verywhere I go in Manila, I'm reminded of World War Two and its aftereffects. I guess that's what happens when you live in a city whose very appearance, skyline, traffic flow ... the very quality of life inside and outside its buildings ... are defined by the thorough destruction that city experienced during a war.
... not to mention the country's constitutional regime, its political and social structure, its cultural obsessions, its naughtiness ... and the idiomatic American English people speak here ...
The building we're staying in, Sy-quia Apartments, is defined by the fact that it's one of the few art deco buildings to have survived the bombing in WWII. Outside, it's another corrugated-metal-awned dirtfest a la Manila. Inside, the floors are mahogany, the grilles are art deco, the ceilings are high.
The apartment I'm staying in, Chiqui Mabanta's, was featured in a number of design spreads (the left pic is mine, can you tell?) Downstairs in this building is the renowned, underground art salon and residency space The Living Room that is hosting the Galleon Trade artists for the duration of our stay. The building is full of artists and design types. It's typical of what I'm talking about: outside is ugly, shabby Manila. Inside is beautiful, historical, culturally updated Manila on mahogany floors.
WWII and history are hidden to American eyes in America because they are literally invisible. History is the hidden engine that has gotten us to where we are and most of us are just passengers anyway. WWII and history are hidden in Manila to American eyes because they are so obvious, and so huge, that we don't know how to see them.
Everywhere I go, everywhere: in the cabs, in the museums, along the park, to the bathroom, everywhere I go WWII is waiting. You can't see it in the photo above, but some of the magazines arrayed on the coffee table--as a design element--are of course vintage. What vintage? LIFE, ca. 1940 ...
... with its spread on the Atlantic fleets and the names of the ships! (Most of the ships are named after places by the way.)
Carlos Celdran explained in one of his tours that Manila was rightfully called "The Pearl of the Orient" before the war: modern, busy, the Asian city of firsts, beautiful architecture, varieties of wealth and enterprise ... the gateway to Asia in every sense.
Then the Americans bombed the shit out of it and this is what it looks like now:
Well, grain of salt. Colonialism effects a lot of comfort, because colonizers want all the comforts of home. And a great deal of the "beautiful" architecture of prewar Manila was European. The loss of soul Celdran tells us accompanied the loss of Intramuros, the old Spanish city center, was the loss of an old colonial center which had supplanted another colonial center, and was supplanted by yet another colonial center.
What the governor general giveth, the governor general bombeth away. It's the giving and the taking, the arrogance of building a pearl city in the Orient in your own image, and then destroying it again to suit your own agenda, wherein lies privilege. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos lived here the whole time, wandering in and out of construction sites and rubble, incidental to the whole process. Does it sound ridiculous for them to object to the destruction of structures the building of which they never sanctioned in the first place? When do they get to say, "stop! This step was one step too far"?
I'm thinking a lot about privilege these days, types and expressions of privilege, and it seems to me that the biggest and most operative expression of privilege is the ability not to see it. It? The privilege, of course, and the effects, or lack of effects, that the operation of power has on that which belongs to the privileged. This is privilege on a massive, national scale, where a nation becomes involved in a world war, which, by virtue of that nation's power never touches its own land (with the exception of Hawai'i, of course.)
Everywhere else I've traveled in my life, WWII has left marks: physical, architectural marks, structural marks, and psychic marks. My mom wears a deep scar behind her shoulder blade where doctors cut into her lung when she was six to drain the fluid pneumonia had collected. Chung King was blockaded by the Japanese, so medicines couldn't get in and my mom had gotten sicker than necessary. They operated on her without anesthesia.
Everyone of my age group in Germany when I was there had a story from their parents' childhood, or grandparents' young adulthood about the war. It's only Americans whose stories from that era are during the war and not about it. For us, the war was Daddy going away for awhile--or forever--and not our lives interrupted, our houses bombed, our food supplies stopped, and rapine and disease raging through our neighborhoods. We didn't come out of the war with images of our babies tossed onto bayonets.
The result? Among other, more complex things: Manila is a centuries-old city where most of the buildings age out at less than sixty. There are a lot of such cities around the world, where the building materials start out shabby and temporary. This, far from a fresh start, is a constant, sore reminder of what was lost and a decade of national trauma.
And unlike in ancient times, when a place is razed now, the civilization does not simply cease to exist, its people and uses dispersed to the subtle graveyard of cultural syncretism. The global civilization it is part of goes on around it and it has to run to catch up. All late twentieth century urban ugliness is either reparing what WWII destroyed, or catching up to the progress that WWII brought into your neighborhood. It's a doubling effect: the trauma of war and the trauma of catching up; the load that everyone--but we Americans--has to carry.
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