IT occurred to me that while I have written about Juban, my birthplace, and my ancestry on the maternal side, I had not written about Villasis in Pangasinan and my father’s forebears. Perhaps my mother was a story-teller about her gothic hometown—bizarre tales validated by visits to Juban before the war. My father hardly talked about his birthplace.
My early childhood memory of a visit to Villasis was perforce a hazy one—that of a house in an open field with elders telling me not to venture out beyond the fence because an animal outside might attack me. Was it a goat or a carabao, I could not recall. My older brother, Dedong, later told me that when grandfather died in Manila (where we lived before the war in Paco) my father used our top down automobile to transport Lolo’s coffin secured astride the car all the way to Villasis for burial. He and an older brother accompanied my father; I was still too small for the trip.