MABUHAY: A HISTORICAL TRAVEL NARRATIVE
By Ramon Vilaró
Anvil Publishing
AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
By Elaine Castillo
Viking Books
The Philippines is a conduit of stories. Whether you stay here or leave the country long enough, you end up with stories to tell. Veteran Spanish journalist and Fil-Am author Elaine Castillo remind us of what a vast, complicated weave it is making up Filipino lives.
Vilaró, who returned here recently to launch a book of his travel pieces through Anvil, Mabuhay: A Historical Travel Narrative, first touched down during the Vietnam War, as a journalist covering the plight of boat people coming to these shores. As a correspondent for El Pais, based in Tokyo, he’s touched down here during flashpoints of modern Philippine history: at the last stage of the Marcos era, during People Power, the Honasan revolt, the arrival of Cory Aquino, coup attempts, and reigns of Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo-Macapagal, Aquino, and now Duterte.
His current book is a journey that sets off on foot starting in Intramuros and ends up in a current reflection on Davao, Duterte country, before summing things up in the business nexus of Makati. Along the way, almost incidentally, Vilaró has told us this country’s story. It’s a history lesson packed with local color and flavor.
Starting with Corregidor’s early role as a gateway to the Philippines, Vilaró charts the early arrival of Chinese pirates and Spanish fleets, and a 300-year rule most notably administrated, for better or worse, by Catholic priests and friars (as well as tobacco barons). He takes us through the gates and cobbled streets of Intramuros and the fields of Fort Santiago, with a journalist’s keen eye for details — the type of customers in Ilustrado, or the fact that Rizal’s arms were bound when he was executed, not held aloft to the heavens as his statue suggests. He limns the complicated ties that still bound Rizal and Spain — the fact that his “Mi Ultimo Adios” is written in Spanish, a language and culture he loved despite his desire for Philippine independence.
He travels to Kawit to espy the site of General Aguinaldo’s proclamation of Philippine independence from his balcony in Cavite; then heads north to the bailiwick of Marcos, and its complicated connection to history; and he covers the “50 years of Hollywood” initiated by the United States’ arrival with a far superior fleet to Spain’s in 1898, dispassionately recounting the transfer of a country from one colonizer to another, receipts included.
It’s all in the history books, but Vilaró has a lively way of taking us along on the journey. Having pored over no shortage of Filipino culture tomes aimed at foreigners and newcomers, I find this one really puts you on the ground. I asked him via email how he gathers details. “Like all investigators, I combine several things,” says Vilaró. “The documents and books written throughout history and, above all, I try to cross it on the ground to breathe the atmosphere, smells, landscapes and imagine how it could have been in the past… Stepping on the street is fundamental for a journalist. Talk to people, enter the shops or restaurants.” This he does, from Ermita to Siquijor.
Later in the book he sits with National Artist F. Sionil Jose in his cozy La Solidaridad bookstore in Ermita, specifically the novelist’s upstairs lair with its small, sunny table suitable for author talk, and its darker writing cove governed by a typewriter and endless stacks of books. You feel like you’ve been there.
Vilaró hedges his bets a little towards the end, visiting Duterte’s home city to find a kind of cult surrounding the former tough guy mayor. Yet though Vilaró criticizes Du30’s “style of assassins murdering people on the street, totally opposed to human rights,” the author notes the president retains a high approval rating, and as long as the economy is humming along, that’s unlikely to change. So here we are. Another gringo assesses life in these islands, finds it marvelous, fascinating, a little surreal at times, and as true and corrupt as any other teeming outpost of life throughout history.
Along with Vilaró, first-time novelist Elaine Castillo was also in town recently to launch her sprawling meditation on the Fil-Am abroad. With its crackling style that leaps across generations, decades and countries, America is Not the Heart takes us into the living tissue of Hero de Vera, a girl raised to be a doctor, through detours in the New People’s Army and a third incarnation as a working class wife in the United States.
Life is like this — long stories like Hero’s that wind and slip down blind alleys. Castillo layers a sharp overall sense of design into this tale, though, and it never wavers or loses its way.
As the title suggests, the conflicting barometer of the diaspora — the Fil-Am caught between two or more worlds — is summed up in a long opening chapter (effectively told in second person), in which a main character looks down upon her sleeping daughter, now safe from the world’s worst harm, trying to put into words what it means to be an American and also a Filipino at heart:
Throughout her childhood, you won’t be able to stop yourself from constantly telling your daughter: If you were born in the Philippines, we would both be dead. She’ll grow up knowing that the only reason she’s alive is because she was born in America — though she doesn’t have to love America any more or less for that reason. Then again, she doesn’t have to love it. She’s of it.
It’s the kind of meditation that nativists in the United States might use as fodder to argue that immigrants and outsiders can never really “belong” or feel any “loyalty” to their adopted country of the US. But read further, between the lines, and you realize what a struggle it is to leave your heart behind.
Looking down at her in those first few moments, what you see most of all is what she doesn’t have. A fate. You know what it’s like to have a fate; you also know what it’s like to escape one. This one won’t sell chico on National Road. This one won’t brush her teeth in her hand every night. As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.
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Mabuhay: A Historical Travel Narrative and America is Not the Heart are available at National Book Store.