also, after several days spent relaxing, tourist-ing, getting used to the city, getting lost on jeepneys, etc, my research is about to start in earnest.  i have one interview tonight, an orientation/meeting lots of young volunteers tomorrow, two interviews on wednesday, two on thursday, three on friday, and one this weekend in Baguio.  AHHHH!

i have approximately 5 billion photos of markets and such, but no idea when i'll have time to post them... ahh!  so much to do, so many places to go, so many people to talk to, so much to write about, so many pictures to post, SO LITTLE TIME

thailand, reunions and contrasts

Yesterday I went to a forum/roundtable discussion on the situation in Thailand (featuring both Filipinos and visiting Thai citizens) that was interesting for several reasons.  First, it was cool listening to the Thai turmoil discussed from a Filipino point of view - there were many comparisons to EDSA and questions of how far those comparisons can go, debate over whether the red shirt/yellow shirt divide is a true class conflict or not, and expressions of solidarity with the Thai.  Secondly, it was my first time watching an academic discussion about the third world/global south that took place in the third world/global south (and yeah, for what those definitions are worth I'd say Thailand is right there - unless you ignore all the rural poor, and as recent events have shown this would be a poor idea).

It was in many ways a very familiar setting, surrounded by professors and listening to a panel speak in academic English (there was a lot of contextualizing and reframed discourse and sociocultural conflict) but thus far in my life I've mostly attended discussions of global poverty and horrific violence in the decidedly wealthy, tranquil setting of Davidson College (and St. Mary's College, come to think of it).  At UP, there was the distinct presence of personal memory and knowledge - of massive street protests, martial law, disappearing opposition leaders, corrupt heads of government, the fury of the disenfranchised poor.  Shared experience filled the room as I struggled to catch all of the references.

But in some ways it was not so different - after all, I think I could fairly say that the well-educated panel-discussion-attendees were members of the elite class (or at least middle class) in the islands and in Thailand.  One attendee asked about the Thai progressive response to the violence (and why they had not known to anticipate it) and whether the anger of the disenfranchised could be channeled into a productive movement.  Before any of the panelists replied, the panel moderator gently reminded her that as wealthy progressives, "we cannot pretend to truly understand movements of the poor and disenfranchised, because we don't share their lives."  I think she was both answering the question about why Thai progressives hadn't seen this coming and chiding the assumption that elite progressives could or should redirect the fury of the protesters.  At any rate, it was a very familiar rebuke.

Thirdly, as I was eating the dinner provided after the forum, a man sitting next to me introduced himself, and after I told him my name was Camila, he said, "Oh... is your dad Tom?"  It was one of the more astonishing moments of my life, given that I was 8,000 miles from home, but it turns out I was sitting next to an old friend/coworker of my mother's (although he thought of my dad's name first, go figure).  This guy knew me when I was 2 years old.  Is that weird or what?

Okay, it's not as weird as it sounds.  He worked with my mom at the Philippine Resource Center, so it's not that surprising that he would live in the Philippines now.  Or that as a white guy he speaks fluent Tagalog.  And one of the panelists was another old friend of my mother's, who actually invited me to attend, so there was a connection.  I was still kind of flabbergasted, though.  My mom's other old friend, the panelist, was a pretty awesome guy - he's in the house of representatives, has written lots of books (including one on Thailand, hence the panel) and although juggling what look like fifty billion different obligations, took the time to introduce me to some people who might help me with my research.  He also gave me a ride back to my condo (along with all the Thai people - we were squeezed into an SUV like clowns into a kiddie car) and we sang along to Bob Marley as we went.  It was pretty cool.

Anyway, my original point was going to be that this was my first time venturing outside of the wealthy enclave of Ft. Bonifacio.  i know, I know, it took me a while - but I was sleeping, and de-jet-lagging, and buying supplies, and - and - well, anyway, I only got here Wednesday morning, so that's just two days I took to acclimate before venturing out past walking distance.  That's not that bad, right?  right?  So I have finally seen more of Manila, and I'm afraid that all I can say - with a stunning lack of intelligence or insight - is WOW.

This place is huge.  And chaotic.  And crazy.  And fascinating.  And the driving!  Well, I'll talk about the driving some other time.  For now, what struck me most of all was the incredible contrast between rich and poor.  I'm hardly the first person to say this, and this is certainly not exclusive to Manila, and it had been pretty well described to me before I came here, but - well - WOW.  It really is unbelievable, and there's nothing like seeing it first-hand.  In two minutes we drove from Ft. Bonifacio High Street, where the night before I'd been gazing longingly through the gleaming windows of an Aldo store, to the entrance to the highway, shadowed by sheet-metal shacks.  As we kept driving towards Quezon City the distinctions just got more and more striking (and sobering).  50-story glass and steel condo buildings rising behind strips of stores and restaurants with roofs held up by sticks.  Barefoot teenagers running across six lanes of traffic, wearing dirty t-shirts and shorts, in front of billboards for designer clothes and watches.  Three scrawny men and ascrawnier dog squatting in front of a BMW dealership.  The mind rebels at the sight - I was staring out of the windows of my taxi, wondering how it was even possible, with an acute sense of guilt from the surety that somehow I am helping.  Part of the solution or...

At least I hadn't bought any Aldos.

lunchtime and language barriers

OK, so the first tagalog words I'm going to learn will most definitely be FOOD WORDS.  I was originally planning on starting with the courtesy phrases (my current repertoire is kumasta ka/po (how are you), mabuti (fine), and salamat po (thank you)  as you can see, it could do with some expansion).  But plans have changed.  Buying lunch yesterday, from the bevy of food stands in the mall, was a downright harrowing experience.

Pancit - I know what that is, though I had no idea it came in fifty thousand variations that look completely different.  And I can visually distinguish the grilled squid from the pork kebobs, the fried chicken from the whole fish.  And the white rice, that I can spot.  But those recognizable items are drowned out by a mass of balls and clumps and soups and stir-fries and wraps and slices and cubes and bowls and plates of... of what?  white and brown and green and red... what?

and I stand there - the only white woman in the entire mall, as far as I can tell, calling plenty of attention to myself as it is - staring cluelessly at the signs.  Kare-kare... I know what that is, I KNOW i know it, I just can't remember!  lumpia... that sounds familiar... whatever it is.  but pochero?  longganisa?  ginisang monggo? I for sure have never heard these words before in my life.  Pro tip: make flashcards for the airplane of the major dishes of your destination country... even if everybody there speaks English, too.

concluding that a fast food market full of people in a hurry was not the optimal time to ask strangers to explain an entire country's cuisine to me, I rolled all my strength into one ball (of unknown ingredients and dubious sweetness), and ordered... kare-kare, grilled squid, something green and squishy, white rice, and something on a skewer.

there goes six years of vegetarianism... departing with lots of tentacles and peanut sauce.

Seriously, though, I need to learn these names.  Call me unadventurous, but yes, I'd like to avoid tripe and chicken intestines (did i mention six years of vegetarianism?  any kind of meat is about as appetizing as... well... chicken intestines!)  and I would very much like to know what I am eating, at the least.  So, tagalog, here I come... from afritada to wansoy, one way or another, i'm going to learn what I'm eating.

P.S.  Sweet tea in the Philippines is EVEN SWEETER than it is in the South.  I didn't even know that was possible.
P.P.S.  Okay, I could have gotten pizza or spaghetti.  But that would have been SUCH a cop-out.
P.P.P.S.  Fruit.  Delicious, delicious fruit.  Maybe i'll write about the fruit later but if I can't learn my monggo from my morcon, at least I can eat mangos!!

Manila

after thirty hours of travel, (flying through thunderstorms, sitting on runways, meeting some wonderful strangers on planes)...

12 time zones and over 8,000 miles...

i arrived.  2 am on Wednesday morning.  left at 7 am on monday.  so wait, counting the 12-hour time difference, i guess that's only 27 hours of travel.  My b.

I have loads more to say... I think.  My brain is kind of stumbling along right now.   Let's see if I can get a full night's sleep tonight and get my neurons operational again, and then we'll talk.

list-making

I have lists of things to buy.  I have lists of things to pack. I have lists of things to do before I leave, and things to do when I arrive, and while I don't yet have a list of things to do when I return, I bet I will soon.  I have lists of whom I've contacted.  I have lists of whom I need to contact.  I have lists of questions, lists of goals, lists of destinations.

I should probably - no, certainly - spend less time making lists of whom to contact, and more time contacting people... less time making lists of what to do (seriously, lists, plural, why would htat ever be necessary?) and more time actually doing it.

But I have finally decided that my list-making serves a vital function.  I sometimes like to feel like I am in control of my own life (we all have our little delusions).  I don't think it's obsessive or unhealthy, and it is hardly a universal rule - for instance, I have no objections at all to being lost, probably as a result of finding myself locationally confused so very often - but it's there.  And I have to accept the fact that when I travel alone to a country halfway around the world for the first time, there's going to be an overwhelming amount of stuff that I just cannot control.

And I know that.  And I accept that...  Theoretically.  Intellectually.

But I still want to have some sense, however small and illusory, of control.  And if making lists helps keep me sane, as long as I remember that my actual control is really limited, then by golly, I'm going to go make some lists of phone numbers to keep handy in printed form so I don't have to worry about my netbook working.

'Scuz me.

on heritage

Hapa: 1; Of mixed racial heritage with partial roots in Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry. 2; If an individual has one parent whom is Asian/Pacific Islander, and one parent whom is of an ethnicity outside of Asian/Pacific Islander, they would generally be considered Hapa. 3; Damn good looking people

- Urbandictionary.com

Seriously, though, all joking aside... I am 1/4 Filipino.  What does that mean?  Can I, should I identify as hapa or mixed-race?  Does it matter that I look white?  That I do not feel connected to Filipino culture?  If I do identify as hapa, am I claiming a heritage and a tradition I don't have a right to?  If I don't identify as part-Filipino, am I 'passing' as white?

And as I travel to the Philippines, is it more problematic to minimize my heritage - which might seem to dismiss it - or to highlight it - which might seem like an attempt to claim a culture I was not raised in?

more borges

A major event in the history of the West was the discovery of the East.  It would be more precise to speak of a continuing consciousness of the East... something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible...

We will examine later the words Orient and Occident, East and West, which we cannot define, but which are true.  They remind me of what St. Augustine said about time: "What is time?  If you don't ask me, I know; but if you ask me, I don't know."  What are the East and the West?  If you ask me, I don't know.  We must settle for approximations.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Seven Nights"

What does "the East" mean to "the West" - and more specifically, what does "the Far East" mean?  I feel like I have spent far more time thinking about orientalism and the interactions between "the west" and "the middle east/near orient" than I have ever spent thinking about the Far East... and I'm part Filipino!

So even before I can start to contextualize my trip - a white American woman traveling to the Philippines - within a larger context, and even before I can start to challenge my own assumptions about "the Far East," I need to know what those assumptions are.  And only then can I start to pick them apart, invert them, or approach them from an "Eastern" rather than a "Western" perspective.

Side note:  these constant quotation marks grow rather tiresome, but I can't help it - I want to use the labels and challenge them at the same time.  I am traveling to the "third world," but I can't quite bring myself to say that I am traveling to the third world.  Does that make any sense at all?

Anyway, the "Far East..." what do I even think of?  Certainly not the Philippines, before I started seriously thinking about going there.  Japan - pagodas, haiku, geishas, food.  China - economics, communism, language, food.  The Koreas - war, Kim Jong Il, flashy cell phones.

Vietnam, war.  Tibet, the Dalai Lama.   Thailand, food.

That's about all I've got, really.  It's downright shameful.  And note that the Philippines don't appear at all - they have the 12th largest population in the world and a long history of US involvement, and they wouldn't even have appeared on my shortlist of associations-with-the-far-east except, perhaps, as a personal note - "and my own ancestors, from this mysterious archipelago I can maybe locate on a map."

My point, I suppose, is that one of the biggest challenges I am working on, as I prepare for this trip, is to understand my own ignorance - maybe even to embrace it.  Not as a positive good, perhaps, and not as an unconquerable evil - I've been doing lots of reading! - but as a fact.  There's just so much I don't know.

Borges was writing (or lecturing, rather) on One Thousand and One Nights - when he says "The Orient," he means "Arabia."  I quote him anyway, because as I reflect on what "the Far East" might mean to me, I too am limited only to the roughest of approximations - and I find

something vast - including China pushes the scale of the East to something quite unimaginable
something immobile - literally, of course, as a fact of geology - but also somehow I have failed to keep up with the changing course of time, and with the exception of images of cell phones, the pictures I paint of "the East" are stuck several hundred or thousand years in the past.
something magnificent - art and religion and beaches, oh my!

and yes,

something incomprehensible...

oh destiny of domonoske

There are worse ways to introduce myself than by explaining that I have a deep and abiding love of Borges, so: Hi, I'm Camila, and I have a deep and abiding love of Borges.

And there are worse ways to start off this blog than with his Elegy, since I am soon to travel to the land of my own estirpe - the land of my own ancestors, my own lineage - and after that, to wander through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London.

Zurich and Cordoba will have to wait, though.

Elegía

Oh destino el de Borges,
haber navegado por los diversos mares del mundo
o por el único y solitario mar de nombres diversos,
haber sido una parte de Edimburgo, de Zurich, de las dos Córdobas,
de Colombia y de Texas,
haber regresado, al cabo de cambiantes generaciones,
a las antiguas tierras de su estirpe,
a Andalucía, a Portugal y a aquellos condados
donde el sajón guerreó con el danés y mezclaron sus sangres,
haber errado por el rojo y tranquilo laberinto de Londres,
haber envejecido en tantos espejos,
haber buscado en vano la mirada de mármol de las estatuas,
haber examinado litografías, enciclopedias, atlas,
haber visto las cosas que ven los hombres,
la muerte, el torpe amanecer, la llanura
y las delicadas estrellas,
y no haber visto nada o casi nada
sino el rostro de una muchacha de Buenos Aires,
un rostro que no quiere que lo recuerde.
Oh destino de Borges,
tal vez no más extraño que el tuyo.


Elegy

Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse
names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the
two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they
mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil
labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias,
atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.

Jorge Luis Borges