GaWC World City Commentary

This World City Commentary has been published in Australian Book Review, No. 235, October, 2001.

Please refer to the published version when quoting the paper.

Letter from Manila

D. Altman^*

Of all major South East Asian nations, the Philippines is least known in Australia, and rarely studied, even in our universities. The material and historical difference between the two countries seems to have blinded us to the interests our two countries share. Australia did not support the long Filipino struggle for independence, as with Indonesia‚s, nor actively oppose it, as with Vietnam‚s. Nonetheless, both countries were part of SEATO and supported US involvement in Indo China. Within ASEAN, the Philippines has often been the country most sympathetic to greater links with Australia, and the Philippines is regarded as a high priority country for development assistance by Ausaid.

Traditionally, the ties between the Philippines and Australia have been thin, and often mediated through the United States. From one perspective, this is odd: there are cultural and intellectual similarities which should make links far richer, and there is a significant and growing Filipino population in Australia. The first Filipinos came as pearlers or seamen, but the White Australia Policy blocked the growth of immigration until the 1960s, though we were linked by the War General MacArthur fled from Manila to Brisbane. (There is a wonderful fictional account of the war, including MacArthur‚s role in both Manila and Brisbane, in Neal Stephenson‚s Cryptonomicon, 1999.) Filipino immigration has grown particularly since 1980s, with many women coming as spouses (the gender imbalance is now decreasing). There are over 100,000 Australian-Filpinos (the Embassy claims almost twice as many, but they include the Australian-born children of Filipino immigrants.). But it is not a very visible population: while the Melbourne phonebook lists Nepalese and Mongolian restaurants, no Filipino ones are identified. Only eight students are taking Filipino in Victorian schools, fewer than are studying Tamil or Dutch.

I first visited the Philippines in 1976, four years after Marcos cancelled residential elections and declared his Œ New Society‚. I had been in touch with a friend from my time at Cornell University, who had returned to the Philippines, been held in detention and was then under a loose form of house arrest. I sat with him and his American-born wife, their marriage disintegrating from its own stresses, and heard stories of the closure of all centres of independent thought in what had once been the most open democracy in Asia. Marcos claimed to be restoring Œlaw and order‚ but, during his reign, the enormous inequalities of the country escalated.

Ten years later, the streets of Manila were filled with yellow-clad protestors, and the Marcos regime crumbled before the television cameras in one of the most striking examples of a genuine popular revolt in recent history. The downfall of Marcos had a considerable effect upon me, one of those moments others are the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and the destruction of the Berlin Wall that restore faith in the political, the capacity of collective action to overcome injustice and create a better world.

I have revisited Manila five times since Marcos‚s downfall and the election of Cory Acquino, but, while the forms of democracy have returned, the poverty and inequality seemed untouched. Manila both attracts and appals foreigners (my own images of the city merge with the depictions of the city in books such as James Hamilton Patersons‚s Ghosts of Manila, Alex Garland‚s the tesseract and Timothy Mo‚s Renegade or Halo2.) On one visit, I stayed in a small guesthouse several blocks from Manila Bay, close to both the American Embassy and the posh Manila Yacht Club. Outside, the hotel roosters tethered to small poles scratched the ground, and small dogs and cats ran in and out of cramped hovels. Nearby is the zoo, a metaphor for the city, just as the immaculate Singapore Zoo represents the extent of that country‚s wealth and sophisticated surveillance. A small number of seemingly bored and unhappy animals lions, giraffes, monkeys, a crocodile, even a donkey live in small dank concrete enclosures, too dispirited even to complain. The Zoo is surrounded by squatters, and even within its walls one sees neat lines of washing hung out to dry. Zoos have their own particular smells, but in Manila the stench of unsewered water overwhelms that of the animals.

Here are all the contradictions of a developing country, with huge disparities in wealth and a ruling class more at ease in English than their indigenous languages. But for most urban Filipinos life is centred in the streets, and the power of the streets more accurately the gathering of huge crowds in the streets with the tacit support of the military was used to overthrow Marcos and, more recently, Estrada. The streets, too, are home for thousands of people: teenage girls, already mothers, squat with two or three toddlers in cardboard shelters; women, old at thirty, wash themselves and their clothes in stinking gutters. Meanwhile the élite squat elsewhere, in private compounds guarded by men with rifles half their height, and move effortlessly from business to government whatever the régime.

Despite the influence of the Catholic Church, there is a huge sex industry, fuelled both by tourists and local demand. One sees the ugliest side of Œglobalisation‚ in the tourist areas of Manila, where large numbers of single men from rich countries, both Western and Asian, buy the services of women and children for derisory sums. Here is Rosie‚s Cantina, a twenty-four hour gathering spot for sex workers and customers alike, an imitation American diner fronting one of Manila‚s more notorious pick-up streets. Rosie, the menu tells us, was a Œtypical happy Visayan girl from Cebu [who] came to Manila with stars in her eyes dreaming of becoming a model‚. Instead, Rosie became a Œcultural dancer‚ in an Ermita nightclub, travelled to the States on a Œfiancée visa‚ and ended up as counter girl at Œthe Night Owl Diner in downtown Hoboken near the New Jersey turnpike‚. In time, Rosie returned to the Philippines and opened a diner, whose menu documents the mix that is Filipino culture, from breakfasts combining rice, bananas, scrambled eggs and Œfunlink‚ (sausages) to the year round Christmas Dinner special. It also becomes a document of commercial sex, with scrawled autographs, calls for pen pals, phone numbers and personal notes: ŒHi! I‚m 21 years old. My name is Lisa and I do not like 69 or blow jobs.‚ 

My current knowledge of the Philippines draws heavily on my experiences of the Filipino response to HIV/AIDS. The Philippines was one of the first countries in Asia to adopt a strong set of policies to deal with the looming epidemic, but also one which has seen considerable tension between health officials and the Catholic hierarchy, especially over the provision of condoms. There is a vibrant community sector in the Philippines, with one of the first groups for gay men in Asia organised around a karaoke bar known as The Library (its name comes from sets of crumbling schoolbooks around the walls). Some of the first outreach programs to gay men and sex workers were funded by Australia, and Australians were significant in assisting in the development of the Filipino national AIDS plan.

In general, however, such mutual interest and cooperation is rare. As the Philippines, once one of the richest countries of South-east Asia, has declined in relation to its neighbours, Australian attention has focused on countries in the region that seem to offer greater trading opportunities or are more significant in strategic terms. Indeed, the much-vaunted Australian desire to be Œpart of Asia‚, which has declined since the election of the Howard government in 1997, too often defines Asia in terms of tiger economies and new markets. Yet our two countries share a marginality to Asia and complex ties to US and to Europe through religion and settlement. While the history of colonial settlement and nation building is very different, I know nowhere else in Asia where it is as easy to enter into frank and intellectually challenging discussions across a range of topics as the Philippines. Indeed, some East Asians dismiss the Philippines as not Œreally‚ part of the region, because of its American ties and its Catholicism.

This marginality impinges on central questions of governance, namely the role of the nation state in a world increasingly dominated by multinational corporations and international movement of goods and capital (and often in heartbreaking ways for the Philippines, of people). The gap between the suburban comforts of Melbourne and the gross inequalities of Metro Manila may become less extreme than they now appear as both our countries become less and less able to exert meaningful control over our role in a globalised economy.

I recently spent time with a Filipino friend of mine who currently works for the Australian Red Cross in Laos. He had just returned from a conference on reproductive health in Manila, and reported that the Lao women delegates were shocked by the open disagreement and debate at the conference. The debates would not come as a surprise to Filipinos, who are accustomed to the bitter divisions between Catholic doctrine and feminist and public health advocates on issues such as contraception, HIV prevention and abortion. In most countries of Asia outside India and perhaps Japan, such discussions are not possible with the frankness and willingness to confront official policy that characterises the Philippines.

Two years ago, the first joint research conference between La Trobe and Ateneo Universities took place on the latter‚s campus, a collection of undistinguished buildings set in spacious grounds on the outskirts of Metro Manila, opposite a shopping strip with the usual take-away food chains, which are aggressively ubiquitous in the Philippines. We were housed in austere rooms, complete with hard, narrow beds and the frowning images of Catholic martyrs and saints patrolling our sleep. With my deeply ingrained suspicion of religion this was both strange and uncomfortable, and not helped by the squalor of the student dormitories, which reminds one of the gap even for middle-class Filipinos between their expectations and ours.

Yet, through my connections with Ateneo, I have found myself working closely and with great pleasure with people who are committed to the teachings of a Church I see as an enemy of human freedom. For me, this posed a particular challenge: how do we reconcile the secular and the religious commitment to social justice, which seem too often in direct conflict? In a world where conflict between religions and between the religious and the secular seems ever increasing, might this not be the major intellectual project that Australians and Filipinos can embark upon together?

* Dennis Altman, School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.