Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  THUS THE UNNERVING counterpoint continued: smiles amidst the squalor, and songs. In Japan, my previous stop, I had grown accustomed to living in a kind of mobile isolation tank; here, as I walked down the street, people looked me directly in the eye, and flashed me cheering smiles as they passed. The girls at grocery-store cash registers drew me shyly into conversation; the high-spirited boys who worked in my hotel showed me their college books. And all day long, from dawn to midnight, music buzzed through the streets of Ermita.

  Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore—West Virginia …” Sometimes the songs were played in the original recording, sometimes reproduced live, but with such high fidelity that it was impossible to tell if the sound came from jukebox or human voice. Either way, the sound was sunny and intoxicating. In Ermita, I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station.

  I quickly noticed too that the talented Filipinos were able to turn their voices to any style or fashion. Yet they seemed most at home with sugarcoated Middle of the Road ditties: soft, straight-from-the-heart tunes, sweetened by pleasant melodies. There were forty-seven radio stations in town, FM and AM, but nearly all of them played the same AM tunes—easy listening as a background to easy living. I heard the Everly Brothers more often in Manila than ever before, and Simon and Garfunkel too; Peter Paul and Mary, and the Eagles. Country-and-western laments for lost love were everywhere too, and once, at a free concert in Rizal Park, I heard bankers perform duets from Rigoletto and miniskirted secretaries do arias from La Traviata. But in more than three weeks, I heard no hard rock, no New Wave, no eighties pop; no Talking Heads or Clash or even Twisted Sister—just ballads of heartbreak and high spirits, decorated with sweet falsettos and silvery harmonies.

  The Number One hit while I was in the Philippines was, without a doubt, “We Are the World,” the song recorded by the superstars of U.S.A. for Africa to raise money for the starving in Ethiopia. The anthem of hopeful charity had, in fact, become a virtual sound track to Philippine life. One morning, as I walked into Mister Donut for breakfast, the bespectacled college boy behind the counter began swaying rhythmically to the song as it came up on the radio. That same day I walked into a restaurant for lunch and heard Bruce Springsteen rasping his way passionately through the same plaintive refrain. The same appeal was drifting out of an open-air restaurant, sung by two young boys with acoustic guitars, as I walked down Mabini that evening. And at Calle Cinquo Restaurant that same night, cheers arose from the audience on two separate occasions as two different girl groups struck up the song’s intimate opening bars.

  On many a night, I could imagine nothing in the world more pleasant than just to wander through the streets of Ermita, catching the music that pulsed out of bars and beer gardens, hearkening to the siren call of caprice. One typical evening, I went to eat at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor (“We Serve Fun”) and was entertained by Euphoria, a tight, hard-driving seven-man group, six of whose members took turns on lead vocals. Every one of them had a beautiful voice and for every sad song—“I am just a poor boy/Though my story’s seldom told …”—they had a singer who could reproduce the exact pitch of the original recording. Then I dropped in at a beer garden where three women in Swingles-singers dresses and two middle-aged men in Travolta-ish black suits and white waistcoats danced their way through sleek, synchronized Manhattan Transfer-type numbers. Then I made my way to My Father’s Mustache, a folk club where the waiters came dressed in three-gallon hats with sheriff’s badges pinned to their chests and holsters around their waists. The walls of the place were decorated with sepia prints of American men in cowboy gear, and the theme song from Bonanza pounded out of the sound system. Onto the stage—designed in the shape of a Conestoga wagon—strode the Pony Express band, dressed up in Stetsons and bandannas. A fast-strumming banjo man, a fiddler and a girl with a tambourine careened into a roaring version of “Red River Valley,” then raced into “Freight Train” (complete with choo-choo whistles). “Hi, y’all,” drawled the lady singers after they had finished their overture, “we’d like to do a song by Hank Williams.” Out came “Jambalaya.” “Yee-hah,” cried the guitarist. “Whooo-ey,” called the bassist. And the fiddler played like the devil.

  On my way back home that night, I found myself half skipping, so infectious was the happy music. And as I entered my hotel, I heard the receptionist breaking into a rendering of “We Are the World” so pretty that my heart felt like singing along with her.

  III

  “Where There Is Music,” said a T-shirt in a Mabini gift shop, “There Can’t Be Misery.” “Music,” said another in the same store, “Is the Medicine of a Troubled Mind.”

  Such wishful slogans were not difficult to believe so long as I was inside some folk-music club, watching a smiling singer under flashing orange lights. But as soon as I was back on the streets, amid the clutch of urchins and the cracked fences, it was harder to imagine that music could change the world. And as the days passed, the gray skies of Manila, its sense of peeling dereliction, began to wear me down. I did not know how to cope with the beggars, how to be of assistance to the large-eyed girls in the restaurants. I did not know what to make of the glossy ads for the Manila Casino (on Imelda Avenue), which offered free entrance to tourists and cried, “Game and Gain in U.S. Dollars. Watch that hot dice dance! Tumble at the table!” I needed some fresh air.

  And so one day I took a bus out to Angeles City, the small town around Clark Air Force Base, one of the two American bases that help bind the ties between the United States and the only country it has ever directly ruled.

  It was not hard to tell when we had arrived. For an hour or so, the bus drove through rice fields and small villages, past huts guarded by wide-eyed gamins. Then it drew up to an unkempt T-junction surrounded by vacant lots, gas stations and fading billboards. On one side of the road was Shakey’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken; on the other a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet (“Open 24 Hours. World’s Finest Coffee”) and a Drive-Thru Donut King. On the far side of the junction stood a rusted roadside shack called the Jailhouse Rock Disco and next to it the Café Valenzuela (“Pride of the Highway”). In the near gray distance gleamed the Golden Arches.

  Inside, the walls of McDonald’s were decorated in the style of an Arizona coffee shop; a faded picture of John Wayne; another of the Lone Ranger and of Chief Red Cloud; a drawing of a Typical Cowboy; a map representing “Guns of the West.” Opposite me, frowning over his breakfast of burger and fries, was a big American kid, with blue eyes and a broad, open face. Above his snakeskin boots and jeans he wore a short-sleeved blue shirt made up of a collage of headlines from the New York Times and the Miami Herald. And seeping sweetly out of the music system I heard, yet again, the willful optimism of “We Are the World.”

  I waited to hear the end of the song and then went out along the town’s main drag, the MacArthur Highway (sometimes spelled McArthur, sometimes spelled Hi-way). It was, I thought, the saddest-looking place in all the world—one long, gray strip of cardboard signs and cocktail lounges and beat-up bars with neon signs for beer in their windows, all lined by a rickety wooden porch. The stores had electric guitars in their windows, and “Harley-Davidson” warm-up jackets; sometimes they had baseball caps with “Playboy Club” on the front, or “Hillcrest Baptist Church”; sometimes they had army shields that said “Eternal Vigilance” and “Ready to Report” and “Pride in Uniform.”

  There were plenty of motels too, all with air conditioning, swimming pools and wall-to-wall carpeting, some advertising such additional frills as Betamaxes, Magic Mirrors, Drive-Thru service and free transportation to the base. There were also billboards advertising “bold movies” at the local cinema
s. Mostly, though, there were bars—the Valley of the Dolls, the Spanish Fly, the Lovers Inn. The sign outside one of them said simply, “Wanted: Girls Immediately.”

  I could, I imagined, have been in any of the desolate small towns of the American West, where used-car lots and twinkling motels and dilapidated cafés run all the way out to the desert. But here there were not stores, but shacks; and here there were shanties, not houses, along the riverbank. There were “Pickup for Hire” signs in all the hardware stores, but there were also signs that said “Goat for Hire.” And the children playing in the streets were not exactly All-American: the little boys bouncing tennis balls had black skins with Oriental features; the little girls at the candy stores were dark, but their hair was sandy.

  As I continued looking around, a plane rumbled through the heavens and a few minutes later it began to rain, pouring down hard on the stucco roof of the Question Mark Lounge, on Louisa’s Patio (“Tourists and Returnees Hangout”), on the bar that promised Candy’s Models and the Sunshine Café (“No Hustlers / Shoeshine Boys / Poofters / Dunces”). I hailed a jeepney (the souped-up secondhand U.S. jeep that provides mass transport in the Philippines) and took shelter on one of its benches, looking out into the grayness as we juddered past the Ponderosa Club, Mark and Donald’s hamburger joint, the Harlem Disco A-Go-Go, Coney Island (“the All-American ice cream”). Most of my fellow passengers were little girls just out of school, eyes dark and faces bright in their tidy Holy Angels uniforms.

  The jeepney bounced me off to the far side of town, and then turned around and took me back to the Friendship Highway. I got out, though the rain had yet to abate, and began walking again. “Born in the U.S.A.” was thumping out of one of the bars, accompanied by a steady pattering on the rooftops. A gangly American teenager in a crew cut was leading a pretty little Filipina into one of the motels. Another tall man with a blond crew cut and a clean white shirt was marching purposefully through the downpour, a badge on his heart saying “Church of Latter-day Saints.”

  And as the rain kept coming down, I took shelter on the streetside patio. Beside me, under a falling roof, a jukebox stood forlornly against the wall. A teenage Filipina in pink curlers strolled out of a pool hall and pressed a selection. Then, as the first chords of “We Are the World” began to come through, she started to sing along with it softly, rocking her baby in her arms as the rain continued to fall.

  THE PHILIPPINES is not just the site of the largest U.S. military installations in the world. It is also perhaps the world’s largest slice of the American Empire, in its purest impurest form. The first time I landed in Hong Kong, I felt a thrill of recognition to see the pert red letterboxes, the blue-and-white road signs, the boxes of Smarties that had been the props of my boyhood in England; upon arriving in Manila, I felt a similar pang as my eye caught Open 24-Hour gas stations, green exit signs on the freeways, Florida-style license plates and chains of grocery stores called “Mom and Pop.” The deejay patter bubbling from the radios, the Merle Haggard songs drifting out of jukeboxes, the Coke signs and fast-food joints and grease-smeared garages—all carried me instantly back home, or, if not home, at least to some secondhand, beat-up image of the Sam Shepard Southwest, to Amarillo, perhaps, or East L.A.

  Most of all, the Philippines took me back to the junk-neon flash of teen America, the rootless Western youth culture of drive-ins and jukeboxes, junior proms, cheap cutoffs, and custom dragsters. Many of the young dudes here, in their long hair and straw hats and bushy mustaches, had the cocky strut of aspiring rock stars, and many of the girls, saucing up their natural freshness, the apprehensive flair of would-be models. The jeepneys they rode, plastered with girlie pictures, Rolling Stones tongues, garish stickers and religious symbols, looked like nothing so much as graffitied pinball machines on wheels. And everyone here had a nickname (Wee-Wee, Baby, Boy and even Apple Pie), which made them seem even younger than they really were, little brown siblings to the big Americans across the sea. As it was, the average age in the entire country was only seventeen (in Japan, by contrast, it was over thirty). Small wonder, perhaps, that I felt myself living in a chrome-and-denim Top 40 world.

  America’s honorary fifty-second state had received much more, of course, from its former rulers than star-spangled love songs and hand-me-down jeans. The commercial area of Manila, Makati, looked not at all like Bakersfield or Tucson, but more like some textbook upper-middle-class California suburban tract. Jaguars lurked in the driveways of white split-level homes, maids sprinklered the lawns along leafy residential streets. The shopping strips were neatly laid out with a mall-to-mall carpeting of coffee shops and department stores. And though the area’s jungle of high-rise office blocks seemed hardly to merit its title of “the Wall Street of Asia,” it did resemble the kind of financial district you might find in the Sunbelt—the downtown area of Salt Lake City, say, or San Diego.

  Baguio too, the hill station designed as a summer retreat for the American rulers—a kind of New World Simla—revealed the American Empire in a more pastoral mood. I could not easily discern the town’s resemblance to Washington, D.C.—on which, many Filipinos proudly informed me, it had been modeled—save for the fact that both places had roads and trees, as well as a quorum of American servicemen, scientists and missionaries (“Most people in the U.S., I think,” said a local cabbie, “are Christians and Mormons”). But Baguio was still a glistening vision of silver and green, graced with its own distinctive charm—white villas set among the thickly forested slopes of pine, quiet parks verdant in the mist. In the mild drizzle of a dark afternoon, the place had a cozy market-town feel of hot cakes and light rain; on a calm Sunday morning, the peal of church bells through the mist took me back to an English village. In Baguio, I settled down with an Elizabeth Bowen novel in the teapot snugness of a small café, and went on a gray afternoon to a crowded kiddies’ matinee.

  For all its silvered, foggy charm, though, Baguio did not seem to have the imperiousness of a British hill station, or its weighted dignity. And in much the same way, I did not sense in the Philippines anything comparable to the kind of stately legacy that the British, for example, had bequeathed to India. India seemed to have gained, as a colony, a sense of ritual solemnity, a feeling for the language of Shakespeare, a polished civil service, a belief in democracy and a sonorous faith in upstanding legal or educational institutions; it had, in some respects, been steadied by the chin-up British presence. By contrast, the most conspicuous institutions that America had bequeathed to the Philippines seemed to be the disco, the variety show and the beauty pageant. Perhaps the ideas and ideals of America had proved too weighty to be shipped across the seas, or perhaps they were just too fragile. Whatever, the nobility of the world’s youngest power and the great principles on which it had been founded were scarcely in evidence here, except in a democratic system that seemed to parody the chicanery of the Nixon years. In the Philippines I found no sign of Lincoln or Thoreau or Sojourner Truth; just Dick Clark, Ronald McDonald and Madonna.

  ON A HUMAN level, of course, the relation between America and her former colony was altogether more complex, and best seen, I thought, just by watching the slow mating dances that filled the smoky country-and-western joints of Ermita every night.

  As I entered Club 21 one rainy evening, a small and perky Filipina in a red-and-white-checked shirt and tight jeans—a kind of dusky Joey Heatherton—was leading a country band through songs of lost love and heartbreak. The minute the group struck up the opening chords of another sad song, one of the American GI types seated at the bar, a craggy man in his sixties, six feet tall perhaps, slowly stood up and extended his hand to a pretty teenage girl in a white frock and white pumps. “Today,” drawled the singer, “is the darkest day of my life,” and the pedal steel wailed and the man put one hand around the girl’s tiny waist and the other on her shoulder and led her, with great courtliness, through a slow, slow dance.

  As the next ballad began, the vocalist went into a perfect Dolly Parton rasp, a
nd a man in a bushy ginger mustache with sad eyes behind his thick glasses stood up, hitched up his trousers and walked over to a table in the corner where eight young Filipinas were staring idly into the distance. Crouching down, he whispered something to a beautiful young lady in a yellow-and-red ruffled skirt and she followed him back to the bar. “What’s your name?” he said softly as they sat down, extending his hand. “I’m an American.”

  A couple of barstools away, another old-timer was gently stroking the long hair of his doll-like companion. “Hey,” he chuckled, looking over her head to a colleague. “I’m going to marry her in a minute.” And the band went through another plaintive ballad, then vanished through a back door that said “George’s Massage Special.”

  A man got up from the bar and walked out, and as the door slammed behind him, his sweet-faced companion stuck out her tongue at his memory, then straightened her skirt and went off to sit in another man’s lap. The door swung open again, and a lady came in with a basket full of roses. A red-faced Australian hailed her from where he sat and bought ten flowers. Then, very slowly, he walked around the place and, very tenderly, presented a rose to every girl in the room. The band came back again, and sailed into more sad songs from the West. “I warned you not to love me,” wailed the singer, “I’m not going to be here very long.”

  If I had closed my eyes, I could have believed myself in Tucumcari, New Mexico, or listening to some jukebox in Cheyenne. But my eyes were wide open and in front of me two couples were gliding around the dance floor, tiny arms wrapped around large backs as two pretty young girls, eyes closed, buried their silky heads in their partners’ burly chests.