Oral History

I believe the person I can interview an oral history interview is my mother, who is the only person close to me who knows much in the country of the Philippines. For my father, he is not available for the moment. From what I know, I will certainly ask about religion, since it is a major part that almost all Filipinos treasure seriously because of Spanish dominance centuries ago. My mom would also tell me folklore stories about mythical creatures and anything supernatural, and most of them are scary, so I believe it’s a decent topic to add. Also, I will try asking how in her past times is so much different than it seems now, because back then I only knew that she used to be in a rural environment and worked as a farmer though was poor. And maybe the many traditions that lived on through the ages. I will try to find out how Philippines was affected by World War 2 since Imperial Japan used to invade the country. I will try and see to reach my father to see his perspective. I will probably use an audio recording for the oral history assignment with my own voice.

Oral History Transcript

Me: “Mom? Can I ask you a question? What was life back then in the Philippines when you were a child? Like how you lived, what society was like, and the environment?”

Mom: “When I was child, we were very poor. We were four siblings. My mom was the only one that worked for us but had no stable job. She just worked and harvested in the cornfield and did the laundry but there was no washing machine. There was no radio, no telephone, no electricity, no TV, we had nothing. There were radios but only the middle class could afford them. We also had no running water except we just fetch water from the river using a water wheel. We would use it for cooking.”

Me: “So does that mean life was terrible for you?”

Mom: “Yes! It was terrible! Your uncle Richard, who was 7 to 8 months old at the time, I was the one who had to take care of him. I was in grade 2 at the time but my mom would tell me to stop going to school because nobody would watch him except me, who was our youngest while my mom would harvest the corn and rice.”

Me: “Were you happy with your life despite it being hard sometimes?”

Mom: “When I was young, I didn’t feel the hardship until I was 7. My mom was teaching me to cook rice, but I was terrible at it, so sometimes it was not pleasant. I was still happy with my family though.”

Me: “What kind of food did you eat?”

Mom: “If we had the money, we would go buy some meat and fish. But if we had no money, we would have no choice but to eat rice with water and salt. Sometimes we would eat nothing at all. So my mom made a garden so we could grow plants and make food from them.”

Me: “Did you play any games?”

Mom: “No, nothing. No games. There were toys but we didn’t have enough money to afford them. The rich would only have something like that. The first time I saw rich children playing with toys that surprised me was a toy helicopter that could fly. I would stand by and see what they were doing, and I’d get jealous because me and my playmates also wanted to play with them, but we couldn’t because they had a housemaid that wouldn’t allow us to do that. So, all we could do was watch.

Me: “What about animals? Did you own any?”

Mom: “Yeah! We had dogs and cats and I’d play with them a lot.”

Me: “What about farm animals?”

Mom: “We had pigs, chicken, goats, but we didn’t have carabaos, which was a type of buffalo because they were expensive to buy.”

Me: “How about society? What was it like?”

Mom: “We were ignorant. We didn’t want to meet educated people who seemed higher than us. We were scared to face them, and we’d hide from them.”

Me: “Then what about the government? Was it good or bad?”

Mom: “The government was very poor. The currency at that time was different than now. 5 pesos was very big for us and the salary in jobs was 2 pesos for 8 hours. 100 pesos used to be an amount that we thought was really high.”

Me: “What was your impression when you first came to America?”

Mom: “Oh, I was really expecting America to really have high technology, because when I saw a movie of James Bond, the ground would open and come out like an elevator, but I realized it wasn’t like that. Somebody even told your dad that, ‘if you’re in America and going to school there, the machine would bring your things and you wouldn’t have to carry it yourself,’ but it wasn’t true also.”

Me: “So you were disappointed?”

Mom: “Yeah. But for the environment, it was so different compared to the Philippines. The streets were clean, but it wasn’t as populated. In Manila there would be a few million people there but there were so many areas that were so dirty and filthy. We’d called them a Squatters’ Area. But here, I knew America was rich because they’d help the poor and it was totally developed.”

Me: “Okay, thank you, mom, for answering my questions. That would be all.”

When I wrote my essay on how this reflected me, I think it made me surprised to make me feel a little sucessful because I was able to learn these new strategies, terms, and themes or lessons. Throughout the class, having to read and analyze has educated me to become a better writer which I was hoping for. I didn’t think one of the things that also helped me for what I was looking was simply having to search some scholarly sources to look into more information on a topic or see across from a wider range of audiences to know what their thinking is, meaning I would simply have little trouble when it comes to making some kind of review. Honestly, as someone who wants to write a better novel someday, this class has helped me just a little more because now the strategies taught to me can be put to better use. I don’t think I can express a better way to be grateful.

The time when I fully acknowledged the concept of the world of language as my inspiration and part of my life was somewhere during my time in middle school. Before that happened, I was not so interested. I thought books to be meaningless as my first impression. Like what would a compact load of words gathered in a page benefit me? How does it entertain me? Words are just words. I used to have that mindset a long time ago as I thought reading didn’t seem to be important to me nor it will contribute to my future.

So, throughout my years of education in school, I had to pretend to read to meet the expectations of teachers and for my grades that I didn’t deserve to earn. Years later, I had this nihility inside me, that I was so very bored. Anything that entertained me didn’t fulfill my satisfaction or expectations. It was when I decided, with aimless direction, to grab a grab a book from one of the school shelves and read it seriously for the first time. I forgot what book I read since it was school property and that I don’t own it, but the first few pages have already delved into my interests. The more I read, the more I became invested. The more I became invested, the more I realized how wrong I was all along. Every word between the lines had meaning. For every word, images manifest in my mind, but more like a scene playing in real time as I read on. It was almost like the book came alive except everything only happened in my head. Not only that, but I also felt like I had a deep relationship with the author, who had written it with passion, skill, and the knowledge who seems to have experienced almost everything in the world, as if I understood at first glance their purpose and the messages that they wanted readers like me to know.

To this day, reading has become an important part of my life and played a role in my perspective of seeing the world around me. I was ashamed of myself for not reading something so entertaining sooner, otherwise I would have not lit a spark of open-mindedness and I might have stayed ignorant my whole life not knowing the joy. But I was also grateful because it has helped me so much with my grammar to be a lot better when I needed to be erudite at times, like written essays or when I had to help my parents communicate with other people. After my life-changing encounter, I have read a lot of books, but mostly online for free since they are more tangible and convenient. For every book I read, the knowledge that I have accumulated expanded my mind so much at almost a universal level. It was as if I understood everything about the world. Like feelings, human behavior, the meaning to live, and other abstract things that perhaps nobody thinks about every day. After knowing how much reading means a lot to me, it was about to be the same for writing. If writers write a book, then it would require a vast and vivid imagination, and experience to propel as knowledge and a message to readers.

I was inspired to take up on writing my own novel. But for time, it was hard. The only things I could at least succeed in were only short novels. If it were for longer ones, I would get stuck the longer I take writing it and eventually get lost because of doubts about my skills in writing. One short story I made that I thought to be great was a fanfiction story of Macbeth from William Shakespeare’s plays. Because of my confidence in what I’m capable of in mind when it comes to reading and writing, I took the initiative to enroll myself in English classes like Creative Writing in my high school and hoped I could learn something to improve my writing. One thing I remembered learning from it was something called an Epigraph which is like quotation that usually begins at the beginning in a piece of writing to give a reader an idea. And now that I’m learning another English today, I hope I can learn anything from it and someday prove myself and be proud of my own masterpiece of writing.

The time when I fully acknowledged the concept of the world of language as my inspiration and part of my life was somewhere during my time in middle school. Before that happened, I was not so interested. I thought books to be meaningless as my first impression. Like what would a compact load of words gathered in a page benefit me? How does it entertain me? Words are just words. I used to have that mindset a long time ago as I thought reading didn’t seem to be important to me nor it will contribute to my future.

So, throughout my years of education in school, I had to pretend to read to meet the expectations of teachers and for my grades that I didn’t deserve to earn. Years later, I had this nihility inside me, that I was so very bored. Anything that entertained me didn’t fulfill my satisfaction or expectations. It was when I decided, with aimless direction, to grab a grab a book from one of the school shelves and read it seriously for the first time. I forgot what book I read since it was school property and that I don’t own it, but the first few pages have already delved into my interests. The more I read, the more I became invested. The more I became invested, the more I realized how wrong I was all along. Every word between the lines had meaning. For every word, images manifest in my mind, but more like a scene playing in real time as I read on. It was almost like the book came alive except everything only happened in my head. Not only that, but I also felt like I had a deep relationship with the author, who had written it with passion, skill, and the knowledge who seems to have experienced almost everything in the world, as if I understood at first glance their purpose and the messages that they wanted readers like me to know.

To this day, reading has become an important part of my life and played a role in my perspective of seeing the world around me. I was ashamed of myself for not reading something so entertaining sooner, otherwise I would have not lit a spark of open-mindedness and I might have stayed ignorant my whole life not knowing the joy. But I was also grateful because it has helped me so much with my grammar to be a lot better when I needed to be erudite at times, like written essays or when I had to help my parents communicate with other people. After my life-changing encounter, I have read a lot of books, but mostly online for free since they are more tangible and convenient. For every book I read, the knowledge that I have accumulated expanded my mind so much at almost a universal level. It was as if I understood everything about the world. Like feelings, human behavior, the meaning to live, and other abstract things that perhaps nobody thinks about every day. After knowing how much reading means a lot to me, it was about to be the same for writing. If writers write a book, then it would require a vast and vivid imagination, and experience to propel as knowledge and a message to readers.

I was inspired to take up on writing my own novel. But for time, it was hard. The only things I could at least succeed in were only short novels. If it were for longer ones, I would get stuck the longer I take writing it and eventually get lost because of doubts about my skills in writing. One short story I made that I thought to be great was a fanfiction story of Macbeth from William Shakespear’s plays. Because of my confidence in what I’m capable of in mind when it comes to reading and writing, I took the initiative to enroll myself in English classes like Creative Writing in my high school and hoped I could learn something to improve my writing. One thing I remembered learning from it was something called an Epigraph which is like quotation that usually begins at the beginning in a piece of writing to give a reader an idea. And now that I’m learning another English today, I hope I can learn anything from it and someday prove myself and be proud of my own masterpiece of writing.