Hapa

Longing

2006-03-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

I'm behind the wheel, making that same drive to the office past the Martinizing dry cleaner, the Dairy Queen, and the pet store-turned- Buddhist temple, and suddenly, I am barricaded in the back seat of a different car. The air-conditioner is blasting, I'm sitting behind the white-uniformed driver from the Mandarin Oriental, or behind Kamuching Adap in a baseball cap driving the Obispo's Toyota van, or behind Pedro Baraoidan and his barong tagalog as he drives us to Bauan, or behind F. Sionil Jose's silent, bearded driver as we nudged our way to De La Salle.

Manila Bay is going by on my left, the water quiet but pulsing in the blinding tanghali sun, palm tree after palm tree breaking up the view of the bay, or it's the broken hills and fruit trees and cattle in Batangas, or a parade of tall buildings and squeezed-between shops nearly toppling into the narrow streets, and between the cars and the views are people old and young hawking newspapers, bags of peanuts, and window-washing, and I get the longing.

I'm brushing my teeth in my overlit bathroom upstairs, and it happens again. I am squeezing through the doorway in the bakery leading to the dark polished stairs taking us upstairs to the Obispo living quarters, and the air is redolent with eggs and flour and sugar, even more than it reeks from tricycles and jeepneys, and as we climb, the air gets hotter and thicker, and I hear the whirl of the floor fans, and the chatter from Karla's television in the waiting room of her dental practice and I nearly clutch my chest, from the longing.

I long for the Phiippines and the Filipinos, in the way a child longs to return to a circus, a sandbar, a toy store a museum, a junkyard, a cave she only began to explore before it was closing time, or too dark, and she was just too tired.

After 18 days, I had to take myself away. It was all too much, and my life-that-just-goes beckoned to me. But the Philippines calls to me in these moments of longing, like a loon at dusk, or a train whistle in the dead of night. Whatever I am meant to do there, I'm not finished.

Something lingers

2006-02-08T05:29:00.000-08:00

I am still carrying the Philippines around with me, like I'm still there. Somehow I'm not yet arrived in America, even as I was racing to leave crowded Manila. I simply cannot shake my constant looking about, my wide-eyed vigilance, the small tension in my gut. I don't miss the cacophany of urban sounds, the Jeepneys, tricycles, and buses. I miss the Filipinos: their great warmth and humor and common sense, the indefatible and creative spirit, a deep sense of grace and dignity.

You'd think I could make the transition more easily. The ground in Michigan is covered with snow, not palm leaves, the air is bitingly cold, not syrupy warm, and nothing hangs from the trees except bare, brown-black branches, and the occasional dangling sneaker, thrown up there by the local college kids. A week ago, I could look up and see clumbs of bananas, mangoes, or coconuts in the trees.

You'd think I would quickly re-embrace the lavish spaces in America. A week ago, there were no trim houses, yards neatly landscaped. Instead, every square meter in Manila, and even in the provinces, in Bauan, were Spanish style raised houses, concrete, soot-covered buildings, shanties of aluminimum and boards, and tiny, open-front sari-sori stores, all competing for space.

My eyes could never rest in the cities of the Philippines. I learned to stop looking at the window, or risk visual and emotional overload. There are no patterns of housing or building, no consistency at all. The neighborhoods have no integrity or distinctiveness anymore. Apparently, as people spilled from the provinces to find jobs, they crammed in anywhere they could.

I saw this: Between two post-war buildings in disrepair, in the space of six linear feet, someone has concocted a dwelling of rusted corrogated aluminum sheets, and rotted plywood. The wood is hammered in such a way as to make a little door, and a window. Behind the dwelling, the owner has strung a rope, to dry newly washed shirts and pants and handerchiefs, which hang neatly, by category.

Out front of the 'house' is an umbrella table holding neat rows of bottled orange and mango juice and Cokes. Under the table is a neat mound of pale green coconuts, also for sale. On a skimpy patio chair sits a shirtless old man, who dozes, his shoeless young grandson about three squatting at the edge of a traffic-filled street. In one moment he's filling coconut shells with bottle caps; the next moment he's scampering up a low wall.

I notice that children who live at the margins are constantly in motion; their highly physical play of climbing, running, darting, looks disorganized and random, without much joy or purpose.

As the boy strays toward the road in his play, a huge Jeepney in front of our car honks him back, and he moves back smoothly just in time, without looking up. The boy, nor his grandfather, seem the least panicked that he was inches from death.

I cannot so easily file away these kind of images, now that I'm back. I have trouble forcing them into the folder labeled 'Travel-Philippines' nor the psychic containers which are marked 'interesting' or 'unusual' or even, 'thank your lucky stars.'

The Philippines isn't a Cambodia, or Vietnam, or Laos or Thailand, or even an Indonesia. Those countries are re-building themselves from ruin, carefully placing hotels and restaurants and Internet cafes in sight of national treasures, like beautiful temples and gardens and palaces from antiquity. As some of the intelligensia told me, the Philippines doesn't yet have a clear idea yet about its own identity, apart from the antiquity left behind by previous colonizers, and its borrowed Western stores and fast-food stations.

And--this is the disquieting thought that keeps me back there-- until it does, the Philippines is like the little boy and the old man: just surviving, too perilously close to self-destruction.

Still in Bauan

2006-02-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

Here's what Bauan is to me, an American visitor, one with a lot of experience moving around busy giagantic monstrocity cities like New York, London, Chicago, Madrid, San Francisco, Auckland. Washington D.C., and Houston. (Somehow L.A. still escapes me, and okay, I haven't visited Rome or Cairo).

On one hand, it made me afraid to venture out. Unless we had a Pilipino escort-guide, we did not leave the second floor flat of our host family in Bauan. This was disturbing at first. AFter all, Rob and I are continual explorers. Traveling to a new area, our first instinct is to jump right in, walk the streets, find stores and sights, take in the place at the street level, mingle among the people, and, sure, find a coffee bar.

What happened here? The people weren't the problem. No one hassled or hounded us; even the street beggars or vendors hawking newspapers or peanuts or jewelry in Manila, or the provinces, while they were persistent, did not threaten to retaliate if we looked the other way, which we mainly did.

Bauan- city of 70,000 living in 23 barrios--wasn't itself menancing. There were no obvious signs of criminal-minded people, despite hearing and reading that political crime was on the upswing in the country at large, despite the fact that a Bauan reporter, on the trail of something or someone, was murdered in the city several years ago. Type 'Bauan' into Google, and THAT story is prominent, by the second screen.

So? What kept us indoors much of the time? I think it was the streets themselves in Bauan. They're narrow raceways filled with 1000 honking, screeching, motorized tricycles, many Jeepneys, cars, and buses. All these vehicles compete for space on the one or two-lane roads, and rush about frantically, narrowly missing the young and old pedestrians, dogs, and cats. Without stop-lights or stop-signs, or driving rules, it's a free-for-all frenzy out there, far from the lazy, seaside village I foresaw, with maybe one busy, hectic street.

It's not just the roads; the edges of the roads are just as dangerous. There are very few sidewalks; those that exist are water-pitted, with deep almost bottomless holes, or crumbled at the edges. Clearly the population has greatly expanded while the streets have not. Tjey're like capillaries bulging, not with destructive plaque, but with packed red cells, thriving and squeezed in matter with little room for maneuvering.

Crossing the street in downtown Bauan--or Manila, or Quezon City-- is not unlike crossing a mid-sized freeway in L.A., on foot, during rush-hour. It takes courage, and excellent eye-foot coordination. The street is rarely emptied of vehicles. It's a dare game. Does that guy on the tricycle see us, or not? Our hosts ALWAYS took our arms to walk us about, like we were little children with no experience, which was practically true. 'Single file, Tita Pat' Karla or Kristine would say. 'You need to watch,' Lita or Ida would warn me as we walked about. Just noise, or just traffic might be more negotiable for a foreigner like me, but the combination intimidated me. And so, we kept still much more than I'm used to.

On the other hand-and for this I am greatful- being still was ultimately rewarding. It meant being in homes, and focusing on what was around me visually, afternoon after afternoon. I sipped, not gulped, like I usually do. Indoors for hours, I got to experience the small beauties of Filipino homes,some more Spanish, some more Mayan or Chinese: the spare tidiness of rooms devoid of unnecessary clutter; the inviting large retangular or circular dining tables; the heaping bowls of carefully chopped pork and green beans, resting in a thick, soy-vinegar-garlic-ginger sauce; the shrines, the small to large porcelain blue-rose-white Madonna figures watching over the living rooms; the polished ornate wood and rattan furniture grouped symetrically about a lace-draped table; on the wall, the many, many framed photos of children, family groups, and ancestors, and the simple to ornate pictures of Jesus or crosses. Everywhere, the swatches of color in mango or dark lime, or turquoise or rose played out against the backdrop of rich, dark wooden furniture and floors.

The Pilipino homes I sat in had some other dramatics touches: high ceilings, or great, sweeping touches like an interior balcony, flowered draperies looped from window to window or large, pew-like wooden benches with rising backs, tilted back chairs in wood and rattan, glassed cabinets holding precious memories of people, or prized possessions like figurines, or china, or imported liqueurs; dark, polished floors, and ornately carved doors.

There is something important and immutable here in what I was made to see staying indoors much of the time. It might be this, that the best gifts lie, not just beneath the wrappings, but deeper, in the meeting space between giver and receiver, in the the meanings to be taken from the exchange,the things that are what's remembered, and preserved. What's important to a Pilipino home is not an array of possessions meant to be emblematic of class or status, but the care and preservation of only the important items necessary for staging family, custom, and rememberance. What's essential is not the expensive sterling-silver vase, but a tiny red plastic candle holder sitting below a draped, religious statue, and its flickering flame, burning day and night, no matter what.

Bauan

2006-02-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

I don't know what I was expecting, really. I guess I thought Bauan would be a couple of busy, congested streets surrounded by more provincial areas with rice paddies, small farms, and an area by the sea. After all, this was a Province, not Manila, a mash of stained and crumbled concrete, miles of overhead wires, a city that looked liked it had been through a Demolition Derby (which it had: the Japanese bombed it thoroughly; after Dresden it was the second-most destroyed city during WWII).

Crossing into Batangas from the northern provinces, my hope rose. Grassy areas were dotted with palm and coconut trees. It was green, wavy in the wind. Several mountains popped up, without ranges or plateaus, just dense jungles of tropical trees. Occasional cattle grazed placidly. Fresh from reading Battle For Batangas, set in 1900-1902, I passed some of my car time imagining how difficult it was for American soldiers to traverse this land. Fresh from the Indian Wars, they were used to the wide open plains.

What I saw approaching Batangas from the one freeway which goes there, was a match for what I had imagined from the meagre scraps of images I had from old and new photos of Batangas. Bauan was a seaside town, according to my map, dead center on Batangas Bay, one which ran from Batangas City to a small peninsula. Sea plus tropics plus burgeoning, small industry town: that was my picture.

Cora's photos suggested there were lots of Jeepneys, and it was noisy. So what? I love New York City. What could be more crowded and noisy than, say, 53rd St. as it moves from East River Drive to Eighth Avenue, in Manhattan, or the corner of Fulton and Lafayette in Brooklyn, where Adam and Kelly used to live?

It was like a third-grade drawing, compared to what I found. We approached Bauan from the East, from Batangas City, through San Pascual. Southern Batangas Province, along the Batangas Bay, is a continuous stream of people, vehicles, and stores. An occasional school, or municipal building, or little college breaks up the view.

The road is not widened, so when a bus, of Jeepney, or motorized tricycle stops, everything stops. This equals tremendous traffic, and condensed traffic equals noise, and pollution, and dangerous walking conditions for the many children, adults, and stray cats and dogs who walk about.

I would spend the next several days there, try to immerse myself, try it on, see it through the eyes of the families living there.

Does a city have a life, a character, a personality? When you define a city as a birthplace it takes on romance, and becomes infused with sentimentality. I had always contrasted peaceful, pastoral Bauan with the hard grey metallics of the ships wjere Pio spent much of his adulthood. What can be inferred about a person, from visiting the person's birthplace?

No much, I'm thinking. My grandfather, a shy, gentle man would have not been at home in today's Bauan. By the century's turn, especially after the Americans burned and looted it as punishment for Bauanians' support of the revultion, perhaps Bauan was becoming a place he was began to dislike. Maybe that, and the traumas of the Philippines-American war was why he left his seaside, Batangas town, never to return.

Dimayuga

2006-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

Pio Dimayuga Carino is coming into focus, not yet through knowing his exact place on his several family trees--despite some signficant leads-- but through the legends of the Dimayugas, the stories and character of people who share in the name, and the communities wherein Dimayugas first resided: Bauan and Lipa, in Batangas Province.

Mention my search for a Dimayuga and the response has been about the same: 'Ah, Batangas.' I sat next to a man at Alfredo Roces' book party at De La Salle University, an esteemed, retired Dean of the school who received deep bows of respect from his colleagues in all of the opening speeches. Perhaps he was a Dr. Alicarte from an old Manila family. Because of the language barrier, I could not hear it clearly, and became too embarrassed to ask a second or third time. After all, I am part Filipino.

When I mentioned my quest to this tall, white-haired man in a blue leisure suit, he said, 'Ah, Dimayuga. Unshakeable. Dima means 'cannot.' And so, snatching from a Web-site I found years ago, I see the following names have meanings that are suggestive of strength against being beaten down or held in place:

Dimaano untouchable Tagalog
Dimaapi unoppressable Tagalog
Dimabasa unwettable Tagalog
Dimacuha unobtainable Tagalog
Dimaculangan uncheatable Tagalog
Dimagiba unbreakable Tagalog
Dimaguila
Dimailig unbendable Tagalog
Dimaisip unfathomable Tagalog
Dimalaluan unsurpassable Tagalog
Dimalanta unwiltable, untiring Tagalog
Dimanlig
Dimapasoc unbreachable Tagalog
Dimapilis
Dimapindan
Dimaporo unpointable Tagalog
Dimaranan unpassable Tagalog
Dimarucot (dimadukot) ungettable Tagalog
Dimarumba Tagalog
Dimasalang untouchable Tagalog
Dimasuay unstoppable Tagalog
Dimasuhid
Dimasupil(Dipasupil) unvanquished Tagalog
Dimatulac unpushable Tagalog
Dimaunahan unbeatable Tagalog
Dimawili unsatisfied Tagalog
Dimaya
Dimayacyac Tagalog
Dimayuga (dimaiuga) unshakeable Tagalog

Like Pio, like myself. I have many of these traits. It's not a stubbornness, like some mules I know who cannot be budged to move forward. Hindi (no). That's rigidity, when the mind closes down, and loses sight of the goal, or the context, or the consequences of being a mule. That's any number of people I know, with the jaws that clamp shut, the eyes that glaze over, the hands that told together slowly on the table. I could name names, but will not, for fear of judging them, although I often catch myself with those superior notions.

Luckily these people are ultimately stoppable, because I just go around them,sometimes stamping and fuming, other times with head-shaking humor. I just get another donkey to take me where I need to go.

Oo(yes). When the Dimayuga part of me is harnessed, I can be unstoppable. Outside I look cooperative, accomodating, pleasant, unruffled. After all, I am part Filipino. But inside something is in motion. A wave is beginning to form and it is gathering force from somewhere deep. Maybe it is reaching down, under the plates or rock and molten lava, to gather energy from the South Pacific, from Batangas Bay.

Then something happens. One second I can feel the idea begin to surge; in the next it is visible. I can see the shore where the wave will finally break, my final destination. There is relief, clarity, resolve all at once.

If something or someone is constructing some barrier, I begin to resist. But not for the sake of resistance or the demand for control; in this way, I am often misunderstood.

You see, when this Dimayuga part gathers strengths, I am usually going toward something that I judge is leading to sometime very meaningful to me or potentially meaningful to others I love. So I resist anything or anyone who would impede me, even if it's a trip to the drugstore to buy batteries (for my camera for some pictures for someone I love), or the library to look up some arcane reference for my love, writing, or a trip to Florida, or the East Coast, or London, or New Zealand, or Nashvilleto see people I love. Even if it's some crazy, unrealistic, expensive, untimely, frightening, or illogical idea.

Like going to the Philippines, to Bauan, to Pio, someone I loved.

Kapwa

2006-02-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

When I return to the United States, which are anything by united, I want to make a drawing. It will not be artistic; I wish this was my talent. Instead, it will be a map of the human connections I made while I have been in the Philippines.

They do not seem random, these connections. (In Tagalog, I might write that as Mga connection hindi ba random. It makes more sense to emphasize the main part of the idea in a sentence and then modify it from there. And, for heavens sake, skip the verbs.

Americans are very verb. Very verb-al, very verb-ose. We are too much about action, and not enough about meaning, and connection. That Tagalog uses linkers between most words is a perfect analogy to the way the people relate: smoothly, and with consideration.)

Take tonight. The Baraoidians made a bookend to the last leg of my trip by coming down for dinner: Pedro (Pedring) Lydia (Jane) , Penny, and Manny. I loved talking with them. We went smoothly between humor and serious talk, between laughing about the coffee I spilled today at an important author talk at De La Salle, and serious talk about Filipinos in the US Navy. Pedro posed an important question for me to consider: if the work was so bad, why did the navymen keep encouraging others to come?

When my friends and family ask me next week, how was your time in the Philippines, I will not be able to answer them without teling them about the people I came to grow very fond of. Without the people, the Philippines is concrete, corrogated rooves, and neon signs. The West pushing into the East. Traffic. Honking. Food stalls. Many people working so hard and bravely to scratch out a living, that their futures are suspended, and their pasts are ghosts and what-ifs.

The Philippines is the easy human connections I made here, from the woman From Quezon sitting next to Rob on the plane over, to my driver, Phillip, to F. Sionil Jose and Antonio Pastor, to the proud and protective Obispos, to Rose Marie Mendoza, my new assitant, to the hard-working young man at the National Archives, the beautiful and helpful girls at the Mandarin, like Ivy,and to all the Dimayugas: Feling, Uray, Tess, Carlos, Carina, Amando, and Divinia. And, of course the Baraoidans.

At Solidaridad today I bought a book by Katrin de Guia (perhaps a distant relative!). It is entitled Kapwas: The Self in the Other: worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipin Culture Bearers.

Kapwa, she writes, beholds the essential humanity recognizable in everyone, therefore linking people, rather than separating them from each other. Humaness at its higest level. People remaining just people, despite titles, prestige or wealth.

I have found kapwa here. It was perhaps always a part of me, bequeathed to me from Pio,and the ancestors before him.

Kapwa, my self in others, and others in me, inseparable all.

Panik-panik

2006-02-02T15:04:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning to find that the hallway light near my room had come on. Before I went to bed last night, I'm positive all the lights were off, because I recall thinking how brave I was, to sleep in the total darkness, with just the lights of Manila skyscrapers behind the curtain to keep me company.

Instantly I released my legs from the heavy coverlet and swung them to the floor. No fear. Not yet. But how could the light have come on? Is there a timer somewhere?

The door was still bolted; peering through the security keyhole I saw no one, at least no one I could see. I unbolted the door and peered outside into the hallway. The paper had not yet arrived, nor was anyone visible. Closed the door again, and this time, figured out how to use the third security device, an invisible chain.

The safe in the closet was open. No worries. I don't tend to lock it at night. There was my camera, a full camera card, my passport holder, my passport, and the envelope of pesos Rob bought me before he left.

But where was the new stash of money, the 8000 pesos I took late yesterday afternoon from a Citibank ATM, under the watch of several armed police spaced every 12 feet around the building? In the buttoned down pocket of my hiking pants? Negative. In all the other places I tend to keep money. Negative-negative. In Tagalog, when you want to superlatize an adjective, you just say it twice.

Panic-panic. Upon investigation, near the inside front door is a little slot where a room-key-type-card sits. I never figured out why it was there. Playing with it a little I found out why. Outside in the hallway, when you put your key in the door, the hallway light comes on, so that you don't have to come into a darkened room. If' you'd rather not have that happen, simply remove that card. Oh....Uh-oh.

I doubled my effort so find the P8000, my fear rising. Already my judgment began to cloud, the way it does when you begin to doubleback through your things looking for lost items. Soon, you go amok, searching in all the no-way places: bedcovers, ALL your pants pockets, the inner pockets of suitcase long closed.

In a zippered pouch on my right leg, in yesterday's pants, I found the money. Double feelings: relief coupled by a wave of self-hate. Why didn't I put the money in the safe? Why didn't I search more thoroughly.

Images of yesterday's lapses came back to me, and I could feel the fear bubbling up from my stomach. I left my purse in the driver's car while he drove around the block, while I went to Citibank. Upon arriving back at the hotel, I couldn't find my room key in its usual spot. Checked and re-checked. Figured I had mislaid it at the Archives, and simply re-keyed the room with the concierge and got another one

I tend to hypothesize when anything puzzles me. It's my way of making sense of the world, and fending off anxiety. This gets me in trouble occasionally, because the hypotheses are occasionally more scary than what has motivated me toward hypothesis-making.

This was one of those times: Okay, the hotel taxi driver, who has easily seen my wad of cash, stole my key. He seemed like a trustworthy fellow, but then he makes $395 pesos a day, a little over $7.00 a day, or less than a dollar an hour. Did he come into the hotel in the middle of the night? Did he try to use the key he stole? If so, because I had to re-key for a new card, it didn't work

But my light came on.

Pamilya Manila

2006-01-28T01:53:00.000-08:00

January 22

The airport baggage area is a throng, a word I will use again. Rob tells me that the Philippines has 76 million people crammed into a country with the land mass of Arizona.

One problem at the airport is the many, many large boxes lumbering onto the luggage carousel. These are American goods coming to the Philippines. They usually come by ship, in huge freighter containers. Like the over many billion dollars being shipped here from the millions of Pilipino workers abroad, stuff comes on every plane as well.

I stand back while Rob squirms his way toward the carousel. A couple of huffs and puffs, and we've loaded the cart. Coming through customs is not the serious ritual it is in the States. The guy takes one look at us and waves us through the exit door.

And there, the man walking tentatively towards us, a trim, light-browned skin man dressed in a traditional white Pilipino shirt akin to the barong Tagalog, is Pedro. We shake hands. I break all the rules I read about in the guidebooks and give him a hug, American style. He is gracious, if embarrassed. His English, as I knew it would be, is impeccable. The car is coming around, he says, as he guides us to the curb. It is hot, even at midnight. It's like being under an overpass in Brooklyn or the Bronx. It's a smell of a fuel, rain, and grit.

A shiny black SUV pulls up, and out comes Pedro's wife, Lydia. She is a small woman with short black hair, sweeping bangs, and a wide smile. She puts her two hands on my face and says slowly and sweetly, 'Welcome to the Philippines.' She knows, of course, how long I have been planning this trip. Her welcome seems deliberate, and I am immediately touched.

There is Quinio (sp?), Pedro's son-in-law, quickly and deftly hoisting our luggage into the back. And in the front seat, his wife, Janelle, a doctor. Like her parents, she is warm and welcoming. Pedro climbs in the back with Rob and I and we're off.

I'm very excited, practically beside myself with gratitude that they have picked us up. Because--a huge crowd of people who apparently parked their vehicles (loosely translated), are stuffed behind a low gate waiting for their relatives too.

Right off, I see a Jeepney, or two, or twelve. These creatively decorated long, covered jeeps are crammed with passengers. The Baraoidans point them out as we thread our way through the dense traffic toward the hotel. I am doing double work: talking, catching up (they want to know about Janet, Bill, Jamie, and Ruth), and I"m peering into the dark, humid night, absorbing as much as I can.

In five minutes we cover important ground: how Pedro introduced my aunt to her fourth husband, who was his rooomate at West Point, what Pedro did afterward. Right off we learn that he has a Ph.D. in Math from Berkely, that he left the country afer Marcos was toppled (or, he says, after the US arranged for his topplement.)

At a light (there are only few of them), Pedro remembers to tell me that, oh, a coup is on. Some escaped NPA officers are threatening another revolt within the military. The Baraoidans are laughing, and I am wide-eyed, since they say that the last time there was a coup, the rebels took over a well-known hotel. This is gentle teasing from the Baraoidans, fun stuff. I remember that suddenly from growing up. But there really are escaped NPAs within a mile of our hotel.

Before the light changes, I glance over my right shoulder toward the back seat window, past Pedro's face.

A girl, maybe ten, has pressed herself up against the window. She has stringy hair and hollow eyes. She just stares at me, with a look that is so penetrating I can recall it instantly, days later. It will be a stare I, and any other wealthy persons, receive from beggars.

No one says a word, even though they see her I'm sure. 'You always know there is a traffic back-up by the number of beggars who come around the car,' Pedro tells me two days later.

The girl staring at me both intently and woodenly in a way that would come back to me. Come Bauan, I would begin my own kind of staring. She wanted money. I, a naive traveler with no third-world-like experience, would want to remember images for my writing, like this blog. We were both purposeful starers, the girl and I.

But yet we're so very, very different. I don't need blogs for my next meal, and she surely need the little change we might pass to her from the car, but-- don't.

Pamilya

2006-01-18T04:01:00.000-08:00

In less than a week, I will exit the customs area at Ninoy International Airport in Manila and begin looking through the crowd for a sign that reads 'Robert and Pat.' The man holding that sign will not be a hired driver, nor an employee of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He will be Pedro Baraoidan.

Around 1960 Pedro was a Filipino cadet at West Point, continuing a long tradition of Filipino men trained in United States military academies, for export back to the Philippines. I have a very faint recollection of him, or perhaps only a picture of him: a young, handsome, slightly built man with an easy smile. In 1960 I was an awkward, gawking thirteen year-old living with my family in Michigan.

Just barely into adolescence, I had new 45 rpm records of Fabian and Elvis, but still liked to pretend 'boat' with my younger brother Peter in our recreation room. 'Boat' was an enactment of our family's former life on the southern shores of Long Island where we ferried to Fire Island on summer weekends. Long Island and Queens is where Pedro showed up, on weekend leave from West Point.

West Point is where Petra, my father's elegant, tempestous Filipino-American sister, and John, her third husband, along with Janet, his beautiful 16 year-old oldest daughter, showed up. They came up the Hudson because John, a full Filipino man who immigrated to the United States in the 1930's, was Pedro's uncle.

A big family drama happened next at West Point, with Pedro and Uncle John as innocent bystanders. There, my sister would meet her husband, Bill, and, there, my Aunt Petra would secretly court her next husband, a West Point cadet named Will, and eventually divorce our beloved Uncle John.

Uncle John carried an eye-popping wad of money at all times, and had equally eye-popping biceps. He dressed in fine suits and drove fancy cars, and treated me and my brother like we were his kids. John was a bartender and bookmaker for the Mob. But he cried when my aunt left him.

See, the trips to West Point not only strengthened a nephew-uncle connection; they enabled contact between the glamorous Carino women and handsome, uniformed West Point cadets. From our home in the midwest, my father heard the stories, and wrung his hands over his sister and daughter. These romances ignited in the fires of West Point dances, New York City nightclubs, and Sunday dinners hosted by my grandparents in their Queens row house.

I can see how it all happened. I smell the beer, taste the fish and roast beef and rice pudding, and hear the laughter, the piano, the barking dog, the sound of the front door opening to streams of people. Because as a child I sat there too. I can see Pedro, John, Petra, John, and other West Point Cadets sitting around a dining room table crammed shoulder to shoulder with relatives and friends, many of them Filipino-American, every one of them embraced as 'family' by my grandmother. She probably met my grandfather Pio that way, in Brooklyn, 30 years earlier. A uniform always turned her head, and so that legacy continued with her daughter and grand-daughter.

I saw John only four more times before he died in the 1990's. The last time was a day in Florida at his home. We sat in his overheated tropical garden talking quietly about his past, his family in the Philippines, and what had happened to each of our lives since 1961.

Pedro would fade from my consciousness. My sister kept some contact with him. At some point Pedro returned to the Philippines, served in the military there, married, and had a family. He lived for a signficant time in the United States. As I planned my trip to the Philippines, I thought of him, and called John's second wife and widow, Ruth, who gave me Pedro's address in the Philippines.

Here in the United States, given our vast mobility and high disregard for tradition, 'family'is a watered-down concept. In an email from the Obispo's, our host family in Bauan--strangers who are already referring to us as family--Tita Pat and Tito Rob, Aunt and Uncle--they seem very pleased to hear that I will be spending time with Pedro and his wife,Lydia. True to the Filipino definition of family which is very strong and inclusive, they call them 'my family.'

Indeed Pedro, my late, former uncle-in-law's nephew, is taking just that kind of interest and care. He and his wife, Lydia, will escort us for two days, and we will catch up. I will hear how Pedro's life went after West Point, learn more about our Uncle John, and Pedro will get to know me for the first time.

A seafood dinner is planned with them Sunday night. We will eat, drink, talk, laugh,and tell stories. We will pick up the end of a string dropped over 40 years ago by time, loss, and neglect, and complete an arc, from the Philippines to America and back. We will do pamilya.

Bahala na

2006-01-16T04:49:00.000-08:00

In Tagalog, 'bahala na' is translated to mean 'happen what may.' It is a shrug of the shoulders, a call to accept uncertainty, and be confident in providence and yourself.

This is the attitude I am aiming for this week as I launch myself to the Philippines. Yes, there are more books to be read, more Tagalog to be practised, ,more maps to study, more Internet sites to find and print. I could do all this, again and again, in the interest of insuring that the trip will be meaningful and productive and anxiety-free.

Instead I want to adopt 'bahala na.'

After all, my goals are clear: to complete the circle Pio, and others in the family, began in the early 20th century in their wave of immigration; to search (but not necessarily find) relatives; to understand more about why and how this generation migrated through the US Navy, and how it impacted their families left behind; and to understand more about myself as a Hapa.

For ten years I have read about Batangas, the Phillipine-American war, Filipinos in the Navy, and Filipino-Americans. I have studied a little Tagalog, cooked a little adobo. In the past two years particularly I tried to know more Filipinos and hang out with them: Deling and Jason and Emily at the University of Michigan, Cora and Chris in Ann Arbor, Edwina and Allen and their crew in Norfolk, Ulpiano Santo in Chesapeake, Fe and the warm people at my local Filipino-American historical association in Southfield, Dean from Hawaii.

Within my family, I have interviewed a number of people about being Filipino-American, or being married to FilAms. This would be George Gomez, Nonny Adap, Ted and Jean Carino, Rita Riggs Steuer, Petra, Mike Salvador, Audrey Laeno.

Many hours late into the evening were spent on Ancestry.com, locating Filipinos in my family's life, the extended kin from the East Coast whose pictures and stories I have: Jose Sallez, R. Marcelino, Servando Castor, the Pacanzas, the Palmares, the Santos's, the Baraoidans.

To prepare for the trip, I have arranged my first four days in the country, and taken the necessary security and health precautions. I have several host families awaiting me. They are the ties that will secure me in my quest: The Marasigian-Obispos in Bauan, Pedro Baraoidan in Manila, and the Dimayugas in Lipa.

Now, with all that in hand, I want to simply go there, to follow my nose, as Ulpiano Santo described doing in his interview with me about life as a mess attendant in the early 30's.

Pio surely had to adopt bahala na. When he walked through the Cavite gate onto the Naval Station, he had no way of anticipating what it would be like, and what would happen to him. He had a few ideas, like me, and had spoken with others, like I have. And there were some longings and dreams, no doubt.

Some would come true, others not. I will guess that he wanted someday to see his birthplace and his family again, a dream that did not come to pass in his lifetime.

I hope my trip will satisfy him. At least, I will try to carry out that dream for him, and in doing so, learn more about the parts of me that I have left behind: being Hapa, and writing down my life.

The beginning

2006-01-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

In precisely two weeks, on January 22, 2006, I will enter my grandfather's town in the Philippines: Bauan, in the province of Batangas.

I am trying my very best not to imagine what this will be like, or how I will feel to be there, standing on earth he walked upon, or swimming in waters he fished as a boy.

Instead I want to be guided by my instincts, the way Pio had to do when he stepped through the gates at Cavite Naval Station in early 1910, walked up the gangplank to the USS Mohican and into the US Navy, then stepped onto American soil several weeks later.

Within him he carried the memories of his childhood and family from Bauan, as well as the seeds for a family of his own to come. Once he sailed from Philippine waters, Pio, nor any of his relatives, ever returned.

I am returning him.

And as I do, I believe he will be with me, as he was one evening in 1989 in a darkened movie house. There I was, watching "Field of Dreams, " having a sudden, intense feeling that Pio was speaking to me. There he was, conveying not just that I should find a way to tell his story, but that writing will be my contribution to life on earth.

This was unbelievable, and unexpected. I had dabbled in writing for years, once considered it as a profession, enjoyed it, had some modest talent for it. My grandfather had died in 1974. I went to his funeral, feeling no overwhelming sadness, except that he died in a grocery store parking lot, alone. I hadn't been particularly close to Pio, nor he to me. His strong presence in the movie theatre was not a case of suppressed grief.

For hours after the film, I couldn't speak, except to say to my husband that I was overcome, with something. I cried as soon as I was alone, overwrought not with missing Pio, but with a strange energy akin to a sense of destiny. It felt dark, almost foreboding, the way one might feel on the eve of a difficult climb up a high mountain, or a sail through uncharted waters.

A mission to tell Pio's story and to be a writer was passed to me that night. I sense Pio's story contains a great sorrow, since often I can be moved to tears when I see or hear or read things about my grandfather, his generation of ward attendants and navy stewards, and the atrocities and prejudices committed against Filipinos.

And I believe his story has lacked closure, because I have had difficulty being tidy and organized in this project, a hard time working steadily towards its completion. The resistance is palpable, as if someone or something is battling against me telling the story.

Whatever the forces for and against, for 17 years on and off, I have made it my mission to know my grandfather's story in the Philippines and the Navy, and to tell about it from the beginning. The beginning is Bauan.