At home in Asia
(During the spring cleaning I did during Valentines’ Day, I retrieved this unpublished speech from the bottom of a bayong.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 – first in Malaysia, and later in Singapore.)
Like many Filipinos of my generation, the only thing I wanted was to live abroad. This was true for those of us who grew up during the dark days of the Marcos dictatorship, when the future was gray and on our tongues there was nothing else, but the taste of ashes.
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 Leondardo di Caprio, or a Catholic nun before she became the fabulous Beyonce.
And so I studied in the United Kingdom on a British Council fellowship, 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 later, studied at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on a Fulbright Felloswhip, 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 instead of pining for Wichita, in 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 Filipinos 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. One night I went to a party in my torn jeans and tight shirt and the police at the checkpoint asked me to get off the cab. They checked my palms for calluses (sign of construction worker) and did not believe me when I said I was a teacher back in Manila. When I showed them my passport (multiple entry, professional visa, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia: it said), they bowed collectively at me and asked, looking at my torn jeans and tight shirt and spiked hair, “Where did you come from, Professor?” I said, “From a costume party.”
It was good my friends were there to comfort me. My friends at UKM 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 cobble-stoned streets of Amsterdam, on a chilly day with no sun in the sky, walking on the way to the University of Amsterdam 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 surly people who 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 lonely 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 the 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 ceramic fragments melting in the dying afternoon.
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, one of several sitting serenely in Borobudur, green with lichen and slippery with rain. Half of its face had been blown off by the blast of dynamite several years ago but its one surviving eye looked at me. Its steady gaze seemed to tunnel 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. All my cousins have emigrated either to Canada or the United States. Last October, my sister finally left for the US and her son followed her in November. I live in her big, three-story townhouse in Fairview because no one else lives there anymore. One of my sisters has been in the US for ages and my brother works in the Middle East. Only my sister who has Down’s Syndrome and I have remained in the Philippines.
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 remain there, in one’s tongue, like moist and vivid memories.
And if I do not live in Manila, well, there is Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore, or Bangkok, now that ASEAN Integration have come, is here. These cities are cousins of each other, and I know I will always feel at home in Asia, chaotic and colorful Asia.