There is a particular kind of silence in a lot of Filipino households, the silence that sits in the space where "I love you" should go. We know our parents love us. We know it from the packed lunch left on the table before school, the extra fish put on our plate without being asked, the years spent working abroad so a nephew could finish nursing school. What we often do not get is the sentence itself. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned that love in our families gets shown, not said. And if it does get said, it comes out clipped, almost apologetic, like it cost something to admit.
I thought about this a lot while reading the opening pages of Sabrina Victoria's The Princess of Himmapan. The prologue introduces us to a queen named Khin, visiting her young son Zeya at night to tell him a bedtime story about the mythical Himmapan Forest. Compare her to her husband, Paing, who showers their son with kisses and easy compliments about his painting, warm and unguarded in a way that comes naturally to him. Khin is different. She sits stiffly. Her affection reads almost formal. When she finally tells Zeya she loves him, the text notes her eyes widen slightly, as if the words surprised even her on the way out. And when she smiles at him, it looks a little awkward, like she is not sure if it is too much or too little.
Anyone who grew up with a mother like that, or has become a version of that mother themselves, will recognize something familiar in that scene.
We do not talk about it much, but there is a whole spectrum of how Filipino parents express love, and a lot of it has nothing to do with hugs or the word mahal. Some parents cook. Some parents nag about grades because they never had the chance to finish school themselves. Some parents send balikbayan boxes stuffed with chocolates from abroad because a phone call once a week is not enough to fill the distance, so the box has to say what the voice on the line cannot quite manage. Some parents, like Khin in this story, sit beside their child and tell them something, anything, because the telling itself is the closeness, even if the words "I love you" only slip out at the very end, almost by accident.
What struck me about that prologue was not just the emotional restraint. It was the choice to bond through storytelling specifically. Khin does not just say good night. She grabs chalk and paper and starts drawing the Himmapan Forest for her son, describing cows with butterfly wings and elephants with fish tails and half-bird, half-human guardians called Kinaree, building an entire world stroke by stroke because that is the language she has access to. It made me think about how much of Filipino parenting, especially from an older generation, happens through kwento rather than direct conversation.
Most of us have a version of this in our own family history. A lola who told us not to whistle at night because the ghosts might answer. A tito who swore a white lady haunted a particular street near his old barangay, told with such conviction you avoided that street for years afterward. A grandmother who explained thunder as an old man in the sky bowling, so you would not be afraid of the sound. These were not just stories to pass the time. They were how our elders handed us their worldview, their warnings, their morals, in a form softer and easier to swallow than a lecture. Fear of the tikbalang did more to keep kids close to home after dark than any direct rule ever could. A story about duwende living under an anthill got more kids to walk carefully around anthills than any straightforward warning about snakes or fire ants would have.
We are, I think, letting a lot of this fade.
Between smartphones, streaming shows, and the sheer exhaustion of daily life in a country where both parents often need to work multiple jobs just to stay afloat, the ritual of the bedtime story has quietly become rarer. Kids fall asleep to YouTube videos instead of a lola's voice. Extended families that used to gather around one grandmother telling the same five ghost stories every summer now live scattered across different cities, sometimes different countries, connected mostly through group chats. Organizations like Adarna House have spent years trying to keep Filipino folktales alive in printed form precisely because there is a real fear that if nobody writes these stories down, an entire generation might grow up without ever hearing about Maria Makiling or the legend of Mount Kanlaon, without ever getting the versions of these stories that our own grandparents grew up with.
There is something quietly moving, then, about a novel that centers itself around exactly this act: a parent passing down a myth to a child in a private, unhurried moment before sleep. It reminds you that storytelling was never just entertainment. It was inheritance. It was how a mother who struggles to say the softer things out loud could still hand her son something of value, a whole imagined forest full of wonder and a little bit of sorrow, built specifically for him.
I also want to sit with the detail of Zeya himself for a moment. He is described as timid, stuttering, quick to blush, more comfortable with painting than with conversation, and his mother notices this with something like confusion, assuming he will grow out of it and become more like her. There is a familiar tension here too, the tension a lot of Filipino kids feel when they do not match the version of themselves their parents expected. Sensitive boys get told to toughen up. Quiet kids get compared to their more outgoing cousins at every family reunion. Kids who would rather draw or write than play basketball in the street sometimes grow up feeling like a slight disappointment, even when nobody says it outright. Khin's confusion toward her gentle, artistic son is not cruelty. It reads more like the quiet bafflement a lot of parents feel when their child turns out to be nothing like them, and they have not yet learned that different does not mean lesser.
None of this is a spoiler, by the way. It is all there in the first few pages, before the actual story even properly begins. But it sets a tone that will land differently depending on who is reading it. If you grew up in a house where love came out sideways, through gestures rather than declarations, through stories rather than hugs, you will recognize Khin immediately. And maybe, like me, you will find yourself wondering less about the mythical creatures in the forest and more about all the things your own parents never quite said directly, choosing instead to hand you a story and hope you understood what it meant.
Maybe that is worth remembering the next time you are tempted to skip the bedtime story for a screen instead. Somewhere in the stories our elders told us, whether about forest spirits or missing princesses, there was always something they were trying to say that they could not say plainly. It might be worth asking them again, while we still can.