I’ve spent much of the last year in the Philippines with my family while on sabbatical. I’m no stranger to the country. I’m married into the culture, have written about it extensively, and have been a frequent visitor and sometime resident since early 1999. Since landing in Manila in September of 2008, I’ve been writing about my year for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency—I approached writing about the country with respectful honesty and an abiding fondness for the place and people. But I was also a little nervous. Filipinos are understandably thin-skinned (in Tagalog, balat sibuyas, or “onion-skinned”) when it comes to foreigners criticizing or stereotyping them. That’s what 400 years or so of colonial occupation (by Spain and then by America and during WWII, Japan) will do to a country. Actually, I was really worried that what I wrote in my “Dispatches From Manila” might inadvertently cause offense. My wife was worried, too, and demanded to be my censor.

“Show me everything you write before you give it to your editor,” she warned me.
After I published my first three or so dispatches and had not received any death threats, I figured I was in the clear. In fact, all indications were that no one but my friends were reading these dispatches. Obscurity came this time not as a disappointment, but a relief.

Then in February of this year, I heard of a case of corruption that caught my attention and almost no one else’s. The Philippines has a perennially and endemically corrupt government, but I seemed to be one of the few people aware of one story that affected book buyers in the Philippines, writers, and publishers.
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