I am Remy Canlas. Fifty-eight, born in Guagua, in Pampanga. My grandmother raised me. She sold vegetables and dried fish at a market stall she had held since she was twenty-six, and she ran a house with seven people in it on what that stall made.
I started helping at eight, with the cloths, because that is the job you give a child: it does not break and it does not burn. By fifteen I did the whole back of the house on a Saturday. What I learned there was not how to clean. It was how to walk into a room and know which object is causing it.
I came here in 1986, at eighteen, with her notebook in a bag. And then I did not open it once for twelve years. A plug-in air freshener in the hallway, nineteen bottles under the sink, a bath mat that never dried, sheets washed cold because I thought I was saving money. I knew better and I did it anyway, because it is what everybody around me was doing.
What changed was the winter of 1998, when the wall behind my washer went black and a man told me six hundred dollars. That night I took the notebook out of the box. Her page was about a wall in a house with no machine in it at all, and it still told me exactly what to do, because the thing on the wall did not care which country it was in.
So this book is not written by somebody who was always right. It is written by somebody who lost twelve years.
