In its eclectic choice of subjects, Filipino writer Lio Mangubat’s collection of historical essays Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves betrays its origins as a podcast. It resembles, not least due to Mangubat’s skill at spinning a good yarn, a collection of short stories rather than non-fiction pieces; and what the book lacks in an easily recognizable throughline, it more than makes up for in a readable prose style that manages to be both erudite and conversational.
The first piece, “Auroran Gods”, sets the tone. Nominally about the Aetas, a tribal people in Luzon, Mangubat opens with the filming of Apocalypse Now before moving on the 17th-century missions in Baler and in Casiguran, animism and the concept of sumpong (defined by colonial Spanish dictionaries as “a collision, a coming together, a bumping into something—in other words, an encounter… An encounter with what? Well, spirits, of course”) while name-checking Father Bernardo de Santa Rosa (whose memoirs date from 1747 and modern writers Resil Mojares, psychologist Rita Mataragnon and Mark Dizon before returning to Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now:
he soon found himself in a hellscape of a production. His first choice of actors dropped out. One of his leads suffered a heart attack. Typhoons destroyed sets. The movie went massively behind schedule and over budget. While filming, Coppola suffered an epileptic seizure, and threatened, three times, to commit suicide. The director would later describe the cursed production as that time in the jungle when he slowly went insane. Now, you could blame all the follies of Apocalypse Now on bad luck, bad timing, and bad management. Or perhaps you could also say that the spirits were having a little bit of sumpong.
Other essays cover pre-First World War baseball in the Philippines, the slot machine business between the Philippines and Shanghai in the 1930s, the trade in North American otter skins that passed through Manila on their way to China (a piece which covers the Manila Galleon and environmental concerns past and present), Nazis and Jews in Manila, how Taal Lake became a lake (it was open to the sea until an eruption in 1754), a Ming Dynasty map, a giant crocodile, an early 20th-century Broadway musical called The Sultan of Sulu and the World War 2 Mexican fighter squadron that was based in the Philippines.
If some of these sound like something Paul French might have written about, that’s because he has. Mangubat quotes from French’s City of Devils as well as Timothy Brook’s Mr Selden’s Map of China, Albert Samaha’s Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes and Tatiana Tatiana Seijas’s Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico. To call Mangubat well-read would be an understatement: the end-notes and bibliography take up more than 10% of this relatively short book.
Mangubat deploys a keen sense of irony. In the essay on the Philippines’s debut on the American stage, he writes:
In 1902, The Sultan of Sulu would have its world premiere at Chicago’s Studebaker theater, before it moved to Broadway and had a sold-out run of 192 shows. It’s largely forgotten now, but back in the day, it was a smash hit. A reviewer called it “excruciatingly funny”, and even said, “It was the best thing we’ve gotten out of the Philippines yet… It almost reconciles one to the twenty million dollars we blew in for the archipelago.”
Things are not, Mangubat points out, always quite what they seem. The playwright
wasn’t poking fun at the Sultan of Sulu or the Moros or the Philippines at all. He was satirizing the entire colonial project itself, and the narratives the Americans used to justify it.
Insofar as the stories have something in common, it is the intersection—and sometimes collision—of the Philippines with the outside (and usually colonial) world. Mangubat links past and present, knows a good character when he sees one, and writes engagingly.This short book could easily have included another half-dozen of these vignettes. This is something of a parlor trick; it might not work a second time.
Short-story collections are often a prelude for something longer: perhaps Mangubat can be the one to write a Filipino history that resonates with a wider English-speaking public. Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves is proof that there’s more than enough material.