Essay: Nomad's Land

by: Sievney Klyze G. Quidet

[...] in response to the [...] excerpt from Boey Kim Cheng’s “Something Fine”, collected from his seminal essay collection, Between Stations (2009).
- The Singlit Station Manuscript Bootcamp 2024 (Nonfiction) guidelines.

Time moves a turtle's pace as a child, but I know one thing: the year is over when we move.

My parents would never tell me anything, because why would they, I am just a child. But I know the fireworks to end this year and usher in the next is when they would bring multiple cardboard boxes home, and a roll of straw or two. Shoving them to my mother's family, we get packing. 

I do not remember what they would pack first, all I know is because I am a newly-minted 'big sister' and excited to be one, I wanted to be big and help carry things to the new house. So my uncle, my mother's youngest brother, gave me a blue plastic bowl lined with dust, a smaller green strainer inside it, and a yellowing spatula, all to carry by myself. Everything else difficult to hold with my pale small hands, especially the items packed in boxes, would be lifted by my uncles from both sides of the family, my grandfather, my father, their cousins, and the neighbours both old and new. 

It is routine that we march like an army of ants at the first scent of a ripe mango fallen from a tree: to the cornucopia of furniture and appliances, pick up something we can carry in our arms, lug it into the new empty house and dump it wherever is convenient, and back out again. It is a loop until the old house is empty, the moving truck is empty, the boxes are empty. 

As I get older we continue to move in between bungalows in one city to another, all within our tropical island. We never had a permanent place to stay, one our own with a deed in my parents’ name. It was always leases my mother would sign, a person’s promise to return a borrowed two-bedroom apartment. In the third grade I learn the word 'nomad': a person with no permanent place to live in, moving from one place to another as needed. With my years marked not by new year celebrations or Easters but summers spent hauling my growing collection of Archie Comics in trucks, I finally found a word to describe who I was. I lived in the capital, I lived in a city informally declared one of the island’s Industrial Zone, I lived next to the airport. At three years old my eyes have seen many ceilings over my eyes more than any child ever has. By the age of seven l have seen and lived in five different houses, all with different neighbours, different ways of speaking, many more personalities to imitate.

With that, my tasks, too, expand in scope. From carrying the plastic bowls and strainers, I get to carry now bags of our clothing to the new house, wherever that may be. I would receive them from my grandfather who stood atop the moving truck like the rajah (Hindi, Sanskrit, co-opted by the Philippine languages: the village chief) that he and I both believed he should have been if his brothers did not sell off our lands for more tubâ (a Filipino palm wine, 2-4% alcoholic content). That he would be a landlord, and I would be his only granddaughter protected, spoiled, and heir of the land in his name; we would not have to move around from one city to another throughout my childhood, and I most certainly would not have moved out of the country with my parents if we had our land to tide ourselves over to live many more years on. 

No child should be living off the land that is not theirs, but like many, the weakening of a manmade bridge called 'the Philippine economy' pushed many families out of the country, mine included. It was a post-primary school student exodus, brought by their families out of the carnage after the Wall Street Crash in 2009. Very few remained in our banana peel island, many of my classmates including myself leaving for many promised lands—for my family, our Canaan was Singapore. 

Moving around the banana peel island, no one could tell I was not from the area because I spoke the language, because I looked like everyone else—tiny, creamy skin, vaguely Chinese like some Filipino kids were, coarse hair. By this time, thirteen, however, it became stark to me in the promised land that I was different. The way I spoke, my a’s wider than others and my r’s trilled, an indication that I was not like them. I was shorter than everyone else, my hair darker than everyone else, my skin no longer as creamy as I perceived it to be. Instead, I was the spitting image of my grandfather’s lost lands: I now had ‘bugas’, a Cebuano word both meaning ‘rice grain’ and ‘acne’, on skin now turning into the shade of my father’s. In this new world where the manmade bridge of the Singaporean economy remained strong, able, an image of prosperity for fifty-eight years, it was clear I was in lands not my own.

Even so, I would still look out the window of the rented home, now in a high-rise building as is normal for public housing in Singapore, and see the new neighbourhood as a new adventure, and living in the hope that despite the repeated act of signing a lease, this will be the last time I would have to pack again, move again, leave old friends again, make new friends again. A nomad gets tired and wants to settle, that is when settlements become proper towns. There is no longer a need for ‘bayanihan’ (literally, cooperation, but pertains to the practice of a group of people from the same community lifting a hut and carrying it to someplace else), now there is a need for sturdy foundations that dig themselves into the ground, a way to say, “I am here and I am not going anywhere!” To become an immovable object. 

On Twitter they ask, “what radicalized you?” The walks home from the Metta Home to our old HDB block. The walks in between Dhoby Ghaut station to Orchard station along the road of the Istana. The runs to the grocery store at ten in the evening because my mother and I wanted ice cream. Having a place, a room, to call my own,  no longer borrowed with much formality so I have a safe place to sleep. A country that would not spit me out because it can no longer hold onto me, where, as Sylvia Plath would say, I am, I am, I am.

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Sievney Klyze G. Quidet is a co-founder and the current moderator of HULMA, the creative writing club of USC SHS. Sievney also has fellowships in creative writing workshops such as the Women's Writing Getaway Retreat (2024), Sunday Club (2023), Cebu Young Writers' Studio (2017), and Bidlisiw (2016). Her poetry has been on the Cebu LitFest Folios (2016, 2017), Hangtod (2017), Palabi Sa Gibati (2016, 2017), Bukambibig: Poetry Folio of Spoken Word Philippines (2017), and the Carolinian Poet (2021). Her fiction is featured on the Katitikan Literary Journal of the Philippine South (2021), and one volume of the USC SHS Creative Writing Club literary folio (2023). Nowadays she can be seen in the genre of creative nonfiction, where her next publication will be the upcoming second volume of Libulan: Binisayang Antolohiya sa Katitikang Queer, slated for release in 2025. Nomad's Land is part of an essay collection she is currently working on about the chemical change of puberty simultaneous to the physical change of migration and diaspora. | sgquidet@usc.edu.ph, @theflipgothic on Instagram.