After nights of rain, a day of weak sun and rainless wind. Roof shingles bang against each other. No birds, no boats are visible on the water, which roils and foams as if an acreage of cotton rippled from a whip or a prod, above and below. You could say it doesn't take much to feel how little influence we have in a world we once thought we could make our home. My people leaped ashore from the blue-black hold of a three- masted ship, sick of salt-winds, aching for the remembered tenderness of bodies before they wore a harness or bent under cargoes of cotton and silk, amber and cassia bark. Never mind that the bruise from such a severance might not heal. Never mind that water— old sojourner, restless tenant— would still wind through the centuries, through houses on stilts in the middle of an estuary, before fanning back out into the sea. ~ "Saint Malo was the first permanent settlement of Filipinos and perhaps the first Asian-American settlement in the United States.... The settlement may have been formed as early as 1763 or 1765 by Filipino deserters and escaped slaves of the Spanish Manila galleon trade." - Wikipedia
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