“Unable to make ethnic identification”
This just in from Budj.
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
…
“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.†—Spook Country by William Gibson
To recap:
Novels by foreigners set in the Philippines
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- The Tesseract by Alex Garland – made into a movie set in Bangkok; too bad as Ige points out there was a great Eddie Garcia part in there
- Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
- The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd – doesn’t read like he was actually here.
- Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo
- And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
- Someone alerted me to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro—Thanks, I’ll look it up.
- Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge, who reportedly got his ass kicked at Scrabble by a madame in Malate
- Ay, almost forgot Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka (Thanks for the reminder), a strange and wonderful novel about the Japanese soldiers trapped in Leyte towards the end of the Japanese Occupation.
Filipino characters in novels set elsewhere
- The hero in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Who else would know how to deal with alien cockroaches. By the time the book was adapted for the screen, the Pinoy had mutated into Casper Van Dien.
- Eugenio Martinez in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Filipino nanny in A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
- Pinguez in Thomas Pynchon’s V
- Conchita the maid in Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester
- Tatsuo’s parents in Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
Songs with titles alluding to the Philippines: Filipino Box Spring Hog by Tom Waits; Bebot by the Black-Eyed Peas.
Movies set partly or completely in the Philippines (the Phils as the Phils, not Vietnam or Indonesia): An Officer and A Gentleman (don’t think they actually shot here), No Way Out (signifier: bananas), that Claire Danes one, and Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, who makes casual reference to Manila in all his movies. And Kon Ichikawa’s masterwork Nobi (Fires On The Plain), which is set in Leyte but was actually shot in Japan. (Really minor quibble: The Filipino cast members should’ve been speaking Visayan.)
Tagalog heard in movies: The Rock, Constantine, Her Alibi, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
Does anyone know the title of that French spy novel with an episode at the Hobbit House?
Tina notes that several of the novels set in the Philippines are of an apocalyptic nature. It’s only fitting that Apocalypse Now was shot here, even if it’s set in Vietnam. Apocalypses R Us.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 7th, 2008 at 23:01
hahahaha andaming references!! woohoo! kaya lang it’s so sad na foreigners get the wrong impression of us dahil lagi taung portrayed na maid or something. Then, lagi pa tayong pinagkakalito sa mga mexicano… Parang wala tayong identity sa mundong ito… Anyways, I have a few:
In The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Charisse (or Clarrise, I forgot), one of the main characters’ friends, was mentioned to be Filipina. Or with exotic Filipina looks, I forgot.
Oh, and, SPIDAMANG! I saw that Chuck Norris movie, it was Delta Force 2. Yeah, that was shot in the Philippines, btw. It also had some old Filipino actors in it, in very small roles.
Also, my mum told me about a Steven Seagal movie where there was a Filipina shopkeeper whose store gets robbed. Then she swears at the top of her lungs in Tagalog. Lolz
Hey, Why wasn’t The Great Raid mentioned? It was set in the Philippines (not shot here, though) during WWII. Look it up.
Yeah, and in The Five People You Meet In Heaven [SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK], the Fifth Person, the dead girl, was Filipina. Some part of that book had some involvement with WWII here.
In Family Guy (Love that show!), Brian, the talking dog, has a gay cousin whose boyfriend is Filipino. There’s a deleted scene in that same episode where Stewie (The maniacal infant) has a conversation with the Filipino guy in Tagalog.
December 13th, 2009 at 21:15
Force 5 Recon: Deployment : Philippines by P. W. Storm. Back cover reads:-
A nightmare born in the Middle Eastern desert has spread to the jungles of the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf, a ruthless Muslim extremist organization, has become bolder and deadlier, increasing the frequency and severity of its brutal acts of terror, and Mac Rainey and his elite Team Dogma are being dispatched to assist the Filipino Marines in dealing with the threat. But the CIA is keeping Rainey’s group in the dark about their true purpose: to act as human bait in the Company’s attempts to hook two enemy collaborators: a high-ranking officer and a Filipino senator. Unaware that they are walking into a trap, the men of Dogma are ambushed, and two of their number are taken prisoner by a bloodthirsty sadist. And suddenly the mission is crystal clear for the warriors remaining: go in as three, with weapons blazing, and come back out as five — or die as one.
Sounds like a Chuck Norris movie.