Something Beautiful, Something Imagined
Something Beautiful, Something Imagined
Do I love the Philippines? What do I exactly love? Its geographic location? Its laws? The people? Trying to answer this feels like “Ship of Theseus”-ing my way through the question.
Hello, how are you? I understand I've been remiss with my newsletter duties. Quick updates: apart from the French class which finished in mid-June (sponsored by the French government, thanks very much), B & I flew to Costa Rica with his friends for most of July.
The trip involved traveling and staying in different areas in the country, starting from Quepos where a lot of the tourists go, to a boat ride through the river to Drake Bay, then to Uvita, and afterward Monteverde. To get to Costa Rica, B & I flew from Madrid, where we caught Carly Rae Jepsen’s performance at Mad Cool Festival, on an 11-hour journey to Juan Santamaria International Airport. There was an unexpected challenge on the way to Madrid, which was supposedly a direct train ride from Montpellier, except a train strike sent us on a mad dash to catch a night bus to Barcelona. It was a good thing that our friend Pilar was in town to host us for the sudden stopover. We had a good few hours in Barcelona and I promised myself I’d be back in the city to explore more of it next time.
The first morning in Costa Rica was exactly as I didn’t expect it. To call it paradise would be too much of a cliché, but I am basic so we’ll go with that. We took a short walk by the beach which we accessed through the back gate of our hotel.
That moment I stood before that translucent curtain of mist that hung above the water, shrouding the islands at a distance: it felt like I was rediscovering the world, that a reality I had no idea about existed. The sun was more golden than I usually remembered it, but I wasn’t sure if it was the jetlag, the caffeine, or the excitement of being in a new country, a new continent.
Maybe it says a lot about my lack of imagination or ambition when I say that Costa Rica was never on my bucket list of destinations. The Philippines had beautiful beaches, we had islands envied by other countries –– and don’t get me started on our mangoes. To my ignorant mind, it felt like Costa Rica offered nothing different.
How wrong I was though. I know they often say a true traveler always keeps an open mind, so I suppose that means that I am really more an Instagram traveler than a legitimate explorer, oop. It was fascinating to find out that Costa Rica was more LGBT-friendly than the Philippines. In 2018, their president (their actual leader!) Carlos Alvarado Quesada apologized for the crimes committed against LGBT people, and two years after that, they enshrined marriage equality into law. Transgender people are also allowed to legally change their gender identity on official documents, and the State sponsors hormone replacement therapy through their public healthcare system. It boggles my mind to think that the country was also once a former colony of Spain and that Catholicism is the state religion. The idea that they have no separation of Church & State drives me insane, and yet: the existence of Costa Rica’s progressiveness challenges the backwardness of the Philippines towards queer people.
There’s a risk of romanticizing other places and peoples outside of one’s own, and I don’t want to make you believe that Costa Rica is wholesale better than the Philippines. (I know this leads me to question what is truly one’s own anyway, but we will not venture down that road.) Maybe to truly love something or someone is to see the worst and say I love this thing or this one, regardless. I will bitch about it, proving that I am not blind to its faults, but also embrace it all, like a mother convinced that her child is the most beautiful.
Visiting different places makes me imagine the different possibilities for the Philippines. The longer I’m away from the country though makes me wonder if there’s even a point to feeling love for one’s country. Do I love the Philippines? What do I exactly love? Its geographic location? Its laws? The people? Trying to answer this feels like “Ship of Theseus”-ing my way through the question.
It also makes me think: how can one truly love something one didn’t choose to belong to? Would I have loved being Filipino had I not been born Filipino? I understand how this question will offend a lot of Filipinos: I have, after all, been snidely accused as being a whitewashed privileged Filipino gay. Maybe to be able to question one’s identity is to be in a position of privilege: other people have no choice but to live the one they have.
Recently over merienda, Pilar and I talked about what privilege meant to us. As someone who grew up in privilege and had to turn her back on it, she said that it ultimately meant having options. It reminded me of something my other friend Gretchen said: she earned money so she can have the options she didn’t have when she was younger.
With privilege, especially the privilege that money offers, you have more choices laid out before you. One’s choices are distanced, even divorced from survival. And delaying decisions does not necessarily lead to suffering or death.
But to get back to my question, maybe I would have loved being Filipino, or maybe not. It’s hard to debate on hypotheticals so there’s really no way of figuring it out. I don’t think there’s also a sensible answer to what being Filipino is, save for the myth that exists in my head, the constant story of Filipino-ness that I repeat in my mind. I experience it, I belong in it, I feel strangely bound to it, much as I reject the things that I hate about it.