A Common Apparition

IT was a time in my hometown when post-World War II euphoria was beginning to fade. The Black Market was closed to newcomers. Chewing gum and chocolate bars were getting scarce. The G.I.s were gone and the local imagination was getting stale. The townsfolk, bored with old heroes, desperately needed new faces to celebrate, to gaze at through half-closed windows, to talk about in excited whispers.

When three "pensionados from America" came to town, one after another after years of absence, expectations throbbed again.

Mario the Mestizo came first. Children followed him around as if seduced by mysterious vapors. His skin glowed under the Philippine sun as he told stories about America to the endless crowds he attracted. The stories were embellished with fancy English sentences: "As I hitched and hiked from Maine to Albuquerque," "I like the free, fresh wind in my hair, life without care," and his favorite: "I've been to faraway places with strange-sounding names." His English dazzled everyone. When radio reached my town some bright kids realized that the smart phrases were really memorized song lyrics. But by that time Mario was long gone, after news of sporadic pregnancies of the town's nubile young women started spreading. He was never seen nor heard from again.

A year later, Captain Rufino visited. A dignified, taciturn, decorated officer of the U.S Air Force, he had been badly burned when his plane was shot down. As soon as he hit town everyone was talking about how "plastic surgeons in America" had used "plastic" to replace Captain Rufino's burnt skin. The few times he appeared in public, people could hardly keep themselves from touching his face to feel how skin-like his "plastic" coating was.

When Noy Beriong arrived anyone was free to touch him. In fact, he went around town hugging and touching everyone he met. The last "pensionado" to return regaled the town with stories of his 30 years in San Francisco, endless yarns of gold-tone romances with white women. At the end of each story he would say, "To enjoy romance in America, one should consistently was one's privates with warm water." Noy Beriong was 92 when he died, a bucket of warm water vaporizing by his bedside.

Now we are the old-timers who occasionally come to town. In all my visits I've never attracted crowds, and only stray dogs follow me in my walks. My sole intimacy with warm water is limited to fixing instant coffee.

The current name for us - "tagagawas," meaning, outsiders - is most fitting. It implies that we are looking in from the outside, making adjustments and the necessary negotiations.

I've always had problems with old labels, anyway. "Immigrant" conjures images of crowded boats from Sicily filled with hollow-eyed future Mafiosi capos. As an "immigrant" I might be asked to shoot somebody who's enjoying his fettucini. Besides, it's only outside the Philippines where we are immigrants; In the Philippines, we ought to be called another name, something like exigrants.

Another word is "expatriate," which evokes the image of a very pale white man with a mustache as thin as his lips, impeccably wrapped in a pinstriped suit, and speaking in clipped accents. If you went to to my hometown looking like that, the folks would let loose the town dogs on you, or ask you to play Pontius Pilate in their annual Passion play. Now the word has been shortened to "expat."

And then there's the label "exiles." This status implies an obligation to write another Noli and Fili, with  a Josephine Bracken facsimile lurking in the guest room.

If you don't want to call me an outsider, perhaps you can call me a "Bewildered Wanderer," because that's what I am every time I go through the Aquino International Airport, searching for the Cebu connecting flight.

Yes, we have become, at least on occasion, bewildered wanderers. For our hometown friends we are ghostly embodiments given another chance at reincarnation. The creakings of old bones, the tingles of old flesh, the hesitations of old minds rise again and again in startled recognition of one another. We stare, we are initially mute as we reach out to touch. We are not celebrities and our skins do not glow under the Philippine sun. We are as common as the next apparition.

Return Flight

WE immigrants, like lovers with unresolved romances, generally carry a torch for the old country. In our hearts the native country always keeps the dreamy hues of past love affairs.

When we heard Filipinos who have lived for decades in America  talked about going back to the Philippines "for good," we thought  it was just the periodic flaring up of an old flame. We expected it to flicker back into an unobtrusive nightlight. Lately however, the old flame has turned into a conflagration.

Years ago, we left the Philippines feeling America as redemptive even if we were not sure what redemption we were seeking. And through the years, we increasingly saw the Philippines as harsh reality, an ancestor we were ashamed to talk about. But this time it has turned into the New Dream, the New Redemption. What is this sudden, obsessive desire to live once more in the Philippines? A need to seek the resolution of something unfinished? A desire to chisel years of nostalgia into solid Philippine marble?

Some of us feel that our years in America is an unfinished symphony badly in need of a third or final Movement. It was a life after all which started with the opening rondalla strains of Filipino folk songs then transposed abruptly into a full orchestral rendition of America, the Beautiful. During our years in America we had our share of cultural discordant notes. There must be this desire this time to clean up the contrapuntal American melodic shifts, to restore some harmony in us. In the Philippines, perhaps, lies that special corner where we can "keep the music playing".

Spinning in the whirlpool of our ambivalence are fragments of curiosity, adventure, and even exorcism. How can we reshape ourselves to fit into an environment and culture that were once natural to us but must now feel alien? Will it be easy to revert to some atavistic ways or will we find ourselves imposing our American ways on our old home?

With considerable success we had turned ourselves into professionals, the labor force, the husbands and wives, the parents, the property owners, the community leaders in the daily American landscape. But there are days when we find our sense of pride in these accomplishments tarnished, no different from the coinage of daily living. The thrill is gone. The heart of adventure in America has become as tired and as sclerotic as our bodies. We now feel the need to jump once more into that swinging rope bridge, Indiana Jones-style, to cross that cultural chasm, hoping the other end is that exotic land where we were born.

When we go back, the faces of the people, the smell and texture of the land, the taste of the food, the voices and the rhythms will be the same. But we and the people we left behind will have changed. We will need to spend some time and effort to live and adjust with the changes.

As we doze luxuriously in Business Class on our flight back, the Southeast Asian sun rises as the American sun sets. Somewhere, our American-born children commute back and forth in the traffic of that American Dream we once had as we carry back live images of "amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties".

Acknowledgments

 My everlasting gratitude to the following people:

Special friends Winnie & Lito Basa and Monsignor Rudy Villanueva (Renato E. Madrid) for their creative nagging through the years that I should not stop writing; Erma Cuizon, Editor, Cebu SunStar Weekend Magazine, for publishing different versions of these essays; Rebecca Anonuevo for her insightful editing; Maricon Baytion, for nursing these pieces while in search of a publisher; and the UST Publishing House, "A Lunch-Break Conversation" and "Tio Felix Flies to America" are previously unpublished.

Preface

Bruised Knees and Buried Treasures

"The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it"--Eudora Welty

Out of curiosity a child wanders away from a mother's watchful eyes to see what's around the corner. The child slips and bruises his knees. Or finds a buried treasure.

Whether it's writing about it or living it, in childhood or in maturity, we are always satisfying our curiosities.

Knowing that the only thing I wanted to do was write, I took myself instead to the world of medical doctors, a place where writers are seen as extra-terrestrials. Knowing how attached I was to my Southern Cebu hometown, I left it for the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, U. S. A. Convinced of how much I had become a stranger to the ways of the Philippines, I ventured to make the return flight.

Living is an unending series of voyages, to and from places familiar and strange. These essays are my scribbled notes from those trips. Each one carries the hope that others who have made the journey, bruising their knees or finding buried treasures in the process, have kept their curiosities alive.

Whether we are coming, going or staying put, natural curiosity must continue to burn. The sense of alienation felt by this reluctant doctor and by an emigrant in a foreign land is identical. At the end of the day, only our natural curiosities can help transcend that alien feeling and turn us into Natives fopr all times, for all climes.

Dedication

For my wife, Florenda, my once and always editorial consultant.

For my children, Luci, Luke & Patty, Renato.

And-

In memory of my mother, Vicenta, who did not want me to write because "writers die of tuberculosis".