Turning East

Hundred Islands in the Philippines

Welcome to Turning East.

This website features oral histories–that is, recorded interviews which were edited to be read but also to retain the language of the individual storyteller, whose name was often changed to preserve her or his privacy. I started collecting these stories after I arrived in China in 1984. All are set in  China, Korea, Japan or the Philippines and center on different focus on different topics:  religion, commerce, education, home life, economics, politics, health care and life on the road. Occasionally I include a story of my own. There are now 111, indexed on the next page. (Please check out the index by clicking at the upper right. If an item looks interesting, check the publication date, then click that date in the archives).

I’m posting every two weeks, so please visit regularly for new stories or register so announcements of new posts will automatically be sent to your email account. Click on any of the pictures for a better view. Please leave comments on the website.

You can contact  me at duss...@yahoo.com. Please do not use any of the content without permission.

In 2009, an alternative health care practitioner, Dorothy Friesen, came to the Philippines to teach a healing modality to communities that were suffering from illnesses caused by toxins and hazardous waste left by the US military.  ( Please check out the links at the end of this post.) The technique was called Body Talk. I first learned of it last year when Liza and I were on our way back from a meditation retreat. Later the two of us spoke with Alan, who has been a practitioner of acupuncture and Filipino therapeutic massage for over twenty years. Now he does only Body Talk massage, which is more complicated than the Body Talk Access discussed below.

Alan’s story (with additions from Liza)

There’s a technique developed that a person can learn in a day and practice on someone (or himself/herself) in ten minutes. It consists of tapping the brain cortices and the heart complex—actually, the sternum or breastbone—in order to balance the left and right hemisphere of the brain. Most people use one side of the brain more than the other, leaving the other side idle. But if the left and the right brain function at the same time we can avoid stress and major health issues, and we can focus on one thing at a time. With this technique we balance from the occipital lobe here at the base of the skull, then the parietal and frontal lobes and the left and the right sides of the brain. Those are the parts we need to balance.

I can give you an example from my personal experience. I’ve done acupuncture and reflexology for more than fifteen years. When I got a migraine attack I could use acupuncture to relieve it, but it would come back, especially when I was exposed to sunlight. But since 2009 when I started doing BodyTalk Access on myself I haven’t had a migraine. It’s very effective.

There are five techniques—the Cortices or cortex balancing, Switching, Hydration, Body Chemistry and Reciprocals. Fast Aid combines two of the techniques—the Cortices and the Reciprocals—to help the body recover from minor injuries or accidents. This is the Fast Aid system.

The Cortices technique has to do with balancing the left and right hemispheres so the body can function in the optimal manner. There’s a body-mind connection. What happens to the body affects the mind, what happens to the mind affects the body. Tapping the head is like asking the body’s innate wisdom, “Hey, brain, can you scan this body and find out what’s wrong with this person, or this body-mind, and repair it?” Then we tap the heart complex so it will store the new memory so the body will remember the next time.

The Switching technique is a sort of a de-stresser. When we don’t listen to our bodies and just do whatever we want—like when we’re working all night despite the body’s need for sleep—the body may shut down and our brains switch off automatically. This is the body’s way of protecting itself from further damage. The Switching technique makes us more attuned to our bodies so we’ll be aware when we’re hurting ourselves with what we’re doing. It also raises our tolerance level so we can be very active without feeling tired.

With the Switching technique, you close your eyes until you can see stars. You find the acupuncture meridian points below the collarbone, an inch and a half down and an inch and a half across. You close your eyes and just press a little bit on the switching point here, the acupuncture point, and tap the head while insuring that you breathe deeply and then tap the heart.

The third technique is the Hydration, which insures the movement of the water in the body. Remember, 78% of the body is water. The problem with the majority of us, especially when we’re stressed, is that the membrane of the cells hardens so the water can’t carry the nutrients from the food we eat and the vitamins we take or remove waste matter. Now, if the water’s not moving, even if you drink eight or ten glasses a day, you can be still dehydrated. The hydration technique allows us to avoid dehydration. We soak a cotton swab in water and put it in the navel. Why the navel? This is one of the highest energy centers in our body. With the wet cotton in the navel we do the tapping and the body-mind, or the innate wisdom, scans the level of hydration and moves the water in the body. Afterwards you’ll feel thirsty or you’ll often go to the restroom. After a week of BodyTalk Access, you lose weight because you are not turning to comfort food. We joke that this is also a weight loss program.

The fourth technique is Body Chemistry, which is just like the hydration except that instead of water we use the person’s saliva, which contains the DNA. The body-mind, the innate wisdom, scans the body for viruses, bacteria, toxins, intolerance, parasites and microbes. If it finds those things, it kills them without harming the good bacteria. It’s not like antibiotics, which I call amok medicine [amok is Tagalog for a murderous frenzy or state] because it attacks everything. It says, “This is good, this bad.” A friend observed that these techniques allow one’s own body to produce antibodies for the microbes, parasites, viruses and bacteria it contains—because each of our bodies has a different set. Also, a standard dose of antibiotics may be too strong for some and not strong enough for others. So we rely on the innate wisdom of the body, the inner healer inside the body, to produce the antibodies that are necessary, to eliminate those that are doing harm to the body but will leave the good.

The fifth technique uses the Reciprocals [corresponding acupuncture points]. The objective of this is to address the body structure—the bones, the muscles, the movement of the joints, the whole body, especially the bones. So the spine, the shoulders, the knees, the ankles, the wrist, the carpals and the metacarpals. This technique insures that movement is good. The posture improves. Reciprocals are very important in doing the Fast Aid protocol. For example, if you injure your left elbow we apply Fast Aid to the reciprocal area, which is your right knee.

As another friend observed, this is where you really notice the balancing properties of BodyTalk. Every part of the body has a partner on the other side. It’s always left and right, up and down. You may accidentally bump your hip, and several days later you notice a pain in your shoulder. It’s like a partner or a friend bearing the burden of another.

­I hurt my knee in an accident. I’m now doing maintenance with the reciprocals to maintain the strength and flexibility of my body structure. All five of the techniques should be done, just like taking vitamins every day. I could just do it in ten minutes, but it takes me an hour because I like to meditate at the same time, I combine a focus on breathing with tapping and visualization, like watching the neurons sparking.

The BodyTalk system doesn’t complicate any medication you take or other practice that you do. It only enhances while doing no harm. If a doctor gives you an antibiotic for seven days, BodyTalk will help insure that the chemicals in it don’t harm your body, especially your liver and kidneys.

US Military

Our NGO is campaigning for the clean-up of the former US military bases here, specifically the Subic Naval Base and the Clark Air Force Base in Pampanga. In Clark Air Base the Americans left cadmium, arsenic, hospital waste and mercury from old batteries. The DDT, which they sprayed every day during their stay here, is still affecting the system. It lasts for more than fifty years, and it will pass from generation to generation.

In Subic one of the problems comes from asbestos exposure. Asbestos affects you for twenty to thirty years. It damages the pleural area and other areas, but the majority of the former base workers suffer from lung problems. Here in the Philippines, we don’t have experts to read those X-rays. When a patient has a lung X-ray the doctor says, “Ah, you have a problem with your lungs.” Or, “You have emphysema” because of blah-blah-blah. But if you ask questions you find out he used to work on the US Naval Base in the ship repair facilities area. That’s where they had the most asbestos exposure. Before the asbestos-coated machines could be repaired, the asbestos coating needed to be removed. After the machine was repaired, it was coated with asbestos again. The Americans didn’t tell the workers that this is very harmful.

We have also found a lot of unused transformers, which are very dangerous. They cause cancer, especially leukemia, because of the PBC. If you were exposed to the fumes, congratulations, you are a candidate for leukemia. The effect is still there to the present day. In one barangay [the smallest size district] outside the base there is a suspicious number of childless married couples, which is not common. Among those children you do find, there is a high amount of mental retardation, mental defects and birth defects like having no anus or dual sexual organs. When women are exposed to those chemicals their reproductive system is compromised.

That’s why we think the Americas should clean up their mess. One of the scientists we talked to called it a kindergarten issue. In kindergarten the teachers train us that if we make a mess we have to clean it up. The problem with the Americans is that in the US-Philippines military agreements of the 1940s there is no provision for clean-up. The members of our NGO consist of 1,500 families. Not all the people in that area are members. But among those 1,500 families we’ve estimated that there are four deaths every month. Although I should say that the number is in dispute.

Now, we also have a problem in our government. Unlike the government of Vietnam, which kept insisting that the Americas should clean up the Agent Orange they dropped during the Vietnam-US War. The Americans held out for forty years, but last year they started to clean up their mess in Vietnam. We have a lot of problems with technical sites. We don’t have experts here to test the water, to test the soil, to test people with problems in their blood. Our Department of Health conducted a secret, random test in the community. They collected blood and urine samples and did a lot of tests. Of the 97 people they tested, 47 people tested positive for arsenic and lead. Among those 47 people—mothers and children—four to five mothers had already died. Those people suffering from lead poisoning have headaches, skin problems and digestion problems every day.

We have partners in America. Right now the focus of our campaign is in the United States. One of our partners says that even if you rally every day, even if the American president is an angel, if the US Congress doesn’t pass laws, the Americans will not clean up their mess. Although they should, just like in Vietnam.

BodyTalk helps the people a lot, especially if they don’t have money to see the doctors or to buy medicine. We don’t promise that this technique will solve their problem, because the practitioner knows that we also need doctors, hospitals and laboratories. This is only a practice that can mitigate those illnesses. Among the children from newborns to seven-year-olds in this area, more than 60-70% have lung problems, asthma, skin asthma. There are a lot of people born with mental disabilities. Maybe I’m also a candidate because I’m so absent-minded that when I was in Pampanga I forgot where I was and drank the toxic water.

We started the clinics in Pampanga in 2010 because of the toxic waste issue. Dorothy Friesen brought us BodyTalk Access in 2009. Then she trained I think less than 100 members. Those people do the technique themselves, but we encourage them to practice outside their own families. We conduct clinics. We invite people in the community to come to this house, on this day, at this time. When people know there’s a clinic, they come. The BodyTalk system is gaining popularity, especially in Clark, where people are sharing their stories.

“Oh, your complexion is very good now. What happened? Did you take medicine?”

“No, just like this—tap, tap.”

In Pampanga they say it’s just like a crazy person tapping your head. But they share their stories. One of the recipients had been taking medicine for hypertension for more than thirty years, but after regular BodyTalk Access now he doesn’t need it.

BodyTalk is truly holistic, including the physiology, the emotions, the whatever. The majority of kids who had BodyTalk have improved their focus in their school, and their grades have gone up. The mothers are thankful. “My kid was ranked number two in her third grade class.” “Thank you, Body Talk. My daughter got five medals in her class.”

Update:

Turning the interview, Alan demonstrated by tapping on my head. I immediately knew he was good at massage–something about magic or magnetic fingers? A doctor I talked to says this happens in the Philippines. Maybe it’s the same energy Buddhist monks use when they heat a cup of tea by holding it in their hands. Recently I’ve become one of Alan’s massage clients.

For one-on-one Body Talk healing sessions, contact:

Manila:
Liway Arceo (09159805604), Hermee Morales (09189118638), Didi Estipona (09064734038)

Quezon City:
Annie Lao (09178219587), Girlie Villariba (09178445516),Alan Along (09233154530)

Batangas:
Myrna Arceo (09272037705)

Davao City:
Chic Ramoso (09177071241)

Related links:

http://fdnbayanihan.org/2011/12/05/alliance-for-bases-clean-up-provides-body-talk-access-a-healthcare-alternative-to-victims-of-toxic-wastes-in-clark-and-subic/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JDcF4Tway0

http://www.bodytalksystem.com/learn/access/cortices.cfm

http://www.bodytalksystem.com/learn/news/article.cfm?id=729

http://youtu.be/JAJrlY_lad4

A reader writes:

Carol, fascinating piece. I’d like to look into Body Talk.

Gigantic new Sanshin painting at Jiri-san

David enjoying tea

David A. Mason has spent thirty years roaming Korean mountains, giving tours, teaching university classes in culture and tourism and researching and writing books and articles about Korean culture, particularly the religious traditions. His Spirit of the Mountains received the 20002 Best Book on Korean Culture Award from Korea’s Academy of Sciences. He was contributing editor to The Baekdu-daegan Trail Guidebook by Roger Sheperd and Andrew Douch and co-author of the 1997 Lonely Planet Guide to Korea. He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Korean Buddhism. This recent interview took place over Skype, when David was in Korea and I was in the Philippines. 

The photographs are used with permission and come from his websites http://www.san-shin.net, http://san-shin.org and http://baekdu-daegan.com. I highly recommend spending a couple of hours browsing through the many pictures and stories. Another interview with David Mason is available at http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20110825000865 and a lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNMnhQGqqw.

The Seorak Dinosaur Range

The idea of mountain spirits and practices is found all over the world—with the concept of sacred mountains—but Korea has probably the most highly developed and most complex culture of mountain spirits in the world. In Korea this very ancient, well developed system of shrines, art works and practices is connected to almost every kind of traditional religious and spiritual form that has developed here. It is an original part of Korean indigenous shamanism as it came from Siberia and the Mongolian areas, with mountain spirits dating back to prehistoric times. After Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism came to Korea from China and the Korean version was rooted here, the mountain spirits seem to have played a central role in helping these new religions become Koreanized.

Three Saints Shrine in Ssanggye-sa Temple

A particular example, which is especially blatant and open, is how Buddhists overcame the skepticism and opposition of the local people by including shrines to the mountain spirits within their temples, which were generally put on a mountainside. This gained acceptance for Buddhism and enticed more people to come to the temples, where they could perform mountain spirit rituals and—since they were there already—learn about Buddhism. Of course some of the temple monks also wanted to venerate the mountain spirits. Later on, we find that mountain spirit altars and shrines were a significant income earner for the temples. They brought in as much in the way of donations as the main Buddha altar at the temple did, and they still do.

A rich culture developed around this and a mutual regard. The Buddhists regarded the Sanshin, the mountain spirit, as the landlord. It was his mountain, and they paid rent with ceremonies giving offerings to the spirit. In exchange they hoped to get the spirit’s protection, a place to live and other benefits of the natural ecology.  So it was kind of a symbiotic relationship. To me it’s fascinating because usually when Buddhism, like most advanced religions, moves into countries it tends to take over the local spirits and make them Buddhist, turn them into some kind of a Buddha or bodhisattva. In Korea the mountain spirit maintained independence. In most art works it is not depicted as any kind of a bodhisattva—only twice out of ten thousand examples. Some of the paintings characteristics show the mountain spirit with Buddhist stature, that is, equal to a bodhisattva or perhaps an enlightened Zen master. So it remains a shamanist-Taoist figure, not Buddhist, although it is included in Buddhist temples.

The three essential elements to a Korean mountain spirit icon are a human figure, generally elderly and wise—it could be male or female—and then a tiger, either realistic or abstract in the traditional Korean folk way, and then a pine tree. Those three are necessary. The tiger represents the king of all animals. Here in Korea, the red bark pine tree is considered the most precious, valuable tree, essentially the king of all plants. The human manifestation of the mountain spirit shows humanity at its best. So this is a kind of idealization of the biosphere of plants, animals and humans. Often mushrooms are included and white cranes, and other elements showing nature at its best and humanity’s relationship with nature at its ideal.

A female Sanshin from Cheongcheon-am Hermitage

Now, you mentioned the male-female divide. Many, many mountains are believed to have female spirits. There are various theories as to which mountains and how it’s divided. But, even when a mountain is widely believed by pretty much everybody to have a female spirit, often the paintings or statues have a male form, a wise old grandfather with a long white beard. This is the influence of Confucianism, which is totally male-dominant and maintains that a kingly spirit must be male; there’s just no option on that. More recently over the thirty years I’ve been chronicling them, there has been an increase in the number and frequency of female Sanshin paintings. It’s an exact parallel to the status of Korean women as it’s been rising from the near-Pakistani subjugation level of a hundred years ago to something approaching equality between men and women. It’s a fascinating revival of religious iconography.

The shrines don’t appear just on sacred mountains, but then you could say every mountain is sacred. Almost any significant mountain or large hill, especially if it’s behind a village or an area where people live, will have a shrine to that mountain spirit. It’s believed that any hill or mountain has a spirit, but the greatest mountains have the greatest mountain spirits. Everything has a spirit—trees, rocks, animals—but the greatest among them are spirits that call our attention to them or deserve our attention.

The Baekdu-daegan Range

Throughout the Korean peninsula there are quite a few sacred mountains that are highly sacred and reputed as such throughout the nation. A few of them even are in North Korea, which itself recognizes their sacredness, even though we deem it a supposedly atheist-communist regime. In North Korea, Baekdu-san, or White Head Mountain, on the border with China is maybe one of the most sacred mountains of all the people. It represents the nation and the ideal of unification of Korea. Then Geumgang-san, which is highly significant for Buddhism, is among the most beautiful mountains in the world. Myohyan-san is very rich in traditional culture, both in Korean Nationalism and shamanism-Buddhism. It has all kinds of relics still there, and the North Korean regime regards it as very important. In the South, where we have more freedom of religion and mountain spirit culture flourishes more, probably the number one mountain is Jiri-san in near South Joella Province. It’s our first national park and still the largest, a gigantic sprawl of three major peaks and a couple of dozen minor peaks, a massive mountain area. Jiri-san means Exquisite Wisdom Mountains. It’s a Buddhist name, the specialized wisdom of the bodhisattva. It’s believed that any spirit who has come to that mountain will attain wisdom. A foolish person can turn wise by living around there. On the slopes of Jiri-san, all around it, are up to let’s say a hundred religious sites—from Confucianism and shamanism and Taoism and Buddhism. I can think of no other sacred mountain in the world with that cultural diversity and richness or with that much activity. Three of the top Buddhist temples in the entire nation are located there in Jiri-san.

That mountain is regarded in some sense as the grandmother of the entire nation, the ultimate matriarch, and definitely female. Baekdu-san, the giant volcano on the border between North Korea and China, is regarded as its counterpart, the great patriarch, the ancestral grandfather figure of the entire nation. Then all of the great mountain range that runs between those two, one unbroken range called the Baekudu-daegan, those mountains are all their children. All the mountain ranges that branch off the Baekdu-daegan are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Together it’s one family that physically defines the Korean peninsula and that serves as the spirit of the entire nation and people, an integrated system

Besides, there are very highly sacred mountains like Gyeryong-san, “Rooster Dragon Mountain,” a rather small mountain filled with probably 60 to 70 shamanist and Buddhist sites. Then near the east coast there’s Odae-san, the “Five Platforms Mountain,” highly sacred to Korean Buddhism, to the north of that, Seorak-san, the “Snowy Crag Mountain, which is actually a highly sacred part of the southern part of the Geumgan-san Diamond Mountain. Below them to the south but still on the east coast, there’s Taebek-san. Its sacredness is mostly shamanistic, National-shamanistic, associated with the entire founding myth of the nation.

[According to the myth, Hwanung, the son of the King of Heaven, descended to Taebaek-san and established a holy city. When a bear and a tiger came to him and begged to become human beings, he gave them mugwort and garlic—sacred food—and told them to stay in a cave for one hundred days. The tiger left, but the bear stayed and was transformed into woman. When she begged for a son, Hwanung mated with her. Dangun, their offspring, founded the first Korean kingdom. – This myth is so widely believed that one of my university students once presented it in a paper as historical fact. He was insulted by my skepticism.]

Three Saints Shrine in Cheonbo-sa Temple

The mountain spirit in Cheonbo-sa Temple

Most nations don’t really have this kind of variety. Their mountains tend to be sacred to only one religion, whereas with Korea there are five different religious-spiritual traditions that hold different mountains sacred in different ways. [Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, shamanism and spiritual-nationalism] that hold these mountains sacred, different mountains in different ways. The Christians are the only exception to this, refusing to recognize even the concept of a sacred mountain and regarding the mountain spirits as demons—although they spend so much energy opposing them, denouncing them and trying to have their shrines destroyed, that it shows they think the mountain spirits are important. Protestant Christianity has only been here for about 120 years. It’s a very fundamentalist, narrow-minded, intolerant, bible-thumping kind of Christianity that came from America, causing constant conflict. It’s the same kind that some 80 or 90 years ago banned alcohol, dancing and any kind of fun. That kind of Christianity took root here and flourished. As usual, once Koreans get a religion they don’t change it much. They don’t believe in liberalization or modernization. They did this with Confucianism and Buddhism also. In China, Buddhism has changed and evolved, but the Koreans kept the original schools as they first came from the Song Dynasty, Zen Buddhism and the other doctrinal schools, and refused to update them. In a scholastic sense it’s fascinating.

There’s a wide, stunning variety of mountain spirit shrines. I spent 30 years photographing them, but I keep finding new stuff. The original shrines were just deliberately constructed piles of stone, out behind the temple, sometimes with a large slab of stone with Chinese characters carved in it saying, “This is the shrine for the mountain spirit.” Shrines like that persist until today, including newly built ones. Sometimes they contain a granite statue of Sanshin with a tiger and perhaps a pine tree carved out of granite. Now most common is a small wooden building, like a one-room shack, with a traditional tiled roof. Inside there’s a painting and/or a statue inside and enough space for a person to bow.

Inwang Samshingak

Inwang Samshingak altar

In the last 20 years, Buddhist temples have been enlarging and expanding their mountain spirit shrines so that some have become almost as large as the main Buddha hall, big enough for 20 people to gather inside. These special shrines enshrine three main folk shamanic spirits, the mountain spirit and a Taoist kind of spirit, the Seven Stars of the Big Dipper, and The Lonely Saint, a disciple of the Sakyamuni Buddha who was endowed with magical powers and who remained here on earth to help human beings. He’s lonely because he’s separate from the others in heaven. This kind of shrine is called the Samsung-gak, Three Sages Shrine or Three Saints Shrine.

It represents the ancient Oriental trinity, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in the entire Orient, starting in China at least 4,000 years ago, a trinity of heaven, earth and humanity. This is from the classical I Ching, the oldest philosophical book in East Asia, and it’s just extremely fundamental to any kind of East Asian Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism or whatever, In this shrine, the mountain spirit of course represents earth. The Seven Stars of the Big Dipper, with other heavenly deities in it, represents the powers of heaven. And the Lonely Saint is a kind of supreme human being, an enlightened disciple of Buddha. The shrines are very popular. They get a lot of visitors, plenty of veneration and cash donations.

A shaman at Samgak-san Sanshin Festival

Samgak-san Festival with participants in Confucian garb

Well, the rituals are some combination of shamanistic, Buddhist and Confucian practices, which is the way things co-developed. People pray in a shamanistic way, rubbing their hands together in supplication and prostrating themselves and praying. Or there is a Buddhist way of doing three prostrations while chanting the name of the spirit and perhaps a Buddhist text associated with the mountain spirit. There’s a more Confucian style similar to ancestor rituals or rituals for the spirit of a respected, departed teacher. All the rituals involve placing offerings on the altar, usually something aromatic so the smell goes up to the spirit. Candles are lit, just as they are in all the world’s religious practices, and incense is burned because that’s pleasing to the spirits. Usually there is a dish of water that is then uncovered—pure water for the spirits to consume. It should be perfectly clean and freshly got from the local stream. Shamans in the deep mountains may do something very simple, like lighting a single candle and having one small dish of water at the base of a great boulder or cliff. It goes from that way of worshipping all the way up to full-scale, Confucian-style productions. The altar table is loaded with 25 different kinds of offerings, and a grand ceremony is held with very senior leaders of the community. These days, local mayors or county heads lead these Confucian-style ceremonies. There can be a traditional orchestra playing traditional instruments and dancers employed as in royal Confucian ceremonies. They can really make quite a big deal out of it.

David observing a Confucian Sanshin ritual

I’d like to add that the mountain spirit culture in Korea is still flourishing. City people may tell you it’s an old-fashioned tradition, “Nobody does that anymore. We’re a high-tech, 21^st century country.” But the evidence is entirely otherwise. Driving around in the mountains, I’ve found new shrines being built and larger shrines than ever before, larger statues and bigger paintings than were ever made in classical times, and more elaborate. People are spending a lot of money. The new mountain spirit shrines and paintings and art works are indications to the scholar that this is not a dying religion. It’s still very much a part of 21^st century Korea.

I think it’s because the mountain spirit is fundamentally a part of the Korean mentality, even if they don’t want to admit it. It goes really deep down into the national identity and personalizing of who they are. It’s connected to so many of their basic cultural norms, which show up in so many ways, that it’s almost a ubiquitous factor in Korean culture. The spirit has acquired some new roles also, being quite “green,” protecting the environment with the new ecological movement that’s been building for out several years. The Sanshin is a perfect symbol of human beings living in harmony with nature. We protect nature, and in exchange nature protects us, our health and well-being. It’s also involved in praying for national unity. Sanshin is fundamental to Korean culture, respected by both the North Koreans and the South Koreans, so that all Koreans can’t help but relate to culturally and spiritually.

Spirit of the Mountains

After about a dozen years of research, in 1999 I published a book called The Spirit of the Mountains: Korean San-shin and Traditions of Mountain Worship. It was given an award by the government as the best book on Korean culture of that year. Later they translated it into Korean, making it both the first book in Korean about the mountain spirits as well as the first book in English. So it was a highly regarded and highly awarded book and popular with scholars, but never much of a seller. A few years ago the Korean publisher let it go out of print, to my disappointment. The copyright reverted to me, and as soon as I have the time I want to rewrite it including the many new things I’ve learned over the past 14 years. I want to add a supplement and correct it and put out a second edition. But my next book coming out is an official Encyclopedia of Korean Buddhism.

Related link:

“A Look at Korean Shamanism” <http://caroldussere.com/2009/11/23/a-look-at-korean-shamanism/>

Monks from all traditions under the tree–or a descendant of the tree–under which the Buddha was enlightened

I meditate with David and Claudine about once a week at the Sattva Center on Xavierville Avenue in Quezon City. At the beginning of this recent interview, I asked David how it happened that a guy from a country as Catholic as the Philippines came to be a Tibetan Buddhist. (Thanks to David Montecillo for the photos from India.)

David’s story

David with Santan Rinpoche of the Nyingma tradition

Okay, I was an ordinary college kid, studying and partying. Because I had a creative streak, after graduation I took a job in advertising. I could spit out good work really fast. But after about two and a half years I started to burn out. I realize now it was because my focus was always on the external, like waiting for the weekend and that adrenaline rush. Eventually it was a three-day struggle to come up with a heading for a simple print ad. I’d gone from a big high to a low low. I decided to bury my disappointment with friends—go out, party, drink. One Saturday in local bar, my friends talked about an energy seminar they’d attended on Pranic healing. I was curious because I was already into martial arts, but only the external side. Our teachers talked about energy, this chi or qi. It was strange. In this crowded bar where people were drinking, my friends were holding their hands in front of each other, feeling each other’s auras and saying, “Your qi is up to here. I can feel it.”

They said there was a class the following morning at eight o’clock in Alabang, a long drive from Quezon City. I wondered about my chances of waking up in time. But the next morning I was up before seven, so I went. That’s how I met my teacher, an American married to a Filipino. Her Tibetan name is Khandro, and she’s a lineage holder of the Tibetan line. She’s also into practices like meditation, Zen and Pranic healing. In class I learned about energy. Sometimes I couldn’t follow because the pacing was too fast, but I felt I belonged, that this was the right time for me explore this kind of thing. The transition started.

At that time I was still in my early twenties. I wanted to go back to school, find a bit more about myself. While I was working on my master’s in business, during the week I went to class, worked with my classmates on case analysis, went to companies to interview them and took tests. On weekends I was at the teacher’s house, learning about dharma, energy, healing and meditation. One side of me was doing left-brain financial statements, and the other side was contemplating the universe. My teacher introduced me to others who taught me things like qigong, and I found my way to a center where I practiced the arts of healing. Over the years one thing led to another. Synchronicities.

David in front of a bodhi tree

So Buddhism is probably the foundation, but I don’t know what to call myself anymore. In my spiritual practice I reach out to a whole milieu of deities—Ganesha, who’s a Hindu deity, is very strong in my life. I’ve been introduced to other energies, like the Isis energy and the Lady of the Adriatic, which is Christian or Catholic. I’ve even touched on the Reiki systems. Every “religion” or pathway leads back to a source. As human beings, before we can put our trust in something it needs to make sense to the rational mind. For me Buddhism was the first step. When I was younger, I didn’t have a good relationship with my Catholic upbringing. I followed the rituals, and in times of crisis I would pray. But it took a Buddhist teacher to make me understand and appreciate Christian terminology. Most traditions have a certain language, but the essence is pretty much the same. We color things based on our culture, our environment, our country’s history. In the office space inside me there’s such a conglomerate that I don’t know what label to use. Some teachers would say that’s good.

Once, friends invited me to a very born-again bible study. They asked my opinion about how to handle certain situations. So I quoted some Buddhist principles, but I replaced the word “Buddha” with “Christ.” Everyone agreed. The language is different, but the principles are the same. In our search for truth, we have buffet before us so we can experience each dish and make our own selections—without imposing them on others. Someone asks me what path to take, and I say, “What do you want? Choose, and if one doesn’t taste right, go to the next.”

Because the Buddhist dharma was written by the Buddha’s disciples, it’s very goal-oriented, like the three jewels [the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha] and the five poisons [ignorance, attachment, aversion, pride and jealousy]. It’s very behavior-based. But if behavior doesn’t come from being-ness, it may not be sustainable. Our being-ness has to translate into behavior. So I learned that even the person who’s throwing a tantrum may also be experiencing Buddha by being authentic, true to the being-ness of right now, rather than following what’s dictated by circumstances. But of course discernment is always there: is this the right place for a tantrum?

Even in Buddhism there’s “do this, do that,” but the true teacher will draw out from you where you want to go. Or give a glimpse of what enlightenment could be like. It’s up to you to find a way, while the teacher says, “You’re getting warmer—oh, you got colder,” a little nudge to get your bearings right. For me, when it was time, the teacher’s physical presence left when she moved to the U.S., but not her energetic presence.

I trained in Pranic healing or qigong therapy, practicing with a group which gave healings twice a week. I found that, regardless of whether people were rich, poor, young, old, when they sit before you their energy patterns tell who they are. And we’re all the same, regardless. Stress, or the issue of separation, is always there, and it shows in our energy patterns.

David’s class with Penor Ringpoche, the head of the Nyingma tradition at that time

I also got involved with a prayer circle led by a lady who channeled angels and gave us messages. In February or March of 2001, she channeled an entity who said through her that I had to be in the U.S. before September. I’d been planning to go for a relative’s wedding in November, and my uncle had asked me to come to New Jersey to help him set up a business. I didn’t know why I had to be on U.S. soil by September, but I talked to my family about going early, and we agreed. My brother and I landed on August 31. It was easy getting through customs with all the luggage because the Filipino officer in charge just waved us through.

My cousins took me around San Francisco, and then I flew to San Diego to see my teacher for the first time in three years. I spent the weekend with her. On September 11, I was in the airport waiting to go back to San Francisco when the World Trade Center was hit. All of a sudden, on the flight information board the signs were turning over—clack, clack, clack, clack—to cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. A crowd was huddling around the television in a coffee shop. “Holy cow!” All the planes stayed on the ground. The weekend with my teacher became a week. When I got back to San Francisco, I shared the story with my cousins. Two weeks later I was on a Korean Air flight to meet my uncle in New Jersey. So I decided I’d had to be in the U.S. in September because if I’d come later I wouldn’t have been able to get in with all the security.

I had a visa in good standing. I was helping my uncle, but each day I had thirty minutes to an hour to meditate and become quiet. In hindsight I feel that universe used me, along with countless others, as a channel to help balance out energies. New York at that time was in an uproar.  There was a lot of stress, lot of paranoia, a lot of hullabaloo. It was unbelievable. But despite everything I had a peaceful mindset all year. I found myself walking mindfully across New York, at peace inside. I’m sure there were many others who started praying and meditating, and I guess that was just my part. My teacher had once said, “When the universe plans to use you, you’ll be used regardless.”

The 2006 Monlam, the prayer for world peace

A year after Sept. 11, the economy was still down. Once my uncle and I went to a job fair in Madison Square Garden. There were long lines—blocks long and four or five people wide. These were people in Gucci shoes and Armani suits who were grabbing flyers for temp jobs. So I saw how people were displaced, how they were suffering. I saw them reach for happiness and security. As one of the gurus had said, “Security is an illusion.” I witnessed that all over New York. And even though my uncle’s business plan looked good on paper, circumstances entered in. Things happened, things changed. Impermanence was the biggest lesson for me. After a year I moved back to the Philippines.

A couple of years later I started a business with a friend who, like myself, was into dancing, meditation. During my short experience of corporate life here and in New York, I’d heard how noisy people were inside. My friend and I decided to set up a company which would bring wellness and stress management to corporations. Over time our company evolved, adding more aspects.

In 2003 went to Hawaii to get a teacher’s training certificate in Shenzhen qigong. In the 1980s this qigong style was imparted to Master Yi Zhenfeng by one of his teachers, but for a lot of it he went into a trance, and the movements just came out. Mankind needs them now. This system is to help open our hearts and our consciousness and awareness. I set about trying to impart the Shenzhen way as much as I could.

Inside the Temple of Bodhigaya. Some tourists.

In 2006 I went to Bodhigaya in Bihar, India, where the Buddha was enlightened. That’s Mecca for a lot of Buddhists. I was the only Filipino with a contingent of Chinese Buddhists from the local Nyingma temple in the Palyul Lineage, the lineage I still follow. My experience there was very spiritual. Sanpen Rinpoche took us around Bodhigaya. I was privileged to have an audience with his Holiness Penor Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma tradition. He gave us blessings. Now he has passed on to nirvana. I met a very young incarnation of a high lama who also passed away. There were a lot of typical pilgrimage experiences, but I remember very distinctly bringing the energy back to the Philippines with me. For maybe a week or two I felt so much inimitable peace, which was very palpable. Others would look at me and say, “Wow, you’re so chilled now.”

Before and after I went to India, I received meditation students in my house. As much as possible I tried to be true to what my teacher taught me, and I understood the trouble she had with me and my classmates because we were still sometimes hard-to-control, rowdy kids.

After I got back, I met a lady named Kim Lopa. The first time we met, we each had a flashback to a past life when we were Tibetan monks. Occasionally when I was still in training, I saw her again at the healing center. Around December 2006 Kim gave a workshop called The Lily and Beyond. This is a workshop, a shaktipat or an empowerment, in which divine grace and the blessings of various masters and teachers come down to us in energy form and complete our energy body. In short, all of the benefits of forty or fifty years of spiritual practice and meditation are given in one workshop. That’s The Lily and Beyond. After taking the workshop, we can go into high meditation space instantaneously and hold it there all throughout the day—while washing our clothes, while driving—whereas ordinarily when we went into meditation we could only reach high levels of meditation pace on peak levels during peak days. With the Lily activation we can actually get there instantaneously and hold the space effortlessly. It provides us with peace and a certain buoyancy, so that no matter how our life knocks us down, our default system is just to get back up very quickly. Getting back on your feet doesn’t take months or years. I’ve seen it happen to others who have the activation. This gives us God’s peace 24/7.  The Lily and Beyond is the culmination in my life.

Zemten Rinpoche, a khenpo, David. When David was presented as a practitioner, the khenpo put his head on David’s as a blessing.

Sometimes I feel like a bank deposit box where you put your jewelry to be stored. Sometimes I’m a bit also hesitant because I’ve learned that “to whom much one has been given, much is expected in return.” The individual is expected to let go of old material things, attitudes and beliefs. Where it’s going we don’t know yet. There’s a responsibility for people who have an awareness or who are working on ourselves to reach that awareness. It’s as if humanity is in a time of transition from the old ways of being and doing to a new way of expressing our divinity, a time of unification, assessment, and of being true to who we are. It’s like a time when we’re starting the roots of culture change from who we think we are to who we are inside, accepting every part of us, the light and the dark, the happy to the sad. It’s bringing us back to who we once were thousands of years ago, before the fall from grace, when human consciousness was very high. Now it’s time to reclaim it. That’s my daily experience. I mean, in our company we still make action plans, but often the universe uses us for something.

In the Lily community we have a “Christ office,” which is a place in the atmosphere where there’s Christ-consciousness—not necessarily Christian, but having to do with unification. People work in the office. We who took the lily activation are given the chance to serve. Once I thought Christ-consciousness meant getting along with others, but it’s about unification from within. First the many aspects of who we are inside have to unite as one. From the light to the dark, we have to be accepted for who we are. It’s respect of ourselves. When that happens, we don’t walk anymore as a personality, but we walk, speak, we move as a deity, as the highest expression of who we are spiritually.

The tree in the main temple

In fact, the mission vision of The Lily and Beyond is peace and one brotherhood of man. That’s one word: peaceandonebrotherhoodofman In order to see it work, for those of us who said yes to the Christ-office, every aspect of our being, of our lives, has to be aligned with it. Our work, our careers, our relationships, our relation to nature—peaceandonebrotherhoodofman. In the Lily community. after the shaktipat, we’re connected 24/7 to divine energy. So our intuitions can be activated. Some people’s healing “powers” can be activated. Some people’s clairvoyance becomes magnified. Manifestations become quicker. This is about change, to help manifest what we call the Golden City Alert, peaceandonebrotherhoodofman. This is a tall order, but we know we are always guided with backup. All we have to do is move in faith.

The empowerment doesn’t violate free will. If we still choose to go to shadow or back into our old programs, it won’t stop us. It will delay the work, but that’s free will. That’s the divine. Free will of man is respected above all else. So that’s how we are in the Lily community. I believe that, in every faith, peace and one brotherhood of man is the goal. It’s like qigong, yoga, Catholicism, Christianity, Islam, are all dots, and it’s our job to connect them so we can see the big picture.

Links:

David and Claudine organized the first Heal-Om Festival. Photos at http://caroldussere.com/2012/10/26/the-first-heal-om-festival/

The Lily and Beyond. http://www.lilyandbeyond.org/ and http://www.mercymartinez.com/home/lily-and-beyond

A reader writes:

Thank you for sharing this, Carol!  I’ve read it up.  Now I got a better appreciation of David’s spiritual growth and transformation, which allowed me to gain an insight as well on the synchronicities I have been experiencing.

Another reader writes:

I really appreciate your latest post about David’s journey and spiritual growth. I like learning about the different experiences of fellow pilgrims.

View of Taal Lake from Starbucks in Tagaytay

Map showing route from Manila to Tagaytay, with Taal Volcano

An hour’s drive from Metro Manila will take you to a cool place. In fact, in my beginning Tagalog textbook it shows up often in connection with coolness, as in, “Alin ang mas maginaw, ang Tagaytay o ang Baguio?” (Which is colder, Tagatay or Baguio?) Both are mountainous areas known for providing relief from the summer heat. Both have terrific views. From many parts of Tagaytay, you can see the Taal Lake its volcanic crater, as well as the mountain ridges and forests where revolutionaries hid out during the 1896 the war against Spanish rule. Tagaytay is popular with tourists and recently also with new residents. Real estate prices are rising. Many upscale restaurants are available. It’s also a great place to just hang out.

On one trip we visited the guesthouse originally built by Imelda Marcos, reportedly for Ronald Reagan, who never show up. After the 1986 overthrow of the Marcos regime, it was named the People’s Park in the Sky.

The People’s Park in the Sky

The amphitheater at People’s Park

Another place well worth visiting is the Daughters of Divine Zeal, a community of sisters which maintains well-tended fields, a restaurant with Italian food and a bee farm. We have gotten into the habit of going there to pick up natural productions like cosmetics containing honey, which are available in the showroom. There’s also a shelter for abused women.

Natural products for sale in the shop

Italian restaurant at the Daughters of Divine Zeal

The bees

A typical Filipino gate

On one visit we stayed in a vacation home surrounded by flowers.

Inside the house

Inside the traditional house

The front porch with locally made wooden furniture

But I fell in love with this traditional Filipino house with its various woods and very relaxing mood, inside and out.

The traditional house from the gate

Woodwork details

Another time we did a retreat at the Angel Hills Retreat Center (below). Always we ate well, including local dishes like bulalot. Fruit from Tagaytay is well known, so we often stopped to take some home.

Fruit vendor near People’s Park

Bulalot, or bone marrow soup, which tastes a lot like Korean beef rib stew

Lysley Tenorio in Makati

In general, I prefer novels to short story collections, but Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress is an exception. Each of these eight stories has a satisfying fullness, and the collection has a novel-like breadth. It really dives into the Filipino-American cultural divide, particularly on an emotional level. Lysley and I met at the author’s book-signing in Makati. The following interview took place over Skype after he had returned to the States, where he teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California.

 CD:  Can you tell me about your immigration from the Philippines to the States?

LT:  I was seven months old, so it was a fairly easy transition for me, without a process of assimilation. But through my siblings I witnessed and maybe experienced vicariously the struggle and the joy and the uncertainty of making a place for oneself in the new country. My oldest brother was nineteen years old, and my older sister fifteen. The teenage years are so volatile that it’s hard not to get a sense of the impact of leaving for a new home. So the sense of transformation, of trying to adjust, trying to make one’s way, is such a heart-felt and intense endeavor that it was palpable to me when I was growing up even if it wasn’t my own personal experience.

CD:  Did you become part of a Filipino-American community, or was your family more isolated?

LT:  It’s hard for me to say about the early years, but I grew up in San Diego in a little community, Mare Mesa, which was nicknamed “Manila Mesa” because of all the Filipinos. There are so many different faces and ethnicities that I never felt isolated or alienated—certainly in terms of public life, like going to school or to the supermarket. I don’t recall a conscious effort on my part to immerse myself in the Filipino or Filipino-American community, but I certainly had Filipino friends. That was just the reality of the place.

The point-of-view characters

CD:  So you didn’t feel isolated or alienated, unlike perhaps your characters. I find them fascinating because they’re all in really extreme circumstances, but as the stories progress, they’re revealed to be very human and in some ways very ordinary people. Can you talk about your construction of characters?

LT:  I’m drawn to circumstances that seem almost too strange to be true because they provide good drama and tension. If the situation verges on the unbelievable, but is actually real, it comes with an emotional depth that’s worthy of exploration if you’re writing character-driven fiction. I’m drawn to strange but true intersections between the Philippines and America. For example, “Help” is about some Filipino guys, Marcos loyalists, who beat up the Beatles because one of them had supposedly said something lewd about Imelda Marcos. It’s based on a true story. I need to ask myself: who are the characters who might occupy this strange space? The challenge is to take characters arising from strange, weird, seemingly unbelievable situations and make them emotionally complex, give them psychological depth so the reader can experience an empathic tension with them.

CD:  Do you start with an emotion or some kind of emotional blueprint?

LT:  No, I would be cautious about that kind of approach. The construction of character really comes from situation and plot. I don’t want to call it a blueprint, but certainly the majority of characters are caught up in the struggle between a kind of collective history that they’re trying to honor or abide by and the individual need to be on one’s own. That’s a common emotional thread. But they’re really shaped by their individual circumstances, which are often dictated by weird, wacky thoughts.

CD:  Could you give an example of collective history?

LT:  I don’t mean a national history or the history of the Philippines, but family history and loyalty ties. For example, in “Help,” the young narrator is caught between loyalty to his uncle—so, honoring the family through his uncle—and his own individual desire, which in the immediate story is simply to meet the Beatles and have a moment with them, not attack them because of an insult to Imelda Marcos.

CD:  Where do you find the collective in the story in the lepers’ colony?

LT:  Well, I think the main character’s problem is that she doesn’t have one. When she was in America for a brief period, she was happy, and her mother was happy. But then she developed this terrible disease and was discarded. In the colony she identifies with the other American patient because she still sees herself as very American even though she’s been exiled for years. When she sees how disfigured he is, it hits her on such a complicated level that it reminds her she’s alone, she’s isolated. Then she can’t connect with this individual or, for that matter, with her claim to the American identity she once relished.

CD:  The collection opens with “Monstress” and this first line: “In 1966, the president of Cocoloco Pictures broke the news to us in English: ‘As the Americanos say, it is time to listen to the music. Your movies are shit.’” —  I hear from time to time that Filipinos don’t get irony, although I haven’t personally found this to be true. There’s a lot of gentle irony in these stories, both with words and with situations. How do your readers react? 

LT:  The ones I’ve spoken with seem to get it. Of course a lot of them are Filipino-Americans with American sensibility, or they may just have more experience with different forms of entertainment, maybe a postmodern sensibility.

My mother subscribes to the Filipino television channel, TFC, which she watches at home in San Diego. Sometimes I’ll watch the dramas or telanovellas with her. They’re very melodramatic, but I don’t think they’re meant to be ironic. It’s like the way Filipinos embrace their beauty queens. The Miss Universe Pageant is still a big deal, which is not to say that some Filipinos don’t look at it with irony or that admiration for beauty queens is inherently Filipino. But in the Philippines beauty queens are elevated to the point of becoming historical figures. I appreciate that they’re able to see something like a beauty pageant through a serious and respectful lens. Even though some of my stories may take a whimsical attitude toward things like monster movies, I do try to respect what they are in and of themselves. In “Monstress” the narrator has played the monster in B-movies, these terrible, tacky things. But when she watches them twenty years later they take on a kind of beauty. One could say that’s just nostalgia at work, but I think she comes to realize that those movie monsters, as silly as they might have been, were created as an act of love. So she comes to respect their purity.

CD:  I really like the way the San Francisco story moves back and forth in time. How did you construct it?

LT:  I’d looked at some stories that have that novelistic feel, that go back and forth between a present time situation and the character’s entire history. So I very willfully borrowed some of those structures. When I tried writing the story from a first-person perspective, it didn’t work, so I changed it to third-person. It felt easier to assert that kind of authority, to say, “Here we are in this small, present-time moment. Now I’m going to fling the reader back forty years and give a lot of information but also palatable drama, even if these are flashbacks. Hopefully those timelines will somehow emotionally converge.”At first I was afraid that it seemed a little too gimmicky to go back and forth between a single night and an entire life. But once I’d decided that this was what the temporal space was going to be, I had to commit to it. I think once I got over that initial concern it felt right. That was a hard story to write, so I appreciate [your saying that it works].

CD:  Your plots seem to turn on some kind of betrayal. Could you talk about that in terms of your construction of stories?

LT:  That’s been pointed out to me before. I don’t think I can speak about it because it’s not a narrative mechanism I rely on. Betrayal has to be dictated by character and circumstances. Hopefully, it’s believable, and whoever betrays does it for reasons one can both empathize with and condemn.

CD:  Your writing seems to go really deeply into the Philippines as I’ve observed it. I’d like to ask about your research, for example with the albularyo, the faith healers.

LT:  It’s very focused research. That story was based on Alex Orbito, a prominent faith healer. Years ago I borrowed a library book about psychic surgeons in the Philippines. So that’s when my interest first developed. Later I looked up “psychic surgery” and found a few videos which show it being performed and others showing it being debunked—like how the surgeons palm the little bags of blood. I tried to imagine the physicality of the gesture as I saw it. With Culion, the leper colony, I was able to get some primary sources about the island, and I did some research on leprosy. But I’ve learned you don’t want to be weighted down by an excess of factual information. You want to commit to the story, so you’ve got to pick and choose your facts and not be seduced by the fascinating information you might find. Stick to the story and the character, and use the information that’s most useful to you. Of course if your writing relies on some factual truth, you want to maintain that integrity without being oppressed by it.

CD:  How did you decide which situations to write about?

LT:  You know, not too many stories in contemporary fiction take place in a leper colony. If I were a reader stumbling across a story like that, I’d be interested. I need subject matter I assume will be interesting to a reader—even on the surface level, on the level of plot. More importantly, it has to be interesting to me, or I can’t commit to it. So I find subjects and themes inherent on those subjects that are both workable and fun to think about, although of course they may be sad, or even dark. I’m the one who writes these stories. I have to take care of these characters. It eats up a lot of my time. So the subjects have to be interesting to me.

CD:  What do you do in terms of constructing the setting?

LT:  If it’s based on a real place, certainly I’ll try to find photos or diagrams or blueprints. That’s always sort of my go-to source. If it’s fictional, I don’t draw it out, but I do have a visual sense of it. It’s never all that specific, kind of amorphous. For example, in “L’Amour, CA,” the narrator hates the house, which he says is too big. I don’t have a clear layout of it, but I have a sense of maybe the light in the room as it comes through the windows. Maybe the color of the walls. I have a visual sense of the most basic planes in the space. Rarely is it that important.

CD:  When you use a setting that actually exists, do you look at it and have the sense of the scene arising in it?

Sometimes, but not too often. When I was in the Philippines thirteen years ago—the last time I was there before the event where I met you—I was at the Manila International Airport, thinking about the part it played in “Help.” I’d meant to collect information and take notes, but as I looked around, I didn’t know how to use what I was seeing. In fact, it felt stifling. But then I saw a sign on the way to the departure gates which said, “No well-wishers beyond this point.” I thought it was such a great visual, such a great message, which works on so many different levels. It helped me understand my character more. He’s just a kid, and his mother is about to leave the country. He tries to follow her, but the guard pulls him back and points at the sign. He says, “I wanted to tell him that the sign didn’t apply to me, that I didn’t wish my mother well at all, that in fact, I wished her a terrible trip, a time so awful she would take the first flight back to Manila.” So that was a serendipitous moment where a detail which had seemed insignificant turned out to be pivotal.

CD:  You were traveling a lot while writing, so these stories were written in several different places. What effect does the place where you are physically have on what you write?

LT: When I go away to write, I rarely go to a place for a specific story. I can’t say the places where the work was written influenced it, although I’m sure on some subconscious level they did. When I’m writing about a particular place I don’t feel a strong need to be there. I used to think that because a lot of these stories are set in the Philippines I had to spend years and years there in order to get them right, but that hasn’t been the case. That may be different with stories or novels to come. Now I go off to a quiet place away from what’s familiar. I feel that the stories are more alive because there’s very little else to take my attention. It’s really helpful to detach from my life—like my teaching, my family, my friends, my apartment, the dishes, all that stuff—just to be able to disconnect for a little bit.

CD:  One of the reviewers of your book wrote, “Hard enough to make sense of life when you’re rooted to one place, one culture; how much more impossible it must be for those of us who straddle one place and another.” Do you find that’s true?

LT:  I would think it’s more complex when there’s more to juggle. That’s not to say that people who are only rooted in one culture, one place, don’t have an equally difficult time, which I would think has its own set of challenges. I do think, when you’re having to manage or negotiate one set of beliefs that are inherent to another place with the yet-to-be-defined sense of values from the new place, it’s complex. I don’t want to say one struggle is more fraught than the other. I won’t compare the two. They’re different.

CD:  In the final story, “L’Amour, CA,” the family’s firstborn is named Isa, or “number one” in Tagalog. After she runs away, the narrator says this:

“I put my head on my knees, close my eyes. Somewhere, Isa is fine without us; here, we are fine without Isa. And this is the truth I don’t want to know: that the ones who leave and the ones who get left keep living their lives, whatever the distance between. But not me. When I was outside in the night, I watched my family; I knew they were fine. When she thought she was alone, I watched Isa; I listened to her pray. For the rest of my life, I would be like this. It’s the difference, I think, between all of them and me; even when I was gone, I was here.”

I have the feeling, although you show both sides as painful, that you see going out into the world as being basically positive. Is that the case?

LT:  I don’t think it’s ever all positive or all negative. In these eight stories, I tend to think it’s admirable to strike out on one’s own with the willingness to see it through—although it may have bad results. It’s gutsy. I hope that’s how some people might see it. I wouldn’t say it’s all positive or negative. People are always going to gain things, and they’re always going to lose things along the way. I do tend to admire people who leave, but it’s important that my admiration for that kind of bravery not blind me to the consequences.

CD:  Is there something else you’d like to add about the book?

LT:  Just that I appreciate your interest in it and I hope that people who read this interview or visit your site will pick it up.

CD: So do I. It’s a real treat.

Reproductive rights will enable Filipinos to avoid having more children than they can house, feed and send to school.

Sylvia Estrada Claudio is Director of the Center for Women’s Studies at the University of the Philippines and co-founder of Likhaan, a non-governmental organization which provides direct services to women in marginalized communities, particularly reproductive healt. In Part 1, Silvia discusses her early political activism as a medical doctor and a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Part 2 deals with her feminism and her support for the Reproductive Health Bill, the RH Bill.

Sylvia’s story

When I blundered back into academe I was in my early thirties. It took me nine years to get my PhD because I wandered off. One semester of not being involved in social issues drove me crazy, and it didn’t improve my scholarship. On the other hand, I really learned to appreciate the discipline and scholarship of the university, which was a welcome relief from the anti-intellectualism I’d seen in the movement. Then I met a movement comrade who said, “I’m setting up the GABRIELA Commission on Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights. Want to help?” I said, “Fine. I’ll be a member of the commission. I won’t to get sucked back into the Party, but I’ll help you.” [According to Wikipedia, GABRIELA is an acronymfor General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Leadership, and Action. It was named in honor of Gloria Silang, who led a revolt against Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century.]

I began reading about feminism and particularly that area having to do with sexuality, what was then called “reproductive rights.” This was 1988-89. I realized that many of my former comrades were never going to accept feminism, no matter how well-argued, even from a Marxist perspective.

I also helped set up the Philippines’ first women’s rape and crisis center. We didn’t have much in the way of resources, so we debated at first whether it was going to be for only rape victims or only women raped by the military or it would include women suffering from other forms of violence. I was still coming from the perspective of human rights work but only for comrades in the movement—although previously I hadn’t been content with serving only the combatants on our side. Human rights should be for everyone. The decision was made very correctly that, even though there were only a few of us, the center should be for both rape victims and battered women. None of us really understood how to help the victims of rape and sexual harassment. I think that was true of the feminist movement the world over. My psychological training and medical training didn’t help a bit. We had to find a way by reading up on the experiences of other people. I did a discourse analysis of rape stories in tabloids to understand how the culture was treating rape so we could help the women who were coming to our center.

Eventually I was told that if I didn’t finish my dissertation I wouldn’t get my PhD. I was ready to give up, but then my mother died. I think I turned grief into work because she died in July and I got my degree in October. It took two or three months of working on the dissertation and then the defense. I think my professors were all saying, “Let’s push her to get it done.” It came down to a referendum throughout the college faculty, with them all arguing that I was finished, I’d only been a day late, I should be allowed to graduate.

The discourse analysis on rape I’d done for the center became part of my dissertation, along with analysis of pro forma love letters. There was a little 20-peso book of love letters, originally published in 1945 but still available in the 80s. I don’t know whether people actually copied out the letters and sent them or whether they just read the letters for their romantic value. My dissertation was written in Filipino because the degree was in Philippine psychology, but I translated it into English and updated it. It was published in 2004 as Rape, Love and Sexuality: The Construction of Women in Discourse.

Then I heard, “Now that you have a PhD, you have to teach.” The women from the Women and  Development Program of the College of Social Work and Community Development actively recruited me. I was insecure because I’d never taught a day in my life, but they said, “You’ve been teaching peasants and workers. You’ll do just fine.” I found that I really did enjoy teaching.

Eventually, along with others the movement, like Dr. Junice Melgar, I left GABRIELA and founded Likhaan, an NGO which is one of the major supporters on the social movement side of reproductive health. We began eleven or twelve years ago when a bill was filed that was really about reproductive health, rather than family planning and population management. We helped write the RH Bill, working with a political Party called Akbayan, which I eventually joined. Likhaan’s core program continues to be organizing women around health issues. During the early nineties, times when the US foundations had lots of money to give, we used to give comprehensive health services. Then the economic bubble burst, less developmental aid was available, and the Philippines—having become less of a basket case—received less aid. Now Likhaan can only afford to concentrate on reproductive health. We’ve been supplementing the government health care centers in the major urban poor communities that we work with. We continue the community-based health programs that we worked with during the Marcos dictatorship, making sure that there are health services for women. We have a new understanding that even in health care women tend to get neglected, especially with regard to reproductive and sexual health.

In doing its job Likhaan kept coming across all sorts of human rights violations and barriers, for example, a ten-year ban in Manila on all contraceptives and family planning. [See http://reproductiverights.org/en/press-room/manila-citys-contraception-ban] Our health workers were refused help and cooperation. We got reports of women being stigmatized for seeking post-abortion care, even in the major hospitals. It was sometimes difficult to find funding. It was very difficult for our clinics to even get contraceptive supplies from government, just because some stupid little bureaucrat in some governmental agency was “pro-life” and didn’t want to give them to us. We’d do something, and then it would just get overturned.

Our view of our work wasn’t that we would replace the government but that as an NGO we would be small and flexible. If we made mistakes, we wouldn’t waste a lot of money, kill a lot of people or diminish the political capital of some progressive politician. We could correct our mistakes very quickly. We were hoping to use our experience to be able to contribute to policy issues for bigger programs. We couldn’t do that when people at various levels of government and various departments opposed reproductive health. We kept banging our heads against the wall. We would say, “Look at this wonderful system we found for tracking contraceptive supplies. Maybe you can do this.” If the people we in the Department of Health were sympathetic, they would try it. Or they would say, “You’ve taught us how to fund a small clinic in an out-of-the-way place. We’ve managed to put it into our system.” But if the next Secretary of the Department of Health was against reproductive health, our efforts would just go to hell.

The last thing we wanted to do was legislative activism. It takes so much time and effort. But the decision was made, and twelve years ago we were very much a part of writing the grandmother of the bill that has finally came out.  At first we couldn’t even get it out of the health committee. It was such a big struggle that we were really happy when it finally came out of committee sometime in 2004 or 2005. Then it had to go to the appropriations committee, which is usually a pro forma process. I don’t know of any other bills in the history of Filipino legislation that actually got knocked out of the appropriations committee. So we learned. For many years we’d fail repeatedly, but we’d say, “That’s the democratic process. Let’s keep going.”

However, to my mind you could see how the argument was being won in the eyes of the public. If you look at past surveys, you see increasing numbers of people, then large majorities of people who know the issues: do you want contraception, should government provide contraception, are you against family planning, do you know the Church’s position? People actually say, “I know the bill. I want this bill to be passed.” It’s a great victory—although we were having victories all along. Except for the passage of female suffrage in 1937, I don’t know of any other piece of social legislation which required widespread public support. I wish all social legislation in the country could receive this kind of well-informed public attention, with people listening to the debate and weighing in on the issues. Then we would really be a progressive country and a democratic one.

The Reproductive Health Bill was the second biggest political victory in my life, after the downfall of the Marcos regime. They took about the same amount of time. When we started I had no idea that it would become a battle against the Catholic Church, the most powerful social institution in the Philippines.

I think the Church has lost a lot of power over the last twelve years. It lost its capacity to prevent the bill from passing, to get the legislators and the president and the institutions of government to do its bidding. It lost the capacity to bring people over to its point of view. At some point in the struggle—six years ago maybe—we noticed that the tactics had shifted from talking to people to pressuring the institutions of government. Telling the president and the legislators that there would be punishment coming from their end [threatening the president of the country and professors of Ateneo University with excommunication if they spoke out in favor of the RH Bill]. If you will recall, the government of former President Arroyo was often in crisis. One of the reasons she stayed in power was that the Church’s stand on her was either neutral or supportive. We tracked how she traded off reproductive rights for her own political stability. Her administration was considered as corrupt as the Marcos regime, if not more so. Then later we found out she’d given cars and all sorts of things to some of the bishops. In her speeches she always said, “I will never approve a bill allowing abortion. I am not for reproductive health.” [None of the RH bills have called for the legalization of abortion.] Then the bishops would come to her aid.

This was in contrast to their behavior with the previous presidents. Cardinal Sin and the bishops finally sided against Marcos and were perceived as helping to bring down the dictatorship. They also made statements condemning Estrada, who was a womanizer and a drunk and not very Catholic in the sense of kowtowing to them. They did not call for rallies against Arroyo.

I was raised agnostic. My father was very scientific, and my mother was a strict Bertrand Russell fan. At the age of nine, when I asked about the existence of god, she handed me a book on the major religions. “Here you go, honey. You can read this.” So I don’t feel the sense of betrayal and hurt that my Catholic friends feel, although as a feminist I agree with the perception that the bishops are ideological conservatives with an old, completely unenlightened view of sexuality. My husband, who’s very Catholic, is very angry. He tracks and compiles all these stupid statements from the bishops. That sense of betrayal is possibly more dangerous for the Church than their loss in the battle over the RH Bill. I have friends who are still Catholic and who formed a group called “Catholics for RH.” I tell them that maybe this is an opportunity have a church they really like.

On the evening the bill passed I kept saying, “What’s next?” My office-mates said, “There’s nothing next. It’s done.” I said, “That’s not possible. I’ve been living with this for twelve years.”

GABRIELA filed a divorce bill last year. [Divorce is illegal, and foreign divorces aren’t recognized. Annulments are very expensive.] We should cooperate on that issue, but in terms of the social movement for sexual health and reproductive rights, I think the NGO and maybe even this office—which has put its mandate, its political will and all our researches around reproductive health—will have to step back and look at what will be really helpful for women. We still have the Supreme Court challenge to the RH Law. We need to defend against that, and then we have to help write the implementing rules and regulations. The Department of Health needs help in order to adequately implement the program we fought for. We will be looking to make sure the implementation is done. The mortality rates are not going down just because the law was passed. We need to see those emergency contraceptive care centers put up in villages and municipalities, and that’s a lot of doing, a lot of nagging, a lot of pushing for the budget to be put where the legislature’s mouth is.

The law which passed is not perfect. As a compromise to some of the anti-RH people language was added prioritizing the poor as the recipients of family planning services. I believe this in fact makes it seem more like a population control program, which the anti-RH people always accused the bill of being. Then there’s this equal protection of the unborn, which is all over the place in the bill. So implementing rules and regulations will be crucial, but we think the bill still does a lot. For one thing, no politician can place an outright ban on reproductive rights.

This has become a social movement with so many faces, very different from a leftwing party leading the masses. There’s no one great reproductive health heroine. If you challenge the most powerful social institution in the country, you have to be a social movement. So that’s another “next,” writing about it from our own perspectives.

Toward the end we were joined by young people called the Filipino Freethinkers, who engaged in the RH issue because they saw the Church trampling all over secular and scientific values. They were a late addition to the movement, but crucial. There have been other agnostic-atheist societies in the Philippines, but Freethinkers has become one of the more successful ones because they chose to engage in reproductive health. Their contribution was critical because someone needed to challenge the Church on other grounds, and they did. [See http://caroldussere.com/2011/06/08/filipine-reproductive-health-part-1 and http://caroldussere.com/2011/06/21/filipine-reproductive-health-bill-part-2]

For the RH bill, the second vote was the most crucial one. We won by nine votes. At one point it came down to a two-vote difference. After we’d won the vote—this was about two in the morning—we marched out of the plenary hall to the women who’d been picketing and rallying. Someone said, “You know, when the votes came down to two, people here started crying.” The backbone of our support was the women from poor communities who filled the session halls. Now if you ask them about legislative clauses, they know. For example, at our Christmas party we played a game, and people were joking about whether someone should have gotten a point or not. A woman from a poor community, a woman who doesn’t even have an elementary school education, said. “Well, we can always resolve this by having nominal voting.” We all laughed. These women know the legislative process because they were there.

For this victory it was really important for the poor women to see that they could influence their institutions, that they could make things happen. The recent research on poverty shows that when women feel they can make institutions accountable, even at the local level, when they feel their actions can have an impact on their lives, they are less likely to rate themselves “very poor.” They’re more optimistic about the future. In fact, they’re more likely to engage in activities that mitigate their poverty and do better for their communities and their families.

It’s really important, even for poverty alleviation, that those of us who were engaged in the struggle write about it from a feminist perspective. As you can well imagine some of the writing will not be feminist, but something else altogether—some politician’s memoir. The Church will probably write it in an entirely different way. [See Silvia’s article “Spiritually Pro-RH” at http://www.rappler.com/thought-leaders/20312-spiritually-pro-rh  and “RH Law: The Long and Rough Road” <http://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/18730-rh-law-the-long-and-rough-road.]

A poster at the Bacolod Cathedral names candidates and parties to vote for (anti-RH and “buhay” or life) and against (pro-RH and “patay” or death) . Father Tabora adds commentary.

The war continues:

http://taborasj.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/team-patay-team-buhay-unconscionable/. A response to the “voter’s conscience” poster on the cathedral.

Pro-RH Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/prorhbill

Meanwhile, in the United States:

http://www.care2.com/causes/oklahoma-may-deny-women-affordable-birth-control-because-it-poisons-their-bodies.html.  A doctor in the “natural birth control” biz is pushing his legislator to make affordable birth control unavailable to women.

It’s all about controlling the means of reproduction. Lenin was right.

A reader writes:

I enjoyed the posts about Sylvia… There are too few minds like hers in this world,  Thank you.

Sylvia Estrada Claudio is Director of the Center for Women’s Studies at the University of the Philippines and co-founder of Likhaan, a non-governmental organization which provides direct services to women in marginalized communities. This interview provides a glimpse into the history of the Philippines and the reproductive health movement. It is also a story of how one woman is making her contribution as a feminist and a proponent of the Reproductive Health Bill.

I began the interview by mentioning that I’d noticed a big gap between most of the Filipinos I knew and the literati and intelligentsia at the literary festival where we met.

Sylvia’s story

Well, there’s a long history of the educated class in the Philippines being alienated from the general population. The elite of the Philippines has also been typically the group that collaborated with the colonizers. Filipinos had no educational system under Spain, so the only people who could speak Spanish were the Spanish themselves, those who were of Spanish blood born in the Philippines and the very few native Filipinos who served them. The American system just continued the split, with an upper class of people who grew up speaking English and who were educated in elite institutions and then a lot of less educated people without the same grasp of English.

During the U.S. colonial period a very good public education system was put into place, starting with the famous U.S. teachers who came on the USS Thomas [in 1901]. My parent’s generation thought their public school education was better than the education in the private schools. The University of the Philippines [UP] was founded as a counterpoint to the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, the Catholic bastion of religiosity and non-secular views. The U.S. wanted a secular republic run by a group of essentially democratic-oriented, scientific, technocratic people. So my father’s generation got lots of Fulbright scholarships and scholarships from other programs. My father did his post-graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. I grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as the child of two UP professors, and we lived on this campus, which seemed very much oriented toward the sciences as taught to our professors in U.S. universities. Nowadays I think there’s not only a split between the more English-speaking elite and the rest of the population, but also a split between those academics who choose to be engaged in social issues and the ivory-tower academics who don’t. Although I do know of pure science nerds who helped in the reproductive health movement even though it had nothing to do with their university work. And I also believe that there are those who do not engage in social issues but still contribute a lot by being excellent scholars working only in academia.

The great belief in technocracy and science and industrialization as the way to Filipino development didn’t really work. In the 70s we had the declaration of martial law and the gutting of social services, including education. The scholarships dried up, so we didn’t have the same opportunities to go abroad. Many people my age went into the anti-dictatorship struggle. I was thirteen years old and a member of a radical Maoist student groups when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. [This was in September, 1972. In the following month South Korean military dictator Park Chung-hee declared himself President for Life.]

So you take a rebellious thirteen-year-old and tell her that her activities are illegal and she’s an enemy of the state. You use the school authorities to control or frighten her. I just became more rebellious. Who knows why teenagers rebel, anyway? Some have really good reasons, some don’t. I spent the rest of high school doing crazy things, like smoking marijuana, not studying and being impolite to teachers. In my school, students with good grades couldn’t get kicked out. So my friends and I just made sure our grades were good while showing none of the traditional respect for the teachers or the school.

The minute I got into college I was recruited to be a part of a small underground cell at the university. Our biggest task was to run The Philippine Collegian, the student newspaper, which had been allowed to come back in, I think a year before. The student councils were not yet allowed back in, so we were also fighting for a consultative committee for student affairs to be formally allowed in the University. Those were the political tasks given to me as a member of the National Democratic Front which was then and now closely allied to the Communist Party of the Philippines.

I’m very proud of having worked on The Philippine Collegian, which ranks high in the journalistic and literary tradition of the country. It’s always been a radical but good student paper, but at that time it gained national importance because it was the only newspaper telling the truth about the Marcos dictatorship. All the mainstream media were controlled and suppressed. For example, when Marcos had a plebiscite to ask the people whether they would allow him to be president for life, only The Philippine Collegian said vote no. During that period, we covered the very first voters’ strike under martial law. We were printing twice as many copies as the total UP student population. I don’t remember the figures, but if the student population was around 5,000 we were printing 10,000 copies, and we had a pass-on readership of ten times that. People were hungry for news, and this small band of crazy young students was giving it to them. Because of that both the editors were arrested. One of them died as a result of that arrest. He had become very weak and had suffered greatly from asthma, which prison had aggravated. I never got arrested. Both times our offices were raided I was not in the office—just timing, I guess.

In medical school I became a member of an underground cell. We formed an organization that brought medical students to poor communities in order to expose them to the realities of those communities, to treat people and to provide services. Even dental, nursing, and physical and occupational therapy students were included. Cells were organized by class, and I’m again very proud. I think never in the history of this kind of organizing in the UP College of Medicine—or in any other medical school—did an underground cell of the National Democratic Front have twenty members. The next biggest had only seven. We did various things. Toward the end, my particular job was to look after high-value, New People’s Army fighters, Communist Party leaders and National Democratic Front leaders who needed medical care. At the UP Philippine General Hospital, I had a network of people to take the patients, give them false charts, send them to specialists who would not question their identities and get them out of the hospital without the authorities’ knowing. In medical school I was invited to become a member of the Communist Party, and I accepted.

So after graduation we—my future husband and I—went to the provinces. We were scheduled to become guerrilla doctors for the New People’s Army, but then we were told that our skills could be put to better use organizing other doctors. I think we were considered to be good at persuading others to join the movement. So we were called back to Manila, and I subsequently founded several organizations which still exist. They were fronts, but they also did the work they were supposed to do. At the same time they were influenced by the Party line, which was both good and bad.

When I was a member of the CPP, I thought I was rather obedient, but I think that in some ways that might not have been true. It’s just that I never considered feminist, personal issues as somehow connected to the struggle of the Party. This made a great deal of sense during the Marcos dictatorship. I had lost a lot of my dearest, closest friends to the military, to savagery and torture. There were massive human rights violations.

I heard stories of comrades who experienced sexism from the Party, like sexual harassment from some of the macho comrades. I wasn’t treated like that. I was living with the man who later became my husband, and I heard, “Why are you living together? That’s a violation of Party rules.” My future husband was a good Catholic, so he said, “Why don’t we just get married?” I didn’t really care, but since he and the Party and the Church wanted us to get married, why not? So in that sense I wasn’t as obedient as I thought. I was happy with the Party until I began to read up on women’s issues and feminism. When you come to work on women’s issues, you have a whole different take on things.

My break with the Party began with “the boycott era” at the time of the Snap Elections which pitted Corazon Aquino against Ferdinand Marcos. The Party came out with our typical Maoist line: it was only a struggle of two factions of the elite, Cory Aquino herself was a big landlord, this was a false belief in empty democracy fostered by U.S. imperialism, the U.S. liked the election and Cory Aquino, but the election wasn’t in the real interest of the masses. At that time I was sitting in the biggest legal formation of our forces. I represented the health sector in that multi-sectoral formation. This included Party members, National Democratic members and ordinary progressive doctors and workers. I told my superiors in the Party that if it came to a vote I wanted to vote yes. In the words of the time, I said, “The masses of the health sector want the election. People deem it worthy of participation. They want to participate. We cannot go against the sentiments of the people. I want to vote for the sentiments of the people I am supposed to represent.” The Party said, “If you vote yes you will be going against party discipline. You’re a Party member first and foremost.” I had no integrity. I voted no. But that was it.

The Party boycotted the election and as a result very much marginalized itself in the EDSA Revolution. As it turned out, the EDSA Revolution was indeed a hodgepodge of various interests. The U.S. wanted a peaceful change  and the U.S. government facilitated that. But even the Party members I knew were very happy when Marcos left. Indeed, Cory Aquino was from the elite and to a certain extent didn’t push for fundamental changes as hard as she could have, but she was a true democrat in the democratic liberal sense. Despite threats to her administration, she established voting and attempted to make human rights a little more respected. She gave up power when she could, and she insisted on changing the constitution [to one which limited the powers of the presidency and established a bicameral legislature]. I really think that as a person she had integrity in the sense that she implemented what she believed in, in fact more integrity than many Party leaders I came to dislike. For example, there were Party purges, which I didn’t participate in.

So Marcos fell, and we had Cory Aquino. I was still hanging on, cynical and doubtful. Then the leaders of the mass organization I was in—it’s called Bayan, and it still exists—started getting assassinated one by one. We didn’t know who was behind it. One theory was that it was a rightwing military group that Cory Aquino couldn’t control. I have no idea. I was in the Bayan leadership. I don’t know where it came from, but according to our New People’s Army counterintelligence group I was one of those scheduled for assassination. There was some verification because a newspaper later published a list of state enemies, called in the military an “order of battle” and I was number 30-something. To this day my friends laugh at me because the price on my head was 20,000 pesos [about $785 at the time]. I was so poor I couldn’t even buy myself. Some people were worth millions. Nonetheless, I was considered worthy of two bodyguards from the sparrow units of the New People’s Army. I lived for a year like that.

If you’re a celebrity or a politician or the child of a multimillionaire, maybe having bodyguards would make sense. But if you’re just an ordinary activist, daughter of two professors, it didn’t make any sense at all. I was working with a poor NGO that I had set up—that is, I was still getting a salary, but I couldn’t go to the office anymore because that’s where I was likely to get shot. I was also getting these really funny vibes. There’s a valorization of violence and martyrdom in that kind of revolutionary movement. I’d enter a room, and the young people would get excited—not because they knew me or liked me or because in their eyes I’d done something admirable, but because I had two bodyguards and was a target for assassination. There were also two people who’d become egotistical because they had a higher price on their heads and far more bodyguards. That was upsetting.

After a year of living this horrible, constrained life, I asked one of my bodyguards if he would really take a bullet for me. I had a four-year-old son then, and I knew he had a family also. He said, “Yes, I would because your work in the movement is far more important than mine.” I thought, “It doesn’t make any sense that someone else should die for my choices. There can’t possibly be any work in the movement more important than his life.” I decided that was it. I asked for a year’s leave to think things over. I said I needed a leave so that the military would stop breathing down my neck and so Party resources could be put to better use. This was in 1987, so about two years after the boycott. The Party said yes, reluctantly.  Of course there were people who said my inability to stay on and live with this hardship, to take the risk and be brave, was due to my faltering ideological…whatever. That’s very much in the subculture of Maoist politics.

Nowadays I often think of how the religious fundamentalists who are opposed to the Reproductive Health Bill think and sound as humorless and as irrational and as ideological as my former Maoist colleagues. They both have the absolute truth. In both it’s a control issue. Both have very top-down organizations.

So to wrap up the storyline, I left. I had no experience other than studying and doing revolutionary work. I left the NGO and went back to the UP Department of Psychology, where I’d done my undergraduate major. The department chair said, “Well, your grades were good. Why don’t you go into the straight PhD program?” I had no idea what that was, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to study for a semester to consider my options. We had no money, so I moved home with my parents—husband and child in tow.

Walking along the Han River

This map of Gangnam shows Apgujeong-dong in orange.

Yes, this is the affluent, entertainment-oriented, newly developed urban area south of the Han River (Gangnam, or Kangnam, means “south of the river”) parodied in Psy’s video. The Apgujeong District, or Apgujeong-dong, is the part of Gangnam considered to have the best public schools in South Korea. In this 2013 interview, my friend Thady shares his experience teaching middle school during the regular school year and the winter vacation program. He also talks about the master’s degree program in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Birmingham, which once employed me as a local tutor. Thanks to Thady for the great photos.

The grammar-translation method he refers to was developed in the Middle Ages to teach Latin.  I learned Latin that was in the 1950s, but when I started teaching in 1966 it had been replaced by the audio-lingual method, which concentrated on the spoken target language.

Thady’s story

As soon as you mention “Gangnam Style” in the classroom, at least one student will get up and do the horse-riding dance. The students love doing that.

I started teaching middle school in Korea about two and a half years ago. I first came to Korea in 2004. My initial plan was to travel to Korea first, then move to Japan, learn Japanese, travel to South America and return to England with Japanese language skills on my résumé. But when I went to Japan for my work visa, I hated it. I fell in love with Korea. From 2004 to 2009 I didn’t go back to England. Then about three years ago I had a motorcycle accident which almost killed me. I went back to England for nine months to recuperate. My family had thought it would take an accident like that to get me back, which was exactly what happened. I thought about Korea every day. So after about three months I started looking for a job where I could work during the day and have my evenings free. I wanted to be in Seoul, not out on the outskirts or in the middle of nowhere. Universities weren’t really an option. The best salaries available were in the Gangnam public schools. So that’s what got me where I am now.

The attraction? I was born in England, but my family all came over from Ireland because of poverty—for jobs—as did many people from the same area. They were neighbors back in Ireland, and they became neighbors in England. In this community there’s a strong feeling of togetherness. People are always joking, very warm. They’re also very kind. People who don’t have that kindness and warmth tend to get ostracized. When I went to university and found the same values weren’t part of my social group, I felt lost. In Korea I immediately I found the same values and the same joking. Korea felt like home almost immediately.

For example, when I first arrived, a friend of mine and I were living in Chulsan. He went out on a date with a local girl, and she brought her brother along to protect her honor. That’s like the Irish thing I was brought up with, having pride in the name and not letting the family down. Another example is Children’s Day. People adore and worship children here, but the elderly are also held very high in society here. In England, it’s unfortunate, but when people reach a certain age, they’ve had their use in society, they get put into a home and they get only occasional visits from their children. Here people live with their grandparents, and the families stay very close together, like the Irish family units I grew up in.

At the moment I’m feeling really thankful both for my school and for where I’m living. At first I lived right next to my school in Apgujeong-dong, which was convenient, but I was coming north of the river every day to see friends who live close to Itaewǒn. Every morning I walk to school along the Han River, which takes two hours. It’s such a brilliant way to start the day. Then I get to school, do my preparation for classes and I teach between two and four 45-minute classes per day. I have a big touch-screen TV in my classroom to use as a teaching aid. When you’re teaching twenty-eight students you need something to keep their attention. I find that the animations, videos and other materials I use are very useful for teaching classes of that size.

It’s really a privilege to teach these students. Middle-school students are aged between twelve and sixteen. My English department consists of four Korean teachers and me. I’m very happy with the faculty I’m working with. We all teach from the same textbook, so we’re all essentially on the same page. They teach the grammar, reading and listening and I teach the conversation. The book is either at the right level for the students, a little high for the students or completely below the students. With the lower level students I use some scaffolding tools to make the lessons easier, with the mid-level students I use lessons pretty much as they are in the book or the teacher’s guide, and with the advanced students I push them to produce their own language on a similar theme.

Sixty percent of my advanced students are fluent in English—many on a native-speaker level—which is unusual for a Korean public school. So I give them a topic, we have a brainstorming session of vocabulary and grammar structures that will be used and then I have them produce their own dialogue, while I mingle around to interact with them and see if they want to ask questions or need guidance on grammar structures or cultural things. At the end of class they act it out their dialogues. I let them write however they want. They love bringing in a comical theme and trying to make the other students laugh.  That’s quite rewarding. It doesn’t feel like they’re being taught. It feels like fun.

Mine are conversation classes so I concentrate on getting students writing the spoken word. Particularly in the lower level, they’re better at reading and writing than they are at listening and speaking, so by focusing on dialogue I’m getting them to transpose skills they already have to speaking. Conversation classes I believe should have lots of role play and lots of dialogue.

Class size is as small as twelve students per class, which give me a lot more one-on-one time with each student and which makes the class much more manageable. My advanced classes with twenty-eight students are almost first language classes. I do have a Korean co-teacher who never has to translate or intervene. The students understand all of my comprehension-checking questions and pick up on whatever I say to them.

It’s really rewarding to watch the students role play the scenes they have worked out. I’m doing a camp over the winter break. I showed the class a Youtube clip of somebody booking a hotel room, and I put them in pairs and asked them to write their own scripts of booking hotel rooms. What things would they have to ask, like how much for a single room for these dates. After they wrote and practiced their dialogue, I got some students to call a hotel in Australia on Skype and actually put into practice what they’d learned. It was really rewarding to give them real life examples of what they can use their language for.

I’m doing a master’s degree in TESL now at the University of Birmingham. I’m very happy with the course. They give students all the pointers and then get us to do our own research. I’ve got a tutor I can phone on Skype whenever I have questions. The first goal of the course is to learn about teaching English, but I think the second is to get us writing academic papers to a publishable standard. Every four months I have to turn in a 4,000 word paper. And I have to write a 15,000 word dissertation [master’s thesis] at the end of that. Then hopefully I’ll have an MA in TESL. After the first year I’ll get a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and after the second year a Postgraduate Diploma in Education. The PGCE is required for teaching in schools in England. Once I’ve got that I’ll be able to teach in international schools as well. There’s a Dulwich College, a British public school, in Seoul. Dulwich has schools in other major Asian cities. I looked at the Shanghai package, and the salaries were absolutely phenomenal. So maybe that’s the direction I’ll go in. I’m thinking of writing my dissertation on my classroom management system or on a reading program if one comes to fruition. I’m beginning to really enjoy academic writing, and I’ve noticed that not only am I getting a lot from it but I can also put something back into academia with the observations I’m making in my classroom.

At the school where I’m teaching I’m pushing a reading program. As part of my Birmingham degree, I’m finding out about reading. Krashen [Stephen Krashen of The Natural Approach] is a huge fan of having students develop good reading habits to improve vocabulary, grammar and spelling. I find that the material they have had taught directly at them and drilled into them at their hagwǒn [for‑profit cram school] becomes a lot easier if they’ve got a reading habit. When I first started this job, I noticed some of my first-year students were always carrying English books with them. It was no coincidence that by the time they reached third year those were the students whose English levels absolutely skyrocketed, even compared to the kids who had been to the States to study. The ones with reading habits always came out on top, and some of them had never left Korea in their lives. So it’s like Krashen’s “i +1 theory,” the more input you put into yourself the more you’re going to be able to produce.

My students are nurturing healthy reading habits, they’re even reading when they’re waiting for class to start, which I’m delighted about. They used to play games on their smart phones.

For this winter camp I’ve ordered leveled readers of all the classics, writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Hemmingway, books like Moby Dick, 1984 and Oliver Twist. These are very thin books, about 4,000 words in each book. I’m getting them to read two books a week, but they can pick up as many as they like. If I get one student reading habit then I’m happy. Everything else will fall into place. I keep trying to explain that when I was a kid and we got stressed and irritated or bored we picked up a book. That was all we had. We didn’t have Smartphones or Internet or computer games which kill your brain cells. A book will expand your mind. Some of the kids are really gung-ho and fascinated by it. With others I think it’s falling on deaf ears. They don’t want to be at camp at all, but their parents forced them. I’ve told them that reading will help them get really high scores on the tests, and that was a big motivation.

Abigail, my very diligent student, is checking out 17 books to read this weekend. She’s determined to win the prize for reading the most books.

Abigail’s book report

My classroom management system was videotaped by the Gangnam public schools for use in the training program. So I was thinking of using it for my dissertation. With a class of twenty-eight students, I put them into seven teams of four students each. I give them points for answering questions in order to get involvement and interaction in the lessons. They get positive reinforcement by asking questions. If they do something bad they lose a point for their team. At the end of class, the team with the highest score at the end of class get a prize—candy or something. The team with the lowest score have to clean the classroom. Sometimes I let the winning team choose who cleans the classroom, and that makes it really fun as well. With students who really don’t get involved, I don’t want to punish the whole team. I put the student’s name on the board, I speak to the form tutor [homeroom teacher], and have the student sent back to my classroom at the end of school to scrub desks.

During the regular school year I get to see each class once for 45 minutes a week, so it’s difficult to do projects where we have to come back and pick up where they left off the previous week.  But at this winter camp I have the same class of nine students every day. So I’m getting them reading a leveled reader of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I want them to write simpler scenes but in modern, everyday language—use their own ideas to write what might happen in inside particular scenes to change the outcome.

Yes, of course there are some negative things. Students have a very long work day. After school they go to a maths hagwǒn, a Korean hagwǒn hagwon and an English hagwǒn. One of my students says he gets home at 11:00 at night, his mom cooks him dinner, then he does his homework. He gets to bed at 1:00 a.m. and gets up at five or six to do some homework before school.

My lessons are all about getting students to use English in the classroom, concentrating on second language use and banning first language unless it can be beneficial. But my Korean co-teachers are still using the grammar- translation method.  This involves long vocabulary lists, memorizing grammar rules and translating texts. The way Korean society is, I don’t think this will change until there’s a change in the way we test students. All research and all of the books written by great Western and Korean TESL researchers and professors won’t do it. For example, the use of English definite and indefinite articles is taught via Korean, which does not have that feature. Why give them repetitive drills in translation techniques for something that does not exist in their language, you know? I tell my students, don’t worry about making errors like in the use of articles. You’re not going to be accurate all the time. If you want to correct errors like that, get excited about reading.

It’s disheartening to see my co-teachers using a method that was used in the nineteenth century, but I don’t have any control over that. What I can do is give them 45 minutes a week where they do learn something and it’s a kind of pleasurable experience. I absolutely adore my students. I’ve got students who’ve graduated and come back to visit me, and that’s a really big thing. The respect Korea students have for teachers and for education is a big thing. It makes me feel really appreciated and makes me enjoy my job a lot more.

My sister is deputy head, which is a vice-principal, in an English elementary school. She told me about the mother of a foreign student, a Romanian student whose mother brought a letter to the school on a Monday apologizing because her daughter had a hospital appointment on Wednesday and would be absent. “Please, can this be agreeable? If not we will make other arrangements.” My sister was absolutely gobsmacked at the respect mother and daughter were showing the teacher and education. She said if it had been one of the English kids the first she would have heard about the kid’s going to hospital would have been when she didn’t show up for class.

That’s what I see in Korea. Most of the kids have got fantastic attitudes. On good days I’m amazed that I’m getting paid to do what I’m doing.

For more on the use of reading—plus television and film—as a vehicle for language learning, please see http://caroldussere.com/2010/01/30/how-to-succeed-at-languages-without-really-trying. This is an interview with a former student of mine.

For more on Korea as “the Ireland of the Orient,” please see http://caroldussere.com/2010/01/24/an-irishman%E2%80%99s-culture-shock.

Fishing net on Xiamen beach (1984 technology)

In 1986 Hong Kong was reported to have more McDonald’s outlets per square mile than any other place in the world. In one of them Mary, a quiet woman in her thirties, talked about the two years she spent on the mainland working for two different companies. Thirty years after her arrival in China, we can still learn from her attempts to straddle the cultural divide, as well as the effect living in a different culture had on her. She has a great sense of humor.

Mary’s story

In 1983, after I finished my Chinese course in Hong Kong, I wanted to live with the language and improve my interpreting skills. I took a job where I would have a lot of contact with the Chinese. Maybe I went there with too many illusions, perhaps because I’d been living in Hong Kong all my life and I’d met a lot of the people who’d been there before the Cultural Revolution. I’d also seen the kind of respect and cooperation they showed the so-called Foreign Experts, who were all very positive. I think I was expecting the same kind of thing. Other people said, “Dear, you mustn’t go there. The country’s poor and broke and miserable, and nobody would want to live like that.”

Most of the time I liked being in Canton. The difficulties were the most interesting things, but on a day-to-day basis I felt at home. Because I speak Chinese I had an “in,” and very soon I was having conversations with everybody. I think as a result of this experience I’ve become a far more open, straight-forward person. I’d assumed there would be things I couldn’t say or do, but that was a mistake. At first I was afraid to give an honest opinion for fear or upsetting somebody. However, l found that once I got to know the individuals, they accepted what I said or did, providing it wasn’t ridiculous or ridiculing. If I didn’t like something, like waiting for an hour to get a menu in a restaurant, I’d say so.

I worked for a partnership of foreign and Chinese petroleum-related companies which provided training to oil company personnel. The training cost a lot. The students were Chinese university graduates who had majored in English. They learned about the oil industry and got some basic office skills so they could work as interpreters and take on assorted office jobs. For the first part of the course, they had one Expert from abroad and other speakers who came in briefly. My job was to interpret at meetings between the Expert and the Chinese and to do all the secretarial work involved. I would go to all the lectures and also provide English conversation practice for the students.

The Chinese provided a basic flat in the school for us to use. The professor refused to live there, but we used it during the day. The outside of the building was brick, but the inside was bare concrete. It had two large bedrooms, a large living room with cane furniture, a bamboo mat on the floor, and a squat toilet. There was running water, but not in the toilet. You had to flush it down with a bucket. Solid waste was supposed to be cleaned out and taken out to the farm, but the toilet was not cleaned in the four months we were there. Only unit leaders used the flat, and there was no way any of them would clean the toilet. They gave us an electric fan. The windows in the classroom were just lattice-works of bricks with no glass. The student dormitory rooms were bare concrete with double bunk-beds and mosquito nets and small tables. The only light was a naked light bulb which was too dim to read by.

Even before we arrived the Chinese had expected the professor would refuse to stay in the flat, so they arranged for two rooms in the White Swan, a five-star international hotel.  There’s a Western coffee shop, and in the Chinese restaurants you get white rice which is white in color and dishes which are fairly rich in meat and vegetables, whereas the school canteen served low-quality rice which was a muddy-grey color. The food was extremely sparse in meat and tasted rather disgusting. If you arrived at 12:00 you might get something substantial, but ten minutes later it would be gone and you’d be left with the very rotten cabbage. I think things have improved since then. In the White Swan, of course, we had air-conditioning and heat. The office equipment, like a photocopier and an electric typewriter and all, was kept in my room.

On a typical day, we’d ride out to the training course, which was a forty-minute trip one way, and spend the morning. Sometimes I’d help get the equipment carried up and down the stairs and set up, and then I’d listen to the professor lecture. Later the students split into groups to discuss what they’d just learnt, and we talked about it. Then we’d go back to the hotel for lunch and come back to give the same lecture to another group. We’d return to the hotel for the night, and I’d type and photocopy materials and order dinner for the speakers. In between we’d have to go to the airport to collect the speakers and make sure they got what they wanted.

For me the difficult part was the interpreting and the liaising because the professor had never been near China before. He was a Scotsman who’d come to China expecting the same kind of efficiency he’d seen in Singapore. I found it very difficult to be in the middle of that situation.  For example, at that time the White Swan was the only hotel for foreigners in Guangzhou. We were living on the eighth floor. The oil companies were just beginning to come in, and  Occidental Oil decided they wanted the whole eighth floor. The night before, the hotel management came and told us we’d have to move in the morning, but for the same rate they offered us a room at the top of the hotel. I thought this was great, but it reduced the man I was working with to a wreck—extreme anger. He said he didn’t want to be treated like that, being told at the last minute that he had to move. I said, “But this is the Chinese way.” If they had a banquet they would always come at 6:00 and say, “Please come to the banquet at 7:00.” For me the anger was one of the hardest things I had to deal with. The lack of knowledge and too high expectations produced anger on both sides.

Oh yes, the Chinese got annoyed at us, too. For example, when we first got there we had a van which belonged to the work unit. Vans were precious, and not every work unit had one.  The first morning the leader said, “We’ll pick you up and take you out there.” We’d told the students to be ready at 9:00. Some time after 8:00 a man picked us up and drove us to his office. At 8:45 we asked what was going on.

“Oh, we have to pick up so-and-so, and we have to drive by there and drop this person off.”

We were thinking about the fact that by not showing up on time we were not keeping our side of the bargain with the students. As far as the leaders were concerned, the students could wait.  There was a lot of that kind of friction all the time.

The driver hadn’t wanted to be a driver. I was always surprised at the way he talked back to his leader and the way he treated us. The students had a long walk from the school to the bus stop in the village. We’d say to the driver, “We’d like the students to have a ride to their bus stop.” He wouldn’t reply. He’d just close his mouth, shut the door, and drive off and leave the students behind. We didn’t realize his leader had told him not to let anybody else ride in the van. Then he’d go back and shout at his leader. I was really surprised at that, because in Hong Kong nobody ever voices any complaints. It’s a job and you do it. In China people believed their job descriptions: “I am the driver.  I drive. I don’t carry luggage.” Or, “I’m a typist. I type.”

We also had problems with ignorance on the Hong Kong side, which never thought of problems like getting equipment into China. We arrived with a photocopier, a tape recorder, a typewriter, and various other pieces of electrical equipment. Hong Kong hadn’t thought to mention to the Chinese that we had all this baggage. At Canton, customs wouldn’t let us in. Fortunately one of the students knew one of the customs officers, so the problem was solved in an hour. After that, every time we had such a problem, that student talked to his friend in customs. The Hong Kong people had no idea how inefficient things were in China, and they didn’t seem to have the knack of communicating with the Chinese. We’d go to the Chinese and say, “We need some [imported] paper for the photocopier.”

“Oh yes, we’ll get you some.”

They never did, so I’d call Hong Kong with a list of what we needed.

“OK, we’ll bring it up on our next trip in two weeks’ time.”

In the meantime we had to do without. It took me a couple of weeks before I understood that you don’t go to the Chinese and tell them what you want. I found out by chance. We had a TV and a video machine for showing cassettes which we kept in the flat at school. The leaders took to staying in the flat since we weren’t using it. One day one of them asked for the key.

“Well, listen,” I said, “I’ll give you the key on one condition—that you leave the TV just as we left it so we won’t have to go through a half-hour hassle.”

He looked at me and said, “You mean it takes half an hour to fix the TV?”

“Yes, it does.”

The leaders looked very guilty. I knew they’d got the message, so I handed over the key. It was just a trade-off, but I said it very politely. They looked at each other and said, “Hey, you know, she’s really being wise today.” They never touched the TV again.

The first part of the course was very intensive—all about petroleum, where to look for it, how to get it, how to produce it. The speakers included engineers, office managers from the oil companies, a contract lawyer. Then the oil part finished, the professor left, and I stayed. Another girl came, and we shared the office work instruction. We talked about offices and filing systems, we taught some typing and shorthand, and we got an accountant to come in and teach some basic accounting.

I talked about things like how to take minutes and how to behave in an office. “Don’t go around spitting out the window. Don’t turn up at the office in your slippers [flip-flops] or your pajamas, don’t just pick up the telephone and say “wei” [hello]. Don’t just sit there chatting. Try to be constructive, even if it’s difficult.” We had some knife and fork discussions because interpreters often have to eat with the person they’re interpreting for. “Don’t eat your fried egg off your knife.” It was just little bits that came in as the situation arose. We had thirty students but only fifteen typewriters, so we did the same session morning and afternoon. I was teaching six hours a day, five days a week.

The instruction was not as effective as it should have been. Since I was working on the petroleum part for three months, I didn’t have time to prepare my own course. In the evening I’d spend four hours preparing for the next day. The Chinese didn’t understand the concept of preparation, but they understood hard work. They would come over to the hotel at 10:00 at night, and I’d be typing, and they would be pleased. “Hey, this is good.  This is what we want.”  But they didn’t know what I was doing or what things we needed. I said, “Look, if the students are going to learn to type, I want them to learn to type properly. These tables are the wrong height.”

They promised some decent tables, but I never saw any.  The students learned to type sitting very precariously on piles of whatever we could find. There problems with the language lab. But the thing was, with the Chinese everything had to be slowly brought to their attention. There was no point in trying to tell them all at once because they wouldn’t take it in until they accepted you.  By the time that happened, the course was finished.

In the first few months in Guanzhou, I enjoyed having people came around and ask for help. I was stuck in the hotel, I had no contacts. I didn’t have to go and buy groceries because I just ate in the restaurants in the hotel. There were no everyday life situations. So it was a relief once the students found out that they wouldn’t get stopped too much from coming into the hotel [because they were ordinary Chinese. Their visit to a foreigner was probably also written down.]  They’d get me to write the words of the songs they were listening to, country-western songs and Bob Dylan. They liked slow songs because they could understand what was being said. For them part of the fun was just seeing what was inside the hotel. [In those days walking into the White Swan meant going from poverty and dirt and noise to the largest chandelier you’ve ever seen.]

The students were far more articulate than I am, but I never knew how much I could say or how honest they were. Sometimes we’d get into wondering about Hong Kong and whether it would become like China. They’d say, “Well, if the Hong Kong people don’t toe the line, we’ll just march over them. This is our country.”  I repeated this to somebody else, who said, “Yes, that’s what it says in the papers for the work units, so we have to quote it.”

Sometimes I was caught between the Westerners and the Chinese, particularly at my second job. If I wanted something done for my boss or another “real” foreigner, people would accept it as part of the office routine. But I found it very hard to change things on the Western side to accommodate the Chinese. Since I couldn’t deliver to the Chinese, I couldn’t get anything for myself. I’d say, “I need a train ticket.”

“Sorry, they’re too difficult to get.  We’re not going to try for you.”

When I complained, I heard, “If you want them to treat you like a Chinese, don’t expect them to give you Western service.”

I just wanted to be treated like a person, without having to make treats or references to “my boss, the president.” I think the Chinese were aware that I wanted more human contact. Spending the time of day with them was familiarity, right? A dangerous thing.

In 1983 we took a field trip with the students to an oil base where there were warehouses and supply ships. It took about twelve hours to drive there from Canton. The students went in a big bus, and the Expert and I went in a little one. The professor liked to smoke cigars—cheroots—so nobody liked to travel with him. In the van we argued about whether he would smoke or not and whether the windows would be opened or closed. When we stopped at outhouses, he’d walk around behind them. He couldn’t stand to go inside.

All the girls came in their best dresses and their high-heeled shoes to go walking around on supply ships and warehouses, which are the dirtiest kind of places you can imagine, I suppose because they were going to have their pictures taken all over the place. The blokes came in their best clothes too, but it wasn’t quite as obvious. There was a compound built by one of the oil companies, with swimming pool and a supermarket and villas for the foreign employees. It was very nice. We walked in unknowingly, and these hysterical French ladies got up and yelled, “Out, out!  Take your dirty shoes out of our swimming pool area.”

The students said, “This is China. You can’t tell us to get out. We are going to stand here and have our pictures taken.” So they arranged themselves for the photo while the French women shouted. That was one situation where I did feel very much in the middle. I was holding the camera, and I wanted to leave.

This interview took place in Manila shortly before Andria’s departure for Spain. It’s a very straight-forward expression of what was on her mind, and she hopes people don’t find it too negative.  Many thanks to Andria for the lovely pictures.

Andria’s story

I’m Irish, but I haven’t lived in Ireland since I was twenty-one. Brian, my husband, is British. We met in Dubai fourteen years ago, then left for England, where we got married and lived for two years. We hated the English weather. It rains 90% of the year. We hated the tax. In the Middle East you’ve got no tax, and in England you’re taxed to the hilt. So we said, “England’s not for us.” We didn’t want to live in Ireland for the same reasons.

When Brian’s company was starting an online site in Gibraltar, he was asked to go there once a month and then to be based there. Gibraltar’s just off Spain, and it’s all rock and concrete. I thought, “No I couldn’t live in Gibraltar, but I could live just across the border in Spain.” At that time my mum was retired in southern Spain. A new motorway had just been finished linking her area to Gibraltar, so it was now only twenty-five minutes away. For the first few years we rented a house. After I got pregnant with Lucas we bought our house. By the time we left, we’d been there eight and a half years.

Spain’s beautiful, but I didn’t like it for the first two years. I didn’t know anybody there except my mum. On the coast where we were living there were lots of wealthy retirement people playing golf, and no jobs for young families. We moved up the mountain to a place called Gaucin, a small village but with a lot of expats. After I got pregnant we moved back to civilization. Most of the people I know there are foreigners. Before the recession of the last couple of years, there was a very big work boom in construction. People emigrated to Spain from the dreary European countries to start fresh. Now when I go back to Spain I’ll be going home to a big group of friends of all different nationalities.

We came here expecting living in Manila to be cheap. We thought wherever we lived would be similar to the lifestyle we left. We moved to Makati [the financial center of the Philippines, a big city in Metro Manila], we discovered that living there  in a place with nice furniture and elevators that looked and smelled clean was going to cost us way more than where we came from. Our rent in the five-star condos at  Shangri-la Grand was 140,000 pesos a month [about $3,182 at the time] for a tiny, two-bedroom apartment without even a balcony. I don’t like living in cities. This much concrete is just depressing. I feel half dead. I need to be surrounded by nature. It was also very difficult traveling with a young child, battling with taxi drivers, getting into unsafe taxis, struggling with the communication problem and not being understood.

I don’t have a big social life, so I spend a lot of time at home. I need to feel I can walk into my home and feel happy. Home has always been a priority for us. After a year and nine months of my being miserable in Makati, Brian and I agreed that I should go back to Spain. Someone suggested, “The Philippines is very beautiful, why don’t you go to one of the islands?”

“I’m not living out in the middle of nowhere on an island that’s not civilized.”

“Boracay is very civilized.”

I’d been there for a holiday, but I didn’t know that it had an international school and it definitely would be an outdoor lifestyle. Go to the beach, do lots of swimming and other fun-filled activities. I went down and I checked it out. We moved to Boracay, with my husband commuting at the weekend. It was probably my best time here—so laid back. Boracay to me was paradise. But after seven or eight months Brian was exhausted with flying down every Saturday morning and going back on Monday mornings, especially if flights were delayed and he had to go to another airport. So he said, “Please come back to Manila.”

“I can’t go back to Makati.” I couldn’t do it to Lucas, taking him out of a place where he goes to the beach for an hour after school and putting him back in a place where he’s stuck indoors without friends to pop around and see. And the same for me.

Then we learned that the skyway was open between Makati and Muntinlupa. Brian said, “Look, if you’ll come back to Manila we can check out living it a house with a garden in Alabang.”

“Okay, yeah, sure.”

I fell in love with Alabang.  Why? Trees, man, it’s got beautiful boulevards of trees. The Ayala-Alabang community is a bird sanctuary. I love to walk the dog and to take Lucas out on his bike. It would seem like a very charmed life, all right. Rent in Alabang is a slightly more than the condo in Makati, but for 150,000 pesos a month [$3,700] we’re getting a lot large, four-bedroom house with a pool.

Actually, when I was living in Boracay and Brian was commuting down, at one stage we were lonely for each other, and he said, “Look, I’m not happy. We have a nice lifestyle, but it doesn’t suit either of us. What’s the point of earning a nice salary if you’re miserable?” He went to his company and he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve done two years here. We’re living separately.”

“What will it take for you to stay?” That was when he was offered the house, the school, the car, the driver.

Then down in Alabang I listened to all of these expat families and found out it’s the standard package for them. They said, “What? You’ve been living in the country and paying for most of it yourself?”

I really enjoyed Alabang. I could have stayed for another year or so. But Brian’s company knew we wanted to go back to Spain in about twelve months’ time, and they asked him how he’d feel about going back earlier and opening an office. So it was perfect.

I do feel very grateful. I don’t take our nice lifestyle for granted. When Brian and I have tried something new it was never ever been about the money. For us it will always be about how our quality of life is together and how happy we are. We’ve been happy broke together. He’s worked his way up, and now good things are happening. I’m aware that this might not last forever. Everything passes. So that’s kind of where we are now.

As I said, the level of friendliness here has made me feel very much at home and very comfortable in my own skin. The guys are very friendly. Filipino men love women. It doesn’t matter where they come from. But the guys are definitely friendlier than the women. I found Filipinas difficult to become friends with. For example, when we were living in the Shang in Makati, I’d be at the pool with Lucas, and I wouldn’t see the mothers. The ya-yas [nannies] and the helpers would be there with the kids. I learned that Wednesday morning was for mothers and the kids. So I tried to make friends with these women and their babies, and it was no go—no invitations to come for coffee, no nothing, just very basic politeness. I thought, “What the hell is this? Do I smell? Is there something wrong with me?”

Generally I’ve found women’s groups here to be very cliquey. I don’t understand the mentality. I don’t understand this obsession to lighten their skin. Do they not want to be friends because they’re slightly jealous of white women? Although I certainly can’t say this was true with every Filipino woman I’ve come across. Maybe it’s just Western women they’re just more reserved or guarded around. They’re certainly not like that around Western men.

I come from a place where I have lots and lots of girlfriends, and the lack of connection with women has led me to be very homesick. I complained to someone who said, “If you go up and talk to a Filipino couple she’ll be wondering if you’re going to steal her husband.”

“What? That’s absurd. I wouldn’t be worried about my husband’s talking to a Filipina, even though most of them are so gorgeous.”

[I suggested that this reserve and jealousy on the part of women in both Korea and the Philippines might be due to women’s lack of power.]

Right. I can understand, absolutely. I’ve come from an environment where a woman can say exactly the same things as a guy would say and no one will blink an eye. They can talk about the same subjects. A woman’s point of view will be taken at the table just as quickly as a man’s point of view. [This was not the case in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, particularly if you were seen as “the wife” or “the girlfriend”].

I’ve found the Philippines to be an extremely chauvinistic environment, which didn’t really bother me because I’m from rural Ireland and I went out with mommy’s Irish boys. But my parents were divorced when I was young, so I grew up in a house with four very strong, bolshy, outspoken women. You had to fight for everything, and that was okay in the company my family kept. When I came here I found out that being loud-mouthy was not accepted. If you’re too opinionated, even with the guys, people wonder if you’re being sarcastic. Sarcasm is not understood here.

During the first year I had to learn to adjust to my environment, which went against my nature. It took a lot of self-doubt. I was getting reactions I never had before. For example, we’d be out having coffee and something would pop into my head and I’d say it. Like I might say, “I would take the piss out of somebody” [tease or make fun of someone]. I could see people were thinking, “What is she talking about? What did she mean by that?” Whereas in Ireland, England or Spain everyone would be roaring laughing. So I realized I’d have to be careful. It was really hard, going out for coffee and then afterwards feeling sick with myself because I’d unintentionally offended somebody.

In a way I wouldn’t change that now because I’d never had to moderate myself before and there were times when I wished I had. It’s a maturity thing. I don’t want to make someone feel uncomfortable, whereas I used to not give a shit if they were or not. So I’ve changed a lot, and I have more changing to do. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to adjust.

This is my first experience with Asian culture, and I’ve found it’s just so different. What do I mean by that? Wherever I’ve been, when people don’t understand what you say they’ll tell you. “Can you say that again slower?” Here I can be talking to someone, like in a shop or a restaurant, and I’ll get lots of head-nodding but a completely wrong order. Last week I was in Max’s. I said, “Do you have decaf coffee?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Decaf.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

And I got brought a Lipton’s tea.

That kind of thing happens to me all the time. I don’t know. Is it my accent or what? I’ve spoken to other people who’ve said the same thing—asking for something and getting lots of head nodding and yes, yes, yes while the person is just standing there and you know there’s no comprehension. I’ll go into a shop and I ask for something, and it’s like “No, ma’am.” Then I’ll walk two aisles down and there it is. [Filipinos express the same kinds of frustrations.]

I think also my expectations were too high. I’d heard most educated people speak pretty good English. But it’s a totally different English. It reminds me of Gibraltar, where people speak a few words of Spanish and a few words of English and switch back and forth. I’m more frustrated by the language barrier than I expected to be. Obviously I’m not as patient as I thought I was. I ask myself why I can’t be more patient about these little things. But I’m used to working and living at a higher speed. That’s probably, now that I’ve said it, been one of the biggest frustrations for me, just how slow life is here on a day-to-day basis.

People don’t arrive on time—if at all. I now have a part-time helper who comes in twice a week. I get a text a couple of hours before she’s due saying she’s not well or offering some other excuse. Does she not need the money? It’s mind-boggling. Unlike me, Brian is very level-headed, and yet several times he’s had this experience talking to employees: “I wouldn’t be shouting. I’d just say, ‘I’m not happy with what you’ve done. This is not what I asked for. Would you mind going back again and doing it this way?’” Then the man would cry. Girls also. If they came back to work, it would be a week later, or they would just not come back again ever.

We learned that you must be very careful not to insult anybody and or make them lose face. Pride is such a huge thing here, which is why people won’t say, “I don’t understand.” I have an Israeli friend here who took a French course where there were only two foreigners in the class. She said not one Filipina ever asked a question. At the end of three or four weeks, there was a test and most of the class failed it, so the teacher went back over everything. My friend was so frustrated.

But there have been lots of wonderful things here. I got to live on a tropical island. I’d always wanted to learn to dive. I took a course at the end of the first year when we went to Bohol, and then I took the advanced course in Boracay, so I have the international diving certificate. In Boracay both Brian and I learned to kite surf. We’d been trying to do it in Spain for years, just on weekends, depending on the weather. We’d only get so far and then the season would come to an end. In Boracay my son was in school during the day, so I was free. I mean, who gets to do that?

It’s extraordinary to have helpers and drivers. I’ve loved that, but I’ve also come out the other side. I wouldn’t mind having a driver because in Spain I do a lot of driving on a daily basis, but I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I need a full-time, live-in helper. I like my privacy. I don’t like to have somebody else’s drama in my house. But I’ve delighted that I had the experience. Living here has been very good for my marriage because I haven’t needed to work, so our weekends haven’t been stressful, running around trying to get a lot of household stuff done. Our time together has been quality time. Living here has been great for Lucas as well. He was born in Spain. He was speaking Spanish when he started to talk. When we moved here we asked our live-in helper to speak Tagalog with him, and within six months he was speaking tons of it. For the first two years he wanted to go back to Spain. When we went for the summer he asked when we were going back to Manila. He missed his school and his room. He’s been very happy here. So it’s been good.

In the last few months I’ve tried to simplify my life. I feel less stress, but at the same time I’m ready to go home to Spain. I’m about to have my second child. I want to be around my family more. My sisters are starting families, and I want Lucas to be part of his extended family. I am ready for sure.

A reader writes:

As a woman who has tried to make it personally and professionally in Asia (Japan) for most of my adult life, I find that  Andria’s experiences and sentiments resonate with me. The feeling of never truly belonging and the loneliness that comes with that seems to be an inescapable part of expat life in some countries. It’s hard to realize that that Western “openness” and friendliness will not magically open doors. The alternative of “going local” is simply not viable. A sense of community is quite temporal and transient. You may have it for a while, but everything is always in a state of constant flux in the expat world.