Contemplating Cruz Contemporary

In the heyday of Philippine Panorama’s fiction prize some ten years ago, Isidoro Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” won first prize for 1996. A short story originally submitted to the Iligan National Writers Workshop the year prior to its win, “Chalk Dust” must have won the coveted national literary prize for its sensitivity to the individual plight of the overseas Filipino worker who, for years, has been considered our contemporary national hero [primarily because of the dollars they scrape and scrimp for one of the lamest economies around the world].

Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” weaves a piece in the life of Clarissa, a former teacher back in the Philippines who went to work as a domestic helper in Singapore. After her contract failed because her original employers backed out, Clarissa eventually worked for the Tangs, a couple with two boys—and with whom the story virtually takes an unforgettable turn.

The situation of the protagonist comes in handy—one morning Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. Apart from a cheap card that she gives to Clarissa, Mrs. Nancy Tang has only few words to say to her as she starts for the airport.

The rest of the story unfolds quite symbolically through flashback, a narrative device that best renders a regretful tone—the one portrayed by the protagonist herself. Right away, we get to ask why Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. What must be the reason why she stops employment?

We answer this question by taking the trip with Clarissa as she journeys home. As memories flash back and forth—we are bit by bit drawn into her sad story. We learn that Clarissa was a former teacher back in her country. We also learn that her father is totally outrageously against her working abroad as a domestic helper, lamenting that they had labored much to help her through college, but not just to end up “scrubbing somebody else’s bathroom.”

We then know that Clarissa left teaching because she did not like it, and it didn’t really pay. We also learn that Clarissa could not really stomach her students’ behavior. That is why she must have left the country to seek the virtual “greener pastures,” whatever that means to her. Because the previous employers whom she applied for backed out, we get to know that Clarissa had to make do with what is in front of her nose—she had to work for a couple with two kids.

Through her keen sensitivity, perhaps squeamishness, we also learn that her employers’ residence is a stifling enclosure, squeezed in a rising metropolis, a busy city where probably progress dissipates the very energies of people, and where the only thing you are given to eat is noodles.

In the midst of this cloistered, monotonous life [which she finds too irksome even exasperating], Clarissa does not at all realize that at any rate she lives in a home that instead rises from the stifling smog and pollution which can kill her.

Eventually, Clarissa realizes her work is not much different from her classroom work. Yes, she may have fewer kids to attend to—just the two sons of her employers, but she is rather convinced they are not much different from her students whom she despised back home.

In the airport, Clarissa meets Trining, a fellow domestic helper. Unlike Clarissa, Trining is a “full-fledged” maid, who must have worked for a number of employers already—so much so that she has been going abroad back and forth, seeking to earn a living for relatives back home who rather only tell her what to bring home next time, and perhaps shying away from the neighbor’s prying eyes or gossip about her work abroad.

And unlike Trining, Clarissa cannot talk as much because hers is a different story—she is not happy from where she came. She’s not excited about going home to family with bags full of pasalubong.

Along the way, after all that was said and done, Clarissa vacillates between what has beens and what ifs. Inasmuch as she does not want to return home, she is doing so right now. She is even catching her trip on time.

What has she gone wrong? When asked about her whereabouts, she also wonders why is she going back to the place where she once despised because she did not like it—everything, what she was doing, what she was, what she was not doing, etc.—there. Was it something she did?

“I’ll tell her! I’ll tell her.!”—Clarissa cannot forget the boy’s face. When the mischievous elder son Jimmy saw Clarissa eating her favorite noodle soup, he started teasing her, soliciting the attention of his younger brother Sam, and told him they’d be playing cooking. Jimmy took condiments from the countertop and sprinkled sorts of other condiments on to Clarissa’s soup.

Even when Clarissa tried to stop Jimmy, the boy did not listen to her until he completely spilled what Clarissa was eating. When Clarissa flared up and then physically reprimanded the boy, the situation only got complicated—the boy spat at her, and on impulse, she slapped him until he cried and kicked her away. When the boy cried and threatened to tell his mother, Clarissa equally threatened that she’d burn the whole place should he squeal.

Interestingly, we do not learn whether the boy ever did tell his parents about it. The slightest hint we learn is that Clarissa must have grown tired of her wards’ misdemeanor which, to some, might have been unobjectionable—if one is well oriented enough to work there for the sake of money to send home, or if one is totally disposed to earn money in a foreign country.

In all, she must have only relived the days when she was a teacher, perennially irritated by the slight, mischievous ways by her students, and taking all these things personally. After all, how else can she take all of these, without her being a person?

At least, her employers are quite civil enough to just let her go—no questions asked. Whether the boy squealed to his parents, she can only assume. She cannot demand as to ask them how come she has to go. On the ways with which they rear their children, her gracious employers must have learned a number of lessons in the past—so maids like Clarissa cannot do as much.

The story’s title “Chalk Dust” forges the clearest image for the whole story, as it spells the dichotomy between the good and bad elements of the protagonist’s experience.

She is going home now because the Tangs simply fired her for her misbehavior. Funny that it was her who most probably misbehaved. Once she must have thought she cannot be a teacher. But now she thought she cannot also be a helper—inasmuch as she must have hated the chalk dust, it is also easy for her dust off any irritating situation she finds herself in. Shouldn’t she realize that a teacher is also a helper? Or has she ever realized that?

Of course, the story ends as the journey ends. She has arrived home, but what still pesters her is how that boy made fun of her picture, and made her see it when he put it on her pillow. Clarissa’s plane landed already, but her disgust about the whole thing has not yet subsided—truly, she must have been home now, but is she at all unscathed?

Written in the context of the Filipino experience, the plight of Clarissa spells the struggle for survival in this country where individual’s hopes are shattered piece by piece—what with the crisis they face every single day, always seeking to make the ends meet, until they find some place definite until one day, like Clarissa, they arrive at their final destination some place else—anywhere but here.

In the bigger picture, “Chalk Dust” was hewn just as when the country would witness the tragic fate of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper charged of murder of the child of her employers. For months, Flor Contemplacion dominated the country’s headlines, as it was not just the case of one Filipina maid working in a foreign country.

It was rather the Filipinos’ global repute—the sheer dignity that people have come to associate with the “dignity of a Filipino” which reads much like our national pride. Despite the intervention pursued by the Ramos government who was rather concerned with globalization [read: the fast-rising export of domestic helpers,] at the time, Contemplacion still was hanged in the Changgi prison. The most that we succeeded in doing was to immortalize her story via Nora Aunor, whose performance raked more profits for film and media moguls.