Kindle Notes & Highlights
Hortensia hesitates before joining in, praying silently to her own God to rescue her from another unbearable night with her proselytizing mistress.
What she doesn’t know is that when most of the guests have gone home and only the older family members sit out on the candle-lit terrace reminiscing over coffee and cognac, I will say goodnight to all of them, including Pucha, and go to the little room behind the kitchen for a secret midnight feast with Lola Narcisa. We’ll eat with our hands: rice, lechon, kangkong adobo, and more leche flan.
OUR COUNTRY BELONGS TO women who easily shed tears and men who are ashamed to weep.
The moment Cora asks her first question, Daisy seizes the opportunity to publicly denounce the beauty pageant as a farce, a giant step backward for all women. She quotes her father and her mother, she goes on and on, she never gives the visibly horrified Cora a chance to respond. She accuses the First Lady of furthering the cause of female delusions in the Philippines. The segment is immediately blacked out by waiting censors.
I’ll admit, I can get off with some old man that way. I need my own movies, with their flexible endings. Otherwise, it’s just shit. Most sex is charity, on my part. I’d rather dance alone.
That’s what I imagine—she’s so high, she doesn’t even know she’s burning.
We Filipinos, we know how to endure, and we embrace the movies. With movies, everything is okay lang.
