Video Night in Kathmandu (26 page)

Most of all, the Philippines took me back to the junk-neon flash of teen America, the rootless Western youth culture of drive-ins and jukeboxes, junior proms, cheap cutoffs, and custom dragsters. Many of the young dudes here, in their long hair and straw hats and bushy mustaches, had the cocky strut of aspiring rock stars, and many of the girls, saucing up their natural freshness, the apprehensive flair of would-be models. The jeepneys they rode, plastered with girlie pictures, Rolling Stones tongues, garish stickers and religious symbols, looked like nothing so much as graffitied pinball machines on wheels. And everyone here had a nickname (Wee-Wee, Baby, Boy and even Apple Pie), which made them seem even younger than they really were, little brown siblings to the big Americans across the sea. As it was, the average age in the entire country was only seventeen (in Japan, by contrast, it was over thirty). Small wonder, perhaps, that I felt myself living in a chrome-and-denim Top 40 world.

America’s honorary fifty-second state had received much more, of course, from its former rulers than star-spangled love songs and hand-me-down jeans. The commercial area of Manila, Makati, looked not at all like Bakersfield or Tucson, but more like some textbook upper-middle-class California suburban tract. Jaguars lurked in the driveways of white split-level homes, maids sprinklered the lawns along leafy residential streets. The shopping strips were neatly laid out with a mall-to-mall carpeting of coffee shops and department stores. And though the area’s jungle of high-rise office blocks seemed hardly to merit its title of “the Wall Street of Asia,” it did resemble the kind of financial district you might find in the Sunbelt—the downtown area of Salt Lake City, say, or San Diego.

Baguio too, the hill station designed as a summer retreat for the American rulers—a kind of New World Simla—revealed the American Empire in a more pastoral mood. I could not easily discern the town’s resemblance to Washington, D.C.—on
which, many Filipinos proudly informed me, it had been modeled—save for the fact that both places had roads and trees, as well as a quorum of American servicemen, scientists and missionaries (“Most people in the U.S., I think,” said a local cabbie, “are Christians and Mormons”). But Baguio was still a glistening vision of silver and green, graced with its own distinctive charm—white villas set among the thickly forested slopes of pine, quiet parks verdant in the mist. In the mild drizzle of a dark afternoon, the place had a cozy market-town feel of hot cakes and light rain; on a calm Sunday morning, the peal of church bells through the mist took me back to an English village. In Baguio, I settled down with an Elizabeth Bowen novel in the teapot snugness of a small café, and went on a gray afternoon to a crowded kiddies’ matinee.

For all its silvered, foggy charm, though, Baguio did not seem to have the imperiousness of a British hill station, or its weighted dignity. And in much the same way, I did not sense in the Philippines anything comparable to the kind of stately legacy that the British, for example, had bequeathed to India. India seemed to have gained, as a colony, a sense of ritual solemnity, a feeling for the language of Shakespeare, a polished civil service, a belief in democracy and a sonorous faith in upstanding legal or educational institutions; it had, in some respects, been steadied by the chin-up British presence. By contrast, the most conspicuous institutions that America had bequeathed to the Philippines seemed to be the disco, the variety show and the beauty pageant. Perhaps the ideas and ideals of America had proved too weighty to be shipped across the seas, or perhaps they were just too fragile. Whatever, the nobility of the world’s youngest power and the great principles on which it had been founded were scarcely in evidence here, except in a democratic system that seemed to parody the chicanery of the Nixon years. In the Philippines I found no sign of Lincoln or Thoreau or Sojourner Truth; just Dick Clark, Ronald McDonald and Madonna.

ON A HUMAN
level, of course, the relation between America and her former colony was altogether more complex, and best seen, I thought, just by watching the slow mating dances that filled the smoky country-and-western joints of Ermita every night.

As I entered Club 21 one rainy evening, a small and perky Filipina in a red-and-white-checked shirt and tight jeans—a kind of dusky Joey Heatherton—was leading a country band through songs of lost love and heartbreak. The minute the group struck up the opening chords of another sad song, one of the American GI types seated at the bar, a craggy man in his sixties, six feet tall perhaps, slowly stood up and extended his hand to a pretty teenage girl in a white frock and white pumps. “Today,” drawled the singer, “is the darkest day of my life,” and the pedal steel wailed and the man put one hand around the girl’s tiny waist and the other on her shoulder and led her, with great courtliness, through a slow, slow dance.

As the next ballad began, the vocalist went into a perfect Dolly Parton rasp, and a man in a bushy ginger mustache with sad eyes behind his thick glasses stood up, hitched up his trousers and walked over to a table in the corner where eight young Filipinas were staring idly into the distance. Crouching down, he whispered something to a beautiful young lady in a yellow-and-red ruffled skirt and she followed him back to the bar. “What’s your name?” he said softly as they sat down, extending his hand. “I’m an American.”

A couple of barstools away, another old-timer was gently stroking the long hair of his doll-like companion. “Hey,” he chuckled, looking over her head to a colleague. “I’m going to marry her in a minute.” And the band went through another plaintive ballad, then vanished through a back door that said “George’s Massage Special.”

A man got up from the bar and walked out, and as the door slammed behind him, his sweet-faced companion stuck out her tongue at his memory, then straightened her skirt and went off to sit in another man’s lap. The door swung open again, and a lady came in with a basket full of roses. A red-faced Australian hailed her from where he sat and bought ten flowers. Then, very slowly, he walked around the place and, very tenderly, presented a rose to every girl in the room. The band came back again, and sailed into more sad songs from the West. “I warned you not to love me,” wailed the singer, “I’m not going to be here very long.”

If I had closed my eyes, I could have believed myself in Tucumcari, New Mexico, or listening to some jukebox in
Cheyenne. But my eyes were wide open and in front of me two couples were gliding around the dance floor, tiny arms wrapped around large backs as two pretty young girls, eyes closed, buried their silky heads in their partners’ burly chests.

A couple of minutes later, the band went into a faster number. “Yee-hah,” cried a man with the frame of a construction worker, standing up at the bar, shaking his fanny and pumping his elbows. He swirled a high school girl in high heels out onto the dance floor, and she flashed a smile back at him, shimmying like a dream. “Shake it,” cried out the singer. “Yee-hah!” The dance floor started to get crowded. The Australian pulled his companion out onto the floor. Two girls in jeans began dancing together. A young girl in a flounced skirt swayed happily opposite an old girl with too much makeup. “Welcome to my world,” sang the girls as they danced, smiling at their partners and clapping. “Welcome to my world.” And as I went out, the singer was just breaking into a perfect replica of Loretta Lynn, while singing, with flawless anguish, “You know, it’s only make-believe.”

THE PROFESSIONALISM OF
music in Manila had impressed me almost as soon as I arrived. But as I stayed longer in town, I was hit more forcibly by a different aspect of the local singing. It struck me first one night in Baguio, in one of the city’s many “Minus One” sing-along pubs, where customers take turns coming onstage and delivering the latest hits, accompanied by a tape to provide backup instrumentation. “I would like to dedicate this song to a special someone,” a girl was whispering huskily into the mike as I walked in. Then she adjusted the stand, put on her tape and proceeded to deliver a note-perfect version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” absolutely identical to the original, down to the last pause and tic. Song complete, she whispered “Thank you” to the mike, sauntered offstage and went home with her special someone.

As the evening went on, the scene was repeated again and again and again and again. Almost everyone in the pub came up to deliver flawless imitations of some American hit. And almost everyone had every professional move down perfectly. They knew not only how to trill like Joan Baez and rasp like the Boss, but also how to play on the crowd with their eyes, how to twist the microphone wire in their hands, how to simulate every shade
of heartbreak. They were wonderfully professional amateurs. But they were also professional impersonators.

When I walked into another pub down the street I got to witness an even greater display of virtuoso mimicry: the Chinese singer onstage was able to modulate his voice so as to muster a gruff warmth for a Kenny Rogers number, a high earnestness for Graham Nash, a kind of operatic bombast for Neil Diamond and a bland sincerity for Lionel Richie. His Paul Simon was perfect in its boyish sweetness. Yet what his own voice sounded like, and what his own personality might have been, were impossible to tell. And when it came to improvising, adding some of the frills or flourishes that his culture relished, making a song his own, he—like every other singer I had heard—simply did not bother.

“Sure,” an American correspondent based in Manila told me when I mentioned this. “Music is definitely the single best thing here. But there’s no way you’re going to hear any local tunes, or variations on the recorded versions of the American hits. There’s one singer in Davao they call the Stevie Wonder of the Philippines, because he sounds exactly—
exactly
—like Stevie Wonder. And there’s another woman locally who’s the Barbra Streisand of the Philippines. That’s how they make it big here. You know one reason why the Filipinos love ‘We Are the World’ so much? Because it gives one member of the group the chance to do Michael Jackson, and another Cyndi Lauper and a third Bruce Springsteen. Some guy even gets to do Ray Charles.”

Finally, in Baguio one night, I came upon a happy exception to the rule: a pudgy singer who slyly camped up Julio Iglesias’s song “To All the Girls I Know” by delivering it in a perfect simulation of Iglesias’s silky accent, while substituting “boys” for “girls.” But then, a few days later, back in Manila, I heard another singer at the Hobbit House do exactly the same trick, with exactly the same words (and, a few months later, I was told, local minstrels were delivering the same song, in honor of the fallen Imelda, to the words: “To all the shoes I had before / I wore them once, and then no more”). Likewise, at a free public concert one afternoon I was surprised to hear a professionally trained singer transform the revved-up anarchy and energy of the Beatles’ “Help” into a slow, soulful ballad of lovelorn agony. But then I heard the song delivered in exactly the same way, with exactly the same heart-rent inflections, in a small club in Baguio, and then again at
another bar: all the singers, I realized, were not in fact creating a new version, but simply copying some cover version quite different from the Beatles’ original. All the feelings were still borrowed.

This development of musical mannequins struck me as strange, especially in a country that understandably regarded its musical gifts as a major source of national pride. I could certainly see how the Filipinos’ brilliance at reproducing their masters’ voices, down to the very last burr, had made them the musical stars of Asia—the next-best thing, in fact, to having a real American. But as a form of self-expression, this eerie kind of ventriloquism made me sad.

It was the same kind of sadness I felt when I read that the national hero José Rizal had described his home as “a country without a soul” or when I opened
What’s On in Manila
to find the first ad in the personals section begin: “I would like to meet an American. Looks are not important but he must be kind and cheerful.” It was the same kind of sadness I felt when I went to Pistang Pilipino, the capital’s main tourist center, and found that the highlight of its show of local culture was a splashy Hollywood-style spectacular in which chorus lines of handsome young men whipped through some brassy choreography and six-year-old girls in bikinis performed acrobatics while a fat man with greasy hair in an open shirt crooned “House of the Rising Sun.” Mostly, it was the sadness I felt, when an intelligent Filipino friend in New York told me, with a happy smile, “Every Filipino dreams that he will grow up to be an American.”

While I was in Manila, there was plenty of token opposition to the U.S. presence. Nationalists railed against the country’s still justified image as the world’s great center of mail-order brides and chambermaids. The Marcos-run paper, in a show of ill-considered braggadocio, printed Manuel Quezon’s famous cry: “I prefer to see a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.” And when foreign newsmen flooded into town for the election a few months later, an opposition paper greeted them as “two-bit, white-skinned, hirsute, AIDS-predisposed visitors.” But the “two-bit,” I thought, said it all. In the Philippines, anti-American guerrillas drew up their strategies in Michael Jackson notebooks. And a
respected newspaper greeted the suggested removal of the American bases with the headline “Bye, Bye, American Pie.”

As the headline suggested, it was not just melodies that struck a responsive chord in Filipino hearts; it was, even more, the sentiments that pop songs expressed, the sensibility they revealed. One day, I managed at last to track down some examples of local music. To my surprise, nearly all the albums had titles like
Romantic Filipino, Romance
and
Hopeless Romantic.
And nearly all their liner notes were florid rhapsodies about hearts burning and eyes on fire, lovesick maidens and heartbroken men. All of Manila was saturated with this sense of overwrought passion and sweetness—emotions borrowed from love songs, convictions taken from a jukebox. The local coaches were called Love Buses, and there were Sweet Love Taxis too. Sweet Love Boat-Lines ran a Love-Boat to Zamboanga. The Sirens of Lost Eden were playing at Love City, and at Shakey’s, Euphoria shared the stage with a group called Sweet Love.