BENG AND I were glad to host a special friend who was in town last week, someone who’s been to every corner of the world and who has seen and written about most of its most fabulous markets and bazaars, but who wanted Beng to escort her to the one place that practically all of our foreign visitors—especially the women—find irresistible: Greenhills and its pearl bazaar.
Our guest for the day was an old Manila hand named Julie Hill, who had spent many years here during the late 1960s and 1970s as the wife of the late Arthur Hill, who had served as director of the Ford Foundation. Now based in San Diego, California, Julie drops in on her Manila friends every now and then, despite the aggravations of Philippine life that have caused her more than once to swear never to return. But still she does.
I didn’t know Julie until about six years ago, when former Central Bank Governor and art connoisseur Jimmy Laya asked me if I was willing to look over the memoirs of an American friend of his named Julie. Jimmy had become fast friends with the Hills during their Manila years, in a relationship nurtured not just by their professional association but also by a shared love of art. When Jimmy’s wife Alice was conceiving, Julie took a look at her and told her, “You will have a son.” Many months later, indeed a son was born, to whom Julie became godmother, and the friendship was sealed for life.
When Jimmy introduced me by email to Julie, she had recently lost Arthur to cancer, and writing about their many-splendored life—one spent on a global jaunt from Australia to Afghanistan to America, with long, colorful pauses in Samoa and Thailand—was a way of keeping his memory alive. Mrs. Hill had been looking for an editor, and there were thousands of them in California, but she had taken Jimmy at his word when he assured her that this Filipino was as good as any of them, and I was anxious to prove Jimmy right.
I was happy to work on Julie’s draft. Though she was fluent in many languages, by her own humble admission, her English needed some help—she was, after all, an Alexandrian Greek who had grown up in Egypt and had only later moved to the US to take her master’s in chemistry in Minnesota, where she met Arthur—but the material was rich and unique, a feast of cultures and memorable encounters.
For while she stood by Arthur as dutifully as any diplomatic wife, Julie had always had a sharp eye and an absorbent mind of her own. (She would later become an AT&T and Lucent executive, crossing other boundaries in the corporate workplace.) Whether she was on the trail of a rare Afghan coin or quaffing vodka head to head with Russian peasants, Julie recorded her adventures with both a war correspondent’s tenacity and a poet’s sensitivity.
That first book, A Promise to Keep: From Athens to Afghanistan (XLibris, 2003), would be followed by another volume of travel pieces that I would also edit, The Silk Road Revisited: Markets, Merchants, and Minarets (Author House, 2006), which chronicled Julie’s journeys across Central Asia. It has to be said that these books are not self-indulgent diaries of the “Here’s me in Paris, here’s me in Rome” variety. Witness this fine sample of Julie’s prose, from a morning in Mongolia:
“At dawn I stepped outside my ger. It was a soft morning with the sun rising behind high clouds. Seized by the clarity and the silence I stood and listened. Not a breath of wind; not a sound from the gravel paths of our encampment, no machine whirring, no horse snorting, no voice coming from the nearby gers, no bird calling. I felt that I was in one of the emptiest places on earth.
“Freed of distraction I held my breath and listened to my own heartbeat; I sensed nothing. There was no wind to move the clouds or dust or bushes. No sound, no movement, no scent, no warmth yet in the sun, no cold remaining in the air. The only sensation was through the eyes: the desert, the mountains, and the hills. This was the Gobi. I wondered if it was possible to be happier….
“We started early every day, sailing on over billowing sand; there were dunes on the left and a huge horizon on the right…. For miles we saw nothing but dirt tracks. The only inhabitants of these immense plains were herds of dromedaries and horses. Once we saw a fine chestnut stallion galloping relentlessly from slope to slope. Another time four gazelles darted in front of us. There were two colors: the yellow of the grasses and the blue of the sky. The emptiness was startling. Mongolia made the sky, with its ornate clouds, seem crowded and busy.
“During the day the temperature was pleasant; through the hot hours of midday, mirages fluttered across the flat expanses. Phantom trees came and went. The nights were cold, bitter cold as temperatures plummeted; we sat around campfires and shared ghost stories. The sky wore extravagant shawls of stars.”
And here she is in Ashkabad:
“The modernesque Sheraton was my first glimpse of globalization, Central-Asia style: a tangle of tattooed truck drivers hauling food and medical supplies to Afghanistan, a Malaysian businessman, Swedish consultants, French architects, British engineers, and a mob of Russian and Turkmen hookers. In the mezzanine two young Turkmen perched on stools strumming ‘Yesterday’ and ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ on vintage guitars, and then segued in to a frenzied rendition of ‘Manitas de Plata’ before ending their set with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Philadelphia’ sung in Russian. Out of curiosity, I entered the casino of the hotel; a cloud of smoke assaulted my eyes, leaving me with the mere impression of dubious characters playing baccarat. I retraced my steps quickly.
“Around the bar, rough and tumble oil drillers were busy fending off a dozen local beauties dolled up in cowboy hats, boots, and miniskirts or tight jeans. They swiveled their hips at potbellied old codgers from Exxon Mobil, Shell, Boeing, Halliburton, or one of the scores of multinational corporations looking to turn a profit in Turkmenistan, the wild westernmost of the Central Asian republics.”
And so Julie’s peregrinations go, to fabled places most of us can only dream about—Dunhuang, Urumqi, the Taklamakan Desert, Kashgar, Samarkand, and so on. As her editor, I too felt transported.
When, a few years ago, our daughter Demi met a man online who seemed to really like her, and she liked him, too. He lived in San Diego, so Beng and I took the opportunity of a visit there, with Julie playing hostess, to check him out over lunch at Julie’s in Rancho Sta. Fe; that way we actually met Demi’s husband-to-be, a very bright and affable guy named Jerry, even before Demi did. Needless to say, and with Julie’s concurrence, he passed. Months later, when Demi and Jerry were married at sunset on a ship that cruised the harbor. Julie was among the beaming guests.
Sometimes books bring us, indeed, to the strangest places in the strangest ways.