twosday

indonesia

singapore

the subdivision or development where i’m crashing for the next few months harbors fancy houses. you might call some of them garish, others forbidding in size, and sometimes they are all three.

like all developments, there’s a theme to the street names here, though it’s hard to pin down what it might be. at first i thought it had to do with latin and hispanized countries: argentina, spain, brazil, costa rica, venezuela. but there are some curve balls that i don’t know what to do with, like greece and nova scotia.

the same could be said about the architecture. a majority of the structures have a modern aesthetic, some reminiscent of the 80s (think cameron’s house in ferris bueller, or suburban office park in miniature), all boxy with rounded corners. Others are updated and filipinized frank lloyd wright prarie-homes, concrete and elongated, giving the impression of being low to the ground. my favorite is the bahay bato revival, throwbacks to stately stone mansions during the spanish colonial period. among these, however, i’ve spied a victorian and a brick colonial number, akin to something you’d find in the northeast.

yes, those are rappelling santas.

the houses share a few common traits: they all seem to have fleets of cars (‘since there’s no public transportation here, there’s usually one car per person in each household,’ my cousin explained) with one requisite luxury vehicle; they are all gigantic (my niece said enviously about her classmate’s house, a few streets away, ‘if they ever want water, for instance, all they have to do is push a button and say ‘water!’ and their helper comes with water.’ in other words, the house is so big that it needs an intercom system); they all use inordinate amounts of glass – floor-to-ceiling windows that look into living rooms, staircases, foyers.

the subdivision, for me, is an opportunity to meditate on what needs to be ignored for worlds and realities to exist the way they do. from within the boundaries of this subdivision, which is difficult to reach and even more difficult to leave, i can easily forget the noise of manila. (except for the trash-littered stream running through the neighborhood, and the construction workers that are trucked inside from somewhere, and the ‘helpers’ bustling around the houses cleaning cars and sweeping sidewalks…)

don’t trust me when i write about the philippines. these musings should best be read – are intentioned to be – open-ended, though necessarily framed by my location: a visitor, an American, a Filipino American – vexed relationship to both –, i’m wide-eyed, aware and reminded of my distance everyday but desiring of doing more, of participation though still groping at how.

my seeing eye is biased, framed, skeptical.

sala

sunday mornings in my dasmarinas life go something like this: i use my weekend rights to wake at 8 but get out of bed at 845a; visit the CR; stroll through the sala to the front porch where C and i have breakfast with Tita E. our breakfasts combine all the comfort foods my mom served only rarely and in separate sittings. this morning, for example, i gorged on garlic fried rice, lechon kawali, hot pan de sal and cheese wiz, and suman. as we eat, trikes rush by on our relatively busy street, leaving behind trails of exhaust and the gurgles of motors. Tita’s meal is usually interrupted a couple times by folks who swing by her corner store for something (a bag of cold water, a packet of crackers, a cigarette).

all the while, Tita blasts 102.7 Kiss FM, an aural privilege reserved especially for sundays. the station uses the same tag as the station in LA circa 1997, but instead of Rick Dees we have a less abrasive, Filipino-speaking DJ. and instead of pop hits from the 90s, the station plays ballads from the 1950s and 1960s.

lazy sunday morning saturation: the air is heavy with heat, moisture, exhaust, paul anka, weepy strings and dramatic musical climaxes; my stomach is weighted by lechon and grains. more ballads – elvis this time? – accompany the trek back through the darkened sala, back to my room.

–

one of my classmates here is puerto rican, and we often trade stories on motherlands, inflected by the lens of our experience now. she marvelled once at the lingual-colonial similarity, something like: “english is like a layer of garbage here, just like in puerto rico. it exists, but it’s in lower, vulgarized forms, left behind by US colonization.”

what i visualized when she said this were Coca-Cola images on handmade signs for corner stores that are more numerous than a 1:corner ratio, Rabsico wrappers that litter streets and waterways, and characters in teleseryas whose Tagalog is interrupted by English phrases used to heighten the drama.

–

my mind is still reeling from conversations with P, R, and A yesterday, part of the herculean and hubristic project i’ve taken on of sketching out communities of writers in cavite, the province where i’m staying this first month. (so far P, R, and A have offered me beautiful things: cavitenos and their writers are matapang, they are travelers and migrants, they are in a complex and dynamic relationship to metro maynila, which sits northeast of cavite and encroaches on the province through its cultural hegemony and exurban sprawl).

P, former editor of the literary folio at DLSU-D, shared stories of the enemies he’s made around campus because of his provocative columns. at one point he spoke with humor and scorn about one of his targets, a student group that exists specifically to further the practice of speaking English among its members.

he said, in tagalog, that the members of this group were of course the more wealthy students on campus. i laughed when he mimicked their english, the kind spoken by valley girls and teenagers in the US, at least in P’s demonstration: “like, you know.” (and in the back of my mind i thought, oh god this is how i talk). after his first stories about the difficulties of convincing the school of the importance of student publications, especially at a school whose funds are funneled to the business school (perhaps the same students of the english group), and after a few hours of hearing stories and thoughtful takes on cavite literature in tagalog (our chats could only be in tagalog, even my broken tagalog), i felt myself laughing with the same scorn and shaking my head with the same disdain.

–

low rider

for short distances within town we’ll sometimes take trikes, these motorbikes with covered sidecars. as a passenger in one of these, you sit low to the ground with the driver a few inches away to your left. there is no door to your right, so the street opens up to you with alternatingly terrifying and exciting immediacy. passengers in other trikes and sidewalk wares can be at an arm’s length away, and so can jeepneys and gargantuan buses (i can almost touch the tops of their wheels from my seat). i quickly learned to put my trust in the trike drivers even when they insist on inching into brisk traffic, because they maneuver so adeptly between buses and pedestrians, and because i just need to in order to get from one place to another, sanity in tact.

trying to wrap up the dissertation proposal so i can leave for the philippines (finally!). 32 more days!

soundtrack for writing frantically:

when school is work and work is your life, the range of memories created between these realms is narrow, and the physical spaces where these memories happen are few.

the next year or so is shaping up to be a transitory one. in the inevitable wistful moments to come while i’m not-at-home, this is what i’ll miss:

early morning warmth and shadows

workspaces

the places where light streams and shadows fall

[relevant sounds]

[toward some framing for this]

i’m surrounded by very good storytellers. my friends traffic in narrative, always sharing something – some memory, a movie watched or music listened to, new projects. my storytelling on the other hand, especially on my feet, is not the best. i fumble for words, but before that, for details. the most challenging thing about narration is knowing what to include or omit – how to make what’s in my head make sense to the people around me.

it seems to be partly a matter of social engagement – simultaneous pressures to share something good or entertaining, to do so in the proper timing and key, so that these moments of sharing will be followed by more.

(i use a metaphor of exchange, but it’s specifically obligational and ethical. i listen so that they listen to me later; i share because they also give me a part of themselves. to refuse to engage is like an affront, and worse, a reason to stop engagement altogether.)

i recently watched the movie funny people, and what struck me the most was how good at storytelling the comedians in the film are, and how much thought they put into writing jokes: knowing how to set up the narrative and how to maintain interest through their work of description. i thought as i watched that i would really like to be friends with those characters.

nostalgia around my college years doesn’t appear so frequently and with force as it used to. now it’s more an odd matter of ahistoric memory through sound. music that i hadn’t heard until after college gets transposed onto places and scenes from my past, like i’m laying down a soundtrack across time. or maybe more accurately, it’s wishful thinking: it’s music that i associate with aesthetics, places, and people that i wish i had known or been immersed in when i was younger — nostalgia for memories that never existed for me.

i wish i had been at the greek theater in berkeley for this, if only because it would have been so apt:

watching and wishing this, though, i remember events that actually are part of my fabric: lots of events at the greek — common, ozomatli, pep rallies (!), graduation, and hearing/watching this under california stars:

the heat in socal can be overwhelming in the summer. one september in high school we played a tennis match in 102-degree weather. it’s desert where we live, so there wasn’t so much stickyness so much as warmth everywhere - on the handles of racquets, between my skin and cotton shirt, on the vinyl seats of the school bus that took us to duarte. i slogged through my sets, barely being able to breathe, then afterward went in search of cooler temperatures. the gym was a noise of volleyball, yells, and handclaps, all generating their own kind of unbearable heat, and there was no shade (duarte high school - more trees, please!). i ended up back on the schoolbus with a few other teammates, slouched on hot green vinyl. my head throbbed, maybe from some combination of exhaust from the idling bus, the fiery furnace around me, and the ice cold water i drank. for the rest of the afternoon i sat still, staring out the window at trees and heat waves.

best coast, especially this cover art for one of her 7-inches last year, conjures memories like that.

as varied as LA childhoods can be, i suspect that most kids who grow up there can at least share the experience of sitting in some car on a clogged freeway, like the one downtown in the cover art (LA friends, is that the 110? or the 5?), while the sun beats down, and you’re staring out the window up at a brown-layered sky.

best coast’s music is like the aural descriptor. it’s a hazy slog, and like the heat, so loud in its noise to the point that you don’t complain, you just move through it. the pop vocals could be something i’d actually hear in the car when my parents tune the radio to the oldies station, which seemed to play a beach boys song every hour as if by socal mandate.

–

more than any accusation of materialism that could be launched against LA (which i don’t buy completely), what keeps me from settling back in LA is the threat of this malaise — that feeling of not wanting to do anything but sit there and move passively through. clogged heads and clogged freeways.