by David Byrne
She brings me to a back room, which is fairly large, and is filled with rude wooden bunk beds, most without sheets. This is where the bar girls sleep and rest, I think to myself. She hollers again, and then, from a room farther back emerges an attractive girl in a red dress who immediately escorts me back into the club room asking me, “What would you like? You like girls?” Her face is painted white—as if she is in the middle of a facial. I remember toenail girl had this white-face thing going on as well. With her full red lips she looks like an erotic clown.
I recall that the pharmacies in town are filled with skin-whitening creams, and I’ve seen numerous TV ads for these products as well. Four out of ten Southeast Asian women use skin-whitening creams. In many countries a lighter complexion implies wealth and class—manual laborers have darker skin from working out in the sun. Odd that in North America and Europe a tan has become desirable, maybe because it implies the reverse—that you can afford to spend time in the sun instead of working.
But why is this girl asking me these questions? Ohhhh, now I get it! Duh. These places are all whorehouses! Why didn’t I notice all the signs reading No Condom—No Sex? And there’s live music and karaoke (naturally) to bide the time while you’re making up your mind. Here are some choices:
I walk on. I see a few girls lazing around, some doing their washing by hand and some sitting and chatting over a soda. Signs read Check Your Firearms at the Door.
Though I doubt these places regularly cater to foreigners, the Philippines used to have a reputation as a popular sex-tourism destination. I thought the epoch of underage sex for foreigners here was over, but it seems not. There are at least two Anglo geezers in my hotel sporting young Filipinas on their arms—the girls seem to be around twenty, so maybe they’re not underage. On my bike meanderings in Manila I’ve seen quite a few more of these May/November couples—over there is Mr. Buster Bloodvessel looking for love and farther down the street I spy the Professor out for a naughty holiday. It seems this country is still occasionally the place for a foreign man to get whatever it was he never had, or get what he craved but was discouraged from indulging in back home. Maybe here in this “western” town of Laoag one can fulfill one’s lifelong dream. When it’s put that way it almost sounds sweet.
I also spy some foreigners with local rent boys—one overweight limping Yank with a southern accent has two! In a restaurant he orders them around, “Salt, I need salt . . . and pepper.” One of the boys dutifully goes and fetches the salt. “Toast, is that toast over there?” One of the boys fetches him three pieces of toast. He seems temporarily satisfied. One can see the temptations of power at work—the more he senses he has power the more he will flex it, to witness and enjoy it in action, to feel the pleasure of command.
“Coffee and cigarettes,” he announces.
Then, “Coffee and cigarettes is my breakfast back home.”
To be fair, not all western/Filipino relationships are necessarily about power or sexual fantasy. A family in the hotel restaurant here in Laoag is composed of an Australian man and his attractive Filipina wife and their kids. He grumbles and grunts in response to the kids’ entreaties while she texts someone on her cell phone. Hardly a perfect relationship, but not obviously predatory either.
It’s Christmas in Laoag, and in the Wild West kids are carol ing on the streets just after the sun sets. I sing “Joy to the World” along with one group, and then they look at me, expecting money—and not just because I am a foreigner. As I wander off I see them going from house to house, hoping for small handouts . . . and that does not mean a hot chocolate.
I begin to take tricycles on short trips. This is not a kiddie bike but a motorcycle with a driver and sidecar-type thing attached. My bike has been left in Manila, as I want to make longer day trips using Laoag as a base. A tricycle affords a limited view, so they’re not so good for sightseeing, but they are everywhere, and hailing one only takes about a minute. And they look great.
Coupled with the ubiquitous jeepneys and the buses, which only leave from designated depots and travel mostly intercity, the tricycles make an incredibly efficient public transport system in these smaller towns and villages. They have a lot to recommend them except for the hideous pollution they generate. New York has a pretty good public transport system, one that rivals, say, Mexico City, though the New York subways are not quite as clean. But this improvised Filipino network seems much more user-friendly.
I continue by bus to Batac, a small town where Marcos lies in state (supposedly it is his real body) in a refrigerated glass casket that sinks into the floor when no one is around.
The mausoleum has piped-in liturgical Mozart music, creating a creepy haunted vibe, and in the air-conditioned chamber there are a number of staffs on either side with sculpted metal tops featuring icons that resemble weird Masonic symbols—crescent moons, stars, spades, hammers, and some that are indecipherable. The security guy can’t tell me what they all symbolize. The effect is deeply mystical, mysterious, almost Egyptian. Marcos’s embalmed body sure looks more like a wax-work than the real thing. The glass coffin is bathed in an eerie blue light, and photos are strictly prohibited. Rumor has it that the real body lies deeper below, slowly decomposing and still denied burial among the other former presidents by order of the present rulers.
Permanent Impermanence
I travel on to Vigan, a small town that was spared the American carpet bombing at the end of World War II. Vigan is now on the UN list of important world historical sites, so although it’s not on my research agenda it’s close, so why not have a look?
The center of town does indeed abound in the type of old buildings of which only a few remain around Laoag and even fewer in Manila. Mostly they are wooden structures that withstand typhoons pretty well due to their flexibility, but that usually require periodic upkeep because of the tropical dampness and the termites that will destroy them after a number of years. Bit by bit, part by part, houses like these will be renovated and every wall and beam will be replaced. Impermanence is an accepted part of life in the tropics. There’s a permanence embodied in the continuity of patterns and relationships, but not in physical buildings or things.
Here’s one outside the town center—beautiful architecture made without architects:
The Rose of Tacloban
Imelda was born in a small town in the southern island province of Leyte and spent a good part of her formative years in Tacloban, the main city on that island. Even though she was from the less successful side of this family, their connections still counted for much. This Cinderella aspect of her past has been self-whitewashed or tweaked quite a bit; the poverty and pain part has been lessened, though she would sometimes refer to it in passing, if it was necessary to make a point. Wish we all could edit our lives so neatly. She often managed to deny the past and work it simultaneously—denying her poverty yet claiming she was once one of the poor people at the same time. Different pasts for different occasions.
In later years she built a “shrine” here in Tacloban, ostensibly to Santo Niño, the Christ child. The entrance opens into a large chapel with a wild altarpiece—the child floating, surrounded by disco lights. The shrine is mainly, however, to herself. Jeepneys heading to this destination from downtown Tacloban simply give “Imelda” as the direction on their windshields. The shrine houses lots of her furniture collection, but more important, she commissioned a series of lovely dioramas depicting her life story—or her life story as she imagined it.
Here is a nice one of her as a young girl at the shore having a family outing with an image of Marcos looming in the sky—her future husband awaiting their fateful meeting.
The rest of the “shrine” is structured as a series of “bedrooms” and “dining rooms” (in quotes because none of them were ever used for those purposes). They function more as regional theme rooms that also each contain one of the above dioramas detailing the Imelda myth. There are fifteen stations, or bedrooms, of the cross.
Back
at my hotel for lunch I hear “Climb Every Mountain,” possibly the version by Tom Jones, on an endless loop—for an hour! Climax after climax! Climbing that mountain over and over. Occasionally I can hear other diners quietly singing along to themselves.
Language as a Prison
The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.
One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names—who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language’s primary “civilizing” function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministra tive words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version.
What’s amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We’ve come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us.
The Gentle People
In 1971 the discovery of a “Stone Age tribe” in a remote area of the Philippines made worldwide news. National Geographic ran a major piece on the gentle Tasaday, which depicted their lives as Edenic. They were portrayed as a kind of Ur people, without any of the hang-ups and baggage we carry with our fucked-up civilized lives. Shangri La was discovered to exist and it was in the Philippines.
The Marcoses in some ways were embarrassed that the world was seeing Filipinos in such unsophisticated conditions (and fifteen years later the discovery was claimed to be a fraud by the media after the Marcoses’ departure). This reaction followed visits by social scientists, journalists, and film documentarians whose intrusions the government said were changing the Tasaday. So Marcos restricted the area—no visitors could disrupt the Eden of the Tasaday—except for a 1976 visit by Gina Lollobrigida for a book and film, the sightseeing granddaughter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and working teams of medical doctors.
Charles Lindbergh visited for several days in 1971 and ’72, and his request to the government played a key part in the declaration of the protected reserve for the Tasaday, which still exists today.
Hamilton-Paterson called the Tasaday a clear-cut hoax in his Marcos book, America’s Boy, but he retracted this a few years later in an article in the London Review of Books, realizing perhaps that in the Philippines things so seldom are what they seem at first, even Edens, even hoaxes.
A man named John Nance, who has had many contacts with the Tasaday, says that the claim of a hoax was the real hoax:The Tasaday themselves are authentic, as was concluded in 1987 by a four-month-long congressional open hearing/ investigation; by the 1988 separate investigation of new president Corazon Aquino; and by the findings of eighteen social scientists—anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, ethnobotanists, and an ethnologist—made over twenty years of research in the field. Not one anthropologist who claimed the Tasaday were a hoax ever laid eyes on a single Tasaday. It has been established by the Congress and President Aquino and others that the hoax campaign was organized by loggers, miners, ranchers, local politicians, and jealous neighboring tribes who wanted to obtain the rich stands of timber and deposits of minerals on the Tasaday’s ancestral homeland. Their campaign failed. Today, thirty-eight years after the first contact, the Tasaday remain on the land that still carries their name.
I see a sign on a building in Tacloban that reads: The Fraternal Order of Utopia. A man zips by on a motorcycle with a Santa hat wildly flapping.
Collective Narrative
One final, sexy fantasy image—Imelda as the nurturing mother goddess, as both a great spirit and in her earthly manifestations.
Though Ferdinand and Imelda’s conflation of national mythology with their own lives to align it with their political strivings was blatant, it’s also pretty obvious in the staged contrivances and the carefully managed press of many other governments. Sometimes we can only see ourselves once we step far enough back to have some perspective. The “story” of the inevitable triumph of democracy (and of messianic Christianity too) is a powerful myth that is easily sold, a grand story that the media often goes along with and accepts as right and good and as an a priori assumption. Manifest destiny, the march of progress, and the triumph of civilization are presumed to be common, universal beliefs, at least until recently. Once “stories” like these are in place, believed in, and accepted, one need only supply the appropriate images, news stories, and anecdotes to continually reinforce the myths and make them seem self-fulfilling and indisputable.
Living “in” a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don’t always know what narrative it is, because I’m living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story. I imagine that if I could step back and look at my life, I’d see that this series of meetings and events wasn’t simply random, that it had to happen the way it did. As history gets rewritten over and over and over again I begin to imagine that our lives have so many possible narrative threads—all existing simultaneously like parallel universes—that the number of human histories is certainly infinite. Heroic, tragic, boring, catastrophic, ridiculous, and beautiful. We all live those stories, and often our narrative includes more than one of them.
Sydney
Sydney. Hooley freaking dooley, what a weird and gorgeous city! I bike through the downtown park—the Domain—so-called because in the late 1700s it was the private grounds of the governor. In one area of the park I see hundreds of large bats clinging to the branches of the trees. Occasionally one flexes its massive wings. During an outdoor opera recital I once attended in the park I glanced up and saw them swarming overhead at sunset, dispersing over the city in search of insects and fruit as the singers warbled arias from La Traviata. The juxtaposition of the Domain—a linguistic reminder of empire—and these giant slightly ominous creatures was a nice one.
Though they’ve become one of the attractions of the park they weren’t the intended attraction—that was the collection of tropical trees and plants in this section of the park. The bat population has grown, and they are decimating some of the trees with their climbing and guano. The trees are nice and all, but hey, giant bats! So there is now a battle between the tree people and the bats—I don’t know if any organization dares stand up for the bats. The park folks have tried all sorts of vaguely humane ways to make the bats move on—I think python odor was one—but none have succeeded.
This hopeless situation seems to be a metaphor for the Australian situation—man and nature on a collision course . . . but beautiful too.
The first time I went to Australia, in the early 1980s, I found it repulsive. I saw the whole place through politically correct glasses. As I saw it, here it was, the same old shit, happening all over again—the white colonials settling along the coastlines, building cottages that mimicked those of their ancestral home-lands, turning a blind eye toward their systematic encroachment on and killing off of the native population. I sensed a vast continent, mostly forbidding and wild, with a smear of Eurojam along the edges. Just like North and South America once must have been.