It's Beginning to and Back Again

I'm back in Ilocos Norte. Been here a little over 2 weeks and of course it's like I never even left. Although in a matter of less than 3 months, my mother has stoped walking supposedly because of arthritis--have to pick her up just to sit up in bed to drink water. Got here in time for the last week of election campaign (Commisioner of Elections and the media use the term ERVI: Election Related Violence Incidents). Here in my father's hometown. The current mayor, my uncle, is running for re-election against his current vice-mayor, his younger brother. The current mayor's choice for vice-mayor is his only son, my cousin who is 9 months younger than me. His brother's choice for vice-mayor is another uncle of mine--who apparently doesn't get along with my father and his family. Aparently this is typical of Phil. politics--keeping both political regimes and oppositions all in the family--read a story about one town where the 2 candidates for mayor were an ex-husband and e-wife. Thankfully there was only one ERVI here, apparently unrelated to any of the family, some political fallout in a remote barangay of the town, an officer guarding a school polling lpace shot. Right after midnight on the eve of elections at my uncles house, they slaughtered 2 horses and made various dishes with the meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner--tasted like a tougher less gamier beef--maybe mcdonald's does use horsemeat. There were accusations aired on the local tv news between the brothers of vote buying--which it seems like no one is absolutely innocent of perpetrating.

The Great Malls of Manila

I'm in Manila. I've been touring all the great malls: Robinson's in Ermita, Mega Mall, Glorietta. I can't decide whether it is more alienating not to be able to understand any of the street chatter around you, or know enough tagalog to catch passing phrases, but not enough to carry an actual conversation--then again everybody speaks english. I inadvertently speak English in a filipino accent--trying to blend in--but the lady at Greenwhich (a pizza chain)clocks me, "Where are you from, I've never heard that accent before." I don't even sound like a balakbayan.

I was born here but that was a very different Manila, before texting and EDSA. I start to realize that my tagalog has a different accent. Sometimes I want to pronounce my e's as short rather than long vowels (e.g., heend-EH rather than heen-dEE) and I wonder where the hell did I get that from, why did my mother speak that way. Are accents even regional to neighborhoods within Quezon City? Maybe like my fake filipino-english I made it all up.

The skys are clear blue here, apparently the miasma of jeepney and bus fumes stays at ground level. I've visited all the Rizal shrines and memorials. The museum at Fort Santiago is especialy edifying: He was a sceptic of Roman Catholocism: Ever the scientific rationalist he believed in a historical Jesus, preached against rituals of blind faith. He did not believe in violent revolution (nothing good could come of hate), but felt there was no other option to escape colonialism. But those too were different times when novels could incite revolution.

Tomorrow I fly to Laoag, Ilocos Norte. And then back to Bangkok for a third time before I head back to Cali (I had to buy an onward ticket at the Bangkok airport--The Phil. allows no entry without onward itinerary).

Phnom Penh, Cambodia Part II

Four three-storied school buildings face a large open courtyard. They are painted the same warm ochre color as many colonial-looking buildings you find throughout central Phnom Penh. They remind you of your Freshman dorm, despite the warm tones they share a bauhaus flair for the cold practicalties of boxes. The first classroom you enter on the ground floor in building A is empty except for the bare metal frame of a cot. Lying on the cot are lengths of metal rebar with links of chain attached to large eyelets, a corroded metal box. Then you notice a blown up unframed photo hanging on the wall just beyond the bed, like something Andy Warhol would have silkscreened in foursquare: a darkly reproduced photo of a mutilated body lying half in half out of the bed frame. Throughout the building you find more of the same. The windows have all been outfitted with bars, but the southern light bleeds through the open windows from the shophouses across the street and bathe the ochre walls and the maroon and gold checkered tile floors in a soft glow. In some rooms the old blackboards are still there with a palimpsest of inscrutable drawings and writings. You notice the dark stains in corners and seeping from the ceilings, rust or blood or mould you cannot tell. Bolts pounded into walls to create makeshift constraints, so many strangely emotive textures like you'd find in nine-inch-nails album art. And you think oh the dark dark tropes that pop likes to play with, and then you worry what does it say about you that you're initial reactions lie in the purely aesthetic.

In building B, the classrooms have been divided into makeshift cells divided by brick or wood walls, the cells no bigger than a restroom stall. The balconies looking over the courtyard lined with lengths of barbed wire. You feel like you shouldn't be taking photos, but then everyone else is, and you think maybe we are all here bearing witness regardless of what drew us here in the first place: morbid fascination, guilt, history, a history of collective guilt.

In the next building, the ground floor is a gallery of photos, hundreds of headshots, a gallery of stoic glances on either side of you, punctuated by photos of mass graves and aftermaths, scenes discovered by the Vietnamese forces after the Khmer Rouge fled. Then there are bones and paintings recreating the actual acts. Tools. Some expat photographer has created a series playing with the quality of light in the classrooms and the reflections seen off the glass cases in the gallery of photos, he claims he is giving the spirits voice by imagining a dialog between the long dead prisoners and the latter day museum-goers captured in the reflections.

On the top floor of the last building you finally find substantive text, a narrative beyond an abandoned crime scene. A series with portraits and testimonials from relatives, lovers, friends of the killed. Brothers, sisters, sons, daughters disappeared. You notices phrases repeated: "He was a kind man" "She was proud to join the revolution" "Joining the army seemed a better option then toiling in the fields." In another room portraits of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge and this place Toul Sleng (S21) central detention and interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge. Their portraits are covered in graffiti, all in khmer script you can only imagine the anger and rage through the scratched out eyes and mouths. In another classroom a child of the killing fields now a photojournalist has created portraits and interviews of former prison guards of this very compound. Their old black and white IDs, young teenage boys and girls unsmiling in there severe uniforms, accompanied with their present day photos, now fathers and wives, a woman gives alms to a monk, a man picnics with his family, another man tends to his field. They all seem to say the same thing, we did what we were told, otherwise we would have been killed. All these voices bring the things you have seen to the human scale of emotion and empathy, a hundred rooms, so much hysteria and fear and anger and loss that still lingers and it becomes all too much to take in at once.