#4 Jason Bayani on "Heaven is Just Another Country" by Jaime Jacinto

I forget how old I was then, but during one of my father’s birthdays we threw a party for him. He got really drunk and at some point he was sitting at the breakfast nook in our kitchen crying, uncontrollably. He used to drink this Spanish brandy— Fundador. When I was young that bottle felt so large and ominous in our cabinet. When I was old enough to want to try alcohol I snuck a taste of it and I remember how it felt like a punch to the throat. The party was still going, but my mother took him to bed. She came down the stairs, and I asked why he was crying. It’s because he misses home, she said.
 
That was the day I understood what it was that my parents had lost by coming over to this country. That our experience in America comes from a foundation of loss. That this is the sacrifice you make to give your family a better life. You grow up seeing these things. You try to make sense of the ways that each of your parents adjust and grow into being a person living here. You see the wide chasm between your experience and theirs. You grow frustrated with the lapse in communications. I was their first American born child. It’s a terrible thing, to grow up looking at your own parents as foreigners. But I wonder about their own difficulties in having a child who is completely familiar and their own, who is their flesh and blood, and yet speaks a different language.
 
I don’t know why I wanted to become a writer. When I picked up a Creative Writing major during undergrad, I thought I could tell some stories. I thought I might be good at that. I hardly considered poetry. I didn’t grow up with a Youth Speaks or have young poets come to my classroom and put me on to the power of expression. I just thought it was dry and obtuse. Then during my Junior year I met Jaime Jacinto. He was teaching at SF State at the time. I took some of his classes and even TA’d for him once. Before him, I had never met a writer who was Filipino. I felt invisible in my program and there wasn’t anyone who was really paying attention to me. Only Jaime was.
 
I think about his poem, Heaven is Just Another Country, often. It was the only thing I had seen written that reflected my own experience back to me. It is a poem that is very Filipino, but more than that is very Filipino American. My people tread a lot in non-verbal communication, but there is a quiet desperation to connect that is so pervasive. In the poem there is a moment when the voice recalls combing their father’s hair.
 
          At the mirror, I draw
          my comb through his hair,
          wipe the gleam of pomade
          from his forehead, and again
          he tells me he’s dying.
 
It’s the only time there is any touch in this poem and it’s so absolutely heartbreaking to me. Beyond the specter of death that looms over the poem, there is this need from the speaker to express love and care for their father. Earlier in the poem the speaker talks about hiding the father’s whiskey bottle after noticing that he’s gotten a bit too drunk. It’s a subtle gesture, but at this moment this is how they know to show love to this father who is probably as vulnerable as he has ever been, who may be dying, though nobody is talking about it. I remember doing that same thing to my father’s cigarettes. I did it because I wanted him to find it and know it was me who hid them. So he could see me and know how scared I was for him. That moment when the speaker combs his hair is the realest, most intimate thing that can be done. And this is the moment where they most effectively communicate.
 
There are different ways I can look at the title of this poem and what to make of its ending. Do we believe that to leave home the ways in which we did was to suffer a kind of death? The death of who we once were in order to become this new thing we are now. Or do we say to those we love, that to leave us would be just like taking that long journey across the Pacific— that we know this route well, that we should not be afraid to say goodbye when the time comes?
 
I think of my father crying at the breakfast nook and the idea of the weight of loneliness that is mentioned in the poem. And how much that weight existed in my home. In a lot of ways it kept our family together. In a lot of other ways it can be a burden we carry with us. I don’t write because I need to express anything. I really don’t give a fuck about expression. I am desperate for answers. I’m desperate to understand who we are in this country. I may never get an answer I want or one that even makes sense— but who we are, our pain, our struggle are as viable as our joy, our elation, and our triumph. Our stories are a beautiful thing. And I could spend the rest of my life wading through all of our beauty just to get a glimpse of a life that makes any sense.

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Heaven is Just Another Country
​by Jaime Jacinto

1.
 
From his usual spot
at the head of the table
in a Chinatown restaurant
I can hear him saying,
I’m going to die,
not to me or anyone
in particular, it’s the weight
of loneliness he’s talking to
and though he’s already
had a few, he orders another
whiskey before dinner.
 
With mother giving
the signal, lips pouted,
pointing with her mouth
as if to say enough already,
I slide his drink behind the
bottles of vinegar and soy sauce.
 
When the food arrives
I help him from his chair
to the men’s room.
He relieves himself,
fingers like knobby roots
on his fly, guiding a yellow
stream down the steaming tiles.
 
At the mirror, I draw
my comb through his hair,
wipe the gleam of pomade
from his forehead, and again
he tells me he’s dying.
 
2.
 
I pretended not to hear
unaccustomed to your trust
and instead remembered
when we first arrived here,
how you were still a young man
new to a country
that needed your work,
to sit at a desk,
chain smoking and drawing
blueprints for houses
you never even saw.
 
I wanted to be seven again
and ride with you past the
factories and railroad yards
down to the warehouses,
to your desk of scattered papers
and an ashtray piled with cigarette stubs.
 
But then we are back home
and I watch you slump into an armchair,
your body soaked with whiskey.
 
Tonight, you say,
heaven is just another country,
and getting there is no harder
than that trip 40 years back,
on your first airplane ride to America
when you sang and prayed
like your own son beside you
because far below there was
nothing but blue sea
and the empty sky
that brought us here.
 
* “Heaven is Just Another Country” has been reprinted with the permission of the poet and Kearny Street Workshop
 
**Jaime was associated with Kearny Street Workshop. The organization was started in 1972 by a group of visual artists and poets in San Francisco. They did so to create opportunity and spaces for themselves because the mainstream art world wasn’t offering it. Although he wasn’t a founding member he was around a few years in. They published his first book of poems. Today I work for this organization as the program manager.
 
*** Along with Jaime, there were many Filipino poets that came up in the Bay Area during the 70’s including the late Jeff Tagami, Shirley Ancheta, Virginia Cerenio, Lou Syquia, Oscar Peneranda, and more. And not to mention, the long time OG poet of Manilatown, the late Al Robles, who my friend, Regie Cabico, once referred to as our Walt Whitman. 

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Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet from Write Bloody Press. He's an MFA graduate from Saint Mary's College, a Kundiman fellow, and is currently the Program Manager for Kearny Street Workshop. http://jasonbayani.com/

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