fiction

from An Embarrassment of Riches
by Charlson L. Ong

PART ONE

1

Manila, January 1998

SO WHY DID I RETURN to the Victorianas? There were a hundred reasons, yet, apparently, none worth the trouble I'd been through. Someone once said that you don't ever need a reason to go home, only to stay away. That one must have been pathologically homesick or unemployable, I was a bit of both.

I left the island with my older cousin, Lorenzo, when I was barely seventeen and fresh out of high school, for our westerly Pacific neighbor, the Philippines. It was supposed to be the first leg of our journey to the First World. We were intending to vacation with relatives in Manila to pick up some pointers, references, American idioms, before flying straightaway to California?I to med school and Lorenzo to his father's dimsum joint in San Francisco. But Lorenzo had sooner picked up gonorrhea in Ermita and an ice pick in his gut from some outraged pimp. He died within three months of our departure from the Victorianas and Father promptly ordered my return to the island.

I was distraught. Visions of trying out for the UCLA Bruins?I was almost six feet, tall for people of my race, and a passable point guard?cheering Magic Johnson live at the Forum, and hobnobbing with Hollywood types were at once smashed to bits like so many frosted ice droppings over my cousin's untempered member. I must admit that at that point I'd hardly looked forward to med school and the prospect of spending the next decade or so dissecting tadpoles with some redneck professor breathing down my thin neck was hardly more desirable than selling canned kerosene to incorrigibly untechnological Victorianos who believed earthbound spirits were trapped inside LPG tanks. It was the NBA or bust for me, though Hollywood might do with a new James Shigeta. But Father was adamant. I was to return home posthaste or never again, and forfeit all claims to his million-peso petroleum products business.

My Uncle Mario, Father's third degree cousin born and raised in Manila, finally persuaded my old man to let me spend the rest of the year in Manila. He started too about the many respectable medical schools in Manila which drew students from as far out as Michigan. Before the year was out Father had relented and I ended up taking premed subjects at the University of the Philippines during mornings while selling scrap at my uncle's junk shop in the afternoons?a deal which saved him not a few thousand pesos in hired hands.

That Father agreed at all to Uncle Mario's compromise arrangement may be uncharacteristic but not completely unexpected. True, having a US-trained doctor for an offspring had become something of a badge of honor among many well-off Chinese-Victorians: the moral equivalent of having a scholar-bureaucrat for an ancestor. And Father longed for his only son to salvage what remained of the clan honor after my mother a native Victoriana allegedly eloped with our kerosene tanker driver when I was barely four and my elder sister, Jasmine, joined the underground communist movement sometime in her late teens and disappeared from our lives. But above all else, I knew Father wanted me off the island "before it sinks to the bottom of the Pacific under the weight of the overgrown bellies and fat balls of these hopelessly lazy natives or before they are at last starved into action and start tearing away at each other's thick hides."

Father was hardly a political person. Neither national issues nor those that periodically engulfed the small but fractious Chinese community concerned him and his petroleum trade. But like all displaced survivors, he had an uncanny instinct for anticipating public chaos. A man of few words, he watched, listened while feigning unconcern, divined the stars, and made his move. Above all else, he remembered. Like the blindfolded prisoner facing the death squad who is forever haunted by the stench of gunpowder and the mocking of the wind upon his face moments before the unexpected grant of clemency an eternity of waiting, the space between two lifetimes Father knew the scent of disorder; the burned-out, sickish sense of a gathering fury. It is the drifter who has need of history.

The same instinct that had urged my grandfather to trade his last ounce of gold for a bunker for him and his pregnant wife who would die and be buried at season the last French merchant ship out of Amoy, headed for Slaws, shortly before the Red army marched into Fijian; that had prompted my father to sell off his lucrative rubber processing business in Jakarta for a pittance so he could resettle on some obscure Pacific island a week before Quarto came to power in the wake of anticommunist, anti-Chinese riots; had now convinced him to send me away to the First World, if possible, to be forever free of the unending strife among the underdeveloped but anywhere beyond the coming madness.

It wasn't so much that Father thought revolution imminent. He believed it was something that would happen in a place like the Victoriana's sooner or later the trick was always staying one step ahead of the big one. That is, collecting our payables, settling accounts and packing up with some to spare leaving the place a bit better off than when one arrived. But he feared that I might, like Jasmine, somehow become involved in a future conflict. He'd occasionally remark in my presence that the sloganeering of the Victoriana's League of Students reminded him of the rhetoric of leftist students in China back in the forties and even of the Indonesian youth during the sixties. Father always made certain to stress his underlying theme the search for happiness, if it should be undertaken at all, is always a personal, at most familial, rather than societal concern. People carved out spaces for themselves and their loved ones aboard the refugee raft forever tossing and turning in an alien sea of troubles. You took in as many survivors as possible but one person too many and the thing capsizes. Father's metaphors often left an acrid aftertaste but I guess he'd been in enough refugee rafts to know whereof he speaks. One need not glimpse too long the broken, slightly hooked nose?a results of injury, doubtless, rather than genetics?squash-seed eyes and wounded, sallow cheeks to see the deep disdain?"I've seen and heard it all before, the same words .the same anger.the same tyrants riding to power on the tide of youthful blood."

There were moments when watching him ply stoically over his stack of South China Morning Post and Chinese-language journals from Hong Kong and the mainland; trying desperately, it seemed, to give meaning to the welter of events; to find an anchor for the refugee raft of his own life, I fancied myself to have arrived at some insight into his generation's insistence that we continue patronizing the only Chinese-language school on the island, founded by an exiled Kuomintang general thirty years ago. Our elders' frustration with our decreasing fluency in the Chinese language and increasing ignorance of most things Chinese, I surmised, had less to do with fears of our diminishing Chineseness much less any overwhelming sentiment for the mainland or Taiwan than with the possibility that some of us might have deluded ourselves into thinking that we had at last found a home.

In an easy I sent home for the Partisano Victoriano , a short-lived, purportedly left-wing journal founded by my grade-school buddy Ignacio Manalo shortly before the fall of the ten-year-old Azurin dictatorship back in '90, I'd written:

".there is perhaps a nagging suspicion among our elders that we may have found another country. A country to live in and die for.that offers sustenance but demands commitment and sacrifice. A focus for youthful passions luring us away from more mundane and safer concerns of commerce and clan. A country that again dangles the promise of martyrdom which only ends in betrayals ? all, that is, that an exile must at least partially abandon when he abandons home. 'Never again' he tells himself and admonishes his children ? 'this is not our war, or yours, we fought ours many seasons ago so you may live in peace.' At some point the migrant knows he must choose to live fully as a person without country if only to survive the vicissitudes of uprootedness. He bends with the wind and profits on cynicism. He says 'no' to everything that forced him to leave home and family ? war and patriotism. He dreams that his children will be citizens of the world. It is a pipe dream, of course, for one cannot love humanity without sympathizing with a neighbor brutalized by systematic oppression; because nationalism is only the concrete expression of our humanity in a particular historic context. This he knows. He knows in his heart of exile that his children are no longer his compatriots. He knows this dream of unbelonging is the last thing he must surrender with grace to time."

There was a time when I wasn't beyond believing that my impassioned prose had something to do with the sudden flight of many Chinese families, along with their capital, from the island or that my father had chanced upon the essay shortly before reportedly bursting a brain vessel; now I'm willing to concede some embarrassment whenever reminded of such conceit?youth must after all be allowed its pretensions if not its excesses. Suffice it to say that I am not altogether ungrateful that the paper's circulation never surpassed two hundred copies and that the military burned every copy it was able to track down. Distance often makes nationalists of us all. So that sipping frosted San Miguel beer one rainy night in a trendy Malate bar curiously named Penguin, discussing the relevance of novel writing in a world gone berserk with Filipino poets Ricardo Yuson and Alfred de Ungria, a thousand miles from the nearest Victoriano death squad, I had written my opus over strips of Marlboro wrappers and proceeded to organize the Movement for a Free Victorianas.

Nationalism, I declare now without fear of future challenge, was in fact a major factor in my decision to spend ten years in the Philippines rather than proceed to the US. The dearth of funds was admittedly a practical concern, but in the long run it was the fear that too great a physical distance would quickly erode one's psychic ties to the motherland that kept me moored to the coconut trees, fresh mangoes, crimson sunsets, brown women, cockfights, basketball fanatics, political carousels of this country which reminded me so much of home.

Still, I wonder whether things would have turned out the way they did if I had never left the Victorianas or had I heeded my father and returned home after Lorenzo's death. To spend one's early adulthood in my country is to be mired in a morass of poverty, power shortages, religious fanaticism, political charlatans and inane movies that often erode whatever pride one has in a people that have survived five hundred years of foreign dominance and fifty more of local misrule and self-abuse to emerge as tolerant, peaceable and instinctively democratic as they are. Spending a week even in a country as similar to the Victorianas as the Philippines has caused many an average Victoriano to forswear his country and never to return. Perhaps I too would have done so if I had spent the ten turbulent years preceding the Tenth Republic suffering the excesses and inanities of the Azurin regime rather than savoring the aesthetic, technological and sensual pleasures of Manila, where I pined and poetized for my nation's deliverance.

I am not prone, however, to speculate excessively on foregone possibilities. What is certain is that Father had little cause to fear any political involvement on my part when he sent me away at seventeen. Like most adolescents with scarcely any outlet for sexual release, I sublimated nascent horniness in an occasional socially-committed diatribe against the "semicolonial, semifeudal, conspiratorial regime of US running dogs." But hardly ever proselytized beyond the dinner table. What convinced him that it was time for me to leave was discovering pamphlets of the Victorianas Liberation Front in my stack of soiled Penthouse magazines?filched from Father's drawers?tucked under the bed. If I'd known that such would be my passport out of the Victorianas I'd have jerked off all over Mao much earlier.

Halfway through my sixth year in the Philippines, Father supposedly died of cerebral aneurysm. His death caused me much sadness yet, strangely enough, certain relief. We hadn't a relative left in the Victorianas and his business partner?a brick-faced Spanish mestizo named Echevaria whom Father saved from the dumps?forthwith cremated Father's remains and sent them over to me in an urn with a note explaining some new decree banning burial for "foreigners." For all I'd known he might have sold off Father's memorial plan along with the rest of our property which he assumed. Echevaria sent me documents declaring our business bankrupt and liquidating our assets to pay off what I was certain were paper debts. "Out of the depths of his affection and gratitude" for Father, the son of a pig sent me a one-thousand-dollar check to tide me over until I found "new sources of income."

I couldn't contain my rage and wouldn't be dissuaded from taking the next flight back to San Ignacio to avenge my father and reclaim my birthright until I realized that, aside from the thousand-dollar check, I hadn't a hundred pesos to my name. Uncle Mario, calm and composed, explained to me the futility of my considered undertaking. I was a minor?the age of majority being twenty-one in the Victorianas?without any legal standing in my own country. My country. Yes. I was a Victoriano, born and bred in that southwestern Pacific island of twenty million, raised in the ever-loyal and Catholic capitol of San Ignacio, who had sung the national anthem "Salvación para Los Bravos" since I was five and was taxed ten centavos for every candy I bought. Yet I was not a citizen of the republic. The Constitution, drawn up after occupying US forces left the island forty-five years ago, allowed for nearly any creature of any race to obtain citizenship except the Chinese. In fact it had become easier for Chinese people holding foreign passports, who had fled to the island to escape tax litigation in their home countries, to obtain Victoriano citizenship through dubious deals with corrupt immigration officials than for us local-born to become legal entities. I realized, too, with not the least pain, that my father had never married my native-born mother?which might have saved me a fortune. The asshole Echevaria had his bases covered and I was certain he had something to do with my father's failure to marry Mother. I was illegitimate. Il bastardo .

I was now an orphan, disinherited and without a country, completely dependent on the kindness of distant relations who had secured a temporary permit for me to live in Manila as a transient student. The Chinese Embassy promised to look into the possibility of issuing me with a passport now that my Victoriano resident passport had been invalidated by Father's death?another quirk of Victoriano law allowed resident Chinese and their dependents to be issued with blue "resident's" passports which may be invalidated, however, by any number of reasons including the death of the principal resident. The thought, however, of becoming a "subject" of the People's Republic during those days, less than two years after the Tiananmen "incident," did cause me many sleepless nights.

It is with some trepidation that I look back at this point to that moment in time when I felt cut off from my past, from everything that had heretofore defined my person. I felt betrayed, abandoned, left to float my own raft in an alien sea. Yet something in me celebrated the freedom that was at had. I was suddenly free to map my own future without any care for family or country. It was akin to being reborn?unfettered, guiltless.

back to fiction | home