An Expat and His Aquatic Dog

I’m going to tell you about the time I nearly killed this guy’s dog with my bare hands. But it involves a bit of a long-winded trip back to 2012.

My mother is from Mindanao in the south of the Philippines and my dad is British, born in Bethnal Green, and raised in Lewisham. I am yet to read or watch anything that truly encapsulates how I feel about being mixed race. I don’t like the term nor any of the new acronyms or shorthand that crop up every week, though I find myself using them out of convenience. That said, I’ve rarely felt rattled about my “identity”.

Until, of course, I was in the process of being fired. VICE’s lawyers asked me to provide evidence of my race...I'm talking literal birth certificates...and evidence that there was a culture of discrimination. The first demand was ruled as vexatious but by then it’d served the purpose of belittling me. I was like, “Okay, touché, you got the ultimate mixed race feels sore spot”. However, all of this was fucking stupid given the last thing I did for them.

I’d first pitched this documentary idea in 2012. It was from a story my mum had told me offhand. This urban legend about a teenager who’d left her terminated baby on the steps of a church in the centre of Manila, in the hopes some mercy would grant the child passage to heaven. But it wasn’t a myth, it was a real and recurring horror; the aftershocks of a religion that’d been imported to the Philippines. 

The story consumed me but it wasn’t until 2015 that it was commissioned as a documentary. The proviso, as was with most international shoots, was that you justified your plane ticket by crowbarring in as many additional films as possible. So, during a two-week shoot, the expectation was to come back with five films of pretty disparate subject matter for five different channels. At one point they truly expected no holds barred access to either Manny Pacquiao or the fucking President of the country before we could leave. In the end, two films survived, another just about limped through and a fourth didn’t have enough footage to justify a release. It was made clear that this was a failure on my part.

The shoot itself was doomed from the start. We arrived in Manila to an unpaid hotel, and I remember thinking that having to float the entirety of the stay on my personal credit card —because the multi-million dollar company that sent us didn’t have any urgency in rectifying this— was probably a bad omen. While filming for one doc I’d be pulled in the direction of the other and kept making mistakes, which simultaneously pissed off the separate film crews. That is: moving between crystal meth dealers and women in slums getting DIY abortions and also having to deliver a cute lil street food vid on the side. It was not an ideal work process. 

When it became clear that the moon on a stick was not going to be delivered, the company’s solution was to pressure the local fixers by threatening to withhold their fee. A fate which I had to communicate and a practice they’d later be rightfully dragged for. I cringe about it to this day. 

The most infuriating aspect, however, was being paired with this bird-like, highly-strung director whose M.O. was filming sad, ethnic women in developing countries. All the pre-production I did kind of got bulldozed because she knew best. The poor woman didn’t know how much I resented her before we even flew out and it only got worse as the shoot went on. Every time she grimaced at the local food and pecked a bowl of plain rice I took it personally. We butted heads every time she felt like I was being brash and I felt like she was putting tepid, women’s magazine platitudes in my mouth. I was worried she’d start crying and I’d look like the bad guy, but not worried enough to compromise with her.

Was I being a prick? Absolutely. It was just unlucky for her that she was my voodoo doll for every neurotic Humanitarian Helen I’d ever met. Very much for women’s rights unless it means paying the au pair more. Has a standard-issue saviour complex but will babify their speech and call anyone who challenges them ‘nasty’. Has a monthly direct debit to an animal cruelty charity but thinks protesting police brutality is uncouth.

A huge number of the shoots were chaotic, underfunded shitshows. If there was an opportunity to cut corners, it’d be taken. I remember somehow feeling I was in the wrong because I refused to force my retired mother to commute to Shoreditch to do unpaid translation work. There was this enormous dependency on acting like a scrappy guerilla start-up, where unqualified egomaniacs worked beyond their experience and hoped to once in a while strike gold. But this began to be increasingly absurd as VICE grew and made no effort to hide the hundreds of thousands of dollars they were spunking on channel launches, celebrity hosts, and entering film festivals. 

The ‘Year of Mercy’ doc was half-heartedly bounced between channels and didn’t come out until March 2016, by which point I had a solid hunch I’d be fired after it was released. I finished a press run where in one interview I’d implied that it had been challenging drumming up interest in stories on women of colour, which was true. I also shared the doc on my social media and, verbatim said I’d become “depressed” trying to get it green-lit. Also true. These were read back to me in a disciplinary as one of the multiple examples of when I’d, apparently, defamed the company.

Not only was it devastating to know you’d fallen way short on something you had spent years trying to get commissioned but it knocked my sense of self. It felt like I’d been a conduit for tragedy porn. There wasn’t that relief you’re supposed to get after a project is over because everything felt like a battle, you were never working “with” each other. Unless, of course, a doc had an overwhelming reception in which case the bosses would be falling over themselves to take credit.

After the case was settled and as soon as the dismissal money hit my bank account, I booked a flight out to the Philippines. Doing ketamine with backpackers and having to hear people rut in shared hostel rooms has never appealed to me. I didn’t do a gap year, I never wanted chlamydia off a yoga teacher. But I knew that I wanted not only to be alone and out of the country but that I was desperate to annul the shoot from my memory. Which, let me tell you, I definitely did.

I stayed at this strip of virgin beach in the middle of nowhere, so untouched you needed to light a fire to keep the sandflies away and with a dirty kitchen to let the smell of frying fish waft away from the house. No aircon, no condos, no shoeless people doing poi. Just me and some water buffalo. There was, however, this freakishly tall, translucent expat who owned some of the land nearby and stuck out like a sore thumb. More so than me, even. The grace of a praying mantis in cargo shorts.

He had built this outside bar and invited me for a drink one evening when I was still very much in an unable-to-turn-down-free-alcohol phase. We ended up chatting long into the night. He had this awful unplaceable accent from being some kind of high-powered businessman all over Europe and had clearly had some kind of meltdown that he spent the evening trying to skirt around. He was very interested in my being mixed race and began to describe me like I was a new breed of cat. My “colouring”, my eyes, my body. How I differed and how I was similar to the local women. A change in tone which I took as my cue to leave. So I got up and politely made my excuses and began to walk back to my place.

I was already well on my way when he caught up offering me a flashlight and I replied that I was okay and kept walking, but faster this time. And then he kept following. And then I felt his breath very close to the nape of my neck. And then this clammy hand rest on the small of my back and creep it’s way up my top.

I think our collective consciousness has shifted in that we all now accept that most sexual assault happens in familiar places at the hands of people we know, not at the hands of boogeymen down dark alleyways. So finding yourself in the lesser-known boogeyman situation is extraordinarily frightening.

All of a sudden I was acutely aware of how pitch black and how far away from everything I was. There was nobody else around if I started screaming. I wriggled away from his hand and started walking again, fast, until I reached my place but this dickhead was still jogging with me. I unlocked the door, which led straight to the bedroom, and he sauntered right in and sat on the edge of my bed, reclined slightly so he was on his elbows and sat smugly with his legs wide apart. Like how men insist on sitting with their legs splayed on public transport without realising how close they are to someone driving a pen into their thigh. 

He motioned me to sit next to him on the bed. Then said, “I have never seen a mestiza like you.” I remember it well because it was said with such unbridled confidence. The confidence of a man who’d clearly moved to a country as a sex tourist. 

I didn’t reply. I just stood there, left hand keeping the door open, right hand placed on this decorative lump of rock I thought might be heavy enough to cudgel him with. Then we just kind of stared at each other, in silence, until his smirk turned into a scowl and he abruptly got up and left the room. All the while I was poised for a sudden movement ready to mace him with some deodorant or beat him to death with a suitcase, I dunno.

The prospect of what could’ve happened was worse than any other horror film I could’ve dreamt up. I, for real, laid chunks of Spam outside my door to get the feral dogs to come guard the entrance and propped a chair under the door handle, hoping it’d give me peace of mind to sleep. It didn’t.

The next day I scuttled down to the beach at 6 am with a “can’t get raped in the ocean!” logic. I was greeted by this big, dopey labrador and recalled he said he’d be staying one more day with his dog. As cute as the dog was, I ignored him and started to swim out. To my surprise he followed me; he was an adorable and very strong swimmer. However, after about an hour I realised he was acting as a large, furry beacon to my new enemy, who came looming onto the beach horizon whistling for him.

So I freaked out. I started frantically guiding his doggy paddle back to the beach. But then a huge swell came in the tide. I bobbed above the wave but before I knew it I found myself accidentally but forcefully holding a dog underwater. And I thought, “Damn, it would really put a dampener on my soul-searching vacation if I drowned a labrador.” I wrenched him back up to the surface and he did this distressing woof-choke as I backstroked him to the shore. Once we were on the sand he shook the wet from his fur, gave me a hurt look, and bolted off into the distance. 

I never saw the dog or him again after that. For the rest of the trip, I did everything I wanted and had planned and it was great, but that night proved to be a stain on the experience I couldn’t wash out. 

I haven’t been back since and I don’t know when I will. But I did learn to stop trying so hard to prove myself to people who don’t matter.