At home in the land of the GIANTS

NEW JERSEY – "Do you have this in the 64-ounce size?" The woman standing next to me in the aisles of the Costco warehouse in Hackensack was hoisting a 48-ounce box of Post Cinna-Cluster Raisin Bran. She was addressing a young female employee of Costco, one of America’s most beloved outlets for outsized food items. Costco – like Price Club, which recently opened in Manila – is the place to go when you need to stock up for an apocalypse, an asteroid, something major that will prevent you from food-shopping for a long, long time.

How big is a 48-ounce box of breakfast cereal? It’s enormous. My wife cannot even wrap her fingers around such a box. (The woman in line could do this easily; we’ll get to the reasons for that in a minute.) So how big is a 64-ounce box, you ask? It’s gargantuan. It’s bigger than a large dog, bigger than most children. It’s big enough to serve as a wall for one of those Habitats for Humanity projects.

The fact that a 64-ounce box of cereal doesn’t actually exist (as confirmed later by the Costco employee) does not change the general point of my story: things are just really huge in the United States. Bigger than ever. Size matters. End of story.

I’d forgotten about this, having been away from the US for such a long time. My first trip back to the malls quickly reminded me. Forty-ounce bottles of Scope. Two-gallon drums of olive oil. Mattress-sized bags of Cheetos. Food items in the US are excessively huge, I’ve concluded, because the people are excessively huge. (They have to be, to push around a Costco shopping cart the size of small Humvee.) People here are really huge because they consume 48-ounce boxes of cereal. And so on, and so on.

My return to the States also brought home how overwhelming a place it can be, especially to foreigners: a head-spinning array of choices awaits you, everywhere you go. You are encouraged to partake of abundance, an abundance that seems bottomless, and everlasting. You are invited to go a bit insane, choosing and partaking of this abundance.

Cans of Arizona Iced Tea stare down from the shelves, a staggering 32 ounces for 99 cents. No one I know can consume 32 ounces of iced tea in one go; you need three bladders to do it. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s the biggest can available, and it’s available to YOU, the consumer.

Again, to put things in Manila perspective: you would have to drink two large Zagus to get the same amount of beverage refreshment. Or three cans of Pop Colas.

Having arrived from the Philippines, my home for the past five years, visiting the States entailed a little culture shock. It always does. How can you experience culture shock in your own country, you ask? Try leaving for a while, then going back. You’ll feel at first like Gulliver, skipping between the Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdingnagians. My first reaction is usually one of surprise: Boy, people are huge! And they sure do eat a lot!

Having grown accustomed to the "single-serving" lifestyle of the Philippines, this consumption level always throws me: back in Manila, people buy single packets of instant coffee, single servings of noodles, one cigarette at a time. It’s only when Filipinos are set loose in foreign lands – in places like Costco, or shopping malls in general – that they go completely batty. Filipinos are notorious for buying up huge quantities of everything abroad – batteries, toilet tissue, Pepto Bismol – then schlepping these items back to the Philippines in groaning suitcases, where they and their purchases are blithely waved through by Customs officials.

Everyone knows there are no illegal drugs, biochemicals or weapons to be found; just extra cushions, rolled-up T-shirts, cans of Vienna sausages, and, if there’s space, 48-ounce boxes of Raisin Bran.

Because of all this, my mean and lean lifestyle in Manila always seems a little quaint and threatened whenever I touch down on US soil. The call to consumerism beats in the blood like faraway jungle drums: How easy will it be to resist the shopping frenzy, the mad Amazon.com ordering, the fever that tends to subside only after a few weeks here? Will I, like so many others, go insane sweeping the shelves of HMV, Virgin, Tower and other music outlets for CDs I thought I couldn’t live without, but will later actually play only sporadically? Just how many pairs of cheap sneakers does one person need in this life anyway? And will we – my wife and I – finally manage to rise above all this shopping mania? Or will we succumb, once again, to the Land of the Giants?

For the moment, my wife and I have decided to sit down and discuss the matter over a bagel the size of a steering wheel and a coffee large enough to wake all of the dead in Manhattan.