I dreamed incessantly of the house we left behind on Old Santa Mesa Street. It was a mother of a house, full of history. There was a Caltex station nearby, a Stop & Shop supermarket on the corner, little Santa Mesa Church down the street. It was a modest, no-frills church—not grand or imposing like some of the old stone cathedrals in Manila—but small, hot and welcoming. I loved the neighborhood where I grew up, with its dilapidated, rambling houses, shady trees and languid pace. To my child's eyes, our house always seemed bigger and gloomier than any other house in the area, the garden surrounding it a jungle of bougainvillea, santan flowers, fragrant frangipani, or kalachuchi, mango, guava, banana, sampaloc and ancient acacia trees. There were snakes and bullfrogs, bats and lizards. I felt the presence of ghosts and spirits everywhere; I was sure that the kapre, a mythic, cigar-toking giant said to live in the huge sampaloc tree outside my bedroom window, would always protect me. In those incessant dreams of mine, the house stood—a sinister yet inviting apparition—on a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of a shimmering sea. I kept trying to swim to the island but never got there, no matter how hard or fast I swam. The house and the island kept vanishing into the distant horizon, reappearing again and again like some cruel optical illusion. I often woke from those dreams in tears, furious with myself for being weak.

In 1974 I finally went back to the Philippines and made peace with my father. I was 25, had moved out of my mother's flat and was on my own by then. I don't know why I waited so long to return. Perhaps I was even angrier than my mother and just couldn't bring myself to get on a plane. After my initial cathartic visit, I kept going back—once, twice a year. The Philippines wormed itself into the forefront of my consciousness. I surrendered to my new muse and couldn't write enough about it. This unsettling country was familiar, yet not. Street names had changed. My old school had been torn down and replaced by a four-star hotel. The hotel was torn down after another visit. Old Santa Mesa Street was no longer laid-back or peaceful but dusty, crowded, congested with traffic. There were lavish new megamalls. And more sprawling shantytowns and beggars than I had ever seen in my childhood.

Until the day she died in 1991, my mother spoke vividly of Manila, her absent family and friends as if they were all that mattered, as if we had left just yesterday. She kept in touch with everyone, kept up with the latest political events. The Philippines and its dramas were more real to her than America could ever be. America was nothing but a bus stop, where she waited for my father to come to his senses and apologize for hurting her. Then, and only then, would she return to her beloved country. But my father never did come to his senses, nor did he apologize. My mother, once a talented painter, became indifferent to the world and gave up her art. I moved to New York, started my own family, wrote my first novel. I visited her as often as I could, but the visits grew more difficult and exhausting as my mother grew bitter, withdrawn and frail. It was frightening how she always looked back, how consumed she was by the past and what was lost. I often think that my ambivalent love for the Philippines and the stories I keep writing are in some ways tied to her unrequited life.

Fast Forward to 2001. I'd completed in New York a draft of my novel Dream Jungle—inspired by an obituary and a photograph. A few years earlier, the New York Times had published an article on the death of Manuel ("Manda") Elizalde Jr., a colorful figure from my childhood. Few people may remember or care who Manda Elizalde was, but many remember the "Tasaday," a mysterious tribe he claimed to have discovered in 1971 in the Mindanao rain forest—shy, noble savages untouched and untainted by civilization. To this day, no one is sure if they were a hoax or a genuine band of long-lost primitives.

In the photograph, Elizalde—scruffy, handsome, 30-something—wears a rakish yachtsman's cap on his head and a pensive, wary expression on his bearded face. Half-naked Tasaday children huddle closely beside him. Perhaps they are afraid of the camera. The children are endearing, sweet and glorious in their innocence. One boy wears a grass skirt. The little boy—if one were to believe the legion of hoax theorists buzzing around the Tasaday—could very easily have been a girl who, upon Elizalde's orders, had her hair shorn off and meekly donned her primitive costume. The photograph is manipulative and powerful, straight out of some macho, imperialist fantasy. Graham Greene meets Joseph Conrad meets James Michener meets Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I kept reading and rereading the article, remembering with a rush how I had once attempted to interview Elizalde, back in 1974, my year of making peace with my father, the year of my first trip "home." The afternoon of our brief, surreal visit is permanently etched in my imagination. Elizalde was already the despised subject of nasty rumors and had become somewhat of a paranoid recluse on his estate. The only reason he had agreed to see me was because of family connections; I worried that he would cancel at the last minute. But at the appointed hour, his bodyguard-aide showed up and drove me for what seemed an eternity to Elizalde's mansion in a bleak, nouveau-riche Manila suburb called White Plains. I was ushered to a seat on the open-air terrace, where I waited and waited—the blazing tropical sun beating down on my bare head—for the mercurial Elizalde to make his appearance. I felt like I was being taught some sort of lesson. Finally, I spotted Elizalde walking slowly toward me, imperious and nonchalant. I remember that he wore a white shirt and white pants, that he was coiled tight and sweating profusely. Clearly, he didn't want to be there. But perhaps I have it all wrong. Perhaps he was walking briskly, neat and dapper as always, cool and charming and totally coherent. Elizalde sat down and stared off into the distance, restless and distracted. He responded to my rather timid questions about the alleged Tasaday "hoax" with terse one-liners, yet I pressed on in the naive, earnest way of a 25-year-old, trying not to be intimidated by this small, tense man. In the middle of one of our long, heavy silences, a shape suddenly materialized on the parched green lawn. He was a lithe young boy with skin the color of mahogany, clad in a loincloth. A red hibiscus was tucked in his thick, black lion's mane of hair. The boy loped past us—almost dancing—on that sun-baked terrace, ignoring our presence. He warbled in a high-pitched voice as if he were singing or calling out to someone. Then with one last amazing leap, the boy vanished into the big white mansion. Elizalde didn't react. I wonder now if he had staged the performance for my benefit, if he were somehow making fun of me. Did I hallucinate the wild child with the flower in his hair, the eerie song, the entire episode? Was he a Tasaday in captivity, flown all the way to Manila to be part of Elizalde's private and intensely personal world's fair?

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