Dumaguete Days, Part One

This post is the first of what I hope would be a planned series of my recollections as a Fellow in the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, back in 2001. The three weeks I had spent there made that summer one of the best and happiest I ever had.

One of the funniest memories I have that I will always associate with the Dumaguete workshop is something that took place the day before it started, on the Cebu Pacific flight bound for the City of Gentle People. Ten people were selected for fellowships that year, and six of us were on that flight. I had yet to meet four of them; Marby had been my fiction-writing classmate for two semesters by that time, so we kept each other company throughout the trip.

During that trip, a flight attendant began conducting a lame game. I later learned that Cebu Pacific practically mandates such games. Another co-fellow of mine, Janet (who had since become a very good friend) later wrote about it so wonderfully, fictively in one of her story drafts:

“…But the flight attendants distract me. They are conducting their usual onboard games: bring me a size 10 men’s shoe, bring me suntan lotion, bring me, bring me. Their make-up jumps out, red against bad skin, and their twenty-year old breasts defy gravity. Their gaiety is harsh; it bears on the cabin like air pressure. Swallowing doesn’t ease the discomfort.”

“A woman across the aisle screams in delight; she is the “weener” in the bring-me contest according to the flight attendant’s bad English. She high-fives her way out of her troupe to grab her trophy: an airline baseball cap. Her troupe cheers. Obviously first-time passengers, the type who’d stash the airline’s complimentary drinks and peanuts in their bags.”

Weener. Marby and I (and probably most writers in English) were—are—particularly sensitive to how the language is spoken, so when the flight attendant pronounced “winner” that way we caught ourselves wincing. Weener. How it stung our ears, burned into our minds. If only that attendant knew how I mutely, wickedly dissed her in my seat. Weener. Ugh.

But little did we know, the exact phrase the girl used that time—“Weener of a free meg (mug)”—would become one of our oft-used lines for the next three weeks. Whenever our batch would get together that phrase would often crop up in the conversation. That’s the power of bad English for you.