Sundays in Manila--Three Full Chapter Excerpts

PROLOGUE

THE FASCINATION WITH THE PHILIPPINES

This book springs from my life-long fascination with the Philippines as well as my conviction that others will share this fascination to some degree after reading this book. Should you also share my passion for travel, you will find information, observations, and reflections to enhance your journey to the Philippines, especially Manila. If you are not yet planning to visit the Philippines, perhaps these pages will plant the seeds for such plans. Numerous excerpts from this book have already found audiences in Philippine-American weekly or monthly publications in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

My preoccupation with the Philippines arises from a mixture of personal and career reasons. I was a few months over four years old when the US entered World War II. I was six when the news leaked out about the atrocities that had taken place after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. Those two names, reported on the radio and in the Movietone newsreels that preceded feature films in theaters, took up quiet residence in my impressionable consciousness, to emerge many years later as titles for chapters in this book.

By 1945, at the age of seven, I was playing war games with my older brothers, reenacting the landings at Leyte Gulf and Lingayen Gulf. Generals MacArthur and Wainwright, more than Patton or Eisenhower, were my heroes, and Filipino allies with exotic-sounding names like Romulo, Quezon, Magsaysay, and Macapagal, were their friends. Like “Bataan” and “Corregidor,” these names were often on the news on the radio and in the newsreels, and now I was also seeing them as headlines in the newspaper.

My early impressions endured, receiving occasional reinforcement. As a teenager I went to a Christian Brothers high school in Philadelphia where I added to my Philippine lore. From the brothers I learned about De La Salle College (now a university) in Manila, the “missions,” to which one of my teachers went to serve. A classmate of mine became a Christian Brother, and he too went to teach in the Philippines. In the ensuing years, I retained a personal interest in news from the Philippines, though the coverage of such news in the US was—and is—relatively scant. I read about the Communist insurgency, about the Marcoses, about the Aquinos, and about the nonviolent “People’s Revolution” that ousted Ferdinand Marcos.

While I was keeping a casual eye on news from the RP, my professional interests took some turns that would eventually lead me to the Philippines. My research and teaching in the area of medieval European literature brought me to Spain on a sabbatical in 1983. My project was to study the productive interaction among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, called the “convivencia,” in early medieval Spain, much of which was under Arab rule. A few years later, I got sidetracked into administration, but after this diversion I returned to Spain in 1993 to reconnect with my earlier interests there. I was privileged to spend three and a half months in the medieval center of Spanish Muslim culture, Cordova, the Baghdad of the West in the tenth century. There I studied medieval Spanish literature and history, material that I still plan to transmute into a historical fantasy novel.

An unforeseen outcome of my sojourns in Spain was a compelling interest in Spain’s global emergence. In 1492 the Spanish Conquistadors completed the centuries-long campaign against the  Arabs to reconquer all of Spain. They then expelled all Muslims and Jews, the peoples from whom they and the rest of Europe had learned so much, peoples that had helped to fuel the Renaissance. With their new learning and their unparalleled military prowess, the Spanish now looked for discovery and conquest beyond their own shores. Their extraordinary talents and arrogance brought them to New Spain—the Americas—and the Islands of (King) Philip—Las Filipinas, so named in honor of Philip II of Spain around 1543.

At the same time that I was following these interests, my college, St. Norbert College (SNC), was becoming more committed to international studies, involving, among other parts of the globe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. I was fortunate enough to be a member of the St. Norbert delegations to Puerto Rico and Nicaragua in 1988, to El Salvador in 1992, and to the Philippines in 1994, all former Spanish colonies.

The three and a half week-immersion experience in the Philippines in 1994 was the realization of a long-held dream, as well as another step in my evolving professional interests. Here were all those dramatic names from my childhood—Leyte, Samar, Manila Bay, Corregidor, Bataan, and Baguio. Here also, in profusion, were testimonials to over 300 years of Spanish and almost fifty years of American colonialism imposed on the Filipinos. The Filipinos cleverly and with characteristic adaptability had ameliorated colonial influences in many but not in all ways. Here, too, in the southern island of Mindanao, was a sizable Muslim population in the only predominantly Christian (Roman Catholic) country in Asia.

The Muslim presence in the Philippines represents a remarkable historical irony. Muslims, or Moros (Moors), as the Spanish called them, reached Southeast Asia before the Spanish did. The Moros, and not far behind them, Islam, arrived roughly a hundred years before their coreligionists were defeated and expelled in 1492 by the Conquistadors in Spain. Only a generation or two later, the Conquistadors, with astonishing brio, while they were circling the globe, and acquiring much of it for their king, engaged the Moros on the far side of the world. And the Spanish defeated them again, everywhere, that is, with one important exception, a portion of western Mindanao and some small islands nearby (the Sulu Archipelago).

While this study-visit to the Philippines was in one sense a culmination, it was also a beginning. One of our most beneficial assignments was the “counterpart” experience. For four days each of us had a Filipino mentor from the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP) in Manila. I already knew my mentor, Jose (Butch) Dalisay. From 1992 to 1994 I had corresponded with him to solicit his guidance in developing a course on the postcolonial novel, focusing on former Spanish colonies in parts of Latin America and the Philippines. Butch readily agreed to be my counterpart. He and his wife Beng and I and, later, my wife Barb, began an acquaintance that has ripened into friendship. Through Butch I met a number of people in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, paving the way for my return, four years later, as a visiting member of this department.

St. Norbert established an exchange program with UP, as a result of the 1994 visit by the delegation, and I was fortunate to be the first exchange professor from SNC. I was particular flattered in that I went to UP in 1998 in exchange for Gemino (“Jimmy”) Abad who came to SNC. Jimmy is one of UP’s best known and most esteemed faculty members. We apparently gave the program the start it needed. Recently (2007) we celebrated its tenth anniversary, and I have been told that UP has asked when I am coming back.

In addition to teaching at UP, I attempted to do what Washington Irving did when he spent five months living in the Alhambra in Spain 200 years ago, that is to collect tales and anecdotes, observe the people, and comment on what I saw and heard. This book is the result of those 1998 observations, amplified and corrected by a follow-up visit in 2004, and fleshed out with details from  my inaugural 1994 visit. Rather than proceeding chronologically or attempting to be comprehensive, I have selected the highlights of my experiences, the places and events, and especially the people, that most affected me. I devote self-contained chapters to these highlights, so that each chapter can be read in any order.

As the book’s title suggests, it focuses largely but not exclusively on the metropolitan area of Manila, Metro Manila as it is now called. I have attempted, however, to present a collage that includes not only Manileños, but, to some extent, the rich diversity among Filipinos generally. Manila provides a reasonable cross-section of the people of the country. As in other developing countries, people have flocked from the provinces to the capital. In the RP they have swelled the population of Metro Manila to about thirteen million or roughly fifteen percent of the total population. Also, teaching at UP brought me into regular contact with students and colleagues from various places. They told me about life in their provinces, where they spoke a language different from Filipino or from English, their second and third languages.

I spent most of my twenty or more Sundays visiting different parts of Manila and, frequently, venturing into the nearby provinces bordering on the metropolis. On a few occasions I ventured further afield, as I describe in a few of the later chapters. Probably two thirds of the book comes from these Sunday outings and the occasional longer outings in 1998 during my teaching assignment at UP. My visit in 2004 has contributed three additional chapters and enabled me to revise portions of others, in some cases substantially. Factual details of a lasting sort from notes and essays about my 1994 visit appear in various places here but have not formed a chapter by themselves.

Before leaving this introductory chapter, I need to comment on a dimension that I have touched upon only lightly in the book: the third-world, developing-nation characteristics of the RP. I am not belittling the problems the country faces when I say that they are the perennial problems of developing nations in other countries in Asia and elsewhere: debt burden, children suffering from malnutrition and disease, inefficient or corrupt government, notoriously inadequate infrastructures, and the list goes on.

On the positive side, the RP is a democracy with a constitution modeled on that of the US. It was by democratic election, supported by “People Power” and, eventually, the military, that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ousted and Cory Aquino installed as president in 1986. Three successive peaceful elections have followed, although President Estrada was impeached and his term completed by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who later won her own term. Mrs. Arroyo has subsequently been accused of condoned illegal vote grabbing by her staff, and calls for impeachment are being heard. It appears likely, however, that she will complete her term which ends in 2010.

Also a positive is the press; while the country suffers much, these ills are not hidden from Filipinos or the rest of the world. The Philippine press is one of the most critical and independent presses anywhere, and it attracts a large audience. Manila alone has more than five daily English-language newspapers and twice that number in Filipino and other languages. On the downside the outspokenness of the journalists has come at a tragic price. The Philippines has been ranked as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists.

Again on the positive side, Filipinos can take pride in their unusual sense of responsibility for each other. Philippine NGOs, established by the more economically privileged, address issues such as homelessness, sight disorders, hunger, and malnutrition.

One problem the country is wrestling with but dealing with effectively is terrorism. Southeast Asia, including the RP, has seen its share of recent Muslim extremist atrocities. Two terrorist organizations, Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, both active in parts of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, are almost certainly connected with Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida. A cooperative endeavor of the US and RP, however, has become a model of how to address the threat of terrorism through a combination of military strategy and extensive humanitarian development assistance.

Referring to US humanitarian assistance early in 2004, a Muslim mayor in western Mindanao was quoted as saying that “Allah has opened the heavens and given us the Americans.” This mayor had previously been antigovernment and anti-US. When I visited in February of 2004, I was surprised that a majority of my former UP colleagues who had been highly critical of the US were now favorable toward it. The reason was the way the US had cooperated with the RP in undermining terrorism through largely peaceful, humanitarian means. Imagine my dismay a few months after my visit when I read comments by US officials—not, significantly, the then president Bush—sharply criticizing the handling of terrorism in the RP. President Bush, on the other hand, cited the gains against terrorism in the Philippines during his 2004 reelection campaign.

While the book is organized in a way that allows for reading any of its chapters independently of the others, it does, nonetheless point up recurrent motifs that merit mention here.

The first motif, one that I became aware of during my 1994 visit, is the natural and unembarrassed spirituality of Filipinos. Examples abound. UP, a paragon of secular education in the country, has several active churches on its campus, including a large, centrally located, and heavily attended Catholic church. Professors at UP have the reputation of being radical, often leftist, thinkers, yet many quietly have their children instructed in the Catholic catechism. Sophisticated Filipinos will mutter a prayer of apology when they encounter a mound during a walk in the woods or fields because they might have unintentionally disturbed a spirit. “Anting-anting” is an expression that refers to magical properties in things, while “duwende” is the name for what the Irish might call the “little people.” A final, singular example of the happy preoccupation with the spiritual is the babaylan, a Filipino priest or priestess perhaps best described as a shaman.

This second prevalent motif, again one that had attracted my attention in 1994, is the prominent place of women in Philippine society. I saw the sacred Mount Banahaw from a distance on my first visit and learned about the babaylans, who congregate there, men and women priests who guard a devotion to a female force or deity that predates the arrival of Christianity. The later widespread devotion to the Virgin Mary seemed to me then to fit with this devotion. After two subsequent visits, I am convinced that such is the case.

The importance of women in the Philippines, however, extends beyond religion, or perhaps flows over from the religious to other spheres. Art, literature, and even the daily newspapers all convey a respectful, even reverent, image of women. Contemporary women hold sway in the domestic realm, but they also hold places of prominence in business and politics.

A third motif that recurs frequently in these pages is one that I missed in 1994, discovered in part during my longer stay in 1998, and came to understand more fully in 2004. It is the pervasive and vivid memory that Filipinos have of the Japanese occupation and the so-called liberation by the US in 1944–1945. Quite early in my 1998 stay, I was surprised at how often I was reminded about the war. I would find a monument, an inscription, a photograph, or a ruin in unexpected places, or I would be told impromptu narratives about the war. Perhaps people regarded my second, longer stay as a sign of solidarity and of a more serious interest in the country and thus spoke more freely of such matters.

The Japanese occupation was brutal, and the liberation brought with it massive destruction. The month-long Battle of Manila alone was devastating. Its toll was over 100,000 civilian deaths, a huge percentage of the population of the entire country, which was approximately sixteen million in 1945. I learned from Filipinos on three or four occasions that the most destroyed allied city in the war, after Warsaw, was Manila. Manila was the largest but by no means the only such casualty of the liberation.

When I visited Baguio, a smaller city, four or five hours by bus to the north of Manila, I saw a photo display in the museum there of a city that had been reduced to a wasteland by the fighting. Filipinos are extraordinarily forgiving, even of the horrors inflicted on them, but they are also realists, so they do not forget and do not want others to forget the evils that attended the war. World War II has entered the Philippine psyche.

I may have gained a sense of the significance of World War II for Filipinos during my stay in 1998, but in the course of writing the first draft of this book, I discovered several omissions, the two most serious being Bataan and Corregidor. I had written about the occupation and about the campaign to end it in 1944–1945, but I had nothing about the beginnings of the war, the five-month period from December 7, 1941, to the fall of Corregidor on May 6, 1942 (Bataan had fallen on April 9).

I went to these two sites in 2004 to remedy these omissions and discovered how serious the omissions were. Like most Americans, I had assumed, incorrectly, that the histories of Bataan and Corregidor had more to do with the American than with the Philippine experience of the war. The reality is that to appreciate the depth and extent of Philippine loyalty to the US, a loyalty that continues to this day, one must know something about Bataan and Corregidor.

In the chapters that follow, the three motifs of spirituality, women, and war will emerge often.

One of my colleagues at UP, a well-known anthropologist, gave me the following advice when we were talking about this book. “Keep it simple. Observe, write, enjoy. Don’t try to be an anthropologist.” I have tried to follow his advice. Rather than write a book of anthropology—necessarily a bad one since I am not an anthropologist—I have, I hope, written a good appreciation of the country and the people as an experienced traveler. I leave it to the reader to judge if I have succeeded.

CHAPTER ONE

AN ANECDOTAL AND PRACTICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE PHILIPPINES

Two facts have impressed me about the geography of the Philippines: 1) its historical importance for Westerners and in particular for Americans; and 2) how little most Westerners, in particular Americans other than military personnel, know about it. In my own case I knew basically in what part of the globe the Philippines resides (see Map One). When I first arrived there, however, I was geographically disoriented within the country itself (see Map Two) and even lost for a while in my own neighborhood on the campus of the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP) in Metro Manila. Only very gradually, after three visits that add up to nearly six months, have I begun to get my bearings.

THE PHILIPPINES ON THE GLOBAL MAP

I arrived for the first time in the Philippines in June of 1994. Butch Dalisay, my appointed mentor, who was responsible for introducing me to his country, specifically Manila, telephoned to make a change in a previous arrangement. “I cannot go with you to Baguio (four or five hours north of Manila by bus; see Map Two) as planned. I have to fill in for a colleague at a two-day conference in Vietnam. In fact I have to leave in a few hours.” What astonished me was the implied physical and political geography. “Can you do that?” I asked him, envisioning huge distances and postwar animosities.

“We go there regularly,” he responded. “I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.” I had left Wisconsin just a week earlier for my first visit to Asia and hadn’t modified my western-oriented geography. It now dawned on me that the flight probably was only a couple of hours (about an hour and a half it turns out) from Manila to Ho Chi Minh City and that Filipinos would not have to deal with the same sort of red tape that an American would going to Vietnam. “It’s going to take me a while to reorient myself,” I realized, “from my Yankee-centric view of the globe.”

As a Westerner I was, of course, not alone in my confusion about Asian Pacific geography. Magellan was not sure where he was in 1521 when he landed on one of the smaller, easternmost islands (Homonhon, close to Eastern Samar) of what is now the midsection of the Philippines, the Visayan Islands. He had been aiming at an east-to-west route to the Spice Islands or Moluccas. Actually he was not far off. The Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia, are just eight or nine hundred miles to the south. Magellan never got there, though a remnant of his sailors eventually did. In fact Magellan’s crew continued westward beyond the Spice Islands and circumnavigated the globe, for the first time on record, by returning to Spain where they had started out three years earlier.

President William McKinley, when he acquired the Philippines from Spain for the US 376 years after Magellan’s arrival, thought that it lay off the coast of Florida. After all, Cuba and Puerto Rico, the other two prizes that came under US control with victory over Spain in 1898, were there. Fortunately for the US army of occupation—though not so fortunately for the Filipinos—Admiral Dewey’s US navy did know the correct location of the Philippines.

General Douglas MacArthur, on the other hand, did not share and suffer from other Westerners’ Asian geography deficit. His father, General Arthur MacArthur, was a good learner and mentor of Philippine geography. General Arthur MacArthur commanded US forces against the Spanish at the Battle of Manila (1898) in the Spanish-American War. He then commanded US forces in Northern Luzon against the Filipinos (1899–1900) during the Philippine-American War. He was appointed Military Governor of the Philippines from 1900–1901.

Map One: The Globe

Arthur’s son Douglas followed in his military footsteps, serving in the US army in the Philippines during most of the 1920s. In a historical twist of fate, Douglas, the son of the enemy general and colonial military governor, accepted President Quezon’s invitation for him to create the modern army of the Philippines when the country became a Commonwealth under the US in 1935. Subsequently President Roosevelt appointed him commander of the combined US-Philippine Army when Japan invaded in 1941. He escaped in dramatic fashion, just before the US-Philippine surrender to the Japanese in May of 1942, making his way from Corregidor in Manila Bay by PT Boat and airplane to Australia, over 2000 miles to the south.

Japan’s military plan included conquering Australia to solidify its hold on the Asia Pacific after Pearl Harbor. The Philippines of course lay between Japan and Australia. The Japanese military figured, correctly, that they had to occupy the Philippines quickly—they allotted two months to complete the task—and invade Australia before it could prepare its defenses with help from its allies. They underestimated the tenacity of the Filipino and American defenders. The defenders made good use of the rugged terrain of the Bataan peninsula and the nearly impregnable rock fortress known as Corregidor Island. Corregidor is strategically located just off the east shore of Bataan at the mouth of Manila Bay. Instead of two months, a Japanese victory in the Philippines came only after four and a half months. The Japanese hadn’t mastered Philippine geography. The Australians had the time they needed.

The Japanese, however, came close, occupying New Guinea a short distance above northeastern Australia, and Indonesia, including its easternmost island, Timor, a shade above northwestern Australia. The Japanese attempt on Australia stalled within sight of its coast. Resistance by the combined US-Philippine Army and later by the small Timorese Army thwarted the carefully planned schedule of conquest by the Imperial Army. When the tide of the war changed, MacArthur made good on his promise to return. He led the way, island hopping up the South Pacific to Leyte Gulf in the eastern Visayan Islands, probably passing close by

Homonhon Island where Magellan had landed over 400 years earlier.

Sailors, while not infallible, are better with geography than most of the rest of us. During the Spanish Colonial Period, starting around 1600, Spanish galleons plied their trade route to Asia with remarkable success for over two centuries (see Map One). Within thirty years of Magellan’s arrival there, the Spanish had colonized the Philippines and established Manila as their Asian base. The Spaniards sailed from their Mediterranean ports across the Atlantic to Vera Cruz on the east coast of Mexico. They then transported their goods the width of Mexico to Acapulco on its west coast. From Acapulco they crossed the Pacific to Manila; from Manila they sailed the relatively few final miles to legendary Cathay (China). Then they returned by the same route. If winds were favorable, the crew healthy, and the pirates napping, the Spaniards might see home after two years. Otherwise the round trip could require a grueling five years.

INSIDE THE PHILIPPINES

The internal geography of the country is relatively complicated, especially for Americans, because its topography is so different from that of the US. The RP is an archipelago of somewhere between seven and eight thousand islands, some of them so tiny they might sport a single palm tree, or none. Approximately eight hundred islands, however, are inhabited and together support a population of over eighty million people. The two largest islands define the northern and southern regions of the country: Luzon in the north and Mindanao in the south. Between them is the array of well-populated islands collectively called the Visayas, the third major geographical region

I once enjoyed a wonderful trip by Superferry from Manila, which is in southwestern Luzon, to Bohol, an island in the southern Visayas. We traversed just about the entire north-south axis of the Visayas, coming practically in sight of northern Mindanao before looping around to the west and then the north and into the Bohol Straight between Bohol and Cebu. The voyage took twenty-two hours to complete. Bohol’s major export, I was told, only semi-facetiously, is priests. It evidently has a large, well-attended seminary.

Map Two: The Philippines

Historically the Visayas have been in the middle of the action as well as the geography. As mentioned above, Magellan’s first sighting of land in that part of the world was in the Eastern Visayas. He might have established a Spanish foothold there had he not attempted a foolish fight in which the the Spaniards were outnumbered. The result was a victory for the local chieftain, Lapu Lapu, and the death of Magellan. Magellan, however, had claimed the land for Spain, which sent subsequent expeditions to the Visayas to plant the Spanish banner there. General MacArthur, as already mentioned above, chose Leyte Gulf, for his famous return to the Philippines with his armada in 1944. Given this rather violent series of events in the Visayas, I find it ironic that these islands present notably tranquil scenes of lush natural beauty. The ocean scenery off the coast of East Samar, for example, brings to mind exotic images of the South Pacific, similar to those described by James Michener in Tales of the South Pacific.

To the south of the Visayas lies Mindanao. About one-third of the population of Mindanao is Muslim, the other two-thirds being, like the rest of the country, mostly Roman Catholic. Located at the opposite end of the archipelago from the capital, Manila, and also boasting much rugged terrain of mountains and jungles, Mindanao sheltered its inhabitants from outside interference. Thus a sizable number remained Muslim rather than accept Spanish Christianity. Likewise the Americans and the Japanese never completely managed to control the island during their respective turns as colonizers or occupiers.

Relations between parts of Mindanao and the government in Manila remain uneasy, at times breaking down completely, which is partly why travelers like me have been cautioned in recent years by the US State Department to avoid visiting most areas other than around Davao, the capital city. Conditions, including geography, government neglect, and sympathy for fellow Muslims, have favored the growth of Muslim activists, some of whom have ties with terrorist groups. The government and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, assisted by US Special Forces, have begun to lessen the influence of such terrorist groups through a combination of military and humanitarian aid to the local people.

The area of the densest Muslim population has, as a result of years of struggle by the Muslim majorities in those regions, gained a measure of independence and the designation of “Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao” (ARMM). Although ARMM has a measure of self-governance, it remains largely under the rule of Manila. Geographically ARMM occupies a relatively small area located in the far west-central section of Mindanao. Part of ARMM is a chain of islands off its west coast that dot their way practically to Indonesia’s Borneo. Indonesia is a kindred Muslim state.

Because I have never visited there, Mindanao has the romantic aura of the unknown for me. Having flown and sailed to different parts of the Visayas where I have gotten my feet on the ground, I have at least a feel for the region and a sense of how these midlands differ from Luzon. I do not have the same sense of personal acqaintance as yet for Mindanao.

Luzon remains the Philippines of my closest acquaintance, especially the southern provinces and Metro Manila. My impressions of the northern parts of Luzon come mainly from an expedition to Baguio. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, my host on my first visit to the Philippines, in 1994, urged me go to Baguio even after he had to back out himself. Fortunately, I followed his good advice and caught the 6 a.m. bus direct from downtown Manila to Baguio, where it delivered me four and half hours later.

The change is remarkable, from a steamy city (even at 6 a.m.) to the cool evergreen hills of the Cordillera Mountains. There, tucked away in the trees, is a city that once was the summer residence of American governors and military personnel. It remains a favorite retreat for artists and for more affluent Manileños, although regular folk live and visit there as well. Many of the buildings of Baguio’s former US Army base, Fort John Hay, remain, but now provide spaces for museums of art and history, for the entertainment of tourists, and for meetings of conventioneers. The town attracts many and diverse groups of Filipinos. In fact the city was so full when I visited (it was an unusually hot May) that I had to persuade a hotel clerk to let me rent a cot in his basement. Baguio is also noted for its military college where the cadets dress in the same uniforms as their West Point counterparts. Baguio also boasts, and I recommend it, the Tree House (literally) Restaurant.

Like Manila, Baguio had been reduced to a pile of stones during the Japanese northward retreat. The history museum displayed the devastation in large photographs. Unlike the national capital, however, it had been rebuilt and tastefully so, restoring many of its parks and other green spaces. People were friendly beyond the economic desire to please the tourists.

I met my first Philippine minority group outside of Baguio. I had been told that they were Igorots but later discovered that “Igorot” can be an imprecise and often misleading term that is sometimes misapplied to include just about any minority group in the Cordillera Mountains and even beyond. The people I met probably belonged to the Kankanai who live nearby, although the Ifugao live not too distant and might have also brought their wares to the more populous tourist area of Baguio. The Kankanai are noted for their skill in cloth making. I bought a brightly colored tablecloth that turned out, as I later discovered when I went to wash it, to be more for display than for crumbs and spills.

I have had extended conversations with people from two other minority groups, the Kalingas (Northern Luzon) and the Bagobos (South Central Mindanao). In both cases the people I met were dancers and were noted throughout the country for the performances of their native dances. I had the opportunity to attend such performances by both groups and was impressed by their gracefulness and expressiveness.

There are at least thirty-five such minority groups throughout the country, accounting for a small part of the population. I have seen figures ranging from five to fourteen percent of the population, but I incline toward the lower number as the more likely one given increases in the majority population in recent years. These groups are people who share the same Malay-Indonesian-Filipino ancestry with the major cultural groups, but they have for centuries avoided intermingling with each other or with the mainstream of the population. They have in varying degrees also succeeded in resisting or controlling all outside influences, including those of the Spanish and American colonial periods.

The persistence of these cultural minority groups is perhaps the most dramatic type of multiculturalism in the Philippines, but it is not the only one. Meeting the Kankanai in Baguio on my first trip to the Philippines (1994) promptly made me aware of Filipino cultural diversity. Only later and more gradually did I recognize diversity within the majority population of Filipinos when I taught at UP in 1998. Diversity within the majority population arises from intermarriage between Filipinos and outsiders, a mingling of peoples, precisely what the minority groups have traditionally avoided over the centuries.

While I would be hardpressed to itemize them in any scientific way, I gradually recognized the common physical traits of Filipinos that distinguish them from other Asian peoples. Eventually, again simply through experience (and coaching) rather than anything I could explain anthropologically, I began to notice how some of my students, colleagues, and friends blended their Filipino ancestry with other strains. Most prominently, I noted Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and American branches on the Filipino trunk. I know there are other blended heritages, and perhaps one day I will note them as well.

Linguistic diversity within the majority population is a trademark of the RP. Fortunately for me when I encountered Filipinos who didn’t (or, sometimes, wouldn’t) speak English, I managed to get by with Spanish vocabulary. Filipino, the national language, has borrowed freely from both colonial languages, Spanish and English. I was also schooled by some of my students, mainly those from outside the Manila area, that Filipino borrows from several of the numerous dialects (perhaps seventy or more) spoken in different parts of the country. (From my observations, the seven or eight major dialects in the Philippines would qualify among linguists as separate but related languages, similar for example to Spanish and Portuguese.)

Again it was some of my students—and other acquaintances—who pointed out that Tagalog, the dialect that forms the linguistic base of Filipino, was imposed on them by “Imperial” Manila. The Tagalogs lived in the area that is now Metro Manila since well before the Spaniards arrived. Once the Spanish made Manila their capital, Tagalog was on the path, a very lengthy one, to becoming the national language, even though it was not the majority dialect. Cebuanos (Filipinos who are from the Central Visayan region around Cebu and speak Cebuano as their first language) correctly boast that more people speak Cebuano than Tagalog as their first language.

It is interesting to note how linguistic variations seems to have arisen in the Philippines. I initially assumed that different dialects arose because of people on one island being isolated by water from people on other islands. That was an oversimplification. In reality water was (and remains) the major means of communication and thus of shared language. Mountains, however, by dividing some of the major islands were typically the barriers that separated peoples and gave rise to linguistic variation. Thus, for example, Cebuano is spoken on the eastern coast of Negros, close to Cebu (see Map Two), and on the western coast of Leyte, again close to Cebu. Cebuano is not spoken in western Negros or eastern Leyte. In both cases, water facilitated and mountains impeded communication. So convenient was travel on water (and difficult over mountains) that it is easy to understand why the wheel was not invented (or borrowed) until after the arrival of the Spanish.

Filipinos typically learn their regional dialect at home and Filipino and English at school; Filipino in the early grades, English in the later. Ironically they become more linguistically diverse than Manileños, who master only Filipino, based as it is on their native Tagalog, and English. One of the brightest students I knew at UP was from a cultural minority with its own dialect, which he spoke at home. In elementary school he learned the regional dialect and Filipino; only in high school did he begin English. At UP he was doing graduate work in English, his fourth language.

Not all Filipinos stay in school long enough to learn English, and among those that do, not all learn it equally well. It is safe to say, however, that about forty percent of the eighty million Filipinos speak English well. You may have spoken with some of them the last time you called for telephone assistance with your computer or customer service assistance from your credit card company.

A final practical geography note is about the time differences between the RP and the four time zones of the US and, when traveling between the two countries, the effect of the International Dateline (ID). The time difference between Manila and De Pere, Wisconsin, where I live in the Central Time Zone, is fourteen hours (thirteen during daylight saving time). When it is 10 p.m. Sunday night in Manila it is 9 a.m. Central Daylight Time the same day in De Pere. I remember that differential well. When I was teaching at UP I would attend Mass at 8 p.m. on campus at the Catholic church (fondly referred to as “the flying saucer” because of its architecture). Afterward I would call my wife around 10 p.m. It was 9 a.m. in De Pere, and she would be getting ready to attend the ten o’clock Mass there. Sharing Mass that way somehow made us feel closer.

In making travel arrangements between the Philippines and the US, don’t forget about the ID, the imaginary but time-important line that runs down the middle of the Pacific Ocean just west of the Hawaiian Islands. Crossing from east (US) to west (RP) one must add a calendar day to the date, in effect losing twenty-four hours. This ID adjustment is to compensate for the fact that the clock is one hour earlier in each of the twenty-four time zones when traveling from east to west. Magellan’s crew, lacking this adjustment, arrived back in Spain, sailing ever westerly, a full day earlier than their meticulously kept log indicated. Crossing the ID from west to east, of course, requires the opposite adjustment, subtracting a calendar day.

Thus the ID can affect one’s travel plans in significant ways. My most memorable ID experience occurred on my return to the US after a three-week visit to the Philippines in 2004. The flight left Manila at 8:10 a.m. on February 14. Eighteen hours later, including a stop in Tokyo, I arrived in Detroit at 11:45 a.m. It was still February 14. I was weary but happy. A short one-hour flight to De Pere, which is an hour earlier than Detroit, and I was home. The ID had enabled me to get home for Valentine’s Day. In fact it treated me to two Valentine’s Days.

CHAPTER TWO

ON SUNDAY IN MANILA

As I have done on other ventures abroad, I wanted to get to know my new surroundings as well as I could in the time I had. In 1994, on my first visit to the Philippines, I had only a couple of weeks. Now, in 1998, I had what I thought would be ample time, four and a half months. Manila’s traffic gridlock, however, was a huge deterrent to travel. In fact, as I subsequently learned, Manila even has a formula by which it regularly calculates its economic losses due to traffic congestion.

The distance from UP’s campus, located in the Diliman section of Quezon City, to downtown Manila, one of my prime objectives, is only about fifteen miles. But the volume of traffic and the lack of traffic control, along with other factors such as heat, fumes, street vendors, panhandlers, and flash floods, were, and still are for the most part, major obstacles to all but the most determined, or needful, traveler.

The sheer size of Metro Manila is itself daunting. Roughly twelve million people live in what, according to my local tourist bureau map, were originally twelve distinct cities and five municipalities. Getting around this “megalopolis” (my map’s term) was threatening to be too much for me, until I made my breakthrough discovery: Manila traffic is blessedly light on Sunday. This discovery remained valid, I noted, when I visited in 2004. Functioning traffic lights and the absence of street vendors and panhandlers have improved conditions, but the sheer volume of traffic remains as bad or worse than ever during the week. Sundays in Manila are still the best days for exploring.

I had a few frustrating experiences navigating Manila traffic before I made my lucky Sunday discovery. My first encounter arose out of necessity. I was low on Philippine pesos, and none of the three ATM machines on campus had accepted my cash card. Less urgent were a couple of items, particularly a local-style shirt, that I could not get at the campus co-op or the nearby supermarket, the Shoppersville. I had become envious of my male colleagues looking so cool and comfortable in their traditional shirts/jackets called barong tagalogs. I had located a tailor at the co-op; now I needed to get the material in the fabric section of a department store. I can’t remember the third item I needed other than that I would have to find a health food store to get it.

When I mentioned these needs to two of my graduate students, they concluded that I should go to the SM (Shoemart) Megamall in Ortigas, a commercial area of Manila, not quite as far from campus as the downtown area. Two SM Department Stores/Malls were closer, but they were smaller and not likely to have what I needed. If I left the next day, a Wednesday, at about noon and got back by four o’clock, my students advised, I should avoid the near-gridlock that would set in shortly thereafter.

I got a late start but expected to make up some time by taking a taxi. The students, of course, had assumed that I would take a jeepney and the bus. I would not mention my extravagance to them. Taxis seemed a luxury to them, but, as I discovered, in comparison to the US, Manila taxis are inexpensive. With tip included, the fare to the Megamall was 160 pesos or about $4.00. Unfortunately, my driver attempted a couple of short cuts that backfired. I left campus at two but did not get to my destination until three o’clock. Had I left at noon on the jeepney and transferred to a bus, I would have been there earlier. I glanced apprehensively at the traffic as I entered the Megamall.

My first objective was pesos. There were ATM machines at either end of the mall, according to the directory. I had found Philippine ATM machines to be particular about the cards they accepted; some didn’t always accept a card displayed on the machine. Unfortunately my first choice of direction proved fruitless. When neither machine would accept my card, I had to hike all the way to the opposite end of the mall. The SM Megamall at Ortigas is a small, enclosed city, one-and-a-half times the size of a typical US counterpart. I covered many miles that day, along with a few thousand fellow shoppers. The crowds, even in midweek in mid-June, put me in mind of the Christmas rush.

I later learned that this mall, as well as the other four or five SM malls in Manila, had its origins in a simple shoe store run by an enterprising Filipino of Chinese descent named Henry Sy. At the time I didn’t know that fact, nor would I have cared at the moment. By the time I got my pesos, my health items, and my barong material, the mall clocks proclaimed five o’clock and the height of rush hour. When I got to the taxi stand, the line was daunting.

Filipinos have developed an extraordinary patience for waiting, which is probably why they have such a fondness for cell phones on which they constantly text-message friends and relatives who are also waiting in a line somewhere. I was not anxious to emulate their patience. In any case I didn’t own a cell phone. Still don’t. Rather than wait in the taxi queue only to take my turn in a much worse line of traffic, I reentered the mall and went to a restaurant called Max’s, where I opted for fried chicken and rice. I read another newspaper, did some browsing, and discovered a good wine selection in the SM’s supermarket.

At about 8:30, fed and rested, I returned to the taxi stand, which now looked only slightly more promising. It was raining. When an entrepreneurial (meter-off) driver approached me, I struck a deal: 250 pesos (about $6.25) to get back to UP. My students would be scandalized, but I could claim that the twin fates of traffic and rain had intervened. The drive back, even after rush hour and without flawed shortcuts, took a full hour. About half way back to UP, as I looked out into the dark, rainy night, with no clue of my whereabouts, I recalled the repeated warnings about taxi drivers occasionally being in collusions with crooks who kidnapped foreigners. But I was too tired to worry and was more concerned about having an early meeting the next morning, and it was well past my ten o’clock bedtime.

My second episode with Manila traffic and conveyances was my first sightseeing outing. I had had a couple of days to recover from my eight-hour shopping journey to the Megamall. By Saturday I was even looking forward to taking the more standard Philippine modes of transportation, jeepneys and buses, rather than the more luxurious taxis. One of my officemates, Vim Nadera, a graduate of the University of Santo Tomas (UST), had piqued my curiosity about his alma mater. Thinking that Saturday traffic would be less congested than on a weekday, I set out for UST after lunch at about two o’clock. Traffic, however, was just as bad as it had been on Wednesday. Maybe worse. I didn’t realize that yet, when I started out on the UP campus by catching a jeepney to Philcoa, where I would transfer to the bus.

That ride to Philcoa fulfilled my expectation of adventure. It was my first jeepney ride beyond campus. It gave me a sense of accomplishment, unlike my first experience with a jeepney on campus. On that occasion I had to pay the fare a second time because I had to go round the whole route a second time just to find where I should have gotten off. In my defense, the UP campus is huge, encompassing four square kilometers and including several different jeepney routes. Philcoa, however, being the end of my jeepney’s route that day, I didn’t have to worry about where to get off. So I jumped onto the step at the rear of the jeepney, slid along one of the two long seats perpendicular to the driver’s seat, handed over my money with the appropriate expression, “Bayad po,” (Money, sir.), then relaxed and enjoyed this authentically Philippine mode of transportation.

At Philcoa I took the Quiapo bus that would drop me off at UST. Quiapo, an area a few miles from the heart of downtown Manila, had been a kind of recreational suburb of Manila proper before urban sprawl spawned Metro Manila. The bus I took was air-conditioned, but it was also packed with at least sixty people in close quarters. Buses are cramped, typically seating five across, three on one side and two on the other, with a narrow aisle between.

Even with air-conditioning the temperature in the bus was probably in the 80s. Still that was better than whatever it was outside, 90s or above. But the bus crawled along in heavy traffic for nearly an hour before I could make my escape. The conductor had forgotten that I had asked her to point out my stop, but I had plenty of time to locate it on a street map, make my way to the door, and prepare to exit while we inched ahead.

I spent a delightful afternoon at UST (described in a subsequent chapter), and when I left the university grounds in the approaching dark, I managed, with help from other waiting bus riders, to get on a bus going back to Philcoa. This bus was smaller than the previous one but had the same five-across seat arrangement, and this time I was on the aisle. Half of me was in the aisle. The conductor leaned jovially out the door as we approached prospective passengers to invite them aboard. She smilingly herded people into the aisles and then climbed over us to collect her fares.

After forty-five minutes on this bus I was looking forward to my jeepney. One was getting ready to leave as my bus swung into the station. Being the last one to board the crowded jeepney, I had to scrunch part of myself (less than half this time) onto the rear corner of the bench. Our driver handled the jeepney like a bronco buster, to my great discomfort. As we bounced over the speed bumps back on campus, my insides, already queasy from bus fumes, were jarred all the way down to my bruised tailbone. When, finally, I was able, gingerly, to sit down in my apartment, I thought, “Wonderful adventure, but am I too old for this? There has to be a better way to get around.”

A week and a day later, on the last Sunday of June, on my third attempt, I discovered the better way to negotiate Manila traffic. I had decided to spend Sunday by treating myself to a nice meal and a quiet afternoon, a reward for completing my first full week of teaching. My day began, with much promise, in an uncharacteristically half-empty jeepney. On the short ride to the neighboring Jesuit university, the Ateneo de Manila—it was midmorning—the traffic was noticeably light. Most Filipinos in the UP-Ateneo area apparently stayed home on Sunday.

Ateneo itself was pretty much empty, unlike UP, which was always bustling. The grounds were nicely groomed, providing pleasant greenspace for walking. The only other person I encountered was a Korean gentleman from Seoul, a businessman who told me he was escaping from Makati, the financial district near downtown, where he was staying in one of the upscale hotels.

Bidding my new acquaintance goodbye, I took a pedicab across Katipunan Avenue to the National Book Store, one of an excellent chain of stores in the Manila area. I found books by two authors I had wanted to read, Ninotchka Rosca and N. V. M. Gonzalez. Close by the bookstore was my lunch destination, a restaurant and bakery aptly named Cravings. Colleagues and I, on our 1994 visit, had come here several times for desserts after dinner. Aromas, like fresh baked goods, lodge long in the memory. After a very good, reasonably priced noonday meal, including soup, salad, and several vegetables from the buffet, I stopped at the bakery section on my way out. I left with a mango bar and, best of all, three bread rolls called pan de sal, baked that morning. Pan de sal, according to Gelia Castillo, a friend and a noted sociologist, is the national indicator of the economy. The cost of pan de sal, three pesos each, never varies, but the size shrinks or expands depending on the economy.

I caught the jeepney in front of the National Book Store, which is just a block or two from the point where jeepneys cross Katipunan and turn back to UP. Technically I was supposed to pay twice, since I got on before the end of the line, but the driver didn’t ask for the second fare. This jeepney followed a slightly different route than the jeepney I came in (I never could figure out these variations) and let me off a few minutes walk from my apartment, a fortunate circumstance, as events turned out.

As I walked toward my apartment, probably headed for a nap, I kept thinking of how light the traffic had been, even after lunch. Being Sunday, I was also remembering that I had promised a couple of people back home that I would light candles for them in the oldest church I knew of in Manila, San Agustin, which was downtown. These thoughts were occupying my mind when a cabby tooted his horn to invite some business. On an impulse, I got in and said, “Intramuros, please,” indicating the original walled city at the heart of Manila. I startled but also pleased the driver, Marvin Romano Gabriel, who introduced himself as we negotiated an agreement. He would take me directly to San Agustin, wait for me, and bring me back for 275 pesos (about $6.90).

Marvin, I discovered, lived in Quezon City near UP and would, he offered, prearrange such trips if I called him the night before. He would even drive me to Baguio, the resort town about five hours north of Manila. He, and apparently a number of other taxi drivers in Manila, were from Baguio and could stay there overnight with relatives. Marvin did not speak much English, which helped my Filipino vocabulary and pronunciation.

Suddenly, almost miraculously, we were driving down General Luna Street in Intramuros, approaching the monastery and church of San Agustin. We had driven from UP to downtown Manila, practically to Manila Bay, in an astonishing twenty minutes. Marvin returned half an hour later, affording me just time enough to pay a quick visit to the church and light my two candles at the statue of Santa Rita. To my further surprise, the ride back to UP took even a few minutes less. As we approached my apartment, I had already decided that I would spend the following Sunday in Intramuros and that Sundays would henceforth be my day for exploring Manila—by taxi.