go-lucky Asians, always with a laugh and a funny story. Maybe that’s to deal with the inexplicable fact that babies and dwarves and giants and centaurs are all bad. There are no good mystical creatures. Even the fairies are evil. Any of them can take you to the grave. So all there is left to depend on is a good laugh or two.

One of my uncles is a complete jokester. He taught all the cousins to pull his finger whenever he needed to pass gas. He tells the most hilarious stories in the world. He’s also my only uncle to get a divorce—after his first wife tried to scratch his eyes out. Also, his son is mentally handicapped and will depend on him into adulthood. This uncle once told me that those who can laugh are given more to suffer. I tried not to laugh very much after that, in case it was true.

I wonder now, as an adult, why I have so many parasomnias that even Xanax can’t quell. I grind my teeth, pull my hair, cry out in fear in the middle of the night. I live hundreds of thousands of miles away from the tiyanaks and the kapres—in a world where science and facts rule supreme, where fanged creatures and winged maidens are only characters in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But perhaps, deep inside, I can never escape my heritage. I am Filipino. The dark creatures are in my blood. And I dream their dreams.

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