Orange you going to say Banana?

Along came February, and in some corner of my mind I dusted off the memory of a mystical, almost mythical, annual orange battle in some small Italian village about which I had previously heard bits and pieces whispered between young world travelers in hostel bunks or boasted over beer steins in some international pub. I hear that hundreds of people - no, thousands - gather from all over the world to throw oranges at each other, from atop buildings and from trees. They camp out for days waiting for it to start. Every year someone dies. In reality it occurs in part to celebrate Mardi Gras, and in part to honor the historical uprising of the common people against tyrannical nobles around the time of the French Revolution. Among other symbolic events that take place throughout the five days of Carnevale, the throwing of the oranges is supposedly intended to remember the Ivreans' "fight for liberty." The event even has a website, which explained the existence and history of the nine teams who actually compete for first place. When I realised that this event was in fact real, and safe, and extremely close to Torino, I decided to enlist the merry company of four friends to investigate.

Here we are, pre-battle.


We took a train up from Torino on Saturday night to check into our hostel and mosey around town before the evening's parade and ceremonies. Along the way we ran into a red-headed and freckled Italian youth named Boris who attempted to direct us toward a pizzeria but succeeded only in creeping us out of being hungry. Our hostel had once been Salesian monestary, and we shared it with a large group of elderly Scottish bagpipers who practiced on the sprawling outdoor lawn the pieces they would play in tomorrow morning's parade. We put our backpacks down in the room, chose bunks, and ran outside to listen to bagpipes in the dying afternoon sun. What a start to the weekend.

The orange battle was just part of a series of intensely awesome events, including a bean lunch that apparently originates from the Middle Ages when some noblewoman gave a handful of beans to some peasants. Over the years, that act of benificience evolved into ten or fifteen humongous vats of beans simmering overnight in an empty piazza that fills to the brim the next morning with people lining up for a deep bowl of bean stew, hunks of hearty bread, and tiny plastic cups of cold red wine. Yes, we ate beans and drank wine at 11am on a cold Sunday. Only in Italy, right?



There were parades, opening ceremonies involving the Miller's Daughter and her Entourage (better explained on the website), cotton candy, riverside fireworks, and more mulled wine than was good for me! And then, of course, the battle itself, which took place from 14,00-16,30 on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Horses pulled carts of helmeted team members into other teams' piazzas, where participants hurled oranges at each other with alarming ferocity while judges and spectators watched. The five of us had prime spots in the centralmost piazza for the start of the Battle and, aside from being thoroughly and continuously astonished at the overall event, I think the most memorable thing about it was that from the physical and botanical carnage rose the sharp yet delicate odor of oranges that - so one Ivrea resident tells me - stays in the city for nearly one month after the festivities have finished. Over the course of the Carnevale pedestrian traffic would mix the orange rinds and pulp into a disgusting paste with horse manure and other garbage, hence the boots you see in our group photo, but we didn't see the worst of it as we stayed only for the first day.

It was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. On one hand, ridiculous; but on the other, somewhat poignant as it's the singular reason for which this tiny village is known in Italy. The deep pride behind these labors was evident in the teams' posture, the musicians' step, the clipped prancing of the ponies, and the long complete silence in which thousands of Italians, young and old, and at least five Americans, turned their eyes heavenward to watch almost half an hours' worth of fireworks explode overhead.

In Which She Marvels at Circularity of Things

Things like the Universe. Sometimes it seems that there really is a plan, somewhere out there.
My host mom turned in shortly after dinner to rest up before tomorrow morning's drive to Tuscany for the long weekend; dad stayed up another hour to do some business stuff on the computer; R-- breathed deeply next to his yellow nightlight - covered in assorted stickers - probably dreaming about wild animals and the new Star Wars lego spaceship for whose assembly he abandoned tonight's dinner; and F-- clutched a brand new iPod, slim and black and already containing hundreds of American songs. I, however, stayed up way past my bedtime to watch Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino from the corner of our big red sofa, with a crafty art project on my lap and mug of tea at my feet, while the rest of the household slept. I really liked the song playing in the background of one of the final and most emotional scenes, and thought the piano sounded oddly familiar. And the voice... sounded like... Jamie Cullum? Then I remembered my last night at Midem conference in Cannes in mid-January, defying sleep and high heel blisters to walk into the center to see one of my favorite musicians play a measly five song set in a small standing-only venue. He introduced the penultimate song with an anecdote about Clint Eastwood, claiming that he'd never performed the song live before, this song requested by Mr Eastwood for his upcoming film. I mentally waved off the introduction and assumed I'd never see the movie; and even if I did, I wouldn't remember to connect this song to that film.



Yet almost exactly one month later, I realised that the song pulling my focus away from the drawing in my lap and even from the actors on the screen, was that very song! The song that Jamie Cullum debuted to me and my dad and a roomful of strangers in some upstairs room on the French coast. Is there such thing as chance? Through my mind raced a bit of a book I'd finished earlier this week, Jeannette Wall's memoir The Glass Castle: If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator. I have run into corroborating evidence for this pattern so many times now that I'm no longer surprised, only deeply pleased and slightly amused. Like how all those years of Catholic mass made it possible for me to attend an all-Tagalog Sunday mass and follow the entire service; like how the Peggy Guggenhaim exhibit I stumbled into months ago came up in a conversation with someone I've never met before, rendering me more widely cultured than I would have appeared. Like how learning the etymology of the word assassin from a seemingly mundane Ital-Eng language exchange sparked a new conversation with a different person from which I learned about an ancient Persian population that came and went leaving almost no trace. Like how taking a wrong turn not only kept me from getting lost the second time, but made it possible to give someone else directions. Like buying those ill-fitting boots in November gave me something to bring to Ivrea tomorrow, with which to wade through the orange muck in one of the weirdest small town events I've ever heard about.

Nothing is ever, ever random. Kepp your eyes open at all times - it is all useful.

Valentine's Day isn't so big here.

But on this particular lover's day,

I

woke up early
delivered a ton of flowers
ate chocolate
gossiped in the back of the flowershop

about the locals.


made some money
spent some money

got buzzed with a good friend
drank wine and ate delicious bread
talked about our Biggest Loves and Biggest Heartbreaks

and realised that, in both cases, they were the same person.


started the evening at the theatre to hear Torino's symphony
ended it walking home at 4am

from Peruvian Night at an Italian disco.

Harvey Milk - Hope (Recurring Theme)

I just saw "Milk" in one of the downtown cinemas, and am so incredibly proud to be from the San Francisco Bay Area. I can't wait to come home.

Titles (Erroneously) Suggest Cohesion

...and this blog entry has none. I have so much to report, but in these days have given myself much less time in which to say it. I'll try to at least break it up into paragraphs.

This was a busy morning: woke up, morning duties with the boys, walked to the market for fresh fish and bread, walked to the gym for a "tone-up" class with ex-ballerina Giorgia (she's a beast) (I hurt), then high-tailed it downtown to see a Goya exhibit with a friend. Then I read a book while walking home, and checked email while I ate lunch. All that before 13,00! Lately I've noticed a sort of frenzied need to do do do everything before-- before what? Before I leave Italy, I guess; before I grow up and have to pay bills and don't get to do things that I like, take side streets, look at the sky and strike up long conversations with strangers. My mom just forwarded me an article from UC Berkeley News titled "Pressure to Be A Supergirl Causing Teen Mental Health Crisis" that makes socioeconomic sense of this weird pressure I can't seem to name, the way I've been wearing myself out for no real reason (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/10_triplebind.shtml). In the article it's referred to as "the culture of "busy-ness" that surrounds teens," and goes along with "the stress of homework and sleep deprivation; the ever-increasing sexual objectification of young females; today's relentless cyberculture; and how genes and environmental pressures are combining forces to compound a teen mental health crisis." Dang. We have a lot to deal with. And even though he's talking about American teenagers, I've managed to bring this busy-ness with me into my 20s, and to Europe. It has manifested itself into a string of multitasks (like reading/eating, exercising/watching a movie, getting a coffee/writing) that leave me exhausted at the end of the day. Even in Italy, even with all the free time I technically have, I can't seem to slow myself down enough to start, finish, and enjoy, one task at a time without feeling an incredible guilt that I'm not doing enough. Author Hinshaw advises girls to "focus less on themselves by finding a wider sense of purpose," and "urges parents and schools to promote self-discovery" over achievement. This is brilliant: FIND A WIDER SENSE OF PURPOSE! I will try to focus less on myself. Hmm... that sounds like a contradictory statement...

I'm taking it easy right now, anyhow, curled in a blanket on the couch, laptop propped up against my knees, and will probably nap when I finish this. The other morning our cleaning woman said that I've taken a great opportunity to just grab at everything I can, take all that life has to offer me at this moment, and that was nice. To get some unbiased validation for this strange year I've given myself, doing a non-traditional job that I don't plan to apply to a career; living with a family that isn't teaching me to speak Italian, in an Italian city wholly unlike the one I fell in love with; losing my personality in a culture and class made up of privileged consumers. I often wonder where the benefits are, here. How exactly this is all helping me grow. Maybe it was the movie trailer for Benjamin Button that said something like, "Life can only be understood backward; but first it needs to be lived forward." I guess I'm just trying to live it forward.

Anyway. Some things that have happened lately. This weekend I went to a friend of A--'s (my host dad) to watch the first of six professional rugby games that make up the Six Nations tournament with three Italian dads. They explained the rules to me, in Italian, and I watched the game with great interest. I watched them watch the game with even greater interest. Since my host dad is crazy for weird organic foods, we brought over a biological fruit tartlet which we then ate with biscuits and tea while England completely dominated Italy. That was fun.

I went to the Filipino church on Sunday, for the first time since I've come to Turin. Silly Lauren - I should have gone a long time ago. I walked to the church, about 20 minutes from my house, and noticed that the number of Filipinos on the sidewalk increased exponentionally with my proximity to the church, until I entered the courtyard and found myself surrounded! Mothers pushing strollers, grandmas pinching cheeks, kids running through the adults, cell-phoned teenagers in twos and threes, the elderly men standing nobly on the periphery with hands clasped behind their backs. Lots of laughing; lots of Tagalog. I didn't even know how to feel. They all looked like Grandma. The priest was an Italian man, but the service (which started late, further supporting the notion that there is, in fact, such a thing as "Filipino Time") was completely in Tagalog. Except for the sermon, that is, which was delivered in a combination of Tagalog, English and Italian. Not like he said one piece and translated it into two other languages, but he spoke continuously in all three. I was amazed to see that most everyone appeared unfazed, and able to understand the discourse in all three languages. How adaptable they are, I marvelled, to absorb so much of this other culture without losing their own.

I was in a position I've never been in before, the only white person among hundreds of Filipinos. Other than the priest, and one tall man I saw across the church, that is. Probably someone's husband. It was slightly uncomfortable, as I felt very foreign and very clueless (more so, surprisingly, than I often do in and around Turin), but I plan to introduce myself to some people when I go back next week. Maybe I'll have learned more words by then. So far, my Tagalog word bank includes "How are you?," "Happy Birthday," "I love you," "peace," and "beautiful girl." I've been Filipino for 23 years and that's all I've got.

Have also been doing weekly English sessions with an anthropology grad student, focused mainly on her work to promote tolerance of Roma (gypsy) children in the European classroom through a thorough education and debriefing of the educators themselves on Roma history. Giorgia's level of English is about at the same as mine in Italian, though her vocabulary is a bit more scholarly, and the 90 minutes I spend in her apartment each week - usually drinking Japanese tea, and listening to flamenco guitar - is a true delight. The more I learn about the widespread oppression of and prejudice against Roma children, the more it resembles that of African-Americans before the Civil Rights Movement. There are all kinds of stereotypes of "gypsies" as being lazy, shifty, and stupid, nearly all stemming from the 'otherness' imposed upon them by the majority (in our case, Italian) population; and these stereotypes are perpetuated in the classroom, which largely functions as a microcosm of the larger society. This week we talked about my experience at the Filipino church, and when the topic of language came up she told me some very fascinating things about cognitive linguistics and the difficulties that arise for children who don't fully learn their parents' mother tongue, when it comes time to learn a second language. It made me wonder how my dad and his brothers not only learned English so well, but went on to college and law school with parents who didn't speak English correctly. That's something I've never slowed down to think about... not only within my family, but in ESL communities everywhere. Americans have it so friggin' easy; we can find English most anywhere we go. But think about all the people who have gone out of their ways to learn our language. Most Europeans are not bi-, but trilingual by the time they reach high school.

There are so many things running through my head these days, that I can't fit it all into the hours I have.

The kids are growing, changing, every day. The youngest has completed his first "semester" of school! He can read and write and do basic math, though hasn't yet figured out how to tie his shoes or like vegetables. The oldest sometimes rages or cries for inexplicable reasons - we assume it's hormones? - and loves it when I serenade him to sleep with my guitar. I think he's attempted a couple of sly boob grabs this week, out of curiosity. Both continue to be picky eaters, favoring chocolate over everything else. Lately we've been playing a lot of "I Spy" from the bus, in an attempt to get them to practice English in fun ways. We have already begun to talk about things in terms of Before and After Lauren Goes Away, which makes me sad. On Saturday, I cried watching their swimming lessons, because I know that I will never love two little rascals the same way I love these.

What else can I tell you all? What have you been missing lately? The weather is getting nicer here, though still chilly in the shade. My hair is still short. I bite my nails like I always have. The heartache and homeache that coloured the months before Christmas seems to have lifted, and I find myself trying to remember what it means to relax (like I did when I first arrived). I'm currently reading "The Glass Castle," a memoir; "Il Buoi e Il Miele," the novel upon which the screenplay for "Scent of a Woman" is based; and "Ill Cammino dell'Uomo," still. Daydream about going to the Philippines in 2010, going to Croatia and/or Tuscany in July, and how and when I will stumble onto the great loves of my life.

This weekend I will go to help the florist with some deliveries for Valentine's Day, then there's a lot of special outdoor performances going on around town into the evening. Next weekend I'll go to Ivrea for the annual Orange Battle. Stay tuned for photographs!

More about the Philippines

Sometime before Christmas, I had a conversation over FacebookChat with one of my good friends from high school, concerning our respective heritages. She's an American Jew who has been to Israel not once, but twice, and seems to know a lot about her family and her people. I, on the other hand, reflected on what I know about my grandparents' homeland, and came up almost empty handed. Originally settled by the Spanish, I think? Comprised of more than 7 thousand islands (I remember tracing a map of the archipelago for a Multicultural Day presentation I did in third grade), with as many dialects. Main crop: rice. And... my info stops there. When I told her that I wanted to know more, to go to the Philippines and get in touch with my roots, she half-jokingly suggested that I write a short report about the Philippines and send it to her in Colorado. "I expect one to two pages about your history, in one month!," she had said. I said, "Okay. I think you're kidding, but I'm going to do it for real." A small, personal research. I can begin at any time, right? I don't have to go all the way to the Philippines to start to know myself.

Well, one month turned into two months, but in the end I wrote up a little something. It didn't come only from Wikipedia, but a handful of travel sites, personal blogs, news articles. From just a few hundred words I learned a lot that I didn't know before, and now I'm even more fascinated by my ancestors than I already was. Check it out:

The Philippines
A Report by Lauren Aczon
3 January 2009

The second smallest one in the front row is Clotilde Albano; my grandma. This was likely taken in the mid-1920s. Click on it to see it up close.

Comprised of 7,017 islands, The Philippines are located in Southeast Asia. The archipelago lies between Thailand and Borneo, some 800 kilometers from the Asia mainland. When filling out official forms I have been mistaken to check the "Pacific Islander" box, for although they border the Pacific Ocean, the islands aren't actually located within the three areas of Oceania that technically make up the Pacific Islands. The name Philippines comes from Spanish explorer Ruy Lòpez de Villabos, who named them Las Islas Filipinas in honor of the 16th century prince of Spain, Philip II. (The name itself derives from the Greek philos (beloved) and hippos (horse). Interesting.) The capital is Manila. The president of the constitutional republic is Gloria Macagapal-Arroyo, who is currently working to develop the modern technological infrastructure of its main cities. According to the latest census in 2000, there are around 76.5 million Filipinos. Luzon, the main island group, accounts for more than half of the entire population; other main island groups are Visayas and Mindanao.

But this is all Now. We want some History.

The history of the Philippines bears Asian, European and American influence. Prior to Spanish colonisation in 1521, the Filipinos had already established strong trade relationships with China and Japan. My family's region, found at the northernmost tip of the country and divided into Ilocos North and Ilocos South, was famous for its gold mines, and exchanged this gold for beads, ceramics and silk. Spain's presence in the early 1500s brought about the construction of Intramuros, a "Walled City" comprised of European buildings and churches which was then replicated throughout the country. After 350 years and 300 rebellions, the Filipino people finally won their independence in 1898... but not for long.

In the same year, it became the first and only colony of the United States. (!!!!) Following the Philippine-American War* the U.S. brought widespread education to the Islands. Most standardised education is taught in English, even today. The two countries fought side by side in the Second World War, particularly at the famous battles of Bataan and Corregidor which delayed Japanese advance and virtually saved Australia. Among the ranks was my father's father, Benjamin Aczon, was in the United States Navy. The Filipinos waged a guerilla war against the Japanese from 1941-1945, an effort that - as far as we know - left the majority of the village's women and children at the mercy of the occupying Japanese military as the able Filipino men retreated to neighboring hills to train. It was subsequently after this guerilla war period that my grandmother left the Islands in 1945, never to return. I don't remember her ever talking to us about what happened in the years before she left.

* (1899-1913) The Philippine-American War arose from the first republic's struggle against U.S. annexation. The first portion of this war, from 1899 to 1902, was an armed military conflict that is also known as the Philippine Insurrection. Over 1 million Filipino civilians perished.


The Philippines regained their independence in 1946.

Travel sites describe the country as festive and welcoming. "The Filipinos are a freedom-loving people," says one, "having waged two peaceful, bloodless revolutions against what were perceived as corrupt regimes." One of those was that of President Ferdinand Marcos whose regime was often compared to Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler. After embezzling millions of dollars of public funds to the United States, he was removed from power by the Filipino people on February 25th, 1986 -- the day that I was born.

The End.


Or rather, a beginning.

Filipinos in Italy

In Italy, a quick errand easily becomes a thirty-five minute discussion over the cash register, purchases set aside to wait patiently in their shopping bags. My errand was to pick up a pair of shoes from the store I'd visited earlier that morning; after walking around for a couple of hours, trying on several pairs and considering the seasonal sales versus my minimal income, I came back to the first pair I had tried on. They had been set aside, I had exact change, it should have taken ten minutes... but the Italian tendency towards long-winded political discourse triumphed once again over my agenda, though in a surprisingly relevant way: Filipinos in Italy, and what's it's like to be a "stranger" here in Torino.

The guy who retrieves my shoes from the back of the store is a cheerful young man who introduces himself as Marvin. Mar-bin, with the accent. After meeting so many Filipino nannies in the garden this summer, I've come to recognize Filipino-Italian when I hear it, but I ask just to be sure. "Sei Filipino? Are you Filipino?" When I tell him that I'm a half-Filipino from San Francisco, he switches from Italian to English and we chat about his family, his situation: he is 24 and has been working in this very shoe store for seven years - since he was 17! It's been here for forty years, he informs me proudly, and is one of the best stores in the city. It's beautiful, I agree, with a glance around the brightly lit mahogany interior and admiring its carpeted floors with new interest. Marvin is here with his whole family, who moved here to Turin from a small village two hours south of Manila. "When is the last time you visited the Pilipines?," he asks. (I've noticed that native Filipinos always ask, "When is the last time," not "Have you ever?") Never, I tell him, disappointed in myself. I explain that my grandparents came over in the 40s and didn't want any of us to visit while they were alive. He encourages me to go, says it's so beautiful and everyone is so friendly. I ask him if he likes it here, and he says with a smile, "Oh, yes! This is a great job. I'm sorry to lose my English, though, since I speak mostly Italian here." He speaks Tagalog with his family at home. "I learned Italian in just a few weeks when I first started. You know us Filipinos: we're adaptable. We can go anywhere, live anywhere where there's work." And bring the whole family!

I like that: being reminded that my flexibility, adaptability, can be attributed to an entire people. My grandparents sure did it when they took the long ship voyage from the Islands. Maybe I'm doing it now. We Filipinos are adaptable, always have been; finding love, contentment, and home wherever we can be of use.

Working my way toward the cashier, one of the two older women also working in the store chime in, in Italian: How nice to be from America! (My friend was with me.) We do the usual schpiel, we're from California, here to be nannies, just finished school, graduated in blah blah from blah blah, looking for an experience. Yes, Turin is nice; yes, our families are nice. No, not yet fluent in Italian - but we're comfortable in conversation. Then she comes back to my and Marvin's talk, You know, I'm not from Turin, either. I'm actually French. And you girls are lucky now that you can live here-- well, of course it's different for Americans. She grew up on the Cote d'Azur, France, and went to Africa after university. There she met the man who would become her husband, a Piedmontese who then brought her to live here in Turin. The beginning was hard, she tells us, arching her eyebrows but keeping her voice even, the way that many women do when talking about hurts they put away a long time ago. The neighbors called me Signora Straniera, Mrs. Stranger (Foreigner), for months after I arrived. Not by my husbands name, but by the fact that I wasn't from Piedmont! It was rude, really hard. I told him that I didn't like it and asked him why they didn't just call me his wife. Why he didn't speak up for me. He just said, "I piedmontesi sono così. That's just how people are here." Aubrey and I are quiet, sympathetic. She takes off her glasses, wipes them briskly. It's hard to discern any French in her Italian, but I know my ear is untrained. Anyway, now it's easier. It's not so strict - she is German, he is American, English - the world is more mixed. We are all everywhere. It's wonderful. The other saleswoman chimes in to ask about Obama, and we talk about his victory, about Michelle (who the Italians don't seem to like very much, for her outspokenness and, er, unconservative choice of Inauguration Day garb), the economic crisis, and the fact that the UK has already begun to manufacture doll versions of Obama's daughters.

Time flies, and I politely interrupt our chat to request that we ring up the shoes. I'll probably think about this Wednesday morning conversation every time I wear them. Marvin asks me to stop in whenever I pass by so he can practice his English, and I tell him he must teach me some Tagalog. He says a phrase in Tagalog, and one of the women laughs, What an impossible language! I could never learn it. As we walk out I hear him explaining to her, in Italian, that it's actually quite easy because, like Italian, it's pronounced the way it's written. I think about a quote I read in Chaim Potok's Book "The Chosen," about how each scholar must begin by understanding his own history, and how little I know about the Philippines. I wrote a report about it in third grade, back when Wikipedia didn't exist and I had to lug oversized atlases home from the Contra Costa County Civic Library to research my family's country. Then I remember this language program called "Tagalog On Site" that someone once told me about, and I look up the website when I get home. Despite the fact that their website doesn't seem to have been updated since 2006, I'm already beginning to imagine a new trip, perhaps for the summer of 2010:

http://www.tagalogonsite.org/tos_program.html

Hey! There are two Filipinos right there!