Eye of the Fish
a personal archipelago
Luis H. Francia
Several parts of this book are based on these previously published pieces: “The Use of Farce,” National Midweek (August 6, 1986), an account of the first coup attempt against Corazón Aquino; “Cordilleras in the Mist,” The Village Voice (Summer Travel supplement, 1991), on Sagada; “The Blood Feuds of Jolo,” The Graphic (December 30, 1991); “Dreams, Snakes, and Fairies,” Asiaweek (January 3, 1992), on Siquijor; “Old Lamps for New,” Special Edition (1994), on the Baguio Artists Guild; “Body Double,” The Village Voice (June 7, 1994), on the Marcos mausoleum; and “Days and Nights in Manila,” Bomb Magazine (summer 1998).
This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and by the generous contributions of Wook Hun and Sun Hee Koo, Ronald and Susan Yanagihara, and many other supporters.
Copyright © 2001 by Luis H. Francia All rights reserved.
Published by Kaya Press Post Office Box 7492 New York, NY 10116
On the cover: Detail from Contemplating Infinito Dios and Vermeer. Copyright © 1997 by Santiago Bose. Collection of Edward F. and Joan T. Simpson. Reproduced with permission from the artist.
Cover design by Sandra Watanabe. Interior design and typesetting by Sunyoung Lee.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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E-book Production: ARTBOOK | DIGITAL
This e-book is not intended to be a facsimile of the original print edition but rather a rendering of the original print edition in a digital manner that respects the textual and visual qualities of the original within the limitations of the e-book file formats and readers at the time of its production: February 2001.
My deep and heartfelt thanks to: all the individuals I met on my trips through the archipelago who generously provided shelter, time, and, most of all, their stories; Lilia C. Clemente, Loida Nicolas-Lewis, and Lily O’Boyle for helping to fund one of the trips; Eduardo Lago, Pascale Montadert, and Eugene Gloria for their critical readings of the manuscript at different stages of its existence; the Edna St. Vincent Millay Arts Colony (where I began this book) and the Fundacíon Valparaiso (where I completed it) for providing space, time, and solitude; Julie Koo and Sunyoung Lee, the stalwarts of Kaya Press, and especially to Sunyoung for her perceptive eye and invaluable editing; and most of all my wife Midori Yamamura, for her unstinting love, encouragement, and good-humored patience.
By the time this book comes out, some of the circumstances described in it will most likely have changed. Be that as it may, the truths—as I perceive them to be—underlying the individual lives and stories here remain relevant to the society that they belong to. I feel these accounts resonate beyond their historical specificity.
Luis H. Francia
Where am I from, I sometimes ask myself, where in the devil
Do I come from, what day’s today, what’s happening,
A roar, amid the dream, the tree, the night,
And a wave, rising like an eyelid, begets
A day, a flash with a jaguar’s snout.
—Pablo Neruda
from “The Magellanic Heart”
(translated by Jack Schmitt)
IF THIS ARCHIPELAGO COULD COMMENT on my existence, what would it say? What memories, if any, would it have of my passage? Did mountain talk to plain, and plain whisper to sky that bore me away, to ocean that separates me from these islands? Did Manhattan’s bedrock pick up, through riverine delta, through tremor, news of an Asian walking its grounds? Did it decipher in an islander’s footfall and read in a Spanish name a tangled history of blood and bone and spirit? Imagination, trace if you can this landscape’s ineffable power, its sources of joy and sorrow.
I had been coming back to the Philippines regularly over the course of more than two decades, a process that began as something purely instinctual, moved by the same urge that compels salmon to travel up the waters of their genesis, moved by the need to feel familiar ground, to add to the store of memory and association that nourished me in my sojourning. The trips gradually took on a conscious edge. Upstream to home: what did that mean? Where was the “I” in all this, where the “we”? Death for the new self, resurrection of the old? But home had changed. And so had I. How then to measure each other? And what of that other sea—passionate, calm, deep, shallow, hot, cold—to which I returned after each visitation, a sea called New York City? I: awkward fish swimming simultaneously in different oceans.
A BLUE-UNIFORMED SECURITY GUARD on Gandara Street resists the afternoon heat’s seductive call to sleep by doing pushups on the sidewalk, his legs propped on a chair. I can only wonder at this burst of activity as I walk by, my lunch of curried noodles and steamed fish, consumed in a crowded panciteria, filling my gut. The guards for the other stores—all of them shuttered on this somnolent, humid Sunday afternoon—slouch on chairs, unbuttoned, some dozing in their undershirts. Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown, has an almost demure air, wearing her secrets the way a grande dame wears her perfume: discreetly but distinctively, hinting at a bouquet of other fragrances. The world passing by has grown smaller and more compact, as though past, present, and future had settled down into one dense layer, and could no longer offer her any surprises.
On Dasmarinas Street, a calesa plies the street, the clip-clop of its blindered horse pleasant drumbeats on the brain. Binondo is mostly deserted today, the colonial-era buildings aspiring to modest heights, their sooty wooden facades, iron-grille windows, stone columns, and solid doors evoking the days when the Chinese grew shy of the Spaniards’ disdainful gaze. Behind the walls, a congested mass of humanity breathes quietly, comfortably, even opulently. Here is the Old Manila still, the Manila that existed before that monument to the mall and American efficiency, aseptic, modern Makati, reared its skyscraper heads south of the Pasig River. Binondo forms part of the city’s cholesterol-choked heart, cheek by jowl with Santa Cruz and Quiapo, neighborhoods that embody the essence of Manila—bustling, brawling, blustery, full of the commerce and vigorous life brought by the river and the sea.
The Chinese trace their presence here to the days when Manila was still a Muslim entrepot. Never proselytizers, worldly to the point of disdain, confiders only in themselves, the merchants and workers from Guangdong, Amoy, and Fukien were distrusted by the Iberians who forbade them to enter Intramuros, the old Walled City, except for trade, and then only through the Parian Gate. Binondo, where they lived right across the river, was within easy reach of Intramuros’s guns. For the Spanish never forgot that their early tenuous hold on the city had been nearly broken in 1574 by Limahong, a Chinese warlord, and his marauding fleet of junks. After a series of battles, the Spanish finally repelled the invaders. Subsequent uprisings by the Chinese in the seventeenth century were all bloodily suppressed.
Binondo’s large esteros, or canals, reenforce the feeling of frag-mentation and separation from the rest of the city. Their murky waters, refuse laden, assail pedestrians on the short bridges with the sweetish smell of decay. The approaches are crowded with shops that sell chestnuts, fruits, sweetmeats, ham, noodles, and Chinese delicacies. In a ritual antedating conquest, shopper and shopkeeper bargain till they reach common ground.
Something happens