Boracay Island Paradise for Natives and Foreigners Alike

My family lives on the island of Panay. It's the big island adjacent to Boracay, now a destination for mostly European tourists looking for cheap living in the gorgeous squalor of a tropical paradise. From my hometown in La Paz, Iloilo, it is a tiring five- to six-hour trip by crowded jeepney, dusty bus or air-conditioned hired car. Tourists can fly directly to the island from Manila, less than two hours by plane.

Boracay is famous for its fine, white sand, not like the vaunted beaches of the French and Italian Riviera covered with gravel. White Beach is the main area that most people first see of the island after arriving from mainland Aklan by pump boat. The harbor is better now. Passengers walk down the gangplank instead of jumping into the water to get to dry land.

By day there is wind-surfing, swimming in the often shallow water so clear you can see down to the sand below. Beach chairs and cabins can be rented and you can spend the day just people-watching. Better yet, hire a two-rigger and circumnavigate the island to find your own private cove or beach. There are other smaller islands like Carabao Island for exploring underwater caves and cliffs overlooking the South China Sea.

White Beach is lined with typical touristy cabins behind coconut groves and hibiscus shrubs but slowly big hotels are taking over the prime areas. At night torches light restaurant after restaurant with surf side tables overflowing with the sea's bounty and, of course, lechón, the Filipino version of roast whole suckling pig. There are souvenir shops galore and Internet cafes.

Many German and Swiss men have married local girls and themselves gone native. Of a morning I follow my nose and wend my way through the narrow paths most tourists don't even notice to fresh-baked baguettes and other crusty European breads the expatriates often sell right off their porches while their children play barefoot under the houses, dark as the native kids. Life in paradise is sweet!

How The East Was Won

We live our four-score years a matter of genetics, family influence, personal choice, and, largely, luck. I’d like to think I make deliberate choices. I’ve bought into the American dream: individual freedom reigns. But I’m Asian at the core: interconnection determines not only the life we live but who we become. We are jewels caught in Indra’s net that weaves us into one, indivisible fabric.

While working at the USAF base in Angeles City, Pampanga, trying to forge connections to land me in America, I met one of the women in that weave of destiny. Mattie was an African-American nurse who one evening, from what goodness of the heart I’ll never know, invited me to her house on base for dinner.

I remember the feeling today. There I was a man-boy, desperately trying to put himself back together, the shining future he had once envisioned now shards of broken glass. The base was a capsule of America. On school buses, teenage girls chewed gum. Servicemen would fly McDonald burgers from CONUS and shared the smell and taste of home with his friends. The base insulated Americans from harsh reality. They shouldn’t have to deal with more war than the war in Vietnam. To me the base was the Promised Land, exciting and scary.

I don’t remember what Mattie served for dinner. I remember sitting at her spinet afterwards to play and sing American show tunes. She left me alone for a minute and came back with a book she felt I should read. I was Asian, of course, shouldn’t this be my natural bent? The Bhagavad Gita was every bit as wise and inspiring as the Christian Bible. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Aside from my aunt, Dayde, Mattie was the first person to crack the door of orthodoxy into a whole, other world beyond. Back then, Asian art, religion and history were below my mind’s periscope. I was miserable and anxious only to escape. The West shone on the horizon like Abraham’s Canaan. There I would find home because where I was didn’t feel like home. No god dealt covenants to me. I had no choice.

It was only after I stopped attending church that my mind opened to other varieties of religious belief. In the early 1980s I found myself swept into the New Age movement. I went to gatherings in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York and California, met new friends, tried on new practices: Sufi dancing, Midsummer festivals, channeling, unorthodox Franciscans, energetic bodywork, men’s groups, Gaia, etc. I was agog. Here were the inner fires I’d been missing.

Like breath, like water, the soul needs fire. We catch fire wherever we connect, whether we choose it or it flows to us from life’s amazing cornucopia of surprises.

The First Blooming of Dark and Light

In high school I had a friend in freshman year who singlehandedly changed the course of my life.

Francisco (his family called him Paking) was visiting his grandparents from Cebu. I believed him to come from a more illustrious, more prosperous family than mine. Back then I had a huge inferiority complex. I think his father was a successful attorney in Cebu City. I didn’t understand why his family had enrolled him at the cow-pasture campus of ICC but that decision put us two together. We became inseparable.

The friendship was like being in love. We wrote each other notes in invisible ink (milk that showed up when the paper was gently warmed over a candle flame) or with a special blue pencil we used just for writing those notes. Francisco had lighter skin. I attributed it to Spanish blood. I was thin, dark, with Chinaman eyes. To this day I see those two boys, one light, the other dark, in khaki short pants, sitting dangling their thin legs on a low branch of the big acacia tree near the Burgos Street gate. We were oblivious of the students passing below us. What we talked about is now lost to time but I remember the closeness, what I later came to call “being on the same wavelength.”

Without seeming to exert effort, Francisco soared to the top of the class. Students were assigned to classes by grades. We were both in the first class of freshmen. I wonder now if I was in that class only because my uncle was high school principal. I certainly don’t remember getting good enough grades at La Paz Elementary. There I remember just sliding to pass. My mother taught home economics to fifth-grade girls. She would ask her male colleagues to do my shop projects. I was a marginal student.

My admiration for my new friend inspired me to shine as he did. I wanted to be among the first to raise my hand in class with the right answer to the teacher’s question. I learned to love getting perfect scores on tests. I did not become more intelligent; I just studied harder. My older sister was two years ahead of me. Since we had the same teachers, her old notebooks helped but mostly I just put in more hours studying than the average student. I’d found a way to feel good about myself.

When Francisco left the following school year to return to Cebu I took over the class lead and held that position through graduation and into college at San Agustín. Scholastic honors became the foundation not only of my self-esteem but were the whole of who I was. The stratagem proved its core inadequacy when I moved from the small pond of Iloilo to Manila but that was six or seven years later.

My friendship with Francisco became the first of friendships that later on I saw in Herman Hesse’s Demian und Goldmund, the strange pairing of opposites that bring two people together. Boys and girls are as unlike as bugs and elephants but, in high school, hormones blooming in their blood stream like springtime in the Midwest, they discover in their differences that dangerous taste of intimacy. Thenceforth we search the world over and beyond to recapture our loss of innocence, our coming of age into a simpler, driven life as adults outside the gates of Paradise.