Mindanao

I have a distant memory of me eating breakfast with my grandmother in the dining room. I don’t like the food and I ask her why I need to eat. She tells me it is because I would need the energy to run – if war ever came back.

. . .

Part I: Ozamiz City

I stand in the middle of the hotel lobby located in the heart of downtown. This is the fanciest building here. It has white couches and glass tables. When I was little I would walk past this same building and wonder who was staying in town for the week. 15 years later and I’m the one staying in town for the week. I feel a familiar sense of isolation, a feeling of belonging but unbelonging. A detached attachment of the girl I once was, in a place I was once in.

It’s a little past 11PM, and through the posh glass walls of the first floor I find myself staring outside to an empty, desolate town. Martial Law has just been activated throughout the whole island of Mindanao, and no one is allowed to be seen outside past ten or else they’ll get questioned for involvement with terrorism. This is because two hours over, the city of Marawi has been taken siege by ISIS-funded jihadist militant groups.

I sit on a chair and do absolutely nothing but stare out into the ghost town. There’s an eerie feeling about seeing no visible activity but knowing that everyone’s inside and still awake. I imagine curious eyes peering out through the cracks of windows.

The hotel staff is gone but the lobby is still well-lit. Because of the glass I’m the only person visible for miles it seems. They can’t question me because I’m technically inside a building, can they?

In the morning I have breakfast with my family in the same lobby, only this time people and pedicabs are outside bustling about. We’re getting ready to surprise my grandmother who doesn’t know we’re coming. She lives just down the street in a two story Spanish-influenced house with a grand staircase. This is where I mostly lived when I was little, and I haven’t seen her in 5 years. Before we leave the hotel my father goes up to a man sitting on one of the lobby’s couches. He looks like a local but his clothing indicates that he has more money than most. Weird. People that stay at this hotel are usually people from other countries. My father shakes his hand like an old friend then bids him goodbye. The man does not acknowledge me or my brother or my mother.

After a couple days catching up with my grandmother my family and I book a bus to Butuan City to visit my other grandmother’s grave. As we board the Jeepney, which is an elongated open-windowed Jeep designed for mass transportation, towards the bus station, my mother reminds me to be quiet – the driver will charge more if he hears even a slight foreign accent. I tell her I know the drill, but it’s my brother that really needs reminding. He’s energetic and takes up space that can only be taken up by someone who was born in America. It’s a sense of accidental condescending dominance and it’s a feeling only Westerners can embody in this place. You feel it no matter how kind or respectful or innocent they are. He’s eight years old.

The bus ride from my hometown to Butuan is supposed to be only around 4 hours, but because of terrorist checkpoints caused by the conflict in Marawi then it will need to be nine. When we discover this information my mother looks at me with a face that says sorry. She knows I hate visiting this place. I pout and ignore her. I know I shouldn’t hate visiting the place I come from, but it’s hot and humid and the talks I hear about citizens being displaced because of Marawi gives me anxiety.

During daylight our bus would stop at the checkpoints and everyone aboard would have to get their ID’s checked by the police outside. The checkpoints were makeshift camps located on the side of the road every x miles or so, and you could tell it was a checkpoint because of the massive “Local Terrorists Wanted” posters that showed the faces of 40 people.  The police wore dark green uniforms and carried rifles strapped across their chests with pride. During one of the checkpoints an officer pauses to examine my ID.

“California,” he mumbles to himself. He says nothing more and lets me get back on the bus.

The sketch terminal we stop at to switch buses is an hour away from Marawi City. Inside the terminal is a small market of local eateries, and my mother decides that we should all sit down and eat together. I don’t like the place my family has chosen so I wander a few feet away to order food from a different vendor. I hate Filipino food but I see something I like: squash with green beans. I ask the vendor for a cup of the dish but without the meat in spotty Tagalog. Too late. I messed up. She hears my accent. She knows I’m not from here. After I pay I sit back down with my family. As I eat I feel the eyes of her and several others on me and my family. It’s uncommon for visitors to be in this part of the island, even more so now that there’s turmoil in the neighboring city.

During nightfall the checkpoints get more half-assed. Instead of everyone boarding off the bus, one of the officers would go inside the bus himself and check all our ID’s that way. This was good news for me because I could just put my ID on my lap and nap for the rest of the way. As I drift in and out of sleep I catch glimpses of AK’s and green uniforms standing in front of me – but by that point of the day I was used to it.

Part II: Butuan City

Butuan City is much more calmer than Ozamis, and for that I’m thankful. After visiting my grandmother’s grave my mother decides we should take a family outing to one of the malls. Wandering away from my family again, I stroll around the mall and realize that most of the stores don’t have customers. However, I spot a kiosk with a wide array of fidget spinners beneath a glass casing. The salesperson directs my attention to a special row of the Generation Z trinkets. “Ito mag ilaw,” she says. They light up. I buy two incase just incase.

Big department stores are mostly empty here, but as I window shop and stroll along a shoe aisle I see a woman around the same age as me. She looks like me except she’s shorter and thinner, and wears a matching crop top and skirt set with a banana leaf design pattern. With gold bracelets jingling on her arms she saunters through the aisle confidently. Her mannerisms are different from any other person here – not like there’s anything wrong with that – but when I see the person holding her hand I immediately understand. Next to her is an old white guy – Australian, mid-60’s, overweight, with a bad taste in fashion. She flaunts him like a show dog shih tzu. As she passes by me she looks at me like she has something I don’t have. I look back at her with a face that says she can do better.

Eurocentrism has been so deeply embedded here that some women think their worth is determined by the aged whiteness that holds their hands. I don’t blame them. It’s an economy here – I know this. After all, for some who have no choice, it’s either that or ship yourself off to the Arabian Peninsula to work as a domestic worker and even there you get only half the human rights that President Duterte allows drug dealers in the mainland. But I hate it. I know too many degrading stories. Maybe it’s love, I don’t know. But I know enough about how most old white men court and treat Filipino women to know that what some of them really want is domestic obedience in the form of fantasized oriental exoticism, and if they don’t get that then they move on to Bali or Bangkok.

The majority of the Philippine economy relies on the money women send back to their families. It’s the women here who get hired abroad, leaving generations of children being raised by men. The majority of immigrants are women, the majority of domestic helpers are women, the majority of people that marry off to Western countries are women. It is unrewarded, unrecognized matriarchy. So at the end I don’t blame her, and wish her good luck in my head.

Part III: Manila

A couple days before departing to South Korea then to LAX, my great-aunt pays me a visit in my hotel room in metro Manila. She brings me gifts from Jakarta: puffy cotton pants that remind me of Jasmine from Aladdin, a cross body satchel with sewed patches, and a pink tie dye blanket she says will serve me well for yoga at the beach.

“Namaskar!” she greets me. She is an Ananda Marga monk and has dedicated her life to social service and meditation, traveling all around India and Southeast Asia teaching in and building schools. The last time I saw her was 5 years ago when we were on a blanket underneath the stars in a remote island off Palawan singing songs and playing the guitar. She’s the person I want to be when I’m older, and everytime I look at her I feel a sense of peace.

She has terrific English and we end up talking about Philippine politics. I know next to nothing other than the things my family tells me, but my Aunt Didi is very passionate about it.

“I voted for Duterte, you know,” she tells me.

“I wouldn’t, if I voted here. He kills people in broad daylight without due process. It’s a violation of human rights,” I reply.

She looks at me in thought. She always looks in thought. “Hmm. That’s what people who don’t live here always say. But that’s because they don’t live here. He’s the first uncorrupt president and the first to be elected from Mindanao, you know. He gives the south a voice – a change from all the racism we got from the North all these years. He just does things in a southern way.”

During the drive home from LAX to Bakersfield my father talks to my mother in a hushed low voice while my brother and I sleep.

“Ozamis City… 15 dead… new mayor…” this is all I make out.

Later I found out that the President ordered the killing of the mayor of my hometown, along with 14 others. My father’s friend from the lobby was one of them.

Marawi was in siege until October of that year, and thousands of people are still currently displaced.