



It begins with a memory of a mother and an aswang.

The orphan recounts how his mother was so sickly and was in constant pain. It was assumed by the neighbors, in the small town of Bicol where they lived, that a tik-tik (a mythological aswang) took a liking to her so the family decided to move her far away, to a relative’s house. They traveled carrying the mother in a hammock. But the aswang followed her. An arbularyo was called and the little boy remembers seeing his mother being laid on a Manila paper as chants and incense filled the room. Unearthly thorns were removed from the Manila paper. But she got worse.

The boy’s mother died.

The father, feeling incapable of taking care of the kid on his own, gave the little boy away to relatives.

That boy is now an older man, directly in front of me for an interview. I place the recorder between us, as he meekly takes his seat, a little shy, a little restless: hardly qualities you expect from such a renowned personality.

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I ask the man in front of me if he ever found out what had really caused his mother’s death. “Most likely, stomach cancer. I think stomach cancer. And so kaya ako mahilig sa mga aswang novel, eventually naging Amapola.”

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“Although dati, aswang na malungkot , exiled sa lupa or walang social skills, aswang na alienated—the misunderstood, the disconnected, the outsider,” he continues.

Confused and alone, the boy got lost in literature, in the form of Liwayway magazines and newspapers and the bizarre stories woven by drunken men that peppered the little sari-sari store where he stayed.

“That time I kept running away. I felt alone, disconnected,” he says in between sips of tea that he ordered.

Then when the boy was in Grade 5, his father died.

So at 10 years old, the little lost boy, whose mother was taken away by aswangs , who felt displaced and unloved, was now truly an orphan.

The orphan’s name is Ricky Lee.