Canaries in the coalmine

I touched down in Manila the other day – NAIA on a cool, post-typhoon evening – and as I filed back among the balikbayans and (surprisingly many) Americans waiting for luggage, I thought about the ritual of returning: how it’s always a bittersweet thing.

I’ve just spent a month traveling in the States, and the most persistent question I heard – "Why are you going back to Manila?" – usually came, not from Americans, as you might expect, but from Filipino-Americans.

"Why are you going back there?"

Sounds a little bit rude, doesn’t it? And sort of smug, especially accompanied with that wrinkling of the nose adopted by Stateside Pinoys. The question wasn’t always phrased just so; sometimes it came out like, "Aren’t you afraid to be living there?" Or – another favorite sideline sport of ex-pat Pinoys – accompanied by a lengthy exposition beginning with the phrase, "The problem with Filipinos…"

An hour later, after the recitation is over, all you can do is nod your head, agreeing with the Fil-Ams who have decided to make their berth in the US, where at least you can get 48-ounce boxes of breakfast cereal.

I spent the Fourth of July – America’s celebration of its independence – watching the fireworks explode over the East River. A big gala, surrounded by Filipino-Americans who had a choice viewing spot from their apartment on 13th Street, facing the harbor. Do these Filipinos spend much time thinking about Manila? Fuhgeddaboudit.

"The Philippines? It’s too hot, too hot there," says the Pinoy apartment dweller, shaking his head. "I tried going back there for a couple of weeks; I had some business in Makati. I never left my car for more than five minutes. The heat was just too much."

Another Filipina party guest asked me about the Abu Sayyaf situation. She seemed to have little idea that Mindanao was far, far away from Metro Manila.

"Do you feel safe there, as an American?" This was another favorite question directed at me, one which made me chuckle inside. As if the Abu Sayyaf were the only worry facing foreigners. As if I felt any more safe before the Abu Sayyaf started acting up, when I just had to deal with traffic, insane drivers, coups, mall bombings, typhoons, earthquakes, and brownouts…

To be fair, living in the States does not seem to cultivate large feelings of Philippine patriotism, or even geography, among transplanted Pinoys. Other than the news they pick up from relatives, visitors shuttling back and forth between the two countries, the philosophy seems to be: out of sight, out of mind. Either that, or the Fil-Ams I met tended to shake their heads in disappointment when the subject came up, as though embarrassed by some black sheep uncle back home. The Philippines might as well be just any other nation mentioned on the world news wrap-up on CNN.

Granted, the news emanating from Manila during my trip to America was not reassuring. The peso kept sliding. Filipinos and Americans alike grumbled about the reported beheading of a US hostage, and everybody seemed to bemoan the government’s inability to cut down the Abu Sayyaf once and for all. Why, the Americanized Pinoys kept asking themselves, can’t the country get its act together?

According to my Fil-Am sources, it’s the same old crab mentality, the inability to act as one, that is stopping the Philippines from moving on, from stabilizing and progressing. There are many arguments for why this is so, as shown below:

• "Filipinos need to learn to help each other, instead of resenting anybody who gets ahead, trying to pull them down." (The Altruism Argument)

• "Filipinos have a lot of good qualities, but there are some bad habits inherited from the Spanish." (The Nature Argument)

• "Filipinos just need to be more disciplined." (The Nurture Argument)

• "The Philippines used to be ahead of Japan, back in 1965" and "Marcos did so much damage to the country, it just never recovered." (The Nostalgia Argument)

These are the comments of Filipinos, young and old, living and working in America. Some are studying, most are working hard for the dollar, trying to raise families in the anonymity of American life. They face the double-bind of wanting to retain some connection to life back in the Philippines, yet finding little to embrace. Instead, they must endure snide comments from radio jocks like Howard Stern ("Why not just nuke Mindanao?") and, in many cases, they bury themselves in American consumerism as an escape from bad news back home. "The first thing the Filipino wants here is to buy a home," notes one transplanted Californian. That is the classic definition of the American Dream. Until then, they seem content to stockpile appliances, big-ticket items, cars, clothing, and lots and lots of food.

And as for those die-hards who refuse to abandon their homeland, who refuse to join the latest "brain-drain," who are determined to stick it out "a little while longer" in the Philippines? To their countrymen living abroad, those brave souls are beginning to seem like canaries in a coalmine: Everybody’s waiting to see how long they can last without keeling over.

Picking up my uncollected mail back in Manila, I came across a Newsweek cover story, a sly lampoon of a vacation postcard: Greetings from the 10 Worst Countries in the World!

I quickly flipped to the story, hoping not to locate the Philippines among the top 10. Phew. Dodged a bullet there. You’d have to be pretty bad off to beat Sierra Leone or Haiti for corruption and governmental dysfunction, it turns out. So maybe things could be worse. Come on, let’s all chant it together: "At least the Philippines is better off than Mali, Albania and Tajikistan!" In these shaky days, it could be the closest thing the Philippines has to good news.