by Larry Farmer
The singer on stage, Freddie Aguilar, was tall for a Filipino, and dark skinned, even more so than most. He had long, black, stringy hair that flowed under a cowboy-type hat. I asked one of the Americans at the table next to us if this guy indeed was who we came to see. The so-called Filipino Bob Dylan. The man I asked verified it was so.
While looking at the menu, made up mostly of American food items, I liked hearing the singer already. His voice was resonant, and he had his performance down. I had to assume it was a performance, that he must do it so much it was routine, but it seemed as sincere as anything I ever saw from a stage.
“We’ll be learning Tagalog,” Lois said in conversation while we waited for our food. “When we get to training. Did you catch that? That’s the main dialect, you know. But after all the colonizing, Tagalog is about a third Spanish words now. Some say Taglish, anymore, made up of English words thrown in, too. Did your instructor mention how there were eighty-seven dialects in the Philippines? But Tagalog is the national dialect, the one spoken here on the big island, Luzon, and in particular, in Manila.”
“Why will we learn the national one, if we’re going to be trained in Mindanao and live there afterwards?”
“Perhaps to not offend other groups speaking other dialects. Mindanao is more recently settled. It’s really more like colonized by other Filipino groups. So many groups from other islands have settled there in a hodgepodge in the last century or two. Even now as the Philippine population keeps growing, I was told, there’s a lot of refugee types from all the resettling going on there.”
“I always pictured Mindanao as like the Wild West,” I mused aloud. “They used to have Moslem fanatics there. They’d wrap themselves in thick vines and wander into a Christian village, or an American outpost, back when it was a colony of ours, and they’d wield a machete on anyone until you hacked them to death or shot them. Either way, it had to be enough to penetrate the vine armor they wore. Several centuries ago Mindanao was the center of a shrunken-head cult in the South China Sea. It wasn’t until the advent of the Americans that headhunting finally stopped. It was also a center for the slave trade in this region.”
“How do you know this stuff, Mississippi?” she asked me as the waiter delivered our orders.
“I don’t know. Books, movies, legends.”
“You read so much or something?”
“I like to read, yeah. Knowledge is power, you know. It’s also entertaining. I was going to say it’s erotic, but mixed company and all that.”
“Erotic?” she asked with a chuckle. “Knowledge is erotic? Just what do you read? Maybe I don’t want to know. Mixed company we are, like you said.”
“I get chills when I learn things,” I explained as I thought about what I’d just said. “Life seems bigger than life to me. Things that happen that make me notice, anyway. It seems sexual, it’s so charged. I’ll stick with ‘entertaining’ then, but that sounds so trite.”
She shook her head as if trying to figure me out. “Neither did I think of knowledge as entertaining.” She smiled between bites. “Maybe a love story or something, but not from a history book or whatever it is you read. Anyway, we’ll be learning Tagalog, so I guess they speak it in Mindanao, or at least at our jobs. I’ll be teaching English in some barrio high school, I found out. Actually, I was told that in the Philippines they call a barrio a barangay.”
“And I’ll be working for the regional offices of the Central Bank. It’s owned by a cooperative, though. A cooperative of small farmers. I wonder how that works. And I’ll be teaching computers—personal computers, desktops. I’ve never even seen one before.”
“They don’t have them in Mississippi?” she teased.
“They only had them anywhere the last few years. Who can afford one, and who wants to bother to learn?”
“Then how are you going to teach it to Filipinos if you don’t know how yourself?” she asked. “If it’s so hard to learn?”
“I didn’t say it’s hard to learn. They have manuals for them. I have a master’s degree, and I know how to read manuals. I took a COBOL course as an undergraduate, and they must have seen it on my application to Peace Corps. I guess that’s how they know I took COBOL, but I don’t remember anything asked about this.”
“They asked general things,” Lois reminded. “You must have answered regarding something about your major. But didn’t we give them our college transcripts too? That was so long ago, and they asked so many things, I don’t remember anymore.”
“I don’t know. Anyway, that’s something I’ll be doing. I don’t know what the bank wants from me. And the same cooperative has a marketing branch for their products. I guess that means rice production. I don’t know what else they grow.”
“It’s the tropics,” she said. “It has a rainy season and a dry season. Unless where you’re going has lots of irrigation, they grow something else besides rice in the summertime, I would think.”
“Anyway, I’ll be helping somehow with marketing, too.”
“The music sure is loud,” Lois complained. “Maybe we should move a few tables farther away from the stage. I can barely hear myself talk.”
“Let’s just listen,” I suggested. “I like it. It’s mostly folk. I like folk. Some of it’s even country.”
“Kenny Rogers?” she moaned.
“Yeah,” I replied defiantly. “Yeah, I like Kenny Rogers.”
“Mississippi would,” she said, smiling.
“Where we’ll be living, they call it our site,” I said as if thinking out loud. “That’s clever. Like logistics or something. Sounds military.”
“Does it make you feel like you’re back in the Marines? This guy here with me is from Vicksburg, Mississippi and is an ex-Marine. And I’m eating in a folk house in Manila, Philippines, with him, in the Peace Corps. Now you tell me how that happened and how something like that could ever happen?”
“A little ying and a little yang,” I returned. “Makes the world go around.”
“How do you know about the ying and the yang?” she asked in amazement.
“Us little hicks from the Deep South, huh?” I snickered. “What do we know about anything except what the Klan teaches us? Right?”
“Well, not exactly the Klan,” she answered, “you being Jewish and all.”
“That must be it, then,” I said looking at her and showing some of the disgust I felt. “The Jew in me somehow sucked some of that in from the Northerners we get. Where else could knowledge come from in a place like Mississippi?”
“You’re being sarcastic,” she said, embarrassed.
“Aw, naw.”
Suddenly, the loudspeakers blared. It was more than Freddie Aguilar playing his guitar. It was a karaoke sound, and very intense. As he began his next song, the Filipinos in the crowd stood and cheered. More than cheered. They came unglued in a defiant celebration. What was this song he was singing? I wondered. It was magnetic. He quit playing his guitar altogether and let the sounds from the speaker accompany him as he used his hands to simulate a flow of tears from his eyes down his cheeks. Then he stood at attention with his fist clenched and placed over his heart as he looked up into the spotlight, which beamed on him as from an angel or even God. I could not get enough. Lois too was captivated. We quit eating and just watched, as did the other Americans in the room. Films of girls screaming for Elvis, or the Beatles, could not match the intensity and devotion these standing, hugging, and fist-clenching Filipinos displayed as they pounded the air with their fists in rhythm to the song. As the singer finished the last phrase, the exuberance of the crowd magnified even more.
As soon as the song and the cheering for it ceased, a table of Filipinos behind us came over.
“Do not be frightened,” they comforted. I didn’t think I was supposed to be, I thought, as I smiled back at them. “We love Americans,” one of them continued. “Do not let this concern you. We are just celebrating who we are. Free Filipinos. Not puppets of the Marcos dictatorship and his
American masters. You are our friends. All Americans are our friends. It is just a pride we feel, knowing who we are as a people.”
“I understand,” I replied, even though I didn’t, yet.
They seemed satisfied and returned to their table.
Lois and I looked at each other, bemused. The Marcos regime had been in power for almost twenty years and was corrupt, lethal, despotic. And hated by most of the country. The American administration had propped him up as part of our Cold War strategy. In the case of the Philippines, added American support was induced to keep our military bases on Filipino soil. But it was all coming to a head now, just as we arrived, ready to live among the downtrodden in a desolate area. I had joined the Marines hoping to fight in Vietnam. That did not occur. I had joined the Peace Corps to aid the poor and share cultures, and now I felt a confrontation that had the potential for war.
And what would happen to a single American girl? Lois, my new best friend. What did she face?
Later that night, back at the hotel, I told my director what had happened with Freddie Aguilar at the Hobbit House, and he explained it to me. The song Freddie sang that so energized the Filipino crowd was called “Ang Bayan Ko,” or “My Country.” Written against the American presence during colonization, it all but stood as the freedom fighter’s national anthem, much like the song “Dixie” in Mississippi.
I can’t say this didn’t concern me, but mostly it excited me. This wasn’t what I came here for, but it added to the allure. How could anyone be content back home, with life as usual, when there was a whole world around? A whole world I was now a part of.
Chapter 4
The best thing about training was that we got to see another part of the Philippines. Lois and I were sent to Zamboanga, in the southernmost tip of the island of Mindanao. Zamboanga lies on a peninsula. We were each put up by a host family for three months while we learned intensively the language—Tagalog, as we were told in Manila—something about Filipino culture and history, and more about who we would be working with when we became full-fledged Peace Corps volunteers.
Magellan was killed in the Philippines. I soon learned that in one of my history and culture classes. How did I not know that? But I didn’t. He was killed by a chieftain named Lapu-lapu, sort of like Captain Cook was later killed in Hawaii. Magellan still got credit for circumnavigating the world, and for claiming the Philippines and other Pacific islands for Spain. Until he did this, the Philippines was made up of what we Westerners would call half-naked savages.
Before the advent of the Spanish, the encroachment of Islam was already changing the makeup of Philippine society, at least in part. Muslim traders sailed by boat as far as Southeast Asia, and, in the process of trade and cultural interaction, many they encountered converted to Islam. That’s why Malaysia and Indonesia, for instance, are mostly Muslim to this day. As are the Philippine Islands south of Mindanao, as well as parts of Mindanao itself, which is the southernmost major island and the second largest island in the archipelago. With the coming of Catholic Spain, however, Mindanao suffered cultural tension that still exists. The remainder of the Philippines, those islands north of Mindanao, had little Muslim influence at the time of Magellan; it was open season for the Spanish missionaries and settlers that arrived.
In all this training, it was language that drove me crazy. While learning about the culture and history was very appealing, language and I do not get along. What made it worse was that after America drove the Spanish out of the Philippines in 1898, we were persuaded by the British to stay, in order to keep the Germans out. And even perhaps to potentially keep out the new upstart in the region, the Japanese. What that meant to me, besides more history that I loved, was that Filipinos also spoke English. They learned it in their schools after they adopted our school system, in their churches, and in their businesses, too. It became the unifying language for them, as did many colonizing languages for other countries that were subjected by European powers at the time. So, as I tried to converse with the locals and get down what little Tagalog I knew, they would reply in English. Either my speech was so atrocious, which I’m sure it was, or they wanted to show off to this new American in their midst how well they knew English. I never ever learned Tagalog. Period.
This was not the case for Lois, however. She took to Tagalog like a duck takes to water. Right in the middle of conversations she and I would have with locals, they would talk to her in Tagalog but to me in English, all in the same conversation.
The rest of our training was self-induced. Meaning we mingled where we wanted. This could be seeing a Tagalog movie at the local movie theater, or having a drink at a hotel bar, or perhaps sampling native cuisine in a restaurant somewhere.
But adventure called in the process.
“You can see Basilan from here,” I said to Lois as we took a break after a cultural sensitivity class. The building where we trained was near the beach, and just beyond the bay you could see an island with palm trees.
“Sulu,” Lois remarked, “is just past it. It’s the main island, I suppose, of the Sulu Island chain. All Muslim.”
“You want to go?” I asked her. “We could go either to Sulu Island in a tourist boat, or even one of these little crafts at the dock here that take people the few miles to Basilan. Just to see Moslem culture. And actually, Basilan is bigger than Sulu. It’s the biggest island of the four hundred islands of the Sulu archipelago.”
“Why do you call them Moslem?” she asked quizzically. “Is that what you say in Mississippi?”
“You make it sound racist,” I commented.
“I don’t guess it’s racist, but you’re the only one I hear calling them that.”
“The o’s and u’s intermix in a lot of languages,” I said.
“Somebody who struggles with language the way you do, and you notice something like that,” she said with a chuckle.
“Knowing that is more in line with history than language. So I guess that’s why.”
“Isn’t it dangerous on a Muslim island?” she asked. “They’re rather hostile here. And remember, it’s a breath away from civil war here, and they’ve been at odds, often violently, since Christian settlers first began appearing. You’re the one who told me about those assassins that wrapped themselves with vines and went hacking at the infidel.”
“The Peace Corps wouldn’t have put us in harm’s way,” I answered.
“That doesn’t mean we have to tempt fate, though,” Lois said. “And I’m a girl. I might be a little too tempting, don’t you think?”
“It is just right there,” I replied, pointing. “Surely Basilan is safe. Let’s just bop there. Saturday’s our last weekend here. It’s now or never.”
“And speaking of tempting fate,” Lois chided, “you’re not going to wear your Star of David pendant around your neck, are you? The Filipino Muslims on staff are taking it in stride, but they work for the Peace Corps. But it’s bad enough just being a Jew around a lot of Muslims, so why do you flaunt it so much here? Thank God you don’t wear your Israeli Defense Forces T-shirt here in Zamboanga like you did in San Diego, but still. You flaunt being a Jew. At first I thought it was some Mississippi thing. That you had defiance toward Southern bigotry or something. But I’d think you’d want to feel a little more secure while you’re here.”
“Security is boring,” I replied as macho as possible. “But I’m not flaunting anything. The Peace Corps is supposed to be this culturally sensitive organization. We’re supposed to share our culture while at the same time opening up, however much, to alien cultures and lifestyles. So here I am. A Jew among us. I’m aware of my status in Mississippi. But most Jews, at least, have white skin and can blend in there, when we want. But it’s not just Mississippi. For every three violent crimes against an ethnic group in America, two of them are directed at Jews. Not Blacks, not Latinos, not Indians, or Asians, but Jews. And everyone knows about the Holocaust, and the pogroms toward Jews in history, not to mention the Crusades. And all this
about affirmative action now? Meaning quotas? Let minorities in universities even if they don’t perform? Until World War II, Jews had quotas against them. To keep them out. To keep them from taking over law schools and medical schools. So I don’t want to flaunt or rub anybody’s nose into anything, but I just thought, while here, hey, y’all, here I am. A Jew. The Moslems on staff here are real good people. I don’t know everything they think, but I go out of my way to be friends with them as a Jew, and they do the same to me.”
I took a deep breath and stared Lois in the eyes. How was she handling my burst of passion, I wondered.
“I won’t wear my pendant on Basilan,” I promised. “Okay? So, are we going?”
“Okay,” Lois agreed, rather fretfully. “I better not regret this.”
“Hey, you two,” someone said from behind us.
We turned to look.
“Hey yourself, Rhonda,” Lois greeted.
With the girl named Rhonda were two other girls. They all had strong Yankee accents. Rhonda herself was from Rhode Island, while one of the girls came from Boston and one from Brooklyn in New York.
“Guess what we found out,” Rhonda said cheerfully. “All of us—me, Margaret, and Jenny here—found out that our sites are building us Nipa Huts to live in. I’m so excited. I’ll have my own little cottage, even if it’s one room, made out of bamboo and standing on stilts. No electricity or running water, but a new shelter, all my own. That’s just the sweetest thing. They must be such good people where we’re going.”
“They must be excited to have an American in their midst,” Margaret said. She was the one from Boston and was a middle-aged, gray-haired woman.
“When we all had our site visits,” Jenny said, “our coworkers-to-be showed us around. They showed us where we’ll be working, the agency and all, and are building our huts near there. I can hardly wait to go, now. All of us have the same story in that regard, even though we’ll live in different communities.”
