Opium Fiend

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by Steven Martin


  It was one of my favorite sights in all of Disneyland—that benevolent Asian deity upon his throne on the bank of a tropical river, shaded by jungle canopy and covered with moss. I don’t know if anyone else my age was affected by this image, but it must have made an impression on me: Some thirty years later I had made several journeys up and down both the Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers, and had published details of my travels in guidebooks and magazines; I had visited all the major Khmer ruins in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos—remnants of stone temples that radiated out like milestones from Cambodia’s Angkor region to the far corners of Indochina, and I had gathered a substantial collection of images of the Hindu deity Ganesha from all over Southeast Asia. It has become fashionable to belittle Disney’s theme parks for being sterile and artificial, but my childhood experiences at Disneyland sparked some of my adult life’s most exotic adventures and eclectic pursuits.

  Adolescence changed my interests somewhat. Is there something about the hormonal assault that goes on within the bodies of adolescent boys that gives so many of them a fascination with things military? I began spending less time reading about fossils and seashells and more time studying the details of World War II fighter planes and Nazi uniforms. There was no hope of trying to gather a collection of either. By the mid-1970s, even such offbeat collectibles as Nazi daggers were being reproduced and sold via ads in the backs of magazines, but I had little interest in collecting reproductions of any sort. Luckily for my parents, my interests were largely thwarted. If the old radio shows had seemed a tad odd, how would they have viewed a sudden urge to acquire Nazi weapons? The one thing I could afford were American military medals. The Vietnam War had only recently ended and, as long as I limited myself to collecting medals from that conflict, there were plenty on offer, and they were cheap. Perhaps because of the war’s outcome there seemed to be no shortage of veterans who were willing to sell their military-issued decorations for a pittance.

  The imagery on one of these awards seemed as though it had been designed especially to fire my imagination. The Vietnam Service Medal had a green, yellow, and red ribbon—the latter two colors symbolizing the flag of South Vietnam—and was embossed with a dragon half hidden in a thicket of bamboo. How could I say no when such baubles were selling for little more than a buck apiece? There were other things to acquire: hat devices and shoulder devices and once a cigarette lighter engraved with a map of Vietnam. The war may have been unpopular with much of America, but in it I saw adventure.

  Had I been born a decade earlier I might have signed up for a tour. Instead, I watched movies. In 1980, the year I graduated from high school, I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now for the first time. Whatever the director was trying to say about the waste and futility of the Vietnam War—or war in general—was pretty much lost on me. Instead I was enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of the settings. Jungle scenes in which the protagonists were dwarfed by giant banyan trees left me in awe. Once the story moved upriver and came upon Colonel Kurtz’s headquarters in the ruins of a Khmer temple, I was completely captivated. Where was this land of misty jungles and hydrogen-bomb sunsets? When the movie was over I didn’t get up to leave. Instead, I sat there awestruck by the experience and watched as the credits rolled up the screen. Then I saw where Apocalypse Now had been filmed. Not in Vietnam, of course, but in the Philippines.

  I was familiar with the Philippines because I had Filipino friends in school. San Diego is a navy town with a number of naval bases, and because the Philippines was once an American colony, its citizens were allowed to serve in the U.S. Navy even after independence was granted the archipelago in 1946. For that reason San Diego had, and still has, large numbers of Filipinos in residence. The ones in school were pretty much the only Asians I knew—although I don’t remember when I realized they were Asian. Their last names were usually Spanish; they shared many of the same surnames that were common among the large number of Mexican kids in school.

  During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, an American-born Filipino friend accompanied his immigrant parents on a trip to their homeland. The following school year he told me stories about his experiences in the islands. Crazy stories. This was a country whose rich were so wealthy they seemed like comic book parodies of billionaires, and whose poor partied as though each day was their last; a land of epic natural disasters, but whose heartbreaking tragedy was always suffused with an element of buffoonery. Still, my ideas about the place were vague. After watching Apocalypse Now I was suddenly able to superimpose visual images onto the crazy stories I’d heard about the Philippines—images that to me were tantalizingly exotic. I made up my mind that I had to see the place.

  Upon my graduation from high school, my parents gave me a gift of a thousand dollars. What would I do with it? I was undecided on a major and so college seemed to be something I should postpone. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but guidance counselors told me to forget the idea. Take lots of math, they advised. In the future everything will be run by computers, and you’ll need lots of math to get a good job. Of course they were right, but I hated math.

  After barely a semester at a community college, I dropped out and began to travel—and the Philippines became my stepping-stone from California to mainland Southeast Asia. By the time I was twenty-one I had visited twice.

  Back then the Philippines got even fewer Western tourists than it does now. Most “tourists” going to the Philippines are really emigrant Filipinos returning home to visit relatives. The tourists who aren’t Filipinos are usually middle-aged Western men looking for a cheap place to drink and carouse with prostitutes. The country is not on the backpacker circuit because its beaches and culture cannot compete with Southeast Asian destinations such as Thailand and Bali. To most Westerners, the Philippines suffers from a lack of exoticism. Simply put, Philippine culture is just too accessible. To a young Western backpacker, sharing a bus ride with a saffron-robed Buddhist monk reading the sacred Pali texts is exotic. Sitting next to a Catholic nun reading the Bible is a lot less so. When the Buddhist monk takes out his prayer beads, closes his eyes, and chants under his breath, the Westerner swoons. When the Catholic nun pulls out her rosary and says her Hail Marys, the backpacker squirms.

  However, I wasn’t put off by the accessibility of Philippine culture—to me its mix of the familiar and the exotic was a draw. I brought the address of some relatives of a high school friend and was supposed to contact them as soon as I arrived. They lived a few hours south of Manila, but I chose instead to check into a hotel in Manila’s tourist district and do some exploring on my own. Having grown up so close to the Mexican border and Tijuana, I was no stranger to poverty or the trickery it often spawns when a seemingly rich outsider appears on the scene. I was on my guard, but the rush of being alone in unfamiliar surroundings was more invigorating than frightening. Certainly my familiarity with Filipinos in California allowed me to feel more at ease than I would have had I just touched down anywhere else in Asia.

  The road trips with my parents were based on destinations, and their approach to travel had rubbed off on me. On my first visit to the Philippines I made it a point to see the sights, including a flight up to the former American colonial hill station at Baguio and then a drive down to La Union where there were beaches lapped by the warm waters of the South China Sea. I also made a pilgrimage to a location where Apocalypse Now was filmed, taking a canoe up the river where the Khmer temple scenes were shot.

  After returning to San Diego I kept in contact with friends I had made in Manila, and during my second trip to the Philippines, nearly two years after the first, they insisted that I stay with them. This didn’t surprise me. What was surprising was the depth of their hospitality: They insisted that I stay with them the entire time I was there. I was able to save so much on accommodations that my trip lasted six months. Besides saving money, this arrangement fit in with my travel priorities for the second trip, which were different from my first. I was less inter
ested in destinations and more keen on understanding the people.

  So instead of seeing the sights, I parked myself in front of the little mom-and-pop shop that my Filipino “family” tended and learned their language and culture by watching the transactions. The narrow lane out front was a constant parade of pedestrians and gliding pedicabs, and people invariably greeted me as they passed—the women and girls with shy smiles and the men with casual, upward nods of their heads. I was the only Westerner in the neighborhood, and everyone knew my name. I sat in front of that little store every day for months and never tired of the view. It was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend the twenty-first year of one’s existence.

  Collecting experiences was easy in Manila, but collecting objects was more of a challenge. The Filipinos whom I knew and lived among were relatively poor, and there were very few objects lying about that struck me as collectible. Things got used until they were useless and then they were tossed into a heap in a vacant lot that served as the neighborhood dump. There discarded items sat until the scavengers with wooden pushcarts made their rounds, picking through the piles. Anything recyclable—bottles, wire, any kind of scrap—was carted away to a vast and stinking shantytown in another part of the city where there resided what seemed to be a caste of trash pickers who made a living from recycling Manila’s refuse.

  In Ermita, Manila’s tourist district, there were a handful of antiques shops that gave an idea of what Filipinos thought about antiques. The old furnishings and knickknacks—many of them made in the United States or Europe—were no different from what one could find at flea markets in Baltimore or Seattle—except that they were ten times the price.

  One thing Filipinos collected that I found interesting were old Catholic icons: carved wooden santos ranging in size from small figurines of saints, friars, and nuns to larger-than-life images of Christ dying in agony on the cross. Some of the shops in Ermita specialized in Catholic antiques, their shelves crowded with dusty santos. The more primitive images—probably taken from rural churches—had an appealing folk-art look to them.

  I was especially impressed by the fine old icons with smooth ivory faces whose features mirrored those of the Chinese artisans who had carved them: Marys and Christs with mournful expressions that were amplified by high cheekbones and slanted eyes. The images were fascinating to look at, but if the asking prices of the Western bric-a-brac seemed unreasonably high, the Catholic icons were astronomically so. Clearly these were already well-established collectibles among the Filipinos themselves. Instead of santos I settled for anting-anting, small brass amulets with Catholic imagery said to possess magical powers that protected the wearer from danger. There were stalls near Quiapo Church where old ladies with skin like Brazil nuts sold these talismanic charms for a few pesos each.

  In August 1983, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino returned to the Philippines from exile in America to challenge the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. Before he could even set foot on the tarmac at Manila International Airport, Aquino was assassinated. I heard the news while attending a birthday party in my neighborhood on Manila’s outskirts. During the tumultuous months that followed I accompanied friends to political rallies in Manila’s version of Central Park, where tens of thousands of people wearing yellow T-shirts chanted for the resignation of Ferdinand Marcos.

  However, by the time the downfall finally happened in 1986, I was in Hawaii. On television the humiliated dictator and his family were shown arriving at the Honolulu airport. The haste of their departure could be seen in their luggage—their worldly possessions packed into scores of cardboard boxes that had once contained Pampers disposable diapers. I watched the events unfold and wished I were in Manila to witness the citywide celebrations that were taking place.

  After my money had run out in 1984, I left the Philippines and returned home to San Diego. Nearly four years had passed since I’d graduated from high school. My parents wanted to know what I was planning to do with my life. One day I walked into a naval recruiter’s office and got into a conversation with the man behind the desk, who claimed that I could get stationed in the Philippines if I enlisted for a minimum of four years. He also told me that submariners made an extra hundred dollars per month and suggested that I volunteer for submarine duty. Both propositions sounded reasonable to me.

  People who grow up in navy towns don’t usually have high opinions of sailors. The ones I saw as a kid in San Diego seemed horribly unhip. In the age of long hair their heads were shaved so close you could see the pimples on their scalps. They traveled in loudmouthed bands at Sea World and Old Town, but no amount of attitude could make up for those clownish uniforms. My father, who like me was born and raised in San Diego, was not at all impressed by my idea of joining the fleet. “Do you want to be bossed around by those pinheads?” he asked. But it was too late. I’d already signed the contract.

  As it turned out, the recruiter was wrong about there being submarines based in the Philippines. I ended up at Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t complain much. At least I would be closer to the Philippines than if I had been stationed on the mainland, and I could fly there while on leave.

  The navy was a four-year holding pattern for me. I did no collecting while I was in. I barely had time to sleep, so hobbies were out of the question. There was some travel but mostly it was work and more work. My primary duty was navigating the submarine. I have always loved maps, but the navy used charts—which are essentially maps of bodies of water. Maps have land, settlements, people, and history, but charts—unless they overlap some coastline—consist mostly of soundings: thousands of tiny numbers indicating the depth of the water. For me there was nothing more boring than a deepwater chart. I worked and squirreled away my money, telling everyone that I was going to get out after my four-year enlistment and retire in the Philippines at the age of twenty-six. I doubt many took me seriously. After I was discharged in 1988, I did go back to Manila, but I didn’t stay there long.

  The gloriously corrupt Ferdinand Marcos was long gone, and President Corazon Aquino, who had stepped into her martyred husband’s shoes and led the drive to oust the dictator from the Philippines, was making an effort to rid the country of the jobbery and petty corruption that many Filipinos believed was Marcos’s dirty legacy. I was staying in the Philippines on a tourist visa, which after an initial twenty-one days could be extended to give me a total of sixty days in the country. Then I would have to leave. Of course, flying out of the Philippines every two months would have been a real expense—except that I had found a way around it.

  A friend of a friend who worked at the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation indicated to me that she could extend my visa under the table if I would have a new polyester bowling suit tailor-made for her. She sent me her measurements, and when the suit was finished, I gave it to her. That done, all I had to do was show up every couple of months at the immigration office with a carton of “blue seal” made-in-the-USA Marlboros, and my passport was quickly and efficiently stamped with another two-month extension. It was one of those arrangements that made me smile anytime I heard somebody cursing corruption in the Philippines. This worked fine for a few months. Then one day I showed up for my usual visa extension but my friend the Marlboro-smoking bowling enthusiast was nowhere to be found. I made a discreet inquiry, “Is Estrellita sick today?”

  “No,” came the reply. “Fired for corruption.”

  An immigration officer asked to see my passport and began thumbing through it. He was joined by another officer, and then another and another. Finally they all moved out of earshot and examined my passport in a huddle. I braced myself for a hefty fine, but when the passport was returned I was told, “You have five days to leave the Philippines.”

  When I got back to my apartment I looked at a map of Southeast Asia. In 1989, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were closed to the casual tourist. Burma allowed tourists a mere seven days of visa time, and on arrival there was a mandatory currency exchange of two hundred U.S. dollars for worthless Burm
ese kyat. The remaining Southeast Asian capitals were Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta. Hong Kong wasn’t too far from Manila, but it was expensive and I had little interest in going there. Singapore, too, was known as a costly place to visit. Thailand and Indonesia would be the most economical destinations, and so I chose Thailand. While in the navy I’d heard plenty of stories about ports of call in the Pacific, and Thailand, because of its wild nightlife and pristine beaches, was always high on the sailors’ rave-about list.

  I spent two weeks in Thailand: a few days at the beaches in the south, a few days in the mountainous north, and the remainder in the sprawling capital waiting for my fresh Philippine visa. The climate was similar to the Philippines’, and the Thais physically looked very much like Filipinos, but the similarities ended there. The Thai language was totally incomprehensible and, unlike Filipinos, very few Thais seemed able to speak English. I wasn’t ready to learn a new language. A nice place to visit, I thought as I was boarding the flight back to Manila.

  Two months later I was back in Bangkok. President Aquino’s anticorruption crusade was still in full swing, and I had again been told to leave the Philippines to obtain a fresh visa. Then something happened. In Bangkok I found work as an extra in a movie being shot by the Hong Kong director John Woo, just as Manila was experiencing a particularly violent coup attempt. I decided it was a good idea to park myself in Thailand and wait out the political flare-up. Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, was experiencing a boom in tourism, and after the film shoot was finished I went to check it out. While there, I was offered a job teaching Thai tour guides to speak Spanish—a language I’d learned while growing up in San Diego. It was a decision that would have lasting consequences. The rent in Thailand was cheap, visas were easy to obtain, and the months segued into years.

 

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