1 So What - Prologue

"In the middle of the road, in the moment you want to give up, shout out even louder: "So what?" – BTS, "So What"

When I was young I never imagined getting married and having kids. It is more of getting a job, be successful and naive as I am, it just ends there. My play would revolve around me typing something, playing with my grandfather's yellow unused receipts in the restaurant but it always ends up that I would draw stories about people around me.

My grandfather owns a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in Manila. We were not rich. It was more of a hole-in-the-wall kind of place where old Chinese folks would sit around, drink tea and some dumplings then talk endlessly with their fellow old people with umbrellas as canes. They always have a newspaper with them for some reason but they never got around reading it in the restaurant.

I think this was one of the happy periods of my childhood where I was left alone most of the time. I would play in the midst of the wooden tables and chairs. My thoughts would drift in the yellowing plasters on the wall and my imagination would see different shapes and pictures from the peeling. I was not allowed to go out so I would sometimes quietly sit amongst the old Chinese men and stare at their moles, when they slurp the piping hot soup from the beef noodles soup our restaurant serves or when they sometimes struggle to shove the soft hot dumpling into their mouths.

Time changed when my grandfather collapsed in the kitchen one morning while tending to a broth of soup and I just woke up looking for breakfast. I saw him lying there and I thought he was just resting and went to look for my paper receipts - until one of the aunties from next door store came in and looked for my grandfather.

Everything was blurry after that. My mother came back from Taiwan and I was told to be quiet. Not a word. At the funeral, there were women crying day and night loudly. I want to cry but I should be quiet. If I cry I was afraid that I would make a noise.

My grandfather was in the coffin and yellow papers with different numbers were hanging on the wall. I knew a handful of auntie and uncles from the stores in our street who sometimes come by. Not a lot of people but they come in and sit quietly and talked to my mother. The only noise I hear was the women I do not know crying loudly as if their lives depended on it.

The restaurant died and my grandfather died with it, maybe along with the old men who came in the early afternoon. I only knew them with the stories inside my head and never saw them again.