We are the same other—inhabiting a foreign soil, wallowing on the cold ground, watching the days pass us by in alien fields. Again, I am reminded of the Philippines. We are beasts of labor looking at each other through different sides of the same diamond-mesh wire amidst ancient ruins of rebar and plaster built by man, a mirror of sorts.
Placated by arbitrary fences in an arbitrary country, you are gazed at, with mouths agape, with heads thrown back in laughter. The kids love you. They wave at you while their parents push them around in their strollers. The grandmas love you. They chuckle when the cast member says that the four of you were named after the Golden Girls. They lift their iPhones and zoom in on your dark brown fur, your sickle-shaped horns, and your mud-caked hooves while you chew the cud, and then they walk away speedily, summoned by the specter of another animal.
There are six of you in Animal Kingdom, in the section called “Asia,” and I joke to my American friends that I am home. I haven’t been in the Philippines for five years, which means I haven’t seen you in five years. I last saw you in the province of Cagayan, where my cousins and I spent summers being pulled on a cart by a water buffalo down to the river. Our aunts washed our clothes on the riverbank and dried them on the rocks while we cupped our hands in the water to catch the tadpoles, to let the currents take them away until they disappeared into the horizon. You heard our laughter then, the innocence of early life, before departure after departure, before death after death in the depths of the forest behind our house.
Seventy percent of all water buffaloes in the Philippines were killed during the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945. My grandfather escaped from Japanese soldiers during World War II because he told them he was going to feed his water buffalo. He ran to the mountains without looking back, in fear, not of turning into salt but of seeing the limits of his ability to protect. He crossed the Cagayan River and found his mother a town over. He died before I could ask if he found his water buffalo, ask if he is reminded of the losses he cannot tend to, ask if he lays aside the grief to sleep at night. The beast of a different economy is worth much but not worth saving.
These domesticated ferals plowed the fields that fed corn and rice to generations of my family through drought and monsoon, through war and open artillery. They were a capital asset, working from dusk until dawn for the families that owned them. In Wisconsin, my mother tells her co-worker with pride that she works as hard as a water buffalo. Her co-worker tells her she doesn’t know what it means. Her co-worker has never seen one before.
When I tell my mother I miss home and want to live in the barrio with the water buffalos, she asks why I keep wanting to go back to the imaginary home of her past. There is nothing to do and no one to return to. Everyone has either died or left. The house sits empty with memory. Silence haunts the concrete floors. In Disney, the water buffalos are all female and cannot give birth. You lay asleep in a makeshift home and wait twenty years for a slow cessation, unable to leave the haunt of ancestry pulling you back to Asia.
In Orlando, the palm trees die overhead. The tips of the leaves wilt dry, and I cry while imagining an American burial for you, born of similar archipelagos, both of us caught in the crossfire of consumption, objects of displacement, creatures with temperate comforts.
You will know oblivion on borrowed land and breathe your last with duck feathers floating on the pond next to you, swirling as the wind blows a cool breeze over the Floridian marsh. The kids will still love you. The grandmas will still love you. But our end finalizes our untetheredness to home. I am reminded of it in your animal presence, how I can return home to never arrive. I wipe from my face the arbitrary tears of a former life, and when you stare back with eyes black and glassy, I know you are reaching across the distance.
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Artwork by Round Icons
