Leaving home

I am between 50 and death and should now be thinking of retirement, rocking in my chair, or writing my memoirs. But instead, I am leaving home.

I am leaving home to fulfill a dream to teach in a world-class research university and to write my novels. I will lecture at the University of Nottingham in nearby Malaysia, which is just 3.5 hours away. This is the length of time it takes to travel from Novaliches to Quiapo on a first Friday of the month.

And I chose to work in Asia, not in the United Kingdom or the United States, where I took my postgraduate studies in Publishing Studies and World Literature.

I studied in the United Kingdom on a British Council fellowship, finally living in the land of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. Specifically, I studied at the University of Stirling, lived in a dormitory beside a 400-year-old castle inhabited by ghosts, and spoke Scottish-accented English for a year and a half.

And then later, studied at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on a Fulbright Fellowship, finally living in the land of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, so very happy in the library full of books that remained open until 12 o’clock in the evening. Why, I even did the unimaginable – I taught college-age Americans how to write their poems and stories – in English!

But one day I came back to Manila and thought that maybe, I should know more about Kota Kinabalu than Kansas. And so I applied for an Asian Scholarship Foundation grant administered by Dr. Lourdes Salvador and lived in Malaysia for a year. Malaysia is the country closest to the Philippines, but it’s a country we know nothing about. We might as well be talking about Saturn, or Pluto.

My friends at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia) teased me for my American English. The Chinese taxi cab driver thought I was Chinese and talked to me in Cantonese. The Japanese tourists at the Petronas Twin Towers thought I came from northern Japan and started a conversation with me in Nihonggo. And the Spaniards at the Instituto Cervantes struck up a conversation with me in Spanish. Well, they were all partly correct, because being Filipino, I have mixed bloodlines – Malay and Spanish and Chinese and Japanese.

But I only felt at home – truly, madly and deeply at home – when I lived in Southeast Asia. I did not feel any sense of alienation. None of the sense of alienation I felt when I saw the dark and sooty buildings of London while on the train from Gatwick to Victoria Station that dawn of September 1989 when I arrived, to take up my graduate studies in the UK. None of the sense of alienation.

I felt when I was walking on the cobble-stoned streets of Amsterdam, on a chilly day with no sun in the sky, walking on the way to the University of Amsterdam to deliver a paper on “gayspeak” in the Philippines. None of the sense of alienation I felt when I was rushing to take the subway train in New York, among a horde of surly people who avoided each other’s eyes, for to do so means you want to strike up a conversation, and that is a no-no in these cold and lonely cities.

Instead, when I lived in Southeast Asia, when I traveled to Thailand and Vietnam, lived in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, I felt like I was coming home. I was enchanted by the sound of the gamelan playing at the Actors’ Studio on the basement of Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur. I crossed a stone bridge in Hanoi leading to a museum full of ancient turtles carved in stone, the shells of the turtles symbolizing the quest – and the burden – of knowledge. My jaw dropped at the sight of the ceramic fragments at Wat Arun beside the Chao Praya River, glittering in the setting sun, the various colors of the ceramic fragments melting in the dying afternoon.

A black-and-white butterfly followed me as I walked round and round the stone steps of Borobudur, toward the stupa trying to reach the clear, Indonesian sky. The ancient temple was destroyed by dynamite planted there more than 20 years ago. I remember one Buddha, one of several sitting serenely in Borobudur, green with lichen and slippery with rain. Half of its face had been blown off by the blast of dynamite several years ago, but its one surviving eye looked at me. Its steady gaze seemed to tunnel inside me, into my very veins. It seemed to be telling me to let everything go, and let my heart be.

And I have done just that. All my cousins have emigrated either to Canada or the United States. Two years ago, my sister finally left for the US and her son followed her afterward. I live in her big, three-story townhouse in Fairview because no one else lives there anymore. One of my sisters has been in the US for ages and my brother works in the Middle East. Only my sister who has Down’s Syndrome and I have remained in the Philippines. Or rather, in Asia.

But I am staying here, where I am happiest – in Asia, where beauty and poverty commingle, whose countries are not separated but linked by the sea, bodies of islands where the cultures are ancient, diverse and dazzling, where the food – nasi goreng, mee hon, and beef satay; pho ha, tom yam kung, and bulgogi; Hainanese chicken, roti chanai, and adobo – all remain there, in one’s tongue, like the most vivid memories.

And if I do not live in Manila, well, there is Kuala Lumpur, or its green and peaceful suburbs, where I’ve lived before and felt so at home. The next pages in the book of my life are waiting for the words, the sentences, the novels about Asia, truly Asia.

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