It must have been my 18-year-old ‘fuck it’ attitude that made me say yes to meeting my estranged grandfather for the first time in the Philippines.
My father had flown over a few weeks earlier to meet with his beloved Lola, while I was preparing for my Year 12 exams.
I’d settled on becoming a writer because I didn't want to do a trade. I wanted to shake up the system and be something different.
Without my father present, the rules were a little looser. No authority figure was around to keep me from taking a swig of whisky before ‘studying’, because that's what good writers do.
A 14-hour flight later, I got off the plane clutching Sartre like the performative poser I was. In an instant, I'd forgotten who the fuck I was performing for when the humidity swallowed me whole, melting polyester to my skin.
I was damn near sprinting to the air-conditioned car, where my father and another man were waiting. I later found out the man was his half-brother – my half-uncle. My grandfather had set up franchises across multiple marriages, and this man was his son from one of them.
‘We gotta stop by duty-free, grab some Blue Label.’
You know that smooth-tasting whisky that’s $300 a bottle? Tax-free gets it down to $265, but I wasn't complaining.
On the way to the swanky hotel, pops informed me of the drive we had ahead of us in the coming days.
Manila to Vigan City. Six hours. In this heat.
Fuck me.
He also told me he’d met his other half-siblings – the rest of my grandfather’s ‘franchisees’ – on Facebook, where they formed an unexpected kinship.
We settled in for the evening and had drinks with his half-brother and half-sister in the hotel's polished lobby. My uncle handed the waiter our bottles, and I sat looking up at the ceiling while these long-lost relatives caught up.
We sipped generously poured doubles of whisky. The siblings asked me what I was going to study, and I told them.
‘Writing. You know, books and so on.’
‘Ahhh, smart boy.’
The whisky kept coming, and I tried to keep up. Big mistake.
