The white vampire with no legs

AKA a 3am Huddle on embracing our differences.

She was there.

Beyond the tall trees heavy with bunches of lychee-like fruit, called lanzones, and by the banana trees right at the back, was the woman in white.  

Except this was no ordinary woman who had wandered onto the tropical backyard – an anomaly within the concrete surrounds of a built-up suburbia that had almost frozen in time since I first visited my grandparents’ home in the Philippines all those decades ago. Both of my mum’s parents were gone now and my mum was staying on their fruit tree-filled property in Granada, located in the south-eastern Philippine province of Negros Occidental, for a visit.

They heard the woman in white before they saw her. It was the tiktiktiktiktik noise that first alerted them to her presence.

And then, they spotted her upper torso take flight above the banana trees, most likely embarking on her nightly search for a human to feed on, while her lower body waited on the ground for her return.

She was a manananggal, a creature with huge bat-like wings who preferred to fly without the extra weight of her lower body dragging her down, and with her intestines trailing in her wake.

She probably wouldn’t be so hungry if she kept her body attached and could digest her food properly. But hey, each to their own.

My mum was telling me this story when I picked her up from the airport after returning home from her visit. She didn’t see the manananggal herself, she was only told by the others who had seen it (in what I imagine to be quite enthusiastic tones as no one on that side of my family speaks softly), but Mum did hear the tiktiktiktiktik noise one night… when she was outside… by herself… and quickly ran inside before she became a main course.

My dad said it was probably a bird.

According to Filipino folklore, it actually is a bird making that noise. A bird who is besties with the manananggal and follows her around to trick unassuming folk with her tiktiktiktiktik-ing.

Sounds like convenient reasoning to me.

There are many stories like this from my mum’s province. And while the distance of an eight-plus hour flight, and an Aussie upbringing, have me wondering how it is that people believe a world in which detached torsos flying around for food exists, I know from experience that when I visit Granada, it’s easier to believe in the supernatural when everyone around you does.

But it always makes me wonder, how different my life would be – how different I would be – if my parents hadn’t decided to move to Australia after they got married. Would I be walking around with garlic in my pockets to ward off evil spirits? (Which is exactly what my mum makes us do whenever we visit – even as adults.) Would I be sprinkling uncooked rice, salt and ash on the roof of my house to keep the manananggal from entering? (For such scary creatures, they have the weirdest fears.) And would uncooked rice, salt and ash on the roof also work to deter Aussie possums? (We currently have a noisy nocturnal visitor who’s keeping my husband up at night.)

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Above: My mum, not the manananggal, on her family’s property in Granada.

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It’s such a strange place to be when you feel like you straddle two cultures, but don’t entirely belong to either. In the Philippines, they consider me and my incomprehensible accent Australian. In Australia, I’m seen as someone whose ethnicity to most is a non-specified “Asian”. (This might surprise you, but it was only last year that I was last complimented on my excellent grasp of the English language by someone I was chatting with. I was on a health retreat at the time and the woman who gave me this compliment decided I must speak so well because I’m married to an Englishman. Um, she’d obviously never spoken to someone from Essex before. That’s all I have to say.)

(Also, if there are any in-laws reading this, I’m JOKING. Obviously.)

There have been a few times I’ve allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and imagined what my life would be like if I hadn’t grown up in a school where I was only one of a handful of kids with skin darker than white. Or if I actually felt represented by the industry I work in.  

But thinking about it, never quite feeling like I properly belonged was probably what made it easier for me to do things that scared others. I was always different, which made it not feel so different for me when I was the only girl at boxing or the only young person running as a political candidate in the state and federal election (lol yes, I did that in my 20s). I was used to being the different one.

Different is okay.

As someone I recently interviewed told me, once we learn to embrace our differences, and accept who we are, the anxiety begins to quieten down. We’re better able to look after our mental health. We’re better able to be our authentic selves and live the lives we truly want to live.

And so whatever ‘different’ is for you – because I know many of us feel this way every now and again – that’s okay too.

Even if ‘different’ means flying around with only the top half of your torso while you look for food.

You do you, my friend. You do you.

Until the next 3am Huddle,

Lizza x

PS I kinda want to write a horror fiction based on all the supernatural beings in the Philippines, but I AM TOO SCARED! It would be cool, though, wouldn’t it?

Main photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.