Within the walled neighbourhood of Intramuros, a picturesque living museum of the Spanish colonial period in Filipino history, the taxi finally stops in front of your hotel, and you hand the driver his money, an amount four times what your guidebook has informed you is standard. The driver flips through his bills, pausing every now and then to lick his fingers. He counts them again and then again and then stops, looks at you, and whispers “tip?” The tip, you think, is included in the exorbitant rate you charged. That is where you may find your tip. He tilts his head and tries again, “What about the tip.” You are calm, extraordinarily calm, but inside, you are politely advising the man that next time we can save each other much time and unpleasantness if you just robbed me with a gun like a self-respecting criminal as opposed to this polite, civilized mugging. You immediately critique yourself for such exaggeration. You can say no. You can scream and shout. You can point your finger, make threats, write down names and numbers, slam doors, kick tires. But instead, you find yourself reaching into your pocket, collecting whatever loose bills and coins have huddled there, and stuffing them into his outstretched hand.  He acts nonplussed and simply deposits the money into the cup holder. He opens the trunk, and you get out.

You secure your backpack, check for your wallet and passport, and casually remind yourself of your respective positions. He is a taxi driver in Manila, one of the world’s most impoverished cities, prone to typhoons and extrajudicial killings, and you are on vacation from your job as an English teacher in Busan, South Korea, where qualified candidates only need to be from places once colonized by the English. You laud yourself for such perspective, for such reflexivity. And then you suddenly defend the man who so nonchalantly ripped you off. He probably supports a young family, maybe a young child, maybe two, maybe one has a medical condition and  he desperately needs the money for medical bills, a visit to the doctor, or some kind of expensive operation. You further chastise yourself for letting twenty or thirty dollars rob this man of his humanity, for letting such a meagre sum divorce you from the historical circumstances that have conveniently led you here, to the elegant White Knight Hotel, and him back to the airport. You breathe. You are satisfied. Everything is fine. Everything is still okay.

After checking into the hotel, you walk the quiet streets reeking with decayed Spanish opulence. Churches, balustrades, alcoves, lamps, all seem to crack and crumble from centuries of humidity, rain, and wind. Even the streets themselves, patterned as they are in a typical Spanish grid, have begun to hurt. A construction crew has gutted one and its wake lie pools of mud water and mounds of dirt. You enjoy the atmosphere, though, minus the drilling and jackhammering sounds arising from the trench, minus the touts on their motorbikes shouting their services as guides. You politely decline with a graceful wave of your hand. Vendors under colourful umbrellas sell sweets and bananas. You are hungry but do not buy any. 

You think about the first time you learned about the Philippines. You are in an eleventh-grade history class and you are writing an essay about the Spanish American War. You read about the history of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, about how the islands themselves, little microcosms of dense diversity, were named after Philip II, king of Spain, king of an empire upon which the sun never set. You read about the encomiendas and the corruption and the massacres of the Chinese population. You make notes about the nascent independence movement and memorize such names as Rizal, Bonifacio, and Aguinaldo, reformers and revolutionaries, who fought and frustrated the Spanish, who dreamt about a Philippines freed of external domination for the first time in four hundred years, the first since Magellan landed in Cebu in 1521. You underline a section explaining the origins of the Spanish-American conflict, about how the Americans intervened in Cuba to aid the independence movement there and to protect certain commercial interests, and after numerous defeats of the Spanish, both in Cuba and the Philippines, and after the signing of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Americans found themselves in possession of not only Cuba but the Philippines as well. You jot down a sentence extolling your frustration with America’s selective enthusiasm for self-determination, about how despite Filipino assistance against Spanish intransience, despite assurances of self-government and sovereignty, the Americans did not depart the islands until 1946. You use this theme, American hypocrisy, as your central thesis and argue that American action in the Philippines was a lesson in betrayal and with friends like the United States, enemies prove redundant and at the earliest convenience, you may find a knife in your back, moulded from metal with the etched engraving MADE IN AMERICA. The teacher likes your essay but suggests you should tone down the hyperbole for it is unbecoming in academic discourse. History is the realm of fair minded and sober reflection. Emotion is improper, of unsound methodology. 

Along Riverside Drive, you watch the long line of jeepneys, kaleidoscopic minibuses of resolute steel and personality, circle a roundabout, as young men hang from the door screaming destinations and summon an array potential passengers who come sprinting from every direction. At Fort Santiago, you contemplate the fate of Dr. Rizal, the Filipino national hero, whom the Spanish executed here in 1896. Atop old dungeons, where Filipino prisoners of war were tortured and killed by the Japanese Imperial forces during the Manila occupation during WWII, you gaze over Pasig River, whose murky waters carry hunks of vegetation under bridges, past ferries transporting passengers between Intramuros and Chinatown, and under cranes lifting and moving pieces of cement and glass and plaster to complete a new building towering over Manila. The sky is a lazy grey. The air is heavy with moisture. It smells of rain. You remove your rain jacket from your daypack and tie it around your waist. You count the pieces of litter floating in the river’s currents.

Across the river, deep in Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown, the streets scream. You glance at your guidebook while dodging pedestrians, men and women who seem to multiply at will. The pages say Binondo is the oldest Chinatown in the world, established in 1594 by the Spanish. But the Chinese influence here existed long before the Spanish arrival, long before Europe became a magnet to which all eyes were pulled, a time when commerce and communication travelled outside the West’s purview, through and between more Eastern corridors. You note the Chinese characters adorning many buildings, the Taoist temples, the Buddhist monasteries, and the arches. You watch patrons hanging about in restaurants sucking long, succulent noodles and tossing back dumpling after dumpling with a flick of their chopsticks. The pace of life here astonishes you, so much activity squished into an impossibly small square. Every step you encounter an obstacle—a rickshaw, bicycle, vendor, car—requiring nimble feet and dexterous movements. You walk underneath a tangled web of thick, black cables, past a store selling traditional Chinese medicines, below a rectangular lamp decorated as you would a Christmas present. As you explore deeper, sidewalks disappear, the shouts of commerce grow louder and louder. You want to take a picture, to capture this chaotic scene for posterity, to enjoy it from your hotel room’s safety, but every time you stop and aim your camera, a bobbing head enters the frame and then another and another. Nothing is still. Everything moves. You begin to feel exposed, vulnerable, ensnared, and when a woman grabs your hand, points to a little girl resting at her feet, and asks for money, you apologize in a half-mumble and forcefully disengage from her grasp. 

An estero runs through Chinatown. In Tagalog, the word means “inlet canal,” a channel used as drainage mechanism in more populated areas. A series of bridges connects the each side of the canal, and on one such bridge, in a more subdued corner of Binondo, you stop to soak in the atmosphere. You notice three boys chasing one another across the bridge. They have the energy and enthusiasm of children across the globe and possess a youngster’s innate ability to make a game from anything. You watch them with a smile, mesmerized as you are by their innocence and playfulness. They are like children the world over, you conclude. Enjoy your time, now, you silently whisper, before adolescence makes you ashamed of play. 

You realize, however, that the game is not as democratic or as spontaneous as it first appeared. Two boys have joined forces against the third and they work together, it seems, to lift the boy up. One boy goes after the legs, the other, the torso. Each time, though, the targeted boy escapes their clutch, tries to flee, but is quickly caught and entangled again by hands and fingers. You think nothing of it as you remember the roughhousing from your childhood. Some weekends, you would invite some friends over and you would all descend to the basement, flick the lights off, and proceed to beat the holy shit out of one another. In the dark, you would punch, kick, and claw, but when the lights returned and everyone was deemed okay, the only sounds heard were our laughter and our collective pleas to go back to the dark and to the violence. 

The third boy, though, does not laugh. His face contorts and frowns. He is distressed, panicked. He wants to sprint toward freedom, down an alley or sides street, to his home, maybe, to a secure place filled with allies and supporters. But at each escape, the other boys block him, their arms extended wide, their feet quick and nimble, and slowly walk the boy back to the bridge, railing, and water, until they attack. One boy has the victim’s hands tied behind his back; the other kneels and scoops up his twitching legs and lifts. And at that moment, with the one boy dangling horizontally between his two tormentors, you finally understand their goal: they plan to throw him over the bridge. They inch him closer to the railing until his buttocks brush against the stone, until all it would take is one last heave to send him hurtling over the edge, falling the seven or so feet to the water. But the one boy is tenacious, and he squirms, struggles, kicks until his one leg becomes freed followed by his second, and then his arms, and then himself. He darts toward freedom and the whole sordid routine commences again. 

You do not move. You do not intervene. You stand and stare and study. But as the one boy sobs, and the others again close in as if a pack of carnivores ready to feast, you question your responsibility. You deconstruct the situation, analyze it as if a discourse, approach it as an ethnographic subject. You are mostly concerned with the optics of it, how it would be seen: a white man coming to the rescue of a brown child. Very white saviour. Very World Vision. Very colonial. None of the passersby seem concerned with these boys, with what they are doing, so why should you? Yes, why should you? You have been in the country mere hours and already you have adopted a position of judgment. You have become the social worker, the rescuer, the fucking superhero. You have become just like the other tourists who go to poor places with poor children and think about how splendid it would be to scoop them all up, hug them tight, kiss their little cheeks, and take them home to Toronto, New York, London, and feed them until their bellies stop bloating, until they become a picture of health, vitality, nurturance, until they have forgotten about their homes, their cultures, their languages.  

They have their hands on the boy, have trapped him, and have begun their journey to the edge. They carry him as if a carcass, a dead deer. The little boy looks resigned to his fate, only screaming and shaking a little. His eyes are big and wondrous. Marbles of obsidian. Spheres of soot. They look terrified. Beyond life. Mere feeling, mere reaction. They are going to do this, you tell yourself. And you see in your mind, the boy falling into the canal. You hear the splash. You hear the laughter. You hear the whispers. But do you hear anything else? Do you see anything else? You do not feel your feet moving, yet you suddenly desire them to. Your hands stay fastened to your sides, yet you wish they would reach out and pull the child back. You realize you do not know how to act. You realize you cannot act. You realize that all your intelligence, all your essaying, all your good intentions, all your feelings of superiority to the herd, the tourist mobs, mean absolutely nothing when confronted with a boy on the verge of catastrophe. Are you willing to live with yourself? The boy is on the railing. He looks down to the abyss. Are you willing to live with yourself knowing you could have stopped this? He hangs onto the railing, and his tiny fingers claw into the stone. The other boys push and push and push. Can you live yourself? You slowly move. Can you?

An elderly woman appears and scolds the two boys for their recklessness. They flee amid the sound of their own laughter. The other boy climbs down from the edge and chases after them, as if it were his turn now to terrorize one of the other two. You feel ashamed for a variety of reasons, each one difficult to articulate. You take a picture of Chinatown, the buildings and cars, and decide to try and remember only that. You are most comfortable around things. You only know how to respond to things.