by Pico Iyer
Touched by her matter-of-factness, and a little discomfited, I remained hunched over my Coke. The door opened, and I swiveled around eagerly in hope of reinforcements. But it was just another huge-headed, grinning little man trying to sell T-shirts. Then my waiter clomped over to my table and pulled himself up onto another chair. Four eyes closed in on me in the semi-darkness. Where did I live? asked the waiter. New York. Ah, he smiled, and burst into a few lines of “New York, New York.” But actually, I said, I always thought of California as my home. “I left my heart in San Francisco,” crooned the dwarf.
We talked some more in a desultory fashion, the waiter occasionally improvising a few songs over the moody piano music, and then I took my leave of the friendly pair. “Come back soon,” the waitress called out after me. “And bring your companion.”
The rain was still coming down in torrents, but I was not yet ready to return to my hotel room. So I walked the full length of the narrow street, exchanging helpless smiles with those huddled next to me in doorways, hurrying past pool halls and beer gardens and restaurants out of which I heard snatches of pop songs, acoustic guitars, jukeboxes. The handwritten cardboard signs that lined the streets were smudged by the rain, but I could still make out their messages. “Wanted: Young Attractive and Beautiful Sexy Dancer.” “Wanted: Attractive Cashier.” “Wanted: Sexy Karaoke Singers.”
After ten minutes or so among these neon-lit shadows, I caught some pleasing music drifting out of a place called the Swagman. Inside, a six-piece band was playing on a modest stage, led by a pretty torch singer who could have been Streisand or Ronstadt in the dark. A kitty box for tips rested on top of one of the speakers. There were only ten seats at the tiny, semicircular bar, and I took my place on one of them. Next to me were two unaccompanied young ladies. Both of them gazed up with large, beseeching eyes.
I tried to concentrate exclusively on my drink, but I could not long ignore the penetrating stares on either side. Finally, I turned around to the girl on my left. She had glitter on her eyelids and her face was sweet and fresh, but her smile was not a cheerful one. We chatted a little, and she told me that she had two kids and a husband. But he could not find a job anywhere, so now she was working at the Swagman. I could think of nothing to say in reply. The singer onstage went into an aching version of “Please Release Me.”
I turned to the lady on my other side, a small, matronly type in a sober green dress. She had two children also, she said, but then she had found out that their father was already married to another woman, and had eight other children at home. She worked in a factory, but the factory closed. So here she was in the Swagman, and once a month she saved up enough money to visit her mother on the far side of Manila, and her children. “My ambition,” she said, “is to finish my studies in commerce. Then maybe I can own small business.”
I did not know what to say to the unspoken appeals, I wanted to help but didn’t know how, so I gulped down my Coke, wished both girls the best and hurried back out into the rain-washed street. There was time, I decided, for one more stop before I returned to my guesthouse.
I had exhausted most of Mabini by now, so I turned to the parallel strip, Del Pilar. There were fewer money changers on this street, fewer stores, and many more signs: “Wanted: Mamasan, experienced.” “Hospitality girl wanted.” “Wanted: A-Go-Go Girl or Receptionist with Pleasing Personality.” The neon twinkled more frantically here, and the narrow lane was full of winking commotion. Loud music issued from the bars, and Western men stumbled out at intervals. Dressed-up girls and dressed-down girls called out invitations. Lights sparkled, neon lips flashed.
The glossiest joint on the street seemed to be the New Bangkok. Inside, Springsteen was deafening on a video screen, the stench of beer was powerful, cigarette smoke rose up from the barstools where foreign men dandled local beauties on their laps, bikinied dancers writhed on a tiny platform. In and out among the customers bustled a middle-aged Chinese lady in a cheongsam, anxious to make sure that everyone was enjoying himself.
A girl led me to a booth, and I put in an order for an orange juice. A minute or two later, I was joined by a different young lady, very prim in a smart gray dress with “Training” written in red across the front. Sitting down beside me and looking straight ahead, she drew a comb gravely through her short, sleek hair. Then, turning to me shyly, she asked if I would buy her a drink. Rosa was eighteen, I learned, and still in high school. Her classes lasted from 9:00 until 5:00, and she worked in the bar from 9:00 at night until 3:30. But she took off the nights before exams because she wanted to do well in her studies. She wanted to become a journalist.
Rosa had started working on Del Pilar only two weeks ago, she took pains to inform me, and she planned to work here only as a receptionist. She wouldn’t wear a bikini, and she wouldn’t be obliged to touch anyone. Dancers got an extra $3 a night, but she was content just to make 50 cents every time a customer bought her a drink.
Was the New Bangkok a good place to work? I asked. She didn’t know, she replied earnestly; she worked at the Blue Hawaii across the street. Then why was she here? Because, she said, her elder sister also worked at the Blue Hawaii, as a dancer. And she could not bear to watch her sister put her arms around strangers or giggle as foreign men fondled her. So she came to the New Bangkok for shelter.
With that, serious Rosa turned to comb her hair again, and another girl, in a black bikini, stumbled toward us, tears streaking her mascara, turning her face into a sad and clownish mask. Lurching up to our booth, she let out a wail, then flung her arms around Rosa, burying her head on the younger girl’s shoulder. Rosa turned to me, with a soft embarrassed smile, then turned back to the girl, put her arms around her and asked her what was wrong. Violently, the girl jerked back her head. “I hate millionaire,” she blurted through her sobs, her eyes wild and vacant. “I hate money.” She looked at me fiercely. “It’s bullshit.” Then she began to choke on her words. “I want Mamá.” Her face twisted up again, she threw herself back onto Rosa.
Rosa looked over at me, confused, and then, telling the girl gently to stay put, she got up and walked away. The girl looked up at me, and through me, with hatred. Rosa came back, gave her a Kleenex and held onto her like a mother. A few moments later, the girl pulled back, dried her eyes and wiped her face clean. It was time for her to dance again.
As she walked off, an awkward silence fell. What was the girl’s name? Rosa did not know; she had never met her before. And what was the problem? Drugs, she said; heroin. The thought made her silent. After a while, she spoke up again. “That girl,” she said, “she reminds me of my sister. She does not take drugs. But when she gets drunk, she cries and cries. She does not like her life. And when she is drunk, she says what is in her mind, what is in her heart.” Aren’t you worried, Rosa, I asked, that the same thing will happen to you, working here? She nodded grimly. “I know. I think of my sister often. But I can keep control. I do not drink. I do not smoke. I will work only as receptionist. I want to reach my ambition.” And you will really be able to avoid all this? “Yes,” she said, nodding slowly and with shaky determination. “My ambition is to become a journalist.”
Then the song changed, and the other girl staggered back again and threw herself onto Rosa as before, sobbing in racking spasms, blurting inarticulate curses through her tears. Solemn in her neat gray dress, Rosa kept hold of her, tender but uneasy. As she did so, the manageress came up, puffing on a long cigarette holder while she placed her hand on the hysterical dancer. “So,” she said, giving me a sly smile. “You would like to take this girl home?”
SADNESS AND MUSIC were everywhere I looked in the Marcoses’ Manila, smiles and rags. In all my travels, I had never seen poverty so open and so crushing. I had expected, from the travel brochures, to find grand hotels and glittery bars strung like jewels along wide boulevards by the sea. Instead I found a border-town seediness of beggars and whores. In the tourist district of Ermita, dead mice lay on the sidewalks like overturned trucks
and men in old clothes urinated in the face of passing cars. The streets in the rain were littered with sleeping bodies, rotten with the stench of garbage and decay.
I moved on my first morning into a slightly better hotel, but often, even there, no milk was available at breakfast. Half of the local supermarket was taken up by a pharmacy; at the checkout stand, more brands of condoms were on sale than of cigarettes. The post office was a single booth, with cardboard boxes placed on the floor instead of slots; the line for stamps straggled along the sidewalk. Nearby, another, longer line had formed outside a sign promising jobs for able-bodied men in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. For women, I imagined, things were a little easier. Most bars or restaurants posted cardboard signs outside: “Wanted: Sexy Dancers, Receptionists.” “Wanted: Hospitality Girl.”
Within five minutes of my hotel, there must have been sixty or more of these places, beer gardens and bars and karaoke clubs where the customers sing along, all of them advertising live music, as well as some combination of “models,” “actresses” or “campus girls,” all “5′ 4″ with Pleasing Personalities.” Typical of the Ermita style was Calle Cinquo, the restaurant where I stopped for dinner my second night in town. It was a fairly nondescript open-air beer garden, protected from the heavens by a thatched roof. There were not many customers in evidence when I entered, and only forty or so tables. But there were fifty-three waitresses in the place, all young, all dressed in bright skirts and prettily made up, most of them sitting around their tables, idly looking out into the street for custom. Meanwhile, lights flashed and guitars glinted on a large stage, where six pretty girls, all red-lipped with long earrings and shiny black hair, all dressed in matching yellow-and-black queen-bee outfits—three of them singers, two guitarists, and a sixth at the keyboards—zipped through record-perfect renditions of “Like a Virgin” and “High Society Girl,” performing jazzy little steps in unison and flashing bright smiles at the scattered members of their audience. As soon as they had finished, another equally high-tech and professional girl group came on, and after them another, and then a fourth. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” the six-girl band chimed brightly, while outside, in the street, groups of men peered in over the fence, and women stopped to look at the signs soliciting more singers, more waitresses (“5′ 4″ minimum. Pleasing Personality. No experience needed”).
All along the narrow streets of Ermita, hostesses in “U.S.A. for Africa” T-shirts or pretty dresses sat listlessly outside the entrance to their bars, staring imploringly at all who passed. The hospitality girls of the charm trade were happy, it seemed, to dance attention on any and every foreigner: there was a Chalet Suisse bar in Ermita, a Scandinavia, an Aussie Bar and the Australian. Richer visitors were even better accommodated. Within a few yards of Mabini were the Sahara Club, the Oasis, the Arabic Club, the Arabian Nights, the Sultan Café and the al-Chams. And all about were Japanese lanterns and bamboo screens and ryokans, the Michiko Karaoke Club and the Keiko Karaoke Club. “Unescorted Ladies Not Allowed” said the signs on most bars; others allowed them in, for a fee of $1.
Sometimes, the fallen dilapidation of the area could almost seem comic—I peered one night into the local bowling alley to see a frantic scatter of arms and legs at the far end of the lane every time a ball came down, and then a disembodied hand putting the pins back in place and rolling the ball back to sender. More often, though, it was hard to raise a smile. The Waldorf-Astoria was a dingy little hole offering “24-Hour Dim Sum.” Inside was Maxim’s Café. “We are Exclusive Club” said another broken billboard, “but everyone is welcome.”
With its rain-worn buildings and its palm trees windblown against a gray harbor, with its half-clad people lying in the streets and its air of careworn neglect, Ermita reminded me more of Bombay than anywhere else I knew. But the squalor here seemed more aching and more desolate. Unlike their Indian counterparts, Manila’s beggars looked surprised by their newfound poverty and unaccustomed to it, lacking anything to support them as they fell. Never before had I felt such an overpowering sense of need—dirty, desperate, crying need; and never before had I felt myself so helpless. In Manila I learned for the first time all the grim sophistries of destitution and prostitution—the shame of giving a beggar only 50 cents, the shame of giving him nothing at all because there are too many others around, the shame of returning to the comfort of even a cheap hotel.
My own small hotel, like most of the businesses of Ermita, was guarded round the clock by two handsome young security guards in smart blue uniforms, guns set snugly against glistening gold buckles. As I settled down in the place, I often sat down in the lobby to chat with the cheery twosome. Manuel had three children, he told me, and he had christened every one of them with a name that began with an “M.” He loved them, he said, but he envied me for being unattached. “Always problems,” he explained. “Always thinking of my family. Always problems.”
His colleague explained that he too had pressures at home. “I am fatherless,” he said, “and my mother depends on me.” Then he paused. “You have power,” he said to me entreatingly. “Maybe you can help me get good job?”
I did not know what to say. “Sure,” said Manuel, smiling brightly. “I come to U.S. I visit you there.” I did not know whether it was crueler to encourage the illusion or just to kill it then. I smiled back sadly.
On my next night in Manila, as I took dinner alone in a tiny rock-video café, a girl dressed in a red headband and a long white T-shirt and almost nothing else began staring at me intently from another table. As soon as I looked back at her, she came over and sat down. She looked very young and very poor. I offered her some chicken, and she gnawed at the bone hungrily. “I have problem,” she began. She had come into town only that morning, she said, bringing with her nothing but the clothes she was wearing and one other shirt and a pair of jeans that she kept in a Dick Whittington bag. She had no place to sleep, she explained with a tired, half-drugged smile. “My ambition,” she said, “is to find a boyfriend.” She smiled at me again. “To find a boyfriend—that is my ambition.”
I HAD NOT known before I arrived in Manila that the tourist district was the red-light district. But then I had not known that one resident in every five of the “showcase of democracy” was reduced to squatting. I had not known that the $20 million government-run Manila Film Center, the grand creation of President and Madame Marcos, made its money by showing porno movies, uncut. And I had not known that across the street from the glittering pavilions of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, whose futuristic ramps and landscaped gardens were a gaudy monument to Marcos splendor, families were sleeping in bushes.
Before I came to Manila, I could not have guessed that more than a thousand families in what Imelda Marcos, Minister of Human Settlements, called “the City of Man” made their homes in the central garbage dump. And before I arrived in the New Society, I would never have suspected that a security guard, after eleven years on the job, received, for a twelve-hour shift, exactly $2.25. Actually, that was quite a good salary for Manila—$55 a month was as much as a long-standing government official could earn. Yet the horoscope in the government-run daily was telling its readers that for all those born on August 24 the likeliest occupations were “polo player, horse breeder, international playboy, jet pilot and travel mogul.”
Until I came to Manila, I had not known that I was capable of social outrage. But then, one evening, one of my hotel security guards invited me home. We drove down Roxas Boulevard, the grand corniche that sweeps along Manila Bay and boasts the Hyatt, the Holiday Inn and many of the city’s starriest discos, as we passed, I noticed people living on the center divider of the road, huddling against the rain and the wind in shacks no larger than a bathtub.
Ten minutes later, we got out in a street of run-down tenements in Pasay City and walked down an alley thick with refuse. At last we came to a concrete shack. My friend pounded at the door. A frightened-looking girl opened it, just a crack, and let us in. There were two dark rooms
inside, but there was little in the way of furniture. There was no room for it.
Stepping over bodies, we made our way to the far room. On a sagging bed, a man dressed only in boxer shorts tossed and turned. Beside him, his girlfriend lay facing the other direction, her head lolling over the edge, her eyes bleary from the joint she was smoking. Between them lay a baby. Next to the bed was a mattress on which a woman was sitting and two or three children were uncomfortably stretched out.
In the other room, there was a bare sink, above it two bottles of brandy. On the floor, a couple of kids and a baby and three adults were sprawled across a mess of bedding. Above them, the concrete showed through the wallpaper. There was a picture of a black-and-yellow sunset on the wall, a photo of a girl torn from some calendar and a portrait of some human-faced dogs seated at a dinner table. To get to the bathroom, one had to crawl out through the window.
The kids, dirty-chinned and dressed in faded T-shirts, scrambled about the half-sleeping bodies. At the sink, the young girl who had let us in rolled joints. The man in boxer shorts got up, stretched, went over to the sink and knocked back some brandy. The kids bawled. It was nighttime, but nobody seemed to be sleeping much. Lulu, the girl on the bed, smiled up at me. She worked in a bar, so she spoke fluent English; it therefore fell to her to play hostess.
“What can we do?” she said, motioning toward the man drinking at the sink. “He is college graduate. Commerce. But no job.” Her own position in the bar brought in a little money, of course, but she was twenty-nine now, and unless she joined most of her colleagues in going to Japan, she too would soon be out of a job. All the time she was speaking, her eleven-year-old son stared at me with bright eyes. Then he broke into a lovely smile. “Hip, hip, hooray,” he cried.