Ilocano Quotes

What Hero loved most wasn’t the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn’t quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing.

Hero had the sense that Pol's Ilocano was stuck in time, that he only wanted to speak it with the people he'd always spoken it to, but even when Hero and Pol spoke in Ilocano with each other in California, there was a playacting stiffness in their voices that hadn't been there back in Vigan, when Hero used to hang on every word.