First Light, Manila

The Philippines that I landed in was thirty-seven years into independence from the United States and twenty-five years into the post-Marcos period, a country still working through what those two transitions meant for the distribution of economic and political power. The flight from Hong Kong takes one hour and forty minutes, which is not enough time to prepare for the change in what you are arriving into. Japan is composed, precise, and expensive. Hong Kong is fast and dense and conducts its business at a volume that you either learn to hear selectively or find overwhelming. Manila arrives differently, with the heat first, the humidity physical and immediate when the aircraft door opens, and then the noise and the traffic and the scale of a metropolitan area containing roughly twenty-three million people in an infrastructure that was designed for considerably fewer.

The taxi to Makati cost two hundred pesos, which was less than three pounds for a thirty-minute journey. The driver was cheerful and bilingual and wanted to talk about Japan. The tsunami that had struck the Tohoku coast three days earlier had sent warnings across the Pacific, reaching the Philippines with enough force that several coastal communities had been evacuated as a precaution, and the driver had relatives in one of them and wanted to establish that I had a first-hand account that could confirm what he had read in the news. I told him what I had seen on television in Hong Kong. He shook his head slowly and drove.

The city that came through the windows on the drive in was not the city I had been expecting, which is an expectation problem rather than a problem with the city. Manila is not a beautiful city in the way that Kyoto is beautiful or even in the way that parts of Hong Kong are beautiful. It is a city that has been rebuilt repeatedly across different colonial administrations and natural disasters and political upheavals, and the result is an urban landscape of considerable visual variety that stops short of coherence. Spanish-era Intramuros, the walled city built in 1571 and devastated by the Battle of Manila in 1945, stands in partial reconstruction in the south of the city. Around it the American-era street grid provides the underlying structure for a built environment that the post-independence period has filled in with towers and traffic overpasses and shopping malls and the dense informal settlements that sit between the formal city’s structures in the spaces its planning did not account for.

The Spanish colonised the Philippines for three hundred and thirty-three years, from 1565 until 1898, and the Catholicism they brought with them took root with a completeness that distinguishes the Philippines from every other country in Southeast Asia. Eighty-six percent of the population identifies as Catholic, a figure that produces a specific relationship between church authority and public life, between the confession booth and the voting booth, that has no equivalent elsewhere in the region. The Church’s opposition to the Marcos regime, delivered from pulpits across the country in the years before the 1986 revolution, contributed to the political conditions that made the People Power uprising possible. Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, broadcast an appeal on Radio Veritas in February 1986 asking civilians to gather on EDSA to protect the military officers who had broken with Marcos, and they came in millions. His name, which he acknowledged with the wry self-awareness of a man who had been asked about it many times, was an accident of birth that became, in the circumstances, something close to appropriate.

The hostel, Our Melting Pot, occupied two apartments in a new building in Makati, the financial district, and was considerably nicer than its price suggested, which in the Philippines is a recurring experience. A group from various parts of Europe had arrived around the same time and were debating what to do with the evening with the collective energy of people who have just arrived somewhere and have not yet agreed on anything. I put down the bag, changed into the one item of clothing I owned that was appropriate for the heat, and joined the debate. Manila was outside, and the heat was still coming off the pavements at eight in the evening, and the city was loud in all directions, and the Philippines, which I had added to the itinerary six weeks ago on the basis of cheap beer and photographs that looked like the Maldives, was going to be more than that.