1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [224]
I had no appointment or anyone to see. It was my notion that I would attract attention, and the attention would take me to the right person. After I had walked around for about fifteen minutes, a man showed up on a motor scooter. He took me up a long slope to the South Drive Bar and Grill, Bulalacao’s sole restaurant. The floor was gravel. In one corner was a small, dusty stage with three guitars, an electronic drum kit, several ramshackle speakers, and a laptop playing, unbelievably, “What a Wonderful World”—the original Louis Armstrong version. As the shuffle function switched the music to Japanese pop I was greeted by Chiquita “Ching” Cabagay-Jano, proprietor of the South Drive Bar and Grill and Bulalacao’s municipal planning and development coordinator and tourism administrator.
The Traveller-7 (Photo credit 10.2)
In the manner of town planners everywhere, Cabagay-Jano was enthusiastic about Bulalacao’s prospects. Investors were coming in from the resorts to the north, she said. Investors were coming from China. Investors were coming from America. Land in Bulalacao was there to be acquired—one man had snapped up 250 acres for a golf course. The government was paving the road around southern Mindoro, which would allow regular bus service. Last year the town had held the First Bulalacao Windsurfing Invitational Cup—banners from the competition adorned the restaurant walls. A crew was coming the very next day to install a permanent webcam above the town beach. Bulalacao was poor now, but soon it would swim in the stream of global commerce. It was waiting for the world.
When I asked about Legazpi, Cabagay-Jano summoned a son, Rudmar, and instructed him to guide my boat to the place where Spain had encountered China. The site was in a shallow bay, a nick in the coast just to the south, occupied by the hamlet of Maujao. Just past the high-tide line was a spring covered by a concrete pillbox. A metal pipe dribbled water into a cement channel, which channeled it to the beach. Two kids were filling up plastic buckets with water.
For centuries Mangyan people had waited there in their embroidered bark-cloth shirts and indigo-dyed cotton loincloths for the junks from Fujian and Guangzhou. White parasols made from Chinese silk shielded them from the sun. The smoke from their beach fires must have been like a welcome signal to the ships from afar. Both the Mangyan and the Chinese had a written language. It is tempting to imagine scribes keeping track of the exchange, so many cakes of wax and bundles of cotton for so many porcelain plates, shiny bronze gongs, iron pots, and needles. The southern wing of the little bay was a sharp point like a finger into the sea. At dawn four and a half centuries ago the Spaniards had abruptly rounded that point in their strangely shaped vessels. Stand back, the Chinese had cried. Many did not live to see the sunset.
Occupying the point was a small, half-complete resort: Thelma’s Paradise. Workers were building the main guest house on the shore. Thelma’s Paradise was going to be a “farm resort.” Visitors from Manila would stay there and “participate in the Bulalacao farming lifestyle”—the phrase comes from a handout Rudmar gave to me. I asked one of the workers what this meant. Rudmar translated, perhaps imperfectly, the response. Busy city executives would come to Maujao and weed Thelma’s gardens—a refuge from e-mail, deadlines, and the office desk.
People from Manila? I asked.
Not just Manila, I was told. From Legazpi’s time, poverty, colonialism, and slavery had scattered Filipinos across the world. Filipinos were nannies, nurses, and construction workers in Hong Kong, Sydney, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Paris. They had made money and wanted to visit home. Home was the sea and the beach and a cookout beneath the palms. Home was bahay kubo.
Rudmar stood