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Show though these are the same years of their feared infertility and an ugly war, the Philippines sit as the islands that they are, protected keys in their lives when their happiness knew no diminishment. As a child, I never questioned the purity of those years. Stories from that time were displayed like delicate confections before us, sweets we could not have, experiences we could not taste. Only as an adult, who understands that we create our selves every day through the stories we tell as well as the stories we hide, do I understand that the PhilippinesirRjst-femainuntarnished in order to understand what happened when they returned to the US. As my father describes it, when they left in 1967 for the Far East, they left a country they knew and loved. When they came back, fresh from a year-long around the world tour that took them from Asia to India to small towns in Europe where cows walked the roads wearing bells, they recognized nothing. Ruined while they weren't watching, their country felt more foreign than the villages in India where people ran up to touch their white skin and men flattened chapattis on their bare thighs before throwing them into the oven . The violence and unrest, the free love, the illegal drugs, the assassinations, and the demonstrations they saw on television confirmed the loss of their country. Even their families were strangers. Tales of eating intestines and being the only westerners on a train traveling across India bored their siblings. The night they held a slide show of their time abroad everyone either fell asleep or snuck into the still-lit kitchen to drink more coffee and smoke, not even halfway through the first tray of slides. Their travel stretched as a gulf between them and those they loved, between them and the world they now found themselves in. Such a homecoming confused the move to 35 |