Monkey Brains
Kiera Inciong | Nonfiction, Summer 2026
I was ten when my uncle came home. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was American and had been living there for a while. I knew that he was a doctor in Virginia, which I learned from his wife, was a state. She was born there, a tall, slim, vibrant white lady my uncle brought back to Manila with him. I thought she was strange, with her curly red hair, red lips, and red nails. I thought her skin was strange; it was pale and never sweated despite the heat. I thought it was strange that they were married. I didn’t think white people married Filipinos. But my uncle wasn’t really Filipino. He definitely didn’t sound like one of us. If you closed your eyes, you’d think you were talking to Rock Hudson.
Well, Rock Hudson wanted nothing to do with me and I wanted nothing to do with him. The white lady, on the other hand, interested me. Up until that point, I didn't think white people were real outside of movies and TV shows. She brought boxes of pasta with her, buttered her noodles, and shaved imported cheese on top, eating that instead of rice and fish. She used a knife with her fork instead of with a spoon, like the rest of us. Our silverware looked so much darker when she held it.
Whenever we needed food for the week, my mother would send our yaya (our nanny) into town with a crisp fifty-peso bill folded into her coin purse and a few extra coins for the tricycle fare. I loved my yaya, so I’d always come with. The wet market was loud. It was bustling with yelling vendors and radios playing love songs through static and the wet slap of fish hitting plastic folding tables. It was mostly other yayas and drivers shopping there too, all carrying woven bags heavy with rice and vegetables
Each stall specialized in one thing only. One sold vegetables piled into plastic-netted basins: bundles of watercress with dripping stems, bitter melons with split skin like a crocodile, and heaps of okra. Okra was my favorite. I didn’t mind the slime on the inside. I thought that's what made it fun. I’d stand beside my yaya, haggling with vendors over half a kilo, one kilo, sometimes even two kilos of okra.
The fishermen were the most slick. You couldn’t haggle with fishermen. Their stalls sat on melting ice and smelled of blood and seawater, with hundreds of silver scaly bodies lined in neat rows. I loved tilapia because there was always plenty of it, cheap and stacked high in blue buckets. My yaya made the best deep-fried tilapia. She’d leave the skin to blister and crisp in hot oil while she crushed salted duck egg over quartered onions and tomatoes for us to eat on the side. She always bought one extra tilapia that we could eat immediately after coming home from the market, a snack before dinner.
Behind the tilapia were the milkfish, larger and more expensive, staring up at me with strange, catlike faces. My mother always insisted we bring at least one home. Yaya filleted and steamed it with ginger and Chinese cooking wine. The belly fat of a milkfish is black against its soft, pale flesh. I used to press strips of that fat into spoonfuls of rice, mixing and mixing, until it melted completely. My yaya always saved the head for herself. She said the best part wasn’t the soft white flesh my mother liked or the fatty belly I fought my cousins for, but the cheeks and the eyes. After dinner, I’d hurry to her quarters just to watch her drizzle soy sauce and squeeze calamansi halves over the head, then carefully crack the skull apart with the back of a spoon and suck the cold and gelatinized meat out quietly over her plate.
A few days after my aunt and uncle arrived, my aunt took me to a European import grocery store somewhere in Makati. I remember stepping through the glass doors and immediately feeling the cold air hit the sweat on my neck. Not cool air, but cold air, the kind that makes you suddenly aware of the wetness of your own skin. The entire place smelled faintly of coffee, bleach, and moldy cheese. I’d never been in a store like that before.
Everything there was sealed and refrigerated. The vegetables were cleaned and untouched by dirt. Nobody shouted. Nobody bargained. No slapping fish. Even the meats were quiet, wrapped neatly in paper and string instead of being hacked apart in front of you by men with cleavers. The shelves were stocked with things I only recognized from television commercials: Jars of Nutella and American cereal boxes with cartoon mascots I’d never seen before. Huge pale wheels of cheese sweated under yellow lights next to freezers full of bacon, pink sausages, and long legs of cured ham hung from hooks behind the counter like animals in a slaughterhouse.
At the deli counter, my aunt ordered some sort of tubular meat in an English I didn’t understand—her accent was fast, southern, and soft. I stared at tubs of white cheese floating in cloudy water. Everything in the store seemed softer than what I was used to. Softer breads, softer colors, even the people spoke softly. Nobody yelled or laughed too loudly. Instead of pop songs on the radio, they were playing jazz. I kept checking price tags; a small jar of mustard cost as much as three kilos of okra.
My aunt seemed completely at ease here. Every few minutes, somebody stopped to talk to her—mostly white men with their Filipina wives and mixed children. Then she called me over to meet the owner of the store, an older gay white man from Delaware. He kissed my aunt on both cheeks before asking about my uncle.
“And how is Virginia’s best plastic surgeon? I saw he was on the cover of Virginia Business!”
“Still impossible,” she laughed. “I keep telling him we should move back here.”
The owner rolled his eyes knowingly. “They always say no until they’re old. Besides, why would he leave everything he built behind?”
I stood there quietly while they talked. The owner’s husband, a Filipino Broadway singer who’d performed in the original London production of Miss Saigon, waved to us from behind the cafe counter with a cigarette pinched between two fingers, the smoke spiraling into the vents above us. Until then, I hadn’t realized there were people who chose to come to Manila. In my mind, America was where you escaped to if you were lucky enough. But here were all these foreigners building little versions of their old lives in the middle of my city.
On the ride back home, my aunt told me she met my uncle while doing volunteer medical work. She spent one summer after her junior year at Old Dominion as a speech pathologist on a relief program in Manila where my uncle was shadowing a surgeon.
“We hated each other at first,” she laughed. She thought he was arrogant and sheltered. My uncle thought she worked too hard for the attention. “I got my first job when I was thirteen,” she told me. “I scooped ice cream at the boardwalk in Virginia Beach.” According to her, my uncle couldn’t understand why a teenager would ever need a job unless their family were poor.
“He thought it was depressing,” she said, shaking her head.
“And you thought he was spoiled?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Somehow they still fell in love. After that they spent years drifting from country to country doing relief work before settling briefly in Manila during the nineties. They had an apartment somewhere in Makati with bad plumbing and stray cats that slept outside their window every night. They used to drink cheap beer on the roof during blackouts, sweating through their sheets because they refused to ask either of their families for money. She loved it here. I asked her why they left. She looked out the window for a long time before answering.
“My father got sick,” she said finally. “So, we went back to Virginia to take care of him.”
Then, softer: “I wish we could’ve done the same for your grandpa.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just sat there, watching the city turn to slums then into our gated suburb, trying to imagine Manila as someplace people could just leave and come back to, as if it belonged to people like them.
I was obsessed with her. I wanted to walk like her, talk like her, and dress like her. I started wearing these bright pink and green Lily Pulitzer dresses she had brought for me as a gift. But my mother had other plans. She somehow convinced my uncle to take me on a trip, just the two of us, thinking he could teach me about becoming American. My stepdad lived in New York, and we’d immigrate in a year, so she wanted me to assimilate as fast as possible.
My uncle took me camping that weekend, told me to leave my Lily Pulitzer dresses behind. We drove seven hours to a secluded rainforest listening to CDs he left in his childhood room. Asian Rock Hudson loved Jazz. We quickly ran through all the Gershwin standards. Apparently, if I wanted to become American, I needed to know Jazz.
“This is real American music,” he said.
He told me about Lead Belly from Louisiana and his 12-string guitar. Then of Bix Beiderbeck, Glenn Miller, and Art Farmer, all from small towns in Iowa, who became big names in big jazz bands. And Louis Armstrong, whose trumpet sounded just like a fat man singing opera.
I listened closely, thinking he would quiz me later. At the end of our drive, I asked if there was Filipino Jazz.
“Yes, but nothing good, just pop-y Bossa Nova.”
I nodded, taking notes in my head, but these were just words to me at the time.
He made me sit in the car while he set up camp. It took him an hour or so; he hadn’t done this in a while. It was dark now, and I was hungry. My mom packed us fishing rods, but instead, he pulled an old hunting rifle out of the trunk. He explained to me that what we were about to do was something every man in our family did, that it was tradition. Since he didn’t have any kids or nephews at his disposal, naturally, he passed it down to me. We had to kill a monkey.
I thought I’d be learning to tie knots or different bird calls or learning the English name of native plants. And besides, eating monkeys was a pre-colonial thing, and extremely illegal. But here was Asian Rock Hudson refusing every complaint, saying it simply had to be done. After all, it was tradition. You can’t break tradition.
So, we set out with my grandfather’s old gas lamp and, apparently, what was also his rifle. It wasn’t hard to find a monkey; you could hear them calling from the trees. But hunting monkeys isn't the same as hunting deer; they're small and fast. Although one thing stayed the same, you had to shoot them in the head.
I can’t tell you what that night looked like, but I can tell you what it sounded like. The bullets in my uncle’s pocket jingled like Christmas bells. I remember the sound of leaves crunching like bags of crisps under his Blundstones, and the sound of his gun when he fired it into the skull of a young monkey. Its still-forming skull suppressed what should have been the sound of shattering bone. But the monkey did not make a sound; it didn’t even see us.
He held my hand walking back to our campsite, cradling this limp little thing with his other arm. With a machete, he beheaded and skinned the thing, scooped its brain into a small copper pot, fished out the bullet with two fingers, and tossed it into the dirt beside us. He boiled it with salt, peppercorns, and a bay leaf. Now and then, he'd stir the pot and glance at me to make sure I wasn't crying. Then he spooned it over two bowls of rice. It jiggled like salt-cured egg yolk, glistened the same way the black belly fat of a milkfish does. I'm not sure what color it was, only that it was shiny, reflecting the fire in front of me.
I asked if we could pray before eating, and he said since he didn’t pray much, that I should lead. So, I balanced the bowl on my lap and held my hands in a fist against my forehead, closed my eyes, and thanked God for the meal and the company. I asked God to tell my grandpa that I missed him and if he would be proud of me if I ate this. My grandfather had died a month earlier. That was why my uncle came home. We each only had a bite and threw the rest in the fire, crackling and flaking apart into the air.
Later, as we sat watching it burn, he told me that when he was a child, my grandfather had brought him and his brothers to the same forest and made the same stew, only then with onions, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, and slivers of century eggs. He laughed, saying they held stalks of lemongrass under their noses to hide the smell. I remember nodding even though I couldn’t smell anything anymore except gunpowder and wet soil and smoke from the fire. Then he looked over at me and smiled. “But you,” he said, “you took it like a champ.”
We didn’t even spend the night; my uncle packed everything up again and immediately drove us to the nearest McDonald's. It was the only thing open at that hour. Over chicken nuggets, we finally got to know each other. I told him my favorite color, and he told me his. I told him my favorite Disney princess, and he told me his. I asked him what America was like, and he said it was nothing compared to home. I asked him why he never came back, and he said there was nothing left for him here. But there are a few things that bring him back home. The heat during summertime in Virginia Beach, the accent of the Filipina nurses at work sounding like his mom, or the water at the dock behind his house. The smell of the ocean never changes, no matter where you are. That salt in the air stays, crystallizes, and flakes off when you’re completely dry.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Some people say that you never forget a scent or flavor. Some memories can sit dormant for years, while others may never resurface again. With "Monkey Brains", I tried to translate the memories I do remember, piecing together scents, textures, and the flavors of my past. I could tell you I had a hard time as a child transitioning from one culture to another, or I could show you what it tasted like.”
Kiera Inciong is a New York-based writer and artist currently pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Food Business Management at the Culinary Institute of America and is an alumna of Fiorello LaGuardia High School's specialized Fine Arts program. She lives with her partner in the charming Hudson Valley of Upstate New York, where her days are filled with baking cakes and other miscellaneous sweets.
Monkey Brains
Kiera Inciong | Fiction, Summer 2026
I was ten when my uncle came home. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was American and had been living there for a while. I knew that he was a doctor in Virginia, which I learned from his wife, was a state. She was born there, a tall, slim, vibrant white lady my uncle brought back to Manila with him. I thought she was strange, with her curly red hair, red lips, and red nails. I thought her skin was strange; it was pale and never sweated despite the heat. I thought it was strange that they were married. I didn’t think white people married Filipinos. But my uncle wasn’t really Filipino. He definitely didn’t sound like one of us. If you closed your eyes, you’d think you were talking to Rock Hudson.
Well, Rock Hudson wanted nothing to do with me and I wanted nothing to do with him. The white lady, on the other hand, interested me. Up until that point, I didn't think white people were real outside of movies and TV shows. She brought boxes of pasta with her, buttered her noodles, and shaved imported cheese on top, eating that instead of rice and fish. She used a knife with her fork instead of with a spoon, like the rest of us. Our silverware looked so much darker when she held it.
Whenever we needed food for the week, my mother would send our yaya (our nanny) into town with a crisp fifty-peso bill folded into her coin purse and a few extra coins for the tricycle fare. I loved my yaya, so I’d always come with. The wet market was loud. It was bustling with yelling vendors and radios playing love songs through static and the wet slap of fish hitting plastic folding tables. It was mostly other yayas and drivers shopping there too, all carrying woven bags heavy with rice and vegetables
Each stall specialized in one thing only. One sold vegetables piled into plastic-netted basins: bundles of watercress with dripping stems, bitter melons with split skin like a crocodile, and heaps of okra. Okra was my favorite. I didn’t mind the slime on the inside. I thought that's what made it fun. I’d stand beside my yaya, haggling with vendors over half a kilo, one kilo, sometimes even two kilos of okra.
The fishermen were the most slick. You couldn’t haggle with fishermen. Their stalls sat on melting ice and smelled of blood and seawater, with hundreds of silver scaly bodies lined in neat rows. I loved tilapia because there was always plenty of it, cheap and stacked high in blue buckets. My yaya made the best deep-fried tilapia. She’d leave the skin to blister and crisp in hot oil while she crushed salted duck egg over quartered onions and tomatoes for us to eat on the side. She always bought one extra tilapia that we could eat immediately after coming home from the market, a snack before dinner.
Behind the tilapia were the milkfish, larger and more expensive, staring up at me with strange, catlike faces. My mother always insisted we bring at least one home. Yaya filleted and steamed it with ginger and Chinese cooking wine. The belly fat of a milkfish is black against its soft, pale flesh. I used to press strips of that fat into spoonfuls of rice, mixing and mixing, until it melted completely. My yaya always saved the head for herself. She said the best part wasn’t the soft white flesh my mother liked or the fatty belly I fought my cousins for, but the cheeks and the eyes. After dinner, I’d hurry to her quarters just to watch her drizzle soy sauce and squeeze calamansi halves over the head, then carefully crack the skull apart with the back of a spoon and suck the cold and gelatinized meat out quietly over her plate.
A few days after my aunt and uncle arrived, my aunt took me to a European import grocery store somewhere in Makati. I remember stepping through the glass doors and immediately feeling the cold air hit the sweat on my neck. Not cool air, but cold air, the kind that makes you suddenly aware of the wetness of your own skin. The entire place smelled faintly of coffee, bleach, and moldy cheese. I’d never been in a store like that before.
Everything there was sealed and refrigerated. The vegetables were cleaned and untouched by dirt. Nobody shouted. Nobody bargained. No slapping fish. Even the meats were quiet, wrapped neatly in paper and string instead of being hacked apart in front of you by men with cleavers. The shelves were stocked with things I only recognized from television commercials: Jars of Nutella and American cereal boxes with cartoon mascots I’d never seen before. Huge pale wheels of cheese sweated under yellow lights next to freezers full of bacon, pink sausages, and long legs of cured ham hung from hooks behind the counter like animals in a slaughterhouse.
At the deli counter, my aunt ordered some sort of tubular meat in an English I didn’t understand—her accent was fast, southern, and soft. I stared at tubs of white cheese floating in cloudy water. Everything in the store seemed softer than what I was used to. Softer breads, softer colors, even the people spoke softly. Nobody yelled or laughed too loudly. Instead of pop songs on the radio, they were playing jazz. I kept checking price tags; a small jar of mustard cost as much as three kilos of okra.
My aunt seemed completely at ease here. Every few minutes, somebody stopped to talk to her—mostly white men with their Filipina wives and mixed children. Then she called me over to meet the owner of the store, an older gay white man from Delaware. He kissed my aunt on both cheeks before asking about my uncle.
“And how is Virginia’s best plastic surgeon? I saw he was on the cover of Virginia Business!”
“Still impossible,” she laughed. “I keep telling him we should move back here.”
The owner rolled his eyes knowingly. “They always say no until they’re old. Besides, why would he leave everything he built behind?”
I stood there quietly while they talked. The owner’s husband, a Filipino Broadway singer who’d performed in the original London production of Miss Saigon, waved to us from behind the cafe counter with a cigarette pinched between two fingers, the smoke spiraling into the vents above us. Until then, I hadn’t realized there were people who chose to come to Manila. In my mind, America was where you escaped to if you were lucky enough. But here were all these foreigners building little versions of their old lives in the middle of my city.
On the ride back home, my aunt told me she met my uncle while doing volunteer medical work. She spent one summer after her junior year at Old Dominion as a speech pathologist on a relief program in Manila where my uncle was shadowing a surgeon.
“We hated each other at first,” she laughed. She thought he was arrogant and sheltered. My uncle thought she worked too hard for the attention. “I got my first job when I was thirteen,” she told me. “I scooped ice cream at the boardwalk in Virginia Beach.” According to her, my uncle couldn’t understand why a teenager would ever need a job unless their family were poor.
“He thought it was depressing,” she said, shaking her head.
“And you thought he was spoiled?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Somehow they still fell in love. After that they spent years drifting from country to country doing relief work before settling briefly in Manila during the nineties. They had an apartment somewhere in Makati with bad plumbing and stray cats that slept outside their window every night. They used to drink cheap beer on the roof during blackouts, sweating through their sheets because they refused to ask either of their families for money. She loved it here. I asked her why they left. She looked out the window for a long time before answering.
“My father got sick,” she said finally. “So, we went back to Virginia to take care of him.”
Then, softer: “I wish we could’ve done the same for your grandpa.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just sat there, watching the city turn to slums then into our gated suburb, trying to imagine Manila as someplace people could just leave and come back to, as if it belonged to people like them.
I was obsessed with her. I wanted to walk like her, talk like her, and dress like her. I started wearing these bright pink and green Lily Pulitzer dresses she had brought for me as a gift. But my mother had other plans. She somehow convinced my uncle to take me on a trip, just the two of us, thinking he could teach me about becoming American. My stepdad lived in New York, and we’d immigrate in a year, so she wanted me to assimilate as fast as possible.
My uncle took me camping that weekend, told me to leave my Lily Pulitzer dresses behind. We drove seven hours to a secluded rainforest listening to CDs he left in his childhood room. Asian Rock Hudson loved Jazz. We quickly ran through all the Gershwin standards. Apparently, if I wanted to become American, I needed to know Jazz.
“This is real American music,” he said.
He told me about Lead Belly from Louisiana and his 12-string guitar. Then of Bix Beiderbeck, Glenn Miller, and Art Farmer, all from small towns in Iowa, who became big names in big jazz bands. And Louis Armstrong, whose trumpet sounded just like a fat man singing opera.
I listened closely, thinking he would quiz me later. At the end of our drive, I asked if there was Filipino Jazz.
“Yes, but nothing good, just pop-y Bossa Nova.”
I nodded, taking notes in my head, but these were just words to me at the time.
He made me sit in the car while he set up camp. It took him an hour or so; he hadn’t done this in a while. It was dark now, and I was hungry. My mom packed us fishing rods, but instead, he pulled an old hunting rifle out of the trunk. He explained to me that what we were about to do was something every man in our family did, that it was tradition. Since he didn’t have any kids or nephews at his disposal, naturally, he passed it down to me. We had to kill a monkey.
I thought I’d be learning to tie knots or different bird calls or learning the English name of native plants. And besides, eating monkeys was a pre-colonial thing, and extremely illegal. But here was Asian Rock Hudson refusing every complaint, saying it simply had to be done. After all, it was tradition. You can’t break tradition.
So, we set out with my grandfather’s old gas lamp and, apparently, what was also his rifle. It wasn’t hard to find a monkey; you could hear them calling from the trees. But hunting monkeys isn't the same as hunting deer; they're small and fast. Although one thing stayed the same, you had to shoot them in the head.
I can’t tell you what that night looked like, but I can tell you what it sounded like. The bullets in my uncle’s pocket jingled like Christmas bells. I remember the sound of leaves crunching like bags of crisps under his Blundstones, and the sound of his gun when he fired it into the skull of a young monkey. Its still-forming skull suppressed what should have been the sound of shattering bone. But the monkey did not make a sound; it didn’t even see us.
He held my hand walking back to our campsite, cradling this limp little thing with his other arm. With a machete, he beheaded and skinned the thing, scooped its brain into a small copper pot, fished out the bullet with two fingers, and tossed it into the dirt beside us. He boiled it with salt, peppercorns, and a bay leaf. Now and then, he'd stir the pot and glance at me to make sure I wasn't crying. Then he spooned it over two bowls of rice. It jiggled like salt-cured egg yolk, glistened the same way the black belly fat of a milkfish does. I'm not sure what color it was, only that it was shiny, reflecting the fire in front of me.
I asked if we could pray before eating, and he said since he didn’t pray much, that I should lead. So, I balanced the bowl on my lap and held my hands in a fist against my forehead, closed my eyes, and thanked God for the meal and the company. I asked God to tell my grandpa that I missed him and if he would be proud of me if I ate this. My grandfather had died a month earlier. That was why my uncle came home. We each only had a bite and threw the rest in the fire, crackling and flaking apart into the air.
Later, as we sat watching it burn, he told me that when he was a child, my grandfather had brought him and his brothers to the same forest and made the same stew, only then with onions, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, and slivers of century eggs. He laughed, saying they held stalks of lemongrass under their noses to hide the smell. I remember nodding even though I couldn’t smell anything anymore except gunpowder and wet soil and smoke from the fire. Then he looked over at me and smiled. “But you,” he said, “you took it like a champ.”
We didn’t even spend the night; my uncle packed everything up again and immediately drove us to the nearest McDonald's. It was the only thing open at that hour. Over chicken nuggets, we finally got to know each other. I told him my favorite color, and he told me his. I told him my favorite Disney princess, and he told me his. I asked him what America was like, and he said it was nothing compared to home. I asked him why he never came back, and he said there was nothing left for him here. But there are a few things that bring him back home. The heat during summertime in Virginia Beach, the accent of the Filipina nurses at work sounding like his mom, or the water at the dock behind his house. The smell of the ocean never changes, no matter where you are. That salt in the air stays, crystallizes, and flakes off when you’re completely dry.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Some people say that you never forget a scent or flavor. Some memories can sit dormant for years, while others may never resurface again. With "Monkey Brains", I tried to translate the memories I do remember, piecing together scents, textures, and the flavors of my past. I could tell you I had a hard time as a child transitioning from one culture to another, or I could show you what it tasted like.”
Kiera Inciong is a New York-based writer and artist currently pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Food Business Management at the Culinary Institute of America and is an alumna of Fiorello LaGuardia High School's specialized Fine Arts program. She lives with her partner in the charming Hudson Valley of Upstate New York, where her days are filled with baking cakes and other miscellaneous sweets.