Those
of us in the Northern Hemisphere may be dreaming of running away to white sand
beaches…but what happens when warm weather doesn’t solve all your problems? Peter Gottlieb
found himself alone in a tropical paradise, where “the word for love and
the word for expensive are the same.”
We talk so long, she gets in trouble with the manager.
She's different from other Filipinas I've met. She's darker than most,
and like most of the citizens of the world, Filipinos look down on
dark-skinned people. Skin-lightening salons are a common sight in the
mega-malls of Manila. Instead of giving in, Sarah flaunts her darkness. She
has incipient dreadlocks in her hair and wears colorful beads in them — on the street, she's
mistaken for a foreigner. Other Filipinos think she's Jamaican or
Cuban. They speak in English to her. She laughs or gets angry when she
overhears passersby whispering about her in Tagalog. She tells me she's
never had a Filipino boyfriend.
Want to get lost, as well?
