The Philippines Experiment, Track Six

If you know who I am or have been reading this blog, you are probably aware that I spent two and half years of my life living in the Philippines. Now I'm back, and I'm going to attempt to chronicle the entire experience as best as my vague recollection allows.

Vince Guaraldi Trio - Christmas Time Is Here [Vocal Version]

It’s December of 2007, six months after I arrived in the Philippines, and I’ve already established a satisfying daily routine. I was so preoccupied with watching pirated DVD’s and eating barbecued and skewered cubes of blood that I was successfully suppressing the homesickness I was feeling. However, the holidays were coming, and even though I don’t romanticize Christmas normally, I had never spent it away from my family so I was yearning for something familiar. I wasn’t insensitive to the fact that a trip to the Philippines during Christmas isn’t cheap, and therefore I wasn’t expecting my family to cross the Pacific just so I have someone to open presents with. But when I talked to my mom on Yahoo! Messenger, she mentioned that they were planning to go to California to see my grandma and Mickey Mouse during their holiday break, and that irritated me a little bit. I don’t know if my tantrum changed their mind, or if they were just pulling a fast one on me, but they decided to go to the Philippines to partake in this experiment with me, even if it’s only for a few weeks.



This wasn’t the first time my family has traveled back to the Philippines for Christmas, so they knew precisely what to expect. But I recall the culture shock that I felt when I first returned to the motherland in Christmas of 2003: the streets seemed narrower, the population seemed denser, and the humidity seemed more uninhabitable than what I remember. I wasn’t surprised though that the people around me seemed friendlier. I figured it’s the three-hit combo of Christmas love, relatives excited to see me for the first time in years, and the fact that I was rolling in with dollar bills that made people more hospitable. I can still remember when I was very young, and I was always delighted when a balikbayan relative was coming back to visit for the holidays since it meant stateside gifts and massive noche buena feasts. It weirdly became a Christmas tradition. It’s no wonder why most Filipinos who have been away from the Philippines for a very long time only have pleasant sentiments about their homecoming because everyone they know there pretty much threw a parade for them around town.

The biggest difference between Christmas in Canada and Christmas in the Philippines is the absence of winter, obviously. No snow means there are no ski trips, no skating on ponds, and no real pine trees to put garlands and ornaments on. Of course, not having winter wonderland also works to their advantage. Once December hits, children congregate and make musical instruments out of tin cans and bottle caps, and they walk from house to house to sing Christmas carols in exchange for a little bit of money. In the nine days leading up to Christmas, the churches open their doors at dawn for Misa de Gallo or Simbang Gambi (Night Mass). The best part about it are the aromatic breakfast treats sold by street vendors afterwards, which usually involves bibingka (cake made out of rice flour and egg), puto bumbong (purple, sticky rice pudding topped with brown sugar and shredded dried coconut), and salabat (hot ginger tea). In a way, having no winter makes you feel the spirit of Christmas in an entirely different way. It’s not just seen when you step outside, it’s also heard and smelled in the Philippines.

You can also sense the enthusiasm the Filipinos have for Christmas. It’s tradition in the Philippines to start a Christmas countdown once September begins, and the festivities customarily don’t end until Three Kings Day (January 3). Having this nationwide fervor is not easy in a developing country, but it’s a great testament to its citizens’ resilience and positive outlook in life. One of the qualities I admire about the people in the Philippines is that most possess the quality they call “mababaw ang kaligayahan”, roughly translated as “shallow happiness”. Usually this is perceived as a negative trait, but looking at it a different perspective, if the littlest things can make you happy, then it means that you’re always happy. With the poverty, corruption, and the lack of progress in every aspect of their lives, Filipinos have every reason to become bitter misanthropes, but mostly everyone inexplicably have smiles on their faces, and it's more prevalent during the holidays.

As elated as my family was to see me, spending Christmas with me wasn’t the only reason they returned to the Philippines. Most of our non-celebratory days were spent in Manila, crashing in five-star hotels, shopping in high-end malls, eating in fancy restaurants. I don’t really consider myself a person who needs the pleasures of an affluent lifestyle to exist, but after living in minimal circumstances for six months, I was basking in the luxury of brand new clothing and all-you-can-eat breakfasts. In the Philippines, Metro Manila is the center of everything; the home of the country’s major institutions of politics, commerce, media, culture, art, education, entertainment, and fashion. The people in Manila are just worldlier and more sophisticated than people anywhere else in the country. Even the women seem hotter, but like my cousin used to say, they just seem hotter because they’re packaged better. Before I started this experiment, I expected to live there, but because I wanted to stretch my budget out, I decided to stay in Olongapo City. It quickly became apparent that if I stayed in Manila, half of my engineering salary would go to rent and the other half would be spent on gas. Nonetheless, my brief taste of the high life in Manila with my family sure showed me exactly what I was missing.

But as expected, not everything is majestic in Manila—the traffic is worse, air pollution is worse, and crime is worse. Also, the country’s underdevelopment is more omnipresent in the metropolitan region. Right outside the international airport, you have street kids desperately hanging onto the sides of your vehicle begging for money. Misread your city map and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a shantytown. On the stairwell of the condo we were staying in, there’s a single mom with three young children calling a wooden pushcart home. The sad part is you can’t live in the Philippines without acquiring a sense of indifference to its distressing scenes of poverty. It doesn't mean that you've become a thoughtless person. You just realize very quickly that whatever concern or aid you think you can provide wouldn’t be nearly enough. It’s just upsetting that if this was happening in Canada, it would be a national humanitarian concern, but in the Philippines, it’s just something you walk past every day.

Four weeks had passed, and by the time i knew it, it was time for my parents to return to Canada. I know from first-hand experience that it’s impossible to abruptly end a trip to the Philippines without feeling sad. It’s always the same. You say your goodbyes in the airport, you make a half-assed joke just to lighten the mood, and you try to convince yourself that a year will zoom by so fast that you won't even notice that another year had passed and you’ll be spending Christmas together again. And it’s always awkward—hugging, waving, finally letting them out of your sight, trying to hold back tears. It always hurts. I realized that I was always the one leaving my family, and I never knew what being left behind felt like. When you’re the one departing, the airport’s hustle distracts you from the sorrow you’re feeling, and it actually gets easier once you've passed all the goodbyes. But when you’re the one left behind, you’re left alone with your thoughts while you’re driving home from the airport, you return to an empty house unsure of what to do next, and you do your best to reestablish a daily routine to suppress the inescapable truth that you miss your family.