Lupang Hinirang

When we were making the plan to come to Asia for the book research, we knew having Sloane along with us would present certain logistical obstacles. That we wouldn't be able to balance the child care responsibilities between us like in Calgary (Turner takes mornings, I'm on in the afternoons), for example. If I was to be the primary,-all-the-time caregiver here it would mean I wouldn't be able to work on the research logistics, the blog, or the photographs as much as we'd like. So at Thaba's suggestion, we started looking into getting a nanny for Sloane.

In the weeks leading up to our departure from Canada, Thab gave me a website to browse that had local Bangkok nannies advertised in a classifieds section. I looked through it, but really couldn't commit to starting an interview process remotely by email or over the telephone - Christmas way too busy to get into long distance telephone calls with strangers about arrangements and details and salary conversations and whatnot.

Thab also kindly asked around at school and through her network: Do you know anyone looking for a temporary position? Beautiful, smiling 10-month-old baby seeks loving daytime nanny to play games and do walkies. Sounds like a good gig, right? She got a few interested bites. But overall we decided to wait until we arrived in Bangkok to make any final arrangements.

Which is what I've been doing for the last couple of days. Calling people from the local website. Registering with a worldwide au pair sourcing company, GreatAuPair.com - you can see our profile here. Emailing people back, arranging interviews, conducting interviews. I found one lovely woman who is leaving for a position in the US next week, but wanted to pick up a bit of work before she goes. So she's watching Sloane today and tomorrow while I get childcare for the rest of January and February ironed out with the other candidates.

There's a whole thing when you're hiring a nanny, obviously. Hours. Pay. Activities. But right off the bat you have to decide whether you want "live in", or "live out". Obviously, we don't want a live-in caregiver for Sloane. For one thing, there's nowhere extra for someone to live here, now that we've fully colonized Thab & Phet's guest room with our patented Explosion Of Stuff method of moving into new (even temporary) digs. But mostly we don't need someone here all the time - I'm just looking for a few hours each day to email people in Auroville about our February plans, chase around the morons at Singapore's Economic Development agency for contacts with their energy initiative, follow the progress of our grant applications back in Canada, take photos to accompany TheGeographyofHope.com's blog (soon to be live - live!), and get in a few hours of my own work and some treadmill time at the gym upstairs, besides. I need four hours in the middle of the day, maybe four and a half, tops.

The more I thought about it, and the further into the process I got, the more I liked the idea of a lovely live-out nanny for our girl - in my mind she'd be a young woman who would play with Sloane between the day's naps, keep her occupied and happy, while Mama pounds away on the computer. She'd speak Thai to the baby, take her for walks around the complex, feed her lunch, play with the blocks. I'd be right here, in the apartment, so I could go to her anytime Sloane needed me, and put her down for naps, an in general just satisfy my own need to be near her, while also getting my portion of the work done. Seemed like a grand plan to me. I'm just sorry we can't afford a nanny in Calgary.

Then the candidates started voicing their interest in our profile, and Thab's contact got back to her. A lot of the people available to work are Filipinos, most of whom are currently in the Philippines. We got a few hits from Polish au pairs, too, and an Afrikaaner from Jo'burg. I had to amend our online profile to state explicitly that we can't bring anyone over to Thailand from outside the country, which slowed the traffic from the rest of the world. But we keep getting statements of interest from the Filipinos, in Zamboanga and Iloilo and Cebu and elsewhere, hoping we will consider their profiles anyway, and I keep having to turn them down. It's been said that Filipinos are the world's nannies, and certainly this can seem to be the case in some parts of suburban Toronto and California. But I never really wanted to have a Filipino nanny for Sloane, and this whole process has set me to thinking a great deal about my experiences with the Philippines.

Bayang magiliw

When I first went to the Philippines in 1995, I was looking for something. An experience, I guess. I had one semester left to go at Queen's, and the mandatory final course I needed to graduate from my program wasn't offered until the winter term. Which meant I had the summer and fall to do with what I liked. I had a penpal in Singapore to whom I'd been writing since I was 11 years old, and I wanted to meet her. In retrospect I realize that I could have just packed up and travelled in Southeast Asia for seven or eight months. But, you know. I'd travelled around Europe on my own but Asia seemed a different matter entirely. This was before Thailand was a completely stomped-down well-beaten full-moon-rave path and Vietnam only that year started issuing 2-week visas to westerners. Plenty of people were travelling in the region, don't get me wrong - but it wasn't yet the Southeast Asia of The Beach, if you know what I mean. (Or rather, it was, but that fact hadn't yet been enshrined in western backpacker culture starring Leonardo diCaprio.) I wanted some sort of safety net, so I found a program that combined volunteer work with college coursework, paid my tuition, and headed off for four months in Manila - after which I would head to Singapore to meet my penpal and travel around the region a bit.

My memories of that first stint in the Philippines are fond, to a point. I made some lovely friends, though most of them were Korean nationals living in Manila to learn English, or other foreigners on cultural exchange-type programs like mine. The vicar who married Turner and I, Claire - for example. Claire and I met at Trinity College of Quezon City where we were both involved in service-learning programs. I had a few Filipino friends, notably Joshua (a cheating charmer who mainly wanted to get in my pants) and Jerome (a flamboyant bakla performer, head of the school's alterna-theatre troope). But mostly I was regarded by my fellow students and the teachers alike as an ungainly, rich foreigner, and I was treated as such. Overall, they didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. Most of the students at the school could speak English, but weren't comfortable enough with their command of the language to talk to me, so mostly they stared. The girls hid their faces behind handkerchiefs and giggled at me, slipping away. The boys looked at me with a mixture of curiosity, wariness, and lust. Before I got used to it (and before I joined the soccer team, where I found my friends), it was kind of lonely, I'll be honest.

Although Filipino hospitality is legendary, in my 1995 experience I found the legend to be in Filipinos' own minds. I was a student, and travelling with very little money. I think I had $450 in spending cash with me, meant to last my whole seven months overseas. But I was often treated by my hosts as a revenue-generating opportunity, and I came to resent this dynamic. I'm not talking about being 'ripped off' for bananas or a tshirt in the market. I learned basic Tagalog and the jeepney routes, I could get around the city and keep myself fed and clothed without too much hassle, and since my interactions with most of the people I saw daily were brief and transactional, my life was fairly simple in this regard. I wasn't looking to have some wild drunken coming-of-age experience over there - I was an earnest and probably somewhat misguided young woman sincerely interested in working for my volunteer placement and going to my classes (statistics and Spanish, mainly), and I avoided tourist areas and the trappings of western indulgence borne of the Philippine willingness to cater to foreigners' needs - military & sexual most famously, and otherwise.

So it was more like this: in my time in Manila I never met a Filipino who wasn't looking to immigrate. To the United States, preferably, but Canada would be just fine, too. Within a week of arrival I was privately approached by no fewer than a dozen total strangers asking me if I would assist them to immigrate to Canada. Over the course of my time there I'm certain the final tally of interactions on this topic numbered in the hundreds and hundreds. It was dizzying and off-putting and bizarre to be so consistently and unabashedly requested to perform what, to me, seemed to be a humungous, life-changing and profoundly important favour - by people I didn't know, by people I did know but had no real connection with, and by people with whom I thought I was developing a real relationship though it became quickly obvious that the friendship was a means to an immigration end... as soon as I flusteringly explained that I had no idea about how to help them come to Canada, the friendship disappeared and they'd glide past me in the halls as though I wasn't there (initially to my bewildered shock, and later to my resigned disappointment). After many months considering the situation, I came to think that this fact might be the crux of all the Philippines' problems: that many (most?) of the rich and able leave, and those who are left behind want to get the hell out, too.

I understand now what I seemed to them, at the time. I know that to even go to the Philippines as a 20-year-old on an extracurricular program represented a measure of disposable income and a nationality advantage that the majority of the people I met would never have. But in my small-minded way, I minded being taken advantage of, regardless of the reasoning. I minded that my host mother would ignore me except when I was paying my weekly rent, during which ritual she would behave as though I was a well-loved daughter. It made me feel a bit queasy, the hypocrisy and servility of that weekly routine. I finally had to move out because I couldn't take the simmering hostility of my host brothers, one of whom was a nurse who'd been denied immigration to Canada (officially, by our government - not by me) and held me personally responsible in some way (I slipped badly on the polished wood stairs one day, bruising my tailbone. He didn't help me up, and when I was later rubbing my bum and voicing my surprise at the fall he sniffed, "You're used to walking on wall-to-wall carpet, I suppose"). The other one was a lazy good-for-nothing, who lost the family's new puppy (he left the door open and it walked away, never to be seen again) and tried to pin it on me, among other things. My host sister and I were exactly the same age, but that was where the similarities ended. Initially I thought we could be good friends, but she was very involved with her boyfriend, who she'd met the year before at the Pope's visit to Manila. It was thought by my host mother (the strictest Catholic I've ever known) that her daughter's match was therefore blessed by the Pontiff and destined to be consummated in marriage - I don't think my host sister ever had a chance. Oliver, the boyfriend, was a dull, controlling boy who only hit her "sometimes". I tried to leave my Canadian feminism at the door when I entered the Philippines, but I couldn't ever get past the fact that he'd smack her, even in front of us - and worse yet, nobody said anything. I just couldn't bring myself to nice it up with him when he came over (which was often) as a result. ...I don't think he liked me much, either.  

Perlas Ng Silanganan

Now, let it be said that the Philippines is perhaps physically the most beautiful country I've ever visited. Volcanos, beaches, rice terraces, rainforest, seascapes and hilltops, misty mountains and steaming flat plains... the quality of light is incredible. It is rich in natural resources, and it's been said by more knowledgeable Asiaphiles than me that if the Philippines ever got its shit together (i.e. elected officials of an ilk different than the stream-of-nightmare-consciousness thieves and bandits they've elected for generations who've used the national treasury as a personal slush fund... anyone else, how 'bout?), it could take enormous advantage of the fact that it's the only large English-speaking country in Asia. Could capitalize on its relationship with the United States to push for preferential trade relations. Could host UN agencies, multinational corporations, and NGO headquarters. Could supply translators and executives to the whole region. It's a shame, really, the wasted potential and all the grab-the-money-and-run consequences of poor government and brain drain: urban decay, traffic like nowhere else on earth, the worst air quality I've ever experienced (and I've lived in Delhi), bureaucratic corruption and paralysis. It's tragic.

And every born-and-raised-in-the-Philippines-Filipino I've ever met outside the Philippines has a tragic story. I mean, we all have tragic stories. But they'll tell you their tragic story inside of five minutes of the first hello, I guess is the difference. The culture of immigration-into-servitude among lower-middle class Filipinos has created a kind of widespread normalization of long-term seperation of parents from children, wives from husbands, families from clan, that I've never been able to fully wrap my head around. It is not in any way unusual to meet Filipinas who have spouses, children, families, houses, jobs, and whole lives waiting for them in stasis back in the Philippines - while they toil away as domestics, nannies, and entertainers, in isolation and obscurity and at very low rates of pay, in Hong Kong condos and Dubai highrise compounds and faceless Canadian suburbs. There is this "what can I do? I must do this..." flap of the hands, sorrowful upturning of the face, when you talk to them about their situation. Why are you so far from your family? Don't you miss them? Isn't there ANYTHING you could do back home? When are you going to see your children again? Don't know, bahala na. By no means are Filipinos alone in being migrant workers working terrible jobs far from home and sending remittances back to keep the family afloat, I do realize this. It happens all over the world. I think it's these Filipinos' incomparable propensity to communicate the difficulty of their circumstances, and somehow plead for assistance while seeming entirely unable to act on their own behalf, that really gets to me. (And yet, and yet: so many want to immigrate. So much so that they'll leave under any circumstances. It boggles.)

And maybe it's just me. I don't know why, but I am so affected by these stories. I find them devastatingly corrosive to my sense of the world. Yes, wars; yes, child abuse; yes, AIDS. Yes yes yes, I know about all that. Turns out the thing that can set my skin feeling weird and prickly is proximity to a Filipino unpacking their life sorrows for perusal, and looking at me as though I should do something about it all.

Alab Ng Puso

Thab's contact's friend had been unreachable for a few days by phone, which is how I ended up on the au pair website in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I was kind of glad I was involved in the whole interview process and able to assess a bunch of Thai candidates and choose someone well-suited to Sloane from a pool of interested applicants. And what's more, I was hoping I might find a suitable nanny through the website before we managed to get this contact woman on the phone. I knew Thab's contact's friend was Filipina and I was increasingly appreciative of the idea of hiring a Thai. I'd been thinking a lot about the Philippines over the last week, and pondering the repeated need to disqualify these online nanny candidates from the Philippines because they weren't reading the part of our profile that clearly states that we cannot bring anyone in from outside Bangkok. There was something about it all that made me think it might be better to steer our choice towards a Thai nanny for Sloaner.

So although I tried to keep an open mind, when I met the woman last night I suspected it might go a certain way, and it did. Over the course of the interview it came out that she was a primary school teacher in the Philippines. A friend from home is working at an international school here, and told her she could probably find work as a teaching assistant at the school. She has a one-year-old daughter and a husband back in Palañaque, and left them behind last August to come to Bangkok to look for work. The job didn't pan out, and she found herself stuck in the city, forced to take a domestic position with an Australian family to make a little money. Her current position is mornings; I would need her from 10:30am to 3:30pm, so it wasn't going to work out, anyway. But she told me that she has to take three "rides" (busses), transferring again and again, to get from where she stays to where she works at the Australians'. And that it would only be two rides to come to us... 

Sa Dibdib Mo'y Buhay

When I returned to Canada in 1996, I missed the Philippines terribly. I felt a kinship with Filipinos who'd emigrated and sought out opportunities to talk to them. I did all my final major undergraduate papers on various topics pertaining to the Philippines, and got into graduate school on scholarship on the strength of those papers and the volunteer work I'd done in Manila the previous year. I found the Filipino grocery near Bathurst and St. Clair in Toronto and took Turner there to look at the Tagalog movie boxes and sample the boiled peanuts and adobo squid when we were first dating. I went to Markham and Scarborough to visit relatives of Filipino acquaintances back in Manila, young women working as nannies or married to Canadian men who were lonely for home and still adjusting to Canada.

When I got into my Master's at Guelph I was assigned this yucky old lech as my advisor, and had to jettison my original thesis topic in order to get away from him in a hurry two-thirds of the way through my first year. In the midst of that schmozzle, I won a travel grant to return to Southeast Asia for research, and (too) quickly assembled a new topic and resources surrounding a project that would take me back to the Philippines. Mainly because I had contacts in place, there. Mainly because it would be easy to set up an advisor at the school I'd attended in 1995. Mainly because I was stressed, and had wrapped my memories of the Philippines in gauzy paper and cherished them, ignoring the difficult times and pushing them to the back of my brain. When I got to Manila, I quickly realized that my research was a mess and all the presuppositions for the proposed project were incorrect. It was all basically a big waste of time and money and energy, and I was lucky that I managed to pull enough facts and figures together to write my major paper - which basically confirmed two or three housing principles that many, many urban researchers before me had already established. It really wasn't groundbreaking or original or even very good, is what I'm saying.

However, that second trip to the Philippines was an eye-opener, different in so many ways from my first school-bound experience. I stayed in a friend's house in Cavite when I did the writing work of my research, hosted beautifully (and a bit over-zealously) by Rosing, the maid attached to my friend's otherwise empty home. My host's brother had me to dinner as a family member every night, and drove me into the city whenever I commuted back to my project site in Cainta. They kept me at Christmastime when I was far from home and sad, and never said a word about the crappy, totally sub-standard presents I bought for them using the last of my grant money. In my research village I lived with a family that had eight children, and they insisted I have my own room in their three-bedroom house. The people whose housing I was studying didn't want to cooperate with my research and they lied to me about everything on my surveys, but they were nice enough about it to make it clear they were lying (hence I was able to retroactively correct my results). I hired a research assistant who was amazingly competent (the aforementioned Joshua's sister, Julie) and worked her ass off for me, and really saved my bum when it came to the analysis.  

But despite all this, something inside me snapped when it came to dealing with the Philippines, and it crystalized as I was finishing that research work. Partly I think I was ashamed of how impatient I was with my host village, not being a good subject site for the poorly-designed project I was trying to carry out. I was angry that my first advisor at grad school had been such a manipulative asshole, but even moreso that I'd let him rattle me so badly that I didn't properly prepare and arrange a viable field project for my thesis work. I was a bit upset at my host mother from my first visit in 1995, a secretary at the school who I saw at least weekly because I'd be there to meet with my in-country advisor; for the weirdness with my initial stay in her home, plus the fact that I'd put in some money to cater a small party for my old professors from 1995 when I arrived to start my research, and she'd taken the money and made the food herself, instead - pocketing a big profit, and she bragged about this fact to me repeatedly. It was one of those things that you just didn't need to be told, you know? Just shut the hell up. 

Then there was the traffic (which is such a dominant aspect of everyday life in Manila that the word has evolved into an adjective in Pilipino English and Tagalog - ex. "It is SO trappik [traffic] today, 'di ba?"). The pollution. The noise (little known fact: roosters crow all night long - not just at dawn, and there were plenty of fighting cocks at my research site). The isolation from other academics, even other native English speakers. No hot water. Missing Turner like mad, just wanting to be in Canada with him - that was the worst. Just all the little and big things of living far from home, in the heat, trying to do an impossible and embarrassing job for which only you are responsible and only you are to blame. And with the two years' of reflection and distance, I was finally addressing some of the things that I'd seen the first time I lived in Manila - and it wasn't coming up roses by any means. The trying, that all-the-time necessary effort of living and working in the midst of the city and the people all the challenges, I just didn't want to do it anymore. So after Christmas, I finished up the research as quickly as I could, and went home early. When I left, I was pretty sure I might never go back to the Philippines. Unless it's to be a political tourist during an election, and we go with Joey, I still don't know if I ever will.

Lupang Hinirang