I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well. I felt like a distance runner who thinks he is not doing too badly until he glances over his shoulder and sees that the fellow who is lapping him is not the leader of the pack, but one of the laggards. Perhaps it was for this reason that I did something in Manila I had never done before: I attempted to act and speak, as much as my dignity would permit, more like an American. The Filipinos we worked with seemed to look up to my American colleagues, accepting them almost instinctively as members of the officer class of global business — and I wanted my share of that respect as well.
So I learned to tell executives my father’s age, “I need it now”; I learned to cut to the front of lines with an extraterritorial smile; and I learned to answer, when asked where I was from, that I was from New York. Did these things trouble me, you ask? Certainly, sir; I was often ashamed. But outwardly I gave no sign of this. In any case, there was much for me to be proud of: my genuine aptitude for our work, for example, and the glowing reviews my performance received from my peers.
We were there, as I mentioned to you earlier, to value a recorded-music business. The owner had been a legendary figure in the local A&R scene; when he removed his sunglasses, his eyes contained the sort of cosmic openness one associates with prolonged exposure to LSD. But despite his colorful past, he had managed to sign lucrative outsourcing deals to manufacture and distributed CDs for two of the international music majors. Indeed, he claimed his operation was the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia and — Piracy, downloads, and Chinese competition notwithstanding — growing at quite a healthy clip.
To determine how much it was actually wroth, we worked around the clock for over a month. We interviewed suppliers, employees and experts of all kinds, we passed hours in closed rooms with accountants and lawyers; we gathered gigabytes of data; we compared indicators of performance to benchmarks; and, in the end, we built a complex financial model with innumerable permutations. I spent much of time in front of my computer, but also visited the factory floor and several music shop. I felt enormously powerful on these outings, knowing my team was shaping the future. Would these workers be fired? Would these CDs be made elsewhere? We, indirectly of course, would help decide.
Yet there were moments when I became disoriented. I remember one such occasion in particular. I was riding with my colleagues in a limousine. We were mired in traffic, unable to move, and I glanced out the window to see, only a few away, the driver of a jeepney returning my gaze. There was an undisguised hostility in his expression; I had no idea why. We had not met before — of that I was virtually certain — and in a few minutes we would probably never see one another again. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I started back at him, getting angry myself — you will have noticed in you time here that glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously — and I maintained eye contact until he was obliged by the movement of the car in front to return his attention to the road.
Afterwards, I tried to understand why he acted as he did. Perhaps, I thought, his wife has just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans. I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, pursuing several possibilities that all assumed — as their unconscious starting point — that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility. Then one of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him — at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work — and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closed to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside.
I did not say anything, of course, but I was sufficiently unsettled by this peculiar series of events — or impressions, really, for they hardly constituted events—that I found it difficult to sleep that night. Fortunately, however, the intensity of our assignment did not permit me to indulge in further bouts of insomnia; the next day I was at the office until two in the morning, and when I returned to my hotel room, I slept like a baby.
During my time in Manila — I arrived in late July and left in mid-September — my main links to friends and family were weekly phone calls to Lahore and online correspondence with Erica in New York. Because of the time difference, messages she wrote in the morning arrived in my inbox in the evening, and I looked forward to reading and replying to them before I went to bed. Her emails were invariably brief; she never wrote more than a paragraph or two. But she managed to say a great deal with few words. One note, for example, contained something to the effect of: “C. — I’m in the Hamptons. A bunch of us were hanging out on the beach today and I went for a walk by myself. I found this rock pool. Do you like rock pools? I love them. They’re like little worlds. Perfect, self-contained, transparent. They look like they’re frozen in time. Then the tide rises and a wave crashes in and they start all over again with new fish left behind. Anyway when I got back everyone kept asking where I’d been and I realized I’d spent the entire afternoon there. It was kind of surreal. Made me think of you.—E.”
Such messages were enough to lift my spirits for several days. Perhaps this strikes you as an exaggeration. But you must understand that in Lahore, at least when I was in secondary school — youngsters here, like everywhere else, are probably more liberated now — relationships were often conducted over fleeting phone calls, messages through friends, and promises of encounters that never happened. Many parents were strict, and sometimes weeks would pass without us being able to meet those we thought of as our girlfriends. So we learned to savor the denial of gratification — that most un-American of pleasures! — and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.
But I was of course eager to see Erica again and was therefore in high spirits as our project approached its end. Jim had flown in to satisfy himself with our final conclusions; he sat me down for a drink. “So, Changez,” he said, taking in our exquisite hotel, the Makati Shangri-La, with a sweep of his hand, “getting used to all this?” “I am indeed, sir,” I replied. “Everyone’s saying great things about you,” he said, pausing to see how I responded; when I smiled, he went on, “Except that you’re working too hard. You don’t want to burn out, now.” “Allow me to reassure you,” I said. “I get more than enough rest.” He raised an eyebrow and started to laugh. “I like you, you know that?” he said. “Really. Not in a bullshit, say-something-nice-to-raise-the-kid’s-morale way. You’re a shark. And that’s a compliment, coming from me. It’s what they called me when I first joined. A shark. I never stopped swimming. And I was a cool customer. I never let on that I felt like I didn’t belong to this world. Just like you.”
It was not the first time Jim had spoken to me in this fashion; I was always uncertain of how to respond. The confession that implicates its audience is — as we say in cricket — a devilishly difficult ball to play. Reject it and you slight the confessor; accept it and you admit your own guilt. So I said, rather carefully, “Why did you not belong?” He smiled — again as if he could see right through me — and replied, “Because I grew up on the other side. For half my life, I was outside the candy store looking in, kid. And in America, no matter how poor you are, TV gives you a good view. But I was dirt poor. My dad died of gangrene. So I get the irony of paying a hundred bucks for a bottle of fermented grape juice, if you know what I mean.”