I grew up in the Philippines and moved to California when I was 8 years old. I recall the legends and tales of my culture, but many were frightening and taught children to behave without question or suffer a horrifying fate. Several stories were quite extreme, but this method of instilling fear is pervasive to Filipino customs from the news features they favored airing while I was a child, such as instances of religious statues crying blood and holy manifestations in nature. At least 81 percent of the Philippines are Roman Catholics and quick to believe in miracles, apparitions, supernatural phenomena, and omens. The masses could be easily controlled with hereditary beliefs and stories like these, but even as a child I was compelled to seek the truth and reasoning behind incidents, although no one would offer me a legitimate answer or take me seriously.

When I immigrated to America, my English was quite good and I took up reading voraciously. My favorite books were always fantasy and myths. I think I particularly enjoyed them because I felt a connection to the characters embarking on an adventure in a foreign land, and at the same time, I craved a deeper understanding of human morality explored in these tales that was missing from my childhood in the Philippines. Unless I had my head in a book, I was always getting into trouble and incredibly mischievous. I believe it was from a lack of assimilation to my new American culture where I felt like things still just happened and that was the way it goes around here. It took a bit of time, but I outgrew some of my outright defiance through the lessons I learned from cultural folk tales. My American education and later childhood exposed me to different parts of the world and different ideas and concepts that I likely would not have had access to in the Philippines.

I loved Greek mythology and I absolutely adored Harry Potter and read all the volumes as they were published, but there were two books I read over and over again, recalling their lessons and the beautiful stories they told.

In times of sadness and times of boredom, in times of happiness and leisure, I read West African Folk Tales by Hugh Vernon-Jackson and the Usborne edition of Stories from Around the World retold by Heather Amery.

I found Vernon-Jackson’s book in a public library and became obsessed with its collection of vivid and fascinating stories, many of them titled with “Why”s and “How”s of creatures and beings both far flung and endemic to Africa. I read the stories of Anansi, a recurring anti-hero and trickster, often portrayed as a spider. I recall the sheer shock I experienced when magical gourds restored the hands of a woman who were severed by her greedy brother. The beginnings of the Universe and why the Sun and the Moon live in the sky paralleled the mythos of the separation of Earth and water and the heavens. Plainly, they were parables of one version of a people far away, but I understood their values and valued their magic. At times I imagined an elder reciting these tales to me around a fire, the basis of civilization and unification under a common ancestor.

Our hardcopy of Stories from Around the World was falling apart at the spine from how much I read it, which made me a bit regretful that I wasn’t very careful with it because it was such an ornate book with amazing illustrations. But I had to keep coming back for stories from Australia, Germany, Mexico, Scandinavia, and all over the world that took me to that land and shared their beliefs with me. My favorite was the Baba Yaga folklore that was much too scary for my younger sister, but filled me with delight each time the heroine escaped the witch. The tale of Baba Yaga has been retold in numerous iterations, including my first Hayao Miyazaki film Spirited Away where her role in helping female protagonists grow up is more conspicuous.

Nowadays I read all kinds of books, but in my adulthood I notice I tend to prefer non-fiction in my manner of seeking the truths about life. Once in awhile though, I crave for the simpler times, and long to remember my roots in reading.