Since the new year, I've been in a sentimental mood, and retrieving old pieces like this profile of compleat actress Gigi Dueñas de Breaupre reminds me once more why I picked her to stand as godmother to my second daughter Miranda Bituin. I wanted Ida to imbibe some of Gigi's intoxicating free spirit, her excellence in her chosen profession that, her in-your-face humor and defiance of constricting conventions that masks a well-cultivated spiritual life. So here's to you, Gigi, from across the oceans. You make Liz Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame look like a wimp!
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She always comes home richly tanned and laden with memories of wind, sand and sun. Gigi Dueñas, actress and true traveler, has scaled the heights and swum the depths of Asia in confirming her conviction that “this is my continent!”
While we mortal plodders, the nine-to-fivers, commute from suburban hutches to Ayala offices, Gigi, 36, lives her “fantasia impromptu” on the beaches of Bali, the lagoons of Tahiti or the mountain trails of the Himalayas.
Not for her the four-day or weeklong group tours that are generally wasted in the shopping malls of Singapore, Hongkong and Taipeh.
“If you travel just to buy Dove soap, Jergens lotion, Agree shampoo, Seiko watches, fake Nina Ricci perfume, diyan ka na lang sa Cartimar,” she declares. “You owe it to the country you’re visiting to learn about the place and culture.”
Lesson One: Nimbly eluding love in Nepal
A fine rain veiled Gigi’s eyes when she first set foot on Nepalese soil 13 years ago. The landlocked country seemed to her like a stew pot, and the storm clouds served as the lid (“parang kalderong nakatakip”).
Months later she embarked on her first trek to eastern Nepal with boyfriend David Forbes, a former ghurkaa captain descended from an aristocratic family and schooled in Eton. Joining them were his butler (“But David, dahling, what is he going to butle?” was Gigi’s ingenuous query) and his client David Lander, then president of Nestle.
Gigi says of the Forbes interlude: “I could’ve married him until I read his mother’s letter. She wrote, ‘Tell your bride not to worry. I’ve got everything under control. By the way, is she really dark? What does she eat?’”
The ex-future daughter-in-law dashed off a reply: “I eat cockroaches for breakfast, rats for lunch and geckos for dinner.”
The end of the trek also marked the end of the relationship. Gigi rented five rooms at the top floor of Traveller’s Lodge in Kathmandu for 25 rupees (roughly P25 at the time) a night. She launched a modest business – sewing sequins on tennis shoes and selling these. “How to live like Imelda Marcos on a (literally) shoestring budget” is her description of the experience.”
She stayed in that three-star penthouse until she met Rob Raab who was to become the father of her son Ziller Miles (or Z). one afternoon, when the full moon was out, Rob and Gigi were wed in a Buddhist ceremony. The union lasted six-and-a-half years.
She cast love aside, but Gigi still keeps returning to Nepal, “my second country. I have an affinity with mountains but especially the Himalayas. They’re young and still growing. Scientists and seismographers are permanently camped out there watching the mountains' constant motion – avalanches and earthquakes. The plates of India
and Asia are pushing against each other. Squeezed in between is this toothpaste tube called the Himalayas.
“I have to do a trek once a year. It is like cleansing process. It’s my yearly exercise. I don’t like aerobics anyway, or Jane Fonda. She’ll look like Nancy Reagan pretty soon. I go up to the Himalayas to remind myself that the world is beautiful after all. Some people say parang hindi na ako nationalistic because I like the Himalayas. Sa akin, those mountains do not belong (solely) to anybody, any country. This phenomenon belongs to all of us.”
In the fairyland of Nepal, Gigi once in a while crosses her looking glass (“Hitsura lang niyang si Lewis Caroll”). On a trek, she meets different cultures along the way. She encounters saddhus (Hindu mendicants) covered in ashes, hair streaked with cow dung and smoking hash. “Of all the gods,” Gigi says in an informal discourse on Asian civilizations.
“Shiva was fondest of hash, the elixir of life.”
She laughingly calls trekking “a better sport than social climbing. Kung magso-social climbing ka, e di tumabi ka
na sa god-king. Makipag-rubbing elbows with the Dalai Lama.”
At 15,000 feet above sea level, Gigi is sneezing from the wintry dust. The wind sweeps in from all directions. The mountains rumble constantly. “When the rumbling sound reaches you, tapos na ‘yung avalanche,” she says. “It happened at 20,000 feet.”
She passes through a gallery of votive offerings at 16,000 feet. There, travelers of yore carved out prayers on
stone while the modern-day ones left their Nescafe cans or signature kerchiefs. Next stop is the shore of an unnamed lake whose emerald greenness dazzles.
Once when Gigi’s party reached Sera Gompa, Buddhist nuns and monks came out to welcome them. They were escorted to the abbott’s room – where they found him playing a Mickey Mouse computer game!
Gigi was struck by the isolated monastery’s being occasionally touched by the crazy vestiges of modern living.
The computer-enthralled abbott, for instance, had a Hello Kitty thermos at his bedside and a poster of a Japanese punk astride a Yamaha bike tacked on the wall. He wore a pair of Converse rubber shoes (his religion forbids him to be shod in cattle hide.)
Whenever she reaches the Annapurna base camp, she feels like she is entering a science fiction setting. “It is as though you’re in the middle of a basin. All around you are these powerful mountains. They can do anything to you, and you’re helpless. The play of light on the mountains is incredible. It changes from pink to mauve. There is a sharpness about the place. From a mountain peak a raven flies down in one diagonal line. The atmosphere is such that I begin to believe I’m seeing gnomes. It’s like being inside a J.R.R. Tolkien novel. Nothing could be more impressive.”
A trek to the Himalayas “rejuvenates you so you can get back to the rat race,” she says. “I go there to get away from the city’s insanity. Up there in the villages, there are no problems between men and women because they are all busy contributing to the community. Life follows the cycle of seasons and revolves in the old ways when communities were still communal and people still didn’t own titles to the land. You feel you’re a human being, not just a human peeing. You recover your happiness. Nepal is my gift to myself.”
So if in Nepal you see porters wearing yellow “I love Ninoy” caps, you’ll know they once bore Gigi’s bags on their backs.
Lesson two: The business-and-pleasure-seekers of Bali
In the Dueñas book of wisdom it is said, “If you can make life simple, why bother to complicate it?”
On the sands of Bali where the spoiled brats of Europe meet, Gigi sashays down in her bikini and sarong like the girl from Ipanema. She unknots her sarong, gracefully spreads it on the sand, plucks out jewels from her basket and in an instant, she becomes a beachwalk vendor-cum-sunbather. She dares Trade and Industry Secretary Joe Concepcion to do the same.
She describes Bali as “mukhang Bicol. Maraming bulkan at may ocean, hindi nga lang Pacific. The ricefields are giving way to hotel. Western tourists, secretaries from Vogue magazine, models who haven’t quite made it yet and who’ve read romantic novels about the place are there looking for a fling. It’s a decadent lifestyle. The Balinese have this impression of white foreigners – they don’t work, they’re rich, relationships are loose, all they do is lie in the sun and fuck.”
But Gigi and company are the respected members of the community. They are travelers who appreciate the culture of the country they’re visiting and show their appreciation by investing in a handicraft and creating jobs.
She calls her crowd the rich of Europe “but not the Yves Saint Laurent groupies or the Princess Di types. These are the ex-hippies who became successful businessmen, the big drug dealers who decided to go legit after the third bust.”
These entrepreneurs are mostly in the jewelry, textile (blankets, tapestries and shawls) and ready-to-wear business. Gigi says, “We spend two or three hours in the factory checking the designs. The rest of the day is spent on the beach to meet appointments and close business deals. We make our agreements not in corporate boardrooms but there on the sand where we have nothing to hide.”
She also enjoys reflecting on the clash of cultures in Bali. One day, she remembers, an Australian woman “with boobs as big as papayas” who fell asleep while sunbathing. Her purse was stolen. When she woke up and discovered her loss, she hopped on a motorbike and sped off to the nearest police precint, naked breasts, bobbing up and down and the lower half of her body shielded by a flimsy sarong. The policemen refused to hear her complaint and told her to get a bra.
Gigi says, “Nudity or a woman in topless wear is within the Balinese context when you’re working in the field under the hot sun. But if you go to the market naked, which is what these whites do, binababoy mo na ‘yung populace. The worst thing you can show them is your pubic hair.”
No wonder that when Caucasian women enter immigration, native boys would sidle up to them and ask “You
want jigajig?” (“Jigajig “is their pidgin for a quick lay.)
Lesson three: Why she got no “guten angst’ in Berlin
Why not Europe, why not the United States for your next yearly sojourn?
Gigi drawls in tones drenched with boredom, “New York is probably fun for a week, if you have the money. Then you can have all the glamour – visits to the theaters, museums, restaurants.
In Germany for the Berlin International Film Festival, she saw punks hanging loose outside the gothic and baroque cathedrals. The images (church and youth) symbolized the dying culture of Europe and the alienation of this generation. Even their artists are only making protest statements, unlike in Asia where art is the elevation of life and art has meaning.
A perpetual summer person, Gigi attended a dinner after a film showing in a piña gown. It was a cold March with still no hint of spring. She was met by actress Lauren Hutton’s icy appraisal, “Aren’t you freezing in that?” but Gigi was quick on the draw: “I’d do anything for vanity. Wouldn’t you?”
Gigi saw the Swiss Alps from a vantage point in Munich and thought, “They’re charming, but compared to the Himalayas, they’re just hills.
She prefers small, exotic places where cultures are being threatened with extinction. This is why she feels that the Filipino innocent privileged to go abroad should think of travel as an eye-opener. “Traveling is not so you can drop the name of an airline or some stupid restaurant you ate in Paris, or coming home with plastic bags from Bloomingdale’s. The trouble with Filipino tourists is they see a vendo machine for cigarettes and they get impressed. Ang Pinoy pag naglalakbay, naghahanap ng mas malaking PX center kaysa Dau o Angeles kaya pag-uwi nila, ang pasalubong ay original na Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific. Ayaw managalog ng Pinoy sa eroplano. Ingles nang Ingles maski umaatikabo ang kanilang Enrile accent.”
Lesson four: Klong-klonging it in Bangkok
The kingdom of Siam offers an example of national pride worthy of emulation. “Thais are for Thais”, Gigi says, “Hindi nila babastusin ang kapwa Thai at the expense of paying obeisance to Americans and foreigners. Thais won’t speak pidgin English with you. Every other person you meet is a prince or princess. Even if they studied in Europe or the US all their lives, they come back and are still Thai.”
A people never subjugated by any foreign power wear its pride well. In a simple transaction, Gigi found that Tibetans haggle for the fun of it, and Indians present bolts of third-, second- and first-class cloth even if a purchase is not consummated but just to show how proud they are of their wares. But the Thais, ah, the Thais won’t stoop to haggling. They will just say, “Isn’t your price too expensive?” and leave.
At an exhibit of “a fantastic array of Thai silk,” Gigi saw how the Thais, with their new affluence, spent their money on their own stuff. “The Americans looked at the price ($1,000), didn’t look at the silk, and walked away. The Europeans looked at the silk, then the price, and walked away. A little old Thai lady looked at the merchandise, studied it closely, realized the months of weaving that went into it, and wrote a check.”
In March last year, Gigi took sons Z and Karlo on klong rides in Bangkok. They went up to to the Golden Mountain, a pauper’s cemetery in the old days. Monks there built a huge temple with a golden stupa (“so monumental you feel you’re two inches small when standing close to it”). It houses niches and tombs for the dead.
Also inside are bronze statues gilded with gold leaves – actually pieces of paper dipped in gold and then attached to the statues as a form of worship.
The opulence of religion is stunning. The Temple of Dawn is a mosaic of porcelain jars, saucers and plates rearranged to take floral and bird shapes. The jars were once used by drug dealers to sell opium. To pay for the bad karma, they broke the jars and out of the shards, a temple grew.
Gigi says the statues of the gods are everywhere. They are not hidden in museums. They are in the marketplace, near the garbage heap, on street corners. “The gods are accessible to their people anywhere, any day, any time. And so life in Thailand is itself dedicated to the pursuit of equilibrium, of inner peace.
“Each waking day is the start of a meditation that goes on at work, at play. This can be seen in the fingering of prayer beads, the flying of prayer flags and the turning of prayer wheels.”
Lesson five: Tales from Rushdie Land India
When friends tell Gigi that one of her favorite authors, Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, Shame and the controversial Satanic Verses), is hard to fathom, she advises them “to read his work with an Indian accent. In a single page, millions of things are going on. There’s so much life in India. You only have two eyes and cannot see everything that’s going on in the street.”
In one typical street, a wedding procession is taking place. A bejeweled elephant lumbers along carrying the bride and groom. Flowers are being flung. A band is playing. At the other end, the untouchables are rioting. Turn your head and watch a leper die.
The nose is assaulted by the heavy scent of spices and incense mixed with the odor of human sweat, feces and animal carcasses. Beggars dance. Shamans chant. And Gigi says, “The variety is overwhelming.”
And adds, “Ang mga fantasia ko as a child, I saw them all in India – temple doors of beaten silver, altars of gold, tall svelte women of Jaipur with their mirrored skirts, the quality of the sand in Rajasthan that can make a city take the color of rose, pink or yellow.”
In Rajasthan the independent-minded Gigi had to don a purdah. Whe she tried walking down the streets in her Western clothes and her face uncovered, the old women spat at her and the men jeered. Her Indian friend Ibrahim borrowed a purdah from one of his seven wives for Gigi to wear.She climbed into layers and layers of petticoat. Last came the black billowing cotton gown with sleeves reaching past her fingers.
She recalls. “The first time I wore a purdah, I was disoriented. I couldn’t walk. I kept losing my balance because
of this mesh in front of my eyes. Now I know what it’s like to be a walking non-entity, to be a heap of rags na mukhang bangaw.”
India for her is a great paradox. She once entered what looked like a slum and was astounded at the multicolored strands of shimmering silk laid out on the road to try. “But the people are so poor!” she cries.
Lesson six: Tangoing in Tahiti
One look at the Tahitian women (long black curly hair, ample breasts and hips, small waists) and the riot of orchids, birds of paradise and hibiscus everywhere, and Gigi understood why writer Herman Melville fell crazily in love with Polynesia.
It is a fluid culture, a fluid people. “They’re really in the sea most of the time. They see a wave and they run to meet it with their surfboards. The French says they’re lazy. But Tahitians are fishing folks and you only fish at certain hours. The rest of the day they dance and sing,” she says.
Because of this fluidity it seemed easy for the British, then the French colonizers, to erase the culture. The island people have no script. Theirs is an oral tradition. Whatever writing done consists of family histories tattooed on the bodies of men and women.
The language is fluid, too. Gigi says, “It’s all vowels. Consonants are like hurdles. There’s a place called Faaaa, that place with the hysterical a.”
But the culture has not been completely wiped out: “The Tahitians destroyed the tikis, the statues of the gods, so the foreigners wouldn’t desecrate them. From afar, the foreigners thought that they had won because the natives were burning or burying their gods or throwing them into the mouths of volcanoes, sealed with curses.”
Gigi says her travels have taught her another meaning for Third World. “Okay, so the West ate us up in terms of industrialization. But we still have this, our humanity.”
Photo above (from the subject's Facebook) shows Gigi in her youth; below, with husband Thierry in the French West Indies where she has been based for more than two decades. Gigi remains a Filipino citizen.
The Sunday Times Magazine, March 5, 1989
