They call me 'A'

For reasons that are beyond me, people at work are wont to call me Miss A or just plain A instead of the three-syllabled name my parents gave me. With some part of me rebelling against the reduction of my name to just a single letter, I haven’t grown accustomed to being called A. A represents a one-dimensional person: that person who gets her work done with a maniacal sense of order. Beyond that my colleagues know nothing about me and would not want to know more, anyway. I’d rather be called Jill as my oldest and closest friends do. Jill, a name from childhood, is who I am to those who know me the best.

And worse yet, hearing my full name has now become a rarity. I think I am the only person left who calls me Angeli. Why can't others do so, too?

travel is utterly romantic

"…We headed off through the ragged gorgeousness of Bhutan, and after a few days the same giddiness we’d felt the first time around started to return. What is it about traveling that inspires that feeling? Is it that when you’re with someone and you’re not at home, you’re in a sort of bubble together, floating through the world, peering out at it together, bound to nothing—jobs, chores, social obligations, dry cleaning that needs to be dropped off—but each other? Is it that when you travel you can invent yourself anew, and the new person you become is freer and more engaged and more engaging that the persona you left at home? And even if you’re not in love, is this still what makes travel so seductive—the creation of a new buoyant version of yourself, unpunctured by the familiarity of people who know you and know that you have another self? Whatever it is that makes it feel this way, travel is utterly romantic and the experience of it is the experience of life idealized, and it makes you feel romantic, and romance-able, and this transformation seems more what makes it magical than any particular lovely landscape or fascinating culture you might encounter. Even bad experiences when you travel seem almost mythical—they are bad experiences, but also stories that you will tell around a table sometime later, exotic and fascinating in their badness." ~ The Best American Travel Writing 2007 edited by Susan Orlean

The depth of my ignorance is deplorable.

In preparation for our trip to Cambodia several months ago, I read Maurice Glaize’s Guide to the Angkor Monuments, which succinctly describes the origins of the Khmer:

Established since prehistoric times in the lower Mekong valley of the southern Indo-Chinese peninsula that included not only present day Cambodia but also Cochinchina and parts of Siam and Laos, they were in fact a mixture - from an ethnological rather than a linguistic point of view - of people from lower Burma and various barbarous people from the annamitic chain, themselves in turn quite probably deriving from Negroid and Indonesian roots. The Indian contribution apparently resulted from a natural expansion towards the east for commercial, civil and religious reasons rather than for any brutal political motivation.

As I was reading the passage, it dawned on me how unaware I was about our Asian neighbors. I know nothing about them. The depth of my ignorance is deplorable.

How is it that I know more about American culture – from its pop stars and TV shows to its literature - than that of the countries that the Philippines is supposed to share a common ancestry and geographical region with? How is it that I can vividly recall the story of Remus and Romulus and the birth of Rome but not the reign of the kingdom of Siam and the decline and fall of the Khmer empire? Why do I know the myth or Sisyphus, but not the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata? How come I know more about the Holocaust but not Pol Pot’s killing fields? My lack of knowledge about such things brings me guilt and shame.

Except for the Chinese whose culture has penetrated our everyday lives and the Koreans and Japanese who have invaded Philippine pop culture, our Asian neighbors are not within our immediate consciousness. Whatever cursory knowledge we have about their culture and how it links with our own is learned only in school (if it’s even taught at all) and easily forgotten. Our culture and educational system has been saturated by Western ideas and standards that there is no space left for that which is Asian.

It is only when we go to a foreign country that we identify ourselves as Asians. As Filipinos in our own country, we do not have an Asian identity or an Asian consciousness. We never identify ourselves with the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Lao, with Cambodians, Sri Lankans and Malaysians; and it’s only when we go to an Asian country and we are mistaken for a local that we realize how similar we are to our neighbors.

We are from Asia but have neither become nor thought of ourselves as Asians. How shameful. How sad.