Tapos na ang Buwan ng Wika pero talagang iba ang hugot kapag nasa sariling wika. Masheket.
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Do not get me started with a Manny Pacquiao comparison, with Pacquiao staying in the Philippines and even becoming a Senator.
The Filipinos are crazy with boxing, basketball, and beauty queens, and the powerful people who supported Pacquiao weren’t in it simply for sheer interest to help our athletes, but because it was good for their business and it aids the optics.
Pacquiao’s rise to stardom was due to an American company handling him, and unlike Onyok Velasco, he was never a boxing olympian who brought the country an Olympic medal.
I’m not downplaying Pacquiao’s achievements. My goodness. He is a living legend. But, I have to establish that while they are both athletes, chess was never a thing that would sell as good as basketball, beauty queens, and boxing.
But our basketball players and beauty queens are a consortium of imports I think of the kids who play in their makeshift half courts and the makeshifts stages in family gatherings where kids play the ball or perform a talent-Q&A combo. Do we have a dearth of talented players and pretty and smart women that we need to scout outside?
Golf champion Aidric Jose Chan and archer Bianca Gotuaco are playing for American colleges. Oh, do we even have archery and golf in UAAP? Nope. It’s just basketball and cheerdance (and volleyball, sometimes).
Oh, let’s talk about the performing arts. Charice was not good for our tv as Sam Concepcion. But she was a musical sensation in Korea and in Hollywood, we had to pull her back to us only to disown her after becoming true to the Jake that he is.
We share the Tony Award with Lea Salonga – a renowned singer who has always been in Philippine showbiz. But she decided to stay in longer in Broadway because she knew that she has more value abroad that in a country obsessed with defining singing ability with the number of octaves reached by the human throat and lungs past Middle C. It was only a few years ago when she was getting more projects here with top billing that she decided to stay. Even our Chona Velasquez did not go far until she ventured into Asia, renouncing her Filipino image to transform into the marketable Regine that she is and Viva noticed. Only then that the standard included melismas.
Jhett Tolentino, a University of Iloilo-educated accountant by profession, the first Filipino to win a Tony and a Grammy, was given a hard time by local government when he brought MButterfly to the Philippines. That was a legit EGOT contender, who has a Tony and Grammy somewhere in his closet but who never forgot that he was once that poor Iloilo boy, that the government managed to fuck with.
Yael Pineda, the Rafiki (the mandrill monkey) of Disney’s The Lion King in multiple theatrical performances, is a product of PWU and the Bayanihan Dance. But who cares about them in the Philippines unless a field demo requires us to look for Bayanihan dances?
UST alums Ronnie Del Carmen of Disney’s Inside Out and Gini Santos of Disney’s Coco will never have to endure the embarrassment of having to edit Victor Magtanggol visual effects while they have fun at Pixar along with a ton other Filipino animators who may not have come from the premier UST Bellas Artes.
We have Atenean-Mapuan Dado Banatao, a naturalized American who was born in Cagayan, who is basically God’s Gift to Computer Engineering – the Father of Chipsets! He is a living legend in Silicon Valley and even Filipinos in the US don’t care about him. But why the fuck would the Philippines care about Engineering if the engineer cannot build you a house or a bridge, right?
First Asian Executive Chef of the White House is UP FoodTech alumna Cristeta Comerford. Who the fuck cares about food tech, right? There’s no war like in the Japanese era where the Filipinos had to invent a thing called banana ketchup. Food tech my ass.
The late Alice Bulos of UST Sociology, a naturalized American, chose the US, where she became an appointee of Bill Clinton for social work on the aged people, over possibly becoming a foremost academic and social worker in the Philippines. Now, a highway in California is being named after her. Who the heck cares about her in the Philippines?
What’s behind the pride when Jasmine Lee had to become a Korean politician instead of serving her own people? The Atenean Vicente Rafael is teaching Philippine history at University of Washington. Astrid Tuminez is President of Utah Valley University and Luis Calingo was President of Woodbury. Are there no history and educational leadership posts in the Philippines?
You love your beauty queens, but UP alum Michael Cinco chose to pay his dues to the United Arab Emirates. Unlike Rajo Laurel, his grandfather clearly was neither a Philippine president nor a university founder. But why did Monique of the wealthy Lhuilliers chose to stay far from Cebu? Why is Lisa Yuchengco publishing articles 6,000 miles away from Manila?
Why is Oscar Franklin Tan, the only Filipino I know to have delivered the student address at the Harvard Law School Commencement exercises, working in a law firm outside the Philippines? Why is Michelle Alba Chua of La Salle making more money for the media giant NBC Comcast instead of working for a Filipino conglomerate?
UP alumna Jenny Ann Barretto – the Barretto who discovered the world’s largest caldera – is a scientist based in New Zealand. The research was not even a study funded by the Philippines.
If it weren’t for his father who left her a marching order as a dying wish, multi-hyphenate Miriam Defensor Santiago, bless her soul, would not even waste her precious mind on Philippine politics. Her brother stayed in the Philippines because he is a military general. But her sisters Nini and Peachy are academics abroad.
And now we ask: why are we so proud of them? Why are we so proud when they have seem to have left us?
We are proud of them because they have already gone out of the country. They are free from the shackles we made for ourselves – because it is more possible to get bitten by a toothless shark than to see the Filipino people become proud for what they do without the world validating it. Why do you think we have deemed our blue collar domestic helpers, seafarers and, aviation crew better even when their schedules cannot always make them meet their families? Because they earn more and they have been “outside” of some sort to serve as living symbols of Filipino hospitality – our trait so national and ingrained, it has no equivalent Filipino term. Estima? Hospitalidad? My goodness, this is the one that needs to be identified because Bayanihan does not always happen unless there’s a clear sense of utang-na-loob.
Those are the values of the Filipino: blind utang-na-loob and superior hospitality. Those values allow for the propagation of zero opportunities and corruption. And we look at them as our best values. Wow.
We are not Koreans who dictated their own standard. We are not Germans who were willing to embrace their Nazi history while exemplifying justice and progress in their side of the world. We are not American who has an esteem for the law no matter how crazy and tumultuous the process is. We are not Chinese who know how to help their peers to grow, whether thru legal or illegal means. We are not Indians who accompany their economic status with a post grad.
We are Filipinos – indolent even in the validation of the self. When someone tries to assert their own validation by sheer determination, we hear “akala mo kung sino” in a snap.
It is so confusing even a rich kid in Alabang who has artistic talents do not know where to corner anymore.
It’s not just the poor people who wants out. The rich, the middle, and the poor – everyone is tired, so fucking tired, of this endemic, systemic corruption.
Corruption of the government. Corruption of the people. Corruption of the values. Corruption of the sense of shared destiny as a people.
Good thing Aiden Blasian, Darren Criss, and Batista are Filipino citizens – or they would have set their minds that their most pivotal achievement is to have left their motherland.
By: Julius Payáwal Fernandez
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