I am really serious on making this blog successful I had to ask my personal feng sui advisor on lucky dates for doing updates. Business owners do this before deciding to open up their businesses. Beggars on the streets use feng sui on choosing strategic places to beg (that's why you dont see beggars inside malls, that's feng sui actually) Besides, Kris Aquino's Feng Sui film made millions in theatres worldwide.

But before coming up with the dates the feng sui guy spent hours consulting old chinese texts which in my opinion were just old chinese calendars he would later wipe his ass with. My hair had grown three inches longer and still this century old chinese guy haven't yet found the lucky dates i have asked him to find. I was reading old text messages from poor people asking for pasaload when finally he spoke.

"Ikaw may Cha-neese blood?" He stared at me as if my face was smeared with
Chinese characters which bear the answer to the meaning of life.

"Of course I have Chinese blood. My grandmother was born in Shanghai in the 1930s
and moved to the Philippines after WWII with her Chinese
family. They brought a lot of lumpiang Shanghai and siomai and silk with them."

Of course my grandmother wasn't Chinese, she was half-Korean, half-alcoholic.
But i was so bored i had to lie.

"Pak ikaw not Cha-neese wala swer-te."

"Fine, just gimme the effin dates will you?"

As if I was pointing a gun at his Chinese head, the feng sui master quickly wrote down random numbers on the back of one of his calendars. I snatched it quckly from him.

"Thak-you-very-much-have-a-nice-day." I left a few coins on his table and walked out of his small office.

On my way to the door i saw old photographs of what I assumed as the Chinese guy's family - a young Chinese lady holding a small boy and a Chinese opera lady which as i child i thought was a fiercer Chinese version of a white lady.

When i was still a little child I had a playmate I exclusively called Ann-ann who used to live in a huge house next door to our rented house in Baguio. Ann-ann's family was Chinese, her parents used to own a small restaurant in Session Road which is now turned to an ukay shop. And oh boy, I envied her for being chinky eyed and for being a million papaya soaps whiter than me (i was a dark kid) so much that i festered my mother with a lot of how-come-im-not-Chinese questions. To shut me up, my mother told me about Ann-ann's family secrets (which i have recently learned were not true), how they killed and ate their cats and how they started serving feline siopaos at their restaurant. I was about to open my mouth to yawn when my mother, thinking that i was about to say something, left the room faster than the speed of light.
But still I grew up wanting to be Chinese. When I was in highschool, i had a classmate who was half-Chinese and i kind of had a crush on her. It's not that i wanted her to become my girlfriend or my future wife or anything, I just liked her for being chinita, and for owning the best-looking, moisture-rich pimple-free skin an adolescent could ever wish for. Her skin was so moisturized you'd see her uniform dripping with moisture. I remember getting excited the day after Chinese New Year to go to school and get details on How Chinoys Celebrate Chinese New Year in the Philippines from this girl. Dying to know how her family celebrated that year, on my way to school I wrote down carefully chosen questions to ask her like, "Did they have too much fireworks that night his Chinese grandfather instantly died from a heart attack?" or "Did they have soo much food in their dinner table one of his family members died?" Unfortunately i wasn't able to ask her any of these questions because she skipped school that day. Her seatmate told me that she was in the hospital and was fighting for her life due to food-poisoning.

In college I have secretly admired F4. I liked them so much I have written Jerry Yan's name in my heart with invisible ink and would often speak to imaginary F4 members in my room everyday telling them stories about school, in, of course, Mandarin (although i was a language major, my department did not offer Mandarin in our elective classes so all i did was to speak softly, barely audible to Vaness Wu and just clench my jaw to produce Mandarin-like sounds).

I have no idea how my chinese obsession ended. I have had other obsessions like an obsession with the expression, "Kumusta naman?" (which i could be explaining in the next few posts) and just like my-wanting-to-become-Chinese-so-much obsession, they all faded away from my psyche subconsciously. The only Chinese thing that has made the hugest impact in my life is a red book (from a big eyed friend who visited Shanghai years ago) which has the words of a great Chinese man who said:

"...Yaong nadarama ay hindi kaagad-agad mauunawaan, at yaon lamang nauunawaan ang higit na malalim na nadarama."