When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  Plate 2

  a) A typical Filipino handaan (party). Because these parties are usually attended by numerous guests, food is plentiful and suitable for being kept outdoors for a long period of time, even if it grows cold. This is complemented with beer, juices, and soft drinks. Flies are very sensitive creatures and simply waving the strips of paper is enough to keep them away.

  b) A typical dish fitting special occasions is a whole suckling pig, slow roasted over a fire. The favourite part for most is its crispy skin dipped in liver sauce. (The box of Fruit Loops on the table belongs to my son, Paul, who has set it aside to pose for the photo.)

  c) Outdoor fruit stands line markets and side streets in many parts of the country. With import liberalisation, previouly expensive fruits like grapes, apples, and oranges have become, in many cases, cheaper than home-grown ones such as mangoes, avocados, pomelos, durian, tamarind, banaba, and bananas, shown here.

  Plate 3

  a) Contrasting many of the local outdoor handaan is the elegant cocktail party shown above, held in one of the luxurious condominiums at Fort Bonifacio (recently renamed Bonifacio Global City), a financial and lifestyle district of Manila.

  b) For the people in the lower economic classes, celebrations with friends come at much greater costs relative to their earnings, even if dishes might only consist of pancit (noodles dish) and soft drinks. Still, there are parties not only for birthdays, but also for baptisms, graduations, fiestas, and any other excuse for a celebration. On a visit to Victorias, I saw Santa Claus hand out toys and food items to the eager townsfolk to help them celebrate Christmas.

  c) Other donors are more organised, packing their gifts for more orderly distribution. The Philippines remains a country of contrasts: between the small minority who are rich or very rich, and the large majority who are poor.

  Plate 4

  a) There were only three of us in my immediate family, so our home life was much more focused on one another. In the photograph (top left), our youngest family member is learning how to be a London chef.

  b) At other times of the year, Paul would rather be Dracula as he went trick or treating around the neighbourhood. I have witnessed this American import grow from the early 1990s when you would see only occasional ghouls covered in bedsheets during Holloween. I would paint Paul’s face so he could join them. Now, it has become a professional affair—lavishly dressed witches are all over the streets of London, as they are in even more conservative Germany. Meanwhile, giant spiders with their impenetrable webs line the lobby of my condominium building in Manila—for a whole month!

  c) My family photo circa New Year 1994.

  Plate 5

  a) Father and son bonding during a boat excursion. This contrasts with my own early experiences when I was almost never alone with my parents, but instead was constantly surrounded by a slew of relatives.

  b) Klaus and Paul riding in Wales, UK. Like many parents doting on an only child, we tried to expose Paul to a number of after-school activities: fencing, judo, art classes; then on weekends—tennis, cricket, rugby. He stopped horse riding lessons when he was about twelve because his riding mates were all girls! But he still skis and plays golf. In contrast, my sister used to complain that we all led “deprived” childhoods, never learning how to swim or ride a bike. In spite of the fact that the Philippines is an archipelago, I would hazard a guess that most Filipinos cannot swim nor indeed ride a bike.

  Plate 6

  Balay Gamay (Small House), my holiday home in the hillside town of Tagaytay. The house is a testament to one of my earliest experiences dealing with corruption in the Philippines. I was pressured to pay an extra amount aside from the fee legally mandated so that the certificate of title of ownership to the property could be released. One must, therefore, decide on what to do in such a situation. Do you give in and pay corrupt officials because that is the only way to survive? If so, do you draw a line in the sand? More long term, how do you as an individual contribute to the building of Philippine institutions so as to mitigate corruption?

  Plate 7

  a) The 1986 march against President Marcos after he reputedly cheated in the national election that Cory Aquino won. More than a million Filipinos marched in the streets. Pictured is a demonstration in Ayala Avenue, Makati, a business district in Manila. (Photo taken from People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986, published by the James B. Reuter Foundation.)

  b) I was one of those who marched in the streets of Makati, being showered by shredded papers thrown from the windows of office buildings, and feeling as though I were in a ticker tape parade. (Photo taken from People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986, published by the James B. Reuter Foundation.)

  Plate 8

  a) My ever-idealistic father sympathised with our grievances, bemoaning the lack of morality of many of those in power. I remember him saying, “I feel sorry for your generation.”

  b) To put action into words, he donated several hectares of prime land to the Salesian Brothers, who built a home for street boys, today called “Boys Town”. We try and do what we can.

  Part Three

  Choices

  and

  Identity

  Five

  Who Am I?

  Nationality,

  Gender, And Identity

  I’m Nobody, who are you?

  Are you – Nobody – too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

  How dreary – to be – Somebody!

  How public – like a Frog –

  To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

  To an admiring Bog!

  Emily Dickinson

  A literary critic wrote about Dickenson’s poem, “This little anthem to outsider solidarity—invisible, independent, self-nurturing, ignoring the knock on the door…”

  When I was very young, I stayed with my grandmother who, at that time, was living in Manila. I was the only child in her household and she satisfied my every whim. Consequently, I learned to demand instant gratification. After a few years, I moved over to my parents’ place and was quickly disabused of such nonsense. They were busy with their businesses and my mother had the added responsibility of heading an extended household with her siblings and their families. To survive, I had to fend for myself.

  There were a number of us young cousins in the household, most of whom were boys. I wanted to join in the games of these boys, so I fought my way in even though I was one of the smallest. However, I was constantly punished by my mother for being quarrelsome. In due course and eager to win her approval, I became obedient and by my teenage years, was almost totally withdrawn. This was exacerbated by the fact that as I grew older, my cousins moved out of our extended family home and my sisters departed for Manila to study, leaving my younger brother and me mostly by ourselves.

  We studied in far-away Bacolod City, returning home only during weekends. Whilst back in our town, we were discouraged from going out of the gate of our house so that we lacked opportunities to form friendships with neighbourhood children. On the other hand, as one of the eldest in a small group of boarders at school, I also didn’t have occasions to socialise with most of my classmates and friends after school hours. Thus, I never learned how to dance nor how to behave with boys.

  Instead of flesh-and-blood boys, my teenage world was inhabited by distant characters embellished through my lively imagination. My life became immersed in the stories of my heroes, vicarious experiences mostly engulfed in American mythology: a Horatio Algers who firmly believed that you reap what you sow; an idealistic James Stewart as Mr. Smith going to Washington and ending up with his integrity intact; or a deeply individualistic Robert Redford in the guise of Jeremiah Johnson, embracing the loneliness of the wilderness for love of freedom.

  At the same time, I observed how hard my parents worked, and I now th
ink back to their unassuming lifestyles. My father left the house at dawn, driving to the farms to inspect the sugarcanes in an old MacArthur jeep, a military surplus he bought after the war and reconditioned again and again, until nothing of the old engine remained. However, he almost never refurbished the body: the upholstery of the seats had long worn out, and each time my brother and I went with him, my butt and indeed all my bones ached. We would return home before midday, dusty when the weather became dry and hot both outside and inside the jeep. It was worse when it rained as the roads were not asphalted, instead we criss-crossed creeks and hills reached through rugged terrain. I had humanised our jeep, and felt sorry for it when it got stuck in deep mud trying with all its might, smoke billowing from its hood, as the driver pasted his foot on the gas pedal. Quite often it failed, and the driver would have to call people from the farm to push the jeep out of the mud, laying stones underneath its tyres to firm up the ground. Sometimes, when the situation was deemed not too bad, we might be allowed to stay inside the vehicle, and I would make my body as light as possible in order to help our jeep. My bond with it deepened after I drove it into the ditch. I was fourteen years old when my father called the driver to teach me how to drive so that I could be self-reliant.

  Unlike my father, my mother thought money was to be spent. As she could sometimes not get sufficient cash even after she had waylaid my father’s staff for money, she decided to set up her own business. Again, as I earlier reported, she built a movie theatre right beside our house and it became her cash cow. One of the downsides to this ready cash was that it came mostly in loose change. I remember paying my rather sizeable tuition fees with these, and the Spanish nun looking at me in obvious annoyance.

  After having lived with the Spanish nuns, then with the German nuns, and lastly, with the American nuns, I developed a set of rather rigid moral principles. Lacking social influences from my peers—even at university with the American nuns, I spent days at the library reading about Alexander the Great instead of gossiping with my friends. Thus, the orientations I formed consisted of an amalgam of a conflicted childhood, a set of moral constructs, and a belief in the value of hard work without pretensions, whilst my dreams were coloured by an idealised worldview.

  As if to challenge this rather infantile personal world, my first foreign experience was about being “banished” to the concrete jungle of New York City, with nary a friend to help me cope during my initial months, and later, developing friendships with Americans rather than joining the Filipino community. Thus, it was in New York City where I grew up psychologically. Like a caterpillar, I shed my old cocoon and emerged a brash New Yorker. I learned that I could fight things out by simply out-shouting Americans. I learned to walk fast so you could mow down those who tarried and before anyone else mowed you down. To this day, Filipinos call me aggressive (I sometimes correct them and say, no, assertive is the word), direct, impatient, independent, and yes, individualistic—characteristics I imbibed from Main Street Manhattan.

  As I grew older, however, and learned the value of working smart over working hard, my natural introversion re-asserted itself, and I learned to harness my energy in order to develop my strengths. For example, constantly dealing with a crowd of people simply tired me, and I learned to minimise such interactions whenever socially acceptable. A popular psychological assessment (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI) pointed to my personality type, deemed innate. I am allegedly very much an introvert. Further, I perceive my surroundings intuitively, with broad holistic strokes rather than using my senses of taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch. I reach conclusions about my experiences using my feelings rather than through reasoned and logical analysis. (I express these sometimes intense feelings in torrential words, the reason many people think me extroverted.) Lastly, I am supposedly decisive and organised (Personality Type: INFJ—I for Introversion; N for Intuitiveness; F for Emotions-based; and J for Decisiveness.)

  This innate temperament largely runs counter to what I have concluded are the modal Filipino preferences for Personality Type ESFP—E for Extraversion; S for Senses-apprehension; F for Emotions-based; P for Continuing focus on perceptions. Filipinos are mostly “extraverts”—the roughly similar word to extroverts—used by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst who first developed the typologies.11

  You don’t need to be particularly observant to note that Filipinos are a highly extroverted lot. They enjoy being constantly out with their different barkadas. This is coupled with the use of their five senses instead of a more conceptual and imaginative perspective as they take in information from the world around them. For example, no one will deny that Filipinos live to eat rather than eat to live; they enjoy singing and dancing, attested to by the fact that the country is replete with talents and skills in the performing arts. They are not, however, as efficient at making decisions, always focused on the present—constantly observing and perceiving. With a high tolerance for ambiguity, they have a tendency towards procrastination and a spontaneous decision-making process. Further, when they have to implement their decisions, they lack well-thought-out plans. In my case, I was and still remain impatient with people who dilly-dally, who can’t think ahead, and, in general, who can’t seem to get their act together. Especially in the past, I often told them so! Not surprisingly, I had relatively few friends, not to mention belonging to barkadas, and in the old days of courtship, virtually no “suitors”. To this day, I still struggle with my natural tendencies, on the one hand, and the desire to be more socially acceptable, on the other.

  The only thing I seem to have in common with most Filipinos is that, like them, I make conclusions and decisions based on gut-feel rather than on detached analysis. In short, there is little overlap between my own inborn tendencies and what I think are the preferences of the majority of Filipinos. I possibly inherited my introversion from my father, and my emotionality from my mother. These, and my other preferences, are reinforced by many un-Filipino traditions I was exposed to at critical points in my life. To a large extent, they shaped my views, ideals, and values. Thus, notwithstanding that the Philippines was my country of birth and where I spent most of my years until I was twenty-three, I could identify neither with my extended family, nor with my community, nor with my fellow citizens.

  For the longest time, however, to admit even to myself what I thought were my true inclinations would have caused a great deal of guilt and shame. That I never felt a sense of pride in, nor attachment to my country of birth, was something I didn’t want to acknowledge even to myself. Thus, I decided that in justice and fairness—not charity—I had the duty to give back to the country what I had taken from it—a comfortable lifestyle and good, though foreign-run, schooling, among others. In my idealism, I tried to work for the Philippine government, hoping to help by effecting some changes from the inside of organisation/s. Needless to say, I did not succeed. Now, I am content with contributing what I can to NGOs with whose aims I can identify.

  *

  On the other hand, my father was a true patriot. He was an active Rotarian, taking seriously the idea of community service. Joining the Luzonians, he worked towards the integration of people coming from other islands who, like him, migrated to Negros. On 10th of October each year until well into his fifties, he would march his young family to visit his alma mater, the state-run University of the Philippines (U.P.) in Los Baños, Laguna to commemorate Loyalty Day, when in 1916, the government sent a battalion of Filipino volunteers from his university to fight side by side with the Americans in Flanders, Belgium. He of course also had pro-American views, having worked in an American-established agency during the Philippine Commonwealth period.

  My father’s patriotism was inclusive. However, the loyalty my other relations and friends sometimes had, edged into the more exclusive form of nationalism. For instance, when I worked briefly at the regional headquarters of Bank of America, then located in Manila, a family member made pointed remarks about my colonial
mentality. Likewise, my colleagues at the business school sometimes derisively referred to me as “that American woman” when they thought I had come across too strongly.

  True, after a number of years in America, I did feel “American”. Finally, in the mid-1970s, I seriously considered staying in America. I was encouraged by teachers such as the renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, who told my class that as we now understood different cultures, we could search for a place anywhere in the world and choose to live wherever we most fitted. After hearing these remarks, I decided I was at heart a cultural refugee, seeking cultural asylum in America. After all, I had read that even birds didn’t adjust to their habitats but rather chose habitats where they were most comfortable. I thought of applying for a “Green Card”, a permanent residence visa. However, my father strongly objected. He emphatically admonished that the only reason for emigration was financial need. You left only if you were poor and in search of better opportunities. There was no such thing as a cultural refugee.

  What is Self-identity?

  One of the very first pieces of recommended reading I was given when I started my anthropology course was an article about how, by virtue of our humanity, each one of us is like everyone else. Then, because of our membership and loyalty to particular groups (shared nation, religion, ethnicity, gender, class, etc.), we are like some others. Finally, because we are all individuals with unique characters, we are like no other. What are the values and loyalties that bind us together, and what are those that draw us apart? When we find the answers to these questions, we have defined the way we look at ourselves and our relationship with the world. We have defined our personal identity.