If You Want to Be Happy

Nightfall. A woman, her head bent over a book, her hair concealing most of her face, sits on a park bench. A pretty woman walks past with a young man who holds out a box with a ring to her.

BOY Will you marry me, darling?

GIRL Yes, yes! She embraces him and turns to the woman, ELENA, who is bent over the book. The camera closes in on her pitifully ugly face.

GIRL Congratulate us! We’re getting married.

ELENA [forces a smile] Congratulations and best wishes. I’m happy for you. In a voiceover. And it’s true I’m happy for them. If I look sad, it’s for myself. Because that kind of love is something I will never experience.

Maybe I’m not at that point yet; at seventeen, I’m far from being an old maid. But a lot of people think that’s my fate, including my mom. Especially my mom. I don’t think I’m quite as ugly as the character Elena in the script I wrote. Not so much ugly as insignificant. But Mom was disappointed in the way that I looked from the time I was born with her flat nose and my father’s brown skin. And to make matters worse, I ended up needing glasses when I was in second grade.

As a little girl who believed in fairy tales, I would peer into mirrors hopefully on occasion. I always tried to be good, so surely I deserved to turn pretty too, someday. I still dreamed it as I entered my teens even if I no longer really believed in magic.

I look at my reflection now as I stand in a department store dressing room in a bright yellow bikini my sister had insisted I try. No, I don’t look magically prettier. In fact I look more angular than ever. Taking off my glasses probably isn’t going to help matters except for blurring my far-from-perfect image.

Forget trying to be beautiful. Forget the stereotypical teen experiences of dating and first kisses that I dreamed I’d have only because they were so ubiquitous on television. I’m a different person from a different kind of world. Assuming that world I see on screen actually exists. It’s almost a fairy tale to me, so far removed it is from my mundane uniformed private school life.

There’s a knock on the dressing room door. “Well, how is it, can I see?” It’s Ate Di, my older sister and my shopping partner for the day, who was not only so jealous of me for going on this trip but bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t fit enough to look good in a bikini anymore. I was lucky I didn’t have her sagging belly so why didn’t I try one. “Everyone in California wears bikinis!” she claimed. I’m not one to do something just because everyone is doing it, but to please her and because I was kind of curious to see how I’d look in one, I agreed to try this one on. Now I open the door to show her.

“I look ridiculous,” I say. She doesn’t disagree. The straps keep sliding down. I just don’t have enough on me to hold up a bikini properly. Not on my front. String bikinis definitely didn’t do anything for my boxy figure.

“I think the size is the issue,” she says. “That’s the smallest size in teens, but maybe I can find something in the pre-teen section. Be right back!” She sets her one-year-old daughter on the bench behind me. Mika looks inquisitively at the clothes hanging on hooks on the wall, and I smilingly ask her opinion on the various t-shirts I’ve selected.

Then Di returns and thrusts a ruffled periwinkle two-piece at me. Prepared for another disappointment, I try it on—then gaze at myself in the mirror with awe and delight. The periwinkle blue flatters my muddy skin tone and the aqua ruffle makes me somehow look perkier without being childishly cutesy. The wide crisscrossing straps cover most of my awful spots on the back. And somehow I look just a bit curvier in front.

“I think I found you the perfect suit!” Di crows. “I ought to be in fashion or something. Like those professional consultants on makeover shows. I could make a fortune helping rich people dress and maybe Mom and Dad will let me quit being receptionist for the center. They don’t believe in getting in the way of talent, after all.”

I am so pleased with my reflection that I decide to ignore her ridiculous bragging and thank her sincerely. I even urge her to pick something out from the display of summer clothes for herself while I go pick out a sundress for Mika. And, a little concerned with how low the suit is cut in front, I decide to grab a long-sleeved rashguard as well.

I try on the whole ensemble at home. With the sporty turquoise rashguard, I look more like a racing cyclist than a Filipina Malibu Barbie. But even remembering how good I looked in the suit without it, I just can’t imagine exposing so much of myself, at least when there are boys around. Not with modesty being drummed into my head throughout my twelve years of private Catholic school.

So much for sunbathing on the beach in a bikini. But at least I will experience these things, all in the next two months of my life:

Going up in an airplane! An overseas flight, too. A lot better than my sister, whose first flight was last year, when she was eighteen and she went with her friends (and, secretly her boyfriend) to Boracay.

Living in LA and going to Disneyland! I’m staying with my aunt, and she promised a visit to Disneyland. Universal Studios, too.

Traveling on my own. Without my parents, at least.

My parents are always busy working. And I appreciate why they do because they’ve given us a pretty good life. But it’s also too safe a life for me. I don’t get to go anywhere much on my own, even with my friends. And, as I said, they are always busy and hardly bother with family outings or vacations. Sometimes I think they pay so little attention to me that they haven’t even noticed that I’ve grown up. Not in terms of height, too much, because at just under five feet I am one of the shortest in my class. But I mean things like letting me be more independent and planning for my future.

While they are always at home with us at night, they spend most of it urging us to do the next thing we need to do. “Have you done your homework? Then pack your bag, lay out your uniform, set the table…” They hardly take a moment to look at us. Or rather, at me. I always used to see my mother’s eyes linger fondly on my sister even as she was stomping off to do her homework and chores with a sarcastic remark. Because she’s the pretty one.

“If you want to be happy, don’t focus on your looks,” my parents have always told me. They both tell me this all the time. I suspect they came up with a plan to spout this line to me ever since they saw the reddish-brown, smudge-nosed, newly-born me (I’ve seen the pictures, complete with blood on my face and blotchy birthmarks that have mostly faded by now). I don’t think they’ve ever said it to Di, who is always smiling at herself in the mirror like the evil queen in Snow White. They must have known from the start that she was going to be pretty. Even as a baby, she looked like our gorgeous stewardess aunt, dad’s sister Tessie. She was made her godmother precisely because of that. Their baby pictures are displayed right next to each other in a double frame. They always said that they chose the name Diana for her because she would be as lovely as the late princess—as well as good, they would hastily add.

Neither of my parents is especially good-looking, and they’ve always preached to us that being good is more important. I think they try to practice what they preach. They chose to get in the tutoring business as much for the good they believe it does as well as the money. They honestly believe that the majority of the rich kids who go to the tutorial center that they run are in desperate need of help because of too much pressure instead of just too lazy to put effort in school without someone at their back. I guess their sincere belief helps them to get more clients. Not that I think they do it on purpose (Can you purposely try to be sincere? That would be a total irony.).

My parents honestly believe in the importance of always trying to be good. That’s why they named me Benita, they say. But I know much as they want to believe they value being good more than being beautiful, my mother at least feels differently, deep in her heart. Like I said, she was always looking fondly at Diana even when she had just been defiant or rude—and she was a lot. Di has always been determined to get her way. I’m sure she was admiring her looks secretly. Mom is a plumper, fairer-skinned version of myself. I get my brown skin from my dad. Di is fair, of course, and her hair is mostly straight except for a bit of a curl at the ends. She’s also on the tall side and has a great figure. We don’t look like sisters at all.

And we haven’t really felt like sisters for most of our lives. It isn’t because I resent that she was always my parents’ favorite and was allowed to get away with more. I can see that Mom has wistfulness as well as love and pride in her eyes when she’d ignore Diana’s answering back in a case when they would demand a more respectful response from me. Di looks the way she wished she did when she was young. I’m sure. I always wished Di and I could be closer, but, growing up, we never had any common interests at all. Until last year, when her baby was born.

Di lost her virginity in the most cliché way—at her prom. She found out she was pregnant when she went to Boracay with her friends two months later and constantly threw up on the boat, and got married at eighteen. She has one semester of college under her belt and is struggling to get her teaching certificate studying part-time. She doesn’t know when she’s going to finish but right now, she doesn’t care too much, because she absolutely adores her baby girl. And so do I.

So that’s brought us a bit closer together, plus the fact that she actually experiences moments of hating her body now—fretting over stretch marks, dark smudges under her eyes, and her large feet that have permanently outgrown her almost imeldific collection of dainty, fashionable shoes.

But for all that, my mom still thinks she looks gorgeous. That much is obvious when Di runs down and models for her the skirt I bought her, twirling and preening as if she was a toddler like her daughter. Mom doesn’t pay any attention to me. Our maid Luning, who used to take care of me when I was a baby, takes my shopping from me and insists on laundering the clothes for me, though I protest, “I probably should learn how to do that myself. You won’t be in California to wash my things for me.”

I don’t think of this trip as a vacation. I expect to have fun, but that’s not the main reason I asked my parents for this as a graduation-slash-eighteenth birthday gift. My plan is to learn everything I can while I’m there about how to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter.

My sister may be the favorite and she did get a lavish eighteenth-birthday debut ball and a trip to Boracay with her friends. But for once in my life, my parents are giving me something they didn’t give her. I’d gotten honors only in English, my best subject, but they said I deserved a terrific present anyway.

“After all, you saved us money by not going to your proms,” Dad said. Mom nodded, and I guessed that they were thinking about more than the money I had saved by not going to the proms. They were thinking of something else I had saved, which was not really by choice since I’d never had a boyfriend, never even been kissed. I think it’s a good thing really. I just kind of wish it was something I had done out of true virtue and principle and not because I was the kind of girl no guy ever thought of in a romantic way. I always hung out with boys at school—my best friend Elisa’s boyfriend and his best buds--but they just joked around with me almost as if I was another boy.

I’m hoping my situation will change someday. Getting my braces off in another two weeks may help. Now that I no longer have to get up early for school, I’ve actually requested headgear that I have to wear all night. I can’t sleep well, but I figure that’s all right, since I need to readjust my body clock for California time anyway.

What I think is more important, though, is to launch my writing career. My parents have had me teach a creative writing class for elementary school kids every summer for the past few years, and though I don’t get a lot of enrollees, my students are always satisfied with my help and encouragement. It’s fun, and something I’d like to keep on doing. But I want to do more in the future than just teach writing or run my parents’ tutorial center, which I know is their fondest hope. Last year, we had this project in English class to make a video based on a Filipino story in English. I did all the writing and directing and the others did all the acting. I didn’t mind not having a role. I loved seeing what I had written come to life. It was a story with hardly any direct dialog, so I had to do a lot of original writing for the script. It was all worth it. My teacher commented I had a flair for dialog, my classmates quoted lines from my script for the rest of the year, and I felt that I had discovered what I really wanted to do in life.

I’ve actually been California dreaming since I got all those compliments about the script. So when my parents started suggesting a major reward for me for finishing school with honors and an intact hymen, I was ready to propose a trip to California. My aunt’s family lives there, close to Disneyland and not too far from Hollywood, so my cousin Ava tells me over Facebook. So I’d have a chance to learn what the screenwriting scene is like there.

Sure, I could work in film locally. But things are far from the level of Hollywood here. There isn’t just as much money to spend on making movies, I guess.

I watch Luning run the clothes in the machine so I’ll know how to do it myself, then I run back to my room where Mika is playing with my old stuffed toys on my bed. I turn on my computer so I can get to work on a new script while we wait for Di’s husband to finish his Sunday basketball game with his buddies and join us for dinner.

In about an hour, I come up with a draft for a high school movie. It will show the contrast between a Filipino single-sex Catholic school, which is the kind of school I went to up to grade ten, and a US one. I don’t think it’s any worse than the American high school movies I’ve seen. And even if it isn’t likely I’ll sell my first feature-length movie script right away, I can at least learn what I need to about a California high school firsthand during my trip, along with how to make it as a screenwriter.

I don’t tell my parents this. I know they want me to keep working at the tutorial center but I think I can combine writing with that. Even so, they won’t take me seriously, I know. Even if I’ve graduated high school, even if I’ve been working for them since I was sixteen, they still treat me like a kid, maybe because I still look like one. A gawky kid with wiry curls, glasses, flat nose, and brown skin at that.

I don’t dream of becoming beautiful anymore. I’m focused on other dreams. I don’t really believe in fairy tales anymore, at least, not the kind where the plain girl, neglected and unloved by her family, wins the heart of a handsome prince. But stories like these got me through my lonely childhood, and writing stories keeps me believing that dreams can come true. And maybe, by sharing stories like this on screen, I can make others feel the same way.

I don’t expect Mom and Dad to understand, I just don’t want to hear them discourage me. I know it’s not going to be easy; nothing ever has been for me. But that’s why I need to keep believing.