this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on October 30, 1999.
The backpack was heavy. Inside, the little travel things collided: a green Philippine passport, five sweat-soaked shirts, a pair of jeans, a Swiss knife, bottled mineral water, pens, a battered blue travel notebook, a toothbrush and a face towel. From my hand dangled a handy ”Lonely Planet Philippines” travel guide, dog-eared with use. On Page 371, I read with furrowed eyebrows something about Dumaguete City: ”It is a pleasant town with well-tended little park areas and what must be the cleanest market in the Philippines . . . It’s also a university town.”
I closed my eyes, aching to remember. My stomach was queasy from an overdose of familiarity, yet everything was strange and foreign. Even the tropical sun did not remember me: it scorched my skin red, and I had rashes all over. From the bow of the Supercat, I saw the town suddenly springing from the horizon. The boat docked. The gangplank was secured. I set my reluctant first step on the concrete pier, and whispered a silent prayer.
Welcome home, stranger. Coming home was never simple. My bewildered face betrayed a culture shock with my own culture. But what did I expect? The truth of the matter was, as a friend once remarked, ”Once someone has tasted ice cream, why would he settle again for the clumsy taste of ice candy?” I couldn’t help but suddenly develop an unfair intolerance for the traffic, for the ubiquitous trash, for Filipino time, for people’s reluctance to queue up. I almost had a heart attack when somebody cut in front of me while lining up in the domestic airport phone booth.
In the span of a year, I came home to a different country: Erap had been elected president, the heat was alien, faces looked garishly brown, and even my native tongue escaped my comprehension for approximately three minutes. Where was my Tagalog? My Cebuano? I panicked. But soon memory oiled my tongue.
In Tokyo, where I had studied at the International Christian University, people would come up to me, surprised that I came from the Philippines. A heathen corner of the Third World, someone had whispered in the beginning. ”Do you still live in trees?” a German acquaintance asked casually. ”Did Imelda Marcos really have a thousand pair of shoes?” The Philippines to the outsider mostly existed in a cloud of television stereotyping. If it was not all Mt. Pinatubo covered in ash, the country was one Smoky Mountain, a treacherous archipelago where kidnapping happened every hour. ”Worse than Calcutta,” said an outspoken American who had spent a week in Manila, then fled later on to Bangkok. ”I love the Philippines,” an Irish graduate student mused. ”I love the people–so very friendly. I love–how do you call it?–adobo.” (They always love adobo; even Ricky Martin swears by it)
I can get myself hoarse defending and explaining the Philippine way of life (”Filipino time is like this. . .,” you might begin). On the other hand, I also have come to realize that even if one has lived most of his life in the familiar confines of his country, chances are he barely knows his country at all. One often takes for granted the common and the familiar, and soon they barely matter at all, disappearing in the periphery of consciousness. One becomes like the New Yorker who hasn’t been to the Statue of Liberty.
I traveled the lengths of Japan, from snowy Hokkaido to the bustling, cosmopolitan Osaka and the ancient Nara. Always, people asked, ”Have you been to Banaue? What’s Davao really like? Bacolod? Palawan?” Always, I shook my head in regret over my ignorance, and they would, in turn, regale me with stories of backpacking trips across many islands unknown to me except in the pages of geography books and tourist brochures. One Japanese friend who knew more about Philippine politics and economy than I did once asked me, ”What is the unemployment rate right now in your country?” I could only scratch my head and venture a guess: ”Ten percent?” He rewarded me with a pillow fight.
Ashamed of my ignorance, I told myself it was time to explore my own country, to know what made it tick. But what is the Philippines? What is the Filipino? I had asked myself these questions while going through the crowded shops of Shibuya, while waiting for an express train in Shinjuku, while eating an early morning sushi in Tsukiji, while traversing Patpong one night in Bangkok, while climbing Petronas in Kuala Lumpur. But we never really know. We are a mishmash of borrowed cultures.
Like our islands, we have a fragmented sense of identity. Jessica Zafra once wrote in Newsweek that ”the Great Filipino Dream was to be an American.” In the movie ”Goodbye, America,” Nanette Medved tells an American G.I.: ”We are confused with our identity. As long as you (Americans) are here, we will never find out who we are. We don’t even speak our own language, only a bastard tongue of half-Tagalog and half-English.” We are proud of what we are, without an inkling of what we are.
Who are you? The question almost becomes caricature. It is a constant query, haunting you as you fly from one country to the next, so persistent, so vague, so portable that it fades into the little travel things in your backpack, almost always unanswered.
