Alex Maskara
Thoughts, Stories, Imagination of Filipino American Alex Maskara
Welcome
Four Students
~
The Long, Boring Monologue of Mod’s Dreams
When Sonny woke up, Jaime was gone. So was Rene.
In their place, taped to the wall above the study table, was a small sheet of bond paper with a message written in thick black marker:
THANKS A LOT, GUYS. —Jim
Sonny smiled, rolled onto his side, and hugged his pillow. The morning air was cool. The room, for once, was quiet—much quieter than the chaos of the night before. Still, something felt different.
The faint sour smell of Jaime’s vomit lingered in the air. The drawers that had been yanked open in last night’s commotion were now neatly closed. But it was the fourth bed that caught Sonny’s attention. Once empty, it now held a trunk, a bundle of clothes, pillows, blankets, and a cardboard box filled with novels—classic titles, their spines worn from use.
The fourth roommate had finally arrived.
Sonny felt a flicker of excitement. And a cautious hope.
Maybe this one would be better than the first two. Jaime and Rene were colorful, loud, volatile—too volatile. They carried tempers like loaded guns. Sonny had imagined college roommates who were serious, studious, perhaps even refined. So far, reality had disappointed him.
From the small kitchen area came the hard dragging sound of slippers across the cement floor.
The sound reminded him of Lola Sabel.
Back home, Lola Sabel rose before dawn every single day, determined to “beat” the sunrise. Her wooden clogs were worse than an alarm clock—sharp, loud, relentless. By five in the morning she would already be sweeping, tending the firewood stove, setting water to boil. Smoke would drift through the hut, forcing Sonny to wake up whether he wanted to or not.
She believed people must rise before the sun to receive God’s morning grace—even during typhoon season when the sky stayed dark and swollen. Dawn was her sacred hour. Her shrill voice would join the roosters’ crowing, pigs’ grunting, horses’ snorting, and Sonny’s reluctant groans.
With Lola Sabel, the world felt secure in its repetition—sunrise and sunset, birth and death. A beautiful monotony. The air would be cool and damp, carrying the scent of fishpond water and wet soil.
While the rice simmered, she would step outside with a rake and sweep the yard clean of plastic wrappers, fruit peels, dried mango and guava leaves from her sari-sari store. The pile would grow like a small hill. The yard, marked with neat rake lines, would look reborn—as if its sins had been gathered and cast aside. She would burn the pile in the corner. Neighbors would gather around the small bonfire, trading stories before the day began. By sunrise, her store would be open and the village alive.
“Good morning.”
The voice startled Sonny.
His new roommate stood at the doorway, grinning from ear to ear, a steaming mug of coffee in hand.
For a moment Sonny’s vision blurred with sleep. The young man seemed almost ghostlike, emerging from the kitchen light.
“I’m Mod,” he said.
Sonny gave a drowsy salute and buried his face in his pillow again.
If Sonny was an ordinary provincial boy, Mod was even more so. Rubber slippers. Shorts obviously cut from old trousers. Hair slicked with what looked suspiciously like pomade. The very fact that he had come to Maliwalu City—worse, to the State University—dressed like this made Sonny shiver.
If Sonny, with his bell-bottoms and barrio fashion, already felt out of place at State U, how much more would this boy?
Mod moved calmly, unhurried, as though he were simply passing through. Not nervous. Not excited. Just… present. He looked around the room with dreamy eyes, as if expecting to read invisible graffiti on the walls. And yet, he had clearly cleaned the entire lodging before dawn.
“What are you taking up?” Sonny asked, mostly out of courtesy.
“Literature,” Mod replied.
Sonny instantly regretted asking.
There are people who spend their whole lives waiting for one question. And when it finally comes, they unleash years of accumulated thought.
Mod exploded into speech.
He talked as if delivering a lecture at a symposium. Sonny lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, trapped by politeness. As Mod’s voice droned on, Sonny imagined animals startled into motion above him—snakes slithering, lions pacing, tigers prowling across the ceiling. You don’t startle animals. And you don’t ask certain boys simple questions.
Mod spoke of thoughts gathered like pebbles from brooks. Thoughts formed while riding water buffalo across rice fields. Thoughts carried from muddy barangay classrooms to the concrete towers of State U.
“I’ll write about our country,” Mod declared. “I’ll write stories that come from the heart of the Filipino. Our literature today sucks.”
Sonny’s jaw dropped.
“It’s full of romantic fantasies disconnected from reality. Our nation carries billions in debt, yet our fiction parades rich lovers vacationing in Europe. It insults me. Literature should reflect its time. I can’t write about the past or the future. I can only fix today—this hour, this minute—into words.”
Sonny blinked.
“My goal is to fix time,” Mod continued. “Because tomorrow, today is forgotten.”
He went on about relevance, realism, and truth. He attacked sentimental love stories, elite historical sagas, anti-American novels, obscure poetry. He jumped from literature to film, criticizing actors with foreign features who became instant stars, filmmakers who relied on plastic fantasies, writers obsessed with prestige degrees instead of readers.
Sonny was lost. Literature? Movies? Rizal’s intestines? Tandang Sora’s sex life? A boy making love to a buffalo? A grasshopper turning into Saint Francis of Assisi?
Mod’s ideas tumbled over one another.
“I want to write about ordinary dreams of ordinary people,” he said passionately. “The youth. The streets. The church. The jeepneys. The way we talk and fight and laugh. These are beautiful.”
He spoke of aging, of using his strong arms and sharp mind before they faded. Of refusing to grow old filled with regret.
“Every day I ask myself—did I do something good? Did I write something true? There must be something good in our time. If no one sees it, I will.”
He invoked Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac. He compared Maliwalu to Petersburg and London in their suffering. He spoke of poverty as furnace-fire shaping gold. Of hope in hardship. Of gratitude in suffering.
Sonny’s temples throbbed.
Mod’s voice filled the small room like an overinflated balloon.
Finally, Sonny couldn’t take it anymore. He clamped his hands over his ears and shouted,
“SHUT THE HELL UP!”
Silence.
Mod stopped mid-sentence. He stared at Sonny, wounded but composed, then quietly turned toward the door.
Sonny sat up, exasperated.
“I just asked what your major was,” he muttered. “Wow.”
He sighed deeply.
And just like that, the fourth roommate had arrived.
2026-02-16 13:32:25
4students
In Lerma, Sonny confronted Maliwalan student life for the first time—not as an idea, but as a condition. It was merely an extension of university existence, stripped of dignity. He sighed.
Students lived in cramped, makeshift rooms cobbled together from thin lawanit panels beneath blistering tin roofs. Inside, flattened cardboard served as walls. Along the pavements, lodgers scrubbed laundry beside communal faucets, rationing water drop by drop. Others hunched over scarred tables, poker cards spread, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Billiard halls multiplied like weeds. Somewhere in a corner, a lone basketball court offered brief relief—a few minutes of sweat, movement, escape.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOLA SABEL
Sonny had been expected to study Medicine. His Americanized parents insisted—convinced that a son in the medical profession would one day reduce family hospital bills, assuming he made it to America.
The 1980s favored such thinking. They were the golden years of dollar remittances. The peso had collapsed, and any tie to Uncle Sam across the Pacific was salvation. The dollar meant power, prestige, survival. Sonny carried quiet status in his barrio because of the monthly envelopes from Illinois—George Washington’s face staring back at a country desperate for him.
In those days, wealth did not require millions. American shoes, Japanese gadgets, German labels—that was enough. Anything foreign was superior. Local goods were dismissed as *baduy*, *bakya*, cheap things for the poor. First Lady Mapang-Api cried for the masses in her Chanel suits, while activists in Nike sneakers denounced imperialism. Imported items—legal or not—were priced in dollars, always worth more, therefore better. Quality, people believed, came with a higher exchange rate.
The poor absorbed this logic. Slowly, they learned to see themselves as inferior.
Lola Sabel would not allow Sonny to inherit that shame.
One night, she spoke with restrained fury.
> “Sonny, this time is worse than the war. At least during the Japanese Occupation, we knew who the enemy was. Today, the enemy wears our face. Look at my sari-sari store—prices rising every week. Mothers dig through their pockets for a lost centavo and find nothing. Then they lift their heads and ask for *utang*.
>
> “Families who were comfortable in the sixties are starving now. Some of us who survived the war are dying slowly. We escaped the Japanese only to be destroyed by our own.”
A woman came often at midnight, knocking softly for rice. Her name was Elena. She wore a clean duster, her hair tightly bound, her cough dry and useless. Her body had thinned into angles and bone.
One night she pointed to her two-year-old daughter and said, “Lola Sabel, I see it in her eyes. One day she will save us.”
“How,” Lola Sabel asked gently, handing her the rice, “when you can barely feed her?”
“She could be like Sonia—Indang Monang’s daughter. A maid at twelve. An entertainer in Japan at sixteen. Now she sends dollars home.”
Hope lit Elena’s face. She whispered thanks and disappeared into the dark.
Elena was twenty-four. Her husband, Ramon, had been abducted months earlier. Once a guerrilla, later a government informant, he vanished after a funeral. Lola Sabel supported Elena quietly—careful, cautious, aware of how easily compassion could become a liability.
Every time she saw the young widow, her chest tightened.
One evening, she found Sonny beneath the acacia tree.
“I am eighty and still standing,” she said. “I want to live long enough to see this country recover. I will never leave Maliwalu like your parents. Our blood is in this soil.
“I watched Ramon and Elena grow up. Their grandparents were my playmates. We planted rice together. Doors stayed open. Nights were filled with laughter, zarzuelas, shared meals.
“Now every house is locked. We survived the Japanese because we were united. Today, we destroy ourselves.”
Sonny answered carefully. “Lola, Maliwalu has fifty-six million people now. Things can’t be the same.”
She turned sharply. “Population doesn’t create crime. Poverty does. Hunger does. Hopelessness does.”
“What’s the difference,” Sonny asked, “between poverty then and now?”
“Then, poverty was imposed by foreigners. Today, it is manufactured by one of our own. When a leader steals without shame, everyone learns to steal. His crime becomes permission.
“But there is hope. One act of courage awakens many. One sacrifice reminds people who they are. That is the Maliwalan heart—quiet, buried, waiting.”
“And me?” Sonny asked. “Where do I belong?”
“Educate yourself. Observe. Question. Criticize—but with intelligence. Remember Christ in the desert. The Devil spoke Scripture; Christ answered with Scripture.
“Go to Maliwalu. Watch the people. Learn how they think. And be careful—those who know they are wrong are the hardest to confront.”
THE OTHER LODGERS
Still carrying Lola Sabel’s words, Sonny opened the door of his boarding house and nearly collided with a naked man pulling on his trousers.
“Sorry,” Sonny muttered, looking away.
The man later introduced himself as Rene, a freshman in Economics.
“You must be my roommate,” Rene said, grinning.
He was too old for a freshman. His eyes were bloodshot—whether from cigarettes or something stronger, Sonny couldn’t tell. Books were stacked everywhere: psychology, economics, philosophy.
“Mind if I smoke?” Rene asked, already lighting a Marlboro.
“I don’t like the smell of smoke.”
Rene laughed. “Do you think I care?”
Sonny swallowed his irritation. This man would share his space for a year.
He remembered Lola Sabel’s verdict on the youth:
“They live in a permissive culture—un-Maliwalan. They have forgotten Asian restraint and European faith.”
Sonny wondered what kind of education awaited him now—and what kind of men.
2025-12-16 00:39:52
4students
Four Students 7
The Long, Boring Monologue of Mod’s Dreams
When Sonny woke up, Jaime was gone. So was Rene.
In their place, taped to the wall above the study table, was a small sheet of bond paper with a message written in thick black marker:
THANKS A LOT, GUYS. —Jim
Sonny smiled, rolled onto his side, and hugged his pillow. The morning air was cool. The room, for once, was quiet—much quieter than the chaos of the night before. Still, something felt different.
The faint sour smell of Jaime’s vomit lingered in the air. The drawers that had been yanked open in last night’s commotion were now neatly closed. But it was the fourth bed that caught Sonny’s attention. Once empty, it now held a trunk, a bundle of clothes, pillows, blankets, and a cardboard box filled with novels—classic titles, their spines worn from use.
The fourth roommate had finally arrived.
Sonny felt a flicker of excitement. And a cautious hope.
Maybe this one would be better than the first two. Jaime and Rene were colorful, loud, volatile—too volatile. They carried tempers like loaded guns. Sonny had imagined college roommates who were serious, studious, perhaps even refined. So far, reality had disappointed him.
From the small kitchen area came the hard dragging sound of slippers across the cement floor.
The sound reminded him of Lola Sabel.
Back home, Lola Sabel rose before dawn every single day, determined to “beat” the sunrise. Her wooden clogs were worse than an alarm clock—sharp, loud, relentless. By five in the morning she would already be sweeping, tending the firewood stove, setting water to boil. Smoke would drift through the hut, forcing Sonny to wake up whether he wanted to or not.
She believed people must rise before the sun to receive God’s morning grace—even during typhoon season when the sky stayed dark and swollen. Dawn was her sacred hour. Her shrill voice would join the roosters’ crowing, pigs’ grunting, horses’ snorting, and Sonny’s reluctant groans.
With Lola Sabel, the world felt secure in its repetition—sunrise and sunset, birth and death. A beautiful monotony. The air would be cool and damp, carrying the scent of fishpond water and wet soil.
While the rice simmered, she would step outside with a rake and sweep the yard clean of plastic wrappers, fruit peels, dried mango and guava leaves from her sari-sari store. The pile would grow like a small hill. The yard, marked with neat rake lines, would look reborn—as if its sins had been gathered and cast aside. She would burn the pile in the corner. Neighbors would gather around the small bonfire, trading stories before the day began. By sunrise, her store would be open and the village alive.
“Good morning.”
The voice startled Sonny.
His new roommate stood at the doorway, grinning from ear to ear, a steaming mug of coffee in hand.
For a moment Sonny’s vision blurred with sleep. The young man seemed almost ghostlike, emerging from the kitchen light.
“I’m Mod,” he said.
Sonny gave a drowsy salute and buried his face in his pillow again.
If Sonny was an ordinary provincial boy, Mod was even more so. Rubber slippers. Shorts obviously cut from old trousers. Hair slicked with what looked suspiciously like pomade. The very fact that he had come to Maliwalu City—worse, to the State University—dressed like this made Sonny shiver.
If Sonny, with his bell-bottoms and barrio fashion, already felt out of place at State U, how much more would this boy?
Mod moved calmly, unhurried, as though he were simply passing through. Not nervous. Not excited. Just… present. He looked around the room with dreamy eyes, as if expecting to read invisible graffiti on the walls. And yet, he had clearly cleaned the entire lodging before dawn.
“What are you taking up?” Sonny asked, mostly out of courtesy.
“Literature,” Mod replied.
Sonny instantly regretted asking.
There are people who spend their whole lives waiting for one question. And when it finally comes, they unleash years of accumulated thought.
Mod exploded into speech.
He talked as if delivering a lecture at a symposium. Sonny lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, trapped by politeness. As Mod’s voice droned on, Sonny imagined animals startled into motion above him—snakes slithering, lions pacing, tigers prowling across the ceiling. You don’t startle animals. And you don’t ask certain boys simple questions.
Mod spoke of thoughts gathered like pebbles from brooks. Thoughts formed while riding water buffalo across rice fields. Thoughts carried from muddy barangay classrooms to the concrete towers of State U.
“I’ll write about our country,” Mod declared. “I’ll write stories that come from the heart of the Filipino. Our literature today sucks.”
Sonny’s jaw dropped.
“It’s full of romantic fantasies disconnected from reality. Our nation carries billions in debt, yet our fiction parades rich lovers vacationing in Europe. It insults me. Literature should reflect its time. I can’t write about the past or the future. I can only fix today—this hour, this minute—into words.”
Sonny blinked.
“My goal is to fix time,” Mod continued. “Because tomorrow, today is forgotten.”
He went on about relevance, realism, and truth. He attacked sentimental love stories, elite historical sagas, anti-American novels, obscure poetry. He jumped from literature to film, criticizing actors with foreign features who became instant stars, filmmakers who relied on plastic fantasies, writers obsessed with prestige degrees instead of readers.
Sonny was lost. Literature? Movies? Rizal’s intestines? Tandang Sora’s sex life? A boy making love to a buffalo? A grasshopper turning into Saint Francis of Assisi?
Mod’s ideas tumbled over one another.
“I want to write about ordinary dreams of ordinary people,” he said passionately. “The youth. The streets. The church. The jeepneys. The way we talk and fight and laugh. These are beautiful.”
He spoke of aging, of using his strong arms and sharp mind before they faded. Of refusing to grow old filled with regret.
“Every day I ask myself—did I do something good? Did I write something true? There must be something good in our time. If no one sees it, I will.”
He invoked Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac. He compared Maliwalu to Petersburg and London in their suffering. He spoke of poverty as furnace-fire shaping gold. Of hope in hardship. Of gratitude in suffering.
Sonny’s temples throbbed.
Mod’s voice filled the small room like an overinflated balloon.
Finally, Sonny couldn’t take it anymore. He clamped his hands over his ears and shouted,
“SHUT THE HELL UP!”
Silence.
Mod stopped mid-sentence. He stared at Sonny, wounded but composed, then quietly turned toward the door.
Sonny sat up, exasperated.
“I just asked what your major was,” he muttered. “Wow.”
He sighed deeply.
And just like that, the fourth roommate had arrived.
2026-02-16 13:32:25
4students
Four Students 6
In Lerma, Sonny confronted Maliwalan student life for the first time—not as an idea, but as a condition. It was merely an extension of university existence, stripped of dignity. He sighed.
Students lived in cramped, makeshift rooms cobbled together from thin lawanit panels beneath blistering tin roofs. Inside, flattened cardboard served as walls. Along the pavements, lodgers scrubbed laundry beside communal faucets, rationing water drop by drop. Others hunched over scarred tables, poker cards spread, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Billiard halls multiplied like weeds. Somewhere in a corner, a lone basketball court offered brief relief—a few minutes of sweat, movement, escape.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOLA SABEL
Sonny had been expected to study Medicine. His Americanized parents insisted—convinced that a son in the medical profession would one day reduce family hospital bills, assuming he made it to America.
The 1980s favored such thinking. They were the golden years of dollar remittances. The peso had collapsed, and any tie to Uncle Sam across the Pacific was salvation. The dollar meant power, prestige, survival. Sonny carried quiet status in his barrio because of the monthly envelopes from Illinois—George Washington’s face staring back at a country desperate for him.
In those days, wealth did not require millions. American shoes, Japanese gadgets, German labels—that was enough. Anything foreign was superior. Local goods were dismissed as *baduy*, *bakya*, cheap things for the poor. First Lady Mapang-Api cried for the masses in her Chanel suits, while activists in Nike sneakers denounced imperialism. Imported items—legal or not—were priced in dollars, always worth more, therefore better. Quality, people believed, came with a higher exchange rate.
The poor absorbed this logic. Slowly, they learned to see themselves as inferior.
Lola Sabel would not allow Sonny to inherit that shame.
One night, she spoke with restrained fury.
> “Sonny, this time is worse than the war. At least during the Japanese Occupation, we knew who the enemy was. Today, the enemy wears our face. Look at my sari-sari store—prices rising every week. Mothers dig through their pockets for a lost centavo and find nothing. Then they lift their heads and ask for *utang*.
>
> “Families who were comfortable in the sixties are starving now. Some of us who survived the war are dying slowly. We escaped the Japanese only to be destroyed by our own.”
A woman came often at midnight, knocking softly for rice. Her name was Elena. She wore a clean duster, her hair tightly bound, her cough dry and useless. Her body had thinned into angles and bone.
One night she pointed to her two-year-old daughter and said, “Lola Sabel, I see it in her eyes. One day she will save us.”
“How,” Lola Sabel asked gently, handing her the rice, “when you can barely feed her?”
“She could be like Sonia—Indang Monang’s daughter. A maid at twelve. An entertainer in Japan at sixteen. Now she sends dollars home.”
Hope lit Elena’s face. She whispered thanks and disappeared into the dark.
Elena was twenty-four. Her husband, Ramon, had been abducted months earlier. Once a guerrilla, later a government informant, he vanished after a funeral. Lola Sabel supported Elena quietly—careful, cautious, aware of how easily compassion could become a liability.
Every time she saw the young widow, her chest tightened.
One evening, she found Sonny beneath the acacia tree.
“I am eighty and still standing,” she said. “I want to live long enough to see this country recover. I will never leave Maliwalu like your parents. Our blood is in this soil.
“I watched Ramon and Elena grow up. Their grandparents were my playmates. We planted rice together. Doors stayed open. Nights were filled with laughter, zarzuelas, shared meals.
“Now every house is locked. We survived the Japanese because we were united. Today, we destroy ourselves.”
Sonny answered carefully. “Lola, Maliwalu has fifty-six million people now. Things can’t be the same.”
She turned sharply. “Population doesn’t create crime. Poverty does. Hunger does. Hopelessness does.”
“What’s the difference,” Sonny asked, “between poverty then and now?”
“Then, poverty was imposed by foreigners. Today, it is manufactured by one of our own. When a leader steals without shame, everyone learns to steal. His crime becomes permission.
“But there is hope. One act of courage awakens many. One sacrifice reminds people who they are. That is the Maliwalan heart—quiet, buried, waiting.”
“And me?” Sonny asked. “Where do I belong?”
“Educate yourself. Observe. Question. Criticize—but with intelligence. Remember Christ in the desert. The Devil spoke Scripture; Christ answered with Scripture.
“Go to Maliwalu. Watch the people. Learn how they think. And be careful—those who know they are wrong are the hardest to confront.”
THE OTHER LODGERS
Still carrying Lola Sabel’s words, Sonny opened the door of his boarding house and nearly collided with a naked man pulling on his trousers.
“Sorry,” Sonny muttered, looking away.
The man later introduced himself as Rene, a freshman in Economics.
“You must be my roommate,” Rene said, grinning.
He was too old for a freshman. His eyes were bloodshot—whether from cigarettes or something stronger, Sonny couldn’t tell. Books were stacked everywhere: psychology, economics, philosophy.
“Mind if I smoke?” Rene asked, already lighting a Marlboro.
“I don’t like the smell of smoke.”
Rene laughed. “Do you think I care?”
Sonny swallowed his irritation. This man would share his space for a year.
He remembered Lola Sabel’s verdict on the youth:
“They live in a permissive culture—un-Maliwalan. They have forgotten Asian restraint and European faith.”
Sonny wondered what kind of education awaited him now—and what kind of men.
2025-12-16 00:39:52
4students