Love And Shame -- A Native Son Returns To Find Filipino Culture Emotionally Rich But Still Bowed To The West

CUTLINE: ALEX TIZON: AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AHS JUST LET OUT N THE SMALL TOWN OF SAN FABIAN IN PANGASINAN PROVINCE IN THE PHILIPPINES.

YOUNG AND OLD ALIKE USE UMBRELLAS TO SHIEDL THEMSELVES FROMTHE TANNING RAYS OF THE SUN.

Insomnia on Flight 19. Seattle to Seoul to Manila, 16 hours at just under the speed of sound. I was going back to the Philippines for the first time in 26 years and the old brain just wouldn't shut down.

Twenty-six years, I kept thinking. Twenty-six years of avoiding the issue. Now I was being hurled through space in a hunk of contoured metal across a wide ocean to pierce the very heart of the issue.

For a long time, I'd wanted to write a profile on the local Filipino community, the largest and fastest-growing ethnic group in Washington. But something always held me back. Part of it was because so many local Filipinos - about three-fourths of the community - are Philippine-born, still brimming with the language and customs of a land I knew virtually nothing about.

But much of my reluctance, I see now, came from the sense that probing into the community would mean probing into untouched corners of my own psyche. I am only still learning what it means to be Filipino.

As I looked out into the passing night, I kept thinking about one particular moment with my father years ago. I was 9 or 10, sitting cross-legged facing him. He was sitting with one hand resting on my head, the other pinching his nose. Using the tips of his thumb and forefinger, he ran his grip up and down the length of the bridge, massaging and molding it to look narrower.

``You should do this every day,'' he said. ``You are a handsome boy. But do this for 30 seconds a day and you will be even more handsome. You will look like a mestizo.'' He smiled and shook my head roughly, as he often did to his five kids to show affection.

A ``mestizo'' is an Asian or Native American with European blood. I heard the term a lot growing up. My parents and all their Filipino friends - some of whom were leaders in the Seattle Filipino community at the time - would use it as the ultimate compliment. The more European, and therefore the less Filipino, the better.

I followed my father's advice. Thirty seconds, every night before I fell asleep. But being the obsessive fool I am, I took it a few steps further and began attaching a clothespin to my nose and leaving it there all night. Sometimes it was too tight. More than once, I woke up with blood on my pillow. To make my lips thinner, more mestizo, I would suck them in and place masking tape over my mouth for hours at a time. If my parents had walked into my bedroom during those nights, they would have thought I was being held hostage. And, in a sense, I was.

My father's messages confused me, though. If a non-Filipino said anything disparaging about the Philippines or Filipinos in his presence, he would fight them - with words, fists, anything. Once, he attacked a group of five men at a restaurant after one of them had made a racist remark. He ended up in the hospital, where doctors stitched up a huge gash on his head. Somebody had broken a liquor bottle on top of it, just like in old westerns.

I don't want to portray him as a flake or a hothead. He is in most instances a reflective, judicious man. Just someone who carried around a deep ambivalence about his racial heritage. An ambivalence that was passed on to him, and eventually, on to me.

See, my family came to the U.S. in

1963 when my father, then a diplomat, was assigned to the Philippine Consulate in

Los Angeles. This was two years before the election of Ferdinand Marcos, who went on to rule the country with an iron fist

for the next two decades. I was 4 at the time.

After L.A., we moved all over the country, spending a few years in each place, finally settling in the Northwest. We lived the longest in Seattle, where my father served in the consulate for about five years. It's been my home on and off for a decade.

By the time my family became naturalized in the mid-1970s, all the children had become, as my parents would say, ``Americano.'' And we were, in many ways, your basic middle-class kids from Northwest suburbia who grew up on J.P. Patches and attended school in the Green Lake area, who joined the local Cub Scout den, played pee-wee football and cheered whenever the Sonics or Blazers won. We eventually lost our native tongue, Tagalog, and spoke English with no hint of an accent.

When people asked where I was born, I would tell them, but didn't elaborate much. My images of the Philippines and of the local Filipino community were sources of shame and embarrassment.

History class had taught me that my ancestors were beaten up and colonized by Spaniards for 400 years, by Americans for another 50, and by the Japanese for a brief period during World War II.

Newspapers had taught me that the Philippines was a Third World banana republic run by a corrupt dictator and his shoe-crazy wife. And that the Seattle Filipino community was a disjointed, ineffective bunch whose claim to fame was that two of its members, who were anti-Marcos union officials, were shot to death by a gunman somehow linked to Marcos himself - all of which spurred rumors of a seedy Filipino underworld rife with gangsters and gambling rings and who knows

what other evils.

It was good drama, but not too good for my soul. Years would pass before I learned that those were woefully incomplete pictures.

But even then, like my father, I had some amorphous, fiery thing in me that was intensely loyal to my origins - whatever they were. Even during the time I was doing silly things to

my nose, I'd gotten into a playground shoving match with a kid who'd shouted in the hallway that Filipinos ate ``dumb food.'' I mean, I wanted to be proud of my heritage. I wanted to embrace it. And defend it. All my instincts told me that I should.

Which, in short, is what led me aboard Flight 19.

I'd heard that a group of Filipino-American teachers and school administrators from Seattle were planning a two-week cultural tour of their homeland. Some of them were going back for the first time, too. The timing was right. The money was right. So, with the kind of abandon it takes to jump into a swirling unknown, I arranged to travel with the group.

My official mission was to immerse myself in the Philippines so I could begin to understand the local community. But for me and several companions on board, there was a whole other, bigger task at hand.

Andy Tangalin, principal of Seattle's Cleveland High School, was part of the group. He is a converted Northwesterner, having come originally from Chicago, moving for good to Seattle as a teen-ager. An analytical man with a gregarious laugh, Andy had to overcome his own set of ambivalences before deciding to go. At 52, he was making his first trip to the islands.

``It's time I did this. I'm confronting my own essence and it's frightening,'' he said, articulating what several of us felt. ``When I get there, I'll find out my relatives probably live in a barrio, probably are poor, probably have problems with alcohol, probably aren't influential in any way. I think I know these things already. They may just be things I don't want to validate . . . But can you really separate yourself from what you're a part of? I don't know that you can.''

It was a cloudy Saturday morning, still dark, when we began our final descent. As we approached the island of Luzon, I could barely make out the lights below. They were a strange pale yellow, arranged in unfamiliar patterns, and I wondered what they would reveal to me in the coming days. I was scared. What if I found nothing to be proud of?

On the road. Along a provincial stretch lined with fruit and vegetable stalls, someone asked our bus driver to pull over. A few of us were hungry. One by one, we stepped out into the morning light.

Humidity there has a presence. It closes in on you, weighs you down and makes you sleepy. It makes you want to rip off your clothes. The Philippines is a country of scant attire, where sweat from dawn to dusk is no disgrace.

We were immediately surrounded by child vendors waving their arms and filling the air with cries of ``Please buy.'' From behind the back of the bus, I noticed a little girl peeking out at us. She couldn't have been more than 7 or 8, but there was something about her dark eyes that made her seem older, more aware. Like the rest of them, she wore a brown burlap dress and no shoes. Around her face and arms was a thin, grayish film that looked like powder but I knew was dust off the road. She held a straw mat of corn for sale, but couldn't seem to decide whether to step forward or back, as if she had not yet decided to live this kind of life. As she lingered there, wavering like a tiny brown reed in the sun, I had to wonder what kind of choices somebody like her had.

Our eyes met once and then she was gone.

I would see other kids who would remind me of her. The corn girl. Her place in this strange world became clearer to me later in my journey.

The group spent most of the first week touring schools and historic sites around Manila, the bustling heart and capital of the country, where one block can look like downtown Bellevue and the next like a tribal village. As the days passed, we ventured farther into the provinces, the rural areas that make up most of the country. Andy kept his eye open for the legendary bananas ``as big as a man's leg'' that his father had told him about. ``Like this,'' he would say, wrapping his fingers around his thigh.

The provinces were as serene as Manila was chaotic. You could drive for hours without seeing or hearing a single machine of any kind. We passed vast stretches of rice fields, dotted occasionally by nipa huts and laborers with wide, cone-shaped hats. The flatness would be broken by groves of giant acacia trees whose outstretched branches seemed to reach right into our bus. Once in a while, we would pass a water buffalo pulling a plow or a wagon full of children. Every scene seemed to capture some essence.

``THIS (pause) is the Philippines!'' Gloria Adams would proclaim at regular intervals. It became a running joke. Every memorable scene would be punctuated by the statement, and we'd all laugh.

Gloria, head counselor at Seattle's Meany Middle School, is president of the Filipino-American Educators of Washington and was the leader of the tour. She was one of my favorite people on the trip,

always energetic and beaming with an obvious affection for the country.

It had been her home for most of her life. After college she went on to become a teacher and eventually a school principal in the Manila area. She is representative of the Filipinos who now immigrate to the Northwest in large numbers: college-educated and established in a profession - unlike before World War II, when most Filipinos came as laborers. In Washington, the number of Filipinos has almost doubled in the past decade to about 45,000. More than half live in the Puget Sound area.

And, like Gloria, most have to take a step down in rank to get jobs in their fields. Gloria, in her 50s, has been a counselor at Meany ever since she came to Seattle in 1968. For her, coming to the U.S. was worth it as long as she could afford to visit her homeland once a year.

She is a smallish, ebullient woman with pretty good timing, a flare for the dramatic and an easy, maternal way of checking up on you.

``So. What do you think of this country?'' she would ask me.

During those first days, a certain quiet overtook several of us, and I would have no answer for her. So many images were just sinking in, and no words had yet emerged. For most of the trip, we were just receptacles, waiting to be filled by the spirit of the Philippines.

From somewhere deep inside me, abstract and elusive as a dream, corny as a tired cliche, a feeling began to surface as the days passed that I had indeed come home. It was as if my whole being would say in moments of fuzzy epiphany: ``Ah-ha! Now I understand!''

It is a country of colors. I'd never seen a people so unabashedly display the full spectrum of hues, in clothing, accessories, cars, houses. Filipinos seem to have a particular fancy for blazing reds and oranges and yellows, which explained why my parents' house always had the feel of a parade about to happen. All of the Filipino houses we used to visit in Seattle were the same way.

Once, in a tiny town in the central plains of Luzon, we happened to get off in front of a school at day's end. Within moments, we were besieged by a crowd of children carrying brightly colored umbrellas. We didn't know what hit us. With all the twirling and scampering and jostling, the street became a giant kaleidoscope.

``THIS is the Philippines!''

It is a country of churches. From huge, archaic, stone buildings that grow out of

the ground, to tiny ``house'' churches that host congregations of a dozen or less. Statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus are everywhere. Religious slogans are pasted, stapled, tied on to everything from cars to pineapples. The country is predominantly Catholic, one of the legacies of the Spanish colonialists who came wielding a cross in one hand and a sword in the other.

Spain left its imprint on every facet of culture. The country is named after a Spanish monarch, King Phillip II. Many surnames are Spanish, the result of centuries of colonialists coercing their genes upon the native peoples. My last name came from my great-great-grandfather, who, according to my father, was a Spanish priest.

For the Filipino immigrant who comes to Seattle, where everything is strange and new, a Catholic church would be a home away from home. Which, I see now, is why the church plays a central role, if not in leading the Seattle Filipino community, at least in getting the members together.

Every Sunday, thousands of Filipinos fill the sanctuaries of Immaculate Conception Church in Seattle's Central Area; St. Edward's, St. Paul's and St. Peter's churches in the city's South End; and St. Theresa's Church in Federal Way. Filipinos make up the largest Catholic churchgoing ethnic group in the state.

Filipino potlucks, festivals and celebrations often revolve around one of those churches. In October, an estimated 700 people flocked to Immaculate Conception to commemorate the canonization of the first Filipino saint, St. Lorenzo Ruiz.

``It's very much a part of who we are as a people,'' says Mars Rivera, head of a Filipino lay ministry council in Seattle. ``Look back at the Edsa Revolution (which ousted Marcos and swept Corazon Aquino to power in 1986), people were praying the rosary and praying with the soldiers right on the street. We are, at our core, a very religious people.''

It is a country of many faces. During a tour of an elementary school in the heart of Manila, Andy and I peeked into one of the outdoor classrooms. Every head turned to look at us. The faces ran the gamut from the very light-skinned to the very dark, from the very Asian to the very European. Every classroom was the same.

``So what are Filipinos supposed to look like?'' Andy said later. His mother was Polish, and he had talked of incidents in Seattle when people told him that he didn't ``look'' Filipino. ``I look in that classroom and I see the whole range. What were those people talking about?''

I'd had similar experiences in the Northwest, being mistaken for anything from Chinese to Native American to miniature Samoan. I had one friend who told me, in all seriousness, that I wake up looking Asian and become more Hispanic-looking as the day goes on.

Sometimes, I don't even recognize a fellow Filipino.

On various assignments, I had seen and talked with Seattle City Councilwoman Dolores Sibonga, who has become something of a rallying point for the local Filipino community, and it took no less than a half-dozen times before I realized she was Filipino. Other prominent Seattle Filipinos, such as Maj. Romero Yumul of the Seattle Police Department and Myron Apilado, vice president of minority affairs at the University of Washington, could easily be mistaken for something other than Filipino - all of which touches on a sensitive topic in the community.

Over and over again while interviewing people for this story, I'd heard complaints of skewed media coverage of the community.

Examples: When the two union officials - Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes - were murdered in 1981, the news media portrayed it as a distinctly Filipino affair. When Filipino youths had been involved in a number of street assaults in the early '80s, the media again clearly identified them as Filipinos. Yet whenever a Filipino, such as Sibonga or Yumul, was involved in something civic-minded or otherwise positive, they were identified generically as Asians. I recently went through the news clips of the union murders, the assaults, and Sibonga's recent campaign for mayor. They corroborated the complaints.

It may seem like a trivial point, Filipino leaders say, but not to Filipinos, especially the young, who might consciously or unconsciously forge their identities with images gleaned from the media.

So the Philippines is a country of many faces, which speaks of its great diversity. But all those faces in the classroom, as beautiful as they were, also hinted at a dilemma that plagues the country and its outermost branches, including the Filipino community in Seattle.

The faces are symbolic of the scores of subcultures that make up the Philippines. Is there any hope for cohesion in a nation made up of 7,000 islands, 110 cultural groups and 70 dialects - each a separate kingdom with its own set of loyalties?

Optimists say yes. Pessimists recall Lapu-Lapu.

Chief Lapu-Lapu was the tribal leader responsible for killing Ferdinand Magellan, who first claimed the islands for Spain in the 1500s. But Lapu-Lapu never had a chance because allied with the Spanish was another island chief, Zula. From the beginning, the native people couldn't unite to fight their real enemy. If Lapu-Lapu and Zula and other chiefs had banded together to repel the Spanish, if the different regional peoples had come together to fight the Americans at the turn of the century, who knows, the islands may have taken an entirely different course in history.

Cohesion is still an intense challenge to Filipinos everywhere. I was astonished to find out there are more than 100 Filipino organizations in the Puget Sound area alone, amounting to one organization for about every 25 Filipinos. And many groups seem to have their own separate agendas. I later came to learn that a large number are cultural and regional ``clubs'' that have been simply transplanted from the Philippines.

And so you have the Visayan Circle, for immigrants from the region known as the Visayas. You have the Cebuanos of Washington, for those who hail from the island of Cebu. You have the Cagayanons of Mindanao, for people from the city of Cagayan De Oro on the country's southernmost island, and so on.

These regional groups are partly social and partly civic. The Cagayanons of Mindanao, for example, is made up of 20 immigrant families in the Puget Sound

area who meet once a month to play games and sing Cagayanon songs.

``It lets us keep contact with the people we grew up with, the people we went to school with,'' says club president Eddie Liloc. ``We exchange news of what's happening over here and over there.'' As part of the club's function, members regularly send clothes and other needed supplies back home to Cagayan De Oro. The latest project involved sending books to fill the city's library.

So there is a stalwart loyalty among local Filipinos, but it is generally defined along narrow boundaries. Like other clubs, the Cagayanons of Mindanao has no driving need to associate with other Filipino regional groups.

``That's why people in one part of the community don't really know what's happening in the other parts,'' says Gloria Adams, one of a handful of leaders quietly campaigning for one giant, effective, umbrella organization.

She and other leaders got a glimpse of the community's potential last year when, in an unprecedented show of unity, Filipino organizations together raised $80,000 for Sibonga's mayoral campaign. And again this summer, the community quickly came together to collect emergency supplies and raise more than $15,000 in relief aid for victims of the massive July earthquake that rocked Luzon.

It's too early to tell whether these were isolated instances or the beginnings of a new unity. But leaders can barely contain their anticipation of the possibilities.

In Seattle, Filipinos have the numbers to wield a 10,000-strong voting bloc, which is significant enough to swing any close

city election. ``If we could all come together, work together consistently, we could really be a powerful force,'' Sibonga later told me. ``Already, in our present state, we are starting to rattle cages.''

Rich and poor. When my mother was young, growing up in Baguio City, her family had a corps of servants. Her father was a colonel in the army who owned huge parcels of land. My mother, an only child, had her own servants, one who would fan her all through the night when it was too hot, and even one who would take spankings for her whenever she broke the rules. My mother was part of the privileged class.

She is repulsed by the whole thing now. She was born into a system that existed before her and continues today.

One academic estimates that 60 families effectively control the entire Philippine economy. The rich are very rich. Their walled-in mansions spill over with

the toys and trappings of their counterparts in the West, and more; they crawl with populations of full-time, live-in servants.

During one formal function, as I was being fanned at the dinner table by a young woman in a glowing red dress, I thought of the corn girl - that little dust-covered waif whose eyes met mine for a brief moment on a country road. It's children like her who seek escape from poverty and end up fanning guests for a living.

Those not as lucky often end up lining the streets and bars of Ermita and Olongapo, infamous red-light districts that cater mostly to American servicemen and foreign tourists. A U.N. study last year said there are at least 20,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines.

Some find other ways of living. Interspersed among the fortified palaces and Western-style office buildings in and around Manila are hundreds of squatter villages, teeming with rail-thin people in rags. The largest and most famous of these is Smoky Mountain, a community of shanties built on a massive garbage heap. Tens of thousands of people make it their home, living off whatever they can scavenge and sell. What they can't sell, they use.

I went to the mountain with a small group, and in silence we watched human beings at their lowest. The smell of 40 acres of rotting garbage was so piercing that all of us had to fight to keep from gagging. And yet there were children there playing, foraging, passing time. I thought I saw one child - a boy of 3 or 4, whose feet were sunk ankle-deep in some dark ooze - put something in his mouth. I fought back an impulse to yell ``No!'' Someone else had told me a similar story and I thought about how routine the sight must be. Men hauling makeshift wooden carts trudged up and down foot-worn paths, hardly giving us more than a glance. Several dozen yards behind the children, with slow, casual swings of her arms, a mother was hanging laundry to dry.

This is the Philippines.

Every country has something to be ashamed of. Filipinos are ashamed of Smoky Mountain. It follows them like a ghost wherever they go, and not even a trip to America or to the particularly pristine Emerald City can offer escape from it. Talk to Seattle Filipinos about Smoky Mountain, and watch them look

away and shake their heads in silence.

Getting out. The crushing poverty is what drives people to leave the country. Even the educated and highly skilled yearn to bail out.

On the flight to Manila, I met a middle-aged Filipino woman who was going home to visit family. She said she loved the Philippines but couldn't get ahead there. She had been a physician for more than two decades before immigrating to the U.S. Now she works as a lab technician in a California hospital, making six times what she made as a doctor in her homeland.

Every day, beginning hours before sunrise, hundreds of people line up at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, hoping to find deliverance in the form of a visa. The law allows people to emigrate based on an intricate system of preferences and quotas, forcing countless to wait indefinitely.

I met a bank official in Batangas province who was on a waiting list to go abroad. He told me he'd already been waiting five years and had eight more to go. His voice was filled with such longing and anticipation that it made me depressed. All his dreams hung on a ticket to America. Only eight more years.

``Yes, the migration to the States is hurting us. All the best and brightest leave. But can you blame them?'' says Eduardo Morales, a retired colonel in the Philippines army, a tall, thin man with immense dignity, who, in a few words, seemed to sum up what many felt. ``There are no opportunities here. It's every man for himself, and you don't see anything getting better. The economy is a mess, you don't have telephones that work, you don't have roads that are reliable, you don't even have electricity in many places. Why should they stay? It doesn't lead to the good life.''

I heard many references to ``the good life'' during my visit. Everybody wants it. And the mass perception is that it is in America. It's what brought Andy Tangalin's father to Chicago and then to the Northwest to work in the lumber industry. It's what brought Gloria Adams to settle in for good at Meany Middle School. It's what made my family stay 26 years ago. More Filipinos immigrate to the U.S. than almost any other group in the world.

They leave the Philippines poor and arrive poor. Which partly explains why there so far are no major Filipino-owned businesses or corporations in the Northwest while, economically, the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans continue to make impressive strides. Said one local Asian scholar: ``There's Tokyo money, there's Hong Kong money, there's Seoul money, but there ain't no such thing as Manila money.''

Wandering around Roxas Boulevard in Manila one afternoon, I spied the line of people waiting at the U.S. Embassy. I looked at their faces and tried to guess which region each came from, which dialects they spoke and where each belonged in the culture's rigid caste system. And I wondered how such a group of individuals - strong and resourceful and brave as each may have been - could ever unite to push for the interests of their homeland when the most compelling thing they shared as Filipinos was a desire to get out.

Love and shame. Having said all this, I can't fully explain why I fell in love with the country. The days went by quicker than any of

us wanted, and by trip's end, I found myself profoundly attached.

There was the sheer beauty of the countryside and its remoteness from what we call progress. ``THIS is virgin land!'' Gloria Adams would proclaim whenever we went through an especially pristine area. In traveling through entire regions that had never felt the teeth of a motorized plow or heard the razing buzz of a chainsaw, we came to see and smell and feel how landscapes can have their own kind of dignity.

And there was something about the land that seemed to extend into the people who lived on it. This is what moved me most. Everywhere, we were received by our hosts with utter generosity, and a kind of innocence that is almost obscene.

One late morning, while the group was touring a high school in Pasig, on the southeastern outskirts of Manila, I took a walk along a quiet, pockmarked road. From out of a shack came the sound of a guitar being gently strummed. I knocked on the door and introduced myself, and within minutes was playing old Beatles tunes with my new friend, Richie, while his wife and two children watched wordlessly from a few feet away. The shack was made up of one room, no bigger than a walk-in closet, with a wooden platform where all four slept. His wife, Rosie, offered me a meal and a place to stay for the night.

I asked them, out of curiosity, where I would sleep. Richie said he and his wife would sleep outside, the kids could sleep on the concrete and I could sleep on their ``bed.'' I was floored. They had known me 20 minutes.

We ran into this situation all the time: people with so little offering everything they had. My mind flashed back to the time years ago when our grandfather came to visit, and my brother and I moved out of our bedroom for him. He stayed for a year. My parents said that's just the way it was.

A historian acquaintance told me that it stems from the original Malay culture that is the foundation of the country, a culture that lifts up deference and respect for others above all other values. There are said to be mountain tribes today that still don't have words for ``weapon'' or ``war.'' And I shuddered at the thought of how the native peoples must have opened their arms to the first of the Spanish conquistadors nearly five centuries ago.

Ithink it was during my few moments with Richie that something inside me began to turn. Intellectually, I had always felt angry that colonization of any kind had ever happened. That anger began to grow teeth and horns; it walked and stalked with a new wisdom. In my mind, the weight of shame began to shift from one people to another, and I started to understand that it is not the conquered who need feel ashamed.

For the last few days of my visit, I walked around mad.

Mad at the colonizers. Mad at myself. Mad at the entire country!

I walked up and down the busiest sections of Manila and saw how so many Filipinos had not yet come to the same realization. I could see it in billboards and advertisements, posters and store mannequins, restaurants and movies, this deep yearning to escape their origins and adopt everything American: Kids wore Bruce Springsteen T-shirts and donned L.A. Lakers caps, American Top-40 tunes blasted out of passing cars and boom boxes, monster-size billboards of the movie ``Pretty Woman,'' with huge glossy images of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, stood as towering icons above the brown masses.

I could see it in the way people strived to look. The lighter-skinned, the better. Women and girls carried umbrellas to shield them from the sun, and suddenly the memory of a street-turned-into-a-kaleidoscope was no longer as beautiful. A young Filipina in her early 20s told me that she wished her complexion was lighter ``because dark skin looks dirty and white skin looks clean.'' She told me she wished her eyes were rounder and her nose narrower.

I almost asked her if she'd ever attached a clothespin to her nose, but instead just put my hands in my pockets and took the next bus home.

An entire people held hostage, I thought, hostage to an unreachable ideal, a lost cause. This is the Philippines: a country of people who pay little homage to their own strengths - their resilience and perseverance. Their potential, which bubbles up even in the most dire of circumstances.

The country bows to the West.

You can see it in the way Filipinos cling to the two massive U.S. military bases on the islands, Subic and Clark, whose leases run out next year. The nation's brightest minds for years have said the bases must be dismantled and removed if the country is ever to truly belong to Filipinos. But

polls have shown the majority of the people want the bases to stay. Why?

Explanations abound. Here's one: ``For so many years, we have been taught to see Americans as the saviors of the Philippines,'' says Greg Castilla, a Filipino activist living in the Seattle area. Born and raised in the Philippines, Castilla described himself as a typical product of the Filipino educational system, which was put in place by Americans during their half-century as colonialists.

``Everything is taught from a U.S.-centered point of view,'' he says. ``We were taught to appreciate apples, and we don't even have apples. We sang Jack and Jill, and I never knew who Jack and Jill were. We all grew up appreciating things American, rather than things Filipino. What it's molded is a Filipino who is pro-American rather than pro-Filipino. This is the tragedy.''

His words rang in my ear. They brought all sorts of vague notions to a crystalline point. This kind of ``education,'' joined with the sweeping cultural urge to be something other than Filipino, molded my parents, and through them, molded me. It probably molded much of what is now the Seattle Filipino community, that multi-headed sleeping giant with no name.

The realization settled into me that, in a way, I and the community to which I wanted to belong were really microcosms of the Philippines itself: a body wounded, torn and searching for identity. At the end of my journey, I was able to peer clear-eyed, perhaps for the first time, into the soul of the ambivalence that had haunted me for so long.

CHRISTINE COX IS A SEATTLE TIMES NEWS ARTIST.