Notes on origin.
I grew up in Marblehead, which is just outside Boston. An eastern township, all clapboard housing, flag over the porch. To get there from the city, you take one of the hot trains underground to Wonderland, a greyhound racetrack that in childhood made me think of sweet white bread inside rainbow packaging, how we'd spread it with butter, sugar and cinnamon in the kitchen of 59 Auburndale Road. Marblehead is sand and public beach; floured oysters deep-frying that we'd eat in the back of a minivan (personalized license plate: IMELDA); the neighbours' fat chihuahua that could sing "Happy Birthday" on command. The house was brick and crammed with stuff: boardgames I'd un-wedge out of wobbly piles in the garage, my older cousins' scooters and bicycles and shark-emblazoned bodyboards, mobiles made out of coral and seashells, souvenirs that were startlingly Filipino in this outer Republican bastion. We went often to Salem, where I liked the occult witchyness and didn't give a thought to the original horror of the situation. The first time I saw snow was when it dusted the climbing tree out front. It was a few nights before Christmas. I felt happy inside the small house, and warm - not hot or humid, an altogether different and more familiar sensation. America! I wasn't nervous. This is the only time in my life I can remember feeling calm.
I grew up in Manila, which is in the centre of the north of the Philippines. Advertised "Pearl of the Orient," but more-or-less concrete jungle, every building streaked with soot, greenery erupting in unexpected corners: along highway borderlands, in verdant guarded villages, amongst the undulating tin roofs of the inner slums. I made light of apocalyptic situations. The "volcano game" stemmed from my parents driving miles through falling ash (like snow, my mother said; she had first seen it in Connecticut). During typhoons we went to the innermost part of the house and made pillow-forts that obscured the lightning, deadened the thunder. "Earthquake," well, you get the idea. My dad fetched a friend from the rubble. It was a country of great blockages, of obscurity and landslides, and often I wondered how anyone could hide anything under this constant flat, high sunlight. Our grandest boulevards were filled with trash. I'd walk their length and see the grey ocean, which in this weather should have been blue. Instead, a weird slurry. Arrests on accounts of corruption. For some time there were journalists being vivisected in the jungle. Election season, I remember reading that voting boxes, being carted from island to island, had been lost overboard. I wondered how anyone could have made this archipelago a nation. Eventually, we fell into too much danger to stay. So we went east, to the West.
I grew up in London, although I didn't at all. London, the dystopic template with its twin CCTV cameras perched looking on every street... My parents sent me to the British School Manila (yes: neocolonialism) for express reason to finesse my diction. "Hard to be accepted, as a local," adults would tell me. "You must be very bright." Maybe I was obvious in my discomfort. Nonetheless, new in London, I felt neglected knowledge surface. Victorian history, given in the too-chilled rooms of a mosquito-infested suburb of outer Manila, once felt like mythology. Suddenly, it was attached to a specific geography: finally, an application for stories so brutally prized over my own. I thought, for the first time in years, of the sunburned teachers with their vibratory homesickness for the cool grey of London, there in that country (my country) of uncomfortably big sky. I sensed another root of my fascinations: of brutalisms and displacement and the passing shudder of failed empire; ironic to be the kid recipient of one "Commonwealth Prize", the word 'commonwealth' in regards to a violence so systematic and committed to conquest and capital. Nothing was less shared than wealth, truly, and I felt that too in west London's Bentley-ridden corridors, which I'd bicycle through (the tube made me ill) en route to the frayed immigrant outskirts where I rented a room and shared a bed with a friend.
I grew up in Manila, which is in the centre of the north of the Philippines. Advertised "Pearl of the Orient," but more-or-less concrete jungle, every building streaked with soot, greenery erupting in unexpected corners: along highway borderlands, in verdant guarded villages, amongst the undulating tin roofs of the inner slums. I made light of apocalyptic situations. The "volcano game" stemmed from my parents driving miles through falling ash (like snow, my mother said; she had first seen it in Connecticut). During typhoons we went to the innermost part of the house and made pillow-forts that obscured the lightning, deadened the thunder. "Earthquake," well, you get the idea. My dad fetched a friend from the rubble. It was a country of great blockages, of obscurity and landslides, and often I wondered how anyone could hide anything under this constant flat, high sunlight. Our grandest boulevards were filled with trash. I'd walk their length and see the grey ocean, which in this weather should have been blue. Instead, a weird slurry. Arrests on accounts of corruption. For some time there were journalists being vivisected in the jungle. Election season, I remember reading that voting boxes, being carted from island to island, had been lost overboard. I wondered how anyone could have made this archipelago a nation. Eventually, we fell into too much danger to stay. So we went east, to the West.
I grew up in London, although I didn't at all. London, the dystopic template with its twin CCTV cameras perched looking on every street... My parents sent me to the British School Manila (yes: neocolonialism) for express reason to finesse my diction. "Hard to be accepted, as a local," adults would tell me. "You must be very bright." Maybe I was obvious in my discomfort. Nonetheless, new in London, I felt neglected knowledge surface. Victorian history, given in the too-chilled rooms of a mosquito-infested suburb of outer Manila, once felt like mythology. Suddenly, it was attached to a specific geography: finally, an application for stories so brutally prized over my own. I thought, for the first time in years, of the sunburned teachers with their vibratory homesickness for the cool grey of London, there in that country (my country) of uncomfortably big sky. I sensed another root of my fascinations: of brutalisms and displacement and the passing shudder of failed empire; ironic to be the kid recipient of one "Commonwealth Prize", the word 'commonwealth' in regards to a violence so systematic and committed to conquest and capital. Nothing was less shared than wealth, truly, and I felt that too in west London's Bentley-ridden corridors, which I'd bicycle through (the tube made me ill) en route to the frayed immigrant outskirts where I rented a room and shared a bed with a friend.