I am walking along Ocean Beach at land’s edge with the Pacific surf nipping at my heels. As I stroll southward along the beach, I watch the sun take its diurnal dive over the horizon, leaving in its wake a pink, bluish cast to the fading light that clings to the Western sky. It is thoroughly enchanting, this exquisite, elegiac scene of the Sun’s death being played out before me. But there is something else, equally alluring as the sun, drawing my attention.
My eyes are averted to my left side and I see cars speeding along the Great Highway, trying to race the ocean tides and the omnipresent seagulls overseeing the beach. A sluggish melancholy overtakes me, as the sense of wistful contentment that I reaped from enjoying the Sun’s demise abruptly disappears with the noise of the automobiles screeching by. Darkness has just come, enhancing the aura of the lights on the Great Highway. Standing on the grimy beach with sand crunching in my shoes, I try to look up at the newly born night sky, searching for some visible body that will remind me how insignificant I am compared to the infinite totality of the universe.
It is a typically chilly evening, but the chronic Northern California fog has chosen to stay away this night, clearing the heavens for almost perfect viewing. Still, I lose my bearings looking for Venus, the brightest star and a planet whose remote beauty gleams like a benediction in my soul. But I am looking in the wrong place. The brightest object is not in the night sky, but is adjacent to the Great Highway in the form of a huge neon light outlining the American flag, sparkling brilliantly against the background of the black Pacific Ocean. Placed there in memory of the September 11 tragedy, the flag-light is as allegorical as it is partisan, representative as it is dazzling, revealing as it is stylized.
The electronic flag serves as a glorified dust jacket, a dust jacket that begins to convey what the phenomenon that is America is about. In looking at the electronic monstrosity before me, I see in my mind’s eye a representation of a nation beset by free and creative winds generated by its tolerant and generous inhabitants. I see a nation that is enamored by the bliss of individualism and by the wonders of technological progress. And I see a nation invested by the vagaries of God, by the grandeur of disproportionate power, by the bewitchery of glistening icons, and by the color of violence and money. Having lived in America since I was one year of age, I have come to the conclusion that it is a republic running vigorously in stride, but with long shadows crossing overhead.
I have shed tears of joy living in America, having read, witnessed, and experienced how breathtaking and extraordinary this great country can be. At the same time, I have shed tears of anger and sorrow at how inequitable it has been for so many. America troubles me the way I become unsettled when I read Dostoyevsky or a Shakespearean tragedy. I shudder in suspense at what awaits me on the next page. But not unlike a famished lover who thinks he or she knows a good thing when they see one, I keep reading on to the very end.
Despite being bowled over by the effulgence of the light-flag, as well as by the symbolism it imparted, I resume my walk southward along the beach. As I try to gather my thoughts, I shift my gaze irresistibly at what I can still observe of the dark Pacific in all its churning, restless immensity. My gaze stretches thousands of leagues to the Philippines, the land of my birth. I can’t bear to contemplate how far away it really is. I fool myself into thinking that the Philippine archipelago is just over the horizon, that all I have to do to get there is take a small boat and cruise for no more than a few minutes to the point where the ocean meets the sky. There, I will see the contours of palm trees, of soaring and rutted mountains, together with the perfect cone that is Mayon volcano.
I will feast my eyes on the celebrated steps of Banaue’s rice terraces and on the metropolitan buildings that line Manila’s Roxas Boulevard facing Manila Bay. I will eagerly discern the vivid colors belonging to brown-olive bodies, green dense-as-can-be jungles, and gaudy smoke-emitting jeepneys, not to mention the bright red blood shed by a rooster in a cockfight. There are also the rusted colors of corrugated roofs covering the dilapidated dwellings that poor Filipinos call home, and the multihued chromaticity of the sails attached to the bancas that are coming out to meet me. I will smell the luscious aroma of lechon kawali, kare kare, and of pancit canton wafting through the atmosphere. I will taste the sweet, delectable taste of halo halo, leche flan, and of the santol fruit. And I will feel the heat, that oppressive, tropical heat and humidity that mercilessly engulfs the anatomy of this cold-acclimated Californian.
I am mesmerized now, floating in an alchemy of harmony and promise. The Philippines awaits me, its possibilities endless under a pearly, cerulean expanse or beneath a razor-sharp crescent moon. It offers me the balance and proportion and adventure that America cannot. But the Philippines is an apparition, an abstraction, a terra incognita, something that I cannot touch or comprehend as a miniscule figure on the distant, opposite side. Stretching my imagination across the ocean depths is not enough to make me forget that there is no substitute for being there.
Yet, I am left to ponder a surreal image in my mind, an enduring image that is wondrous, spiritual, and at once, anguished. It is an image of the Philippines, the land where I, as a prematurely sentimental teenager hurriedly searching for his roots, once wanted to be laid to rest as soon as I could stop having to mark the passage of time and cease renewing my life’s meaning.
Here is the image I am projecting: I am still walking on a beach, but this one is covered with immaculate white sand, gently buffeted with balmy breezes. The water lapping on the beach is crystal-clear, tepid, teeming with tiny forms of life swimming around my feet. Exotic birds, radiant creatures of flight that only God’s boundless originality could have conceived, dart among the foliage and soar above the beach, sounding their hymns from their pulpits on the ground and in the air. Chocolate-skinned children run up and down the beach, speaking a Babel of tongues, splashing water at each other and rollicking in the tender waves. It is high noon, and the Sun’s rays are burning into my skin, making the sand pleasantly warm and my body shiny with perspiration.
The centerpiece of the beach is a narrow, hollowed out vertical piece of rock, measuring about six feet high and situated a few steps from the shore. Contained within it is a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary. It is bizarrely surrounded by strobe lights which flash at night and cause the statue to appear to be moving slightly within its half-opened rocky niche. The Virgin is a revered figure in the Philippines. She embodies the ideals of moral purity and spiritual devotion that Filipino Christians strive to attain. She also acts as a savior for millions of Filipinos. The Virgin is their redeemer, their protector, and their guide for they are lost and alienated in their own home, in their own country.
I wait for night to fall before I move closer to the statue. Some of the native inhabitants try to dissuade me from approaching the Virgin. Leave her be in peace and do not transgress what should not be transgressed, they appeal. But I choose to ignore them, dismissing their admonitions as medieval superstition. It is not my intention to sacrilegiously violate the Virgin’s threshold. I simply want to see her up close because from a distance she is beautiful, vibrant, and blessed. I have this irresistible desire to touch her, to feel her piety and spiritual energy running through me.
Standing directly in front of the Virgin, I examine her, awed by her chastity and benevolence. The strobe lights have been switched on in the meantime, making the statue appear extraordinarily natural. So natural in fact, that I notice the Virgin is scrutinizing the constellations on high. Perhaps she is empathizing with God while doing so.
Suddenly, she looks at me with crimson-tinted orbs. The Virgin has been weeping in silence, fine threads of tears streaming down her vestal countenance. In this moment of passionate intensity, I somehow come to understand that she is crying for the Filipino people, for their sufferings, for their mutilated hopes, for the annihilation of their innocence, and for the forgiveness of sins that they had been forced to commit.
Bewildered, my rational mind struggles to come to grips with this instance of divine revelation. Everything in the rational ethos, indeed the American ethos, that I have learned, been subjected to, and engaged in since I can remember tells me that I only fantasized the sight of the statue crying. We all see what we want to see, so say the full-blown acolytes of callous American rationality. But the burgeoning traces of my Filipino genesis grants me no reprieve from the phantoms of my cultural visions. The Virgin was crying and will always be crying as far as the Philippines is concerned.
American rationality is inappropriate in this context. As such, it is a perishable product, its heaped-up ideas and concepts of logic, profit, and science having been shattered on the tempered wall of spiritual faith. Render onto God what is God’s. Render onto America what is America’s. I used to coerce myself into believing that the Philippines was my real homeland, the true gravitational field of my ethnic and cultural self, of my solicitous heart, and of my esteemed and infamous pedigree. I wore this mask despite the fact that the United States was where I was raised and educated to be a compliant little citizen, brandishing his blue passport at anyone questioning my right to genuflect under the triumphal arch of all that America stands for.
But for a time, I could not stomach America’s arrogance and condescension, its backdoor politics, selective morals, schizophrenic notions of freedom and order, obsession with capital, and its almighty power to speak for others. My disillusionment was such that I would regulate my use of English so that I would not sound too fluent when conversing with Tagalog-speakers. My purpose was to avoid giving the impression that I was dreadfully “spoken in dollars.” In other words, as a Filipino American, I was scared to death of Filipinos perceiving me as being too American and not very Filipino—a turning of the Filipino colonial mentality on its head. Quite a contradiction: that I would pretend I was not a child of America, when in truth I was, first and foremost, a creation of it.
I have changed for the better I think, since those giddy days of pretense and guises. I am no longer ashamed to call English my mother tongue. No longer am I mortified to be unable to hold even the simplest conversation in Tagalog. Rather than depending on sleights of hand, embellishments, and alibis to reinforce a half-identity, I have found a comfort zone of sorts, between my modern American nurturing and my primal Filipino origins.
Paradoxically speaking, I belong to neither culture and to both. I belong to neither Ocean Beach in San Francisco or to that mystical, whitewashed strand of equatorial coastline, located somewhere and anywhere in the Philippines, that haunts my reveries. All the same however, both points serve as signposts that show me the right path whenever I stray into the impenetrable thicket of cultural anonymity and confusion. \
To complete the image: the Virgin is not crying or looking at me any longer. She has reverted back to her previous stance, a taut, yet flowing posture etched in deep repose. But for me, the image as a whole has taken on a new form, a form that I have trouble fathoming as the two beaches blur into an amorphous heap of hazy visualizations and sensations. I can barely distinguish them in that state.
Perplexed and exhausted, I sit down on the sand sliding beneath me and try to digest what has just happened. Before I can solve the puzzle, two miniature angels alight onto my shoulders. The Filipino angel on my left shoulder is excitedly nodding its head up and down in praise, while the American angel on my right shoulder is cynically shaking its head sideways in repudiation.
Desperate for answers, I plead to the Virgin for intercession. Just as she is about to speak, the Virgin squelches the words before they can escape from her mouth. She smiles at me instead. With that smile, in that fleeting nanosecond of illuminating quietude, I must say that everything became absolutely clear to me.
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