It started when, in 1945, my father met my mother, who was working at the post office in Akron, Ohio. They fell for each other, and he took my mother to meet his parents in LaGrange before they were married on December 9. His parents couldn't have been more enchanted by my mother, who was 27, and beautiful in a way that was typical of the times. My father was a 32-year-old soldier, a veteran of campaigns in North Africa and Italy. It wasn't the first rodeo for either of them - they had both been married before.
Towards the end of her visit to LaGrange, my mother was walking down a city street and an older black man was walking towards her on the sidewalk. As soon as the black man was within ten yards of my mother, he stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and tipped his hat as my mother passed him. My mother had never witnessed such strange behavior before and as soon as she got back to her in-laws' house she related the incident to my father. He explained to her in matter-of-fact terms that, if the black man hadn't behaved in that way, he'd have been found the next morning hanging from a tree. My mother quietly considered my father's words for a moment and then told him to take her back to Ohio as soon as possible because she didn't want to remain in a place where such things happened.
Over the rest of their forty-three year marriage, my mother and father disagreed on matters of race every now and then, and she always won, but only because she was always right and because my father loved her enough to admit defeat. So it was my mother's principles that informed my understanding of the South, about racism and racial bigotry. She hated the South, but my father had his Army career, that had landed him at the last in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. When he retired in 1968 and was awarded full disability (a heart attack pushed him out) and he found that he still couldn't support us, he got a job at the State Penitentiary as a tower guard, working the night shift. A few years into the job, however, another heart attack got him retired from that job, too.
So in 1975 my mother decided that it was her turn to choose where we would live. At first she thought about going back to Europe. My father had been stationed in Stuttgart for several years in the early ‘50s and they were the happiest of my mother's life. But Germany had become too expensive in the decades since. Her next choice was Switzerland, and, on receiving a real estate booklet in the mail, she was amazed at the low cost of living there. This was due to her having confused Swiss francs with French francs. When someone pointed out her mistake, Switzerland was quickly out of the question. I recommended Vermont, because I had found a book of photographs of the state that made me feel homesick for it, even though I'd never been there. But no one else, alas, was keen on New England because of its notoriously hard winters. Then my mother hit on an alternative to Switzerland, the state of Colorado. So in September of 1975 we packed everything we had into the biggest U-Haul trailer available and we left the South – we hoped for good – and went West.
My father was growing old and his poor health gave his wish to die in the South a sense of urgency. Over the following 9 years, the civil war between my parents bounced us back and forth between Colorado and South Carolina five times until my father finally got his wish, dying in Columbia in 1988.
I inherited my mother's distaste for the South. Since departing the region for the Navy in 1988, I have only been back there on leave for a few weeks at a time, and the very last time I was there was in 1992. Living there for so long until I was 17 seems to have inured me to being discontented.
As readers of this blog (all three of you) should know by now, I have been marooned in the Philippines since my passport was stolen in 2007 and my tiny Veterans Disability pension made sure that I would never have enough money to acquire a replacement passport and to pay for a decade's worth of visas. Living with me for most of my exile has been a Philippine woman and her youngest children, a boy and a girl. Deserted by their own father before I came into their lives made them both understandably dubious of fathers and whatever role fathers are supposed to play in their lives. I was their provider, if not much else, and the language barrier between us took care of the rest. When they saw me open my mouth to speak and heard nothing but gibberish, they learned to stop listening to me. (Even now, they will interrupt me when I'm speaking simply because, by now, they don't hear me.) All that these two children have known of me is that I am in the Philippines involuntarily and that all I want is to get myself out of here. A perhaps unintended consequence of this is that they seem to have acquired the same distaste for their country, a lack of faith in it, and the desire to leave it. Both of them are going to extraordinary lengths to get themselves out of their country. Her son, assisted by a cousin now living in Germany, got a Bachelors Degree in computer science from a local university, but is now being trained as a caregiver, since it is one of the few jobs available for him in Germany.
But it's the girl, now 20, who has gone to the greatest lengths to secure a chance of living abroad, and her choices are the ones that are the most painful to me. Against my understandable objections, which I’ve made abundantly clear to her, she dropped out of high school and, following her 18th birthday (which is known to Filipinos, among other cultures, as a young woman’s “debut”), she travelled north to Angeles City, a tourist resort that caters to men who travel from all over the world to have sex with young women. The girl who lived under my roof from the age of 6 has chosen to be one of those young women.
There is a cruel irony in this, a cruelty that is double-edged. Angeles City is the place I visited on my first visit to the Philippines in 1993, on leave from the Navy. It astonished me then, and probably astonishes every tourist who visits the resort today, how easy and cheap it was to get an attractive young woman to go back to my hotel with me and stay for the night. But by now my astonishment has been replaced by a sickened sense of inevitability: the reason why it’s so easy and cheap to have sex with these young women is simply because it’s something they and most Filipinos have been doing all their lives – lying down and taking it.
But what I want to know before I leave this country forever is – did the two children who lived in my house absorb the distaste for the Philippines and the desire to get out of here from me, just as I had absorbed my mother’s distaste for the South? Am I responsible for their hard choices?
My mother might have told me that it wasn’t her that taught me to hate the South. The South did that. Was it the Philippines that taught them that their only chance for lasting happiness is abroad? I passionately hope that it was.
[The reason why the photograph of my mother is so tattered is because my father carried it in his wallet from 1945 until his death in 1988.]
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