A review of Elsa Valmidiano’s The Beginning of Leaving by Nayt Rundquist:
Recent social and political events have shown how easy it is to feel disconnected from others. From the early days of the COVID pandemic, connecting for drinks and game nights and readings only virtually, to the swaths of hate crimes, antisemitism, anti-trans legislation, and outright fearmongering in politics and media; no matter how easily the internet connects folks across the globe, it’s not hard to feel there’s more dividing than bringing us together.
Elsa Valmidiano’s sophomore collection of lyric essays brilliantly investigates these levels of alienation. In turns macro- and microcosmic, The Beginning of Leaving stares unflinchingly into the face of interpersonal, familial, and societal disconnections, and asks the reader to stare along with it. But Valmidiano is dedicated in these masterful essays to reforging these connections, to tapping back into the stories and relationships that shape her, that shape us all. The true magic of these essays comes from how they read—in layers, folding in on themselves and each other like memories—like stories around the dinner table. Like Valmidiano’s father and his siblings in “Aswang Hunger”, recreating childhood stories in the lot in Labnig, where their home had stood.
Valmidiano’s essays interrogate how stories connect and drive wedges. How partial family histories—omissions buried in the rubble of wartime traumas and the aftermaths of colonization—can leave us stranded from previous generations. As she says in “Stone”, hoping to learn of the past from her Lola: “Stories were buried in her body. I wanted them.” Stories that reveal the trauma her relatives lived through, the hardships they faced in simply surviving to bear the next generation. Stories silenced and passed down almost epigenetically: “Their silence carried a wound so deep that I could not comprehend how it still bled for my mother who never had the opportunity to call her father, ‘Pa,’ as she called her mother, ‘Ma.’”
Pieces like “One Hundred and Eighty Eggs” and “Bad Pro-Choicer” delve into the insidious and long-lasting impacts of religious trauma. Having attended Catholic school as a young child and living through what passes for sex ed served to maroon Valmidiano from her own generation. The societal shame built up around abortions and miscarriages alienates women and birthing people from the friends and loved ones who should be their support system. Valmidiano recounts an experience many women and femmes who have had an abortion or miscarriage know—her body keeping track of the months her mind did not or could not, only to realize on what would have been the due date. She rode through that panic, that trauma, alone on an international flight. The reader senses that betrayal in her words—feeling like the world is crashing around her while everyone else carries on like any other day. The experience leaves Valmidiano stranded even from herself—unable to feel at home in her body—or trust the instincts telling her to flee from an abusive boyfriend.
But Valmidiano also gives readers a remedy for these disconnections. In “Happenstance,” on vacation on Olango Island, Valmidiano finds connection with another Filipina American who had worked in the same building in San Francisco’s Financial District. They bond over shared experiences and family dynamics and the terrifying, awesome serenity of being out at sea. “There was a magic about the ocean and the intimacy that water can bring when you’re in it with someone else, drawing a fear and longing, maybe because to be completely submerged subconsciously reminds us of that original haven of floating in our mother’s watery womb. Willerie felt like a birth twin.” That day—those few hours in the ocean—grounds Valmidiano, connecting her to her culture and herself.
In essays like “Giving Birth in a Time of War” and “Stone”, Valmidiano hunts for stories of her family’s history—reforging connections across generations. She embarks on a mission to uncover a stone, the lynchpin in her Lolo’s fate, and the fates of the whole family, in World War II. The titular stone is the only physical marker of what happened, of where Lolo Dominador had perished. Along the way, she uncovers their radical and guerilla lives:
I couldn’t help notice the eerily similar fates between Dominador and Amadeo . . . who both rose as leaders but were murdered by their own men, leaving grandchildren in their wake who would know little of their patriarchs, gathering up pieces of information like scattered bits of stained glass. We would never know all the answers. (“Stone”)
But she gathers those bits of glass, pieces together what she can, and finds connection to those long-gone ancestors and, by extension, still-living family too.
These bonds stretch even beyond family as Valmidiano finds and forges solidarity across indigenous communities. She recognizes the traumas they have shared at the hands of colonial forces—the indigenous children victimized by boarding schools across North America and Australia and the African peoples drowned at sea in the Atlantic slave trade. In “How Not to Drown”, she connects those lost Africans to her own Filipino ancestors on Spanish galleon ships. In a beautifully quiet moment that matches the wide-open serenity a half-mile out in the ocean, Valmidiano communes with these ancestors—finds a calm to ease a fear of swimming.
The title piece, a collection of flash-length essays, perfectly braids all Valmidiano’s strands together. While on a semester abroad in New Zealand, she visits her Manang Ava in a remote town on the opposite side of Australia. Ava had known and cared for an infant Valmidiano and was able to fill in many gaps in the family history, but as is so often the case, everyone and everything is more complex than can be encapsulated in a single story: “. . . some family members would’ve greatly contested Manang Ava’s generous description of Lilang. We can have such conflicting views about one another that it’s hard to know who is telling the truth, or maybe we all were.”
“The Beginning of Leaving” is also where Valmidiano likens the experiences of her Filipino family to those of Aboriginal peoples in many ways, including the stories of how their island archipelago homes came to be: “We had gods, spirits, and monsters too. Aran and Angalo were our cyclopean parents who created the earth . . . I wondered if the ancestral beings of Murujuga felt my presence and were curious . . .” Valmidiano finds connections between peoples in ways that are creative, cultural, and wonderful.
Through the course of this collection, she masterfully, lyrically shows readers that we are all connected. That bonds can be reforged across generations, across peoples, across personal traumas. Even in a world that can feel so divided by hate and fear, there are beautiful stories of families and creation, perfectly serene moments on the water, simple moments connecting with siblings and cousins and nieces that prove we are connected. Valmidiano’s writing does not flinch away from atrocities or trauma, and as such comes with trigger warnings, but the deftness and beauty of her pen showcases the wonder and connection that can be found in this world and in each other—if we pay attention.