Hello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name

You painted me, and I sat quite still.
- The Sundays

There seems to be an incalculable force at work here, some demigod with abstruse eyes and a voice that sounds like it's always on the verge of spilling over into laughter. I don't know what it is, exactly, but that force is causing at least 70 percent of my friends and acquaintances to call me a name that isn't even mine. At least, not technically. If we're going to be rigorous about things, I go by only two names: my real name, which is Charisse-Fuschia Arriba Paderna, and my nickname, which is plain old Peachy.

If there is such a demigod slinking about behind the scenes, though, he's been responsible for all these people kissing me on the cheek and trading high-fives with me in a demonstration of bonhomie, and then finally calling me Pechay. Pechay. Not Peachy, but Pechay. Not the fruit, but the vegetable with broad, emerald leaves. As in that common thing that sprouts from a layer of dung-enriched soil and is harvested so it can be sold at your local market, where a bunch of the stuff can be bought cheap so your Dad or your Mom or your household help can fling it into a greased wok with onions and garlic and ginger and cubes of tofu, and then serve it in all its leafy, steaming glory right under your waiting nose.

Crunch, crunch.

I don't get it, I really don't. For some reason, people seem to switch almost imperceptibly from Peachy to Pechay, without so much as a premonitory gesture. I've noticed, though, that the switch usually occurs at that point in our acquaintance where they feel like we can stop pretending that I'm respectable. Because face it, whatever credibility I've managed to hoard while growing up has been lost, lost, irrevocably so! It's all been fed to the hogs, like left-over pechay!

I'm sorry, the simile was winking so persistently at me, I couldn't resist abusing it.

But let's go back to the subject at hand. If you're thinking that this is a recent phenomenon, you're dead wrong, like dead pechay. Okay, I won't do that again, promise, no more bad similes. Anyway, you're wrong. This sort of thing has plagued me as far back as that summer when I was six years old, rollicking down the neighborhood's narrow streets with the other kids, riding our bikes and playing hide-and-seek or squealing through this dumb game we made up ourselves called Shark Shark.

That's around the first time one of the kids called me Pechay, and he laughed so hard at the discovery of his own unbridled wit, I was quite sure he was going to choke on his own tongue. Which he did not, unfortunately. More unfortunately, however, the other kids caught on to the jeering as though it were a case of mumps, and I was cowed back to the safety of our house by a full clutch of neighborhood kids chanting Pechay, Pechay while a few others haw-hawed in the background.

What poleaxed my six-year old heart the most, what snuffed out all my illusions about justice and parity wasn't just the fact that the boy who started it didn't choke on his own tongue. Oh, no. What destroyed me was the fact that his name was Lep-Lep, Lep-Lep for crying out loud, and wasn't that an infinitely bigger laugh than what Peachy and all its possible permutations could ever be? I mean, holy shit, Lep-Lep? As in, leper? Like, kess my leps? Lepsteck? And why was I on trial here, when the other kids' names stank worse than mine? What about Tata and Bibing and Wapol?? My name wasn't even Pechay, it was Peachy. Haw haw yourselves, goddammit.

The name asserted itself through time, refusing to be eroded away by the procession of years. Since that summer of my childhood, though, a callus seems to have formed where Pechay kept on rubbing itself against. The name no longer hurts or offends, but I feel strangely divorced from it, no matter how many times the name has been appended to my person.

What I find intriguing, though, is the barefaced universality of it among my friends. I have friends from different circles who have never laid eyes on each other, and yet share the identical desire to label me as a green leafy vegetable. I've done a little investigating, too, in an effort to wring out a logical explanation for the switcheroo, to bridge that trench opening up between Peachy and Pechay. How does one get from Point A to Point B?

"So, I got a question. It's just that, you know, I do get around to wondering why most of you guys call me Pechay. Why? Why??"

"Because you're Pechay! You're such a...a Pechay!"

"All right, wait – is this something you actually agree to do among yourselves, like, Oh, let's start calling her Pechay instead of Peachy?"

Some head scratching. "Uh, no, we just somehow get around to calling you that, it just kind of pops out."

"But I don't like Pechay! Why can't you just call me Peachy?"

"But we can't stop just like that!"

"Yeah, but Pechay sounds so tacky! I'm not tacky," I'd say, stamping my foot.

"Of course you aren't tacky. It's just something that we end up calling you, that's all. Wanna have some beer?"

"Orright, let's go!!"

Obviously, not a lot of investigating gets done in the end. I'm beginning to suspect, however, that it all boils down to the fundamental question of my alleged personality, which is also allegedly incongruous with the alleged traits espoused by the name Peachy. I can no longer count the number of times I've been told that I don't seem like a Peachy, that Peachy somehow doesn't fit. Bruce said it himself when he recalls the first time I hung out with them. My name had been mentioned by Camille a number of times in the past, and Bruce was expecting to be introduced to a sweet-faced giggling thing with fluff for brains. Instead, he found himself shaking hands with a wild-haired, beer-guzzling girl who swore like a sailor and – had fluff for brains. At least he got that detail right.

Some anonymous, sweet-faced girl. No amount of plastic surgery
can give me that kind of face.

While I'd like to humor myself and think that I am a Peachy, that I am, indeed, peachy, rosy and fragrant and lovely when ripe, the consensus seems to be that I am not, nosirree. I am, apparently, green when right for the picking, and I grow directly from earth that the wise farmer has scattered shit upon. There's an acrid bite to my leaves when you chew too intently on them, and when I become part of the left-overs, I will naturally be fed to the hogs.

But I give you vitamins and I am packed with fibre. Which encourages bowel movement. Which you so need now, when the only things you seem to digest are burgers and chips and your own inexhaustible regret.

I am supposed to be good for you. I've been told that.
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