ARCHITECTURING THE STORY

 ARCHITECTURING THE STORY

NAME: BARAZAR, MALIQUE ILJANAH C.                         STUDENT NO. 2019300966

I. Part 1 (Factual information)

Title of the Article: MY FAMILY'S SLAVE By: Alex Tizon

Web Address Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/

Description (one-sentence format):  She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

New Title (Prescribed): SLAVERY OF LOLA By (your name): Malique Barazar

Description (one-sentence format):  She was 18 years old, when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us.

Elements of a Story Highlight: Choose only one (from Part 2). Plot

Justification:  This is one of the best story articles I have read. Where the thoughts and emotion was attentively elaborated. There is no hiding or being biased of what happened, drastically. Without the detailed plot—with dialogues, it would have been a lot to miss about. Every scenario was essential for defining the character of Lola, and the creativity of it. It gave the story to move and flow. Though the plot flow which was written below is different on ordinary plots. If it is not detailed, then there would be an absence that cannot be pointed out.

II. Part 2 (Content Information)

Descriptive Statements

Plot Alex Tizon was standing and waiting at the baggage claim in Manila Airport. He unzipped his suitcase, to make sure Lola's ashes were still there. Alex's grandfather, Lieutenant Tom who lived during the war, He gifted Lola to Alex's mother. Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed, and dressed his mother. One day during the war Lieutenant Tom came home and caught Alex's mother in a lie—something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table.” His Mom was covered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a quivering voice, she told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Lola looked at his Mom pleadingly, then without a word walked to the dining table and held onto the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound. Seven years later, in 1950, his Mom married his father and moved to Manila, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32‑caliber slug to his temple. His Dad was offered a job in Foreign Affairs as a commercial analyst. The salary would be meager, but the position was in America—a place he and his Mom had grown up dreaming of, where everything they hoped for could come true. Alex's Dad was allowed to bring his family and one domestic. Figuring they would both have to work, my parents needed Lola to care for the kids and the house. His mother informed Lola, and to her great irritation, Lola didn’t immediately acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she was terrified. “It was too far,” she said. “Maybe your Mom and Dad won’t let me go home.” In the end, what convinced Lola was his father’s promise that things would be different in America. He told her that as soon as he and his Mom got on their feet, they’d give her an “allowance.” Lola could send money to her parents, to all her relations in the village. Her parents lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Lola could build them a concrete house, could change their lives forever. Imagine. They landed in Los Angeles on May 12, 1964, all our belongings in cardboard boxes tied with rope. Lola had been with my mother for 21 years by then. In many ways, she was more of a parent to me than either my mother or my father. Hers was the first face he saw in the morning and the last one he saw at night. As a baby, he uttered Lola’s name (which he first pronounced “Oh-ah”) long before he learned to say “Mom” or “Dad.” As a toddler, he refused to go to sleep unless Lola was holding me, or at least nearby. Lola never got that allowance. She asked his parents about it in a roundabout way a couple of years into their life in America. Her mother had fallen ill (with what I would later learn was dysentery), and Lola's family couldn’t afford the medicine she needed. “Pwede ba?” she said to his parents. Is it possible? Mom let out a sigh. “How could you even ask?,” Dad responded in Tagalog. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?” By then Arthur, eight years his senior, had been seething for a long time. He was the one who introduced the word slave into his understanding of what Lola was. Before he said it he'd thought of her as just an unfortunate member of the household. He hated when his parents yelled at her, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they—and the whole arrangement—could be immoral. “Do you know anybody treated the way she’s treated?,” Arthur said. “Who lives the way she lives?” He summed up Lola’s reality: Wasn’t paid. Toiled every day. Was tongue-lashed for sitting too long or falling asleep too early. Was struck for talking back. Wore hand-me-downs. Ate scraps and leftovers by herself in the kitchen. Rarely left the house. Had no friends or hobbies outside the family. Had no private quarters. (Her designated place to sleep in each house we lived in was always whatever was left—a couch or storage area or corner in my sisters’ bedroom. She often slept among piles of laundry.) One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then 9, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said, as Dad stood over her and glared. Her feeble defense only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and he could hear her wailing, an animal cry. When he once referred to Lola as a distant aunt, Billy reminded him that when we’d first met he'd said she was my grandmother. “Well, she’s kind of both,” he said mysteriously. “Why is she always working?” “She likes to work,” he said. “Your dad and mom—why do they yell at her?” “Her hearing isn’t so good …” Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. They spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people they were, what kind of place we came from. Whether they deserved to be accepted. He was ashamed of it all, including my complicity. There was another reason for secrecy: Lola’s travel papers had expired in 1969, five years after we arrived in the U.S. She’d come on a special passport linked to my father’s job.  He and his Mom argued into the night, each of them sobbing at different points. She said she was tired of working her fingers to the bone supporting everybody, and sick of her children always taking Lola’s side, and why didn’t they just take our goddamn Lola, she’d never wanted her in the first place, and she wished to God she hadn’t given birth to an arrogant, sanctimonious phony like him. Lola finally begged them to stop trying to help her. Why do you stay? They asked. “Who will cook?” she said, which he took to mean, Who would do everything? Who would take care of them? Of his Mom? Another time she said, “Where will I go?” This struck him as closer to a real answer.  Lola was 75 when she came to stay with him. He was married with two young daughters, living in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From the second story, they could see Puget Sound. They gave Lola a bedroom and license to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She could relax—and be free—for the first time in her life. He should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. She cooked breakfast even though none of them ate more than a banana or a granola bar in the morning, usually while they were running out the door. She made their beds and did their laundry. She cleaned the house. He found myself saying to her, nicely at first, “Lola, you don’t have to do that.” “Lola, we’ll do it ourselves.” “Lola, that’s the girls’ job.” Okay, she’d say, but keep right on doing it. “I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” he said, and went through a long list of slavelike things she’d been doing. One afternoon, he found her sitting on the back deck gazing at a snapshot someone had sent of her village. “You want to go home, Lola?” She turned the photograph over and traced her finger across the inscription, then flipped it back and seemed to study a single detail. “Yes,” she said. Just after her 83rd birthday, he paid her airfare to go home. He’d follow a month later to bring her back to the U.S.—if she wanted to return. The unspoken purpose of her trip was to see whether the place she had spent so many years longing for could still feel like home. She found her answer. “Everything was not the same,” she told him as they walked around Mayantoc. The old farms were gone. Her house was gone. Her parents and most of her siblings were gone. Childhood friends, the ones still alive, were like strangers. It was nice to see them, but … everything was not the same. She’d still like to spend her last years here, she said, but she wasn’t ready yet. One day, while Alex and Lola were putting away groceries, he just blurted it out: “Lola, have you ever been romantic with anyone?” She smiled, and then she told him the story of the only time she’d come close. She was about 15, and there was a handsome boy named Pedro from a nearby farm. For several months they harvested rice together side by side. One time, she dropped her bolo—a cutting implement—and he quickly picked it up and handed it back to her. “I liked him,” she said. Silence.  “And?” “Then he moved away,” she said. “And?” “That’s all.” “Lola, have you ever had sex?,”  he heard myself saying. “No,” she said. She wasn’t accustomed to being asked personal questions. “Katulong lang ako,” she’d say. I’m only a servant. Alex and Doods' truck pulled up to a small concrete house in the middle of a cluster of homes mostly made of bamboo and plank wood, in the province of Tarlac. Surrounding the pod of houses: rice fields, green and seemingly endless. “Where is Lola?” A voice from another room. The next moment, a middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. “Where is Lola?” Alex slid the tote bag from his shoulder and handed it to her. She looked into his face, still smiling, gently grasped the bag, and walked over to a wooden bench and sat down. She reached inside and pulled out the box and looked at every side. “Where is Lola?” she said softly. He didn't think she knew what to expect. She set the box on her lap and bent over so her forehead rested on top of it, and at first he thought she was laughing (out of joy) but he quickly realized she was crying. Her shoulders began to heave, and then she was wailing—a deep, mournful, animal howl, like he once heard coming from Lola.

Character She was named Eudocia T. Pulido but no one called her since they started to call her, "Lola." She was 4'11, with a mocha skin and almond eyes. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She was whole-heartedly devoted to her "amos." Lola’s story began, up north in the central plains: Tarlac province. Rice country. Slavery has a long history on the islands. Before the Spanish came, islanders enslaved other islanders, usually war captives, criminals, or debtors. Slaves came in different varieties, from warriors who could earn their freedom through valor to household servants who were regarded as property and could be bought and sold or traded. High-status slaves could own low-status slaves, and the low could own the lowliest. Some chose to enter servitude simply to survive: In exchange for their labor, they might be given food, shelter, and protection. Lola’s legal status became what Filipinos call tago nang tago, or TNT—“on the run.” She stayed TNT for almost 20 years.

Idea ​A secret that was revealed when Alex Tizon posthumously published non-fiction; a heart touching that Lola doesn’t deserve all through spending years thus she kept doing the opposite side like a mother’s unconditional love. Meanwhile, good thing Alex Tizon saw reality and felt what Lola’s striving and surviving through. ​ A young woman 4 foot 11 was 18 years old gifted to Alex’ Mom by his grandfather Lieutenant Tom, a woman became old who spent most of her whole life but then she was defined as a slave. A woman was known as how a mother treated her children at the same time being a nanny, an old woman who experienced being cruelled, shouted, spanked, thrown by things, teamed-up, never been paid, and verbally abused but still she did what she needs to; to cook, do laundry, fold mountains of laundry, prepare table settings, prepare what they should wear, of course other household chores. A woman who prioritized what kids needed, who would take care of kids, who learned to read and write when she got old, started to do in fields when she was 8 but still she did her part, she did great despites of things instead would provoke her to seek revenge someday. ​Non-fictional story was filled with a heartbreaking plot which taught how you must treat a person, what kind of person you are, what kind of family you have. It felt like you were there, watching what happened and observing what kind of place it is, how the day started and it ended. How people were characterized by how they move or do things rather than introducing them. ​ A reality was written in a creative way and how strikingly it ended and how it brought you to that place and time. An extraordinary way to tell what really happened behind of it; going to reality driving on the road of mirthful words. Alex Tizon was toned how hard he tried to understand each side and figure out what was happening, how regretful asking why did he do it late, why not earlier but at least he did it right while there is still time. Alex knew it was right that he returned Lola back to her place. ​Finally a woman did great until she was 86 and died at the same date as Alex’ Mom, a woman was treated as a slave, a woman was disrespected even being a human, a woman cried with no sound, a woman who never complained even though what she experienced was a worth complaining and running but she didn’t, a woman who still loved the family especially the kids despite of its not worth loving and taking care for. A woman got old spending her life and revolved her world through looking how about the kids in the future, what they would be. She was named Eudocia T. Pulido.

Language In the article of the story, First Person of POV used, significantly, the interior dialogue. "I" statements were exemplified. It allows an author to dive much more deeply into the narrator's character, since the reader gets to hear the narrator's inner thoughts and experience the narrator's emotions. Additionally, it makes the narrator the main character, or protagonist, of the story. "I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. To make her life better. Why didn’t I? However, during the writing on the plot was changed into 3rd person, to act as an omniscient narrator.

Music Rhythm - It was shown above that Alex's thoughts were concise and elaborated. The pattern used through the flow of dialogues.  Tone and Texture- In the article story, since the writer used the Interior Dialogue for 1st Person POV, invaded the thoughts and emotion. How the writer was shattered while witnessing the reality of Lola. Alex's disappointments were seen in the plot written above.  Tempo - Numerous commas were used even in dialogue, for faster reading, to feel the emotion more. Then every period used, shown also on the above, slower and to give emphasis. The usage of punctuation marks controls the speed of reading.  Form - The classification of the writing used is in essay or paragraph form for narrative purposes.

Spectacle The highlight in this story is how Lola endured his 56 years knowing that her life would never be the same since she was presented as a gift. She was not only devoted to Alex and kids, but also to her mom and the husbands as well. Because of her devotion, she learned to endure without complaining, she was not paid or treated as a human.  One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then 9, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said, as Dad stood over her and glared. Her feeble defense only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and I could hear her wailing, an animal cry. Sensory images that appeal to the readers used were not usually descriptive of tangible things, it is more of being within the scenario. Basically the vivid descriptions, the dialogues for the reader to visualize the setting and the character. Alex Tizon was basically writing this somewhat of thinking out loud.