there is no traffic here. the manila dream. everything is so impossibly clean. you could eat cakes off the sidewalk. someone else will sweep up the plastic wrappers. a working train system where you don't have to hold your wallets close. no street children pushing saint's rosaries or mama mary into your sweaty palms. no jeepneys cutting off tinted suv's. a tissue auntie near the mrt gantry, but no slums. even a jollibee outlet in novena, with the same cheesy spaghetti and chickenjoy meals, the same smiling bee statue as in greenbelt mall. when my parents arrived in singapore they marvelled at an air-conditioned nation. the sky: a pantone blue. the day's motions matching the trading patterns of the hong kong stock exchange. the roads without potholes. street lights incandescent at night. all of a sudden they understood why their coworkers called the philippine highways "dark." hygienic hawker center food. the police not asking for bribes. tap water you could gulp down without the stomach-ache. no gunshots. air, without the choking. where were the exhaust fumes from trucks full of chico fruit and sugarcane, the big billboards for pepsi and bench clothing and lucky me! noodles, the boy banging the pot all the way down where the cars stopped, selling dusty packets of fried pork belly to drivers? when we watched lee kuan yew's funeral on the television, my father cried for the only time i could really remember in my lifetime, asking, what might the philippines have become if we had a man like this. growing up we believed we had escaped. in singapore it rains but in the philippines it floods. what does it mean to go from overseas filipino worker to singaporean citizen. the night after my lolo's funeral, my father drove us to a bakery in pampanga province. they only made bread after midnight, so we drove in the starless dark to the smallest bakery in the world, and even now i am remembering clearly--the dirt road, the solitary storelight, the miraculous smell of fresh bread filling the car, the pan de sal, warm and soft like manna. even now, when i go grocery shopping in the immaculate aisles of ntuc fairprice, giant, cold storage--i am always looking for that pan de sal. the manila dream.