From a Daughter of the Samurai to a Filipina
And in spite of a vague fear, I knew, deep, deep down, that whatever might happen in the days, or years to come, I should always love him and should always be true to him. And I always have.
I just finished my 7th book of the year yesterday in A Daughter of a Samurai by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto.
The tone of this book is exactly like what a daughter of a samurai should be: a combined tenderness and strength. Page by page it tells a story of a woman who discovered her own beliefs and the land where she came from.
As an Asian living in Italy, it has touched my life as I am seeing new ways of looking at my own country from the questions and remarks of the people I am living with now.
There are many ideas of long ago that remained in Italian families and they have held on to it for the simple fact these are still working. One best example of that is gardening fruits and vegetables. My childhood is composed of always looking at the bigger cities or another country because that is where the good life is, which is not all bad. It does however defy the fact that we can survive from what we have. The Philippines has a land more fertile than lands with four seasons. We bask in the everyday strength of the rain and sun all year every year and yet we don’t see how it can be beneficial to us because we recklessly throw off the old and madly reaching out for the new.
What’s so wrong with being a farmer? Who made it a symbol of poverty? Clearly, that man or woman never knew that rice villages hold the life of the nation in his hand. Although the farmers and ricefields bow with their burden, it is in this burden that all of us are fed and made strong.
And one may say it’s easy to write this because I am not the one who plows the field. But I did plow the field when I was younger because I came from grandparents who work on the farm. In my childhood I was surrounded with workmen who were paid by the job, not the hour, wiping the perspiration from their faces under the heat of the sun, delighting of heart-pride in one’s work, living with the belief that to degrade one’s pride is to lose one’s hold on to the best, after having had it. Discontent is simply death to the soul growth of a man and then to a nation.
There was once a quote I posted in my bedroom at 17 years old when I just got my first job while attending university:
Wherever you are is where you’re supposed to be.
It keeps reminding me that wherever I am is a good life and there is goodness everywhere I go. It holds on to appreciation despite the pain of growing and lacking. It reminds me to give value wherever I go, wherever I am.
