My mother and I spent an afternoon unfurling my lola’s apartment a few days after she died, back in 2017. In her closet, my grandmother had stored a big cardboard box with an address in Manila written on the side in thick marker. Inside the box were neatly arranged cans of food, bags of rice, drugstore makeup, and clothes she had bought on sale. Some of the items were labeled with our relatives’ names, and the package was left open in case anything else needed to be added as she went about her days.
Sending a filled-to-the-brim box to the Philippines each Christmas was a treasured routine my lola had settled into long before I was born. But instead of mailing it that year, she had been waiting until she could ceremoniously take it back home herself. Transporting it to the airport would have been physically impossible for such a small and aging woman, but I imagine that she viewed hand-delivering gifts to the children and grandchildren she hadn’t seen in years as evidence of her love. What I didn’t know then was that this beloved tradition of sending or bringing home oversize care packages, called balikbayan boxes, had started as an authoritarian regime’s effort to stem the Philippines’ economic crisis in the 1970s.
Romantic comedies are enjoying a renaissance, and Glass energizes the genre with a zaftig, feisty protagonist who is unapologetic about her love of all things geeky. If you’re a fool for a friends-to-lovers trope and a slow-burn, hilarious romance, “The Love Con” won’t disappoint.
"Essays Two" may not be light reading for the general interest reader, but for all its erudition it's always accessible, comprehensible, and even fun. Davis is a literary treasure.
Sometimes I’ll suddenly remember the power
of her house, and of the approach to it,
down the narrow, extreme-curve-to-the-
right street, opening onto the