Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.
—Emily Hahn, “The Big Smoke,” The New Yorker, February 15, 1969
Tench was a forgettable character with an ugly, monosyllabic name—a booze-sotted British dentist trapped in a Mexican backwater partway through a novel. The only reason I mention Tench is because of an idea put forth by his creator, Graham Greene—an idea that he uses the wretched dentist to illustrate. According to this premise, the course of the character’s life is set when, as a small boy, he finds a dentist’s plaster cast of a set of teeth in a wastebasket. The discovery led to Tench’s growing up to become a dentist—and then down a slow, steady path toward his eventual self-exile and ruin far from home.
Is it possible that a person’s childhood fascination with some object could subtly influence every other decision made during his or her life, a snowballing of interests, propelled by obsession and compulsion, that rolls on long after the initial discovery is forgotten?
And if this were possible, would it then happen only to the most obsessive and compulsive of us? I bring up the idea because I believe I remember the source of my own Tenchian fixation—the beginnings of an early fascination with things Asian. A fascination that, many years later, would inspire me first to travel in Asia and then to live there. A fascination that would eventually drive me to accumulate so much knowledge that I became the world’s foremost authority on a shadowy Asian ritual. A fascination that over time was to become so nuanced and narrow, it would lead me to become a slave to that most Asian of vices.
But that’s all a long way down the road. Let me first explain how I believe I was instilled with a curious proclivity that affects a very small percentage of Westerners. Let me tell you how I was “bitten by the Asia bug.”
When I was a small child my paternal grandparents had a glass display cabinet that contained, among other things, one of those colorful silk shoes that Chinese women with bound feet used to wear. There was only a single shoe in the cabinet and I remember during each visit, as I pressed in for a closer look, my grandmother would tell me that a whole race of women once wore tiny shoes just like this one. She never explained the part about the women being full sized, and I just assumed that their stature was in proportion to that silk shoe—a population of miniature women, perhaps related to the people who once inhabited the porcelain pagodas at the bottom of the adjacent fish tank.
Now, lest anyone get the idea that my childhood was something that Bruce Chatwin might have invented, I must admit here that I had no spinster aunts who chatted about Samarkand over tea. I do not have an exotic family history; at least it’s hard for me to imagine anyone finding anything exotic about my past. I was born and raised in San Diego. My family on both sides had lived there a generation or two before I was born, but all had originally come from somewhere else.
The San Diego of my youth—roughly the 1960s and ’70s—was a very livable place. I gather that most people have a favorable view of my hometown, and I think it’s deserved if weather and location are what makes a city pleasant. Like nearby Los Angeles, San Diego is blessed with a climate that can pass for subtropical much of the year. In truth, most of Southern California is a desert and rain is almost unheard of, but by diverting water from faraway rivers, city planners have allowed anyone who can afford the water bills to turn their properties into faux-tropical jungles that are the envy of much of the rest of the country.
As I remember it, even the city’s poorer residential areas were picturesque and interesting. There was street after palm-lined street of crumbling stucco bungalows, the foliage in their yards often a clue to whether the residents were locals or some recently arrived immigrants. Mexicans were partial to lemon trees; Filipinos planted clumps of banana trees; and, after 1975, Vietnamese immigrants arrived and began nurturing stalks of sugarcane. These were things I noticed because as a kid I was interested in tropical foliage. I knew the species of the palm trees that grew in my neighborhood, and during rides around the city I kept my eyes open for types of palms that I’d never seen before. Once home, I’d thumb through the Sunset Western Garden Book in order to identify them. Anything new that I had spotted went on a list, and if anyone asked me, I would have rattled off the varieties of palms that could be found growing around San Diego County.
Palm spotting was not my only pastime. I also entertained myself by making exhaustive lists of anything that caught my fancy—an embryonic form of collecting that was my first childhood hobby. While poring through the family set of encyclopedias, I drew up lists of World War I biplanes; lists of breeds of toy dogs; lists of Old West outlaws. I spent hours gazing at the illustrations in my many children’s handbooks authored by Herbert S.
Zim, books that inspired lists of Native American tribes and species of insect pests. I made a list of what kinds of sharks you were likely to come across if you swam off the California coast, and I lamented over my list of birds that had become extinct in North America.
My parents must have wondered what to make of it. In one of those “school days” memory books that people used to keep, my mother wrote that in the third grade I wanted to be a “statistician.” She got it wrong. I wasn’t looking for patterns. It was nothing more than an impulsive gathering of information. Once I was old enough to do minor chores and wheedle an allowance out of my parents, I stopped making lists and began to collect objects.
Despite my early fascination with the silk shoe, my first boyhood collections had nothing to do with Asia and were rather unoriginal. I look back now and realize that these initial attempts at collecting were simply an exercise in gathering and categorizing that is common among young boys: a cardboard box filled with seashells and colorful stones, followed by an album of foreign postage stamps and, later still, a bureau drawer full of the persistent offerings of the Littleton Coin Company.
My first coin collection was a lesson in how the urge to acquire can cloud one’s judgment. I came across an advertisement for the Littleton Coin Company in the back of a comic book. I signed up and soon had a handful of tiny manila envelopes, each with a coin from some struggling or recently extinct country, such as the Republic of Biafra. “Pay for the coins you wish to keep,” said the accompanying letters from Littleton, New Hampshire. “Send back the coins you don’t want.”
I wanted them all—despite having no way of paying. A new coin showed up in the mailbox every few days. I examined each one carefully before hiding it in a bureau drawer. Before long the coins began arriving with letters written in tones of polite urgency, which over time became curt and vaguely threatening. I simply stopped reading them. Finally there was a phone call. My father stuffed all the little manila envelopes into one large manila envelope, and my whole coin collection was mailed back to New Hampshire.
I did better with fossils, which I dug out of the ocher-colored dirt in the backyard of my grandparents’ house. In the distant past the area must have been the bed of a shallow sea, because the fossils were recognizable as seashells—mostly bits and pieces but now and then a whole clam or snail shell looking as though it had been made from the same sandy earth, pressed in a mold and baked solid. The sheer excitement of finding a well-formed fossil was enough to keep me in the backyard for hours, troweling away in the shade of a huge rubber tree. I wrapped each fossil in a length of toilet paper and kept them all in a box, and as soon as I got home it was time to consult Herbert S. Zim. After a time I no longer needed the book because I’d committed to memory all the text and illustrations that applied to my finds.
At this young age I was like a hyperdedicated sports fan who hungrily memorizes the professional statistics of a favorite athlete. As soon as I found something that caught my interest, I would read about it until I had exhausted all my resources: the family encyclopedias and books around the house, and later books at the school and public libraries. When I felt I’d learned all that I could, my obsession would start to cool and eventually burn out, but while blazing it was about the only thing on my mind.
In my early teens I began to collect foreign banknotes, and with these I rediscovered my attraction to Asian imagery and iconography. This collection, gathered while I was in junior high school, contained samples of the worthless paper currency of the recently defunct South Vietnam, and of Cambodia and Laos, as well as earlier banknotes from when the three countries were part of colonial French Indochina. These mid-century bills, with their colorful and idealized images of native peoples, elephants, and pagodas, were miniature works of art.
Travel was also a big part of my childhood. In 1972, when I was ten, my parents decided to buy a Volkswagen bus and hit the road. National parks were the primary destinations of the trip, and we—my parents, myself, and two younger siblings—visited the major parks in the western United States as well as lesser-known national monuments. We made subsequent road trips in the ’70s, each with a different theme. One trip took in the ghost towns of California and Nevada. During another, we made stops to explore ancient ruins left by Native Americans—sites in the Southwest with names like Casa Grande and Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle. I remember enjoying the natural beauty of the national parks and monuments, but for me it was the historical human settlements that inspired. There was something about the mystery of these places that gave me a fascination for dwellings that had once sheltered past lives.
This fascination also included antiques. As a boy I was convinced that certain inanimate objects had feelings. Okay, admittedly I was a weird kid, but I could not accompany my mother into a thrift store or junk shop without feeling sorry for some of the items that had been banished from the lives of their previous owners. At times these discarded things seemed to call out to me, and their pleas for a new owner were especially heart wrenching if the objects were damaged. My mother was patient but firm. “No, you can’t have that,” she would say. “It’s broken!”
In an episode of the early 1970s television show Nanny and the Professor, the children found an enchanted antique radio that could somehow pick up music and events that had aired many decades previous. After watching the program I became convinced that the idea was plausible. I wanted a radio like the one on the TV show, one of those wooden cathedral-shaped models from the 1920s with a dial that glowed like a peephole into the past. I gabbed about it until my parents inquired at a couple of antiques stores, but by this time such radios were already collectibles, and if they still worked they did not run cheap.
To console me my mother bought some record albums that were recordings of radio programs from the 1930s and ’40s—The Shadow, The Great Gildersleeve, and Fibber McGee and Molly. She then made some drawings, and my father took these into the garage and, using a piece of plywood and a jigsaw, made a convincing copy of the face of an old cathedral radio. After staining and lacquering it, he stapled a scrap of grille cloth to the back of the plywood to simulate a speaker, and then glued Bakelite knobs onto the front. There was even a dial that lit up via a tiny bulb connected to an AA cell battery. When finished, we propped the replica radio façade up on the hi-fi cabinet and spent evenings listening to the recorded radio shows. The effect was perfect. Unlike the radio in the television show, however, I didn’t imagine that mine was miraculously picking up broadcasts from the past. Instead, I used the scene to pretend that I was in the past. From what I remember, that imaginary radio was the first instance of my trying to feel nostalgia for a past that I had not known.
I was also a Disney geek. Being only an hour and a half away from Disneyland was, in my mind, one of the best things San Diego had going for it. From about age five until adolescence convinced me that it was no longer cool to do so, I went with my family on annual day trips to the vast amusement park. Of the themed sections that the park was divided into, Adventureland was an early favorite. Like the thousands of “tiki bars” that were all the rage in post–World War II America, Adventureland was not an attempt at replicating any cultural accuracy or geographic coherence. Instead it seemed to be based on the tales of sailors returning from voyages in the South Seas, or the stories of great-uncles who had passed through European colonial outposts in tropical Africa and Asia. This was not something that I realized at the time, of course. To me Adventureland was simply the most exotic place I had ever been—like being able to jump into a Saturday morning episode of Danger Island.
The landscapers at Disneyland took full advantage of the Southern California climate, creating riotous jungles where before there had been groves of orange trees in orderly rows. The centerpiece of Adventureland is the Jungle Cruise, a ride on a cleaned-up and canopied version of Bogart’s African Queen steamboat. A cleverly designed maze of artificial waterways and islands, the ride quite convincingly made me feel as though I were chugging first through the rivers of tropical Asia and then Africa.
The usual animatronics that Disney has long been famous for—depicting both animals and people—are the highlights of the ride, but I remember being most intrigued by some of the simpler visual effects, specifically the ruins of an ancient Khmer temple and a shrine to the Hindu deity Ganesha. The latter consisted of a concrete statue of the elephant-headed god—suitably detailed to appear carved from sandstone and clad in the patina of age—that the boat’s steersman pointed out and explained was the guardian of the “sacred elephant bathing pool” that lay just beyond the next bend in the river. The passengers of the steamboat got a fleeting glimpse of the shrine, a smiling Ganesha atop a plinth and surrounded by emerald stalks of giant bamboo, before the boat rounded the bend and the vision was gone.
It was one of my favorite sights in all of Disneyland—that benevolent Asian deity upon his throne on the bank of a tropical river, shaded by jungle canopy and covered with moss. I don’t know if anyone else my age was affected by this image, but it must have made an impression on me: Some thirty years later I had made several journeys up and down both the Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers, and had published details of my travels in guidebooks and magazines; I had visited all the major Khmer ruins in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos—remnants of stone temples that radiated out like milestones from Cambodia’s Angkor region to the far corners of Indochina, and I had gathered a substantial collection of images of the Hindu deity Ganesha from all over Southeast Asia. It has become fashionable to belittle Disney’s theme parks for being sterile and artificial, but my childhood experiences at Disneyland sparked some of my adult life’s most exotic adventures and eclectic pursuits.
Adolescence changed my interests somewhat. Is there something about the hormonal assault that goes on within the bodies of adolescent boys that gives so many of them a fascination with things military? I began spending less time reading about fossils and seashells and more time studying the details of World War II fighter planes and Nazi uniforms. There was no hope of trying to gather a collection of either. By the mid-1970s, even such offbeat collectibles as Nazi daggers were being reproduced and sold via ads in the backs of magazines, but I had little interest in collecting reproductions of any sort. Luckily for my parents, my interests were largely thwarted. If the old radio shows had seemed a tad odd, how would they have viewed a sudden urge to acquire Nazi weapons? The one thing I could afford were American military medals. The Vietnam War had only recently ended and, as long as I limited myself to collecting medals from that conflict, there were plenty on offer, and they were cheap. Perhaps because of the war’s outcome there seemed to be no shortage of veterans who were willing to sell their military-issued decorations for a pittance.
The imagery on one of these awards seemed as though it had been designed especially to fire my imagination. The Vietnam Service Medal had a green, yellow, and red ribbon—the latter two colors symbolizing the flag of South Vietnam—and was embossed with a dragon half hidden in a thicket of bamboo. How could I say no when such baubles were selling for little more than a buck apiece? There were other things to acquire: hat devices and shoulder devices and once a cigarette lighter engraved with a map of Vietnam. The war may have been unpopular with much of America, but in it I saw adventure.
Had I been born a decade earlier I might have signed up for a tour. Instead, I watched movies. In 1980, the year I graduated from high school, I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now for the first time. Whatever the director was trying to say about the waste and futility of the Vietnam War—or war in general—was pretty much lost on me. Instead I was enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of the settings. Jungle scenes in which the protagonists were dwarfed by giant banyan trees left me in awe. Once the story moved upriver and came upon Colonel Kurtz’s headquarters in the ruins of a Khmer temple, I was completely captivated. Where was this land of misty jungles and hydrogen-bomb sunsets? When the movie was over I didn’t get up to leave. Instead, I sat there awestruck by the experience and watched as the credits rolled up the screen. Then I saw where Apocalypse Now had been filmed. Not in Vietnam, of course, but in the Philippines.
I was familiar with the Philippines because I had Filipino friends in school. San Diego is a navy town with a number of naval bases, and because the Philippines was once an American colony, its citizens were allowed to serve in the U.S. Navy even after independence was granted the archipelago in 1946. For that reason San Diego had, and still has, large numbers of Filipinos in residence. The ones in school were pretty much the only Asians I knew—although I don’t remember when I realized they were Asian. Their last names were usually Spanish; they shared many of the same surnames that were common among the large number of Mexican kids in school.
During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, an American-born Filipino friend accompanied his immigrant parents on a trip to their homeland. The following school year he told me stories about his experiences in the islands. Crazy stories. This was a country whose rich were so wealthy they seemed like comic book parodies of billionaires, and whose poor partied as though each day was their last; a land of epic natural disasters, but whose heartbreaking tragedy was always suffused with an element of buffoonery. Still, my ideas about the place were vague. After watching Apocalypse Now I was suddenly able to superimpose visual images onto the crazy stories I’d heard about the Philippines—images that to me were tantalizingly exotic. I made up my mind that I had to see the place.
Upon my graduation from high school, my parents gave me a gift of a thousand dollars. What would I do with it? I was undecided on a major and so college seemed to be something I should postpone. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but guidance counselors told me to forget the idea. Take lots of math, they advised. In the future everything will be run by computers, and you’ll need lots of math to get a good job. Of course they were right, but I hated math.
After barely a semester at a community college, I dropped out and began to travel—and the Philippines became my stepping-stone from California to mainland Southeast Asia. By the time I was twenty-one I had visited twice.
Back then the Philippines got even fewer Western tourists than it does now. Most “tourists” going to the Philippines are really emigrant Filipinos returning home to visit relatives. The tourists who aren’t Filipinos are usually middle-aged Western men looking for a cheap place to drink and carouse with prostitutes. The country is not on the backpacker circuit because its beaches and culture cannot compete with Southeast Asian destinations such as Thailand and Bali. To most Westerners, the Philippines suffers from a lack of exoticism. Simply put, Philippine culture is just too accessible. To a young Western backpacker, sharing a bus ride with a saffron-robed Buddhist monk reading the sacred Pali texts is exotic. Sitting next to a Catholic nun reading the Bible is a lot less so. When the Buddhist monk takes out his prayer beads, closes his eyes, and chants under his breath, the Westerner swoons. When the Catholic nun pulls out her rosary and says her Hail Marys, the backpacker squirms.
However, I wasn’t put off by the accessibility of Philippine culture—to me its mix of the familiar and the exotic was a draw. I brought the address of some relatives of a high school friend and was supposed to contact them as soon as I arrived. They lived a few hours south of Manila, but I chose instead to check into a hotel in Manila’s tourist district and do some exploring on my own. Having grown up so close to the Mexican border and Tijuana, I was no stranger to poverty or the trickery it often spawns when a seemingly rich outsider appears on the scene. I was on my guard, but the rush of being alone in unfamiliar surroundings was more invigorating than frightening. Certainly my familiarity with Filipinos in California allowed me to feel more at ease than I would have had I just touched down anywhere else in Asia.
The road trips with my parents were based on destinations, and their approach to travel had rubbed off on me. On my first visit to the Philippines I made it a point to see the sights, including a flight up to the former American colonial hill station at Baguio and then a drive down to La Union where there were beaches lapped by the warm waters of the South China Sea. I also made a pilgrimage to a location where Apocalypse Now was filmed, taking a canoe up the river where the Khmer temple scenes were shot.
After returning to San Diego I kept in contact with friends I had made in Manila, and during my second trip to the Philippines, nearly two years after the first, they insisted that I stay with them. This didn’t surprise me. What was surprising was the depth of their hospitality: They insisted that I stay with them the entire time I was there. I was able to save so much on accommodations that my trip lasted six months. Besides saving money, this arrangement fit in with my travel priorities for the second trip, which were different from my first. I was less interested in destinations and more keen on understanding the people.
So instead of seeing the sights, I parked myself in front of the little mom-and-pop shop that my Filipino “family” tended and learned their language and culture by watching the transactions. The narrow lane out front was a constant parade of pedestrians and gliding pedicabs, and people invariably greeted me as they passed—the women and girls with shy smiles and the men with casual, upward nods of their heads. I was the only Westerner in the neighborhood, and everyone knew my name. I sat in front of that little store every day for months and never tired of the view. It was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend the twenty-first year of one’s existence.
Collecting experiences was easy in Manila, but collecting objects was more of a challenge. The Filipinos whom I knew and lived among were relatively poor, and there were very few objects lying about that struck me as collectible. Things got used until they were useless and then they were tossed into a heap in a vacant lot that served as the neighborhood dump. There discarded items sat until the scavengers with wooden pushcarts made their rounds, picking through the piles. Anything recyclable—bottles, wire, any kind of scrap—was carted away to a vast and stinking shantytown in another part of the city where there resided what seemed to be a caste of trash pickers who made a living from recycling Manila’s refuse.
In Ermita, Manila’s tourist district, there were a handful of antiques shops that gave an idea of what Filipinos thought about antiques. The old furnishings and knickknacks—many of them made in the United States or Europe—were no different from what one could find at flea markets in Baltimore or Seattle—except that they were ten times the price.
One thing Filipinos collected that I found interesting were old Catholic icons: carved wooden santos ranging in size from small figurines of saints, friars, and nuns to larger-than-life images of Christ dying in agony on the cross. Some of the shops in Ermita specialized in Catholic antiques, their shelves crowded with dusty santos. The more primitive images—probably taken from rural churches—had an appealing folk-art look to them.
I was especially impressed by the fine old icons with smooth ivory faces whose features mirrored those of the Chinese artisans who had carved them: Marys and Christs with mournful expressions that were amplified by high cheekbones and slanted eyes. The images were fascinating to look at, but if the asking prices of the Western bric-a-brac seemed unreasonably high, the Catholic icons were astronomically so. Clearly these were already well-established collectibles among the Filipinos themselves. Instead of santos I settled for anting-anting, small brass amulets with Catholic imagery said to possess magical powers that protected the wearer from danger. There were stalls near Quiapo Church where old ladies with skin like Brazil nuts sold these talismanic charms for a few pesos each.
In August 1983, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino returned to the Philippines from exile in America to challenge the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. Before he could even set foot on the tarmac at Manila International Airport, Aquino was assassinated. I heard the news while attending a birthday party in my neighborhood on Manila’s outskirts. During the tumultuous months that followed I accompanied friends to political rallies in Manila’s version of Central Park, where tens of thousands of people wearing yellow T-shirts chanted for the resignation of Ferdinand Marcos.
However, by the time the downfall finally happened in 1986, I was in Hawaii. On television the humiliated dictator and his family were shown arriving at the Honolulu airport. The haste of their departure could be seen in their luggage—their worldly possessions packed into scores of cardboard boxes that had once contained Pampers disposable diapers. I watched the events unfold and wished I were in Manila to witness the citywide celebrations that were taking place.
After my money had run out in 1984, I left the Philippines and returned home to San Diego. Nearly four years had passed since I’d graduated from high school. My parents wanted to know what I was planning to do with my life. One day I walked into a naval recruiter’s office and got into a conversation with the man behind the desk, who claimed that I could get stationed in the Philippines if I enlisted for a minimum of four years. He also told me that submariners made an extra hundred dollars per month and suggested that I volunteer for submarine duty. Both propositions sounded reasonable to me.
People who grow up in navy towns don’t usually have high opinions of sailors. The ones I saw as a kid in San Diego seemed horribly unhip. In the age of long hair their heads were shaved so close you could see the pimples on their scalps. They traveled in loudmouthed bands at Sea World and Old Town, but no amount of attitude could make up for those clownish uniforms. My father, who like me was born and raised in San Diego, was not at all impressed by my idea of joining the fleet. “Do you want to be bossed around by those pinheads?” he asked. But it was too late. I’d already signed the contract.
As it turned out, the recruiter was wrong about there being submarines based in the Philippines. I ended up at Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t complain much. At least I would be closer to the Philippines than if I had been stationed on the mainland, and I could fly there while on leave.
The navy was a four-year holding pattern for me. I did no collecting while I was in. I barely had time to sleep, so hobbies were out of the question. There was some travel but mostly it was work and more work. My primary duty was navigating the submarine. I have always loved maps, but the navy used charts—which are essentially maps of bodies of water. Maps have land, settlements, people, and history, but charts—unless they overlap some coastline—consist mostly of soundings: thousands of tiny numbers indicating the depth of the water. For me there was nothing more boring than a deepwater chart. I worked and squirreled away my money, telling everyone that I was going to get out after my four-year enlistment and retire in the Philippines at the age of twenty-six. I doubt many took me seriously. After I was discharged in 1988, I did go back to Manila, but I didn’t stay there long.
The gloriously corrupt Ferdinand Marcos was long gone, and President Corazon Aquino, who had stepped into her martyred husband’s shoes and led the drive to oust the dictator from the Philippines, was making an effort to rid the country of the jobbery and petty corruption that many Filipinos believed was Marcos’s dirty legacy. I was staying in the Philippines on a tourist visa, which after an initial twenty-one days could be extended to give me a total of sixty days in the country. Then I would have to leave. Of course, flying out of the Philippines every two months would have been a real expense—except that I had found a way around it.
A friend of a friend who worked at the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation indicated to me that she could extend my visa under the table if I would have a new polyester bowling suit tailor-made for her. She sent me her measurements, and when the suit was finished, I gave it to her. That done, all I had to do was show up every couple of months at the immigration office with a carton of “blue seal” made-in-the-USA Marlboros, and my passport was quickly and efficiently stamped with another two-month extension. It was one of those arrangements that made me smile anytime I heard somebody cursing corruption in the Philippines. This worked fine for a few months. Then one day I showed up for my usual visa extension but my friend the Marlboro-smoking bowling enthusiast was nowhere to be found. I made a discreet inquiry, “Is Estrellita sick today?”
“No,” came the reply. “Fired for corruption.”
An immigration officer asked to see my passport and began thumbing through it. He was joined by another officer, and then another and another. Finally they all moved out of earshot and examined my passport in a huddle. I braced myself for a hefty fine, but when the passport was returned I was told, “You have five days to leave the Philippines.”
When I got back to my apartment I looked at a map of Southeast Asia. In 1989, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were closed to the casual tourist. Burma allowed tourists a mere seven days of visa time, and on arrival there was a mandatory currency exchange of two hundred U.S. dollars for worthless Burmese kyat. The remaining Southeast Asian capitals were Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta. Hong Kong wasn’t too far from Manila, but it was expensive and I had little interest in going there. Singapore, too, was known as a costly place to visit. Thailand and Indonesia would be the most economical destinations, and so I chose Thailand. While in the navy I’d heard plenty of stories about ports of call in the Pacific, and Thailand, because of its wild nightlife and pristine beaches, was always high on the sailors’ rave-about list.
I spent two weeks in Thailand: a few days at the beaches in the south, a few days in the mountainous north, and the remainder in the sprawling capital waiting for my fresh Philippine visa. The climate was similar to the Philippines’, and the Thais physically looked very much like Filipinos, but the similarities ended there. The Thai language was totally incomprehensible and, unlike Filipinos, very few Thais seemed able to speak English. I wasn’t ready to learn a new language. A nice place to visit, I thought as I was boarding the flight back to Manila.
Two months later I was back in Bangkok. President Aquino’s anticorruption crusade was still in full swing, and I had again been told to leave the Philippines to obtain a fresh visa. Then something happened. In Bangkok I found work as an extra in a movie being shot by the Hong Kong director John Woo, just as Manila was experiencing a particularly violent coup attempt. I decided it was a good idea to park myself in Thailand and wait out the political flare-up. Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, was experiencing a boom in tourism, and after the film shoot was finished I went to check it out. While there, I was offered a job teaching Thai tour guides to speak Spanish—a language I’d learned while growing up in San Diego. It was a decision that would have lasting consequences. The rent in Thailand was cheap, visas were easy to obtain, and the months segued into years.
After a few years in Chiang Mai, I relocated to Bangkok. My teaching jobs gave way to writing gigs—first for a local magazine, then for the in-flight magazine of Thai Airways. This led to freelance journalism for the wire services Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press. Later, along with features for the wires, I began penning travel pieces for the Asian edition of Time magazine. Then came the guidebooks: For nearly a decade, I paid the rent by doing updates for Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, contributing to biennial editions of guidebooks about Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines.
Not long after arriving in Thailand I began collecting again. The writing jobs meshed perfectly with my old hobby: Suddenly I was getting paid to travel all over the region and had ample opportunities to scour its antiques shops. Based in Bangkok, I lived frugally in a small apartment in the city’s Chinatown, spending less than five dollars a day on food and channeling the rest into whatever I was collecting at the moment. I owned no television and, except to browse Bangkok’s Saturday night thieves market, rarely went out at night. After some initial exploration, I found the allure of the city’s famed nightlife easy to resist. Some people collect hangovers and sex partners. My follies were less fleeting.
Thailand and the surrounding countries offered seemingly endless collecting possibilities. It wasn’t just that the cultures of mainland Southeast Asia had been producing collectible artifacts for thousands of years. Even if you took away the antiques shops and discounted old things altogether, the simple fact that Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Cambodia used non-Roman scripts to write their respective languages made their modern products exotic—and hence collectible—in my eyes. In the Philippines, a Coke bottle looked just like a Coke bottle did in the States. In Thailand, the Coca-Cola logo had been rendered into the Indic-based Thai script—voilà! Instant collectible.
After a couple years in Thailand I began collecting something that was inarguably an art form: textiles. One would have to be blind to spend any time in Southeast Asia and not notice them. Many of the different ethnicities in the region have longheld weaving traditions and have been producing works of art in silk and cotton for centuries. What I found most interesting was that historic events, such as forced migrations in the aftermath of war, could be traced by reading what experts referred to as the “grammar” of the region’s textiles.
Prices could go as high as tens of thousands of dollars for museum-quality pieces, but I found that during my travels I often passed through villages in rural Laos, Cambodia, and Burma whose inhabitants would part with interesting textiles—usually sarongs—for just a few dollars each. In southern Laos, in the bamboo jungles along what was once the Ho Chi Minh trail, I visited a village whose weavers had produced cotton blankets with motifs that could not be misidentified: American fighter planes and “Huey” helicopters. It was as though I had found the exact opposite of a World War II cargo cult. This isolated culture living along the former Ho Chi Minh trail—one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in history—had produced talismanic blankets in the hope that those wrapped in them would be protected from the terrible rain of bombs and bullets.
After a few years I had built up a respectable collection of textiles, but then my interest started to wane. One thing that turned me off was my fellow collectors. From afar they looked harmless enough. Some were matronly Thai women with big hair, titled according to the kingdom’s system of ever-diminishing nobility. The Thai men were either moss-backed academic sorts or flamboyantly gay. They were an elite crowd and often spoke excellent English, and you wouldn’t earn any points for speaking Thai to them unless it was flawless. There were also Westerners who collected the region’s textiles, a bohemian-looking lot who had lived in the region for decades. Yet this was no polite circle of tea-sipping friends. According to stories I heard, the eccentric façades masked a cutthroat competitiveness. Okay, most serious collectors of just about anything will be able to tell you eye-popping stories of greed and deceit, and with the sums of money involved it came as no surprise that the Southeast Asian textile crowd had some real scoundrels among them.
Take, for example, the Thai university professor who approached a woman from Chiang Mai—a friend of mine—who was selling off a collection she had inherited. The collection itself contained some rare pieces, particularly from northern Thailand, an area that had been officially a part of the kingdom for less than a century and whose textiles reflected cultural influences from neighboring Laos and Burma. As established collectibles, such textiles had a high market value and could sell for thousands of dollars. The professor explained that he was writing a book, and he requested a selection of relevant pieces from the woman’s collection that could be professionally photographed to illustrate it. My friend agreed but immediately there was a glitch: The photo shoot would take much longer than expected. When the textiles were finally returned to her months later, many of the best pieces were nowhere to be seen. Instead, similar but inferior textiles had been substituted. The professor was an acclaimed expert on northern Thai textiles, and my friend with the inherited collection was a nobody. Guess who never saw her textiles again?
Such tales were disturbingly common. Southeast Asian textiles were beautiful, but I had little affinity for the people who collected them. Perhaps I was afraid that if I kept at it, I would become just like them. Or perhaps I was simply bored with textiles. After some years of collecting, I abruptly stopped. I wanted to collect something new; something romantic without being common or clichéd; something whose collectors were not snobby or grasping but open to sharing knowledge and enjoyable to be around. I also felt I should be helping to preserve the old ways of Asia—ways that were fast disappearing. I didn’t set out to actively look for my next collectible. It wasn’t necessary. These things just have a way of finding me.