The Ilocos: A Philippine Discovery

IF JOSE'S WORK IS boiled down to plot summary and reform plans, it may sound tendentious or grim, neither of which it is. There is often. playfulness to his prose, which may have something to do with his decision to write in English —since it's not his first language, he's freer to bend the rules or use improbable words—and probably has much more to do with his personality.

José is a short, plump, nearly bald man of sixty-six, who would not look out of place wearing the baggy shorts and basketball-style undershirt of the typical Chinese shopkeeper in Southeast Asia. When I see him, I am reminded of a little boy—in the way he carries his body, in his quick and unconcealed switches from desolation to glee. On our five-day trip last summer, when he was driving me and a young Soviet academic to see the sights of his youth, we passed a railroad siding where the teenage José had been held by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. "I was so scared," he said, his face clouding like a ten-year-old's. "I was so little and skinny then—ho ho ho!" he roared, slapping his round belly. We stopped every few miles so that José could see whether the cane-sugar sweets, or the little roasted birds, or the other regional delicacies were as tasty as he recalled. When he was not planning the next meal, he sat watching women with a blissful look. "Ah, I tell you, Jim, the eye never dulls!" he said in a restaurant after four stunning young women walked by our table "Only the flesh becomes weak—ho ho ho!" Eventually I asked him how his wife, Tessie, whom he married forty-two years ago, after both had been students at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, feels about the adoring descriptions of young women that fill his work. "She knows I am devoted t her," he said, serious for a moment "And she forgives me my pecadeeeeyos!" A rich roar of laughter. This, I thought, is what it must have been like to be on the road with Rabelais.

It was only after several such days on the road that I grasped a point that must be immediately obvious to José's readers in the Philippines. Many of the traits that make him distinctive, in his writing and in his public life, depend less on his identity as a Filipino than on his being Ilocano.

The island of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, is shaped more or less like the head of a tomahawk. Along the northwest edge of the island is terrain reminiscent of Big Sur, in California, but with the trees stripped off. To the east are steep mountains, to the west the sea. In between is a narrow belt of habitable land known in English as "the Ilocos." During the Spanish centuries, when most of the Philippines was being converted into vast haciendas worked by serfs, the land in the Ilocos seemed too forbidding to be exploited on such a large scale. The Augustinian friars built imposing missions and introduced the Ilocanos to Catholicism, but today the Ilocos region remains the only part of the Philippines where small farmers working their own land are the norm. As in many other countries, there are strong regional and tribal stereotypes in the Philippines. Imelda Marcos is from a part of the Visayan Islands where people are thought to be extravagant and showy; her life, like Lyndon Johnson's, is seen as one long reversion to regional type. Ferdinand Marcos, like Frankie José and many other prominent Filipinos, was Ilocano. The Ilocano stereotype is of iron will, clannish loyalty, frugality, and hard work. (Frugality? In the Ilocano view, Ferdinand Marcos was led astray by his wife.)

This stereotype is probably as true and as false as any other ethnic generalization, but it has an important consequence. Within Philippine culture an Ilocano heritage connotes a sense of success. The country as a whole is dominated by images of failure and victimization, to which the Ilocanos and the Chinese-Filipinos are the main exceptions. Throughout Asia this sense of being competent or incompetent as a group seems to have a powerful effect on behavior. In Malaysia, for instance, the ethnic Malays have evolved a theory explaining why they cannot hold their own against Chinese-Malaysians in economic or academic competition. Many Malaysian and Filipino Chinese, like Koreans and Japanese in general, are taught to assume they will succeed if they try. Too much can be made of these hazy cultural factors, but it seems to me that the combination of elements in José's identity has equipped him to be fully sensitive to his nation's miseries without succumbing, like many of his characters, to corruption or despair.

There is not a bit of smugness or superiority in José's view of his country. On the way south from the Ilocos, toward Manila, we drove along the broad beach of Lingayen Gulf, where Douglas MacArthur came ashore. After the Japanese surrender, the mighty U.S. fleet dumped its surplus bombs into the sea; for the Americans, José said, it was not worth the bother to take the weapons home. But as soon as the Navy left, Filipino fishermen began diving for the bombs, hoping to salvage the explosives from them for use in "dynamite fishing"—a common local practice of setting off underwater explosions and then collecting dead fish. Countless fishermen and their families were killed when they failed to dismantle the bombs safely—and when they succeeded, they went on to pulverize the underwater coral reefs. José told the story, sighed, and drew his only conclusion: "They are so poor." Earlier in the trip we had been in a restaurant that José thought could be run a little better than its owners realized. "Why not put a few flowers down by the entrance, and really sweep the floor?" he asked, as he was paying the bill. "Ah, what could be done with a place like this!"

When we got back to Manila, the news was predictably bad. The economy had further worsened; the state airline was running out of gasoline; the continual rumors of an anti-Aquino coup were growing more intense. "You know, I have concluded there is no hope for this country," he told me, not for the first time, outside his house at the end of the trip.

"After the war, we were the envy of Asia. Korea—it would never catch up! Tokyo was where you went to find a cheap lay. Now. . . look at us!"

He sat brooding for a moment, saw his wife and beamed, and went inside to resume his work.