Rob's Thailand and the Philippines

In Blumentritt.

I'm back in the US now. I'm slowly getting better, so any more its just hacking and sniffling. I even sound human now.

The above picture, to me, represents more than anything else my memory of Manila. Fundamentally, that is what it is like. Ever moving, crowded, dark.

I came back to Sacramento and the first thing I thought upon driving into my neighborhood is "there's hardly anyone here." A Filipino from Manila, upon coming here, might think that most of the people had been wiped out by a plague. Look at all the space! The cars have so much room, they go so fast, where did everyone go? It's like a science fiction movie.

Day Five: 75% of the population has disappeared. The streets are deserted. All of the street vendors selling Durian and meatballs on a stick have been vacuumed away by a terrifying force, leaving the sidewalks curiously... blank.

I have dreams about buses and trains, and curious Filipino faces. I remember a group of school girls at Fort Santiago that wanted to take a picture with me, like I was some minor celebrity, the only qualification being that I'm Caucasian and six inches taller than almost anyone else there. I was flattered, although I don't know why.

Sometimes I wake up like a man in a Joseph Conrad novel, looking around and seeing the streets and the vendors, the mass of people. I am the captain of a steamer on the Congo, and this is the Heart of Darkness.

I sometimes think about a young boy I saw begging in the street. He went from car to car and knocked on the windows, I remember his tussled hair, and he held one hand forward for money, peering in to see if anyone was there. The car I was in had tinted windows. I hoped he couldn't see me. Why? I was with other people and they weren't giving him anything. Am I embarrassed to give a begging child money because these people aren't? Or maybe it is just that I don't know what to do. Doubt is one of the great curses of man, or maybe just me.

Getting no response, he moves on to the next car and we move forward with traffic. I bless tinted windows, I think I have escaped, I am free, I am inoculated because he didn't see me. Our eyes never met, so he didn't know I was there.

But the reality is I am not free. He didn't know I was there. But I know.

The harsh reality is that I can't help everyone in the Philippines, or anywhere else where there is human misery. I helped a lot while I was there. But what is help? Economic activity? I threw some money around? Is that help?

Now more than ever I am convinced that this place needs a different kind of help, though, so it becomes a country where children don't beg in the streets. I just don't know what that is. Surely some investment can be made here, where the labor earns $70 a month? Wasn't that why China grew so much? What about here?

And maybe I'm overreacting, because I live in a rich country where the streets are quiet at night, and I'm not used to the crush of humanity on sidewalks crowded with street vendors and the smell of fried pork hitting me in the face. They don't seem like unhappy people. They don't have the drug problem that we do. How much misery have they avoided like that? A lot.

But somehow, despite our defeats and their victories, we're still rich and they're still poor.

Heart of Darkness.

Their whole social structure is much more family-oriented than ours is now. Sometimes we're isolated, alone in a strange town because that's where our job is. It's not like that with them. Their family structures seem so expansive that they can go far and wide and still find family to stay with. Wouldn't it be nice to have cousins all over the country that treated you like a brother? That's Filipino hospitality. Even for people who aren't family. Even for me.

So, they're poor, but they certainly seem no less happy than we do. Who am I to storm in there like the Great White Hope and tell them to change?

I don't want to give the impression that I hated the place. I didn't hate it at all, it's just that I thought I was prepared for the reality of what the Philippines is, and in the end, I wasn't. It's not any one thing, I didn't see violence there or any kind of hardship I haven't seen before. It's just that the place is covered by a pall that is so alien to who I am and my own experience that frankly, it disturbed me on a fundamental level. The Philippines scared me. Maybe I will never be able to explain why. Maybe I'll never really know why.

I don't have the answers for what ails the Philippines. Maybe there are no answers. Then again, I don't have any answers for what ails America.

In hindsight, the Philippines changed my perception of the world on a fundamental level. It was a shift, like waking up and discovering that there was an earthquake, and there is a new plateau, and you have to step up just to access the rest of the world. I think, on a subconscious level, maybe that was my goal all along in the Philippines. Maybe that's why I went there. Now, in hindsight, although it wasn't always pleasant, I am glad I did. Is the Philippines a dark place, an evil place? No. Are the Filipinos bad people? Not at all. They are dignified, kind, generous. The place itself, though, gives me a bit of the shivers.

From America, in no particular order, to Glym, Leah, the Boxer Girl, Jelisa, Christy and Ericson, Maryjose, and the girl in the Blue Room with the devastating, dark Vietnamese eyes...

Salamat.

I'd like to tell you all about Ayutthaya, the ancient and historical capital of Siam, but I'm afraid I didn't learn much there. I visited several area landmarks including crumbling ruins, Wats and ancient palaces, but I learned little along the way because I was still half catatonic from being sick. My time in Ayutthaya was more a refusal to bow to illness than an actual tour. I was in Thailand, and by God I was going to visit the landmarks. So I paced myself and took a lot of pictures, but left the learning for later.

One thing I have failed to mention, a curiosity you may have noticed from pictures, is the absence of heads on most of the statues of the Buddha in Thailand. This is because over the centuries, Siam and Burma have sometimes gone to war, and in the areas where non-Buddhist Burma conquered Siam, they systematically removed the heads from all Buddhas they could reach. So all over Thailand, including in a photo from a Buddha at Jim Thompson House in an earlier post, you can see that the old Buddhas are headless.

I was carted around Ayutthaya by the manager of my hotel, who offered the transport service for an exorbitant (for Thailand) cost of $6 an hour. It was still a good investment. Incidentally, my hotel room was $16 a night (and another hotel I had in Bangkok was about $24 a night) and it was quite serviceable. It was better appointed than the $50-a-night room I had in Cabo San Lucas. It did have a couple of lizards roaming the walls when I checked in, but I was so tired I didn't care, and they were gone when I woke up. To where, I do not know.

I found this fellow repairing stonework at the Ancient Palace, among the stray animals.

Ayutthaya, as well as most of what I saw of Thailand and the Philippines, is occupied by an endless menagerie of sickly looking cats and dogs. They roam everywhere, in parking lots, temples, and here in this ancient palace. None of them look very healthy.

Some of them, alarmed at my approach, got out of the way in a very energy-conserving way. It was clear that they were not well nourished. If you are going to come to Asia and you love these animals, my advice is to bring some pet snacks. I kept wishing I had some. The Thais apparently regard them as vermin and pay them no heed whatsoever.

I find it funny that Thailand is a monarchy, and yet the country seems to be quite well run. Hmm.

I can't say I liked Davao very much. It seems to be a city in dire need of a big maintenance push. It had the same kind of traffic, street vendors and uneven sidewalks as other poor places I've been. On the plus side, though, everyone was unfailingly polite at all times. This really has to be said to the credit of Filipinos. Whether it was the cashier at a store or a security guard searching my person and my bags, all was "Yes sir," and "Thank you, sir."

Speaking of searches, I have never been searched before, in my entire life, as much as I was searched in the Philippines, and this includes my misspent youth. I was searched going into malls, entering stores, and my taxi was searched every time I pulled up to a hotel. And the Filipino security guards and police are armed with wicked looking pistol grip shotguns.

A guard in Fort Santiago. Note Don't-Mess-With-Me firearm. He told me it was unloaded.

The Filipino culture resembles Hispanic or Latino culture much more than any Asian culture. Other than the people being of Asian appearance, this could be Mexico City. I hear Latino music here all the time. Maybe it’s the Catholicism, or that the country was a Spanish colony.

People's Park in Davao. They search you before they let you in. They even take your cigarettes, because smoking is banned in most places in Davao. Sadly, this is about what I got to see of Davao before I got deathly ill.

I had fun in Davao for my first couple of days, including going out with a girl and her friend and ending up singing Karaoke in a beach hut at 4:00am. While we were at the Blue Room, a bar in a hotel here, they were telling me that they never got to do things like this. They were very pleased and thankful that I would spend so much money on them. The total bill for two bars and a karaoke beach hut: About $35.

I don’t tell you this to brag, and I’m not throwing money around to look like Mr. Big. But I took out three other people (one girl’s boyfriend came over too) for an entire evening of drinking and bad singing, and it cost me $35. Who wouldn’t want to do that if they could? Isn't the best time the one where you don't have to worry about money?

I have to also say that there was a woman working in the Blue Room who was just stunning. She had dark, piercing eyes and looked vaguely Vietnamese. I wish I'd been able to take some pictures of her.

Beggars in the US are drug addicts and the mentally insane. Beggars in Bangkok were women with children at their feet. Beggars in Davao are children. They come up to your window and knock and hold out their hand. I haven’t given them any money yet, and I just stopped to ask myself why. It’s because I’ve conditioned myself to ignore beggars because in the US, giving them money is counter-productive. They just buy booze or drugs with it, because they already have other support systems for the basic necessities (shelters, churches, etc.). Here, they’re beggars because they are dirt poor and they need money to stay alive. So I’m going to start giving it to them.

I won't dwell on it, but I saw one woman lying in the street, begging, who did not look like she was going to be alive much longer. Even the Filipinos on Jeepneys were giving her money.

In wandering the streets here I was approached by another woman, a prostitute, with yellow eyes. If I ever had an interest in hookers, it would have ended when I talked to her. Visible signs of disease are a big red flag. I politely tried to dissuade her and continued on, ignoring her. This is unfortunately the only way to deal with touts, whether they be salesmen or prostitutes, because if you talk to them they will never leave you alone.

About two blocks away, I turned around and she had been following me. I guess when you look like you're already sick, it can be hard to drum up business in the sex trade, because she was desperate. She asked if I was staying in a hotel, I said yes. She said "I go to your hotel with you." Uh, no.

So we come back to this: Why is the Philippines so poor? It’s like nobody can keep any money around here. It just vanishes. Why is the Philippines poor and the US is rich? Is it corruption? Cultural? It’s not laziness. Filipinos work much harder for a buck than Americans do. It could be the recession, but not wholly.

Some of it has to do with the infrastructure, I think. The whole time I was there I didn't see a single freeway. I think they exist, but they must not be of much use, because I travelled the length and breadth of Manila and we never got on one.

If you ever wondered why immigrants in the US will work so hard for so little, you only have to visit a place like the Philippines, where they work just as hard for much less. The monthly wage for a cashier-type job here seems to be about $70. That's one day of work in the US at minimum wage. One girl I knew told me she'd be glad to come to the US and be a janitor, and she wasn't being funny about it. She genuinely would jump at the chance. If you lived here, so would you. You would leap - with both feet.

Across the street from my hotel there is a building that would be decent looking, except that its fancy tiles have fallen off of the bottom of the building. Maybe they could replace them, but they don’t. Do they just not have any money?

Maintenance seems to be an ongoing expense that is just not done here. Also, Davao could really use a street sweeper. The gutters, sidewalks and streets just have dirt everywhere. Is this cultural? It must be, because barring a street sweeper, you could just pay Filipinos to sweep the place up. If there’s one resource the Philippines has, its cheap labor.

And like Mexico, there seems to be no effort to make the sidewalks even, so you have to watch where you’re stepping at all times.

Anyway, after two days here everything went to hell because I caught the nastiest bug I’ve had in many years. I was so sick that I went to the Davao Doctor’s Hospital and, it being a Sunday, had to use the emergency room. They did blood tests on me and I breathed some steam from some device. My insurance isn’t accepted here, so I was dreading the bill. Total cost: 850 pesos. About $17.

Considering the number of people who waited on me, and the doctor, I just cannot fathom how this place stays open. My whole visit was less than my co-pay at home. But a better question is, why is it many times more expensive in the US? If you want to look at a model for reducing health care costs, I would think you would start in the Philippines.

I told my friend here later that I had gone to the hospital. She asked which one. I said Davao Doctor's Hospital. "Ooh," she said, looking grave. "That's the expensive one."

So I slept in my hotel room for three days. Then I changed my flight and went back to Manila a day early.

One thing that makes the Philippines an attractive destination for Americans is that English is spoken widely here as the result of decades as an American possession. So I feel right at home - just like in California, English is a second language here. You can travel far and wide here and never need to learn a word of any of the local dialects.

A few that might help though:

Opo – Yes
Salamat – Thank You.
Mahalkita – I Love You.

Be careful with that last one.

I met a friend here that I had been chatting with online for some time. She was very nice, and spoke English well, and laughed at most of my jokes, which is important.

I spent an evening with her family at her home. I was warned against doing this kind of thing by some people, who said I would end up spending a boring night being interrogated by relatives, but I don’t want to learn the Philippines of shopping counters and restaurants. This is not the true Philippines, any more than a visit to a mall in America teaches you anything about America. So I went anyway, and I learned a lot about this place, and incidentally it was a lot of fun. Her family laughs at my jokes too.

They spent the evening variously plying me with food and drinks, casually mentioning marriage possibilities with my date here, and trying to get me to buy into a taxi company. Well, it sounds bad when you say it like that, but it wasn’t. Their family owns a taxi company, and apparently they have ten taxis in service. The person trying to get me involved in the family business didn’t speak English very well, so I wasn’t totally clear on what was being offered. They either wanted me to buy 200 taxis or 400 taxis, or land in Manila to park the taxis, or part of the company. I told them foreigners can’t own land in the Philippines. They said you put it under the wife’s name. And we're back to that again.

One of her relatives was a lot of fun to talk to. He had a great sense of humor and liked World War II history like me. We spent a long time talking. He’s the one who taught me to say “mahalkita”.

“’I love you’ in Tagalog is ‘mahalkita” he said.

“Mahalkita” I repeated.

“Who?” he asked.

Not wanting to get roped into anything on the first day I met her, I said to him “You.”

Everyone laughed. Then he shouted “I’m going to America!”

Driving in Manila is a lot like Thailand. The horn is very important here. In the US, to honk is to say “Hey asshole!” It is nearly a threat. In Asia, the horn means variously “I’m here,” “stop”, go”, “what are you doing?” “let me in,” “get out of the way,” “watch out,” “all clear,” and finally “I have no idea what's going on.”

The Philippines' own home-grown mass transit solution is the Jeepney. This is an elongated truck that looks like a Jeep in the front and a small school bus in the back. A Jeepney route is typically pretty short, a couple of miles I think, but there are so many, with so many routes, that it isn't hard to find your way wherever you want to go. A ride on a Jeepney is from 7-10 pesos - 15 to 20 cents.

Driving in the Philippines is one big, continuous game of chicken. Your objective is to merge into traffic or cross the street when there is no possible way of doing so without the threat of an accident. To do this, you must simply go, without regard to other drivers, and if someone has to stop to prevent an accident, so be it. Of course honking is very important. You can have whole conversations with other drivers just using the horn.

Beep. “Let me in.”
Honk Honk: “You can’t come in.”
Beep Beep: “I’m coming in.”
Honk: “Don’t do it.”
Bee-Beep Beep: “Here I come.”

Sometimes they honk once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times with a pause in the middle. It sounds random, but in fact may be a cleverly orchestrated code system. "Beep Bee-Beep Beep." Translation: "I have a passenger and he's a foreigner, get out of the way."

Taxis, again, are dirt cheap if you go by the meter. My ride to the airport, maybe 8 miles, was less than $2. Any ride of less than, say, 8 blocks is less than $1.

And they are still talking about Michael Jackson, but somehow, not as much as they are in the US I don’t think.

A visit to Asia is an education in globalism. The malls have shops for Louis Vutton, Dolce & Gabbana, Swatch, even Wrangler. There are a lot of 7-Elevens here. They even have the Big Gulp, but it’s not 32 ounces, its 22-somethings. Deciliters or miniliters or whatever those are. They have localized versions of Fear Factor and Who Wants to be a Millionaire (as does Mumbai India, if last year's Oscar winner for Best Picture is anything to go by.)

Some things in Asia are cheaper than America, but anything made by any multi-national corporation seems to cost about the same wherever you go. If you buy something from Dolce & Gabbana, it's going to cost you about what it would cost you in the US. If you get a Rolex for much less than the US price, it's probably fake.

Some Americans delight in navel-gazing and thinking up all the reasons the US was wrong to do what it did, at whatever time it did it. This really strikes me as a form of self-hatred. There is still some debate in the US about whether we should have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, for example. In the Philippines, I do not see any such criticism, nor any propensity to pursue it. They experienced the Japanese Imperial Army first-hand. They do not wonder whether our behavior in World War II was excessive.

I doubt you will find any person in the Philippines with any criticism of the US war effort, except regret that we surrendered the country in the first place. We could have burned the Japanese soldiers alive en masse and my impression is that the Filipinos would not have said a word in protest, and for good reason. The sadism and cruelty of the Japanese occupiers in the Philippines and elsewhere is legendary. I won’t go into it now, but the information is there if you want to learn about it. The Bataan Death March would be a good place to start.

It’s things like liberating the Philippines that make me proud of my country, regardless of the purity of our motives for doing so.

They don’t have much to say in support of the Spaniards who colonized them for 300 years either. Their national hero is a man named Jose Rizal, who wrote many letters and two books in an effort to expose the cruelty of the Spanish. For his efforts, they eventually executed him. His writings are beautiful though, and reveal a deep love for the Philippines and its people. I’m beginning to agree with him. People here are resolutely polite and friendly.

Some of Jose Rizal's personal items. He was a doctor.

One of Rizal's girlfriends. Revolutionaries get all the good-looking women. He was a famous ladies man.

Anyway, I still wonder why they are so pro-US here. We held the Philippines as a possession before and after World War II. We were viewed as “occupiers” by at least some of the sources I have read here. But the Philippines is overwhelmingly pro-US. Even more pro-US than the US. There, we are split 50-50 or 60-40. Here, pro-American opinions on most things US are in the 80% range.

I suspect it is because we liberated them from the Japanese, and then eventually supported independence and democratic reform there. Truth be told, the liberation was probably enough.

I left Manila wishing I had more time to spend there.

On my last day in Bangkok I visited Jim Thompson House. Jim Thompson was an American OSS agent (the organization that preceded the CIA) during World War II and settled in Thailand afterwards. He transported several houses from different areas of Thailand and assembled a little compound in Bangkok. This compound bears many old artifacts of Thai culture collected by Mr. Thompson when he lived there. Sadly he disappeared mysteriously in the 60's in Malaysia.

I learned during this tour that Thailand has never been a colony of a western power, though it was bordered on the south by the British colony of Malaysia, and on the north and northeast by the French colonies of Burma and Indochina. The Thai people are proud of this fact, and in the 1970's changed the name of the country from Siam (pronounced SeeYAHM) to Thailand, meaning "Land of Freedom."

I try to take these things into account when I visit foreign lands. The land is the people, and the people have a memory of what has happened to them in the past, and this shapes who they are.

From here, my next stop is the island nation of the Philippines, a place I know a little more about, due to its prominence in World War II and American history.