Staring contest with jeepney driver
Chapter 5 of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is set in Manila. The Pakistani narrator and his fair-haired, light-eyed American colleagues are in Manila on a business trip. He finds himself attempting to act and speak like an American because the Filipinos they work with seem to look up to his American colleagues. One day, on a busy street:
“I was riding with my colleagues in a limousine. We were mired in traffic, unable to move, and I glanced out the window to see, only a few feet away, the driver of a jeepney returning my gaze. There was an undisguised hostility in his expression; I had no idea why. We had not met before—of that I was virtually certain—and in a few minutes we would probably never see each other again. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I stared back at him, getting angry myself—you will have noticed in your time here that glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously—and I maintained eye contact until he was obliged by the movement of the car in front to return his attention to the road.
“Afterwards, I tried to understand why he acted as he did. Perhaps, I thought, his wife had just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans. I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, pursuing several possibilities that all assumed—as their unconscious starting point—that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility. Then one of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him—at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work—and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside.”
So why was the jeepney driver glaring at the narrator?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 14th, 2007 at 23:35
In the Phillipines you can get killed for a “masamang tingin” so one must be sensitve enough “na makuha sa isang tingin.” A glance is either an invitation or a challenge. We’re obsessed with “tingin” as in “may pagtingin, may pagtitinginan.” I can only guess what’s going through the driver’s mind “Anong tinitingin tingin mo dyan, bumbay?” The driver was daring the narrator to turn that glance into a measure, a judgement. At leche, malayo pa siya sa boundary.
December 15th, 2007 at 00:09
Well, i guess staring in a more not-so-poker-face look is just normal. We can’t just stare on a straight face, can we? (well, you’re stoned or something)…so a little angst in a look is just okay, unless, you want to go overboard and smile, and we don’t give smiles to strangers. I guess, it’s even more weird to get a smile. On most cases, we’d be more puzzled with that. A smile from a stranger? Some would find that rather odd, or to the most, insulting…(I mean, why is she effing smiling? Do i know him/her? Something wrong? Dirt on my face?)
Or to end the paranoia, “sunlight” usually crumples the face. Don’t think that driver, or that cigarette vendor on the street has something against you for having that face…c’mon, it’s usually hot!
December 15th, 2007 at 00:27
In the gay community, we stare when we cruise, and most of the time it might seem hostile, but it’s only because we wait for the other to smile first. I think the jeepney driver wanted to have sex with the narrator.
December 15th, 2007 at 03:55
Filipinos openly stare at anyone the least bit unusual. Nothing personal or judgemental. Foreigners complain about this all the time.
December 15th, 2007 at 09:12
According to a friend, the real irony here is that the Pinoy jeepney driver would always identify more with the blue-eyed American rather than with the “Bumbay”.
December 15th, 2007 at 17:10
Sorry, I don’t know where else to put this but it’s kinda related. Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke”, the recipient of the 2007 National Book Award for fiction apparently has many references to the Philippines as well. Johnson was supposed to have been raised partly in Manila. However, B.R. Myers of the The Atlantic, as expected, doesn’t share Michiko Kakutani and the rest of the literary snobland’s enthusiasm for the novel in this recent review: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/vietnam.
Jessica, I wonder if you share Myers’ opinion “on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose”. [For those not familiar w/ him, here’s his infamous “A Reader’s Manifesto”: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers%5D It’s pretty bold of him to take on such widely regarded literaty giants as Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, etc. but I think he’s mostly spot on. Whether or not you agree w/ him , I’m eager to read your opinion (hopefully a lengthy and detailed analysis) on the great divide between supposed “genre” and “literary” fiction.
December 15th, 2007 at 18:30
And oh, as for the drayber’s glare, I think the narrator (perhaps Hamid) is not aware of the fact that most Pinoys just going by appearance would not automatically identify non-Caucasians, especially Middle Eastern/Indian-looking people, as being “Amerikano”. Aside from what most of the commenters have already pointed out, Pinoys do have a generally condescending view of the latter to be particularly “mabaho”; at least not as strongly as white people’s reputation as non-frequent bathers themselves but their fairer skin and aquiline noses do much to avert that relatively little obstacle from the Pinoy’s prevailing sense of their being superior.
December 17th, 2007 at 09:41
could it be that the narrator just has a really big mole between his eyebrows? :)
The problem with regards to how most pinoys deal with foreigners is that they always associate them with what they see on tv, movies and print. So they think that all Joe Gringos (or anybody blonde and blue eyed) is Mr. I Can Take On Anything You Throw At Me And Still Do It Looking Good. Plus we really STARE LIKE LITTLE KIDS at anything strange and unusual.
December 17th, 2007 at 09:42
The jeepney driver wasnt staring at him. The limousine’s window, like all limousines’ windows, was tinted. The driver was checking himself out in the window and didnt even see the darn, self-absorbed guy.
December 17th, 2007 at 13:49
More than anything else, it’s the limousine that brought this Pinoy to stare at the Bumbay. Think Edsa at 2pm. And you happen to be beside this grand car. This car must have cool aircon inside, with a filthy rich guy watching DVD, oblivious to the unbearable hardship and poverty that the people experienced. And as #9 comment would say, the situation was made worse by the driver’s refrection he saw at the limo’s window. “What have I done to deserve this kind of life,” he asked himself.
December 17th, 2007 at 15:57
Jeg: exactly! We all have this thing about mirrors/glass partitions or just about anything we can see our reflections into – we always check ourselves out.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:28
The driver just bought a limousine. He was thinking, “My limo’s much cooler than these a**holes’ limo. Look at the f***ing color, black like a hearse. Mine’s brown, like the limos of the old rich.”