My heart belongs to me

On my last night in Kuala Lumpur, 2 of my friends–one new and the other old, came to see me at the hotel and we went out for dinner.

I’ve known Y since 2006, having met in a training that I participated in Hanoi. We would see each other two more times in other training workshops in 2007. And whenever I was in KL, we made arrangements to see each other. I am witness to her on-going transition from a university-based researcher to a development worker. In the time that I had known her, she had come out to her Chinese-Malay family as a lesbian. I met R in a training I attended in Chiang Mai late last year. He’s the same age as my mother, but there is such youthful mischief in his eyes it is easy to mistake him as much younger than he actually is. Like me, he works in the field of HIV prevention, focused on vulnerable populations. He’s German, but has lived in Malaysia for almost 20 years, ‘partnered’ with a Malaysian law enforcement officer for 6 years.

Since I had eaten Chinese food on my first night and had eaten my fill of Malay food the whole day, we decided to have some Korean food for dinner. Fortunately there was a Korean restaurant within walking distance from the hotel so we left Y’s car in the car park and walked out. It was a nice evening for a walk, anyway.

R had never tasted any Korean dish but he said he was willing to try. I told him that Korean kimchi is like the German sauerkraut. Also, with the years that he’d been in Malaysia, he has also grown accustomed to eating spicy food. 

However, as we were ordering food–looking for pork dishes, we learned that the Korean restaurant was serving only halal food. So no pork. R did not like beef so Y and I ordered some kimchi soup with seafood for him. Y ordered Beef spare ribs soup. Like the creature of habit that I am, I ordered my favorite Korean dish, Bibimbap. We also ordered a Korean pancake with leeks and shrimp to share. The thing I like about eating at Korean restaurants is even if you order just one dish (which is already a hearty meal by itself), there are a lot of side dishes.

Y confessed to being very hungry already so we started eating as soon as the food was laid on our table. We chatted while eating, catching up on the things that had happened since the three of us were last together in November 2007. My Bibimbap was very good; the taste reminded me of the one served in my favorite Korean restaurant in Phnom Penh. The pancake was also delicious.

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Alone again (naturally)

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur yesterday at 2.30PM and checked into Istana Hotel at around 4PM. After reviewing the documents I needed to study for the stakeholders’ meeting, I took a quick shower and fell asleep unintentionally. I woke up a few minutes before 7PM, hungry. I decided against ordering food from room service. I was looking forward to eating some Nasi Lemak and Nasi Goreng but I didn’t want to eat it in the hotel. My hotel is quite close to Bukit Bintang so I decided to walk towards it. I remember that Super Noodle House, the Chinese restaurant Yuen Mei took me to when I was last here in KL, is in this area. I suddenly craved for Chinese food.

When I got in, I ordered fried noodles with seafood, barbecue pork dumplings, and honey-lemon juice. The noodles were fresh and crispy, with just enough sauce and lots of shrimp, squid, and fish. The dumplings were just as good as I remembered them. While eating I locked eyes with an Indian-looking young man seating a table away from me. He was probably wondering why I, looking clearly non-Chinese, was eating at this restaurant. Well, I could say the same thing to him. I turned to my left, right, and back to check if he was really looking at me. 

He was. Feeling a mild sense of panic, I looked down at my plate and ate quickly. I don’t clearly know why. I had wanted to relish my nice dinner. When he smiled, my innards tightened like a clenched fist. He had thick curly hair, high forehead, bright eyes. My type on 3 of 4 counts. But nevertheless, something about the way he was looking at me unnerved me. The restaurant was pretty busy, and the waitresses have probably noticed the staring match that Suresh (his imagined name–after the character in Heroes) was trying to start with me. I asked for the check, paid for it then I stood to go. I didn’t turn to see him as I quickly left the restaurant and went into the mall.

There was really nothing much to see in the mall. I wasn’t in the market for new outfits, phones, shoes, and other accessories. I turned to step out of the mall and almost shrieked when I bumped into Suresh. He was still smiling, although it looked a bit confused because I think my forehead hit his chin. He had dimpled cheeks, I didn’t notice that earlier. He introduced himself (Anand) and asked for my name. I told him. He wanted to know my nationality and I told him. He said he was Singaporean but working in KL for the last year. I smiled. He said he was 26 and asked for my age. He was surprised when I told him. While this Q&A ensued I was walking briskly on the sidewalk, snaking my way into the crowd as he kept up with minimal effort. Of course, with his longer legs, familiarity with the terrain, and his obvious athleticism, I didn’t stand a chance of outrunning him.

He held my wrist and asked if I was afraid of him. I looked at him. ‘Because you don’t need to be. I’m a good guy,’ he said. I swallowed a cruel retort. The lobby of my hotel loomed above us. He asked if I was billeted at Istana. I didn’t see the point of saying no. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t usually do this. But would you like to have coffee with me in the lobby?’ I agreed.

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Reason to believe

Halfway through Father Ed’s talk yesterday evening, I was struck when he speculated on the probable cause of Jun Lozada’s seemingly incessant episodes of crying that has been recorded, transmitted and viewed by the public. Jun Lozada had earlier told Father Ed that he felt as if he was mourning the passing of his old life, in light of having made an irreversible decision to step into a future that he hadn’t imagined and planned for.

This was at the second buffet dinner cum forum that a group of concerned Filipinos organized at Bistro Lorenzo, a Filipino restaurant here in Phnom Penh, yesterday evening. More than 40 people filled the restaurant, a combination of old (from the first forum) and new faces. The Father Ed I’m referring to is Ed dela Torre, a former priest/activist/political prisoner and later, a government official. He was in Phnom Penh on a business trip, but he was prevailed upon by the group to give a short talk on the forum to speak about the state of affairs in the Philippines. We were fortunate to hear from him because Father Ed had at least a couple of conversations with ZTE-NBN witness Jun Lozada and he offered us a fresh look at Jun Lozada.

For the benefit of the new participants, Dinky presented her powerpoint slides. I still found it compelling, to tell the truth. But she soon gave the floor to Father Ed. And as Father Ed was elaborating on the point of dying and rising again in the theological, philosophical, and practical sense, I suddenly thought of cataracts.

As a Nursing student in the early 90s, one of the requirements in the third year was to assist in 5 major and 5 minor surgeries in the operating room, one of the areas of rotation in the hospital. My first major surgery was called ECCE (Extra-capsular Cataract Extraction) and this caused me undue panic. Not because I was afraid to perform poorly and risk the wrath of the surgeon and my clinical instructor but because the night before, I prepared for an Appendectomy (removal of the appendix). I was informed of the change 45 minutes before surgery. So I had to orient myself with a new set of surgical tools, which were–for obvious reasons way different from an abdominal surgery, memorize these, and prepare them accordingly.

But this is not the point of my story. I was able to perform well in that surgery, by the way. But what really struck me was the image of the cataract as it was being extracted from beneath the surface of the eye. It looked like a fish scale from a big fish (carp came to mind). Being the good Catholic that I was then, I thought of the conversion of Saint Paul, when the regaining of his sight was described as scales being removed from his eyes. Whoever had his cataracts removed must really feel relieved to see things clearly again. I never saw the patient after his surgery. I would have asked him to describe how it felt to be able to see again.

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I’m going down

Last Sunday night I attended the suprise birthday party of my friend in one of the Filipino restaurants here in Cambodia. Her husband asked a couple of us to help him organize it and the party went well, even if the surprise element of the birthday proved to be debatable (they arrived ahead of most of the guests).

On the way home I dropped by my neighborhood friendly (pirated) DVD store to browse at the new titles. I got three films and as of this writing I have seen all of them. But I will only talk about the two not just because of their inherent odd-ness. Both are road movies (a la Little Miss Sunshine), both are gloomy and tragic (while one has a bit more comic elements), and both of them have a certain exuberance within the tragic circumstances.

The Darjeeling Limited, the 5th movie directed by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), shows three semi-estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who are travelling by rail across India. The trip is planned by Francis (Wilson) with obsessive attention to detail and with an explicit therapeutic objective (for them to bond, and later, to see their mother who ran off to become a nun). But soon, circumstances and the nature of the brothers lead them astray from their precious itinerary.

The brothers share a common attachment to material things: expensive clothing (Francis), a girlfriend who has walked away (Jack), their dead father’s eyeglasses and shaver (Peter), and a set of monogrammed luggages (all three). They find their mother–who runs away again the next morning, save 2 out of 3 boys from drowning, and just when you think they’re ready to resume their interrupted lives in America, they discard all their baggages (physical and psychological, presumably) and decide to stay in India.

Into The Wild, directed by Sean Penn, tells the true story of Christopher Johnson McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp who in 1990 (after graduating in university) donated his $24,000.00 savings to charity then set off on a 2-year journey that took him from Mississippi, the Pacific Northwest, the wheat fields of the northern prairies, and to Alaska, where he died of starvation as a complication of eating a poisonous plant by mistake. Along the way he meets and touches the lives of a middle-aged hippie couple, a rambunctious wheat farmer, a 16 year-old singer, and an old widower who lost his wife and only child to a drunk driver. McCandless is brilliantly played by Emile Hirsch (The Girl Next Door), he is at once innocent and worldly, and consistently charming and intelligent.

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Waiting on the world to change

My family did not, still doesn’t in fact, care much for politics. I was raised believing that my social responsibility ended in being a productive member of society: educated, gainfully employed, obedient to the law. I remember, in the 80s, I had an uncle on my mother’s side who got into activism. His choice to pursue this was generally ignored and/or frowned upon, attributed to his poor performance in academics.

In my small immediate family, my father could very well be the most political. He vigilantly keeps himself informed of the latest news, and he wastes no time expressing his opinions. I have imagined that, if familial duties did not prevent him from finishing his college degree, my father in his youth would’ve been an activist himself. My mother and I rarely engage him in discussions of this kind.

I wouldn’t dare call myself an activist. I like to keep abreast of current events, but I was never into attending protest rallies and marches. After college I got into AIDS work, just about the same time that I was starting to acknowledge my homosexuality. I worked and became friends with people who called themselves AIDS activists. Still I didn’t regard myself an AIDS activist (even if I’m still into AIDS work 15 years later). I consider myself more of an advocate. I am an advocate for health for everyone, regardless of social standing. I advocate for equality and equity for all, regardless of sex and sexual orientation.  Because AIDS is also a development issue, I took time to learn about development concepts and issues and let it inform my work and my life.

Still, you wouldn’t find me on the street, protesting. Sure, I’d get upset by the ineptitude of most government officials, at the continuous meddling of the church on state affairs, at the injustice that many people are subjected to but I remain silent. Each of us, I believe, are entitled to our own suffering.

When I settled here in Cambodia, I managed to insulate myself from the things that were happening in my home country. I arrived here in April 2004, not regretting at all that I wouldn’t be able to vote in the presidential elections that year. I completely immersed myself in work, in earning money, and making a life removed from the sheltered life I lived in Manila. It didn’t last long, though. Like my other countrymen, I discovered a strong sense of Being Filipino when I’d been away from my country. Homesickness or not, I couldn’t deny this feeling. 

So I tried to re-connect to my being Filipino by accessing information–reading on-line versions of Filipino newspapers, watching the news at TFC, by befriending other Filipinos here (in spite of mixed results), and by trying harder to keep abreast of what is happening in Manila. I am still resistant to joining the organization of Filipinos here, for reasons I will not disclose in this blog. I still believe in maintaining quality over quantity when it comes to becoming friends with other Filipinos. But I will not distance myself from the affairs that are happening in my country. Not anymore.

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