in which i am no longer the whitest person in the room

I've experienced a new kind of culture now - backpacker culture!  I spent the last two nights at a guesthouse catering to the backpacker population, and it's been quite the experience. I've stayed at hostels and pension houses before, but not ones with really popular common areas, so I hadn't really hung out with other travelers, but at Friendly's a whole slew of nomads were hanging out in the rooftop lounge.

And I really would define it as a cultural experience, because the backpacker community does seem to have its own distinct culture.  Though hardly any backpackers here are American or British, English is the language of currency, so that Dutch and Spanish and German and French travelers can all communicate with each other.  Cheap hostels, cheap food and cheap beer are the staples of life.  Everybody is reading, and talking about what they're reading, and swapping books, and everybody drinks, and everybody smokes.  Hot damn, do they ever smoke.

Talking to strangers is completely acceptable - no, more than that, it's absolutely essential.  There's an almost desperate friendliness to some of the travelers, in fact, which makes sense if you consider just how lonely travel can be.  Especially if you're traveling by yourself.  Especially if you've been on the road for as long as many backpackers have - when I asked, "and how long have you been traveling?" the answer was almost always counted in months, and sometimes in years.  One guy hadn't been to his home country in a decade.

Nobody has firm plans - at least not that I've met.  Everybody is making it up as they go along, asking each other for tips and advice, stretching out their money and their time, changing countries so they don't have to get visas.  "Travel buddies" seem to be shifting alliances, as people who started together go separate ways, strangers who just met in the dorm rooms plan to visit the next city together, and everybody, after a while, just tries not to be alone

and gawd, can these people complain!  Manila isn't "Filipino" enough, it's all Americanized, the Germans complain while they sit in their hostel.  They even have Wendy's!  Where's all the Filipino food?  I (rather gently) suggest that they visit one of the turo-turo canteens, the carinderias locals run out of their home, where adventurous eaters can point at whatever looks tasty - and they say, "Oh, I haven't seen any of those yet," although they are on every single street.  And they say they can't wait to get to the provinces, where it will be beautiful and they can see the "real Philippines," whatever that means, and I suggest (humbly speaking from painful experience) that they bring their own mosquito nets, and they say, "oh, we'll be staying at beach resorts, I'm sure they'll have some."

and I remind myself that the only reason I've eaten at carinderias and met, you know, actual Filipinos is because I have family here and I'm doing research that forces me to, and who am I to judge how these people choose to travel?  but when we're talking about malls I mention the squatter communities in the same city as the massive Mall of Asia, and a German backpacker laughs and says "Just like an American city, huh?" and I say, "um, no, actually.  I have pictures.  Would you like to see them?" and show the scrap-metal shacks hanging precariously over trash-filled rivers, and the children swimming in the same water where the sewage goes, and talk about electricity-tapping and floods and typhoon damage.  And they say, "Great pictures."  And they probably think I'm a sanctimonious asshole but it was driving me crazy to hear them say that Manila is "just like America," especially when the derisively ask what happened to the culture here.  And I said, oh you know, five hundred years of colonization and a world war that completely destroyed the city, and they said, "yeah, BUT..."  Anyway, maybe I am a sanctimonious asshole.  I mean, who pulls out slum photos during a casual conversation about the sights in Manila?

And the backpackers certainly are a friendly community, and it would be a gross and offensive generalization to say that they all think Manila is like America, or that the "real Philippines" can be found at beach resorts - there are a lot of travelers pretty aggressively seeking the unfamiliar.  Looking for limit-experiences, I guess, or maybe just bored, or who knows!  Something keeps them traveling month after month, arriving at new ports full of strangers and another unfamiliar language.

Anyway, I had some really interesting conversations that unfortunately distracted me from the passage of time, so that I didn't make some phone calls that I really needed to make.  And in the evening, instead of updated my list of expenditures - kind of essential because right now I don't even know how much money I have left - I wound up watching Funny People with an awkward Israeli.  Poor life decision.  But hey, cultural experience, right?  :P

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...