/// do androids dream of electric dogs

"Let's try another." Impossible now to get a meaningful response. "You are watching an old movie on TV, a movie from before the war. It shows a banquet in progress; the entree"- he skipped over the first part of the question- "consists of boiled dog, stuffed with rice."

"Nobody would kill and eat a dog," Luba Luft said. "They're worth a fortune. But I guess it would be an imitation dog: ersatz. Right? But those are made of wires and motors; they can't be eaten."

"Before the war," he grated.

"I wasn't alive before the war."

"But you've seen old movies on TV."

"Was the movie made in the Philippines?"

"Why?"

"Because," Luba Luft said, "they used to eat boiled dog stuffed with rice in the Philippines. I remember reading that."

"But your response," he said. "I want your social, emotional, moral reaction."

"To the movie?" She pondered. "I'd turn it off and watch Buster Friendly."

"Why would you turn it off?"

"Well," she said hotly, "who the hell wants to watch an old movie set in the Philippines? What ever happened in the Philippines except the Bataan Death March, and why would you want to watch that?"

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

///

Aside from typhoon-beaten images of my country, and almost always being skipped over the international weather report like a country of 94 million doesn't exist, the Philippines is rarely known and rarely shown. But! In pages 88 and 89 of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was there. Too bad it had to be something sad. For the record, I have never eaten boiled dog.