Manila: A Brief Sentimental History

Volume 1, July, 2016

by Charlie Samuya Veric

I arrived past midnight in a gray shirt and smoking jacket. Bleary-eyed, I felt the wind hit my face as I stepped out of the airport. It was humid—late May when summer gave way to the first signs of monsoon. My brother, himself newly returned from Dubai where he had worked as a fashion designer, waited for me in the arrival area with my ex-boyfriend who thought we could still repair our selves. Standing there in a pair of boat shoes, looking lost, I realized I was overdressed for the city that lay sleepless at my feet.

We got into a cab in no time, the blue sports luggage that I had taken with me to the United States five years earlier, tucked away in the trunk. It was the heaviest object that I carried back, full of clothes and books. To think I had hoped to travel light from graduate school, wishing for a less painful experience after turning my back on the blandishments of American life.

On Sunday, I received my doctorate in American Studies, marching in my velvety gown in a light rain that fell intermittently in New Haven. By Friday, I was on a Cathay Pacific airbus en route to Manila, stopping briefly in Hong Kong before heading home, traveling with returning overseas Filipino workers who made ribald jokes throughout the trip and ignored everyone else, including the stewardess who paced helplessly in the aisle.

From the cab, everything seemed like a blur: the trees on the roadside, vacant lots, jeeps picking up commuters leaving early for work, vendors in the glow of street lamps. My head spun, trying to make sense of how the tall glass windows of JFK, shooting up in the air like birds in flight, could turn into the dullness of low houses in a matter of hours. There I was, between New York and nowhere, moving in space more quickly than my mind could ever grasp. Oblivious to my dizzy incomprehension, my brother and ex-boyfriend eyeing me quietly, the cab swam in the thick humidity of a city no sooner benumbed than living.

I awoke the next day to a rattling din, the sounds of tricycles punctuated by roosters, drunken men drowning their sorrows in karaoke. Out the window, the petals of a fire tree lay scattered on the ground following a thunderstorm. Then it hit me. My American pastoral was gone, completely gone.

On the first few days of my return, I walked around Manila in a daze. My body was back, but the cavity that held my heart was hollow. I had no idea that jetlag could result in such misery. And I certainly had not been prepared for the way a previous life would take its hold on me. On those days, memory came back with such force I found myself totally depleted, collapsing like a road built over a sinkhole.

In my misery, I remembered the Gothic spires framing the sky over New Haven, the 54-bell carillon in Harkness Tower ringing without fail at sundown. I remembered my jogs to the top of East Rock, the view of the outlying sea and green flatlands, the descent into the river where a covered bridge led to a park with winding pathways, a deer feeding on low branches, waiting to surprise a wayward visitor on a lucky day. I remembered the summer trip to Miller’s Pond where swimmers could pick wild berries on the banks, our vintage convertible driving into the sunset, white picket fences lining the hills. I, too, remembered walking across the New Haven Green one fine day in spring, thinking how my happiness was so complete I could die there and then, struck by lightning.

Such happy memories haunted me as I grappled with Manila after my return. For the first time, I saw the city in foreign eyes, suddenly strange and monstrous, defamiliarized. Reeling from the shock, I would think of New England towns each time I got stuck in a train with broken air conditioning. The red brick roads of Yale came rushing back as I navigated narrow alleys overtaken by fruit stands and hawkers. I recalled Maya Lin’s table fountain each time a vulcanizing shop assaulted my eye, grubby and black, an eyesore as universal as the jumble of electrical lines in every street corner. There was utter density everywhere: buildings, people, cars, wastes, noises. The very air seemed to fill one’s lungs with mercury, viscous and deadly. Condemned to know my own unhappiness, I was cast adrift in a city of unending loudness and clutter.

I had to get out. To keep my sanity, I decided to take a slow boat to the southern island in the middle of the archipelago where I was born. A bus brought me out of the megalopolis. In two hours, I was at the harbor where a ship waited to take me home to a town situated at the mouth of a river flowing to the sea. I would wake up early in my hometown to jog to the beach, meeting old faces on the way. By the time I got to the open coast, the sun had come out, shining on still waters and distant islands. I would stand on the edge of a sandbar, contemplating my future, drawing long steady breaths at the sight of each passing cloud.

I do not know what it was, but I recovered a bit of my old self during that break. I returned to Manila soon after for work. And little by little, I came to see the city in a different light. It struck me that I had been secretly looking for its madness all along. For although I had loved the life that I led in New Haven, not once did I feel that I belonged the way a tree or stone held its place in a landscape. In fact, every time I returned to the campus from a trip, a deep terror would grip me as I drew closer to the city aboard a train, the houses on the trackside falling away. At night, unable to sleep, I would sit in front of my laptop to watch Didith Reyes on Youtube, the famed balladeer whose beauty and talent won her the admiration of critics at the Tokyo Music Festival in the 1970s. I would listen to her sing a Filipino love song, studying her face as I turned the volume louder and louder to catch the vibrations in her voice, forgetting I owned a laptop, not a stereo. Outside, the roads were dark. In the winter, frozen. What, I asked my self, is this place I have gotten into? A beautiful spot on earth I could not call home. This was the biggest single truth that kept me whole.

It had not occurred to me though that Manila and New Haven have actually a lot in common. Both, for example, are colonial complexes built on acts of appropriation. Consider how the Spaniards constructed Manila on a piece of land wrested from native dwellers, just as English colonizers erected New Haven, the first planned city in North America whose four-by-four grid was virtually an apartheid system, on the tribal grounds of Quinnipiac people. In other words, the colonial making of both cities was premised on driving out indigenous populations. Both are also port cities that sustained the rise of Spanish and British empires, facilitating global commerce. And both are sites of anti-imperial revolts, one against the Spaniards, the other against the British, which gave birth to modern postcolonies, with America becoming an imperial power all its own, seizing the Philippines from the clutches of Spain at the end of the 19^th century.

In some vague measure, such connections dawned on me while walking to a restaurant with the poet and geographer Dolores Hayden, who commented that many of the documents needed to study colonial America were kept away in the British archives. This reminded me of the Philippines whose historians would have to fly to Madrid and Washington to get hold of the historical records. Manila and New Haven, I realized, shared the fate of being erstwhile colonial centers on the margins of imperial powers, the study of their past a necessity that must overcome great distances to become a possibility.

These connections, however, had not always been clear to me. What I knew then was that I took an unusual interest in exploring what lay beyond the safe borders of the university, an interest that ran afoul of the unspoken law that every Yalie had to learn: stay in the bubble, never stray west of the campus.

But I was never a typical Yalie. So, westward I went and not even the harshest winter kept me from hiking to Edge of the Woods, an organic grocery located in a black neighborhood where the cooks and sweepers of Yale resided. From my dorm, I would tread on hard ice to get to Whalley Avenue, stopping briefly at Popeye’s to get my favorite serving of fried chicken, the protein keeping me warm for the rest of the trek. The staff was mainly African American, the customers even more so. In my mind’s eye, I can still picture the black worker behind the fryer, a hulking man whose torn apron and long arms were always dusted with starch, his skin glinting against the powdery whiteness.

Needless to say, Popeye’s was the first sign I was entering an American terra incognita. For the more one got further into the neighborhood, the higher the prospect became of not seeing a white face, the likelier the chance of meeting men with gold teeth, braided hair, and exposed underwear milling in storefronts when the weather was fine, in barbershops on a cold day. Lined with sad looking churches and houses, the neighborhood was littered with fast food chains and blighted shops that were the first to fold up when Wall Street tanked in 2008. But here, where the down-and-out had made their home, I found some strange solace that kept me grounded, safe in the thought that another world existed beyond Yale’s glittering edifices.  

Exactly five years after my return, writing in a room with a view of the metropolis on a cloudy day in June, I begin to realize that my pilgrimages to the gritty exterior of New Haven were the manifestations of a deeply disguised longing. Now I understand. I came to the edges of a first world suburbia to see the remnants of my third world Manila. Walking on Whalley Avenue, I, without fully knowing it then, got on the fastest lane to a city 8,483 miles away.

 

These days, I lose myself in the city, particularly in the old shopping district of Divisoria and Binondo, site of the oldest Chinatown in the world. If I could draw a small circle on the map of Manila, I would mark these spots as the centers of my urban experience, one that revolves around commuting, walking, eating, loitering.

Getting off the train from Katipunan Avenue, I would pass through Odeon Mall then take a jeep at Recto Avenue, alighting at the corner of Benavidez Street, then making a turn on Soler Street to have my fix of vegetarian meat at Green Planet. If my body hurts, I would go to Peace Hotel for a Beijing-style massage, my feet dipped in a vat of warm gooey liquid, but not before I get a slice of chocolate cake at Salazar’s on Ongpin Street, or a bottle of beer at Lido’s where old folks of a certain class kill time, singing Chinese songs. Or, I would follow the throng pressing into buildings interconnected by bridges past Reina Regente Street, labyrinthine shops selling everything from shoes to umbrellas, hammer to tooth paste, pirated DVDs to export overruns from Bangladesh, even Korean ice cream.

A hard mood normally drives these journeys. When I feel awful or bored, I hop onto the next tricycle to the train station. I know too well what mischief an anxious mind can muster. And I get just as well how walking can sate its ravenous hunger. Moving, I discover, stills a restless heart. So, I would walk, retracing old haunts, getting lost in the crowd. My body turns into motion, anonymous like the pickpockets that blend in the ruined setting. I forget myself, become part of the flow. I move past movie houses, bus stations, beer houses whose derelict beauty comes alive at night, a play of light and shadow. Then I begin to see how anonymity and crowding prove to be potent antidotes to melancholy, cures for living in times without meaning. Perhaps it is the way a knotty feeling gets undone as I navigate the streets, as if to walk aimlessly is to cultivate self-forgetting. Why should I be lonely? The streets are heaving.

Manila’s density for me is, thus, a sensate geography. The “whole of you is transformed into feeling,” writes the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy in an ode to the houses and cafes of Alexandria, addressing a place as if it were a dear beloved. By my lights, Manila is the same. All of it is feeling. The man on the canal, collecting trash under a narrow bridge, is feeling. The stalled bus on a rainy night is feeling. A woman touching the feet of the Black Nazarene is feeling. And I am comforted to be with them. In their presence, I am no longer my self—all my affliction melts into space. This is why I prefer taking public transport and walking to riding a private car, breathing deodorized air. Out in the open, exposed to crime and grime, I become part of the sensation of a place that, to borrow the words of the French poet Charles Baudlaire, is “teeming, swarming, city full of dreams.”

And what dreams can Manila be full of? On any given day, homeless people sleep on plant beds that separate the lanes of Recto Avenue, entire families napping in broad daylight, unmoved by the rumbling train on elevated railways. They are sleeping off hunger, drunk on the scent of cheap solvents that induce delirium while damaging the liver. As they sleep, the city drones on, creating an industrial ditty at once hypnotic and enervating. It may be hard to believe that dreams can be had in such circumstances. But uncommon utopias are born daily in the open tenements of the homeless, the decay prompting visions of the future. The beginnings of such visions are not difficult to see. Written in the dark, open letters appear on the sides of buildings and bridges, their authors hiding in plain sight: Raise the Minimum Wage! Join the Revolution! Down with the Government!

If the city, as the American cultural historian Lewis Mumford writes, “records the attitude of a culture and an epoch to the fundamental facts of its existence,” then Manila records the fundamental facts of social neglect and exclusion, the muck and rot an embodiment of its failure. The Manila City Jail, a penal colony in the eye of a squatter colony, is a testament to this generalized state of abandonment. Yet this also makes it the best place in the world to reimagine social order. Mired in its catastrophe, one has no choice but to hasten the coming of a utopia in which the good life is the property of all. Manila, in this sense, is an anonymous birthplace of the world’s future egalitarian cities.   

  

Strange how I have developed such deep affection for a city that disembowels. But maybe not, and my father’s experience of it might explain why. Like me, my father was born and raised on an island. Like me, he loves to disappear in the city. How did an islander come to love a forbidding city? The story of my father is the story of a young man fleeing from the poverty of his family, making a living as a poker player on ships sailing between the capital and the rest of the archipelago. In Manila, he stayed with his relatives in a slum on the outskirts of the city.

During one of our recent rides on a cab that took the longest route to our destination, a ploy that drivers would use to hike up the meter, my father, trying to dispel his anger, pointed out a row of condemned buildings behind which, he said, was the shantytown where he lived as a young man. But he could not remember the road that led into it. Viewed from the taxi window, the setting was no longer the way he remembered it.

Save for these fragments of another time, however, I know very little about my father’s life before he got married to my mother. That past is a dark place I will never discover, knowing full well how secretive he is, and how filled with filial tension our encounters tend to be when we are together. Our conversations normally begin without malice, but for some reason, they always end with bitterness, one wrong word a trigger for remembering an inmost offense, my father and I unable to see eye to eye.

But our love for Manila, for the hidden life it affords us, is mutual. Every time he comes to visit my brother and me, he would leave without saying where he would be going, what time he would return. He would be gone for hours, worrying us sick because of his advanced age and poor eyesight. Manila, the three of us know, is no country for old diabetic men. Still, he would go and no one could tell him otherwise.

Upon his return, he would share his story about some barber from the past, some street urchin who became the subject of his compassion, some distant relative he met in a corner. And I would listen wordlessly, imagining a map of the unnamed places he had been to while he reports his adventures.

How my father’s story reminds me of another story of another father, lame in the foot, who rides on the back of his son to escape a burning city. It is a story my father will find too Greek, unschooled as he is because his parents could not afford to get him a pencil. But to my mind, my father and I are the Anchiseses. And Manila is our Aeneas who carries us on his back, we who have found our solaces in sprawling labyrinths. Manila, too, in all its guises, is Troy itself. That is to say, the burning city is our doom. It also happens to be the only city we can call home, the place of both our memories.

Author's Bio- Note:

Poet, critic, and translator, Charlie Samuya Veric holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University where he was a member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture and the Photographic Memory Workshop. His critical essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Common Knowledge, E-misferica, Kritika Kultura, Philippine Studies, Rethinking History, and Social Text, among others. He is also the author of Histories, the acclaimed and bestselling debut poetry collection, and of the forthcoming lyric sequence entitled Boyhood, both from Ateneo de Manila University Press. An e-book version of Histories can be purchased at http://www.ateneo.edu/ateneopress/?q=product/histories-poems-ebook. His other writings are available at https://ateneo.academia.edu/CharlieSamuyaVeric. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.