Kina Takes Her Seat At Ancestral Dining Table

When I first visited the Philippines, Laurea’s mom picked us up at the airport to take us to the hotel—and then promptly took us to her childhood home instead. There, while slightly dazed, I sat at the family’s enormous round dining table, slightly worn, with its inset paneling and built-in lazy susan, and I ate the best mangoes of my entire life from the tree in front of the house.

Some time ago, years after Laurea’s grandfather died, the family rented out the house, and her Aunt Charie took that table—which Laurea’s grandfather had gotten for the house decades prior, when Charie was still small—to her farm in Batangas. It is in her kitchen now, with its lazy susan and the chairs I sat in eating mangoes in 2009, ready for family.

Yesterday (or the day before, here, because that’s how time zones work), Kina took a seat at that table and ate spaghetti and mangoes. One after another, she devoted her fruit, spinning the lazy susan until the serving platter came her way. The plate she ate from is from the same collection of plates that Laurea ate from when she was little.

A lot has changed here in the Philippines since I was last here—more so since Laurea was a little girl. The house is gone, and so are her grandparents. Laurea herself is living on the other side of the world, where the tables are small and the mangoes are underwhelming. But the table is still around, and round, and round, in Charie’s kitchen on the farm, surrounded by fruit trees and wandering dogs. When Kina sits at that table, it is as though nothing at all has changed.

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