Catchup Edition: Yet Another Relative Buys Kina a Pretty Dress / Sadly, Sweetly, It Is Time To Go Home

Lots of family stuff in these last two newsletters of the trip. In the first of them, from our penultimate day in the Philippines, Kina’s Tita Connie (who is technically Laurea’s Tita Connie, but the property is transitive) takes our publisher on a journey through the Landmark department store and buys her a sparkly dress. Then, she spends a little time at dinner braiding Aleli’s hair—a little gift for her favorite near-relative of the trip. Through it all, Kina slowly becomes a resident of the Manila Peninsula Hotel—an Eloise of the Philippine Archipelago.

And then there’s this—our last edition of the trip, marked by a visit from her Tita Maica (who is actually Laurea’s cousin Maica, this time) that ends with a heartbreakingly long embrace—it means a lot for Kina to be able to hug Maica, for many reasons. This moment felt a bit like the entire trip for me, a gift for Kina and for her family. That gift played out over four phases: the forest in Batangas, an initial visit to Manila, a journey to the island of Siquijor, and a return to Makati (again, in Manila). We saw relatives from both sides of Laurea’s family, ate a tremendous amount of food, were inspired by the transformation of the Philippines in the thirteen years since I last visited, and watched as Kina learned about her roots and learned some rudimentary Tagalog. This morning, as I headed out of the house to work for the first day in three weeks, I told Laurea that it felt like the culmination of a dream; we’ve been talking about this visit for seven years now, and part of me was worried it would never happen, but now it has happened—and it’s strange to find that it has already and completely happened, an event that took so long to arrive is now behind us. We are all pretty severely jetlagged (which I’ll talk about in the evening edition) and reflecting on the trip in ways that I never expected to.

The Philippines is an amazing and complicated place. It is so deeply important to who Laurea is, and we want it to be deeply important to Kina, as well. By the end of this trip, we accomplished everything we’d hoped to; it’s time to come home. But we’ll be back, for sure, for the family and the food and the people—all of which is fantastic.

And the dresses. Kina will be back for the dresses.

Thank you for your patience and your enduring readership of this publication. We will return to a slightly more predictable delivery time as soon as my jet lag wears off.

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