Halfway down the Danube

Balikbayan guest blogging 5: Back in Batangas

HDTD's man in the Philippines, Noel Maurer, continues guest-blogging, this time on the effects of the medical brain drain on the Philippines. (This might be of interest to our new Armenian readers. Welcome! Compare! Contrast! We're all in this together.)

On Wednesday I spoke to Dr. Maria Lorenzo, a prominent researcher at the Philippine National Institutes of Health. The PNIH is located in an old shambling colonial era building—which in the Philippines means the Depression or thereabouts: 1930, not the nineteenth century. The facilities are rather run down. The research they do there, however, is excellent.

One of the Philippines’ big worries is the loss of skilled personnel, particularly in health care. Health care workers make up only about a quarter of all skilled emigrants—but that’s the only statistic about the outflux that isn’t impressive. There are roughly 200,000 practicing doctors and 300,000 registered nurses in the Philippines. Approximately 130,000 nurses (many of whom had trained as doctors) work abroad. Britain’s National Health Service, in particular, is having a field day, now that they’ve sucked all the professionals out of the West Indies like a giant socialist vacuum cleaner.

In fact, the U.K. is particularly clever about aproveching — yes, that’s Spanglish, but it’s a good word [Lou Dobbs would prefer you use the word 'poaching' here -- CY] — the American education legacy. They recruit entire operating room teams, the whole kit-and-caboodle, something they were never able to do in their own former colonies. As a result, the number of heart operations in the country has halved in the last two years. As a result, hospitals in Davao, in Mindanao, have received no new residents for two years, and 300 of 800 government-run hospitals have, in an interesting turn of phrase, “less than one doctor.”

Even Australia has now gotten in on the act—according to Philippine officials, they’ve asked for help (which the Philippines is, in fact, providing) in recruiting twenty thousand doctors over the next few years. That’s a lot in a country that graduates only about 3,000 new doctors every year.

(Anglosphere, schmanglosphere, that’s our ex-empire you’re messing with! Go pick on East Timor, willya?)

The Philippines being an entrepreneurial place, supply has risen to meet demand. Since the year 2000, the number of nursing schools in the Philippines has doubled, to 460. Of those 460, however, only 12 had a pass rate above 90 percent (the government standard); 32 had a pass rate below 30 percent and are about to be closed. The overall pass rate is down to half, from 80% in the 1990s. The PNIH is trying to capture the bad schools before the steal their students’ hard-earned money, but it’s an uphill battle for a bureaucracy as... ah... disorganized as the Philippines.

For example, when the Commissioner for Higher Education ordered the failing schools to close, President Arroyo ordered them to reopen. The commissioner resigned on the spot, but the schools have remained open. Jaime Galvez Tan—who speaks Spanish, to my surprise—explained to us at lunch in a traditional Filipino restaurant in Malate that some of the failing schools were owned by a Congressional ally of the President, and facing impeachment and military coups, she needs all the help she can get.

And so, Raul took our black Camry to Batangas. We took the South Luzon Expressway—the Slex—to Calamba, where we got lost looking for the Southern Tagalog Arterial Road. The interchange isn’t quite done yet, and Philippine road signs are actually, in a surprise, worse than Mexico’s. Along the way we got a wonderful taste of both the Philippines’ healthy lack of historical memory and the decline of the American Empire—giant rising suns decorated the overpasses. Who do you think put up the money for the road? No points.

I know you know this, Noel, but the nucleus of Davao City in Mindanao -- over a million people and still booming -- crystallized around the efforts of Japanese settlers in the early 1900s.

Traffic on the rural roads was fairly heavy.

Anyway, we got to Batangas, a ramshackle town in southwestern Luzon where the Japanese have built a container port. The thing with Luzon is that houses cluster along rural roads far more than elsewhere because there are relatively so few of them, which can give you the impression that you’re continually traveling through heavily populated urban areas when you are, in fact, out in the middle of nowhere. So it’s hard to say where Batangas City begins. Anyway, we got into town—and the center is a bunch of very impressively maintained government buildings that date back to the American administration—and with some help from passers-by, we got to the Batangas regional hospital.

The hospital has about 250 beds, and usually runs over 90 percent occupancy, except during the rainy season, when it spikes to 150 as the tropical disease victims roll in. As you can imagine, it’s a low-overhead operation. 70 percent of the patients are “charity,” which truly means charity, since most of the paying patients are there courtesy of the mandatory national health insurance program—which only covers workers in the formal sector.

A very nice woman, Dr. Eleanor Gamo, showed us around the hospital. She mentioned that the hospital had been built by the Americans in 1927. She pointed out maternity tables that had been left by the Americans in 1946. But she talked about the Americans as if it had been a long-ago aid mission, not a colonial regime. She was angry that the building hadn’t been renovated until last year. (The interior looked like the set from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, only for real.) But either she was so angry that she lost control of the English language or her grasp of it is not as strong as you might expect. I don’t know if that reflected quality.

A neurosurgeon, Dr. Domingo, did speak perfect English; but he commented on how great it was for his private practice in Manila, if not-so-great for the country, that so many of the great English-speaking doctors wound up leaving the country.

I spotted a group of white-clad nurses grabbing lunch outside. (Old-fashioned white nursing outfits, too, with the funny hats that I’ve only seen in World War II movies, you know, the ones that look like they’re about to fall off the back of the head.) Since I’m here investigating the brain drain, I figured I should go over and talk to them. The female nurses seemed to speak in giggles, but there was one rather overweight male nurse, and he was willing to talk to me... sort of. He spoke English, but there was just this off-key quality to it; his replies were often non-sequiturs. [not saying anything here. -- CY] It turned out that they were students from a nursing school in Quezon Province.

Again, I can’t judge quality. The uniforms were very clean. I grew up in the Eighties, so that counts for something. Right, Mr. Crystal?

Still, the hospital was only depressing to someone less jaded than I am—while sad, it wasn’t clear to me that the “brain drain” was the cause of the poor quality of the facilities. The issue is complex. What is clear is that there is plenty of room for gains from trade.

For example, the U.K., while it raids the Philippines with the official aid of the Philippine government, it funds nursing and medical schools in South Africa. The cost of medical school in the Philippines is about $650,000 pesos for a four-year course: that’s only $13,000, much less than the cost of educated someone in the British Isles. (At a public university, a student would pay only about $900 of that cost.)

So why not in the Philippines? The problem, it seems, is that the Philippines is an English-speaking country in the wrong neighborhood. The ties with the U.S. are fading, but the other English-speaking countries aren’t interested in investing in the fine educational infrastructure that the U.S. left behind.

So the islands are on their own. For now. If we were smart, we’d spend on public health in places like Mindanao; win lots of friends here and strike an inexpensive propaganda blow in the Global War On Terror. But we’re the United States, and our sense of history (and increasingly, our politics) takes a right turn after our encounter with the Philippines.

But that’s for another post. Plus, I never did talk about Payatas. So I’ll be back.

First days

Oh, my. It took me two days and about 50 trials to dial up to this particular service. It's SLOW but you know what? I'm so happy to have a connection at all that I don't even mind how bad it is!

So quickly, before I lose this connection (I hesitate to go offline and write because who knows when I will succeed to dial up again) -- here some impressions from our first days in Armenia.

-- We can see the Ararat from our house! Well, from the bathroom window, anyway. And only the northern ridge. But it looked really beautiful in a reddish-golden glow of a spectacular sunrise this morning. Hm.

-- Speaking of the sun, we saw the eclipse yesterday! Everything was perfect, the sky was clear, the sun was bright, and then it got all dark and coolish and we could see perfect crescents with our holed papers. The kids especially liked the wacky shadows. Doug and I thought it was very cool.

-- Even the off-season tomatoes are good here.

-- Now that I'm finally connected to the world again, I feel less isolated.

-- We are eating parsley from the garden, freshly picked by Alan. He declared parsley-picking to be his new duty...

-- Doug is working a lot. But he seems to like it, so that is good.

More later, or so I hope!

Balikbayan guest blogging 4: Chillaxing on the volcano, or, the end of empires

Another missive from HDTD's man in the Philippines, Noel Maurer. Warning, it's a long one...

I am sitting on a cliff overlooking a volcano sticking out of a lake, and contemplating the end of empires.

I’d like to claim that the reason for that is the fact that I am being serenaded by a three-man band in mariachi suits singing an off-key rendition of “La Bamba.” Is there an image that better captures the colonial history of the Philippine Islands?

The United States, I assure you, is the only other country on the planet in which you might find an “eatería.”

Anyway, I am contemplating the end of empires, in this case America’s empire in the Philippines.

That empire did not end in 1946. In some ways, U.S. power in the Philippines grew after independence. The postwar Parity Act, for example, removed most of the restrictions on private American investment in the Philippines that Washington had imposed during the colonial era. [yes, Washington did things like that, once upon a time. -- CY]

Better yet, for those of you who might think that Philippine protectionism was a blow to Dread Empire, it turns out that it was a highly resented U.S. trade mission in 1950 that foisted the entire edifice on a Philippine government that would have greatly preferred to retain free trade. In fact, the “Special Economic and Technical Mission in the Philippines” in the 1950s had more control over Philippine economic policy than the colonial regime had since 1907.

In a more traditional imperial manner, the Armed Forces of the Philippines not only defeated Communists at home, but were capable of sending 7,000 combat troops to Korea when Uncle Sam asked. Today, of course, American troops helped the ARP neutralize Abu Sayyaf and provided aid after the recent landslides, and everyone seems to have an “uncle in the U.S. Navy.”

But the empire is fading. America seems to be withdrawing from this country. The United States seems much further away than it does in El Salvador or Panama, and I don’t mean geographically.

You first see it in little signs, things that might not be obvious to most visitors, but which stand out to anyone who has spent time in Latin America, or at least Latin America north of the Panama Canal.

It starts with the use of the word “Asian.” Everything is Asian. The commercials brag about “Asian” products. The new malls tout themselves as Asian. Stranger still, whenever somebody points out something odd or interesting about the Philippines—even the most astoundingly Latin American things—they’ll smile and say something like, “Now you know what it’s like in an Asian country” or “That’s how we do things in Asia.”

Me, I always used to agree with President Fidel Ramos—the Philippines is a Latin American country in the wrong hemisphere. And when I first got here I was strongly reminded of San Salvador, only bigger. The architecture, in fact, is if anything even more American than anywhere south of the Río Bravo. But after a week I’m clear that the Philippines are not in the same orbit as Latin America.

Noel, I’ve found Filipinos often use “Asian” as an adjective to describe things they believe aren’t derived from the West. Since Filipino culture has the very American tendency to gloss over the actual details of history — unlike some nations, whose inhabitants hold onto history like grim death — this can lead to some very WTF moments. But General Ramos went to West Point, where they do not stint on history, and I think he was very aware of the possibility he might become the Philippines’ first caudillo... and if my read on his character is correct, he didn’t like that idea at all.

Take musical tastes. Them Filipinos, they do like the hip-hop, at least in a poorer part of Mandaluyong City where Lil’Kim (Lil’Kim? Yeah, Lil’Kim) blared from a boom box. And they play 50 Cent in the hotel gym. But that’s not representative. Filipino pop music is, to an American ear, an unlistenable slop of odd melodies and slow beats. Imagine a world where pop peaked with Electric Light Orchestra.

But the really popular foreign artists come from Korea and Japan, not Brooklyn or southern California. And it shows in the way people dress. There are no baggy pants, no chains, no track suits, nada. Nor is there stringy hair and ripped jeans. Or black nail polish and combat boots. None of the typical American pop subcultures can be found, in rich neighborhoods or poor.

The contrast with, say, Zacatecas City in Mexico, is striking. Carlos knows why I picked Zacatecas, but you can say the same about almost anywhere in Latin America. There, the rock is as good, the hip-hop is much better, and the Latin music is... uh... the same Latin music. Even the schlocky pop and the embarrassing (but addictive) Euro-techno-electro-dance-whatever is recognizable in Latin America—it may not be on MTV, but you’ve heard it in a car commercial. That’s not true in the Philippines. I mean, nobody here even knows what reggaetón is. That’s just un-American.

Ahem. I’ve seen the signs for reggaetón in NYC, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard any. Be that as it may, one of the Philippines’ most noticeable human exports used to be musicians for the supper clubs of Asia. Lounge acts and saxophonists, no kidding. The point of reference you want is not ELO, but the Captain and Tennille singing “Feelings” to a background of Kenny G. Haven’t you karaoke’d there yet? I'm shocked.

Considering that I’m here on business, I also can’t help noticing the strange business card ritual. You whip out the card, hold it without both hands so that the other fellow can read it, and hand it over with a little bow. If there’s a business card ritual in the other hemisphere, I bloody well never noticed it. But it’s the norm all over Asia.

As far as I know, this is recent in the Philippines, Asia’s last holdout regarding this custom, which I believe was modified from fin-de-siecle British practice.

It’s more difficult for me to talk randomly to people than it is in Latin America. [Noel speaks Spanish fluently, and if memory serves he can get along in Brazilian Portuguese. -- CY] The reason is that the general level of English is poor. Surprisingly poor. All the newspapers are in English. Most of the signs are also in English, even in the slums. Yet I’ve overheard only two conversations between Filipinos occurring in that language; one here at this resort, the other in a bookstore in the astoundingly upscale Rockwell area of Makati City. (The bookstore had the very Filipino name of “Fully Booked.” One thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the Filipino love of a bad pun.)

Nevertheless, 'more difficult' isn’t impossible. The fellow we hired to drive us around, Raul Relente, introduced me to his friends and family. And here’s what I found: they all have relatives in the States. Most would like to move there. But most would like to move anywhere that is neither poor nor predominately Muslim. The U.S. is just another country.

Raul is particularly angry about the perceived decline of English in the Philippines, believing that it’s robbing his children of opportunity. “Tagalog will not go anywhere! Tagalog will not disappear! They are not going to forget how to speak Tagalog!”

While Raul’s command of English is excellent, he’s mostly self-taught and his accent takes some getting used to. And while English is more than just another language here, its level in the Philippines may be deteriorating. I’ve heard this complaint over and over, from journalists to academics to politicians.

English could disappear. [and why not? it happened to Spanish. -- CY] People could forget how to speak English. In fact, I’ve seen it happen on national television, where the head of the National Bureau of Investigation started to stumble for words during an interview, and the announcers switched to Filipino without realizing it.

Of course, it’s hard to say what the real trend is. Marcos strongly discouraged English, and switched the schools over to Tagalog. Cory Aquino continued the policy. Nevertheless, the 2000 census reported that 64% of all Filipinos over age 5 can speak English, up from a reported 52% in 1980. What we don’t know, however, is the quality of English.

Responding to President Arroyo’s recent decision to re-emphasize English in the public schools, the Department of Education administered an English diagnostic test to about 60,000 teachers... and has since refused to release the results.

My take on the Filipino linguistic situation is that it’s not bilingualism, but diglossia. Two languages are used, but each in its own social context. (The literature on the subject sometimes talks about “high” or “prestige” versus “low” languages. I find this terminology carries its own toxic set of assumptions.)

In the Philippines, English is not primarily used as a lingua franca, but as the language in which one discusses, um, the matters one discusses in English. It’s the technical language par excellence. It’s the language of journalism and Scrabble and international gossip. You don’t use it to converse by itself, but as a specific mode to convey certain types of information.

You can see how this might not quite correspond to what a modern language educator would consider fluency.

Also, there’s a lot of code-switching in Filipino conversation. One language will be used to convey sincerity, and then there’ll be a sudden switch to another to discuss business, and possibly even another switch to a third for other subjects. Think of the French conversations in War and Peace. It’s like that.

In the past few years, policy has changed back towards encouraging English, but the idea is not to retain ties with the United States. It’s to compete better with other Asian nations. If the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (J-PEPA, “jay-pepa”) with Japan comes through—which I tend to doubt, but more on that later—Japanese might be more relevant. (My driver Raul has three sisters who are married to Japanese men, with ten Japanese-born and Japanese-speaking children between them. They don’t speak English; they’ve all moved to Japan.)

I met the Philippines’ chief negotiator with Japan, Thomas Aquino, on Friday. He had a lot of very interesting things to say, but two things stand out. The first was during a discussion of investor protection in J-PEPA. He mentioned that the Japanese are very different than the Americans … and more attuned to the Philippines. “The USTR came down hard on is on intellectual property; they wanted to see prosecutions. But we’re more Asian: the courts are used more to get a feel for the other guy’s negotiating position before going to an out-of-court settlement.”

(He’s half-right. The Japanese are trying their best to be attuned to Philippine sentiment, but the particular use of the courts that Mr. Aquino describes is not particularly Asian—it’s common to any country where personal relationships can’t cover everything and the courts still don’t work very well.)

He went on to say, “The feeling that people have about the U.S. is that it’s just there. The U.S. expects us to be an ally like Britain, but we’re just not that close.”

And that’s true. You know what the kicker is? No anti-Americanism. The place just suffered an attempted coup, a Senator is on lam, American troops are still roaming around the far countryside, and nobody, not in the papers, not on the TV, is ranting about Washington.

That Latin American style of anti-Americanism certainly has existed in the Philippines, but I think — and I could be entirely off-base here — that it’s now viewed as rather quaint, like tie-dyed love-beaded hippie protestors are in the U.S.

Of course, all this could really be nothing more than my Latin American background. I’ve spent most of my time either in the United States or in a region where it dominates everything, from pop culture to politics. When the informal American empire cracks in that hemisphere, you see it happening. It involves tear gas, oil prices, and really long speeches on television. But here, in the Philippines, the United States just seems to be slowly fading away, to be replaced by an inchoate “Asianness.” So maybe it’s all a case of inflated expectations that I didn’t even know that I had.

There are lots of ways the fading of U.S.-Philippine links could change. Call centers and business process outsourcing could tie the economy back across the Pacific. The country could do something to really piss America off and bring the empire charging right back. Or the U.S. could start to cultivate the ties it’s allowed to fade since the first EDSA revolution. It could happen.

After all, can a country that can produce this really ever break its ties with the homeland of Orange County, California?

Truly, madly, TMI

I was searching on the Internet for an explanation why brushing my teeth has become so much more exciting for me lately, when I found this how-to guide. Yikes. (I also found a possible solution to my problem -- use a toothbrush with a smaller head. We will see. Update: well, that didn't work.)

On a related note, I think I shocked Doug when he was in D.C. by pointing out to him the new wave of lurid young adult novel titles. My favorite title still has to be Sloppy Firsts, which is more innocent than it sounds... but then, it kind of has to be, doesn't it? I'm fond of Shelley Stoehr's oeuvre -- young adult novels about self-mutilation, life in a Mafia family, life as a runaway topless dancer, and teenage lesbian stalkers -- just because they exist.

On a lighter note: pikachu! No link; I just like saying it. Pikachu!

Arrived

We have arrived for good. Yesterday morning, at 4:35 a.m., we made landfall at Yerevan Airport which is, incidentally, not a recommended airport. Think "Deep Space Nine" built by Communists without a good plan. It's that bad.

However, here we are. We had a great spring day yesterday, and walked the boys around a lot to tire them out. It didn't work. Meaning, they did get tired and complained a lot, but by the time we came back to the hotel, they perked right up and proceeded to watch DVDs for the rest of the evening. Jet lag in toddlers and small children is a horrible thing...

We are also battling adjusting to the high altitude and extreme dryness: dizziness, nose bleeds, fatigue, thirst. Jacob's way of dealing with this is to nurse nonstop. Ouch - he has two teeth now.

Now, here's a problem: we move into our new house tomorrow and Internet access from there is abominable. Dial-up and bad telephone lines will make my internet life quite miserable. Doug will have good enough internet access in his office but since he already works his second day here, on the weekend, I anticipate him being very, very, very busy indeed.

But don't go away quite yet, we'll find a way. Promised.

(Oh, and the local red wine is really nice! Thought you'd like to know that...)

Balikbayan guest blogging 3: Manila, finally

Like Magellan (but not), our intrepid guest blogger Noel Maurer makes landfall in the Philippines:

Ninoy Aquino International... Bus Terminal. Actually, it’s not as bad as the build-up. [hah! -- CY] The linoleum is a little frayed, and the lighting is a little harsh, but it works. The airport’s problems go a little deeper than the décor.

You see, there are three terminals here at Ninoy Aquino. The shiny new international terminal is reserved for Philippine Air Lines. Now, Philippine Air Lines is not one of the planet’s great air carriers. The airline’s owner is Lucio Tan. I hesitate to speak badly of Lucio Tan. (I lived in Mexico during the bad old days; I know how these things work.) Let’s just say that after he bought PAL in 1992, a group of senators signed a petition demanding that the deal be undone, and the Ramos Administration spent the next six years unsuccessfully attempting to prosecute Mr. Tan for everything from tax fraud to influence peddling.

Under President Estrada—who yesterday took the witness stand for the first time in his five-year-long corruption trial—Tan got the government to go to bat for PAL in a dispute with two Taiwanese airlines. The government lost when Taiwan stopped accepting Filipino guest workers, but Tan managed to preserve PAL’s monopoly over the shiny new terminal.

There is a reason that I didn’t fly PAL, despite its non-stop service from California and comfortable arrival area.

(I would think there are several.)

The domestic terminal is also a bit run-down and in need of replacement. It too is dominated by Philippine Air Lines. But here’s the fun part: there is no legal way for a passenger to get from the old international terminal to the old domestic terminal without leaving the airport. You can see the damn building, but you can’t get there from here.

And leaving the airport is not as simple as it appears. You need to flag down a jeepney, take a ten minute ride outside the perimeter fence, get off, and flag down another jeepney. This is good for the jeepneys. This used to be good for Philippine Air Lines. This is not so good for the Philippine tourist industry.

Jeepneys, for those of you who do not know, are colorfully decorated SUVs that seem to be completely hand-made. I’m not sure of the structure of the, ah, industry... but I imagine that somebody knows somebody because Manila’s very efficient (and totally misnamed—it’s a full-fledged metro) light rail system stops right outside the airport. In fact, the train yards are right outside the perimeter fence. But it just doesn’t quite make it. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation.

And so, there is no way to transfer from an international flight to a domestic connection without a trip on a crowded jeepney, which is, I’m sure, exactly what Chinese and Japanese tourists want to do on their way to a tropical vacation.

I later asked Sonny Coloma — Corazon Aquino’s chief-of-staff — about the airport. He laughed. Then he wiped his eyes and laughed again. After which we discussed jeepney manufacturing and basketball. Apparently, March Madness doesn’t penetrate here much, but people have strong opinions about the NBA. Are the current Knicks the worst team in pro basketball, or the worst team in pro basketball ever?

The Knicks are a less depressing topic than Philippine politics, you see.

Anyway, there was a sign at the airport reminding me of just why I’m here. In addition to the special lane, there were posters congratulating “our returning heroes,” the Overseas Filipino Workers. It was just like coming back into the United States, only with no yellow ribbons, light green-gray uniforms, or wheelchairs.

Looks like I didn’t get around to the food or the garbage dump. More to come.

Oh, and thank you, Bernard and Carlos. I will avoid the fish from now on.

Dude. You'd eat seafood in Venice, right? But the Veneto (and hell, probably Tito) dumped a lot more in the Adriatic than Metro Manila ever has in the bay. (For now, anyway.)

Let me post a recipe from Alan Davidson's Seafood of South-East Asia. It's for stuffed milkfish, and Davidson was the go-to guy for international seafood cookery.

I detect in this recipe a clear echo of Mediterranean techniques for stuffing fish, of which the archetypical version may well be uskumru dolmasi, the Turkish recipe for stuffed mackerel. Turkish and Levantine influences reached round the coast of North Africa and into Spain; which make account for stuffed-fish recipes which I found in Tunisia and for the enthusiasm with which Spanish cooks prepare merluza rellena (stuffed hake, the hake being one of their favorite fish). It seems reasonable to suppose that the Filipino practice represents the same tradition applied to the most plentiful and suitable of the Filipino fish.

There are two ways of preparing the fish for being stuffed, difficult and less difficult... the less difficult is as follows. Gut the fish in the ordinary way, taking care not to perforate the abdominal wall. Then make a cut right along the back of the fish, from head to tail, open it carefully, snip the backbone at both ends and life out all flesh and bones. If you use this technique you will of course have to sew up the back or otherwise secure it in place after stuffing the fish.

1 milkfish of about 3/4 kilo
salt
cooking oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped very fine or crushed
1 onion, finely chopped
3 medium tomatoes, finely chopped
1 tablespoonful butter
2 medium potatoes, cubed and fried
2 tablespoonfuls of peas, fresh or canned
2 tablespoonfuls raisins
2 eggs, beaten (or the yolks of 3 eggs, beaten)
flour

Prepare the fish [as described above] and simmer all the meat from it in a small quantity of salted water. When it is done, finish flaking it and removing all the bones.

Meanwhile heat the cooking oil in a pan and saute the garlic, onion, and tomatoes therein for a few minutes. Add the flaked fish, with seasoning, and continue cooking for another 5 minutes or so. Transfer the cooked mixture to a bowl and add the butter, potatoes, peas, raisins, and beaten egg. Mix all well together and then stuff the fish with it.

The stuffed fish is then to be dredged with flour and fried in hot oil until it is well browned. It may be garnished with celery sticks (kinchay) and lemon wedges.

I should add that there are those who recommend that the skin of the fish, after it has been emptied and while it is waiting to be stuffed, should be marinated in a mixture of calamansi juice, soy sauce, and pepper.

The calamansi juice is good, of course, but what makes it really Filipino is the deep-frying. Maybe some banana ketchup.

Balikbayan guest blogging 2: still in Hong Kong

Noel is now in the Philippines, in lovely Makati City, after touring the lock-down garbage dumps of Payatas. We continue with his sojourn in Hong Kong:

Asian food. Isn’t. Asian. Although it seems to be food.

For dinner during my stopover in Hong Kong, Mike Chen and his lovely Malaysian wife, Joyce, took me out to dinner in Kowloon. We neither drove nor took the subway; rather, we hopped the old-fashioned ferry. And it’s seriously old-fashioned. Two decks of stomach-churning fun for the whole family. The upper deck is called “first class,” but the main difference seems to be that the seats are more comfortable downstairs.

Think the Staten Island Ferry with anorexia. Very much not like the rest of Hong Kong. Mike tells me that the ferry’s one concession to modernity is that they no longer roll down the doors and lash them to the deck. He misses the bells they used to ring. I told him that it was only a matter of time before they realize that they can charge more if they bring ‘em back.

Yes, it’s private. Hong Kong, you see, is a libertarian wet dream. Well, other than the government’s land monopoly and the tight business regulation and the strict zoning laws. And the social insurance scheme that pays single parents up to US$1100 a month should an industrial accident befall their spouse. (Yes, regardless of the spouse’s sex.) Oh, right, and the socialized medicine. So other than the monopoly and the regulation and the social insurance, it’s a libertarian paradise. I am reminded of the Monty Python bit about the Romans.

And this despite my attempts to keep HDTD a Python-free zone.

Anyhoo, the ferry got us to Kowloon across what’s left of the harbor. They’ve been filling it in the way American coastal cities used to, before we decided that it was easier to build freeways out to the horizon. Not that I’d notice, but Mike complained about it.

And so, Kowloon, with its Blade Runner ambience. Neon, crowded sidewalks, slow-moving bubble-shaped cars, kids playing handball despite the crowds, and teenage girls with brightly-colored gravity-defying hairdos and really weird patterned stockings. Actually, a lot of it really does seem like lower Manhattan, only shinier. I asked Mike if I could catch the subway uptown to see where the Puerto Ricans lived, and to his everlasting multicultural credit, he laughed. We went to a restaurant atop a mid-rise building that overlooked the skyline of Hong Kong Island across the bay. The restaurant itself was meant to evoke a traditional Chinese alleyway, but never having been in a traditional Chinese alleyway myself, it was lost on me.

Pigeon. Avoid. Especially the “drunken” pigeon. Apparently that means you should only try it if you are drunk. Which I may have become, since I quite literally had to swig my Tsingtao and swallow it whole to keep from experiencing the joys of reverse peristalsis. Of course, it was my own damn fault. I ordered the stuff. Having grown up in New York, getting my revenge on one of those sky rats seemed eminently satisfactory. It wasn’t, although whether it was the gamy taste or the fact that the eyeless cooked head seemed to be oxymoronically staring up I me, I couldn’t tell.

Snake, not so bad after the pigeon. But not to be repeated.

Meanwhile, the other dishes, while more edible, lacked that “Asian” flavor you get in Chinese and Thai restaurants back in the U.S. of A. I asked: they use MSG, so that’s not it. Everything just seemed to vaguely taste like shellfish, except the crab cakes, which tasted like meatloaf. I have no explanation.

The next day, it was off to Chep Lap Kok and Manila. Getting to the airport: smooth. (That train. Wow. US$23 round trip, but still wow.) Getting through the airport: smooth, except for the fact that I’m me. My carry-on, you see, was too large, and the very official woman at the gate would not let me take it through without checking it. “It’s for your safety, sir,” said the little luggage fascist. What was I to do? I checked it, a remarkably painless procedure … and no, the people at Cathay Pacific never asked what class I was flying before directing me to the right counter. They smiled, took it, and yes, it showed up in Manila with no problem. That said, the Latin in me ranted and raged all the way through emigration and the security check, and the American in me wondered why the AC wasn’t turned all the way up to meat-locker like at home.

Both the Latin and the American have found Manila mucho mas gemutlich, on both counts.

I killed time in the Cathay Pacific lounge talking with a German-American fellow on his way to Bangkok on an assignment with an environmental cleanup consulting firm—based, unsurprisingly, in Buffalo, New York, and perhaps that city’s last export industry.

Mañana I will discuss my impressions of Manila—and the food, and the airport, in which I did not thankfully have to sleep—but here I’d just like to leave you with a picture of the bay I snapped as we landed. Anyone know what those squares are?

Noel, I've wondered about those squares myself. Anyone?

Monday special guest balikbayan blogging!

We have a guest blogger this week! Noel Maurer is travelling to the Philippines for arcane work-related reasons, and he is sending his observations on to me, who in turn am sending them on to you, one of our thirty-seven remaining readers. Here he is in Hong Kong. Enjoy!

... Cathay Pacific is a very nice airline. Of course, I was flying first class [bastard. -- CY] — but the automatic upgrade when seats are available is part of why it’s a very nice airline. You’re greeted by these hostesses wearing spray-painted green evening gowns. Then, at your seat, a tall fellow in a shiny purple suit and a petite woman in a bright red miniskirt give you pretty much whatever you want. It sort of felt like a Prince video. (Well, whatever you want that can be mentioned on a G-rated blog, so don’t ask for **** ** * *******.)

Chep Lap Kok really isn’t the best name for an airport, but it is a very good airport. The moving sidewalks are broad. And the police wear these bitchen uniforms, the height of 21st-Century neofascist chic, black suits with a belted jacket and baggy slacks that make ‘em look cool instead of like bus drivers. And unlike Great Britain, they didn’t feel the need to carry intimidating and utterly useless automatic weapons on slings.

Of course, the poor Ethiopian couple in the immigration line ahead of me suffered from a rather intimidating interrogation by these guys; me, I just got waved through. Customs doesn’t seem to exist. There were some more extras from V for Vendetta sitting at their desks, but they didn’t stop a soul.

Past customs, the airport is also a shopping mall, but unlike Heathrow the designers seem to have thought things through and not set up the shops to deliberately gum up the airport’s function. Crowds, huge crowds, but things flowed. I bought a ticket on the MTR and headed downtown. But first, I reset my watch for Hong Kong time, which seems to be about 25 years ahead.

The train, the Silver Line it ain’t. It whizzes past modern high-rises and swooping expressways and is full of shiny modern people wearing everything from business suits to indescribable Japanese fashions. Three stops, 20 minutes, and right to a train station where the airlines will check in you in.

Unfortunately, my cabby to the hotel wasn’t very talkative. I mean, it’s a union rule that cabbies are supposed to say eminently quotable things to foreign tourists. You can’t go ten blocks in Buenos Aires without hearing either a long philosophical disquisition on the country’s sad sad decline—or the similiarly sad decline of La Boca soccer club, which is almost as tragic to your typical porteño cabbie—and the Mexico City hacks love to complain about crime, AMLO, and how unfair it is that you need to know English in order to get a good job these days. But this Hong Kong fellow? Nada. So either he only learned a few stock phrases of perfectly-pronounced British English and had no idea what I was saying, or he just plain didn’t like me.

After 25 hours on airplanes, he probably had reason not to like me.

So, Hong Kong. Neon! Buildings! Cool-assed overpasses! Bridges in the sky! Bridges in the sky! Unlike, say, Boston, Hong Kong looks the way the future is supposed to look. Which is to say, like Minneapolis, only with brighter lights and far better fashion sense.

No, let me be clearer. Hong Kong Island looks the way the future is supposed to look. Kowloon looks like downtown Brooklyn. But with far more colorful people. And lots of kids. Little girls playing what looked like rock-paper-scissors in Cantonese, little boys running around and yelling at 9:30pm.

I know, the statistics say that Hong Kong has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, the Hong Kongers apparently having decided to solve the dilemma of immigration from the mainland by going extinct. They seem to make up for it by letting the kids run around wherever they want, unlike the way us rabbit-like Americans have high fertility, but make it so you’d never guess by wrapping our 2.1 kids in a protective cocoon and never letting ‘em out without full body armor.

Now I’ve got a plane to Manila to catch, so I’ll be off. More on Hong Kong, real Chinese food, and (assuming I get there safely) the Philippines next time.

Noel, if you end up sleeping on the concrete floor in the outside alcove to the domestic wing of Manila International Airport, don't forget to tip the men's room attendants. They'll let you wash up. Also, there's Dum-Dum Airport, outside Calcutta, not to be confused with Wack Wack Golf Course, outside Manila, which you could land a plane on.

Sad House

The house looks sad. There are piles everywhere -- a car pile, an airship pile, a "this goes only to Germany" pile. Already, the house doesn't look like it's being lived in anymore.

Tomorrow morning, the packers will come and take everything that isn't in the car by then. We will spend one more lonely night in an empty house, without internet access, a camping adventure for the kids. Then it's off to Germany in the car, and to Yerevan next weekend.

It's the end of a chapter in our lives. We had wonderful times in this house, and we had difficult times. We rejoiced over the birth of David and Jacob, and we mourned the loss of Benjamin. We saw Alan walk out of the door to his first day of school, and we heard David speak his first word. We felt safe during earthquakes and sheltered against snow storms. We had friends over for Thanksgiving dinners and for board game evenings. We had a big Christmas tree in the corner, Easter eggs hanging off the chandelier, Halloween spiders dangling over the doors.

It's a good house. I wish the next tenants as much happiness and luck in this house as we had.

It's time to take the mezzuzah off the door frame.

Good night, old house.

I have a tropism

I took a brief break Wednesday from America's First Empire: The Quickening to see Diablo Cody read at Coliseum Books, literally across the street from the famous central building of the New York Public Library. (Diablo Cody is a charter member of my frightening blogroll, all tucked away at the bottom left-hand corner of this blog <-- that way.) I was the second least non-threatening guy in the audience, which was OK, since there were only two guys there. (Phrasing update: as opposed to the remarkable assemblage of interesting women present.)

Of course (needless to say) I was smitten by Ms. Cody's smart and smutty style. We briefly bonded about being from the northern Midwest -- "I'm from Wisconsin." "So you know." -- she went off to celebrate her upcoming Letterman appearance, and I went home to write more about Ferdinand Marcos.

What?! Read her book. It's fun and appallingly accurate.

Random Monday links

This blog not only has a horrible name, but it has some guy named Carlos (not me) who has clearly overdosed on the "Mankind's destiny in SPAAAAACE" Kool-Aid. On the other hand, it has the sanest things Larry Niven has said since the 1970s. The early 1970s. We shall see.

For some real space exploration, here's the Planetary Society's weblog. (Doug suspects I have a crush on its proprietor, Emily Lakdawalla. Doug knows me far too well.) Someday this site too will join my frightening blogroll.

I know guys like this dead journalist. Man, they are hard to get along with. And yet, the world is poorer when they leave.

Now to install those Armenian fonts.

De mortuis nihil nisi

... bonum.

Notes from Yerevan

So, Armenia.

I've been here for three days to house hunt and get some things set up like cell phone coverage and internet connections. We are going to hit the ground running!

Some first impressions:

- My suggestion for Armenia's contribution to world peace: Pomegranate tea. Pomegranates are also called "the Armenian rose" here. Mixed with rose petals and hibiscus, it's unbelievably delicious. It makes you sink down in your chair, softly humming to yourself. Hmmmm.

(Note to best friend: Yes, I bought some for you and will have Doug bring it over!)

- My favorite pastime here will be sitting on the steps of the Cascades, staring at the Ararat. I wasn't prepared for the utter presence of this mountain - it's much closer than all the pictures I've seen made me believe. It's also breath-takingly beautiful. No wonder everybody wants to have it to themselves!

- The children's favorite pastime will be going up and down the escalators inside the Cascades. Even Jacob loved it.

- People here love children. Love, love, love them. Even more so than in Serbia.

- People are very friendly and smile a lot.

- As soon as you turn a corner from a main street, the infrastructure suddenly and utterly collapses. It's quite dramatic. In the middle of Yerevan you'll find streets that look more like a rural Romanian village than the center of a capital city.

- Artbridge will be a favorite hang out of mine. Some books, lots of art, yummy food.

- Speaking of art - it's everywhere. Some is ugly, some is mystifying, some is strange, some is beautiful. All is quite captivating.

- The carpets look just like in Turkey.

- I rented a house! It's really nice and has a beautiful garden. It's behind the Cascades.

Brief notes on classical Armenian literature 2

We got letters!

This particular correspondence was first recorded in Eusebius, but Moses Khorenats'i gave it his own special spin. Backstory: King Abgar of Edessa has been "wracked by fearful pains that he had contracted in Persia seven years before." (Dare we speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.) He hears about a new curandero down south, and writes him a letter:

31. Abgar's letter to the Savior

"Abgar, son of Arsham, prince of the land, to Jesus, Savior and benefactor, who was revealed in the land of Jerusalem, greeting."

"I have heard about you and about the healing that was accomplished through you without medicine or drugs. For, as is said, you cause the blind to see and the lame to walk, you cast out evil spirits, and you cure whoever has been afflicted by long illnesses; you even raise the dead. And when I heard all this about you I decided one of two things: either you are God who have descended from heaven and work these things, or you are the son of God and do them. So therefore [either way! -- CY] I have written to you to ask you to take the trouble and come to me and heal this affliction of mine."

"I have also heard that the Jews murmur against you and wish to harm you. But I have a small and pleasant city, and it is sufficient for us both."

"Sincerely Yours, Abgar"

32. The reply to Abgar's letter

"Blessed is he who believes in me without having seen me. For thus it is written concerning me: 'Those who see me will not believe in me, and those who do not see me will believe and live.'"

"Now, as for your writing to me that I should come to you, I must fulfill here everything for which I was sent. And when I have completed this, then I shall ascend to Him who sent me. When I have ascended I shall send one of my disciples to cure your pains and grant life to you and those with you."

"Enclosed is a recent picture. Peace, Jesus."

Anan, Abgar's messenger brought his letter with the Savior's portrait from life, which has remained in the city of Edessa up to the present day.

I should note that there was little stigma attached to Jewish ancestry in that era's Armenia. Rather the opposite. Moses Khorenats'i spends some time linking the leading Bagratuni family of Armenia to otherwise unattested Jewish leaders captured by Nebuchadnezzar, and means this in a good way.

Of course, that's not the oddest genealogical link MKh comes up with. More later.

Agathangelos, History of the Armenians

I was going to summarize this very strange account of the coming of Christianity to Armenia here, but this Armenian! rock! opera! does a far better job than I ever could.

But for Luke, here's the smashmouth nun Rhipsime at work:

When the king entered, he seized her in order to work his lustful desires. But she, strengthened by the holy Spirit, struggled like a beast and fought like a man. They fought from the third hour until the tenth and she vanquished the king who was renowned for his incredible strength. While he was in the Greek empire he had shown such bodily strength that everyone had been amazed; and in his own realm, when he had returned to his native land, he had shown there too many deeds of mighty valor. And he, who was so famous in every respect, now was vanquished and worsted by a single girl through the will and power of Christ.

Part of the backstory is that the king, Tirdat (or Tiridates, a theophoric name like Mithridates, who died old) once beat the king of the Goths in single combat. After the whup-ass doesn't work, Tirdat brings in her abbess Gaiane, to convince her to give in. This also does not work, and the whup-ass continues:

But Rhipsime was still fighting from the tenth hour of the day until the first evening watch, and she overcame him. The maiden was strengthened by the holy Spirit; she struck him, chased him and overcame him; she wore the king out, weakened him, and felled him. She stripped the king naked of his clothes; she tore his robes and threw away his royal diadem, leaving him covered in shame. And although her own clothes had been torn to shreds by him, yet when she went out she still victoriously retained her purity.

Any further comments by me would be blasphemous.

Brief notes on classical Armenian literature 1

What it said.

1. If I ever start a literary culture from scratch, I want it to be at least this good.

2. Seventeen hundred years of divergence in theology can make even the holiest idea sound wacky.

3. A bad king transformed into a boar??? Ireland is that way.

4. No, that area did not need Islam in order to have holy wars.

5. I have learned new ethnic slurs of extremely limited modern applicability.

6. I never knew the Holy Spirit gave virgin nuns smashmouth powers.

7. You're not supposed to fight to a draw in a heroic epic!

8. Or lose horribly either! WTF?

9. Sometimes narrators can be so unreliable, they come out the other side.

10. I hate to say it, Mesrop, but your alphabet looks like a bar code.

Interlude interlude

A minor break. Some goober started a trash fire on the steps leading to the building next door's basement. [1] Because the people of New York City have now become as efficient as Wisconsinites at dealing with the slings and arrows of weather, jackassery, and random fate, the people of the building, after using up their fire extinguishers, organized a bucket brigade and put out the fire -- which could have been very bad, flames licking along the paint is not a good sign -- before our local firemen could show up. Which they did pretty quickly, but you still want to have professionals examine the work.

Still, it's not as impressive as the time a blind man fell onto the A train track in Columbus Circle and four guys immediately jumped down to pull him out. I don't even think they looked. (I looked, which means I got 911 duty.) He was rattled and a little bruised, but OK. The most amazing thing was, after everyone was satisfied that the right thing was being done, they went their separate ways on the same train.

[1] Yes, Noel and Carrie, it's the one with the cute women across the kitchen window from me.

Balikbayan interlude 2, the mystery of Filipino sports

Let me be blunt. The national sport of the Philippines is basketball. And no one knows why.

1. There is no soccer in the Philippines.

Yes, that's right. In the Philippines, while there are soccer players, soccer has no national following of any kind. You might as well be kicking a dead panda's head around.

This British blogger is completely bewildered at the lack of soccer in the Philippines. Like most soccer bigots, he blames American influence. "Yes, those Americans have a lot to answer for!" Uh-huh. The idea that soccer is not a very interesting game to someone not brought up in the sport never crosses his mind.

2. In fact, there is no football, period.

But "Nomad" also neglects to point out that the Philippines has also rejected real football, the gridiron (although other Pacific islands have adopted it with almost religious zeal), and even that occasionally worthwhile Australian kind, perhaps due to Filipinos encountering too many Australian football players over the years. But perhaps not.

3. There is no baseball in the Philippines either.

Like other east Asian countries, like other Latin American island nations, the Philippines has also flirted with baseball. I myself don't understand the passion baseball can inspire. For me, it's only a pastime: pleasant, pastoral, a relaxing way to spend an afternoon with a beer. On the other hand, it can seduce the most unlikely people. For instance, here's British historian Simon Schama:

I’m helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love, the first time you go to bed with a woman. You never forget. It’s special. It’s the first time I saw a ballpark. I’d thought nothing would ever replace cricket.

(3a. Which lets you know where cricket stands in the scheme of things.)

And yet, after a promising start under the nearly benevolent American occupation of the Philippines (and even a continuation under the almost completely malevolent Japanese occupation), baseball simply petered out. It became in the Philippines something like soccer is in the U.S. -- a kid's game, a game you watch on international TV -- and even there, it's become tainted. (In 1992, Zamboanga City in Bangbang province beat Long Beach, California in the Little League world championship... except the manager of the team had brought in ringers from down the coast. Oh well!)

Joseph Reaves, in his award-winning Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia attempts an explanation. Part of it, he theorizes, was due to an aging postwar Filipino baseball player population:

In 1949, for example, the preeminent Filipino baseball writer of the time, Filemon V. Tutay [and isn't that a wonderful name? -- CY] wrote in the Philippines Free Press that large numbers of fans "stayed away from the ball parks because they have grown tired of seeing the same faces on the local diamond." By way of underscoring his point, Tutay wrote an article four months later that amounted to a roll call of the relative geriatrics then playing in the country's top baseball leagues "despite wobbly legs."

Reaves gives Tutay's roll call, and Tutay wasn't kidding. Some were pushing Filipino life expectancy of the time -- for instance, Hugo Ramos, Sr., age 54, starting left fielder. He needed to be identified as "Senior" because his son, Hugo Ramos, Jr., was playing on the same team. (Second base.) One wonders if there was a Hugo Ramos III waiting in the wings, and if so, at what position.

But Reaves is as bewildered as our footie friend by what the Filipinos turned to:

Baseball's recovery in the postwar Philippines was hampered by the amazing popularity of basketball. At first glance, the transfer of affections seems both improbable and illogical -- improbable, becase Filipinos of the mid-twentieth century tended to be comparatively small physically, and basketball is a game that penalizes physical limitations. Filipinos might be able to compete against Filipinos, but their prospects were severely limited in international competition.

The shift to basketball was illogical, too, because for most of the first half of the twentieth century Filipinos had shown an affinity and talent for baseball. They were, arguably, the dominant force -- at the very least, a highly competitive force -- in Asian baseball for much of that time.

Clearly, basketball and baseball are both readily identifiable as American games... any attempt to link baseball's waning popularity in the Philippines with some sort of anti-American backlash seems futile. Besides, baseball remained as popular as ever in Japan during the height of World War Two.

4. In Filipino basketball, it's not about how tall you are, but what you can do with the ball.

Here's P.J. O'Rourke, back when he was funny, about 1987 or so. The setting is Davao City, one of the Philippines' many garden spots:

Nick took me to a squatter patch called Agdau. It used to be known as "Nicaragdau," partly because the NPA [New People's Army, which is exactly what you think it is -- CY] ran it and partly because Filipinos love any bad pun. [true! -- CY] Agdau was built right in the water with splintered packing-crate catwalks from one stilt shanty to the next. The Davao River -- sewer, sink, and the garbage collection service combined -- flowed by underneath.

On one bit of dry land was Agdau's only solid structure, a tin roof covering a basketball half court. I was promptly beaten in a game of H-O-R-S-E. The tall kids in these precincts of malnutrition are four feet eleven inches but do lay-ups like Air Jordan. If the NBA ever raises hoops to twenty feet, the Chicago Bulls are going to have to take up field hockey.

As it turned out, the NBA didn't have to raise the hoops for the once-great Chicago Bulls to become lowly. But O'Rourke's point still stands.

5. Finally, there is no ice hockey in the Philippines.

Yet.