By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
“HEY, this book is all about me and my sisters,” I thought, awe-stricken, after reading the first few chapters of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.”
Well, how could anybody miss the similarity in the names and temperament of the March sisters and my own siblings?
Meg, the eldest sister, is sweet and domesticated, exactly like my Ate who even took up cooking lessons to perfect her sans rival. Jo, that tomboyish and spirited budding writer, is definitely me, with my baptismal name Josefina, my love of books, the penchant for writing poetry in grade school, and the physical scrapes I always got into with my male cousins. Amy, the pretty and vain sister, is my third sibling, whose fair good looks became her main ID. Elizabeth March, the sickly sister, is my fourth sibling, whose severe asthma attacks kept her away from school most of the time. Why, they even have similar names!
I must have been in fourth grade when I made this astounding discovery that I had a fictional twin. Only, it didn’t feel fictional at that time. After all, this was a real book, a hardbound book with no pictures, only pages of text that marked it as serious reading. It was worlds away from the household staple, the komiks that defined our childhood. We read them all — Pilipino Komiks, Redondo, Kulafu, Aliwan, Tagalog Klasiks, Wakasan, and those vernacular magazines Liwayway and Bulaklak. These were my parents’ favorite reading fare, a comforting habit they took with them to the city where they fled to start life anew after the war. Of peasant stock, they had to stop schooling during the “Japanese time,” forced to a hardscrabble existence in the mountains of Central Luzon.
Starting over in Tondo in the 1950s wasn’t easy, but they had their trove of komiks to turn to after a hard day, where they would cozy up with Mars Ravelo’s Dyesebel and Darna and vicariously feel empowered as these characters fought off evil.
It was this fantastic world we reveled in as kids, so it was quite refreshing to find out that people didn’t need to have a fish tail or fly in a costume to have books written about them, that stories could be about ordinary folk and their everyday life and still sound interesting.
“Little Women” made it so. More magically the book told my story, or so I thought, and I made sure to hew closely to the novel’s storyline as the years went by. I guess that’s how I wound up as a writer.
For more books — life-changing, uplifting or plain entertaining — check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Summer Reading Issue this Sunday, March 30.
