The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  I have a few hours of sustained cognizance in the late afternoon, and somehow the hangover I’d been expecting never comes. I fall asleep on the bus, and when I wake up we’re unloading near an old Spanish cathedral that would look abandoned if not for the well-advertised gift shop next to it. The structure is small, and we’re told it dates back to the late nineteenth century. The white façade is covered in the black and green stains that accumulate on porous walls in tropical climates, and it looks like it could cave in without much force. Inside, the waning sun cuts through stained glass windows that have been replaced many times, casting colorful geometry on the dirty tile floor. The sensation of déjà vu overtakes me for a moment as I look at the plaster icons, all white faces, contorted in agony, looking upward. I’ve always wondered where these icons come from, and, operating under the assumption that worshipping unseen gods does not automatically make someone unreasonable, I’ve wondered how these white European faces persist. The Santo Niño de Cebu is covered in elaborate royal silks and jewels worthy of a king, even though by Christianity’s own accounts, the blessed child was born in a manger to a carpenter and a homemaker. The cathedral looks like every other Catholic ruin in the so-called Third World. It doesn’t seem unlike the cathedral in Fortín.

  Outside there is a long iron stand where one can light a votive for a loved one. The candles are all different colors, and when they melt they drip their bright wax over the iron lip onto the ground, where it accumulates into a huge rainbow mass. After the church closes someone must scrape the iron and ground underneath, and the spent wax must be dealt with in some way to make room for tomorrow’s candles. I wonder whether it’s simply thrown away. Nearby, a child, maybe three or four years old, sits on a curb playing with something in his small hands. I wander over to him because it seems, at first, like he’s alone. As soon as I near him, though, the street vendor who’d been stationed on the front sidewalk has turned and is watching me. I smile and nod, and he smiles back. The child looks up and shows me the small matchbox he’d been playing with. He slides it open and a thick black spider with blade-like legs pokes half its body out, and then it fully emerges to crawl around his hands as he laughs.

  A few days later, our minders set us loose in Manila, and Jeremiah and I decide to wander around the city on foot without any destination in mind. After a long trek away from our posh hotel, through streets choked with trikes and lined with tall residential towers, we find our way into an area of densely packed buildings that aren’t high-rises or newly erected condominiums. It feels like an actual neighborhood. A few kids kick a soccer ball against a tin gate. A woman hangs clothes on a line in a gangway between buildings. A man pulls up to a small grocery store on a bicycle with a large cart platform welded to the front. It’s stacked about five feet high with what looks like thousands of eggs, and when he steps on his brakes they come sliding forward off the platform and onto the ground. A deluge of clear and yellow goo runs down the street. The grocer, an older woman wearing a blue dress and apron and brown rubber sandals, runs out to help the poor man salvage some of his eggs, while a few stray cats lap yolks out of the gutter.

  We wander for a few hours turning randomly down residential streets. Jeremiah is a good companion because he is as keen on getting lost and not talking as I am. Intermittently, and silently, he points at something he thinks I should see: a pink furry streak on the asphalt that had once been a kitten, a sign on a wall for legislation to outlaw the birth control pill, a small white duck with yellow feet waddling down a sidewalk as though it were running late for an appointment. Morning becomes noon and we can feel our scalps burning, so we decide to have lunch in the first place we see. As we cross the street toward a small outdoor restaurant, I hear the slapping of footsteps running toward us, and before we have time to think, there are two children, a girl and a boy, wrapped around us, begging for money in a few broken English phrases. Neither of us had seen them coming. The sound of accelerating footsteps coming up behind us had produced a ball in my throat, and my heart is still pumping so hard it feels as though something is slamming against my breastplate. The girl, maybe five or six, with a long black ponytail that goes down past her waist, has Jeremiah’s arm in a tight hug, and the boy, around the same age, has all four limbs fastened around my leg. After I’ve processed that they’re just children, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Our first reaction, which is to play with them, comes spontaneously, out of sheer astonishment and not knowing what else to do. Jeremiah gently begins swinging the young girl, lifting her off the ground, smiling, trying to get her to smile back. I look down at the boy, whose left eye is completely red with blood. He’s barefoot, they both are, and even from above I can see thickened, cracked toes and soles from walking the streets without shoes. I puff out my lips and cross my eyes, which he can’t help but laugh at. Their clothes are torn and dirty, and they look malnourished. Jeremiah tells them in English that they need to let go of our arms so we can reach into our pockets, but they either don’t understand or don’t trust that we’ll give them something if they do. We walk a few paces, pulling them along with us, and they continue laughing until we’re in front of a 7-Eleven. Abruptly, they bolt away, sprinting across the street, disappearing around a corner. When we turn to look at what they’d seen, there’s a guard standing in the window with his hand resting on the grip of a shotgun.

  After this we both need beer. We sit under a red San Miguel umbrella in an outdoor restaurant decorated with hanging statues of pink cherubs trailing white ribbons. After our first beer, we decide we need another, and then another. We drink them fast, sitting silently in the shade for some time, not knowing what to say. After a while, I notice that almost everything around us—the napkin holders, the plastic tablecloths, the umbrella casting its red shade—reads San Miguel. I was under the impression it was a beer company, but later I’d learn it’s the Philippines’ largest corporation and has crept into energy, mining, infrastructure, and telecommunications, even a brief stint in commercial air travel. Its chairman, Eduardo Murphy Cojuangco Jr., advised US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos through the period of martial law from 1972 until 1981. After Marcos fell out of favor with the United States and fled the Philippines, Cojuangco transitioned into the public sector. At one point, it is estimated, his business empire accounted for one-quarter of the Filipino gross national product. Somehow the ubiquity of the brand name had escaped me until then, but once I was aware of it I saw it everywhere.

  On our walk back to our hotel I thought about how transition and continuity are indistinguishable here. The historical sites we’d visited until then had been, if not aseptic, then old enough for spilled blood to have gone cold. They’d been presented to us as historical, that is, they’d performed their historicity by being designated historical sites, relics of a dead and hermetically sealed past. They were set apart from the spaces and time in which they existed, so as tourists we were not obliged to consider the barefoot children in relation to the cathedrals, and the cathedrals in relation to the high-rises and banks. We weren’t pressed to follow the gradient from the Spanish crown to American imperialism to our so-called soft power and cronies and corporations. The clipped official histories printed on plaques and materials for guided tours gave us the illusion of being observers, not participants.

  We finish our beers and settle up because we have to meet the group for a tour of Intramuros, the walled city that served as the seat of government for the Spanish empire. On our walk back to the hotel we pass a neighborhood of houses made of scrap pieces of wood, corrugated tin, and cardboard. In the window of one there’s a young boy, maybe four, leaning his head out, watching the cars go by.

  In January 1898, Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy under President William McKinley, wrote a letter to his brother-in-law in which he lamented “the queer lack of imperial instinct that our people show.” He, like many others in Washington, had his “imperial instinct” aroused in the US war with Sp
ain and the possibility of acquiring former colonial possessions. Roosevelt became a leading voice in the push toward expansion in the Pacific as the natural extension of manifest destiny. There were all manner of political philosophies revived or constructed to justify this lust, including political gravitation, natural right, and natural growth. Despite popular resistance to the spirit sweeping Washington, the United States annexed the Philippines in 1899. When anti-imperialists pointed out that spreading the “empire of liberty” by force violated the core principle of “consent of the governed,” written in the Declaration of Independence, Roosevelt pointed out that no “sane man” would think this was meant to apply to savages.

  The walls of Intramuros are stained with patches of green moss that crawl up and over their highest points. Traffic flows down wide streets that run through openings in forty-foot-thick walls. The fortification is a collage of power and conflict, at times having been occupied, destroyed, rebuilt, and refortified by different belligerents fighting for different interests: landmass, regional control, and domination of trade routes. It has a different quality than the other ruins we’ve visited thus far, because it’s functional and currently transited by locals making their way through Metro Manila.

  While we’re waiting for the horse-drawn carriages that will take us on our guided tour, I overhear a young boy speaking to his mother in a language I don’t recognize before he switches midsentence to nearly unaccented English. Dressed in designer clothing, the mother holds a familiar brown leather purse covered in L’s and V’s. His quick bouncing between languages reminds me how it would be nearly impossible to find a place in which I couldn’t make myself understood in English, about the power and prohibition that comes with speaking or not speaking one of these dominant global languages, and about how enduring the story of the shibboleth has been in our societies.

  The boy had also reminded me of myself because of the way he switched languages with ease. He held his mother’s hand, and his small voice quickly bounced through syllables. But the language he’d started with wasn’t European. It confronted me with the reality that I only spoke the languages imposed by two kinds of conquest, and part of that violence had found its way into every aspect of my being: my culture, my speech, my very genetic makeup. Even the voice I hear in my head, the language in which I dream, the way the world is formulated as it passes through my perception, bears those marks.

  The carriages pull up, and we’re loaded on. I’d thought someone would be guiding our tour with commentary but am pleased to find our carriage ride is silent. The walls of Intramuros have seen waves of violence from different sources, and now they attract tourists to the walled city. After the settler colonialism that had claimed the so-called New World, this seems to have been the first location upon which the United States projected itself imperially, this occupation of an already occupied capital city. Historians disagree about what Thomas Jefferson meant when he formulated America as an “empire of liberty,” but the annexation of the Philippines through the abject horrors of war, the immeasurable amount of blood spilled in the process, is another example of why his intent was irrelevant, his words empty. Near the Puerta Isabel II, an entrance and exit in the walled city named after a nineteenth-century Spanish queen, there are the familiar green plastic letters that spell out “Starbucks Coffee” on a wall that bears the ghosts of some of the most brutal history of our past.

  Later that evening, after not being able to stop thinking about Intramuros, I slip into a torpor that clouds my thoughts. I lie on the large king-size bed in the sleek hotel suite in which Jeremiah and I are rooming, feeling uneasy. I decide to go for a walk to try to clear my mind, but it takes me about an hour to pry myself from the dim room. As I exit the hotel there are people eating dinner outdoors on elegantly stark tables that run along the exterior. I light a cigarette, and a tall, lean European man wearing brown suede loafers approaches. He asks me for a cigarette in English spoken with a thick French accent. I ask him how he knew to speak to me in English. He smiles. “Lucky guess.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Ceremony

  Returning to the United States after having been gone for over a month is disorienting. It feels like entering a foreign country, but it also feels as though I’d never left. Throughout Southeast Asia I’d had encounters with things that were truly foreign to me—bits of culture that were completely unrecognizable—but they were always set within a periphery that was eerily familiar. In the Philippines the colorful, squat Jeepneys that are everywhere first struck me as wholly Filipino cultural objects until someone pointed out that their name came from the US military Jeep that had become ubiquitous during American aggression and occupation. Many of the first-generation Jeepneys had been tricked-out, military surplus Jeeps that were sold to Filipinos after they’d served their purpose. I’d also gone to Cambodia, and as soon as I deplaned there, I noticed an airport employee walking with a wooden crutch because he was missing his right leg from the knee down. I didn’t think anything of it until I arrived at my hotel where there was a young man playing a khim in the lobby. He sat on the floor with his legs pointed behind him, and I almost missed seeing that he too was missing the bottom half of a leg, but his was the left. Somehow the connection evaded me until a few hours later, after a much-needed nap and shower, when I had dinner in the empty hotel restaurant. Sitting in silence at Le Bistrot, I awaited a large platter of escargot, and it wasn’t until the waiter, a dark brown Cambodian man in his twenties, set the dish down that I realized that seeing two men with missing bottom extremities had not been a coincidence. I remembered bits of what I knew of the international meddling after Cambodia had gained its independence from France, the series of US bombings during the sixties and seventies, and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. For the rest of the meal I thought about a countryside littered with land mines and mass graves.

  Upon landing in the United States I check my email after not having checked it for a couple of weeks. One of the first messages is from my landlord, who’d been collecting my mail while I was gone. He wrote that I’d gotten a certified letter from the Department of Homeland Security, and he wanted to know if he should forward it to my parents’ place in Chicago. On my layover I call him and asked him to read it to me, which he does. It contains the details for my oath ceremony, which he says is tomorrow, so after flying from Bangkok to Los Angeles, and then from Los Angeles to Chicago, I borrow a friend’s car and take off for Iowa City.

  I zone in and out of driving because I haven’t slept and there are only intermittent cars after long stretches of nothing. For dozens of miles there is only the rhythm of the yellow lines on the triangles of black asphalt made visible by the headlights. I lose track of the fact I’ve been driving for long periods, so when I am finally present again it’s scary that I don’t remember the last ten or twenty minutes of steering the vehicle at eighty miles an hour. I mostly daydream about Iowa, about how strange it is that after having lived in Chicago for over two decades, the place where I’d be naturalized would be West Branch, Iowa, a city with a population of just over two thousand, to which I have never even been. I think about the life-sized butter cow at the Iowa State Fair, about the National Cattle Congress, about politicians making pilgrimages to the heartland for down-home footage, about the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, and about the plaque in Riverside that looks like a headstone and reads “FUTURE BIRTHPLACE OF CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK, MARCH 22, 2228.” I think about the 2008 Postville Agriprocessors raid, the largest single raid of a workplace in US history to that point, in which a kosher slaughterhouse in northeastern Iowa was stormed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Just under four hundred workers were convicted of document fraud and served five months in prison before being deported. I think of the two 25,000-square-foot golden domes of Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, where hundreds of Iowans attempt to reach enlightenment through the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

  I call and leave a message for my Iowa friend Chelsea,
asking if I can sleep on her couch because I’d sublet my apartment to a traveling nurse for the summer.

  Chelsea calls as I’m passing “the world’s largest truckstop,” a four-hundred-parking-spot facility with a chrome and accessory shop for big rigs, two tricked-out semis, a dental clinic, theater, barber, public library, chiropractor, shower facility, and fast-food court. She says she’s just landed from her own return trip through Korea, and that I can meet her at her place. As I pull up, her fat white cat jumps out of her roommate’s open window and disappears into the neighbor’s tall bushes. For a moment I think about climbing in through the window so I can go to sleep but decide it would be dangerous, so I sit on her porch chain-smoking. The eastern Iowa sunset this time of year makes whatever is underneath look picturesque. The intensity of the pinks and oranges seems impossible. On the drive here, the rolling hills really do look as pristine as they look in Grant Wood paintings, and it’s very difficult to see why this is a fiction. Peppered along the roads there are long, one-level structures that look like warehouses, with built-in fans down the sides. This is to mitigate the lack of windows. Each is crammed with tens of thousands of chickens that wallow in their own filth and have less than a square foot of space to move for most of their lives. And far from the roads, away from visibility, there are slaughterhouses that are illegal to photograph, staffed by temp agencies that broker undocumented labor.