Grace Talusan

Feeding Stories: A Meditation on Ifugao Wooden Spoons 

"OBJECT NUMBER 08-36-70/4879" is carved by hand from a single piece of wood. The object is Ifugao, made by a person from this ethnic group living in the Cordilleras region, a mountainous province of Luzon Island. I was born on this same Philippines island, in the lowlands, and left when I was two.

On my honeymoon, I visited the place where this spoon was made, transformed from tree to utensil. Every human civilization of every age has used a kind of spoon.  

Newly married, my husband and I journeyed hours from Manila to the rice terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site, but by the time we arrived at Banaue Hotel, the land was hidden in darkness. I was exhausted and motion sick from the day-long journey up and down winding mountain roads. By nightfall, I was too tired to feel fear; I barely reacted whenever the angry eyes of another vehicle, a bus or a jeepney, stared their bright lights into our van and we veered close to the cliff’s edge. As they barreled towards us, I wished our van could sprout wings and fly from the road. A childhood habit returned—I was stressed and without power—and I prayed the “Our Father,” a song on repeat until the only words I had left were, “Deliver us.”

The next morning, I moved the fabric curtains from the windows to let in the sun. What I saw filled me with a sudden urgency to wake my husband, “Come here now. You have to see this.” As if he might miss it. As if these rice terraces, formed over two thousand years, were fleeting.

I did not have words for this beauty. For all the kinds of green. Undulating hills and valleys for as far as I could see. Carpets of neat green stairs climbing towards heaven. 

I asked the ancestors who carved the land to forgive my petty complaints. What a wonder! I felt grateful to have survived so that I could see how people had transformed mountains into rice.

Later, we ate our meals in the hotel canteen. We ate the Filipino way, spooning soup and rice into our mouths. Metal spoons, not wooden.  

But who carved this spoon, OBJECT NUMBER 08-36-70/4879, over a hundred years ago? They are long gone, and yet, here is their spoon, halfway around the world from home and sleeping next to the bodies of other wooden spoons protected in these archives.         

One can purchase a vintage and authentic Ifugao spoon online. The British Museum has an Ifugao wooden spoon in their collection. So does The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Oriental Museum in Spain also holds some of these spoons. Is that how I’m supposed to understand what is valuable? I visit the spoons at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, a collection of over four hundred, and wonder about where these spoons were born. Whose hands gripped them and whose mouths did they enter and feed? The imperialists carried these wooden spoons over the ocean to show people back home. Was this spoon a gift? Or merely a curiosity, or a souvenir—evidence of their good work abroad.

A human figure takes up the entire handle, its feet resting on the top of the spoon’s shallow bowl. I won’t attempt to assign gender to this body. But what does it mean that the waist curves in from the chest and back out into hips wide enough for childbearing? The inner thighs don’t touch. How many times in my life as a Filipina immigrant did I pray for legs like these? The legs of beauty pageant contestants, magazine models, and movie actresses. I wanted to be American. But now, I realize that what I really wanted was to be a white woman, slender and beautiful.   

On the figure’s chest, dual lines are drawn from the nipple to the shoulder. Twin tattoos? Decorations carved into the body to distinguish the artist’s hand? But I only see stitches, surgical scars. Perhaps from a double mastectomy. No, that can’t be right. I have been in America too long. I have forgotten to prioritize the communal over the individual. I see through selfish eyes. Everything is all about me. I have been too long away from my birthplace and my kinship network. I have forgotten that I am Filipino. That I am not just me. Does this mean that I have finally become American?

A spoon is made of two parts—the handle and the bowl. A simple tool with a simple goal: To move food from a container into a mouth. But when is a spoon a body? Or rather, why is this spoon a body? A spoon feeds a body. Otherwise, a spoon would be a shovel to dig and move dirt, perhaps over a body.

I could tell you anything about this spoon, my Filipino body writing about this Filipino spoon, and you’d have to believe me. But what do I know? I am not from Ifugao lands; my sister tells me our last name can be traced to the Maguindanao people, but I've never been south of Bohol.

All I know is that even in America, I don’t feel I’ve eaten unless I’ve had rice.