Malu Fernandez: Hate ugly Filipinos

Malu Fernandez: Hate ugly Filipinos

Don’t we ever run out of scandals? Lately it has been the fierce and fabulous author Malu Fernandez of People Asia magazine. Allegedly she already resigned from her writing job due to the numerous complaints against her article of June 2007 titled, “From Boracay to Greece!” It is a travel piece recounting her summer spent in the beautiful island of Boracay fighting off insects and protecting her immaculate pedicure from the white sands and then jetting off to Greece to see the goddesses but having to go through ugly Filipinos en route.

What exactly did she write? She said that to save on ticket going to Greece, she bravely took the economy class via Emirates with a stopover in Dubai, only to remember that the latter was the hub for OFWs. She “wanted to slash her wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them.” She was tormented in her sleep with “endless yelling of “HOY! Kumusta ka na? At taga saan ka? Domestic helper ka rin ba? I thought I had died and God had sent me to my own private hell.” On the return trip [of course she had to fly back somehow], she “resigned [her]self to being trapped like a sardine in a sardine can with all these OFWs smelling of AXE and Charlie cologne while my Jo Malone evaporated into thin air.”

With these lines, Malu offended our sensibilities, went against political correctness and doomed herself to public condemnation.

Our sensibilities say that to travel for leisure is a privilege and a luxury. Millions of our countrymen brave foreign shores in search of the proverbial three meals a day. Hence to vacation in Bora or, rather and, Greece in one break is something we whisper a prayer for and count our blessings. How can Malu be so ungrateful, we ask not out of envy?

Malu writes for the sosi crowd. For outsiders, sosi means sosyal—a Filipinized word of “social” referring to high society and the rich and/or famous. It is obvious from her article that Malu is part of this class (otherwise she will not be a credible source so essential in sosi magazines). Well, she scrimped on her plane ticket to shop for more accessories and her nose spotted the difference of AXE and Charlie, scents of the masa (masses) and her exquisite Jo Malone. That is how socialites are.

She flaunted political correctness when she dared to be true to herself and called OFWs for who they are: A noisy lot intruding into personal space sacred to others in small places like economy seats. At least she is honest with her thoughts. She could have injected the value of empathy—understanding that it is beyond the OFWs themselves and largely attributable to socio-economic factors like education and professional attainment. She may perhaps have been trying to be cute about it or simply reflected the elite mentality.

She is publicly condemned for pointing out, albeit unintentionally, the stark truth that we are a society of pretenders—of OFWs buying branded goods and perfumes instead of saving up and matronas spending three hours at hair spas and then going to their favorite charity balls, of migrants fighting for survival and public servants swimming in pork barrel, of urban professionals concerned with the next gimmick or new car or exotic vacation and our national budget in perpetual deficit because of low tax base and tax evasion, of mall goers hugging dogs and cats and young children on the streets begging for alms. Damn, we sure deserve what we see and don’t see. Don’t we just hate Malu and hate ourselves the ugly Filipinos. How could we look away?

Malu, you are not alone, come back and write. Let us hate the ugliness of the OFWs in us, enough to do something about it.

Bad ba mag-txt?

Bad ba mag-txt?

Ramon C. Sunico

THIS IS the first stanza of the poem “Alba” by Ricardo de Ungria, professor and former chancellor of the University of the Philippines Mindanao. It is part of the book Eros Pinoy published by Anvil Publishing in 2002. It was the first poem I read in Text or SMS format — a lovely, ingenious piece that explored the tension between sexually explicit diction and the elliptical, almost cryptic abbreviation associated with text messaging. Showing even as it hid, involving the reader as both codebreaker and intimate, peeping tom and partner. I read the poem just a few months after the president of the Philippines was unseated by a series of Metro Manila-based protests that were fanned and fed by text messages. SMS-ing like mad were segments of the population upset by the outcome of the reality-show-cum-telenovela called the impeachment proceedings.

As early as 2002, students of media and members of academe were cataloguing and analyzing the relationship between Filipinos and the keypads of their mobile phones. For example, history professor Vicente L. Rafael, then with the University of California at San Diego and now with the University of Washington (Seattle), quoted from and interviewed various members of Jose F. Lacaba’s Plaridel Papers mailing list to write his essay “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” It remains interesting reading until now and has the added bonus of capturing the mood of — shall we call it text empowerment? — during the heady demonstrations against President Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada. (And lest we think that texting is another case of “Only in the Philippines,” Rafael recently informed me that the essay has been included in other books on media, in the United States, Italy, and India.)

Even before Edsa Dos, however, people were already using this “secondary feature” of the mobile phone to finesse the physical difficulties of going around the metropolis, to find family members lost in mallwide sales — and, yes, of course, to cheat during pop quizzes and unit tests. Yet today people still wonder (and worry) what texting does to the Filipino’s communication skills. The images are familiar and often cited: a couple sitting together at a table, holding, not each other’s hands, but their glowing mobile phones; visitors at a wake, heads bowed, not to pray but to better read the latest addition to their inbox; or (and this is from personal experience) a new graduate applying for an editorial position in a publishing house by sending:

Gud am. Pwde b po mg-apli 4 jb as cpy editr. Tnx. Pls rply & tu2loy ako s ofc nyo.

(No, I didn’t reply and no, hindi puwede.)

THAT PEOPLE worry is understandable. After all, television, when it arrived in the ’50s and ’60s, may have diminished the time families sat facing each other to swap stories or accounts of the day just ended, and undermined the communal observance of the Angelus or the saying of the rosary. But at least it still brought them together in living rooms or bedrooms, laughing and squealing at the same shows, sharing the same memories and accounts of Leila Benitez, Sylvia La Torre, Oscar Obligacion, “Sea Hunt,” and “Perry Mason.” Today, with more channels and cheaper sets, the children and grandchildren of these families watch their own shows on their own sets in their own rooms. Could texting do the same thing? Will it bring about a country of not only bad spellers, but of people woefully unable to interact when face to face?

I don’t think so — at least not yet. Television, after all, is one-way. It talks at you, not with you. And, despite epithets like kapamilya and kapuso, it remains, above all, a pusher: news anchors shout at you, commercials and station IDs (in what amounts to the same thing) have their audio tracks pre-set to decibels above normal programming. It acknowledges as much when it appropriates the phone and the modem as tools for you to share your thoughts, your pictures, and in the case of “all-text” channels, your desire for sexual adventure. The only way to communicate directly with a television set is to press the off button or the button that changes the channel. Even this is not a communicative act; it ends communication instead.

Not so with the mobile phone. Despite what the marketing divisions of phone makers trumpet about their everything-in-one devices, the mobile phone remains a tool for communication in a country that is A) an archipelago B) full of people torn apart by poverty, inadequate education, class, and culture. It allows people who have long been talked at (or talked to) to talk among themselves, allowing them, at a relatively small price, to complete the many small transactions of everyday life. Through the artful manipulation of a few plastic keys and their re-presentation as pixels on a tiny screen, the invisible in our society achieve a sense of presence and belonging in a greater community that has been typified by alienation, isolation, and separation.

We are a people of small groups who think in terms of family and barkada (close friends) before neighborhoods, of clans, classes, and tribes before nation, of provinces and regions before country. Texting allows us to affirm those few relationships that inform our lives whenever and wherever we want to. And if we take this sense of presence and belonging, of being part of a loop no matter how small it is, as a basis for communication, then texting — no matter the subject of one’s message — affirms the social nature of our being.

my nsetip wet
w/ ur pbic swet,
cum, n me own slva,
a fngr n ur ass alertd
ur nppls stpplng my beli
nothng around us s dry