The Wily Filipino

Pages 1 and 2.

Well, it's done. Three hundred and six pages, on their way via Federal Express to my editor in Philly later today. Just don't ask about how long it took to research and write, because the whole process cost me more than you can ever, ever imagine.

(In comparison, my first book -- I was younger and had more energy, plus it was before I was of drinking age -- came out only a little over four years after I started writing the first paper that led to the whole project. But 90% of it was written during one humid Ithaca summer.)

Despite (or because of) the advance contract, I'm still legitimately fearful of the dreaded "You know, I'm so sorry, but it just doesn't look like what we envisioned" telephone call. I'm still worried about whether it all hangs together. I'm wondering whether I deleted enough of the theory. I'm wondering whether I deleted too much of the theory. And of course there will be more revisions, perhaps even more revisions that I'm prepared for.

But for now, it's done.

(I told my students at City College -- a wonderful bunch of kids, by the way -- that I was going to celebrate by going to Costco and buying myself a new vacuum cleaner, and they laughed. But I was only half-kidding. There really was this nice Electrolux canister vacuum that I saw last time I was there.)

So... if the book ever comes out, and it shows up on Amazon.com, this is what you'll probably see if it has a "Search Inside!" feature. Probably, anyway, if it survives the first round of editing, or if it gets moved somewhere else, and I'm already seeing things I should have changed. Then it's all (hee hee) downhill after the first two pages.

Ahem:

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Chapter 1: A Repeated Turning.

One will hear the joke told, eventually, though it hardly ever sounds like one. It's almost always delivered casually, thrown out like an offhand rhetorical question, as a matter of incontestable fact:

You know why it's always foggy in Daly City, right? Because all the Filipinos turn on their rice cookers at the same time.

The particular teller of this joke (Wally, a newspaper photographer) and I (a student of anthropology) are sitting in scuffed plastic chairs in the living room of his cramped apartment in the Filipino capital of the United States. We are both among the 33,000 Filipino residents of Daly City, California, where one out of three people are of Filipino descent.

It is a freezing afternoon in late August, and we are looking through the damp glass of the window that faces out onto the quiet suburban street. Outside the fog swirls, tugged by the wind into gentle twists of cotton, spilling over the roofs and parallel-parked Hondas. But inside, it is warm, as it does not take much time to heat up the small room cluttered with boxes of bulk food purchased from Costco, cassette tapes, photography books, and an open balikbayan box addressed to Wally's parents in Quezon City. Wally, with a half-consumed bottle of beer in one hand, leans back in his chair after delivering the punch line, and waits for my reaction. I grin widely, because it is hard not to. I've always found it really funny.

Wally is not the first person to tell me the joke. Almost every single one of my interviewees inevitably asks me the question about fog and Daly City. There is very little variation in the way the joke is told, whether in English or Tagalog, whether there is a pause between the question mark and the answer. There is nothing here for linguists to savor or puzzle over. In this instance, for the anthropologist, perhaps what counts most is the teller, not the tale; it is in the teller that the kind of cultural difference worth studying lies. The tale is something we all already share.

And yet, despite its silliness, despite its meteorological absurdity, the joke begins to acquire a sense of both political and semi-religious gravity: to envision the peculiarly affecting image of thousands of Filipinos depressing the rice cooker switch simultaneously, about half an hour before dinner is served, in a daily culinary ritual that comes almost as naturally as breathing. And the steam collectively rises up and out, the fog as a unanimous, quiet declaration of ethnic presence.

In this city, you may not always see the Filipinos. They may be hard at work at their jobs; they may be huddled in privacy behind their drawn curtains; they may be inside the warmth of their kitchens. But they are there. The fog proves it.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 13, 2007 07:22 AM