The Weight of Shadows (12 page)

From outside the window, construction cranes cast long shadows on the hotel curtains. I put my bags down and go to the balcony, which overlooks a group of workers smoking cigarettes in the depressed concrete foundation. A few pieces of bare rebar jut out of the flat gray surface and extend upward, looking like the cleanly picked bones in an upturned carcass. The cranes slowly track over development in Metro Manila. The blood-orange sky makes the reflective skyscrapers look as if they're hemorrhaging.

At my last appointment the US government determined I was “of good moral character” by evaluating my responses to a series of inane questions. Had I ever been a habitual drunkard? Been a prostitute or with a prostitute? Had I ever sold or smuggled controlled substances, illegal drugs, narcotics? Had I ever been married to more than one person at the same time? Had I ever helped anyone enter or try to enter the United States illegally? What about gambling? Had I ever received income from illegal gambling? Had I failed to support any dependents or failed to pay alimony? Had I ever committed a crime for which I was never arrested? The fact that my record was clean meant that in their eyes I was one of the good ones, and I had done something or not done something to receive the benefit of no longer being subject
to a punitive body of law that is arguably the most, or one of the most, complicated in the United States. The woman who asked me this series of questions seemed rather uninterested in my answers, but still, as she rattled them off, I wondered what my fate would have been if my answers had been different, if they had pulled images and information from social media to determine my moral character, or if they'd simply talked with friends, acquaintances, ex-friends, and ex-acquaintances. I wondered too how many of the affluent kids I went to high school with—sons and daughters of politicians, news anchors, and high-ranking business officials—would pass this kind of test.

Having lived as a permanent resident through my teens and early twenties had been an incredibly reckless thing to do. In retrospect I'm not sure what my parents were thinking in not putting me through this process as soon as I qualified. In 1996 the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the list of deportable offenses by several orders of magnitude, and things many of the kids I went to high school with were doing on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day, were deportable offenses. I could have been forcibly removed from the country, severing all associations with the people, places, and things that had become home. Minor crimes friends and peers were able to expunge from their records, things cops gave them warnings for, or things they weren't even stopped for because of who they were and how they looked could have gotten me deported. I can't imagine my reality if that had come to pass, and I can't believe I'd walked that line for so long. The amount of luck involved in never having been caught doing things that teenagers do seemed supernatural, but maybe it had to do with who I hung around with, in what spaces, and the protection those associations offered. I'd had several close calls with law enforcement, sometimes having been stopped because of the way I look, but they somehow all ended favorably
for me, because, I think, I'd immediately played the game of demonstrating that I was, in fact, “one of the good ones” by choosing a “higher” register in which to speak and mentioning where I went to school.

As I waited for the next certified letter telling me where and when my naturalization ceremony would take place, an opportunity to travel to the Philippines presented itself. I would be able to go, free of charge, as a fellow for a graduate writing workshop that would take place on various islands throughout the country.

I'd been one of the last fellows to book my flight, so the rest of the writers' group was staying at another hotel. I read that it wasn't a great idea to leave the country during the naturalization process and if it could be avoided, it should. The trip was especially troubling considering the amount of time I'd be gone, the potential to miss the actual ceremony, and the potential to get into some kind of trouble that would prevent me from completing the very last step in becoming a citizen of the United States. If I missed the ceremony it could technically be rescheduled, but a failure to respond promptly to the government's certified letters while missing appointments could end in the denial of the application in this final stage. Despite all this, a free trip to Southeast Asia was too good to pass up.

My room at the A. Venue in Makati City is small but luxurious, and it has a Western toilet. It's reminiscent of one of those boutique hotels in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan—the ones that staff their bellhop positions with tall men who look like male models—except here we'd been warned not to drink the water, to use bottled to brush our teeth, and to be discerning about the establishments in which we took ice in our beverages. “They'll like you,” I'd been told, “because you look like one of their celebrities.”

Below the window, the group of laborers has finished their cigarettes, resumed their work. On an adjacent street, a man and woman push a makeshift cart toward an empty lot, and as I turn away from the window, movement in the bed of the cart catches my eye. Looking back, I see a small boy in a bright yellow tank top the color of cartoon birds. He could be two years old or perhaps a malnourished three or four. A small girl, about the same size, sits on what looks like a pile of rags in the cart. Nestled in her lap, an infant gropes at her long black hair. Then the cart and its contents disappear below a sheet of corrugated tin that tops a small structure they've made between construction sites.

Jeremiah, a nonpracticing Jew from Alabama, whom I've known for a couple of years, will be my roommate for the trip. He's a lanky man who always seems to be in a state of bewilderment, as though he were moving through the world seeing everything for the first time. We took separate flights, and, characteristically for both of us, we failed to coordinate our arrivals in any way. Before I can start worrying, though, I see Jeremiah across the hotel lobby examining the texture of one of the walls.

“Oh, hey,” he says, smiling when he sees me walking toward him.

Makati City is the financial center of the Philippines. After dark, everything bleached by the sun glows in disquietude under the blinking of neon signs. S-Class Mercedes pull out of embassies and multinational headquarters into teeming streets, where they roll so slowly Jeremiah and I can observe the individual revolutions of each wheel. A skinny old woman with a white braid dangling down to the small of her back pushes past us, somehow able to move a rolling food stand three times her size. She takes care not to get too close to the luxury vehicles, instead opting to almost roll over the foot of a child sitting on the curb. English-language Revlon advertisements featuring a smiling Halle Berry hang
on the street lamps, while emaciated dogs tear at husks and overripe fruit caked in the gutter.

Less than a block from the hotel, we find ourselves walking down a dark street lined with bars that advertise women. Inside my right pocket, I feel the jagged edge of a cracked Ambien left over from the transcontinental flight. For a second I consider not taking it, but I know our drinks will be watered down and overpriced, so I gather saliva and swallow the pill. We turn onto Makati Avenue, a long strip of twenty-four-hour fast-food restaurants and twenty-four-hour bank branches. The glass fronts of ChinaBank and 7-Eleven throb in the magenta light of an adjacent girly bar, and inside large guards in navy blue uniforms and aviators keep watch with arm-length assault rifles and pistol-grip shotguns. I begin to wonder what the consequences of having several loose pills on my person would be if caught, but I don't worry too much because the authorities don't seem concerned with anything but registers and moneyboxes. Outside, the avenue is clogged with middle-aged white men looking over groups of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls as if picking produce at the market. A white man I later hear speaking Dutch, with a belly that hangs over his elastic waistband so far he can't see down to his curled yellow toenails, walks with each arm slung around a young Filipina, clearly underage, barely clothed. A young man with shiny spiked hair and a pinstriped black button-down shirt open to mid-chest is led by the hand by a heavily made-up girl who looks like she could be in middle school. This is the so-called Third World, seen as a sordid Disneyland, a repository for the West's most uninhibited fantasies. The red-light industry is the fourth-largest sector in the Philippine gross national product, and the averted gaze is part of protecting commercial interests too.

Jeremiah and I settle on a New Orleans–themed bar just off the main drag. I was drawn to the rakish dive by my own perverted desire to observe the remnant wounds of colonial
powers fighting for landmass and constituent bodies, the subsequent colonization, and the forty-year “tutelage” in democracy. It's too dark to be sure, and the Ambien has started to take effect, but it seems like there's a full-sized American muscle car attached to the ceiling toward the end of the bar. Once Americans had been surprised not to be greeted as liberators in the Philippines. Now the ones who are still around are glad to be tourists and customers. A sinewy waste—gray hair and a Harley Davidson tee with the sleeves cut off—paws a Filipina who is sitting next to him trying not to look disgusted. He seems glad to have found a place where he can be the truest version of himself, and I'm glad too, to be on this side of the global order, allowed to wallow in the spoils of democracy even though my passport is not yet blue.

Before we order our whiskeys, several sets of hands slide up and under our shirts. “Would you like massage, ma'amsir?” “Buy me a drink, ma'amsir.” Each of us is the center of a huddle of taut brown bodies wrapped in plastic made to look like leather, women from the countryside or several generations removed, victims of having been born into the continuity of imperialism from which there is little way out. The Ambien has a numbing effect on my body so that all the hands running across my skin feel like one rhythmic throbbing. Jeremiah has drawn more women, perhaps because in the dark his skin glows lighter. He proposes a toast to my impending “transition,” which the women react to with confused expressions. One of them grabs hold of my crotch.

“Not that,” I say, trying to squirm my way out of her grip.

He tells them about my upcoming naturalization ceremony, and they all seem to understand what this means. One of them points to a cake at the end of the bar and says they were about to celebrate her birthday and we can share. Most of them seem drunk or high already, a few of them are unsteady on their long, thin heels. “Cheers.”
Clink
. Everyone does a shot for the birthday woman. A couple of the drunker
ones grab chunks of cake off their plates and try to shove some into our mouths.

The bar is nearly empty except for the women who work there, so the crowd around us keeps swelling. They're at work, so each one struggles past the others to rub various parts of their shiny bodies against ours. The so-called expat in the Harley shirt, really just an émigré like the rest of us, grows his own crowd around him. He raises a glass to us, which we awkwardly and reflexively turn away from, thinking we are somehow distinct from him (and wanting to be). The women understand better, though. They understand the commodity character their breasts and genitals bear, and that we are already in various kinds of transactions. They'd seen us walk through the door, and we weren't yet gone. Places like these are stages for what Alphonso Lingis, American philosopher, writer, and translator, refers to as the “theater of libido,” and we'd come for the performance of which the audience is always a part.

Throughout the Philippines there are populations of “Amerasians,” the name given to the unclaimed children of servicemen conceived during the almost century-long US military presence. They represent the intersections of various kinds of subjugation that are transcultural and transhistoric. The fathers are always the Americans, never the mothers. If their father is white and the child resembles him, the child might receive some benefit from an aquiline nose and lighter skin. If the child's father is black, the child will be ostracized in proportion to his or her blackness. The Department of Homeland Security recognizes and provides preferential immigration status to Amerasians from Cambodia, Korea, Laos, Thailand, or Vietnam born after December 31, 1950, and before October 22, 1982. Filipino Amerasians are excluded. The largest concentration of these paternally unclaimed Filipino offspring is in Angeles City, the center of the Philippine sex industry, and home of Clark Air Base, a former US Air Force
stronghold. The reasoning for the exclusion of Filipino Amerasians from immigration relief is that they were conceived and born during a period of occupation, which is technically considered peacetime, and that they are widely believed to have been conceived from prostitution. Recognizing them would mean tacitly recognizing that US forces participated in the sex trade for a prolonged period of time and en masse.

I'd crossed a threshold at the door of the bar with crisp bills from the ATM across the street. I'd nodded hello and thank you to the guard and his shotgun as he ensured the safety of my cash withdrawal. After the second shot of whiskey, a string of tiny blue Christmas lights bloom like hydrangeas from behind the bar. My libido has brought me here as a representative, and inside the dimly lit space I understand my desire is closer to compulsion than I had known.
L'objet petit a
—the unattainable object of desire—represented by the rising and waning rhythms of writhing bodies. A thick, very young woman approaches, and my gaze becomes fixed on the crease that runs from her inner thigh to her hip as she walks. She sits on my lap and squeezes my hardened dick. A very good man wouldn't have walked into this bar, and a good one would have left after this.