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Michael
S. Janairo
One
of my earliest memories: My mother slick-combs my red hair and her
dress
rustles as she bends down to clasp my long black stockings to my gray
flannel
knickers. She smells of White Linen and tells my older brothers, sister
and me
to remember to say "thank you," "your welcome" and
"please" because Uncle Ed had been kind enough to invite us to brunch
at the Philippine Embassy.
The
starched clothes make me stiff. The rules make me uncomfortable. Not
knowing
what "Philippine" or "Embassy" means makes me nervous. But
our parents pile us in the car and we go.
Inside
the building in Washington, D.C., there's a long, curved stairwell with
plush
red carpeting and heavy wooden doors. One leads to a chandeliered
dining room
with high-backed chairs; another to a chilly basement with a pool
table, a wet
bar and all the Coke we can drink.
Other
kids are down there. They wear creased chinos, white shirts and silk
ties. Rich
kids. They run around and shout, free and loose. I stay close to my
brothers,
especially Max, who is a year older and also dressed like me. These
kids, I've
been told, are cousins. They all have black hair and tan skin. My
brothers,
sister and my mother all have auburn hair and pale skin. Except for my
brother
Ed. He has black hair. Like Uncle Ed. Maybe that's why he has the same
name?
But Uncle Ed isn’t really an uncle. He isn't my mother's or father's
brother.
He's the ambassador. But I don't know if “ambassador” is a type of
relation or
not. So who are all these people? I don't know. And they speak in a
language
that makes no sense. I'm confused.
Perhaps
that’s why I let my older brothers shove me into the dumb waiter to
send me
upstairs to the kitchen, where my pale, freckled face surprises the
kitchen
staff. I hop onto the floor, hurry out a door and dash between the
adult legs
in the dining room to the entranceway, where I find the door that takes
me back
to the basement, where my brothers and cousins are laughing.
Sunday
brunches at the Philippine Embassy in the early 1970s -- when my Lola's
older
brother was the ambassador to the U.S. -- were a long table laden with
soft
beds of scrambled eggs, fluffy pancakes, seasoned potatoes, stir-fried
vegetables and rice, steamed white rice, juicy sausage patties and
crispy
strips of bacon.
My
brother Ed, three years older than me, always piled his plate with a
mountain
of bacon. I never ate as much. I always felt nervous. One day, though,
I sipped
Coke, chewed a dry, crusty piece of toast and felt safe enough to
whisper to my
three older brothers, “What is the Philippines?”
In
the embassy’s basement, perhaps my oldest brother Anthony, four years
older,
said: “It’s a totally different country. Like the United States is a
country,
but it’s far away.”
Maybe
I nodded. I knew I understood “far.” I had seen Grover on "Sesame
Street" running back and forth shouting, “Near!” and “Far!”
Ed
nodded as if he had something to add, but all he did was open his mouth
wide to
show saliva-slick bits of chewed bacon to try to make me sick.
So
I didn’t ask another question, though I had more. Anthony’s reply was a
code
that turned “the Philippines” into a another mystery, a “country,” and
that
didn't even get close to answering why we were there. I thought it was
my own
tough luck if I couldn’t understand it. If I wanted to know more, I'd
have to
find out for myself.
When I think of my trip to the
Philippines in 1994, I think of a photograph taken on a bright, early
April
afternoon from a sizzling blacktop road in the district of Binakayan,
the
village of Kawit, the province of Cavite: a large nipa hut stands in
the dust,
its leafy walls browned and sturdy; chickens peck the dirt in the shade
of
drooping palm trees; a stone wall retains an algae-filled lagoon
The
hut was the birthplace of Maximiano Saqui Janairo, my Lolo. He was the
first
immigrant of the family, the first American and, eventually, the silent
patriarch. When he was born in 1905, the hut was on the waterfront with
a view
that stretched beyond Manila Bay out to the South China Sea. No
stonewall. No
lagoon No paved road. But that's where I stood when I took the photo.
I
knew my Lolo had seen his hut from the water. During World War Two, he
had
survived the Bataan Death March and escaped from Camp O'Donnell, so
when
Japanese patrols neared Binakayan, he'd float in the waves in a small banca, or dugout canoe, and wait for the
signal -- a white sheet hanging to dry -- so that he could return. I
thought
he'd get a kick out my photo.
My
Lolo, though, was 90 by then. He usually spent all his hours in bed.
His sharp
face had become soft and round. But now he was sitting at the kitchen
table,
his head shaking and his clear eyes scanning every bit of the
photograph I had
taken. Then he shook his head and handed it to my Lola.
She
was 83 and thin from recent hip surgery and taking care of Lolo. She
spoke
loudly. She said, “It’s Binakayan. It was photographed by Michael.” My
name, in
her Filipina accent, rang throughout the kitchen like a bell, a slight
trill in
the final “l,” My-kell.
Lolo
looked up at me, shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Then he looked back
at his
wife, pursing his lips, the fleshed pinched around his nose. He looked
away.
His head continued to shake.
Lola
handed the photograph back to me and shrugged her shoulders. “He
doesn’t
recognize it,” she said. “But it’s a good picture. An important
picture.”
When
the Philippines were America’s colony, my Lolo was a student called
Mianong.
The son of a manager of 200 hectares of rice paddies and 12 fishing
boats with
a crew of 30 in a province outside Manila, he knew that to get ahead he
had to
succeed in the new system of public education introduced by the
American colonial
masters.
He
was a good student, at least good enough to be accepted into the
University
High School in Manila, where he graduated seventh in his class. After
his
acceptance into the University of the Philippines, an institution that
was
founded three years after he was born, he enrolled in the pre-med
course. He
wanted to be a doctor. He once said, “My older sister, the eldest, was
studying
to be a pharmaceutical chemist. I was the second child. I wanted to
become a
doctor. I would write the prescriptions, and she would fill them.”
Pride
made him attempt the annual West Point entrance examination. A friend
had
teased, “The only reason you don’t want to take the test is because
you’re
afraid to fail.”
He
didn’t fail. He placed third, and the first two candidates failed the
physical.
Mianong understood that he had earned a free education and the
guarantee of a
job upon completion, but Governor General Leonard Wood, the ruler of
the
Philippines, told him that West Point would change his life.
Two
months later, after sailing from Manila to Nagasaki to Honolulu to San
Francisco, then through the Panama Canal and, finally, landing in
Brooklyn, he
made his way by train north along the Hudson to the ferry that would
cross the
river to the Military Academy at West Point.
He
expected to find a university like the University of the Philippines --
serious
students, wise professors, books and libraries. America in 1926 was a
booming
country full of promise and economic progress. It was the success of
the
Western world. What better place to study than West Point?
But
even before he stepped off the ferry, upperclassmen rushed on to meet
the
plebes. They ordered them to stretch their hats down over their eyes --
and
every man in those days wore a hat. They shouted: “March! Double time!”
Blind,
he ran onto America, up from the river to the main campus. As he ran --
a
suitcase in one hand, the brim of his hat covering his eyes, his
nostrils
filling with the musk of sweat -- he
thought he had made the biggest mistake of his life. This wasn’t like
the
University of the Philippines. He wanted to go home, to go to a college
where
he wouldn't be forced to march blind on unknown territory by men who
were taller
and stronger and who spoke with such a rough command of the language,
as if
they owned that, too.
I
flew into Manila on the night of March 23, 1994, on an Egypt Air flight
from
Tokyo that was filled with students returning home for Easter. They
were not
shy about gasping and shouting in terror when the plane hit turbulence
and the
electronic consoles above our heads flopped open to expose tangled,
colored
wires.
Beside
me sat a young man with a thick mop of black hair. He wasn’t very
talkative,
but he did tell me that he was studying mechanical engineering at Tokyo
University. When we hit turbulence, he white-knuckled the armrests.
I
poured water from liter bottles into plastic cups for the passengers
around me.
Earlier, I had, politely I thought, asked for some water, and had been
given a
couple bottles and a stack of plastic cups from a haggard, unshaven
attendant
who said, “Others may want to drink!”
The
student next to me didn’t want any water. His eyes looked sad and
bewildered.
He asked, “Aren’t you afraid?”
I
carried four letters. One was from my Uncle Toto, telling me he’d meet
me at
the airport. One was from Uncle Ed, who looked forward to seeing me.
One was
from Ted Nierras, Uncle Ed’s grandson, whom I would meet later on the
southern
island of Mindanao. One was from "pretend" Uncle Ed, a man who
survived the Bataan Death march with my Lolo and had attained honorary
family
status. I had met all of them at least once before in the blur of my
early
childhood.
Despite
these connections, I still felt a vague sense of Filipino-ness, and
that
vagueness felt foolish and self-centered. But that feeling was (and is)
always
there whenever I meet someone new who has a reaction to my name.
These
are the three reactions:
1.
“That’s such a
beautiful name!”
2.
“You don’t look
Filipino?”
3.
Uncomfortable
silence.
These
reactions send me back to some primary point of who I am. But that
point has
never felt solid. After all, “points” are imaginary. Sometimes, when I
say the
name is Filipino, I feel it’s a lie. What are the Philippines, anyway?
On
the verge of 13, near the end of junior high, I spent a month
scribbling on
note cards for a 20-page joint History-English paper. My topic: the
Spanish-American War and the Conquest of the Philippines.
I
set aside a Saturday, skipped the morning cartoons and sat down in the
basement
at the Apple II Plus. As I wrote, my
mind filled with imagined jungles, a decrepit Spanish fleet,
sweat-stained US
Army uniforms and loin-clothed, bolo
wielding natives. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Occasionally the
de-humidifier
would hum. But I was lost in the heroic story of Colonel Funston, an
American
who was so courageous and clever that he let a group of tribesmen, who
didn’t
like having anti-colonial rebels hiding in their mountains, take the
weapons
from him and his troops and march them four days to the rebels’ jungle
headquarters as if they were prisoners of war. Once the fake prisoners
reached
the rebels, the tribesmen tossed them their weapons and, without a shot
fired,
the Americans captured the rebel leaders and secured the Philippines as
their
own.
When
I finished, I walked upstairs to the light of the kitchen as my older
brothers
set the dinner table and my sister, the eldest, made the salad. An
entire day
had passed. I felt as if I hadn’t been doing work, but had been deep
within
something my own and not my own.
I
often think about that moment as a primary incident in my writing life.
On the
turbulent plane to Manila, when my fellow passenger asked if I was
afraid, I
remembered that essay and realized my sympathies weren’t with the
Filipino
rebels -- a group that included my Lolo's lolo -- but with the
Americans. Sure,
that was also the point of view of the books I had used for my
research, but
didn't it just show how far away I was from Filipino-ness?
“The
only reason why people go abroad is so they have stories to tell,” my
brother
Max told me after his return from a summer in Europe, first working at
a youth
hostel in England and then busking across Germany, singing Bruce
Springsteen
and playing guitar.
By
"stories," I think he meant the kind of tales that share a sense of
awe at being alive in this world. My favorite Max-abroad story is a
song he
learned from German punks:
The
little frogs, they are so happy
The
little frogs, they are so happy
The
little frogs, they are so happy
In
the night
Qua-qua-qua-quoc-a-doolie
Qua-qua-qua-quoc-a-doolie
Qua-qua-qua-quoc-a-doolie
In
the night
That
was all the English they knew.
Any
guidebook could tell you about the 7,000 islands, but only 1,000
inhabitable;
about the 60 different languages and four major language groups; about
the
ruined economy that is the legacy of the Marcos dictatorship; about the
destruction of Mt. Pinatubo; about the American military bases and
prostitutes
with AIDS; about fanatics who nail themsevles to crosses during Holy
Week;
about communist guerrillas and Islamic fundamentalists on Mindanao;
about the
terrible beauty of the impoverished archipelago.
I
wanted to know something else. If we are creatures of this earth, if
our
identities derive from the places where we originate, then what does it
mean to
have an ancestry from these islands? What is an island? A metaphor for
isolation, solitude, distance and peace?
And
what of its boundaries? The space where the wash of the sea greets the
hard
reality of solid earth; each taking and giving in an infinite struggle
of
definition. Where does one end and the other begin? Chaos theory and
the
mathematics of complexity answer this question with infinite space,
following
the fractal realities of jutting rocks and the shifts in grains of
sand. There
is no definition, only movement.
No man is an
Island, entire of it self;
every man is apiece of the Continent, a part of the main, wrote John
Donne from the British Isles in the 17th century. Is that what I
wanted: to
feel myself a part of the main? if
that main can be said to be my family, my history, my self.
“Fucking,”
ironically, isn’t a topic the often comes up with family. At least, in
my Roman
Catholic family. Though it was my brother Anthony who once said, “I’ve
never
had an ancestor who didn’t have sex at least once.”
There
is a family story, one that I had always thought of as being from the
age of
conquistadors, but it was from the 19th century. Perhaps my confusion
stems
from the fact that we don’t have words for ancestors who pre-date our
grandparents. Specificity becomes cumbersome. We’re limited to three
generations before, three generations after. But ancient stories linger.
I’ve
always known that my Lola’s side of the family descended from a
Franciscan
missionary. Perhaps the word “descended” made him sound feudal. He is
my
great-great-great grandfather. Father Francisco Lopez came from
Granada, Spain.
I
can’t help but think that his arrival to the Philippines wasn’t only
about
preserving immortal souls for heaven and managing church-owned land --
it was
also about making new souls. It was about fucking.
One
saying about the Philippines’ colonial past, first with Spain, then
America,
is, “Four hundred years in the convent; fifty in the whorehouse.” After
World
War II, with US servicemen and “sex tours” from places like Japan, the
Philippines was -- and perhaps still is --
a place where men go to fuck.
Father
Lopez, like many other ordained rulers, were forebears to the sex
trade. He
fucked, and he fucked a lot. At least enough to have eight children.
Nonetheless,
my Lola often joked, “We are blessed. We come from holy stock!”
Days
before I left for the Philippines, I dreamed the Philippines. I was
hiking
through a lush jungle, where the only path was a relatively steep,
shin-deep
stream of cool, quick flowing water. A woman, whose face I never saw,
led me by
the hand. She kept looking ahead. Her calves were taut and tan. I could
sense
the heat of her body. My nostrils filled with the richness of the
earth, and
with the salt of her sweat mixed with other richer scents from her body.
The
climb was difficult with rocks and roots in the stream, and a wealth of
overhanging
leaves. But the landscape was bursting with life. Every rock, leaf and
drop of
water was infused with the unreal clarity of color that the golden
light of
summer’s late-afternoon sun can create after a heavy downpour.
In
a clearing, far from any stream, my attention was caught by a large
flower with
its vibrant red petals stretching open. The petals quivered as I
approached.
This place was a forbidden place. The fleshy petals were slick with a
film of
dew. My heart beat faster. I was drawn closer and closer, beyond my own
control. I wanted to reach out for the flower, to rest inside the
petals.
I
felt a heat burn inside me. Was my guide approaching? Everything went
bright,
vivid and real. I woke and my first thought was that I was no different
from
those conquistadors who feminized and exoticized foreign lands.
My
younger brother, Matt, has, or is, Down syndrome. I never know which
verb to
use. Is Down syndrome a possession, a thing one can have among many
things? Or
is it an inescapable condition -- a primary mark of his identity like
race,
class and gender?
One
day, Matt responded to one of the many times my mother joked that she
wished to
marry someone else by saying, “Sorry, Mom, you’re stuck with Brown
Guy.” Brown Guy, of course, was my father.
When
I heard that story, I asked, “Matt, but if he’s your father, that also
means
you’re a brown guy. You’re not white.” Legally, this is true. None of
my
parents’ pale, freckled children are legally white.
Matt
raised his white arm and studied it for a second before looking up at
me like I
was crazy.
Perhaps
the most important aspect of my Filipino-ness is that my family left.
One
warm summer afternoon, my father and I were sitting on the back patio
of my
Lolo and Lola’s house. The patio is made of dark, gray slate stone and
is
surrounded by a rock garden in which cacti grow. In one corner stands a
limestone statue of St. Francis that’s also a bird feeder.
My
father rarely talks about his past, but as a warm breeze pushed against
us, he
told me, “The way it is there, to get ahead, someone will do a favor
for you,
like get you a job. And then one day, they’ll ask you to do a favor for
them.
Maybe they will ask you to do something that you don’t think is right.
But
you’ll have to do it. We can be more ethical in America.”
My
father’s voice, as always, was earnest and direct, but in my mocking
adolescent
imagination, I couldn’t help but hear Don Corleone’s theme.
Still,
I knew what he meant by "ethical." In the mid-1970s, we moved from
Alexandria to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where my father was made the
District
Chief of the Corps of Engineers. One of my father’s tasks was to
construct a
new Brady Street Bridge. The old one had been blown up. It was a media
event. I
even had classmates who watched the destruction live, sitting with
their
families on picnic blankets in the hills.
For
months, commuters had faced horrendous detours and traffic jams because
of the
bridge. But on the day it was supposed to open, the media hounded my
father:
“Why isn’t it ready?”
He
said, “I made a mistake,” and the local media praised him for being a
rare,
honest public servant. I often wonder if he could have been as ethical
if he
had stayed in the Philippines.
Manila’s
Ninoy Aquino International Airport is unfortunately named after a man
who was
assassinated as he walked off a plane on his return to his homeland
with hopes
of defeating the dictator Marcos. He was also, by the way, a schoolmate
of my
father's.
All
the signs in the airport told me to meet my party outside. It was
night, but a
humid 90 degrees. Human arms, glistening with sweat in the orange glow
of
incandescent lights, stuck out from metal bars and waved. Lips hissed.
No
one called my name. The only place for me to go was down a ramp in
front of me.
Painted on the ramp was a thick yellow line dividing it down the
middle. The
left side said, “A - M” and had an arrow pointing to the left; on the
right, “N
- Z,” with an arrow to the right. I followed the left-pointing side of
the
ramp, in order to take me to my Uncle Toto Janairo.
Down
the ramp, then up and around and I saw all the backs of the hissing arm
wavers.
They continued to hiss, hiss, hiss. Sometimes, voices would explode
with
someone’s name and a crowd of hugging relatives would converge,
ecstatic that
their long-distant relative had survived Egyptian Air.
No
one called my name and my body felt itchy.
I
looked at bodies and faces. I had met my Uncle Toto three years before
at my
Lolo’s and Lola’s house. How much could he have changed in three years?
Was
that him? grayer? fatter? thinner? taller? I no longer trusted my
memory. Worse
yet, everyone around me looked the same.
No
one called my name.
I
decided that maybe a Romualdez (my Lola’s maiden name) had come. Down
the ramp
again and up to the later half of the alphabet put me in a place where
the
crowd was thinner. But what if the plans had been wrong. We
thought you meant next month.
Other
passengers left in large groups.
I
found a phone and called Norma “Baby” Romualdez, whom I would be
staying with
for my first few days in the country. She was my Lola’s niece, the
daughter of
Uncle Ed, the former ambassador. On the phone she was all smiles and
bubbles:
“Your Uncle Toto is there. Yes. He’s there. You don’t need to take a
cab. Not
at all. We’re all here. Waiting for you. But we already ate. If you
need a cab,
don’t pay more than three hundred. When you tell them where you are
going, they
will want more. But be firm. Three hundred is the limit!”
I
liked her, I liked her dramatics. I paced. The outskirts of Manila was
a dusty
dim glow of small orange points of light, a scattered constellation.
A
man approached me. “Uncle Toto!” I thought.
“Do
you need a taxi, sir?” the man said. He was round, with a round belly
and a
rounded nose and a head that was small and round on top. Uncle Toto was
square.
“Where you go?”
“I’m
going to Bel-Aire Village, but I’m waiting for my uncle.”
“Bel-Aire!
I’m going that way. Only five hundred.”
“I’m
waiting for my uncle.”
“I
wait with you.”
We
stood together looking at the slowly diminishing crowd. Again, I paced.
The
cabbie followed me, back and forth along the curb. When I would stop
and look
at him, he’d flash me a weak half-smile.
Eventually,
I heard, “My-kell! My-kell! I was
waiting for you inside!”
Uncle
Toto, his hair shorter and grayer, hurried up to me with short, boxy
steps
beaming a wide smile on his square face. We held each other’s hands. He
said,
“You’ve been waiting outside? I had a pass from my bank and so I was
waiting
inside. I thought, you’d be coming from Tokyo, so you’d be wearing a
suit. I
had my men looking out for an American man in a suit. You’re not
wearing a
suit!”
My men? I thought. I
was wearing a short sleeve shirt, jeans and hiking boots. As Uncle Toto
led me
away, the cabbie followed.
“Who’s
this man?” my uncle said.
I
said, “He’s a cabbie who waited with me.”
My
Uncle Toto said, “What is your name, good sir?”
The
cabbie said, “Bobbie.”
Uncle
Toto shook his hand, saying, “Thank you so much for waiting with my
nephew.” He
slipped him some bills. Then, “Come, My-kell,
your Auntie Norma is waiting.”
He
led me to a small four-door sedan. A pudgy man with a mustache quickly
opened
the doors. “This is Jun,” Toto said to me. “He is your cousin. He is
also a
Janairo.”
Jun
nodded as we shook hands. Then he got into the car and drove.
On
the way to Baby’s house, I stared at streets that could’ve been any
town South
East Asia -- illuminated open-air cafeterias, closed stores, paint
peeling off
signs, rumbling motorbikes, dust rising and clinging to buildings that
looked
like they’d soon crumble.
From
the front seat, my Uncle Toto turned to me, his face spectral in the
dashboard’s light. He handed me a brochure of a villa on the island of
Boracay.
He said, “My daughter has arranged a trip for you if you want. Maybe
read this
brochure and you let me know.”
He
looked at me looking at the dark, strange city. Thin figures in frayed
clothes
hurried down dark streets. I had never seen so many people who looked
so
impoverished. Perhaps Uncle Toto understood what I was thinking. He
spoke about
the politics of the country, reminding me about the People Power
Revolution
that put Corazon Aquino, the wife of the man assassinated at the
airport, into
the presidency. Then he spoke of the newest president, Fidel Ramos, who
had
been in power since 1992. Uncle Toto’s voice was like a slow, gentle
sigh: “Not
much has changed. There have been no major changes. Ramos was secretary
of the
Interior. He is a decisive man. If he wanted to do something, he would
have
done it already.”
Soon after, we pulled up to
the
check-point entrance of Bel-Aire Village, a barbed-wire compound of
wide, clean
parallel and perpendicular streets named after stars and
constellations. The
large homes could’ve been anywhere upper-class U.S.A. But it wasn’t and
it
didn’t fill me with a sense of home. Instead, the armed guard and the
rows of
quiet mansions reminded me of Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. I
swallowed hard
and braced myself. We pulled up to Baby’s house. I was in
the Philippines, I told myself. I had arrived.
Michael
Janairo
was born in Iowa, grew up in Pittsburgh, and studied
journalism at Northwestern University and creative writing at the
University of
Pittsburgh. He lives with his wife, stepson and dog in upstate New
York, where
he works as the arts and entertainment editor for the Times
Union, a daily newspaper in Albany.