Creative Nonfiction

Quarter 3 – Module 1
Literary Conventions that Govern the Different Genre

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 LESSON 1

ANALYSIS ON THEME AND TECHNIQUES USED IN A

PARTICULAR TEXT

Learning Objectives: At the end of this lesson, the learners are expected to:
1. Analyze the theme and techniques used in a particular text
2. Write samples of the Literary Elements Based on One’s Experiences

Let’s Answer This!

Getting Back: Recall what you learned about the literature of the past. Read and
answer the following statements. Write the letter of your answer in your notebook
1.Non Fiction
a. reason for which the author writers c. writer tell his own story
b. writing that is true d. writer gives and explanation of ideas
2. Autobiography
a. writer tells someone else’s story c. writing is not true
b. writer tells his own story d. gives a description of a topic
3. Informational Non-Fiction
a. Intent informing the reader about the topic
b. writing that is not true
c. writer tries to convince the reader
d. original materials that have not been altered
4.Biography
a. writer tells his own story c. writer tells the story of someone else’s
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 b. short form of literary composition d. writing gives explanation of ideas
5. Any short work of non-fiction offering a part of a magazine, newspaper or book
a. article b. diary c. novel d. blog
6. A type of nonfiction writing that includes personal thoughts and reflections.
a. memoir b. biography c. autobiography d. compare and contrast
7. This pattern of writing shows the order of events occurred
a. categorical b. expository c. chronological d. compare and
contrast
8. What is included in background information?
a. claim b. main character c. conflict d. setting
9. Quote, question, study and statement about life and all are all examples of ______.
a. conflict b. text evidence c. resolution d. leading statement
10. The theme of a story is______________.
a. the problem the character is facing
b. how much is the main character solves his problem
c. the location of the story
d. the lesson or big idea the author is trying to teach about

What is Creative Non Fiction? Is a genre of writing that that uses literary styles
and techniques to factually accurate narratives; these includes autobiography,
biography, literary journalism, reportage, personal narratives, travelogues, reflection,
essay, flash nonfiction or flash essay. It is important to know that creative nonfiction
articles must be factually accurate and written with attention (Wikipedia).

Identifying Themes and Literary Analysis

Read the following story for analysis:

Many Mansions

Small World

Ledesma St., San Juan

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 It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What seems modest to
an adult is extravagance to a little one. It was the world to me. It certainly seemed
ample then. There were three bedrooms, which we called blue, green, and aircon.
Children’s names, these; one bedroom was painted blue, one green, and one had a
new air-conditioner. I don’t remember what we called it before the air-conditioner
arrived, but it was yellow, with a parquet floor and a deep dressing area. It was the
room of my parents, which is why the new Sony color TV and Betamax were there.
The old TV was in the living room downstairs, a Zenith in a large cabinet with doors
that slid open. In front of it was a coffee table and the blue sofa where Tito Bing, when
he was visiting, would sit shirtless, leaving a deep, sweaty impression on the vinyl.

My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon enough, a piano took its
place in our living room. We went to a music studio in northeast Greenhills, a short
walk from the Greenhills shopping center. To us that whole complex was simply
Unimart, where my mother bought groceries; then came Virra Mall, a modern marvel,
not yet a seedy haven of smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled universe:
Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco, where my father worked
and where we played tennis on Sunday afternoons; and then on to Ateneo, where I
had studied since grade school.

San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even my relatives
were there. On M. Paterno Street, adjacent to Ledesma, lived Tito Pepot with my
father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas lived in another part of Greenhills, with Tita
Letty and the Mendozas nearby on Mariano Marcos Street. Sundays we heard mass in
Mary the Queen, where I would marry my wife years later.

The big round dining table was new, and I suppose like a lot of families, we
experienced that moment of bliss when, having changed from a long table to this round
one with a novelty called the lazy susan, we were liberated from the forced courtesies
of asking people to pass this or that dish. I wonder though if something was lost, if the
convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until what you wanted was
right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality, the togetherness with one’s
table mates that taught you the give and take of community.

There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at meals we’d
have it and a blue one on the table. Tito Bing would pour orange juice into his coffee,
forgetting that the water was in the orange pitcher, the orange juice in the blue one.
Ledesma Street was a short one, and quiet. Our house was unassuming, with walls of
a modest height and a green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car garage. We’d
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play football there, and Bombit, the eldest, once fell on his wrist and broke it. On
birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables from one end to the other,
balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and our painfully cute posing for pictures.

Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said. I don’t remember seeing
any. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone in that tiny gray house on our left. My
mother says that some of the people there had gone insane. Somehow, coffin-making
and insanity come hand in hand, as we’ve learned from old horror movies.

In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls. Going to
soirées, meeting them, getting their phone numbers, calling them up – how crazy it all
was, to daydream an entire afternoon away, my books on the living room coffee table,
my head in the clouds. The studying could go to hell as my mind floated in its
hormone-induced bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks, then
wallowing in the crushing despair of rejection.

The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone with them more than
fifteen minutes. The Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I loved that. Niña and I
would talk often, it would be daylight out, then it would be dark and I wouldn’t even get
up to turn on the lights, and we’d talk some more. But I should have seen how that
affair would turn out: she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my familiar orbit. At a certain
point, we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle Greenhills, then asked "Was
that you?" later in the evening when I called. When you don’t know what each other
looks like anymore, the courtship has officially failed.

Then we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my second year in
high school. When we were about to leave, we felt the excitement of moving to a new
house, a bigger one, in a more upscale neighborhood. It meant good things that we
were moving up in the world.

When We Were

Rich Heron St., Greenmeadows

There were no phones. For some reason, our application for two lines had been
held up. Having just moved, I became acutely aware of the lack of communications, a
serious shortcoming in the eyes of a fifteen year-old. In such ways were an adolescent

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boy’s inept attempts at wooing adolescent girls doomed before they hardly had a
chance to succeed.
To communicate with the outside world I simply upped and went to a friend’s
house, Gerry’s in Xavierville or Abe’s in La Vista. I would simply show up and take
them by surprise. Was there some emergency? They would ask. Why had I gone all
the way there? Then they realized that without the ability to call them, I had little choice
but to pop up unannounced at their houses, ready to make myself at home and
partake of their meals. Teenagers can get away with such blithe effrontery.
But even with its isolation, remedied a few months after we moved in when the
phone company finally deigned to be of service, the house had its attractions. In fact,
in many ways it was a dream house. It sat on some eight hundred square meters,
more than twice the size of the San Juan house we left behind. And since the house
my civil-engineer father designed used up less than half the lot, we had more room to
roam than we had ever had, or ever would.
I was especially fond of the wide backyard. Half of it was concrete, on which we
thrashed around playing our tortured brand of basketball with an undersized ball and a
makeshift board and ring. The other half was a garden, green and expansive; all we
had at the back of the Ledesma house was a patch of dark soil where nothing would
grow. Afternoons I’d take the cover off one of the round patio tables and spread it on
the prickly Bermuda grass. I’d lie there on the thick tablecloth that was just long
enough for me and gaze wistfully at a blue, blue sky. The open space of the backyard
gave me a vantage point to the heavens I haven’t had before or since. Not a bad place
to live in for someone who sometimes wanted to just ponder the sky, who wanted the
occasional chance to escape to it.
I did that often, sitting on the sidewalk outside vigilantly watching the sun setting
over what to me was Greenhills (where the girl of special interest to me lived), or lying
on that tablecloth in the garden. Or sitting at the balcony that joined the rooms of my
parents and Pixie, my sister, on the nights I’d suffer an insomnia attack; my sister
asleep in the master bedroom, I’d bring a chair from her room onto the balcony. An
insomniac, who sometimes has no choice but to be awake when the dark gives way to
light, can always treat himself to the dawn sky. For the growing teen, perhaps the most
important thing about the new house were the bedrooms.
For the first time I had my own room, no small thing in a household of five boys
and one girl. An only girl must have her own room, mother reasoned, and we used to
envy Pixie her privilege. When we moved, I, the third child, finally had mine. This was
important. As a child staggers into adolescence, he grows increasingly ornery when it
comes to matters of privacy. At last I had a place where my things, and thoughts, could
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be left undisturbed. Late afternoons and early evenings I’d turn off the lights and play
something on my stereo – Barbra Streisand’s "Somewhere" or Boston’s "More Than a
Feeling" or "Amanda," U2’s "With or Without You" – anything that soared, and turn up
the volume. I’d lie in bed facing the window. Or I’d open the window and sit on the sill,
my feet in the plant box, and let the music take me up into the deepening darkness.
It didn’t take long, though, before I felt that I didn’t quite fit here. Neighbors can
do that to you. On the asphalted tennis court at the park I played mostly with kids from
around the village, kids ten, eleven, twelve years old. And they were kids in their brash,
self-absorbed way. I was never comfortable around them, and I put up with them only
because I enjoyed the game.
On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-absorbed kids of the
tennis court were replaced by brash, self-absorbed grown-ups. They found me quiet,
but what was there to talk about? I didn’t smoke, do drugs, party till dawn, or fawn over
cars. In my eyes they were moneyed men in the aimless, petty way I imagined you
grew up to be if you didn’t see anything much that made sense beyond what you could
drive, wear, eat, smoke, or screw. I had nothing to say to them.
I sensed that it was a matter of time before I had to leave. The land surrounding
our house was empty, but for how long? Houses were going up all around the
subdivision. How long until the banging and clatter of construction work drove away the
quiet, the burgeoning houses encroaching upon us and obstructing our view? How
long before the whole place was filled with the arrogant, chattering, idle people I
thought my neighbors were?
The parish church didn’t make me feel any better. It was just outside the village,
and Sundays we heard mass there with the rest of the subdivision and nearby villages.
I never liked the church. I thought the immense bug-eyed statue of Christ above the
altar, to which all eyes had to turn, was ill-proportioned and hideous. It only added to
the feeling of strangeness I felt among my expensively coiffed, dour-faced neighbors.
And then there was the sound. No matter what they did, no matter how they tried, an
echo always bounced off the walls and made it hard to track the priest’s words. The
word of God deserved better acoustics.
Maybe it was no accident that my crisis of faith occurred at about that time. It
was hard enough grappling with soul-piercing questions of faith; it became tougher to
hang on to God in a place that didn’t seem to want you to. How could faith smolder in a
house of worship cold as this? I stopped going to that church, or any other. I see
now that such thoughts could probably weigh heavily only on the mind of a mid-teen,
one grown attuned, excessively perhaps, to the hollowness of conformity. I was
fighting my quiet rebellions, against family, school, social classes, God – the things
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that boxed me in and told who I should be, what I should believe in, how I should
behave. I was concerned, maybe too much so, with the incongruence between who
you were and who you pretended to be. It was too easy to judge.
And perhaps a teenager feels more acutely than others that he is an outsider.
Was I one of them? Yes and no, and I squirmed at the contradiction. There I was in
their midst, living a comfortable life in one of their cushy houses. I wanted the money
and what it could buy (in a family of six children one feels that there is never enough to
go around). But I spurned the accoutrements of such a life, the status symbols, the
badges one wore to prove membership in what I thought was a vacuous elite. I felt
uneasy knowing I wasn’t poor, that my skin was pale, that I spoke in competent
English, that my tastes weren’t lowbrow, that I ate well, that we had cars and maids
and an eight-hundred square-meter house in a posh private subdivision, that I studied
in an expensive exclusive school – that I was part of a narrow stratum of society that
did exceedingly well at fending for itself. This was who I was, and it wasn’t all right with
me. I had become what I scorned: a rich kid. It was one other thing to fight.
In the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness, the wanting to
be both in and out of the club – was simply part of the growing pains, endured during
an adolescent’s labored and fitful evolution toward a higher form of being. Perhaps I
was simply suffering the displacedness one first comes to notice as a teenager, the
universal feeling of not quite being at home anywhere, even in one’s skin. I’ve never
lost that feeling. It’s probably just another part of the turmoil of living in a world that
turns and turns without asking if it’s all too fast for you.
Soon enough, my father told us that we had to move out. He no longer wanted to
stay in the construction arm of Meralco, which he had served for decades. He wanted
to strike out on his own with a new company, with his own people. And that meant
earning less. The house had to go, or rather, we had to let go of it.
In August of 1989, two months into my last year as an undergraduate in college,
some five years after we first moved in, we trundled out of the house on our trusty old
Hi-Ace and a small truck my father borrowed from the office. Years later, we would
look back at the years we spent there and chuckle: those were the days when we were
rich, the days of our brief but failed foray into the ranks of the wealthy.
When my mind wanders back to those days, I’m often back on the balcony
outside my sister’s room, up at daybreak because I haven’t slept a wink, and I watch
the darkness turn into a thin gray, then a blue that grows more and more vivid, the
wisps of clouds streaked with red, herald of the arriving sun. "Night’s candles are burnt
out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top," wrote Shakespeare.

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Those years in that house when I had a balcony seat to the break of day I knew
exactly what he meant.

The House on Stilts

Mariano Marcos St., San Juan

We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on Mariano

Marcos in San Juan, but we had called it Ortega all our lives, and Ortega it still is. That
was how we called it, the way the house on Ledesma Street is "Ledesma," the house
on Heron Street "Greenmeadows" (not Heron); the way my wife calls the Malate house
she was born in "Vermont," though Vermont Street has been J. Nakpil for ages.
It felt strange, karmic in a bad way, that we were moving into it. My Tita Letty
and my Mendoza cousins had stayed in that house all the years I was growing up, and
they had just moved into a none-too-posh subdivision in Marikina, not like the grander
ones in the Ortigas area we were leaving. We knew it was going to be a step down.
It was. From the surface sheen of Greenmeadows to this. The house seemed
old, and more importantly, run down. It stood on stilts, as we kids called them, the
house raised from the ground a few feet, in the style of older times for some purpose
we no longer thought applicable. The doors didn’t have knobs, just handles and hooks.
They closed because of springs attached at the top. You’d hear them bang, the
spring’s squeak, when someone passed through. When typhoons hit, the house made
a low rumble as storm winds made the doors and windows jitter, as if it all would finally
come apart.
The interiors were tighter, the corridors narrower, and – perhaps the surest sign
of our harder times – there were fewer bathrooms. There were no marbled floors as in
Greenmeadows, just narrow wooden planks worn away at some places, and they
creaked under your step. The windows weren’t sheets of tinted glass on large metal
frames; they were made of wooden and capiz panels, in the style of old houses I see
only in Manila or the provinces.
This house sat on an unusually shaped corner lot, with one road (Smuth, which
we never did learn how to pronounce) rising sharply upwards from Mariano Marcos,
creating a pizza-pie slice of land. At the thin end of the pie slice was the gate, which
opened to a long driveway of concrete that was broken in some places. When it rained,
opening the gate was a chore; it was low, water collected just under it, and my mother
eventually bought boots and left them by the front door with an umbrella. The plan was
for us to stay here while our new house in Marikina, in the same middle-class village
our cousins had transferred to, was being built. We didn’t know how long that would

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take, but it seemed to slow down when the Gulf War broke out and prices shot up.
That was the attitude: we were here only in transit. When you walked into the master
bedroom, you could tell we didn’t intend to stay. Together with my parents’ queen-size
bed were single beds, a red sofa, and wing chairs, all refugees from the house on
Heron Street that was no longer ours. They seemed to be biding their time, waiting to
be restored to their rightful place, to a room more in keeping with their status.
The house may not have been much to look at. And commuting to anywhere was
harder since it was a long walk toward the nearest jeepney routes. The drive to Ateneo
was longer. But it wasn’t without charms. It had wide open spaces, for one thing. There
was a garden, which wasn’t like the manicured, sculpted showcase in Greenmeadows;
it was thick with grass green and wild, not prickly bermuda. The earth was soft under
your running shoes. In the evenings I’d look out from the living room window at the
grass shimmering in the ghostly moonlight.
At dusk fat flies hovered eerily in the air, after darkness had relented but before
the sun had come out, as if presiding over some solemn ceremony in which the night
gave leave to the day. I saw that strange but wondrous rite several times because of
my insomnia attacks. One summer I suffered a particularly severe one. I’d go to bed at
ten then be awake at two, unable to sleep anymore. I’d get up and play games on the
computer, watch tapes, read. When my mother got up at dawn I’d help her heat some
water for coffee, put ice in and fill the water jug, and sit at the kitchen table. We weren’t
talkative at five in the morning, so we would just drink coffee. When it started to get
light out I’d take a walk or jog, pounding the concrete and the soft earth and grass,
making small circles in the yard, the fat flies that buzzed softly paying no heed. I’d
come in and eat a heavy breakfast, sleep the whole afternoon, then go through it all
again that night. Somehow, after weeks of this, I was finally able to fall asleep at
midnight and wake at eight. I counted my blessings, old house included. The end came
soon enough. The owners of the lot had sold it to a townhouse developer, and we had
until the end of March 1992 to move out. It had been nearly three years.
We packed up and started shuttling between this place and the next, but moving
seemed like more work this time than when we left Greenmeadows. The trips to
Marikina were longer than the ones from Ortigas to San Juan, and the traffic had only
grown heavier. We’d be able to make only two, maybe three trips a day before
pleading exhaustion. The HiAce got worn down quickly. On our last trip we stuffed
everything that would fit into the cars, just barely fitting into them ourselves, and drove
out for the last time it was also my last day as a teacher in the Ateneo High School:
March 29, Sunday, graduation day. I’d taught there two years. That last year I’d met
Hilda. On my first date with her in the middle of August, I came home at six in the
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morning. We had been on the couch in her living room talking until two, fell asleep, and
woke up at five thirty, my head still on her lap. My mother opened the gate, a look of
worry on her face, as if afraid she’d lost me to someone else. She did. One week later
Hilda agreed to be my girlfriend, my first ever. Five years later we were married.
After two years on probation at Ateneo High, my contract wasn’t renewed, and
on that last day I stuffed what was left of my things into plastic shopping bags and,
after the ceremony and a complimentary dinner, threw them into a car and drove off
into the night. No job, new house, no teary farewells. A few days later, my mother
would go back to try to retrieve some more things. The gate was open, she said;
someone had shit on the driveway. Faucets and other fixtures were gone, tiles torn
out, the place a mess. I’m glad I never saw that. Then they torched the house, easier
and cheaper than tearing it down, and I suppose that was good, as good a way as any
to go.

Five Brothers, One Mother

Taurus St., Cinco Hermanos, Marikina

The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum hanging over our
heads, we had no choice but to move in. Just how unfinished the house was became
bruisingly clear on our first night. There was no electricity yet, and the windows didn’t
have screens. There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t sleep the whole night. My sister slept
on a cot out in the upstairs hall instead of her room downstairs, maybe because it was
cooler here. Every so often she would toss and turn, waving bugs away with half-
asleep hands. I sat beside her and fanned her. She had work the next day. In the
morning someone went out and bought boxes and boxes of Katol.
Work on the house would continue, but it remains unfinished eight years later. All
the interiors, after a few years of intermittent work, are done. But the exterior remains
unpainted, still the same cement gray as the day we moved in, though grimier now.
Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away. The garden remains ungreened; earth, stones,
weeds, and leaves are where I suppose bermuda grass will be put down someday.
In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the successful
Greenmeadows plan, but with more modest means at one’s disposal. The living room
of the Cinco Hermanos house features much of the same furniture, a similar look. The
sofa and wing chairs seem at ease again. My mother’s growing collection of angel
figurines is the new twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of the rooms
in the Marikina house, since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.
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 The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the earlier one, the cooking and eating
areas clearly demarcated. There is again a formal dining room, and the new one
seems to have been designed for the long narra dining table, a lovely Designs Ligna
item, perhaps the one most beautiful piece of furniture we have, bought on the cheap
from relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on Heron Street.
Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-made for the
Greenmeadows house, the same ones we’d slept in since then. It was a loft or an attic,
my mother insisted, which is why the stairs had such narrow steps. But this "attic,"
curiously enough, had two big bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To those of us who
actually inhabited these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was no
bathroom, so if you had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go down
the stairs and come back up again, by which time you were at least half awake.
Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more basic, and more
dramatic, than their location. This part of Marikina is not quite the same as the swanky
part of Ortigas we inhabited for five years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a road, cutting it
into two phases, that leads on one end to Major Santos Dizon, which connects Marcos
Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops at Olandes, a dense
community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty. The noise – from the tricycles, the
chattering on the street, the trucks hurtling down Marcos Highway in the distance, the
blaring of the loudspeaker at our street corner put there by eager-beaver baranggay
officials – dispels any illusions one might harbor of having returned to a state of bliss.
The first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the family and
guest areas, so one can entertain outsiders without disturbing the house’s inhabitants.
This principle owes probably more to my mother than my father. After all, she is the
entertainer, the host. The living room, patio, and dining room – the places where
guests might be entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their places. She
keeps the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of cabinets and
a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who accompanied
her recently while grocery shopping, she buys groceries as if all of us still lived there. I
don’t recall the cupboard ever being empty. That became her way of mothering. As we
grew older and drifted farther and farther away from her grasp, defining our own lives
outside of the house, my mother must have felt that she was losing us to friends, jobs,
loves – forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured that food, and a clean place to
stay, was what we still needed from her. So over the last ten years or so she has
become more involved in her cooking, more attentive, better. She also became fussier
about meals, asking if you’ll be there for lunch or dinner so she knows how much to
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cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t call to say he wasn’t coming home for dinner
after all, or the person who brought guests home without warning. There was more to it
than just knowing how much rice to cook.
I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular Christmas and
New Year get-togethers, which have been held in our house for the past half-decade
or so. She brings out the special dishes, cups and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls,
coasters and doilies she herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand better why her
Christmas decor has grown more lavish each year. After seeing off the last guests
after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I didn’t see her face,
but I could hear her smiling. My father replied, "Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a secret.
Sundays we come over to the house, everyone who has moved out, and have lunch
together. Sunday lunches were always differently esteemed in our household. Now
that some of us have left, I sense that my siblings try harder than they ever did to be
there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the chance to do what she does best.

Epilogue

The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the United States
and never returned. He left some months after we’d moved to Greenmeadows, yet I
have no memory of him there. (In memory there are no things, only worlds. Things
never exist by themselves, but only with and against other things, between
backgrounds and foregrounds, swimming in contexts. This is how we can remember
that something is out of place, like a fancy wing chair in the master bedroom of a worn-
down house, like an eldest brother in a house he left behind. I remember him only in
Ledesma, the rough playmate, sometimes the bully who held us in his thrall, who
would jump on cockroaches with glee, who would take alarm clocks apart and not put
them back together. I remember him in the green station wagon, pillows in the back,
disappearing for days visiting his girlfriend in Manila. In the US they would get married,
have two kids, and divorce messily. The guest room in the Marikina house is for him,
for his hoped-for return. The exodus resumed in 1996 when I got married and moved
to Diliman. Pixie, my only sister, the fifth child, married in December 1999 and moved
to Blue Ridge. Titus, the fourth, transferred to a Makati apartment with his wife after
their wedding this past March. Raul, the second, and Mikko, the sixth and youngest,
are left with my parents. My father is what most people would call a man of few words.
He was a father of few words as well. These past few years I’ve tried to talk to him
more and more, which is special because we never did when I was younger. We often
talk about money. I am amazed to learn how little we had in the first place, and I

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wonder how we could have afforded the Greenmeadows house, how much he has lost
keeping the company he started afloat, how much he still owes here and there.
To me it makes more and more sense for him to sell the Marikina house, use
some of the money to pay off his debts, buy a condominium with two or three
bedrooms, and live off the interest on what remains, which would still be substantial.
I’ve mentioned this to him a few times, and he seems receptive. But I wonder if there’s
such a thing as a transfer threshold, dislocation fatigue that accumulates over a
lifetime of setting up in one place then moving. By my count the Cinco Hermanos
house is my father’s eighth home. Will he and my mother be too tired, too weary for
another relocation? A few years ago my father and his brothers and sisters sold their
house in San Juan. Built in 1948, it had lasted nearly half a century, sheltering my
grandfather and grandmother and their eight children. They had planned to build a
condominium on the lot, but the real estate bubble of the mid-nineties convinced them
that it would be better to just sell. It was sold. That was not my father’s first house,
though it seemed so to me. Born in 1935, he lived near Pinaglabanan church, then in
1940 at the corner of M. Paterno and Alfonso XIII, with relatives. In my mind the
Paterno house was his first, not just because I hadn’t seen the first two (the first is
gone, the second rebuilt). The Paterno house was where his father and mother lived,
and I’d always imagined them and their children making do in that structure that
weathered the decades. When we were little, my siblings and cousins, we spent
Sundays there. I learned how to ride a bicycle on the long driveway. We played tennis
on a neighbor’s court after climbing the back wall. In the grassy front yard we played
baseball, and I hit the first homerun in that tiny ballpark. We fished for star apples with
long bamboo sticks, picked dewy santan, got caught in the thorny bougainvillea
bushes retrieving errant pingpong balls. The last time I passed by the lot the house
had been torn down. My father would have been thirteen when he moved into it; he
was over sixty when he and his brothers and sisters let it go. It made sense to sell it,
but I wonder if anything was bargained away in the transaction. He had lost his parents
years before. Was losing the house a final orphaning? Is this the last one? Am I here
for good? Or should I keep the boxes and packing tape handy? Houses provided us
the necessary certainties – somewhere to come home to where you’d find your family,
your things, a hot dinner, a bed or a good couch. Write to me here. Call me at this
number. But I’ve changed addresses and phone numbers enough times to know
better. Perhaps that’s what houses are really about: the fundamental uncertainty of life,
the slowly learned fact that the reference points by which we draw our maps and chart
our course are ever shifting, and a life’s cartography is never quite done. That isn’t
necessarily a sad thing. Perhaps the houses are no longer, but somewhere inside me I
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am still marveling at the break of day, at the way the moon illuminates the grass, at the
way the lives of those I’ve lived with have crisscrossed and intertwined with mine, no
matter how tangled up it all sometimes got. I count my blessings, the ghosts of houses
past included.

This essay won First prize for the Essay in the 2000 Palanca Awards

After Reading the above stories, do Activity below:

Activity 1.1.1
Students will be divided into 4 groups and each group will be assigned to a
particular segment of the story (1 ) Many Mansions, (2) Small World, (3) When We
Were Rich, (4)The House on Stilts, (5) Five Brothers, One Mother. They are going to
analyze each section using the literary tools. After crafting their analysis posted in a
white cartolina, they will briefly report and then followed by a short dramatization
assigned to them.

Literary tools
Type of Mansion Analysis

1. Plot (synopsis)

2. Setting

3. Mood

4. Characters in the Story

5. Point of view used

6. Symbolism

7. Theme
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Note to the Teacher: Have your assessment on the above activity; likewise decide the
scoring.
For the drama/role play you can employ these rubrics:
Pp128
Source: Writing in Creative Non-Fiction by Sonia B. Sygaco

Activity 1.1.2: Memory Walk Writing Activity

Go on a walk around your place you know well, maybe it’s your home, your
neighborhood or a specific park or building. As you’re walking make a mental note of
places that trigger certain memories from your past .Then when you get back from your
walk, write about the most vivid memory you have collected

Source: study.com
ABL
SKILLE DEVELOPIN NOVIC ACTUA
MASTERF E
CRITERIA D (4 G E L
UL (5 pts) (3
pts) (2 pts) (1 pt) SCORE
pts)

Outline,
Focus,
Purpose
(Controlling
Idea)
10 pts

Ideas
support
and
developme
nt
(Evidence)
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10 pts

Structure,
Organizatio
n 10 pts

Vocabulary
and Word
Usage
10 pts

TOTAL
Score

Source: Writing Techniques in Creative Non-fiction by Sonia B. Sygaco

Let’s Do It!
Activity 1.1.3

Analyze the text that capture the photo in Time Magazine, November 1990 (Write
analysis on the photo that Humanized AIDS)

The Photo that Changed the Face of AIDS

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 RUBRIC
Awesome Good Effort A Work in Just
Criteria
(4) (3) Progress (2) Beginning (1)

Makes a complete Makes a detailed Makes a detailed Description are

and detailed description most of description some not detailed or
description of the the subject matter of the subject complete
Objective subject matter and/or elements matter and/or
and/or elements seen in the elements seen in
seen in the photograph the photograph
photograph

Provides a Provides a Provides some Summary is not

complete summary somewhat summary about detailed or
of the situation and complete summary the situation and complete
time period shown, of the situation and time period
Knowledge
and the people and time period shown, shown, and the
objects that and the people and people and
appear. objects that objects that
appear. appear.

Forms a Forms somewhat Relates how Finds it difficult

Interpretation reasonable reasonable photograph makes to interpret the
hypothesis about hypothesis about him/her fee meaning of the
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 what is viewed in what is viewed in personally. photograph.
the photograph and the photograph and
is able to support is able to support
this with evidence with some
from the evidence from the
photograph photograph

Finds detailed Finds some Finds the time Does not find
information about information about period for the any information
Future Research the time period and the time period and photograph. about the
relates It to the relates it to the photograph.
photograph photograph.

Source: http://www.cyberbee.com/artifacts/Photo%20Analysis%20Rubric.pdf

Let’s Answer This!

Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the given question. Write the letter
of your answer in your notebook.

1. Hints or clues as to what will happen?

a. mood c. personification
b. point of view d. foreshadowing
2. Contrast between what is expected and what actually happens
a. symbol c. simile
b. b. conflict d. irony
3. Perspective from which the story is told
a. mood c. tone
b. point of view d. personification
4. Time and place of action in the story
a. character c. setting
b. theme d. imagery
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 5. The main event or sequence in the study
a. setting c. plot
b. character d. mood
6. This is referred to as the atmosphere of a literary piece
a. conflict c. climax
b. mood d. theme
7. The performers that do the action and speak dialogue in the story
a. plot c. character
b. story d. imagery
8. A representation using an object or a mood to represent an abstract idea
a. character c. mood
b. symbolism d. foreshadow
9. The underlying message that a writer wants to get across such as bravery,
perseverance or undying love
a. tone c. mood
b. theme d. conflict
10. Literary elements of the story which is considered as the turning point of a
narrative work is it’s point of highest tension or drama
a. climax c. conflict
b. characterization d. tone

Let’s Remember This!

Complete the paragraph with the necessary words or sentences that best describe
what you have learned from the discussion. Write your paragraph in your notebook.
Follow the format below.

I have learned that writing in Creative non-fiction

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__________________
_____________________________________________________________

ANSWER KEY

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