Manila Nights

Ermita is where Manila concentrates its nightlife, which means it also concentrates several of the things that attach themselves to nightlife in cities where economic desperation and tourism money occupy the same geography. The area is not subtle about what it sells. The bars along the strip advertise with varying degrees of directness. Men approach you with laminated menus that are not food menus. Children work the street between the bars. The whole arrangement has been running for decades, longer in various forms, the infrastructure of it embedded in the neighbourhood to the point where it has become the neighbourhood’s primary identity, at least to visitors arriving at night.

We had come there as a group, six or seven of us from the hostel, Our Melting Pot in Makati, on the recommendation of one member who had been the previous evening and reported that it was worth seeing, which is both accurate and incomplete as a description. Patrick, a Frenchman with considerable confidence in his own judgment, noticed a group at a table across the room and suggested we introduce ourselves. I looked at the group and told him they were all men. He disagreed, with the conviction of someone who had made a decision and was committed to it. He went over. He came back. Two of them were men and four were definitely women, he said. I looked again and revised this to four men and two possibly ambiguous cases. He went back. He returned a final time, his certainty largely dissolved, to confirm that the consensus at the table was that they were all men, though one of them, in a red dress, had an uncanny physical resemblance to Michelle Obama, which I cannot dispute.

None of this is, in itself, remarkable. Manila has a large and visible transgender community, concentrated partly in Ermita and partly in other parts of the city, and the Philippines’ relationship with gender identity is complicated in ways that are specific to a country that is simultaneously one of the most Catholic in Asia and one of the most relaxed about certain categories of social convention that Catholicism elsewhere tends to police more rigorously. The Spanish who colonised the Philippines from the sixteenth century brought the Church with them, and the Church stayed after the Spanish left, producing a country where eighty percent of the population identifies as Catholic and where, at the same time, beauty queens who are transgender compete in national pageants with widespread public support. These things exist together in the Philippines in ways that don’t resolve into simple conclusions.

We were also introduced, at some point in the evening, to balut, the fertilised duck egg that is the Philippines’ most famous and most confronting street food. The egg contains a partially developed duckling, eaten whole, boiled, and is considered both a delicacy and a test of character for visiting foreigners. None of our group ate one. A local who had been showing us around the area ate one with the casual efficiency of someone eating a boiled sweet, which I found both impressive and slightly difficult to watch.

I sang at some point during the evening, with a live band at one of the bars, which is either brave or imprudent depending on your assessment of my musical abilities, and the band were polite enough not to stop me. The night continued past the point at which I could fully account for it and eventually ended in a taxi back to Makati with the windows down and the city moving past at a pace that felt appropriately blurred.

The thing that stays with me is not the bars or the drinking or even Patrick’s encounter with the table of women who were men. It is the boy with the cigarettes and his answer about making friends, which is sitting somewhere in the middle of my chest still, waiting to be properly understood.