galunggong or tamarung
After I
posted the blog regarding Nangka-Nangka
(a house of ill repute in our small town) in a closed Facebook group of my high school classmates, it was barraged with
comments and answers. Within the first hour, there were already 88 comments. So let me see if I can digest all this
information in as little space as possible. Here are some information I
gathered from my classmates in Facebook.
First, I was mistaken about the location.
Famy said it was in the middle of Martirez St. in Upper San Raymundo district,
and not past the Philippine Constabulary barracks which I thought. That
immediately tells you how much I know or better still, don’t know about the
place.
The second piece of information was that
it was a house and in front of this house was a Nangka (jackfruit) tree, thus
the name of the place.
Third, the women there were called Tamarungs, as Froebel reminded
us. Well, Tamarung is a kind of cheap fish (galunggong in the Filipino
language) which sometimes causes your tongue to itch. The correlation being, if
you availed of the services of the women in Nangka-Nangka and you didn’t wear
protection, you might develop an itch in your nether regions, or worse, a drip.
Wait, maybe those two come hand in hand.
Here is a paraphrase of what Soraya told
me. “I remember (in elementary school) when a group of 3 or 4 heavily made up
girls with full red lipstick would walk in front of our house and the tricycle
drivers would yell “tamarung!”. I asked my grandma why they were called
tamarung and she said because they were bad girls from Nangka-Nangka. What is
Nangka-Nangka and why is it called so? Because that place has a jackfruit tree
on the pathway leading to the house.”
Fourth, per Famy, Nangka-Nangka has
ceased to exist since the martial law days of the 70’s.
Several
pieces of good information continued to come from Froebel who seems to be an
expert on the subject, which brings us to number five. The tamarungs had
competition in town! They were sea
gypsies from the town of Pangutaran, who even preceded the tamarungs from
the town of Jolo in that kind of business. Here is a direct quote from Froebel,
“mostly boys back then went for the 'sea gypsies' rather than the
girls in nangka-nangka. It’s because they are brunette..slim..young and they
are very salty (sultry) :D”
sea gypsies
Here’s more info
from Soraya: the people of Jolo (called Tausugs), never bought tamarung fish
because there were so many good variety of other fish to choose from the
market, thus the tamarung were usually left to rot. Which I guess is what
happened to your genital areas after you went to see the tamarung women.
And one last item
from our prolific informant, Froebel. He says, “Back in the day (early 70's)...when
I was in my teens, I hung out occasionally and sometimes on weekends at my
uncle's house in Upper San Raymundo. Their house stood right by the corner of the alley going to
Nangka-Nangka and must have been 4 houses away from the nangka tree. There I
listened to the legends, stories, gossips back in the day. According to the
older people, when you visit Nangka-Nangka, you can negotiate with the tamarung
about their prize range. With an older tamarung, you pay 10-15, sometimes 20
pesos. Younger ones will cost you double. But if you're short of cash, go there
late at night (past 12 a.m.) and prizes can go down to 5 pesos guaranteed. Just
like going to the movies (last full show), it’s cheap according to them. These
tamarungs were local, pure-bred Tausug.” (*side note – at the time 4 pesos = 1
US dollar*) Froebel adds, “When it gets
slow in Nangka-Nangka, you can see the tamarungs heading West towards the
docks. There they met with their no.1 rivals - the sea gypsies. Oh, talking
about the sea gypsy girls, I remember a gypsy named Lily-Ann. she was a BO
DEREK look-alike (from Bus-Bus district).If only she braided her hair like BO,
it could have been her, only saltier!”
(I wonder if there was some kind of
Sharks and Jets feud between those two groups ala West Side Story…)
So there you go folks! Everything
you’ve ever (or maybe never) wanted to know about Nangka-Nangka and its
resident tamarungs.
Which brings us to the second part
of this blog. We now know that Nangka-Nangka is defunct. My classmates and I
were batting ideas around about restarting the business in our town. After all
there was no competition to speak of. Prior to this, a couple of guys talked
about hunting for buried Japanese treasure, but restarting Nangka-Nangka would
be more feasible. This time we would plant a durian tree at the pathway and
call the place, what else? Durian
Durian of course! Please, you can look up durian on the internet
yourself, can’t you?
Famy mentioned that this could be a very lucrative
business because of the presence of U.S.
Marines in the area (they are there to train local troops). Salma inquired
as to who would like to volunteer to be the Mama San of the place, while Soraya said a feasibility study must
be done first. I said we should name the place - Durian Durian: A Notre Dame
Alumni Cooperative – brought to you by Batch ’73. It was suggested
that Famy should have a large advertising banner placed in town. Business
partners from our batch would have included nurses and health clinic workers
(free condoms and AIDS tests!), doctors (free consultations and treatments for
STD’s!), a banker, a dean of computer studies, a mental health worker (me!),
and other venture capitalists.
Well everyone, it sounds like a
plan so let’s get the ball rolling, get the show on the road, get it
kickstarted, and get the men back on the Tamarung saddle!
*DISCLAIMER. Part two of this blogpost was not
intended to be a serious discussion of starting a prostitution business. My
classmates and I were only joking around with our posts on Facebook and we were
all having fun with how the conversation went. Besides, if Mother Superior ever read what we talked about, she surely would
have given each of us 10 slaps of the ruler on the palms of our hands if she
didn’t get apoplexy first. Thanks for playing along.
I would never have been able to
compile this information without the help of my partners in crime, whose
expertise and knowledge of the subject matter, I’m eternally grateful for.
Thanks to Froebel, Famy, Soraya, Ric, Jane, Leonie, the director, producer,
screenwriter, makeup artist, waterboy, etc., etc., etc… But most of all, thanks
to the Tamarungs of Nangka-Nangka
for making this blogpost possible.
Public comments below, private comments:
E-mail Me!
