My pandemic year in Manila

I’ve been coming to Manila every few years since the mid-nineties for two weeks to spend Christmas with my other half’s family. The visits are always a blur – jetlag, crowded family gatherings, streets empty of traffic in the days after Christmas, meals at people’s houses, a few nights out on the town and then a rushed trip for a few days around New Years to explore the country. When I first came here, nightlife was still happening in Malate, the buzz around Remedios Circle was palpable, the landfill below the Mall of Asia not yet even conceived.

More than 20 years later, I came back in February 2020 for a month to visit my other half who has been working here more regularly. I’d never been in Manila for so long and at a time of year when the city was its more regular self. There was traffic so it would be more difficult to get around the city. I wouldn’t have a daily round of family holiday parties to order my days. What was I going to do with myself?

I’m a native New Yorker, where I’ve made my home most of my adult life, though I grew up mostly in London. I love to walk around cities. London and New York are great walking cities: they are ever-changing.

The Manila I returned to in February 2020 wasn’t the same city I first visited in the late 90s. But this time I had the time to explore it. Even with the advent of Grab, it seemed like I would miss a lot stuck in AC, crawling across the city in traffic. So taking a page from my London childhood, I decided to go out walking in the midday sun (with a hat), though I can’t claim to be a mad dog or an Englishman.

I soon found myself walking across McKinley to the sparkling new, almost Singaporean city of BGC, or wandering through the congested avenues of Makati to meet friends for dinner in newly hip Poblacion, this era’s Malate. Neither had been what they are now on my last visit. I wandered across Luneta and stopped for lunch in Intramuros; those felt unchanged. My Manila hosts and extended family, many of them native Manilenos, thought I was crazy for walking. You should take a Grab, they said. Or at least bring a change of clothes, since you’ll arrive a sweaty mess.

A week before I was due to fly back to NYC, I flew down to Siargao for a three-day trip. A few hours after we landed Duterte announced the lockdowns and we found ourselves stranded for 101 days on an island with no corona. It certainly became an adventure: bizarre, wonderful and unnerving, but that’s a story for another time. Friends and relatives told us of their homebound lives in Manila and I had difficulty imagining the city’s empty streets.

By the time we finally got back to Manila in the height of the summer, the city was returning to some semblance of normality. I took up my walking again – though only in the cooler late afternoons and now with my facemask, shield, bottle of sanitizing alcohol, sunglasses and baseball hat. Anyone who passed me must have thought: who is this crazy kano walking around our pandemic city?

For a few weeks, beautiful shade-filled Paco Park remained open, even though Rizal Park had long before closed. Soon even Paco Park closed. I began to explore the side streets of Manila, finding sudden, surprising vistas, or beautiful, old buildings hidden behind the telephone wires or the Hyun Bin Smart ads. With the city’s picturesque, even if sometimes fragrant, rises over the estuarios and glimpses of lush hidden gardens behind high walls, I can see why Isko Moreno has made recovering – or uncovering – the beauty of the city one of his missions.

I’ve found a wonderful book in the house where I’m staying called Streets of Manila by Luning B. Ira and Isagani R. Medina with photographs by Nik Ricio, published in 1977. The book travels through the neighborhoods of Manila unearthing the histories behind the streets’ current names, to the American, then Spanish, then Tagalog names before them. I’m currently living in Paco and can walk down toward Plaza Dilao, where the beautiful old, now abandoned Paco train station still exists. I’ve learned from the book that “Dilao” was the old name for the settlement along the Pasig that became Paco, “Dilao” being the Tagalog word for yellow, “denoting the aromatic roots of the turmeric or yellow ginger that abounded in the area.” The decaying station sits shaded and hidden under the soon to be completed NLEX/SLEX interchange, which certainly didn’t exist back in 1996 when I first visited. Yet Dilao Plaza and its centuries’ old name remains.

I’ve now just spent another Christmas in Manila. It was certainly different than the first one I spent here, just as the city itself is now vastly different. The Christmas dinner table, like the streets themselves, was emptier. And yet, somehow Christmas and the city felt comfortingly the same in spirit, with a palpable sense that the city will recover and continue to evolve.

It’s now almost 11 months since I arrived. I’ve rescheduled my flight home a number of times and each time something has intervened. I finally decided I should just wait out the winter here and wait for the vaccine.

The other night I walked down to Roxas Boulevard and wandered along the waterfront, with people gathered on the concrete seawall watching an extraordinary orange sun slide into the water with silhouettes of tankers crossing slowly in front of it. I ended up in Remedios Circle, a little more threadbare and definitely emptier than it was in the late 1990s but feeling like it might too be ready for its comeback.

For now, as Manila remains in its cool months, I’ll continue to walk around this beautiful city, facemasked and faceshielded, though probably not in the midday sun.

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Stephen M. Morrison worked in publishing for many years, as editor-in-chief of Penguin Books and later as publisher of Picador. He’s a writer, sometime ghostwriter and also develops projects for television and film.