VIRAL: This 17-Peso Children's Book Has A Disturbing Origin Story About Sayote
It's important that we screen what our kids consume-be it the videos they watch on YouTube or Netflix, the posts they see on Facebook, and the books they read or you read to them. And while there's completely nothing wrong with children's books with fictional stories, there's this now-viral book called Alamat Ng Mga Gulay that's trending for, well... disturbing reasons.
Aia Castillo posted photos of the pages of Alamat Ng Mga Gulay, specifically the story about sayote. The Alamat Ng Sayote starts out with an interesting time wherein tinola wasn't served with sayote because it simply did not exist back then. We call this B.S. or Before Sayote.
While there are definitely grammatical errors in the fictional telling of how the gourd came into existence, this isn't exactly why the book has gone viral.
On page 27 is where it gets all, for lack of a better term, dark. The protagonist's sister dies from a combination of indigestion and a heart attack. Because they were poor and didn't have money to go to the hospital, the protagonist chops up his sister's dead body and uses it as fertilizer to grow vegetables, which then became sayote.
Wondering where he got the name? He named it "sayote" in commemoration of the deceased sister who loves to cook tinola with vegetables, despite his pickiness. In the story, whenever she cooks tinolang manok, he would only eat the chicken and separate the vegetables and say "te sa'yo," an anagram of sayote.
The other parts of the story that caught people's attention were the writer's use of "nashogbak" to say that the sister died and that the protagonist found the sayote resembles his ugly sister-among other things.
Now, we won't judge if you still want to buy Alamat ng Gulay and look past its grammatical errors, choice of words, the absence of a moral to the story, and the human composting aspect (it's legal in other countries, JICYDK). Here's the Shopee link where you can buy it for only P17 if you're curious to see what other alamat might be worth reading.Â
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