Middlesex

Back in grade school, we had an infamous schoolmate whom we call Vizconde (yes, after the Vizconde massacre). She always had a ruffled hair covering most of her face and some missing front teeth and I dunno if that made everybody call her that. She also acts weird and sometimes opens up her skirt for us to see her panties. Perhaps what’s weirder is that everybody seem to believe that she has a small penis (or penis-like appendix in her female organ).

The use of she is based on the empirical data that she wears a skirt as uniform and fairly looked more of a girl. I remembered seeing her play basketball with the boys, in her skirt, or takyan, the vernacular term for sipa only with a piece of hardened alloy as base, which was a very popular pastime during recess with us boys.

Vizconde was the first person to come to mind when I read Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. When I picked up the book, I had a remotest idea that the character already symbolized the title, that the subject matter is one of gender identity crisis, which when u think about it becomes more complex in a hermaphrodite’s case as the story of the novel’s protagonist would imply, when all I was thinking of Middlesex was a city in England or Michigan.

(Interestingly, I'm currently reading Strange Tribe by John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest. It's a family memoir, so personal that it traces the similarities between John's father Gregory's cross-dressing deviance to early hints in Ernest childhood and even in his literary works.)

If Calliope Stephanides, the engaging narrator, is a living person, his/her life would be perfect fodder for the media. Life would be a living hell and she would be the most talked about person in recent history. That’s because we don’t know of any famous, living or otherwise, hermaphrodite whose life is very much an open book. Or nobody, perhaps in Hollywood or any famous personality, would evidently expose his or her genitals as a proof of his/her hermaphroditism and create public morass.

Pages flew like leaps of calendar leaves in a generation – three in fact. For Eugenides cover three generations of the Stephanides family, from pre-war era in Mt.Olympus to the raucous 60s, it captures the very essence of Cal’s search for meaning: profound and immense, sometimes beyond comprehension.

The New York Times says in the back cover that Cal is an amalgam of one of Holden Caulfield and maybe that’s why the narrator is engaging – it seems like Cal is talking right in front of us. Cal’s discovery in every twist and turn of fate is like ours too. Her condition solicits not one of sympathy but understanding and a mesmerizing sense of bewilderment.

But because Eugenides’ epic journey of perhaps everyone seeking acceptance out there is not just one of biological or genetic idiosyncrasies, not just of a search for identity, but for meaning, acceptance and a rightful place in an already peculiar world.