~manila, you're not that ugly

What makes Manila home?

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That sweet, heavy smell of wet streets and carbon monoxide in the air, that’s the welcome that brings me home everytime I step out of the airport in Manila. There’s also the trusty traffic circus–the flash of yellow lights and blow of horns as the audience heats up to cue in the alpha male, Mr. MMDA, who just waves his hand again and again and again. Five minutes (or not even) into the city and I’m suddenly nostalgic about any other place I’ve been to, but no hurrah, I’m stuck–in traffic.

For some reason, though, there comes that pull, that sneaky charm that makes me forget the traffic in five minutes, or maybe thirty, and sets me right–I am home, I am home. I click my heels, and start my chant.

Why Manila? If you listen with a sincere heart, you’ll hear it, the secret life in the Philippine capital that is beyond the traffic and mess. You’ll feel the city’s pulse in the hawker’s food and chicken chatter of the kids, in the busy churches and schools of June. There it is in the unsanitized streets, the daydreaming jaywalkers, the loud-mouthed jeepney conductors who spit on occasion; the abrupt brownouts, the omnipresent fear of intensity 5.0 earthquakes and signal no. 2 typhoons, of sensationalized newsreporting. Even bad governance makes it home; without it, what would fuel the hope for its antithesis? We all know that hope in something is sometimes better than the real thing.

Manila is a suffering city, and it’s what makes it alive. When rules are bent and things aren’t how they should be, what’s one to do, really, but smile? Actually it may be no answer at all, but it works, for many. And what is a life of smiles anyway, but a life of hope, of creating from nothing, of making beauty out of the ugly, no matter how ugly? To live in a place with no rules leaves much room for gray areas, for non-cookiecutter lifestyles. And Manila, in all its wet glory, has given me that.

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