February 16, 2009



Dumaguete was billed as a laid-back college town, home to the hospitable and "gentle people of the south." But I found it otherwise. The folks at the Aldea Lodge were curt and unsmiling, and the sheets in my room there were strangely sticky. I imagined the last tenants eating pineapples in bed, shaving the sides off and plunging their fingers into the golden flesh, but I knew I was fooling myself.

After the charms of Siquijor, Dumaguete might as well have been New York--maybe even Detroit. In Cebu City, folks would at least look at me with a benign fascination. Here, they stared right through me. They didn't want my money, but they didn't want my company either. After finding the town square, and marveling at the brightly colored acre-wide playground there, I was chased off by the cold glares of some teenage mothers, and retreated to my room to relax on a protective layer of dirty shirts.

As I sat there, watching the Asian Travel Channel on mute as the jeepneys ran beneath my window, the mudbutt struck. After a quick peek in the mildewed, Bowery-style bath downstairs, I stole some napkins from the lodge cafe and went in search of a proper comfort room. I ended up squatting over a basin in the nearby Jollibee until my legs gave out and I relaxed my ass onto the seatless rim.

Now most tourists with mild dysentery would avoid Indian food like the plague, but I'm not like most tourists, and I was in desperate need of something meatless. I walked to the Persian Palate nearby--ordering Mongo Dal, ginger tea, cucumber-yogurt salad, and a massive plate of naan--and gorged myself, gasping and sweating as the waitress brought me extra napkins for my forehead and, laughing, turned a small metal fan in my direction.

Out on the street again, I suddenly realized the root of people's apparent disdain for me. Not only has the island of Negros been the site of several bloody sugarcane wars, but Dumaguete, the eastern capital, is home to Silliman University. That was it--these were the Filipinos I'd been looking for: the subversive intellectuals who despised Colonial rule, the bitter old men who wanted the oppressors' hands off their land and resources. I loved them, I wanted to speak with them, to collaborate and collude with them and maybe blow up a sugar truck.

The only problem was, they couldn't tell I wasn't white.