Coming to America

COMING TO AMERICA
Victorino P Mapa

1958 - . The China Clippers that once water-landed in Manila Bay had long passed into legend. but Pan Am was still king of the Air There was no world capital that she did not fly to. Even to Manila. Our “Manila International airport” as it was laughingly called, was still in a World War II mode: Its terminal was a quonset hut inherited from the US Air Force. stapled together with plywood and wire-mesh.It looked more like a concentration camp liberated from the Nazis.
Up until 1957 Pan Am flew noisy, propeller driven DC-4s that crossed the Pacific with stops in Guam and Honolulu before three-pointing in San Francisco . The flight took almost two days and was as choppy as WWII B-29s under a flak attack. The seats came with equipped with barf bags. The Jet age came to Manila via Pan Am’s spanking new 707s shrinking travel time to only 19 hours. It was the year I would come to America.
I walked through the unguarded gates of the US Embassy into the lone three story building straddling the edge of Manila Bay. “When are you leaving?” the vice-consul asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” I replied. No big deal. Within minutes I had a US visa, no other questions asked. Fast forward to 2011. Applicants by the thousands, easier to pick up a date with Shamcey Supsup than get a US visa.. Everyone is assumed to be a potential illegal immigrant.
If Pan Am was king of the skies, the American President Lines was Queen of the ocean. . Crossing the Pacific with her was as enjoyable as the present day pleasure cruises. Those days however, sea voyages were not advertised as vacation cruises but as a mode of transportation, that is, to travel from points A to B. The APL ships leisurely wended its way to Honkong, Kobe and Yokohama thence to Honolulu before docking in San Francisco after 21 days. Sea travel was for me. I went aboard the SS PRESIDENT CLEVELAND. It had two classes of service: First and steerage. I chose the latter and why not? My heart was young and adventurous, not to mention cheap. The one way passage was only $275 one way. The trip included three meals a day served family style, that is, bowls of food, salad and rice plunked on a looong table and you reach, brudda reach!. Midnight, a snack of saimin noodles is thrown in.
Cabin? What cabin? We were stacked forty guys to a dorm. Your choice was lower or upper bunk. It wasn’t co-ed. Starboard was for the boys, aft for the girls. We met and danced every other night to the sounds of a three piece band played at the recreational hall. First run movies alternated on other nights. Our favorite pastime was to come close to the barrier that separated us from first class and listen to a 12 piece band render the tunes of Berlin, Gershwin and Kern. First class passengers dressed in tuxedos and gowns stood on their own upper railing and engaged us in polite conversation.Leonardo Di Caprio and fellow peons re-enacted the scene in “Titanic.”
Two days in Hongkong, very very British .. The Union Jack flag unfurled everywhere and young Queen Elizabeth was in every Hongkong dollar. I could hear the mellifluous voices of James Mason and Ronald Colman at the hotel pubs. Rickshaws were ubiquitous at sidestreets The Chinese was a coolie in his own land. Asian countries have unshackled the chains of colonialism at the end of WWII but it was still alive and well in this British Crown Colony, albeit slowly dying.
Got off in Kobe, took an overland trip and re-boarded the ship in Yokohama. One of the stops included a tour of the Mikimoto Pearl farm. I was offered a can of pearls for US$10. The can was an evaporated milk tin, the big sized one. “No thanks, “ I said. “What will I do with it?” I told the story twenty years later to my kids. All of them said, “Stupid!”
Honolulu. The mind conjured tales of Stevenson . Melville and Michener’s South Pacific, of intrepid Polynesians who crossed the vast ocean to settle its many atolls and islands. Receptionists from the Hawaii Visitors Bureau came on board to greet us with leis. A lovely, beautiful, happy people , I thought to myself. I pictured myself sitting under a shade tree and sharing coconut juice with a sarong-clad maiden . I immediately fell in love with a winsome lass who garlanded me with a lei.. “Aloha!” I said.
She shattered my illusions when she replied, “Kumusta ka na,”
Ay susmariosep! Counterfeit Hawaiians! They were Pinoys!
To be continued.