nonfiction

It's easier to talk about the birds and the bees
by Carl Javier

I’m usually an articulate person. Sit me down and I could talk on and on for hours about movies, music, books, video games, or the various geek kingdoms that my thoughts inhabit. I’ve delivered a few papers at conferences and talks and though I still get butterflies in my stomach, I’m pretty comfortable with public speaking. Lather up my tongue with enough alcohol and you’ve got a fat chance of getting me to shut up. There’s just one situation that I don’t do too well.

I’m no good at talking to girls.

In a formal or professional setting, I’m alright. I can handle that. And female friends that I’ve gotten comfortable with, that’s a cinch. It’s just every other situation with girls or women that becomes problematic. I get nervous, I get tongue-tied, and if I like the girl, my brain usually turns to soup and I start mumbling or blathering about. It’s like those funny characters in romantic comedies who get dumb around the girls that they like, except that what’s endearing in romantic comedies isn’t exactly endearing in real life.

This has posed a problem as I’ve grown up and my life has changed. Like all families, mine has its problems, and recently I’ve had to become the positive male role model. Not a problem with my brother and me. We’ve got a five-year age gap, but we get along alright. We’d hang out, play video games, throw a football or frisbee around until he left for college studies in the United States.

What’s been tougher has been making a connection with my sister. She’s 11 and I’m 24; and however little I knew about girls of that age when I was eleven myself isn’t helping me. I’ll tell you, it’s been a lot of work trying to understand the things that she’s going through. I had my own problems during adolescence in coping with things happening around me, (it was in my adolescent years that my family moved back to the Philippines; I grew up in Los Angeles), and hers are a completely different set of problems to face.

I’ve been worrying about the time when I’ll have to talk to her about the birds and the bees. She’s in the fifth grade, and around that age, they started giving us Sex Education classes when I was in the States. Also, there has been an alarming amount of phone activity at our house, not a few of those calls made by boys who can’t seem to wait until their voices start cracking.

It turns out though, that we’ve already started the time of tough talks. I can’t help but feel that it’s too soon to be talking about the adult world, as if I’m the one shearing away at her childish innocence as I have to answer the questions she has.

One day we were walking down the street of the apartment we just moved into. Just down the street is a townhouse development called Flamingo Lane. It’s a pretty place with quaint homes and those realtor billbaords that make it look like a piece of paradise. She and her friends talk about buying a place there one day.

She asked me, “Kuya, why don't we live there?”

This line of inquiry continued to questions like, ‘Why don’t we have the money to buy a place like that?’ and on to, ‘Why are there rich and poor people?’

Though I graduated with a writing degree, I do have training in the social sciences, and I’ve done a lot of relevant writing and reading in those fields, especially political science. And yet, I could not explain the issue of social divide properly. Should I talk about the capitalist system? How in that system there would always be an exploited lower class? Should I tell her about the Ursula LeGuin short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” where there would always have to be someone who suffers for the greater good? Could it be as easy as saying, "Ganyan ang buhay, may mayaman, may mahirap"? But I knew that she deserved an answer. I just didn’t know what the answer was.

I considered saying some people work hard and others don’t. But that’s not true, because there are a lot of rich kids living fat off family money while there are factory workers busting their butts for minimum wage.

How do you break down all the social factors, all the contexts which would explain to an 11-year-old why there are poor people and rich people? And get her to appreciate all levels of that argument? Before the attention span elapses and they want to talk about something else, that is.

I told her there were different kinds of wealth. Her rich classmates tease her when she can’t afford the things that they can, when she shows up with second-hand uniforms and school supplies from last year.

I give her books. I tell her there are other things besides money, other ways to be a rich person. She does not understand this. But she wouldn’t have understood a sociological explanation of our economic situation either.

In either case she would have to work with something, decipher something which was beyond her realm of understanding. But I’d rather that she figure out what I meant by other ways to be rich. To enrich oneself. It’ll take years for it to sink in. I can only hope it does.

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