Attending a Filipino Festival with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget in Salinas (California)

Attending a Filipino Festival with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget in Salinas (California)


“Not another festival!” my pre-teen daughter Florence cried.  I thought she was suffering from festival fatigue syndrome.

I was undaunted in my efforts to make Florence into a world citizen however.  “Oh, come on.  You’ll like Filipino food,” I said.

“No, I won’t,” she said and ran to see my husband Laurent to get out of the excursion.

Before Laurent could say anything, I volunteered to drive to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas where the Filipino Festival was taking place and pay for lunch.

“We get to leave after 20 minutes if it’s boring, right?” Florence said on the way there.

“If it’s boring,” I said.  I knew she would become interested in what was happening as the day wore on.

When we arrived at the Filipino Festival, I noticed that almost all of the attendees were Filipino unlike the Greek, Turkish, and Sicilian Santa Rosalia Festivals held on the Monterey Harbor.  Those three festivals had many tourists attend them. 

Many of the beautiful, dark-haired women wore long, flowered formal dresses with the stiff sleeves that puff up at the shoulder.  They looked like graceful butterflies flitting about the festival with children and grandchildren.

The long lines at the food booth moved slowly.  The food smelled so good at the Filipino Festival, however, that people patiently waited their turn.  Florence was impatient with the wait.

“Why don’t you go for a walk with your dad,” I suggested.

I was trying to decide what to order.  The names meant nothing to me except adobo.  I had eaten adobe, a kind of stew, before.  I tried to attach names to the delicious looking dishes that people were ordering, but everyone was speaking Tagalog, which hampered my efforts.

When I got close enough to see what was happening behind the scenes, I saw a man tossing noodles and vegetables in a three-foot wok.  I was going to order that – pointing would help me there.

Finally, it was my turn.  The mystery noodle dish turned out to be pancit.  I ordered that, a serving of chicken adobo, and two egg rolls called lumpia Shanghai with two waters and a soda for Florence.  I was happy with the Filipino sampler menu I had put together.

The thin rice noodles in pancit reflect the Chinese influence on Filipino food.  (The Filipinos themselves have intermingled Malay, Chinese, and Spanish roots.)

“Did you know that the Philippines are named after a Spanish king?” I asked Florence.

“No,” Florence responded, more interested in the Filipino dancing than a history lesson.

“The king was Phillip the Second,” I said.

Florence was becoming more interested in the festival as she ate the adobo, which was made with chicken, vinegar, spices, and pork.

Later when I read Reynaldo Alejandro’s The Philippine Cookbook , I saw that he refers to Mexican adobo as the origin of the dish.  Alejandro writes that Spain administered the Philippines as a colony out of Mexico.  Or, was it Filipino cuisine that influenced Mexican cuisine?  Some things in life remain a mystery.

The origin of the long, torpedo-shaped egg rolls I was eating obviously made me think of China with their stuffing of ground pork and onions.  They were crunchy despite mass manufacture for the festival and tasted good dunked in the red, spicy – sweet dipping sauce.

The child dancers left the stage to be replaced by the director of the first all-Filipino cast film called The Debut.

“If we can’t do well in Salinas with an Asian cast, we’ll never make it in Middle America,” the director said.  “So, bring your ‘lolos’ and ‘lolas’ to the film with you!” he told everyone.

“I just learned the words for ‘grandpa’ and ‘grandma’ in Tagalog,” Laurent said.

“Aren’t we going to the cute store?” Florence asked.  As soon as the director finished his sales pitch, we went down to the “Reflections of Asia” market that was a roofed stall covered with palm leaves.

Florence looked at necklaces.  The coral ones seemed to be de rigueur fashion gear for all Filipino young men.  “Always ready to go surfing,” I thought.  I told Florence she could have one if she let me look around in peace.

I gravitated to the book section.  I looked through cookbooks and a beautiful book about Spanish influences on Filipino religious architecture and art.  (The Philippines is Asia’s largest Christian country with more than 80% of the population being Roman Catholic.)  These items were beyond my budget, but I found a small children’s book about José Rizal.  Rizal is the Philippines’ national hero.

“Who’s that?” Florence asked with her coral necklace with a scallop shell on it in hand.

How do you explain a martyred liberation leader to a young Californian?

“He’s José Rizal.  He’s like the Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez of the Philippines,” I said.

“Neat,” Florence responded, having regained her curiosity about other cultures.  I doubted she would remember Rizal’s name, but I would slip the book into her bookshelves to be “discovered” one day.

Florence had outgrown Barbie dolls, but they had several on sale that wore the Filipino dresses with the puffy sleeves that I liked.  I asked the saleswoman what the dresses were called.

“We call them Santa Claras,” she said.  I later read that they are also called “ternos.”

I bought some postcards of the Philippines, too.  The first postcard I bought showed terraced rice fields in the mountains.  I remembered reading a book about them called Rice by an author named Grist at the University of Chicago.  I recalled that maintaining these terraced fields, especially the retaining walls subject to heavy rains, and overseeing irrigation tend to create communal societies.

Another postcard showed the verdant green foliage around the waterfalls on Basilan Island.

Both postcards would go into our family journal along with a write-up of the day’s outing to make Florence a world citizen, who knows about the Philippines.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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