Milkfish

You feed us milkfish stew and long grain rice, make us eat blood soup with chili peppers, and frown at us when we lose our appetite. I remember when I was young and you told me of that monsoon: the Japanese Occupation— stories of a time before you met my father, when you learned the language of an occupied city in order to feed your family. You were the pretty one at seventeen, your skin, white as milkfish. The pretty ones, you said, were always given more food— the Japanese soldiers sentried above the loft where you worked dropped sweet yams, and you caught them by the billow of your skirt. I remember you in sepia-brown photographs as a mestiza who equated liberation with Hershey bars and beige nylons from American GIs— and the season of the monsoon as dark as hunger was not about suffering but what you knew of beauty.