A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

Before the Insurrection, when the rinderpest had not yet destroyed the herds, beef cattle were plenty, and meat was cheap enough for even the poorest to enjoy. A live goat, full grown, was not worth more than a peso (fifty cents gold). Now there are practically no beef cattle at all, so the only meat available is goats’ flesh, which is sold at from twenty to sixty cents a pound (ten to thirty cents gold). Americans living in the provinces rely largely upon chicken, though in the coast towns there is always plenty of delicious fish. There are also oysters (not very good), clams, crabs, shrimps, and crayfish.

One of the most irritating features of housekeeping here is the lack of any fixed value, especially for market produce. There are no grocery stores, every article must be chaffered over, and is valued according to the owner’s pressing needs, his antipathy for Americans, or his determination to get everything he can.

You may be driving in the country and see a flock of chickens feeding under or near a house. You ask the price. The owner has just dined. There is still enough palay (unhulled rice) to furnish the evening meal. He has no pressing need of money, and he doesn’t want to disturb himself to run down chickens. His fowls simply soar as to price. They are worth anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar apiece. The current price of chickens varies according to size and season from twenty to fifty cents. You may offer the latter price and be refused. The next day the very same man may appear at your home, offering for twenty or thirty cents the fowls for which the day before he refused fifty.

Except in the cold storage and the Chino grocery shops of Manila, nothing can be bought without chaffering. The Filipinos love this; they realize that we are impatient and seldom can hold out long at it, and in many cases they overcharge us from sheer race hatred. Also they have the idea, as they would express it, that our money is two times as much as theirs, and that therefore we should pay two prices. Often they put a price from sheer caprice or effrontery and hang to it from obstinacy. In the same market I have found mangoes of the same quality ranging all the way from thirty cents to a dollar and fifty cents a dozen.

In the provinces market produce is very limited. In fresh foods there is nothing but sweet potatoes, several varieties of squash, a kind of string bean, lima beans, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers (in season), spinach, and field corn. Potatoes and onions can be procured only from Manila, bought by the crate. If there be no local commissary, tinned foods must be sent in bulk from Manila. The housekeeper’s task is no easy one, and the lack of fresh beef, ice, fresh butter, and milk wears hard on a dainty appetite. The Philippines are no place for women or men who cannot thrive and be happy on plain food, plenty of work, and isolation. Nor is there any sadder lot than that of the American married woman in the provinces who is unemployed. Her housekeeping takes very little time, for the cheapness of native servants obviates the necessity of all labor but that of supervision. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to talk about. She has nothing to do but to lie in a steamer chair and to think of home. Most women break down under it very quickly; they lose appetite and flesh and grow fretful or melancholy. But to a woman who loves her home and is employed, provincial life here is a boon. Remember that for an expenditure of forty or fifty dollars a month the single woman can maintain an establishment of her own—a genuine home—where after a day’s toil she can find order and peace and idleness awaiting her. Filipino servants are not ideal, but any woman with a capacity for organization can soon train them into keeping her house in the outward semblance at least of order and cleanliness. She had better investigate it pretty closely on Saturdays and Sundays; if she does so, she can leave it to run itself very well during the five days of her labor. And what a joy it is—I speak in the bitter remembrance of a long line of hotels and boarding-houses—to go back to one’s home after a day’s labor instead of to a hall bedroom; to sit at one’s own well-ordered if simple table, and escape the chatter of twenty or thirty people who have no reason for association except their economic necessities!

In the six years I have lived in these Islands, I have never heard of indignity or disrespect shown to American women.[1] They are perfectly safe, and if they choose to exercise any common sense, need not be nervous. Housebreaking outside of Manila is unknown. I myself lived for four years in a provincial town, the greater part of the time quite removed from the neighborhood of other Americans, with only two little girls in the house with me. I remember one evening having a couple of civil engineers, who had been fellow passengers on the transport and were temporarily in town, to dinner. When they were ready to leave, at half-past ten, the little girls had both gone to sleep, so I went downstairs to let them out and bar the door after them. One burst out laughing and remarked that my bolting the door was a formality, and that I must have confidence in the honesty of the natives. The door was of bamboo, tied on with strips of rattan in place of hinges, which any one could have cut with a knife. I admitted that the man was right, but the closed door was the symbol that my house was my castle, and I had no fear of Filipino thieves. The only time I was ever really afraid was when there were two or three disreputable Americans in town.

The two girls from Radcliffe were in a town in Negros where there was no other American, man or woman, and held their position for over a year; nor were they once affrighted in all that time.

After five years of this peace and security in the “wilds,” I went back to the United States and met the pitying ejaculations of the community on my exile. Well, there was a difference. I noted it first on the dining-car of the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, where one’s plate was surrounded by a host of little dishes, where the clatter of service was deafening (so different from the noiselessness of the Oriental), and the gentleman who filled my water glass held it about three feet from the water bottle, and manipulated both in sympathetic curves which expressed his entire mastery of the art. I found it again on the Northwestern, where the colored porter, observing some Chinese coins in my purse when I tipped him, said, “Le’s see,” with a confidence born of democracy, and sat down on the arm of the Pullman seat to get a better view of them.

But it was in Chicago—the busy, noisy, dusty, hustling Chicago—that all the joys of civilization fell on me at once. It seemed to be in a state of siege with house thieves, assassins, and “hold-ups.” There had been several murders of women, so revolting that the newspapers would not print the details. I found my brother’s flat equipped with special bolts on all outside doors, so that they could be opened for an inch or two without giving anybody an opportunity to push in. Once when a police officer called at the door to ask for subscriptions for the sufferers of the San Francisco disaster, I locked him out on the back porch while I did some telephoning to see if it was all right. Women were afraid to be on the streets in the early dusk. Extra policemen had been sworn in, preachers had delivered sermons on the frightful condition of the city.

At night I locked my bedroom door, and dreamed of masked burglars standing over me threatening with drawn revolver. For the thirty days I remained there, I knew more of nervousness and terror than the whole time I spent in the Philippines, and I came back to resume the old life where there is security in all things, barring a very remote insurrection and the possibility of hearing the roar of Japanese guns some fine morning. And through and through a grateful system I felt the lifting of the tremendous pressure, the agonizing strain, competition, and tumult of American life. Thank Heaven! there is still a mañana country—a fair, sunny land, where rapid transportation and sky-scrapers do not exist.