A Professional Lola is the title of author E.P. Tuazon’s newest collection of short stories, published earlier in May by Pasadena’s Red Hen Press. The title story opens with the author’s mother preparing manok (chicken thighs) for a party.
Tuazon writes, “Even when they came pumped with antibiotics, sterilized twice, prepackaged and freezer-burned here in the States, manok didn’t taste safe to her until it was lemon-drenched and salted clean.”
A few paragraphs further in, the author recounts the eulogy he gave at his Lola (grandmother)’s funeral: “I ended it with the first time she taught me how to eat with my hands. Seven-year-old me seeing her eating her meryenda of salted shrimp, fermented egg, tomato, and rice and asking her for some. Our kind, wonderful Lola Basilia scooped a little bit of everything and held it out for me with her bare hands. I took it like someone accepting a love letter of twenty dollars to go to the movies. What was dripping from our fingers was her heart.”
“A Professional Lola,” thirteen short stories about the Filipino experience through the author’s eyes, is bursting with lasa (flavor). We sip black stewed pig’s blood; we pick bits of crispy salty skin, salty skin like potato chips from the back of a lechon (whole roasted pig), conjure spells with witches using spider eyes that are indistinguishable from ground pepper, snack on cornick (deep-fried crunchy puffed corn snack) and butong pakwan (roasted watermelon seeds), and are wooed with an unexpected love-gift consisting of cans of coconut milk, premade purple balls of mochiko (sweet rice flour), and a bag of uncooked, rainbow-colored tapioca.
Throughout the pages, Tuazon tethers even the most surreal moments with the forgiving earthiness of Filipino food. He’s first generation, the son of parents who arrived in the USA from the Philippines in the 1970s. And although the Lakers-fan author grew up in Eagle Rock, his lilting speech pattern and easy command of Tagalog underscore the experience among Filipinos of “…the importance of not sounding like you came from anywhere in a country where everyone was from everywhere.”
On May 15, the Feast of Saint Isidore the Laborer / Farmer, we had the good fortune to simultaneously Zoom not only with E.P. Tuazon but also with celebrity Chef Marvin Aritrango, who was born and raised in Manila and now lives in Pasadena. The latter is a glamorous gadfly with Michelin stars who’s frequently spotted on the red carpet.