Sometimes going back to the Philippines can feel very wistful to me. Life is so different in Canada, and having spent two-thirds of my life here, sometimes returning home can feel like discovering an old pair of beloved shoes and finding that they don't quite fit you anymore. It makes me want to work harder to keep my connections with the country alive.

For a recap of my trip to the Philippines earlier this year, take a gander at my Philippines Trip Travelogue where I outlined the places we went to and some of the activities we did. This post is a follow-up where I talk a bit more about my experience regarding certain aspects of the society there, experiencing "reverse" culture shock at things that used to be familiar to me but not anymore, and things that I'm experiencing for the first time as a balik-bayan visiting the country.

I'd like to state upfront though that for the most part, I'm not going to be passing any value judgment. Each society and culture offers different types of experiences, and unless I can see a lot of harm in something, how one resonates with specific cultural practices is for the most part a matter of taste and familiarity.

Society is very communal

My childhood home sits on a corner lot, adjacent to a gated neighbourhood. The house across the street has a large sari-sari store before its sidewalk, and on its roof is a wide ad for phone data top-ups. The house across the other street bordering ours opens its garage doors at 5am in the morning and sells breakfast and lunch dishes until 3pm. Our next-door neighbours used to be an internet cafe back when we visited in 2011; this time, I'm not entirely sure what service they're running, but they still seem to be selling something. Old ladies sit in front of the house conversing all day, and they greet us whenever we exit. Finally, the house diagonal from us offers ulam for lunch and dinner, as well as halo-halo for dessert.

A man leans his motorcycle on the street branching out from the lot. Throughout the day, others stop by to get their motorcycles checked-out and fixed. A fruit peddler with a cart full of mangoes would park in the same street near the motorcycles, hoping that passersby would buy a bag full of his offerings.

Every morning, around 5:30 to 6, my parents listened for the distinct pot-pot-poott of pandesal peddlers making their rounds in the neighbourhood. They would set aside coins of 20 to 40 pesos the night before, so they could hail the peddler on time. That's how we would get our breakfast. A bag of freshly baked pandesal.

This is just our little spot in the neighbourhood. It's not even the busiest spot in the area, not by a mile. It's a residential area. And unlike the residential neighbourhoods here in Canada with their orderly roads, swept-up driveways, trimmed lawns, and wide sidewalks on which perhaps you might spot half-a-dozen people strolling along on a warm summer day, neighbourhoods in the Philippines are also business zones. Most families own some kind of micro-business, arteries of communal life.

Perhaps it's the heat and the dust; most folks there don't like to go out because of the weather and the pollution, so having small stores and eateries right across their homes become a convenience that the savvy-minded learn to monetize. Peddlers save money from paying rent in a market or a mall or a plaza, and their hard work of cycling around in the heat and dust become just part of the labour they incur in running their business.

Sometimes I sat in the living room and just enjoyed watching the pulse of the neighbourhood. Everyone seemed so at ease, so connected. You want something to eat but you're too lazy to cook? You don't need to call for delivery. You don't need to drive for take-out. You simply walk the dozen steps to your neighbours' garage and buy whatever they already cooked. And it's fresh and hot and hearty.

One time my parents worried about when the garbage was going to get collected. I suggested we look it up online, and they laughed. Things like that aren't written on government websites, they said, not like in Canada. We'd have to ask the neighbours. Which we did. We asked our neighbours a lot of things. Sometimes strangers come up to my parents too and ask them questions.

I know that there are downsides to this type of community as well. People are quick to talk and gossip, and things that would otherwise remain quite private in a Canadian neighbourhood (like your coming and going from your house), become public knowledge. But during my time there, things were quite good and now I sometimes catch myself wishing for a bread peddler at 6 in the morning.

Bathrooms

3-piece private bathrooms in the Philippines usually come without a bathtub, unlike your typical 3-piece Canadian bathroom. They might not even come with a shower, and instead, the spigot is used to fill up buckets with water, and people use a tabo to pour water over themselves. Likelier than not, the entire floor is also meant to withstand water, sloping down neatly to a large drainage, which is why bathrooms can also easily serve as laundry rooms (handwashing, of course).

This type of bathroom was so second-nature to me when I was young, that when I first immigrated to Canada, I actually found the tub & shower combo kind of impractical. What if water spills over the side? What if the toilet overflows? How will you get the water to drain? Turns out, you just have to mop it all up. And you'll be lucky if the tiles don't end up with some kind of water damage.

It's so interesting that during my trip, encountering our old bathrooms kind of put me for a spin. Wait, I have to change into a different set of slippers? Waterproof slippers? What if the soap slips out of my hand while I'm washing and falls into the toilet? Why aren't there curtains anywhere? There's no hot water?

I mean, to be fair, it's so hot in the Philippines, taking a bath with cold water is exactly the kind of refreshing activity people need to beat the heat. But even in summer in Canada, I can't imagine taking a shower with only cold water.

Things get more interesting in public bathrooms. They don't provide toilet paper. At least not for free. If you're lucky, there might be a container that will spit out a pack of tissues if you give it a few coins. If you're in the higher-end bathrooms that charge P5 or P10 to use, the stalls might even have their own bidet or hand-held sprinkler. But for the most part, you either have to do without toilet paper or bring your own.

My mother once said it was because people would steal toilet paper if they were provided for free. But other times she also said it was because the common Filipino practice in bathrooms is to just wash yourself with soap and water. Which is true in private, but it's a practice that is nearly impossible to do in public washrooms.

Varying School Start and End Dates

When I was a child going to school in the Philippines, school years began in June and ended in March. April and May are the hottest months there, so people prefer to stay home. Not to mention, Holy Week was a major holiday, so most schools tended to end their semesters before then.

Now, apparently, start and end dates differ from school to school! That's... that's so bemusing to me. One of my aunts said it was because of the pandemic. Schedules got thrown out of whack, so now different schools decided to just start and end whenever they wanted. My family was there from end of May until early June, and in that time, we saw students still going to school, others just starting, while some were graduating and having end-of-year ceremonies. It was madness!

Lack of Credit Card Usage

I already noticed during my last visit in 2019 that cash still reigns king in the Philippines. However, I thought that with the pandemic and with many businesses moving online, that perhaps the uptake for credit cards would increase. It didn't really, which surprised me. It's true that online shopping has become a little more ubiquitous than a few years ago, but there's still an expectation that you'll be paying for cash.

On our second day there, we decided to have take-out delivered to our home. I was speaking to someone on the phone, and she asked me how much I would like to pay. I was extremely confused, because of course I would pay the total -- it's not like I have the choice to pay less, and I wouldn't offer to pay more. After a bit of hemming and hawwing, the person on the phone explained they needed to know how much change the delivery man needed to bring. I was gobsmacked.

In contrast, most delivery men here in Canada would bring a credit/debit card machine with them. If paying by cash, it's pretty much expected that they will pocket the change as a tip. But it's also rare now to pay at your door. Most of the time, online services will accept credit cards right at check-out. (I did try to use the restaurant's online website, but it was so buggy, I ended up just calling. It was still a buggy experience, because the line disconnected two times.)

Most types of service exchange in the Philippines still prefer cash. If you're going to ride on the most common forms of transportation (tricycle, jeep, vans, buses, etc.) they'll charge you in cash. If you're going to buy in the wet markets, the fruit stalls, family-owned eateries, they'll only accept cash. I went to a grocery store that accepted credit cards, and they had to ask for my ID! You might get lucky in SM and find some stores accepting credit cards, but many don't.

That said, if I had the choice, and if the recent pandemic didn't make it unhygienic to use cash, I do actually prefer cash for in-person purchases. I think there's something about the physicality of it that makes you all that much more aware of how much you're actually spending. And with cash you have the advantage of never overspending.

Lack of Books and Bookstores

Okay, this is the part where I might get a little judgmental, but as someone who loves to read and write, I'm so so disheartened by the lack of books, bookstores, and publicly accessible libraries in the Philippines. It's very ironic for a people that owes their colonial liberation partly to literature. And I'm not the only one who notices this. Historian Ambeth Ocampo said in his book Rizal Without the Overcoat, which was published back in 1990:

Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the Noli me tángere and El Filibusterismo are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence?

More than 30 years later, literature has not boomed even in the slightest in our culture. The National Bookstore is predominantly a school supply store. And more than half of the shelves there contain books imported from the West and manga imported from East Asia. The singular shelf proclaiming Filipiniana works contains a sad array of books not even sorted by genre. (Another pet peeve of mine is how the majority of the Filipiniana books are in English. Tagalog might get the pitiful second place, but what about the dozens of other major regional languages in the Philippines? I went to a National Bookstore in Pampanga, and there weren't even Kapampangan books.)

And this is if you're lucky to even come across a bookstore in a mall. Unlike here in Canada where Chapters Indigo is a steady presence in all malls, and even smaller malls might get a cozy Coles store, bookstores in the Philippines are almost like specialty businesses. It's as if you're shopping for an antique. I hate to say it, but I saw more books in the Taipei airport during our layover.

About a decade ago, back when Wattpad was Toronto's darling startup, and screen producers in the Philippines were combing the writing platform for their next movie or TV show ideas, I hoped that perhaps books and writing will now see a wider cultural resurgence. Unfortunately not much has come out of that, aside from a dedicated "Wattpad Books" shelf tucked alongside the "Filipiniana" shelf. And as someone who uses a digital platform to share my works, I'm in no position to laugh at Wattpad, but I must admit that the range of genres and types of stories it offers is very, very limited.

My Aunt told me that people just don't read physical books. She said that most people could get an epub for P10 from a sari-sari store. And because we also had a difficult time finding vendors who sold newspapers while we stayed there, I was quite ready to accept that perhaps Philippine literature has simply gone overwhelmingly digital.

But if that were true, where's the marketing? Where are the ads for the ecommerce sites? Where are the authors churning out these P10 epubs and how does one discover their books? Basically, where is the Kobo Store of the Philippines?

Perhaps I'm just making a big deal out of this. Is it really that bad if Filipinos don't like to read? We have such a long history of oral storytelling, thus is it so difficult to believe that Filipinos might resonate more with a visual and auditory medium? I mean, there are lots of podcasts narrating short stories. There are lots of Filipino YouTubers.

But to answer my first question, yes, I do think it's disadvantageous for a people to not have a solid body of literature to represent them and their experiences. I do think it's unhealthy to always read about those outside your home and rarely have a chance to reflect on what's happening inside. And even though I am part of the diaspora, I don't think Filipinos in the diaspora should be disproportionately represented in our literature. Local voices matter. Regional languages matter.

And to say that Filipinos can simply access and proliferate our own stories via films or shows is to discount the power of the written word. There are so many things that are easier to demonstrate with text than screenplay. (I have a lot of respect for the production team of Maria Clara at Ibarra, I mean those costumes were banging, but I still cringe every time I remember the cartoony CGI of the ship by the docks.) There are so many concepts you can convey through text that are literally not going to be any more expensive than their mundane counterparts.

Now, I do admit that perhaps a 2-week trip to the Philippines and hearsay from my relatives may not be the best way to learn about the health of the literary industry in the country. Perhaps if I had my foot in the right doors, if I had the right connections, if I belonged in the more bookish circles, I would have a better understanding of writing, publishing, and literary access there. But already, all these "ifs" show that literature might be an exclusive resource for most Filipinos.