Truly Asia
(During the spring cleaning after the habagat finally left, I retrieved this unpublished speech from the bottom of a bayong. I read this at the Asian Scholarship Foundation closing program in July of 2003, in Bangkok, Thailand. Thanks to Dr. Lourdes Salvador, director of the now-defunct and much-lamented Asian Scholarship Foundation, which gave me two successive fellowships to live and write in Southeast Asia).
Like many Filipinos of my generation, the only thing I wanted was to live abroad. Abroad, of course, meant Europe and the United States of America. National Artist Nick Joaquin famously said that the Philippines lived for 300 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Thus, the Filipino was a Catholic priest before he became a Brad Pitt, or a Catholic nun before she became Britney Spears.
And so I studied in the United Kingdom, finally living in the land of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. Specifically, I studied at the University of Stirling, lived in a dormitory beside a 400-year-old castle inhabited by ghosts, and spoke Scottish-accented English for a year and a half. And then I studied in the US, finally living in the land of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, so very happy in the library full of books that remained open until 12 o’clock in the evening. Why, I even did the unimaginable — I taught college-age Americans how to write their poems and stories — in English!
But one day I came back to Manila and thought that maybe, I should know more about Kota Kinabalu than Kansas. And so I applied for an Asian Scholarship Foundation grant and lived in Malaysia for a year. Malaysia is the country closest to the Philippines, but it’s a country we know nothing about. We might as well be talking about Saturn, or Pluto. When I arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Sept. 1, 2002 they were busy deporting planeloads of Indonesians and Filipino who were overstaying and working illegally. I clung to my passport every day and tried to look nonchalant about it. Being a Filipino, Malaysian police and Immigration thought I was either a construction worker or a singer in a cocktail lounge.
It was good my friends were there to comfort me. My friends at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia teased me for my American English. The Chinese taxi cab driver thought I was Chinese and talked to me in Cantonese. The Japanese tourists at the Petronas Twin Towers thought I came from northern Japan and started a conversation with me in Nihonggo. And the Spaniards at the Instituto Cervantes struck up a conversation with me in Spanish. Well, they were all partly correct, because being Filipino, I have mixed bloodlines — Malay and Spanish and Chinese and Japanese.
But I only felt at home truly, madly and deeply at home when I lived in Southeast Asia. I did not feel any sense of alienation. None of the sense of alienation I felt when I saw the dark and sooty buildings of London while on the train from Gatwick to Victoria Station that dawn of September 1989 when I arrived, to take up my graduate studies in the UK. None of the sense of alienation I felt when I was walking on the cobblestoned streets of Amsterdam, on a chilly day with no sun in the sky, walking on the way to the university to deliver a paper on “gayspeak” in the Philippines. None of the sense of alienation I felt when I was rushing to take the subway train in New York, among a horde of people that avoided each other’s eyes, for to do so means you want to strike up a conversation, and that is a no-no in these cold and temperate countries.
Instead, when I lived in Southeast Asia, when I traveled to Thailand and Vietnam, lived in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, I felt like I was coming home. The sound of the gamelan playing at the Actors’ Studio on the basement of Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur. Crossing a stone bridge in Hanoi that leads to a museum full of ancient turtles carved in stone, the shells of turtles symbolizing the quest — and the burden — of knowledge. My jaw dropping at the sight of the ceramic fragments at Wat Arun beside the Chao Praya River, glittering in the setting sun, the various colors of the sunlight bouncing off the fragments. A black-and-white butterfly that followed me as I walked round and round the stone steps of Borobudur, toward the stupa trying to reach the Indonesian sky. The ancient temple was destroyed by dynamite planted there more than 20 years ago. I remember one Buddha, green with lichen and slippery with rain. Half of its face had been blown off by the blast of dynamite, but its one surviving eye looked at me.
Its steady gaze tunneled inside me, into my very veins. It seemed to be telling me to let everything go, and let my heart be.
And I have done just that. My three cousins just emigrated to Canada last month. One of my best friends moved to the US recently. My brother and his family are planning to live in Canada as well. My parents are leaving for the US too, to live with my sister in the sunny state of California.
But I am staying here, where I am happiest — in Asia, where beauty and poverty commingle, whose countries are not separated but linked by the sea, bodies of islands where the cultures are ancient, diverse and dazzling, where the food — nasi goreng, mee hon, and beef satay; pho ha, tom yam kung, and bulgogi; Hainanese chicken, roti chanai, and adobo — all remains there, in one’s tongue, like the most moist, and the most vivid, of memories.
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