Gaugin

I see fleshy white men strutting through the mall, armed with young filipinas against modest, suburban retirements. I find myself embarrassed by and for these men, and I mistakenly assume their lack of eye-contact is a guilty acknowledgement that they know I know what they're about.

My white body is valued here in more explicit ways than I'm used to. Were I in southern Mindanao, my body might literally be a commodity for Abu Sayyaf rebels who've taken hostages with the hope of ransoming them for more money than they could make in their lifetimes. Here, the attention is far more benign - I am greeted by 'sir' whenever I shop; schoolgirls giggle out of passing jeeps; older men and women smile; and young men, well...

Almost every day I pass a sculptor whose shop is by the side of a busy road. The impossibility of having a sculptor working out of a shack on a sidewalk is something I've gotten used to and as I pass we exchange hellos and I pause to look at what he's working on. Sometimes he works with a young man whose expertise is carving marble headstones, though most often he's working by himself on an image of the virgin, jesus, or once, saint george. I've contemplated asking him how much it would cost to make me a statue of saint sebastian pierced with arrows (i imagine the arrows would break off in my luggage, though it's not the arrows that I want). I'd ask him not to paint it, but to sand and polish it, leaving the garish colours of the madonna or the obscene pink of christ in the small, broken cups that line the shelf of his workshop. I imagine my sebastian's colour (smooth, naked wood) enriched by the sweat and attention of the man who formed him.

People often ask how long I'm here for and when I tell them that I'm here for a three-month internship, I notice a subtle shift in the way their body responds to mine. I claim my length of stay as a badge that differentiates me from a tourist, a cano. Despite that, as I walk down the street, my body betrays me. I long to be brought into the fold of this city - to surreptitiously insert myself into the fabric of the space: I want to be as invisible as water on a sweaty neck.

I've taken to introducing myself as Matt Damon - sometimes Josh Hartnett, Ryan Reynolds or Superman [yes, these comparisons have all been made, much to my embarrassment and the delight of the person making the comparison]. If I can't be invisible (really, do I really want that?) then I work it to my advantage and threaten to sign autographs.

We all know that I'm not Superman, but we like the joke - my perverse height and expensive teeth are beacons for the beggars and vendors who rightfully see me as an easy target and beg or sell, respectively. I don't like souvenirs and I don't carry much money on me, so as far they're concerned, Superman's a bit of a letdown. What I will take with me though (my gaudy, tourist bauble), is a promise to myself to continue smiling and waving at strangers as I walk down brusque Toronto streets and a commitment to occasionally rescue handsome young men from evil villains and towering infernos.

kumusta

Okay fine, it was a depressing post. But I'm trying to get at some of the profound contradictions that I've seen here. Here's the happy stuff:

Filipinos pride themselves on their hospitality for good reason. I've been told several times that if I were here just before Lent, I should walk around to people's houses and get fed. I'm to tell them that I'm a relative and I will immediately be forced to eat really, really good food until I cannot eat anymore. Everyone does it, it's just what you do. Some houses become noted for offering particularly good meals and are inundated with extended 'family'.

Everyone has a connection to everyone else and avails themselves of the connections. The same has proven true for Amaraine and I, who've been the recipients of a wide variety of things because someone knows someone's aunt whose niece's husband has something that can be given to us, from hotel rooms to food.

We're also Catholic here. When I reply 'no' to the frequently asked, 'are you Catholic?' the response is invariably, 'oh, so you're Protestant.' There is no checkbox for 'other', or 'religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses'. This is one of many reminders that this country was colonized by Spain for 400 years and I believe that a particularly Spanish Catholicism has worked its way into the culture in the same way it has into the language. It has become Filipino. Saints are paraded on saints days, fiesta's happen in plazas that face a church, and funeral parades include families that spill out of slowly moving Jeepneys. I feel that people generally 'do' catholicism with the same vigour as Victorians who assert that Victoria, BC is more British than Great Britain or as Quebecois who protect their language more assertively than the French. That said, what I find refreshing is that no further conversation continues past, 'are you Catholic?' - which could either be because my soul is destined for eternal damnation and I'm a lost cause or because generally speaking, Filipinos are profoundly respectful and would never embarass you or directly criticize you. Uncomfortable things are not brought up with strangers (or, for that matter, with tourists).

Before I came here, I was wary of the suggestion that Filipinos are really friendly. It's a phrase too often used by happy white backpackers to describe citizens of foreign countries who patiently indulge said backpackers' desire to go native. But it's true: Filipinos are really friendly; unabashedly, disconcertingly friendly (at least to happy white interns whose desire to go native has included saying 'oh-oh' and raising their eyebrows instead of saying, 'yes'). I have never, in my life, been greeted by so many people ever: people smile, wave, ask where I'm going or say 'hi, Joe' wherever I go. Seriously, wherever I go. [Note: Joe is what white dudes are called - stemming from WWII and the continuous presence (until the early 90s) of US G.I. Joe's]

The cynic in me wants to ask, 'what is wrong with you people, why are you so friendly?' and for a time I wasn't sure if the friendliness was genuine. I don't suppose that I'll ever know the answer to whether it is genuine or not (though I suspect it actually is), but I do know that when you feel lonely and sad and far from home, it feels really nice to have someone ask where you're going or just say, 'hi'.

imeldific

On the day that Michael Jackson died I saw a six year old girl with an appallingly disfigured spine begging in the street. As mourners started lining up at Neverland to view the body, I caught sight of a stray dog whose leg had been mangled by what I assumed was a passing car. Surprisingly, the wound wasn't fresh and the poor creature was clearly trying to continue walking on it. It looked like a tree that had lost its bark. Fleabag, Bim-Bim's cat, disappeared some time ago - either because of the bad shellfish we ate and gave to her or because she too, got hit by a car. I've now seen the comically flattened bodies of at least three cats lying by the side of the road.

In a recent meeting, municipal planners were discussing the fact that to their surprise, it wasn't just the human waste from informal settlements that was contributing to the high coliform count in the city's water, but the waste from stray dogs. Their dilemma (apart from trying to move the informal settlers) was that despite having restrictions on stray animals, the enforcement was lax because it was generally understood that in times of scarcity, poor families would eat the dogs.

The only potable tapwater flows through aggressively expensive hotels and I've gotten used to the faint smell of sewage when I shower or brush my teeth. On my way home from work, I often see former gasoline cans lined up awaiting their turn to be filled from the leak in the municipal water pipe. A child died last week from Dengue fever and I was surprised to learn that you can have cholera more than once and learn to recognize the symptoms.

In Boracay, the crown jewel of Filipino tourism, I tired of small children plaintively selling green mango, young men pushing boat rides, women selling, 'thaimassagesir, thaimassage', Mindanao muslims selling pearls, and baklas selling themselves for $15.

Years ago, I remember seeing a placard at an anti-poverty rally that read, 'we're poor because you're rich.' I keep returning to that idea. To confine the Philippines to simple discourse of globalized poverty because of the wealth of the west would be doing a great disservice to the graft and cronyism that exist here (and the wry and tacit discussion of such), though we westerners are implicated in the many articulations of poverty that I've just described. My obvious (and tired) analogy is that these articulations are like symptoms of a mysterious disease - all I can ever see are the symptoms: the cause, (the tumor, the virus) is still unnameable, invisible.

Imelda Marcos suggests that 'Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.' Perhaps she was right, in her own Imeldific way - who doesn't want beauty? The question is whether or not you can afford it.

palihog

I love my morning commute to work - I pile into a Jeepney with 8-10 other filipinos and barrel through a madman's city past crumbling spanish villas and informal corner stores: my ride delicately belching its way through streets so crowded I could easily touch viturally everyone and everything we pass - the ride, though it may seem incogruous, forces me to relax - one cannot hang on to control and must sublimate themselves and their lives to the will and expertise of the driver who simultaneously smokes, shifts gears, makes change, fingers his rosary when passing one of many churches, picks up passengers and navigates obstacles on the road (like water buffalo, pedicabs or people). The only time I've felt this safe was on an ice-floe hunting seal in the middle of an arctic dusk. Surrender.

Definitions of culture can be dangerous. The danger lies in the fact that as we define something, we tend to essentialize it - to make it absolute. In addition to this, we also tend to define in by what is not, a project of almost constant comparison. I'm not immune to this, but I believe that the key is to understand how we make those comparisons and the subsequent power we attach to definitions of culture. Without sounding like too much of a douche, cultures are always produced and re-produced - there are no absolutes, rather we rearticulate our culture constantly, through language, mass communication, films, books, etc. Culture is never fixed, nor is it absolute and the best attempts we can make at understanding culture are to look at the ways in which we reproduce it - the constant iteration of who we think we are...

One aspect of my culture is an obsession with order. We create systems that make order transparent - think of lining up for movies, getting on transit, filling out government forms, traffic lights, buildings with addresses, streets with posted names, etc. Having grown up in this, and having a propensity toward anxiety, I find these articulations of order comforting. The rules are transparent and I can rely on those rules to govern how I inhabit the world - I can reassure myself that even if I feel like I don't have control, the evidence of control is there and subsesquently I can abandon myself to my ordered world. I am reassured when my bus stops at bus stop; my subway arrives within 4 minutes of the last one leaving the platform; my toilet flushes and the water that comes out of my tap I can bring immediately to my lips. I am at home in an ordered world.

I'm not sure I believe that I'm at home in order anymore. I find my body shifting into a new mode. The Jeepney presents the first and most obvious evidence of this crumbling sense of order. They stop wherever a passenger is and stop wherever a passenger wants to get off. You pay by passing your money through the hands of the passengers packed into two rows of bench-like seats and receive your change through the same chain of hands. There are no traffic lights, rather each driver (and anything on the road) constantly manoeuvers crowded intersections and warns their fellow drivers that they're passing by honking quickly on the horn. I've yet to see an accident.

It would be unfair and wrong to suggest that there isn't an order here. The key difference however is that this order (which to my eyes seems evidence of a lack) is more explicitly negotiated than the one I'm used to. It feels as though there is more room to assert one's self (and one's vehicle) here and driving is more like a conversation between drivers and vehicles than a tacit, regulated, silent 'sharing' of the road. Perhaps this is why I find that my commute to work is so liberating - I don't rely on order to comfort myself, rather I understand that here, like in life, I am responsible for where I am and how I inhabit space. Without the same rules that I'm used to, I must insert myself into a larger conversation - I must trust that I know where I'm going.

sa lugar lang

I'm writing this in the garden with Bim-Bim, the daughter of one of the housekeepers where I'm staying. Rather, I'm writing while she's playing with her kitty, a white, flea-bitten kitty who i've made the mistake of falling for. I've fallen for Bim-Bim as well, for that matter - she's 5; and like any 5-year-old with a stranger, everything that she does is with a glance over her shoulder at me, the (seriously) gigantic white guy sitting at his computer in the courtyard of her house.

It's cooler out here - I have all my windows open but the breeze is more than what manages to make its way into my apartment. I feel like I'm living in a greenhouse, like Allen Gardens in the winter - though there's no shock of cold when you leave, the humidity and green engulf you and you have no choice but surrender to it. The only cold exists in the malls. Consequently, everything is done slowly. I haven't run for anything since arriving and I doubt that I will for the entire time I'm here.