What Manila’s antique stores and bookshops can tell us
Dusty.
It was what I remember most as I shuffled through row upon row of vinyl records from the ’60s at a store appropriately called ‘Vinyl Dump’. While I don’t own a record player, scrounging through vinyl records and diving inside antique dust pits has been a habit that I picked up as a university student back in the Philippines. That is why when I came home during Christmas last year, visiting the Cubao Expo was part of the itinerary.
For starters, the Cubao Expo — or as it’s known nowadays, Cubao X — is an area in the district of Cubao, Quezon City, in the Philippines with row upon row of antique shops, watering holes and an Italian restaurant that has been around since 1999. It is a single U-shaped street that one can breeze past in less than five minutes. Before it was the ‘X’, it was first known as the Marikina Shoe Expo. The street was filled with shoe stores. At some point, the shoe stores vanished and, in their place, the Expo became a haven for artists, curators and those bitten by the nostalgia bug.
As a university student, I remember one of my classmates telling me to go there if I hadn’t. That same afternoon after class, I found myself kneeling on the floor of one of the antique shops as I browsed through their collection of books. That night, I saw a naval jacket from the Second World War, copies of the Liwayway magazine — my grandmother told me browsing those was the official Filipino pastime back in the ’50s, and one of those televisions that had a cabinet to conceal it. Snap to now. Nothing much about the Expo has changed. It was still that dusty place where Americana is piled alongside Soviet, Japanese and Filipino memorabilia. One store had a flask from the erstwhile USSR, another had Chevrolet hubcaps and photographs of celebrities from the ’40s. During my visit, there was this one store, UVLA, that had toys which could have been enjoyed by my grandmother or grandfather. Despite being inside a glass case, its patina showed how much joy it must have given to its former owner. For a moment, I thought antique shops are not just places to buy quirky things and put them on display, they are cathedrals of memory. A rusted bicycle could reveal the many crashes its rider faced, a film camera’s wear could tell us of the places where it has been, a toy could tell stories of how its owner got it.
As I stepped inside another store, a toy Ferrari caught my attention. My parents gave me that very same Ferrari toy back in the ’90s after their trip to Hong Kong. Despite it being a ‘display item,’ the kid in me ran it around, made whirring, engine sounds and even sat on it — as if my 4-year old self could fit in a scale model of a Ferrari. In that same store was a poster for television show that I used to stay up late to watch.
Apart from antique shops, the Expo also housed second-hand bookstores. While Dubai’s secondhand bookstore scene exists, Manila is home to many second-hand bookshops. Blame our ‘economical’ pursuit of knowledge for it.
At one such bookstore, I could overhear the storeowner talking about the British indie band, Joy Division. The conversation trailed on as I browsed. During this time of involuntary eavesdropping, I realised that the reason I keep going back to the X is not because of the fancy items from back in the day. But because its filled with people — people that know the value of preserving and remembering history. Back in the UVLA shop, three old men discussed various religious sects of the world and their impact on society. These people are the unknown curators of our age, people who keep a bygone age alive so that nobody every forgets who we were and how we used to be before this era of instant everything.