The City Come-of-Age

Amber B. Garma

2018

On the night the first supermall opened in the city I’ve lived in for ten years, our car got stuck in traffic on the way home for the first time. Along the roads, families mounted atop old pick-up trucks, men pulled out plastic chairs and soft drinks, and mothers struggled with their toddler’s hats. Why is all of Cabanatuan out tonight? I wondered, just as the fireworks began to splash across the sky, and spots of color fell down to the rice fields below. There was something strange about the way Cabanatuan looked on — not in awe or applause, but in silent satisfaction, as if to say it’s about time. When the show was over, everybody packed up and drove off in their tricycles and 4x4s. SM Cabanatuan. It was the city come-of-age, the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

I was six years old when my family left Manila, the Philippine capital, to live in Cabanatuan, a small, land-locked city in the province of Nueva Ecija. Before we moved, my parents would scare me about ‘life in the province’, saying there would be no air conditioning, and all we’d eat were rice and vegetables from the farmlands. They didn’t call Nueva Ecija the ‘Rice Capital of the Philippines’ for nothing. This only added to my initial apprehensions about bidding farewell to Manila and everything that made it my city — the private school I went to, the Eastwood playground, my sister’s ballet classes in MegaMall and the ice cream I would eat while waiting for her, and the two hour drives from Valenzuela to QC where our family of five would get dropped off one by one along Commonwealth Avenue. When we finally arrived in Cabanatuan, there was a two-floor building with a few shops inside that everyone called a mall, even if it wasn’t. In my new grade school, I got introduced as the ‘girl from Manila’. I didn’t know the Tagalog of anything. I didn’t buy snacks from the school canteen. And it was hot, all the time. Living in Cabanatuan had been a constant longing to get out of it.

My ticket out of Cabanatuan was an acceptance into an exclusive arts boarding school in Laguna. I would spend the next four years of my life a whole six hours away from Cabanatuan, even farther away than Manila’s four hours. I would see my new hometown in 48-hour windows, even then distracted by poetry deadlines and last-minute packing for the week ahead. As I sat awake on the bus rides back to school, I would think about how I hadn’t quite gotten rid of Cabanatuan, and I likely never would. I met with the city the same way I would run into an elementary school classmate at the newly opened multi-storey building (still not a mall). I know who you are, I know all the gossip about you, I’ve eaten at your lone pizza restaurant, I’ve watched a movie in your cinema. But we will never get past a hello and a goodbye.

Today, I live in Manila again, finishing up my last two years of high school at a private university. The same city I loved as a child, I detest as an adult. I’ve changed a lot, my personhood forged by four years on a mountain and two years in a concrete jungle. But nothing has changed more than Cabanatuan. There’s always something new popping up in my good old hometown — a shopping center here, a food stall complex there, oh, and a supermall, too — with a Uniqlo and a Starbucks. In the post-SM era, a new phenomenon called ‘traffic’ emerged. The fireworks displays are quarterly. There are whispered plans to make the neighboring municipalities part of Cabanatuan too, with the original city earning the title of “Metro Cabanatuan”. There’s an S&R on the rise. It’s the most lethal weapon in my armory of responses to people who presume we still ride carabaos.

Maybe all cities are bound to live up to their name eventually, becoming city-cities, come of age through franchise chains’ market expansion plans and Manila’s fed-up deserters. But in the middle of the new phenomenon called traffic, I capture the rolling rice fields on a Snapchat video, feeling a twinge of pride about being the girl from the rice province, the only one in my class to have rice fields to go home to, still. Maybe I’ve come of age, too, enough to finally appreciate my hometown for what it used to be, even if my memories of the used-to-be are patchy and dampened by angst. I long for the dragonflies that were either there or not there, for the cool breeze that I’ve felt probably once at most. For a city’s past suddenly made beautiful by the despair of its future.

In 2024

At 22, I know a lot more about cities than I did at 16. I know that the best cities feel both new and old, and that some malls don’t need to be built. There’s a lot I can say about urbanism now, and more than enough city planning decisions to condemn, but I think about how: Marikina is my favorite city, and QC is where I belong, but Cabanatuan is my ‘hometown’ — the word they invented for the kinds of cities you will love and loathe no matter how old you are or who you end up becoming. Cabanatuan and I, so young, so unsure, so desperately hanging on to all of our selves, the old, the new, the dusty, the damp, the lonely, the lost, the spectacular.