The Aswang and Me

Menopause, hormone treatment, and sobriety put Melissa Chadburn in touch with her righteous rage—and helped her identify with a mythic creature from her Filipino heritage.

“Aswang, common form.” H.M.Bec via Wikimedia Commons

Alcohol disconnected me from my rage. It released a weight in me and sent back any dangerous thoughts and words to the depths of my body. Then, over six years ago, in my 40s, I got sober. With the alcohol gone from my life, the rageful feelings sprang up. Over time, though, the urge to suppress my anger has weakened. I’ve finally reached the age where I know that I can’t “good” my way into being loved.

Only in this perimenopausal chapter of my life have I experienced this new layer of feeling. Rage. Thundering through my sensorium. Someone might place me on hold for too long or cut me off in traffic. Or commit tiny acts of economic violence—tell me to do an orientation at the In Home Support Services office; I join a line around the corner, but they only let thirty people in per day, and I’m number thirty-one. The demands of domestic labor, the work of care for our beloveds—what seems to me the most vital and yet least valued work in our country, but also some of the most draining, for which there is no remuneration.

With the alcohol gone from my life, the rageful feelings sprang up. Over time, though, the urge to suppress my anger has weakened. I’ve finally reached the age where I know that I can’t “good” my way into being loved.

I say this having recently entered the chapter of my life where I feed and babysit, educate, keep safe, and nurture my grade-school-aged nephews, while also feeding, dressing, bathing, diapering, and caring for my elderly mother-in-law. In the interim, the world continues to move, the bills continue to arrive. There are hours of lost sleep, lost time to read and write and think and perform my paid work duties, while the bills just rack up, pile high, then eventually drift past, untouched, into the ether. I stand there, bug-eyed, hair mucked, and watch that time sail past. 

***

The college provost sends an email about how a collective bargaining unit is good for some people, but ultimately not in our best interest. The non-profit I worked for fails to pay their fellows on time, sometimes one or two months late. And I feel like I’m going to lose it. IT in capitals. All the control. My day flattened out before me—its corners lifting. I’m gonna wrap it all up, like a picnic blanket, toss it into the ethers, and stomp off. I recognize something ancient about this sensation. Something powerful and useful from all the women who’ve gone before me.

***

It’s no wonder, then, at that precarious time, I’d made the aswang a narrator of my debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove. The aswang is a figure in Filipino folklore who, by most accounts, is a woman by day (either stunning or a spinster) and a bloodsucker by night. She preys on babies, the sick, and men. This is me reappropriating a character who is an invention of colonizers, meant to warn people against the autonomy and power of Filipina women. Especially brujas, or witches. The aswang is badass. The aswang is rageful, yet calculated, yet calm. She’s here to even the score.

***

In my novel I write‑and this isn’t a spoiler because it happens at the very beginning when our protagonist, Marina, is murdered and becomes the aswang:

Her lola’s prayer wasn’t working, she knew she wasn’t in any position to ask O’Lord for any favors and it was too late for more empty promises on her part. Lola belonged to a generation of obedience and atonement, Marina’s was a generation of don’t-give-a-fucks. So she made a special kind of prayer: Marina imagined shrimp wrapped in taro leaves, stewed in a mixture of hot chilé and coconut milk. She imagined a small loaf of sticky rice with mango. Fly swatters, brown rubber discs used to open jars, large wooden utensils hanging from a kitchen wall, bamboo mats painted with anthuriums. The mats that she slept on in her lola’s ranch house in Seaside, California. She thought of Alex and her perfect eyeliner, how it made her look elegant like the flawless face of a good man’s wife. 

This prayer didn’t work either if working means saving her from death. But it did work if working means turning her into me, into something powerful, into Aswang.

In fact this is really what I felt was happening to my own body, at night, awake with hot flashes, in grad school negotiating these adolescent feelings, presenting on critical theory in front of people in their 20s, bleeding through pad after pad, scrambling to get life done, and read and care for all my beloved family members.

***

Recently my 12-year-old nephew was crying and confessed his friends didn’t respect him. When I asked him what that looked like, he said they treated him like he was invisible and pushed him around. Physically pushed him, or pushed past him in class. It made me sad. But what made me saddest is he continued to call these kids his friends. One day he would say one of his friends tripped him, or one of his friends tore his picture in half. This saddens me, his need for this language to describe these other kids. Sad and relatable, as I have survived whole foster families this way, whole decades, an adolescence with a false narrative to protect me from the hauntings of humiliation. The good news is that in menopause, that pull to please has mostly left me.

***

For this new temperament and my body’s revolt, the rage and accompanying uterine fibroids growing inside of me, I tried Lexapro, Busiprone, Paxil, Progesterone, Estradiol, Depolupron, Aygestin, Ashgawanda, Reishi powder, Black Cohosh, and a dozen mindfulness apps. My OBGYN settled on a combination of testosterone gel and estrogen pills.

Nighttime was the worst; a parade of regrets came strutting through my thoughts. I’d quit alcohol six years before, and by that time, alcohol had quit me too. I kept on muttering to my wife, “My nervous system.” It was at that stage in my life that all my traumas had come for me and turned me into a catapult primed to hurl at the slightest aggravation—a guy watching something on his phone on speaker in an enclosed space, “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirts, people who use retractable leashes for their dogs—or even more infuriating, no leash at all.

The aswang is a figure in Filipino folklore who, by most accounts, is a woman by day (either stunning or a spinster) and a bloodsucker by night. She preys on babies, the sick, and men. This is me reappropriating a character who is an invention of colonizers, meant to warn people against the autonomy and power of Filipina women. Especially brujas, or witches.

I’ve learned in recovery that if my reaction to a thing is larger than what is around me, I should search for the original wound. In this case—old traumas.

***

In the wake of my final period, I began to transform. I was fully becoming the aswang. Gone were the long white hairs that cropped up on my shoulders two days before my cycle, the ice cream cravings, the overwhelming sensitivity. In its place came hair loss, belly fat, and a loss of libido. I no longer wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck shit up. I wanted life—adventure, connection, but also to just sit on the couch and do nothing, tell everyone to fuck right off, and then in the night, I’d shapeshift; it began with the sweats. I’d awakened soaked—alarmed—I should’ve known—it shouldn’t be such a surprise—but I still find it astounding. How the hell do people expect us to live through this sort of thing?

And the truth is, they didn’t. At one time, women were not expected to live beyond their reproductive years, but now here we are two, three, four, sometimes five decades later.

***

I was walking my dog, listening to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score when I found myself keeping the score. Early on Van Der Kolk used the term “Nam,” pronounced to rhyme with “ham,” to reference Vietnam. I quickly resented how PTSD studies mostly began with an emphasis on studying veterans, which made me think of the ways in which we value human life. We, meaning Americans, the ways our pharmacological industry devalues human life, imposing a hierarchy of grievability—that is—who should live and who should die? I’m also considering how colonialism is an intergenerational trauma bestowed upon my family.

Order the book.

VanDer Kolk’s subject, “Tom,” a vet grappling with PTSD, raped a Vietnamese woman. I think the reader was supposed to feel sorry for him or for his wife—for his struggle with intimacy. As happens so often in veteran narratives, the Vietnamese people who were murdered, the children killed, the women raped—they were the backdrop to this man’s failures and fears. Just a nameless, mostly faceless, pile of victims. I continue to keep the score.

I rub a dime-sized dollop of testosterone gel on my shoulder, I yell at people who cut me off in traffic… when I get that recording that warns me they are “experiencing a high volume of calls”—I chuck my phone across the room.

***

An interesting point was raised when Van der Kolk began treating women. He writes that many of us equate love with terror. This was definitely a theme for me growing up, and in my 20s, nothing was more seductive to me than power, a person who could kill me was a sexy person; maybe somewhere in me was a skin memory, a soldier. My grandmother always wanted me to marry someone who was at least ten years older than me and who wore a uniform. Ha! I did, in the end, do just that. My wife is fourteen years older than me and wears a uniform, but she is mostly the safest person I’ve ever been with.

In the wake of my final period, I began to transform. I was fully becoming the aswang. Gone were the long white hairs that cropped up on my shoulders two days before my cycle, the ice cream cravings, the overwhelming sensitivity. In its place came hair loss, belly fat, and a loss of libido. I no longer wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck shit up.

***

Right now, I feel myself shapeshifting. Changing in a way that makes people uncomfortable— and with that comes power. For instance, last spring, when outdoor dining opened up again, I went out to eat with my professor and classmates. They were all men, Ranging in age from mid-twenties to the professor who I presume is in his fifties.  The professor dropped his fork and wanted some hand-sanitizer to clean it. I rifled through my big ass purse to see what I’d come up with, and in my little plastic bag was a pump bottle with what looked like clear gel.

“That. Isn’t that sanitizer?” he asked. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. It was NOT hand sanitizer. It was the testosterone—to help with the fibroids, the low libido, the night sweats. (I didn’t know at first that in exchange, I’d get hair loss. Well, hair thinning on my scalp and hair growth on my face—not peach fuzz but dark and thick. More aswang.)

“No, it's testosterone,” I said. The only woman at the table, the only perimenopausal person at the table, the only sober one at the table—me and my overwhelming sack of feelings. He looked at me with an expression that asked, Why do you need testosterone? “Well,” I said, “testosterone is good for if you want to fight, or if you want to fuck, and I have no idea when I’ll want to do either, so I carry it around with me.” It’s true that it did make me feel these things, metallic, and amorous, and maybe a bit powerful—with the anger. It was as if that thin silver seal on the tops of bottles was punctured in me.

Yet truly, the thing I was capturing for myself was their power… the power that otherwise belonged only to the guys at the table—now I had it. I had it in a bottle in my bag. I didn’t need to wonder anymore why teenage boys got angry and kicked newspaper bins or hit walls and other inanimate objects. Now I knew. My body knew. Rage. That feeling I’d been divorced from—rage—had finally found its way to me. Even more than that, my original power—I had it too.

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October is Filipino American History Month.