Hawaiian Woman 4” by Madge Tennant. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

Everybody knows Margarita Corpuz and Estrelita Salvador. They always come on Sundays. They wake up at five o’clock in the morning, when it’s still dark, to bake popular desserts like bibingka, tupig and puto. Then they pick and pack their homegrown vegetables. They fry pork rinds just before loading up their big, baby-blue Ford truck. By the time they pull inside the yellow gates with its FRESH SHRIMP sign, it’s already quarter after seven, when most of the breeders and cockfighters have already unloaded and set up for the day.

Margarita and Estrelita, also called the “chicharon widows,” and also known as “the RitaLitas,” have been coming to the cockfights for two years now. Rita told me once the House considers them regulars. But they were not regular long enough, she said, to be on the “guarantee same spot list.” She added with a shrug, “Our spot could be better, but dis good enough. Going get plenny people who see us,” was her philosophy. Today, the widows are set up three lanes away from the main cockfighting pit, a coveted spot that is guaranteed to bring in lots of foot traffic.

I greet them in their booth, where a sign advertising RitaLita’s Famous Chicharon is prominent. The white script and comic rendering of dancing chicharon in browns and yellows hangs sturdy just inside the food booth’s blue tarp covering. You would have to be blind to miss the sign’s animated smiling pork rinds, hands joined with alternating yellow plumeria and red hibiscus flowers. The dancing legs of the happy chicharon and aloha-print-clad tropical flowers point to the letters in the middle. Their appendages surround the words “RitaLita’s Famous Chicharon” like a lei. It is almost tacky, save for the feelings it evokes of warm kitchens, pleasant fragrances and happy childhoods.

Rita, the primary namesake, is dressed in a longsleeve blue chambray work shirt and milling around under the sign. Her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows and expose strong arms and callused, veined hands. Her hands are Ilokano hands—big and strong. Her fingers, knobby, the kind that are accustomed to digging into the fertile earth of Laoag, Ilocos Norte, where her family is from. Her business partner, Lita, is helping a slightly plump teenage girl pick out some desserts from a wooden display rack. Lita wears a calabash gourd hard hat. Her Army-green fatigues are tucked into black rubber boots splashed with just-as-famous red Waialua mud. I wave to both of the widows.

Their vegetable bounty is piled on three tables pushed together in a “U” and arrayed like a harvest cornucopia. The bright colors of the vegetables compete with the intense hues of the tablecloth, dyed with characteristic vivid stripes and patterns of native ikat weavers. Karabasa, or kabocha, as the Hapons call it, take up most of the space. The mottled-green and yellow-streaked pumpkins are tight-skinned and fecund, like pregnant globes. Long, dark-green snake beans are bunched together by the pound and tied with raffia. Their slender bean bodies form graceful curves, nestled and piled on top of each other. Next to them are patani, wing beans, large and small, that are neatly sorted by size and fitted into one-quart Ziploc bags. Eggplant, singkamas, sweet potatoes, green chili peppers for dinuguan and squash for saari-sari. Kamatis, laya, bawang and sibuyas—tomatoes, ginger, garlic and onions. It is a vegetable stew on the tables.

Then there are the leaves. Paria shoots with small yellow flowers, saluyot greens bereft of their slimy okra fruit. Camote, sayoe and marunggay with its splayed canopy of foliage. Lush kangkong propped up on its hollow reed stems.

Then there are the flowers, carefully placed in the shady area of the table so they won’t wilt. There are beautiful, still-closed tabungao flowers buds, nowadays filled with fancy items and fried by gourmet chefs to be called something high muckamuck like sautéed squash blossoms stuffed with crumbled feta and pine nuts. I move past three women who are picking through a stack of white, curved, beak-shaped flowers and putting the choice ones in their plastic bags. The Filipino name of this flower eludes me, but I visualize a white flower salad with tomatoes and patis.

My favorite vegetable, kabatiti, is stacked in a tall woven basket. I can never remember what this vegetable is called in English. When I first saw kabatiti as a child, they reminded me of dinosaurs. They still do today as I pick one up and see a brontosaurus with its slim neck and elongated, fleshy body. I run my pointer finger along the hard, green ridges that run the entire length of its back. I smile at the two good-size ones I have captured in my hand and make them face each other. Looking around to see if anyone is watching, I bring the dinosaurs into mock battle. Gently, though, so their small-tipped heads don’t get knocked off like my brother and I used to do as children on my lola’s kitchen table. When one head got toppled, it signaled the end of the fight.

Then I see something new. I cannot believe it. It is ingenious entrepreneurship at its best. I marvel at how the chicharon widows are always looking out for their customers. I pick up a bag of the new item.

“Dass for young ladies like you. I make es-pe-shall for your kind,” says Rita, walking over toward me and her creation.

“Nowadays people no more time for cook. Always go outside and eat. Go out, go out, all the time go outside to eat. Like my son and his family. I don’t know why his wife no like cook.”

Maybe she’s tired like me after a long day at work, I silently respond in my head. But I just smile. Rita looks me straight in the eye. “Dat one in your hands. Dat going help you make good Filipino food for your family.”

We both look at the plastic Ziploc bag filled with all of the pre-cut, pre-sorted, pre-layered fixings you would ever need to make pinakbet. You would have to just simply unzip the bag and pour. This is exactly what my generation needs. Pinakbet 101. Pinakbet Helper. Easy Stovetop Pinakbet.

“How old you now? Around thirty-two, yeah? You no more children, hah?” she asks, slightly accusatory and sounding like a social commentary on the sad state of small nuclear family units.

“No, Nana. But I have plenty nieces and nephews, so the bloodline will continue,” I reply. I count on her not noticing my accompanying smirk, as it would definitely be a sign of disrespect.

“Dass good, dass good. Your younger sister is good she has her own family. How many kids now? Four? Her husband come from big family, too. The children can help. They can all help each other. “You know how to make dis?” she asks about the bag I am holding in my hands. I give her a tentative facial expression, a cross between discomfort and eagerness. I try to nod a yes, but she senses my hesitation and takes the bag from my fingers.

“I show you how. First, like dis.” She pulls the top open and fishes out the first layer. She retrieves a large pot from under the table. I am amazed again at how ready the widows are for anything. They could probably feed a crowd at a moment’s notice with nothing but a five-pound box of chicken in their freezer.

“Cook the ginger and tomato with water. See the ginger? Already smashed, so no need do that. Next layer is the big cherry tomatoes I put inside. So no need chop. Here’s the onions next. Stay in big pieces already, so no need cut. Then add the water and the bugguong and then you boil. You get bugguong at home? Every house get. You get some, hah?”

I furnish her with a definitive nod, but it is a lie. I don’t have any bugguong. I have imported patis in a bottle I bought from 99 Ranch in ... I think it was 1999. I keep it in the refrigerator. The expiration date has probably passed. I wonder if patis has an expiration date. It’s already fermented, so how can it rot some more?

“How much water do I put inside, Nana?” I ask.

Rita pauses. “You don’t know?” She responds wide-eyed, incredulous at such an innocent question. “How come you don’t know how to cook dis one? What kind Filipina you?”

I answer her in my head, the kind that don’t know how to cook pinakbet. “How come you don’t know how? Aye, every Filipina should know. You watch your mama and your lola make pinakbet, hah?”

There’s nothing I can do but shrug. I am guilty of not watching my elders cook. I know Rita means well, but I am feeling more and more intimidated the longer I remain in her presence. Her three daughters— Perla, Myrna and Rona—must have had it tough growing up female in her household. Her eldest, Perla, was my classmate at Hale‘iwa Elementary School. Perla was not someone teachers would remember as a happy-go-lucky child.With a mother like Nana Rita, I now understand why Perla was a quiet, serious, straight- “A” student who seldom smiled.

Rita sighs as she answers my question about how much water to use. “You put enough water to cover the tomatoes. This much,” she says as she pours water into the pot. The woman has made water appear out of nowhere.

“Just enough water, but not too much. Or else going get mushy. And don’t stir. Don’t do dis.” She makes an exaggerated stirring motion with a ladle, which she has also magically produced from air, to demonstrate. “Just keep putting everything on top. Every kind stay inside the bag already. Next comes this.”

She pours out cubed, bite-size pumpkin squares. “Next comes this one.” Out tumble three-inch pieces of shiny, purple eggplant. “But you have to soak first. No forget now. Soak the tarong to get the bitterness out. You soak in water for five minutes.”

I am terrified to ask how much water I need to soak the eggplant.

Rita continues to demonstrate with each layer, diminishing the contents of the Ziploc bag. Long beans, ends trimmed and snapped into equal lengths. Wing beans, the small ones cut and the larger ones shelled for their spotted, flat fruit, which are added as another layer. I can almost smell it cooking. Next is the okra, then the kabatiti. There is a deep slit in each rectangle piece. Sequa, that’s what it’s called in English, I remember. And silk squash. And Chinese okra. Of all the stupid things to liken kabatiti to, okra is the stupidest. It’s like the kiwi being called a Chinese gooseberry.

“See dis? You cut kabatiti like dis so all the flavors can go inside. I saw you looking at the kabatiti over there. You can make good soup with dis, too. You take some chicken or pork with dis one here. Aysus, broke da mouth. I no understand why you young people go eat outside alla time.

“You can cut like dis, too. Into stars, see? Thick like dis.” Rita demonstrates with a small paring knife she makes appear, again out of nowhere. The sliced medallions look like flat suns with multipointed sunbeams. I guess they could look like stars.

“And if you no more meat, you just stir fry dis one only and stay ono by itself. Dis is good, stay easy and stay fast. Dis one good vegetable.” She pronounces vegetable in four syllables. Ve-je-tah-bull. Just like my mom used to. Ve-je-tah-bull.

“You cover everything. And you cook until finish.” I prepare for the worst, but decide to ask anyway.

“And for how long you cook, Nana?”

She shakes her head. “You can see, hah? You open the pot and look. You cook until it’s pau! You taste, then you look inside again.” She retrieves a pot cover from beneath the tablecloth and fits it on the pot. “Then you taste again. Don’t overcook. You cover and toss all the ve-jetah- bulls. You just toss like this so the bottom layer come to the top. You wait leelah bit, then you toss again,” she instructs, pantomiming a gentle tossing motion using the pot’s side handles.

The lesson is over because the pinakbet is done. Rita wipes her hands on her pants and then places them on her hips. She wags a pointer finger near my face. “Remember the secret. Don’t stir. It’s easy once you know how.” Finally, she smiles at me. I am encouraged. I feel like I could actually make pinakbet like she did.

“You make it look really easy, Nana,” I say as I help her retrieve the contents from the pot and return them to the bag that I am going to buy. “Dios ti agngina, Nana.” I can still remember the phrases that leave an impression of a decent Ilokano upbringing. She seems pleased at this.

“Wait, wait, wait. Don’t forget the chicharon. Put the chicharon last. And wait leelah while before you eat. So dat all the flavors go inside the meat.” I nod and spy their famous product on the table to my left, where Lita is arranging the bags on three tiered planks supported by decorative cement blocks.

“Hoy, Bolo! Whatchoo doin’ hea so early? Plenny fish today?” Rita calls out to the bolohead man driving his black SUV past their booth. The man slows down, pulls over, gets out and starts walking toward us. Bolo usually comes around lunchtime to sell poke. It’s no secret that his poke is the best because of the freshness of his fish. The raw flesh is always shiny and creamy.

“I helping my friend with his chicken today, Manang. My wife going come bring the poke bumbye,” Bolo explains to Rita.

I walk toward the chicharon and Lita, who greets me with “Kumusta, balasang ko.” I respond properly. She offers to take my pinakbet ingredients, kabatiti brontosauruses and sweet potato tops while I look over the desserts and pork rinds.

Lita is the behind-the-scenes person of their successful operation. Rita and Lita live together and act like they are sisters, but they are actually sisters-in-law. Rita has the green thumb, but it is Lita who makes the pork rinds. I wonder why Rita’s name comes first on the label. Maybe it is because Rita is the older one.Maybe it was Rita’s idea. Then I remember why.

When my mother was still alive, she was known for keeping up with the latest tsismis, and was a popular resource for all of the juicy Waialua Town gossip. It was common knowledge that Rita’s parents had been trying very hard to get her married off, but Rita refused their suggestions for a potential husband. It was local folklore that Rita was nearly thirty years old when she married her cousin’s cousin, Danilo Corpuz, from her clan’s neighboring village of Isabela. Danilo became a truck driver for Dole Pineapple Co. by day. During his free time, he raised fighting cocks as a hobby. Rita sold vegetables and desserts as a side business on cockfight days. I heard my mom tell my dad that the Corpuz family was getting rich on Danilo’s chickens and Rita’s bibingka.

“Hawaiian Woman 1” by Madge Tennant. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

At the height of their success, Mr. Corpuz died unexpectedly of a stroke. Rita was left with five young children— three girls and two boys—to raise on her own. At the funeral mass, Padre Pinacate said that Danilo was a hard-working man, a decent man, a good man who did not mind having a strong-headed wife. I never forgot that because the congregation laughed after he said it. To make a long story short, Rita ended up marrying her husband’s younger brother, Lito, who volunteered to step in for his brother, according to traditional custom. Rita’s children needed a father and Lito wanted to come to Hawai‘i and become an American.

Years later, Lito was eventually able to bring his mother, father, three sisters, two brothers-in-law, four nieces and six nephews from the Philippines. Their household grew into an extended family, which needed an expanded house lot. There are five homes now on the Corpuz family compound. Lito’s youngest sister, Lita, was the last to arrive from the Philippines.

Here’s the part that gets interesting. Rita’s brother, Perfecto, ended up marrying Lita, her husband’s sister. This was because Perfecto’s wife had died of breast cancer a couple of years after Lita arrived. Perfecto was left a widower with seven children. Lita stepped in to marry him, just as her brother Lito had done for Rita ten years earlier. Lita was twenty. Perfecto was forty-five. The gossip was that the Corpuz family wanted to pay Rita’s family back for helping to bring them to America. They wanted to show gratitude for ending up with a better life in Hawai‘i. The arrangement was a bit chaotic and strange, but in the end, it worked out. Rita and Lita are both widows now, with all their children and stepchildren grown.

Lita’s husband, Apo Perfecto, as we children called him back then, didn’t get involved with raising chickens. But he was a regular at cockfights and knew what he was doing as a gambler. He would follow the progress of all the breeders and the fighting cocks and was personable to all. He did not like it when the newer breeders began using steroids. This seemed unfair to him, so he made a big stink about it. He knew which breeders were shooting up the cocks right before a big fight. As a respected elder, he tried talking to the younger breeders and hoped they would understand the older, traditional ways of the sport and its protocol. At first the young breeders demurred and were semicommitted to fighting clean, but eventually they ignored him altogether. The practice of using steroids continued to spread and it greatly bothered him.

Apo Perfecto took the issue to the House and asked them to intervene by banning the use of steroids; they did not. The House leadership did not consider this touchy subject a part of their kuleana, so they let it go on. Apo Perfecto tried to convince them that the sport was not only about making money, but it was to no avail. In his frustration, he gave up cockfighting and concentrated on drinking.

With Lita’s husband’s new pastime making him a bitter and crotchety old man, she found herself raising his children alone. There were rumors of him being an abusive father, so Lita took to his children as if they were her blood relations. After her husband died of liver failure, Lita began selling chicharon out of her home on Sundays. Shortly after that, RitaLita’s Famous Chicharon was born and they took it to the Sunday cockfights instead. It is now a bestseller at cockfights in Waialua, Wai‘anae and Waipahu. Southern Cross Stores in Kalihi sells it exclusively.

Hawaiian Woman 2” by Madge Tennant. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

“You don’t have any of the hard kind today,” I point out to Lita, who is straightening out a row of bags on the other end of the planks.

“No more already. I just sell the last five bags to Bolo. Everybody like the old-fashioned way, with the fat on the inside. I save some for you next week if you like,” Lita says, brusque and efficient.

“And these soft, fluffy ones. How you make them so light, Nana?”

“Ah, you have to dry that one in the sun. And you poke holes on the hard side of the skin. The Puerto Ricans and the haoles like that kind. You use pork belly, not pork back. And you use hot, hot oil to fry in. Use only the skin. No meat. No fat.”

“And what about these ones?” I pick up a bag that contains tender meat and moist fat topped off by a blistered, crackling thin layer of skin. It is mostly meat like Chinese roast pork but drier. I hadn’t quite noticed the subtle differences among the contents of the bags before. I did notice they were sealed with twist ties of different colors. Ziploc bags would make them lose their crunchiness, I presumed.

“That’s our new one. Meed-jum. Soft for the haoles. Hard for the Filipinos. And meed-jum for everybody else,” Lita explained. Now I know why the RitaLitas are so successful. They adapt to changing needs. They work hard. They give from the heart all the time.

“How you make them hard, Nana?”

“You dry in the sun inside the screen box. Or hang up on the clothesline. Or on top the tray inside the oven. Then you fry slow, not so fast and noisy. So the skin no break up. You use pork back, not pork belly.”

For all of the RitaLitas’ culinary secrets, they sure are easy about sharing them. I did not expect tough, enterprising widows to be so generous. It seemed easy enough to make these famous pork rinds. I am going to ask Mrs. Bautista to try to copy it. An old, authentic hand like Mrs. Bautista would be able to duplicate the soft, medium and hard varieties with the information I had already gleaned from the widows. I could then trade what I know about the RitaLitas’ recipe for Mrs. Bautista’s dinuguan recipe. The one she makes with the mild peppers in her version of pork-blood stew. The Bautistas might want to add pork rinds to their repertoire of Filipino plate lunch offerings, fresh hot corn and fried lumpia they offer at the Bautista’s Best food booth.

I could propose different flavored pork rinds to Mrs. Bautista. Barbecue flavor. Ranch dressing flavor. Basalmic vinegar flavor. Maybe sprinkle some li hing powder. Li hing pork rinds. Interesting. Or chili powder. Rinds fried in extra virgin olive oil. Pizza flavor. Taco flavor. The marketing possibilities were endless.

“Do you have a secret recipe, Nana?”

“And what you like know all that for? How come you asking all these kind questions?” a sharp voice behind me cuts into my reverie. Rita has been standing there all this time. She is sticking labels on bags of chicharon she pulls out from a large box. She looks at Lita and they exchange mysterious glances.

“Recipe? You like one recipe,” Rita spits the word like it is a disgusting taste in her mouth. “Maria Conchita Peralta, for all the years I know you and your family, you never, ever been interested in the Filipino culture. And es-pe-shally the Filipino food. Why you like know now about this kind for?”

Rita is now directly in front of me, her face close to mine. “What you doing, Conchita? Spying on us?Or you all of a sudden became one born-again Filipina?”

She and Lita laugh heartily at this. I have to laugh, too. It is Lita who laughs so hard tears start rolling down her cheeks. She seems to be enjoying a really good inside joke.

“I want to collect authentic Filipino recipes, Nana. I want to put them together in a cookbook. I cannot find any cookbooks in Hawai‘i about Filipino food.”

“Chita, you joking, hah?” Lita catches her breath from laughing and leans in toward me. “What I need one recipe for? I know how to make already!” It is Lita’s turn to make fun of me.

“I no give out my recipe to anybody. Not even my children know how to make chicharon like me. They ask me alla time to write it down. I tell them you come watch and learn. But they no like. They only like me make more money. They tell me to sell my recipe. Santa Maria! I not gonna do dat. I gonna take this recipe with me to my grave.”

“This is something we no share,” Lita concludes. “You young people better watch out. Nobody going know how to make this kind food any more.” Rita nods. “I tell you this if you really like do something about keeping the tradition. I give you one hint. We use red Hawaiian salt. The kind from Kaua‘i in the salt ponds. Another important secret is when you fry, you fry with the cover on.

“Here, take this. This is the hard kind we save for es-pe-shall people,” Rita continues and hands a bag of her backup stash to me.

“Now, with all that we told you, you can try to make your chicharon like this. You can try make it better than ours. You can try real hard, but it’s the RitaLitas’ secret. I can guarantee you that yours not going taste like ours.”

That was the most I could get out of the chicharon widows. Armed with a bag each of soft, medium and hard chicharon, I go to find Bino Bautista at the payut tent. I have my heart set on impressing him.

(Reprinted with permission from Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts, No. 89, 2006.)

AMALIA B. BUENO is a poet, writer and researcher. She has a B.A. in English literature from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. “The Chicharon Widows,” her first published story, was given an Editors’ Choice Award by Bamboo Ridge Press for the best story in 2006.