Burning Heart

It was two months till my departure for the Philippines and I was biding my time in Brooklyn while writing my first novel and learning Tagalog and living off the savings of three years teaching college writing. New York had just turned southern-summer humid, an effect that made the center of the urban universe feel only that much more real--intensified the feel of taxicab smog, the stink of subway urine--and I loved it.

I spent the morning in my apartment redesigning my website, a from-scratch job, every line of code mine, a self-designed content management system that would proclaim minimalism inside and out--blistering fast load speeds, readability-optimized page layout--while being as functional as the best of them.

In the middle of it I got an email from a reader of my novel wondering whether more installments were coming--I hadn't posted a new chapter in at least two weeks; New York is an impatient and demanding mistress, but she is worth it--and they would come, alright, but I'd already decided to devote the rest of that day to schooling myself for my upcoming Peace Corps service.

I took the L train into Manhattan. I walked the ten blocks to NYU's Bobst Library, looking over the call numbers of the books I'd found in the online catalog: Burning Heart: A Portrait of the Philippines, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, and a collection of plays by Nick Joaquin who, I'd gathered, is a pretty seminal figure in the Philippine literary canon.

When I got to the library I discovered that the stacks were restricted to faculty and students and approved guests. I would have to apply for a visiting faculty pass to get into the building. I'd never been in a library like that, but given New York's preponderant hoi polloi and its paucity of restrooms, the policy made sense. I didn't have my faculty ID with me but I convinced the security guard to let me in for the day. Call numbers in hand, I walked with New Yorker determination toward the elevator, feeling the familiar rush of excitement libraries often bring me.

Bobst Library's main floor is covered in a tetris-like tessellation that looks three-dimensional when you're walking across it and absolutely vertiginous when you're sitting on the 6th floor looking down through the courtyard-style windows. After a bit of good old-fashioned bookstack hunting, I found my quarry. But I also found that I was not in the mood for literature: I decided to pass over Nick Joaquin in favor of the academic scholarship.

I took Burning Heart off the shelf along with a book titled Philippines into the 21st Century. It seemed appropriate. All You Need Is Love was missing, but there was a whole section on volunteerism with a nice subsection on the Peace Corps, including some of the seminal documents like speeches by Sargent Shriver, the program's first director. I finally settled on Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, primarily for the hinted at problematics in the title. Then I made my way to a study carrel where I could gaze down dizzily upon the entry floor.

I opened Burning Heart. To my surprise, it was a photography collection. I'd intended to do my learning the snobby scholarly way, no picture-book fun for me. But now the book was open and there was nothing do to but ogle. All the photos were done in glossy black & white with just enough sepia to make you realize it would be disgustingly easy to hopelessly romanticize that place, the Philippines. It also had a rustle of poems on facing pages, like this one:

The drag queen

Miss Dias-Pora

bums a cigarette

and strikes a pose

all sass and attitude

a cross dangles prominently

from a chain

around his neck

along with anting-anting

amulets

talismans

to ward off

evil spirits

eye of God

hand of Fatima

shark tooth

(just in case)
 

There was a picture of a teenage boy wearing a Marlboro shirt and holding an Uzi, two scrawny old men with old Chinese wiseman wrinkled faces officiating a cockfight, a crowd with fists raised singing the national anthem, hands exchanging money on a beach while three fish lay below on the sand, a little boy smoking a cigarette begging at a taxi window, a stone monument to Ferdinand Marcos overgrown with palms and birdshit, a topless prostitute at the brothel door, a driving range that opened into the ocean just like that Seinfeld episode with Kramer and the whale, senators praying in their chambers, crosses, Jesus statues, Virgin Mary votives, flaming political effigies, a weary classroom poster that read

Am I ready for school?

Did I take a bath?

Did I wash my face?

Did I brush my teeth?

Did I comb my hair?

Did I change my clothes?

Did I wash my hands?

Did I eat my breakfast?

Did I clean my fingernails?

Did I wash my feet?
 

The photographer had titled this one "School Commandments." My Peace Corps assignment was education, so for obvious reasons this stuck with me. Was this the kind of schoolmarm mindset that would greet me in Manila? Was the poster really as primitively moral-indoctrinatory as it felt? Or had I forgotten that posters not so dissimilar hung in my own kindergarten classroom? Why, when I looked at this photo, did I think of the National Geographic and of high school AP History vocab like the 'noble savage' and 'selective borrowing' and of those commercials about feeding starving children with just a dollar a day? Why had I wasted the morning doing nonessential website design? More to the point, was I looking at the school commandments differently because it was in a beautiful sepia photobook, and because in two months I would be there, tasked with making them like us?

I put the book I aside. I weighed my options. Philippines into the 21st Century. Making Them Like Us.

I found myself opening Burning Heart again, flipping the glossy pages. In that moment, suddenly, something seemed so significant. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew it had to do with cultural relativism, about how we form stereotypes about people and places, cognitive shorthand that is both necessary and dangerous.

The photo book hadn't helped me understand Filipinos any better. At least not in any definite way. Sure, if I'd wanted to I could've teased narratives out of the images, posited explications of the nation's inner contradictions the photographer may or may not have been trying to elicit, to foreground, to put in relief. But I didn't want to. There was something else going on and it had less to do with what I had seen in those photographs and more to do with what those people in those photographs saw in me.