As many of you know, I am currently on vacation in the Philippines — a working vacation of sorts, if you count life work, in that I have met for the first time my five stepchildren, two stepgrandchildren, father-in-law, the sole remaining sib of my wife’s whom I had not met in the States, and about 150 other relations whom my wife has absolved me of the need to keep straight. (I’ll meet them when they visit — which I’m told they all will, if they can help it.)
I also met my wife’s friend, principal of the school that my stepkids attend, which is evidently (having been chosen because of how much my wife values education) among the best in Pampanga. (That is the province containing Clark Air Base, which — until Mt. Pinatubo erupted after having waited until the Cold War was safely over — was along with Subic Bay the major U.S. base in the region.) The friend is turning 60, so competent that the school’s owner has begged her to stay, but is going to emigrate to the U.S. instead. After all, she said, you’re supposed to retire at 60.
Oh really, I said, and after some stupid blundering on my part it came out that you were supposed to retire by 60 but had to retire after 65. “Had to” as in “cannot legally work.” Cannot take jobs away from the younger people who need them. I had lawyer’s questions about how truly true this was — what if you are self-employed, I don’t think I thought to ask, but there were others, and from both her and my wife the answer was firm. Cannot work. You lived on savings, on the support of your family, on the kindness of charity — or not at all.
I’m sure that there is a way out of this for the wealthy, as seems to be the case for anything else here. And I’m sure that the law, if it is a law, if it really exists, if it really has bite, is often honored in the breach, as seems to be the case for many other laws here, including all traffic regulations. But that’s quibbling. The larger truth underlying this is that no one will hire you. No one will hire you, in fact, I was told, if you are a woman of 45, of 35, of … the bidding stopped at 30. I had heard much the same thing about Japan, from my 45-year-old girlfriend whom I met four years ago; she was an accomplished novelist in her youth driven down economically by her father’s long-lasting cancer, left to teaching at increasingly inferior jobs, eventually driven to accept a H-1b job in the U.S. (which turned out to be fraudulent), whom I let live with me in New York for a year after we broke up because the alternative was going back to Japan and for the first time settling perhaps into true poverty, who wangled her way into a teaching spot in Virginia as the clock was running out with the promise (and I hope the reality) of a green card at the end: they would not hire women over 30. They were not cute enough; the Japanese call it kawaii. Hello Kitty. Again, I don’t know if it is truly truly true, but I saw her emotional scars and know she believed it.
In our own country, we are headed, perhaps, for a Philippine future, but worse, because the Philippine economy rides gratefully on the back of the American (and to an increasing extent the Arab Middle Eastern) economy and there is no back on which we could ride. The rich here are awesomely rich. The Makati district in Metro Manila is much like Singapore (though the Indian food here is scarce – damn!) The poor are more poor than most Americans can imagine, though they somehow wangled enough firecrackers to throw at the nice car in which we were driven to the gated community containing the house of my wife’s comfortable (and nice, religious) aunt. (The route winds through the squatters’ camps. There are precious few freeways to take one past the poverty here. I have not heard tell of homeless shelters; given the heat here, at least, the homeless don’t freeze. But there are the rains.) The middle class: that would be my wife’s family, and precious few others anymore. Enough to have a servant or two, whom most in the family seem to treat well (but it only takes a few not to do so to make a live miseable; you don’t think as much about the skin that hasn’t grown a boil, after all, as the skin that has.)
My wife’s middle class house, called a hut because the roof of the second floor greatroom is thatched palm, has no phone, no running hot water, one time each in the seven or so days I’ve been based here no running cold water or electricity, and this morning in the shower the comb nozzle broke off and the slide on the lock broke off (I think I fixed both), no room. But it has a computer — my wedding gift to my wife, whose wants are her kids wants — and the kids are like American teenagers, they know the latest songs, watch the videos, play the games, chat chat chat from home and text from their cell phones. And it has geese and mangy cats and a dog with distended nipples of a kind that I think are illegal in the U.S. and a mango tree and jackfruit tree and chikoo (sapote, or custard apple) tree — why hasn’t sapote become the most sought-after fruit in the U.S.?, I wonder again. It’s livable. I wonder, when I have taken them back to the States in half a year or so (God and the government willing), and then bring them back here, how will they deal with the no phone, the no hot water, the travel by trike (motorcycle with sidecar) and jeepney (privatized bus service where people jump into the back of a decorated jeep and sit in benches on both sides)? I have told them about seatbelt laws and auto insurance in the U.S.; they nod but I don’t think they believe me.
I took them for the longest trip of their lives this vacation, to the north of Luzon, through mountainous Baguio (where I think I’d retire, if I ever did here, for the relatively cool weather), past the gorgeous church in Santa Maria to Spanish Vigan, to bustling Laoag (“Luh-wog”), up to Pagudpud Beach, a lovely and uncrowded beach with off-white sand and turquoise water. (I can’t get the photos to show here or I’d post them.) They are teenagers; the beach is what they want. They will like Southern California for its beaches. Not so much if someone thinks they’re Mexican, perhaps, but I’ve had that talk with them as well.
I think that I see jeepneys and trikes in our nation’s future. The main problem will be tort law (the drivers can’t afford insurance) and safety regulations requiring seatbelts. No, that’s not true — the main problem will be that what works in the Philippines, where except for some happy moments or a few happy roads the speed is around 15 mph, a speed at which one can be killed but it’s less likely — will not work at the 70 mph pace of the U.S. Here, drivers get away with things that would get them killed instantly in the U.S. — the way you are supposed to get into a lane is to block the path of the car headed your way, so that it stops and yields the right of way. Once the right of way is yielded, an endless stream of left-turning or U-turning traffic will proceed unless right of way is reclaimed with one’s front bumper, for which the horns of the cars behind you roundly cheer. Are Americans prepared for a system that relies on deference and courtesy? Are we prepared to be poor?
I look at people here and I see people like ourselves, except less prone, perhaps, by plethora of arms and stain of entitlement, to take what does not belong to them. (That is my true fear for a poorer America — that we become a pirate nation. Iraq was a step in that direction, but we stumbled.) I don’t understand why I am abided here so well, safe even from overcharging so long as my wife is present, but like any American I am grateful for it. I don’t have to hustle so much. I can work past 65 if need be. Mine in a nation of prosperity, target of envy.
Prosperity. I have always worried that this is the hole card in the Republicans’ hand, that they hold out the promise of prosperity, riches beyond telling, don’t worry from where they came. We are a nation where my wife will get hired at 46, can work past 65, can live (like her aunt, independently visiting here from the States) past 80. Or, pessimistically, we have been such a nation. Or, a compromise: we will have been. Optimistically, we always will have been, but I am less optimistic these days. The rich can fly into the air like dandelion seeds, living in Newport Beach, vacationing in Pagudpud, vacation home in Baguio, while the Newport house is taped shut. It’s the middle class that provides the work at home, because vacations are so rare and special. And, as the middle class dissolves, the choices get harder. No work after 65. Rely on your family. Rely on your church. Rely on your wits. Rely on the comfort of pneumonia taking you off without too much pain once it really gets going.
Prosperity is worth fighting for — the Republicans are right about that — but only if it is shared broadly. Shared within our country, shared ultimately with the people of the world. The Chinese are buying out the Philippines — they own Laoag, I’m told — and there version of prosperity involves a bit of coercion, a bit of slave labor, a bit of auctioning off prisoners’ organs, but it does offer, ultimately, theoretically, the upgrading of society as a whole, subject to the costs of environmental degradation that they, like us, usually ignore. They have something to offer the Philippines, although they may enforce the ban on work after 65 with even greater abandon, for all I know. (How did all of the people who argued that Communism was defeated forget about China, I wonder again? Did they really think they could redefine it as capitalist and have done with it?) I did not know what this essay would be about when I began it, but that is the question, at the end: what do we have to offer the Philippines? Can we tell them that they, following us, will be able to work after age 65, or to not work without dying?
I am (kinehora) bringing my wife and our three bright, lovely, hardworking, spirited daughters — now late back from church, to and from which they traveled by trike and jeep, and no phone here at which I could be called if they are in danger — to the U.S. and I think that they future is better for them there. But I don’t know anymore. And I don’t know how to tell them that. I don’t know, as I should know, what manner of world we are creating, with what manner of prosperity, for how many, for how long.
