Words are leisure
Top Model Stephanie Retuya on a slow boat to Mamburao, Occidental Mindoro
‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. ’ — Jane Austen
She may appear painfully shy with her doll eyes glued to the book in her hands. But when she starts to talk, top model Stephanie Retuya lights up like the summer sun, as she tells you stories about modeling here and abroad, the books she has read, or her adorable daughter’s cute antics.
Recently back from modeling stints in Singapore and Korea, Stephanie has yet to take a break from work as she finds herself going from one photo shoot to another. The Asia’s Next Top Model finalist usually starts her day with basic Pilates after drinking water. If she has to go to work, which is almost every day, she makes a point of waking up early enough to prepare food she can bring to work.
As long as she has a book to read, every season is top model Stephanie Retuya’s season in the sun.
This is how Stephanie gets to put her newfound fondness of cooking to good use. Growing up, Stephanie was the type you wouldn’t see holding kitchen utensils or anything from the kitchen. “But now, I’m really interested in cooking. I bake. Not all my efforts are successful but I make my own energy bars!” she beams. “I need to be healthy because before, I would eat anything and everything. But I’m naturally skinny so I feel weak.” Wanting to become healthier, she considers cooking her own food, the ideal lifestyle for her, what with models’ workday so unpredictable you never know what you’re going to be fed at gigs, if you’re going to be fed at all. “It’s both for work and personal,” she explains. “I just found myself looking for healthy choices, even for alternative recipes. So if I want to eat a certain dish, I want the healthy version. It’s not enough that you just keep buying stuff and you don’t know how to cook.”
Stephanie has also discovered a passion for tea. When she opened her cupboard one day, she was surprised by the huge selection of tea she had acquired from all her travels mainly for work. It was a welcome surprise as she now enjoys having tea while reading. “I didn’t realize I had accumulated that much, and that I am that interested in tea!” she says. “I drink tea while reading, it’s a very good combination. I read a lot. That’s my main thing.” There is no difference between buying tea and buying books, according to the tea-loving bibliophile. “I’m only happy when I’m reading,” she gushes. “Even just buying the book, the whole process of it, from choosing to paying for it, is something I really enjoy. It takes me a long time to choose a book. I go over the synopses, I take a close look at the cover, I scan through some pages… It’s quite a ritual.”
While deciding on which book to buy takes quite a while, falling in love with reading was quick and instant, all at once, like love at first sight. It started when she was a child living with her great grandmother. “She had a sari-sari store where comics were rented out,” recalls Stephanie. “That was when I unofficially learned how to read, and realized that I liked it. Then I’d borrow Archie comics from my cousins and devour them, page after page. I think that I also taught myself English by reading.”
It has been the multitude of stories that gets Stephanie hooked book after book after book. To her, books are dreammakers. They broaden her horizons, fuel her desires, enlarge her world, and take her to other, sometimes impossible places, returning her to life at the end of each page changed and unable to change back.
“When you’re a kid and you just play around, you realize you don’t know anything about the world,” muses Stephanie. “Reading made me want to travel because books have these different places, different locations, different destinations I want to see.”
Reading does take her places and gives her a refuge from tough times. When she was competing at Asia’s Next Top Model Cycle 1 in 2012, Stephanie felt at home at their model house because it had shelves upon shelves of books. “That’s the first time I ever read Stephen King and I was amazed by his writing skills,” she says. “But what helped me most of all was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. The book was so depressing I found no reason to get depressed with my own problems.” In Singapore, Stephanie had to deal with homesickness, as she was always away for months on end just when her daughter was turning from infant to toddler. “If you are immersed in a story, there’s suspension of disbelief,” she explains. “You forget everything about your own life as you are focused on the characters.”
It has been said that a true reader reads everything. Stephanie has a wide range of reading preferences, from award-winning literature to bestselling pop fiction to trash plain and simple. She reads anything, regardless of author or genre or writing style. “I devour everything,” she admits. “Even if you’re heartbroken, you can read a happy or depressing book. Like Twilight, the material is very elementary and the writing is like a first draft, but it has helped me. It’s so cliché but it’s how I dealt with first love and the first heartbreak in college. For me, even if it’s such a bad book, it doesn’t matter because it allows me to live for a moment a life that isn’t my own.”
The most dreaded question any bookworm is unprepared to answer is almost always who their favorite author or what their favorite book is. But if Stephanie must answer, she would say Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. In this one book, she sees much of herself in the lead character Elizabeth Darcy (née Elizabeth Benneth), the most beloved of Austen heroines, whose main conflict is her desire to marry for love under circumstances that pressure her to marry for convenience. “She’s courageous. At that time, women had no choice who they married as long as the men could provide for them or pay the dowry. But she would always say no to her parents,” she says of her favorite protagonist. “I read it in high school and I really looked up to her—her courage and the way she carried herself without men, without social pressure.”
Like any avid reader, Stephanie has no idea how many books she has read, but who’s counting? “I even started borrowing books at a Korean library when I worked in Korea. I wanted books I could dispose of after reading, so I need not lug them around with me when I traveled,” she says. “I blame all the money I’ve ever spent on excess baggage on books because I used to travel around with at least five books in my bag. Now, I try to bring no more than two, which is a good thing because then there is room for what I often find at nice bookstores and libraries.”
Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, Stephanie always reads. “Even when I need to pee, while walking to the bathroom and walking back from there, I’m reading!” she says. If the book is really good, she reads it anywhere. But if she had a choice, the beach would be the perfect spot to disappear into a book, sinking herself between the pages, while digging deep into the sand with her toes.
‘If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else
is thinking.’
—Haruki Murakami
Stephanie recommends these books for your summer reading:
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen—a classic
2. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green—it’ll make you cry
3. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder—contemplate and understand the history of philosophy
4. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown—historical fiction adventure (And it’s the first book I bought with my meager allowance!)
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank—to immerse yourself in her inspiring story and so you won’t forget how cruel this world could be
And here’s where you should read them:
1. By the beach
2. Your favorite spot in the house
3. Coffee shops
4. Train
5. Anywhere with a good book is a great place to be
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. —Oscar Wilde
http://www.mb.com.ph/words-are-leisure/
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