“Really?! But Halloween hasn’t come yet!” replied a gobsmacked friend when I told her about the Christmas decorations being already up in the Philippines.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” I texted back.
The holiday decorations have been up since September, the start of the “ber” months leading to December. Crazy as it sounds, it’s true. Being a Filipino, I should be used to it by now, but I am not, unlike majority of my kababayan who proudly bandy to the whole world that we have the longest Christmas celebrations or have unparalleled Christmas celebrations. I just keep quiet about it, always wondering why, and feeling amazed that they don’t find it stressful. My friend is Indonesian, and so I could freely say crazy. My view wouldn’t have gone down well with fellow Filipinos.
Fisher Mall Christmas sceneOne of the Christmas trees at Greenbelt, Makati
The holiday madness is palpable with just two days to go before Christmas that staying put at home is a wise decision. Roads are congested with cars at a standstill or moving turtle-paced on every road, including overhead passes. The ports are seeing kilometric queues of cars waiting to get onto the boats to ferry them, say, from Batangas to Calapan, Oriental Mindoro. Everyone’s out — heading to the airport to catch a flight out, going shopping, soaking up the Christmas vibe or eating at the malls.
Getting home has become a test of patience and fortitude because public transportation is “broken.” Broadcast journalist Atom Araullo summed up the feelings of Filipino commuters in a tweet in Filipino and English on December 9.
“Just arrived at the airport from an overseas trip. No coupon taxis, no metered taxis, no Grab. We don’t have buses or trains here. Basically, if you have no one picking you up, you’re dead. This is what a broken [transportation] system looks like,” he wrote.
In an update, he tweeted he was able to get a ride via Grab after less than two hours of waiting and changing his pick-up location.
Christmas countdown at Robinsons MagnoliaRobinsons Magnolia’s Christmas tree at the main lobby
Our neighborhood hasn’t been spared of the craziness either. Traditionally, the garbage collectors handed out envelopes neatly labelled with their truck number around this period when they come for their routinely garbage pick-up. We could hand them back with money on the spot or the following collection day. This year some of the collectors were more aggressive. They rang doorbells and banged on gates to ask for their Christmas gift outside of their collection days. Not a few neighbors pointed out that they’ve already received money-filled envelopes.
There’s no one major cause of my morose attitude. I surmised that all the little things snowballed into one giant mass of aloofness and self-diagnosed cherophobia through the years. Truthfully, I’m never aloof unless I’m sleeping, working out, nursing a headache or deep in work. I was, said a former flatmate, a sunflower vis-a-vis her “mushroom” disposition. But that hasn’t been the case for a while. I’ve been distant and uninterested in everything around me. Shockingly, I’ve even shunned meeting friends. I wanted to, but couldn’t bring myself to reach out to them, including a dear high school friend.
Christmas trees and giant ornaments at SM MOAelegant curtain of Christmas lights at UP Town Center
I don’t have an immense aversion to happiness yet, riding the wave of cherophobia, my thoughts this season vacillate between thinking that being happy means something bad will happen and that being happy is bad for everyone. Perhaps it’s the past disappointments in life, i.e., broken promises, lies, betrayals, and heartbreaks, which are amplified during this merry month of the year, that pushed me to be aloof and get shrouded in cherophobia. Perhaps.
Still, I try to shake off the veil. I have some degree of success and so, feel the holiday spirit, albeit fleetingly. The Christmas decorations in the malls are nice to look at. I marvel at the creativity and energy of the teams behind the sparkly Christmas tableaux wrapped in the season’s colors. I also can’t help wonder at how many ideas were rejected before the final one was approved, and if they felt the spirit while decorating the mall. Or were they going through the motion?
It’s a struggle to be completely merry when you’re cresting the wave of cherophobia, but being half merry is better than being flat out low-spirited this time of merry-making.
Christine Ang-Buban and Ni Kadek Eta will never watch “All of Us Are Dead” (AOUAD) or any other zombie show. Ang-Buban’s love for Emma Stone didn’t move her to watch “Zombieland” (2009) and Eta tried but couldn’t get past episode one of AOUAD. They’re the opposite of sister-entrepreneurs Anna Clarissa and Angela Javier who’ve included the South Korean series in their top three zombie shows.
Shafa Amani is also into zombie shows. “[They] transcend the restrictions of gore and bodily functions of other creatures. [Also,] FX artists can shine because zombies can be presented in various stages of decomposition,” said the freshman at Gadjah Mada University in Yogjakarta, Indonesia, who lists “Day of the Dead” (1985) as a favorite because it “asks a lot of questions on humanity and morality.”
Amani’s university mate Nadia Azzahra likes the storyline of death as a result of failed experiments and finds it “very effective in scaring the audience along with gory depictions of human disfigurement and drastic loss of humanity.”
Eta and Ang-Buban are a rarity in an era of zombie show lovers especially with hits “Train to Busan,” “Kingdom” series, and AOUAD. The last was the most watched show in Netflix’s Top 10 non-English TV list in January, garnering 124.79 million viewing hours. It is the latest in the string of K-drama shows steering South Korea’s entertainment industry into cinematic zombie history with its own brand of the undead.
Lightning-quick undead
Dokkaebi (goblin), gwisin (ghost), gumiho (nine-tailed fox), and jeosung saja (grim reaper) are creatures found in Korean myths. There are no zombies but they’ve crept their way onto the list, appearing in Kang Beom-gu’s film about corpses rising from their graves because of an experiment on radio waves titled “A Monstrous Corpse” (1981).
They returned decades later as a pack of fleet-footed zombies in “Train to Busan” (2016) chasing Gong Yoo, his on-screen daughter, and other passengers as the locomotive headed to the only safe city in South Korea. The nimble undead zipping through a train car was a refreshing take on the turtle-paced zombies popularized by George Romero. It was a box office hit that dislodged Brad Pitt’s “World War Z,” which held the title of top zombie genre film on its 13th day of release in Hong Kong in 2016.
Gong Yoo tries desperately to save his “daughter” in “Train to Busan.”(netflix.com)
Amani and Azzahra concur that “Train to Busan” fueled the languid flames of the zombie genre with its “amazing special effects and interesting metaphors of human egoism and sacrifice when faced with emergency situations.”
South Korea’s cinematic salvoes continued with the “Kingdom” series and AOUAD. The former framed a zombie apocalypse within that country’s last dynasty and a beleaguered crown prince battling lightning-quick zombies and his political opponents. The latter featured angsty secondary students in a zombie plague fending off infected friends and classmates.
“Zombie Detective,” a lesser-known series, gave it a comedic tone with a foundation-wearing zombie investigating his own zombification.
Trapped in Hyosan High School, the students find ways to survive in “All of Us are Dead.” (netflix.com)
The unusual settings of the fast-moving zombies completed the Korean rebranding exercise. The besieged students in AOUAD were imprisoned in their school. Gong Yoo et al. were trapped in a high-speed train of the Korea Train Express in “Train to Busan.” Crown Prince Lee Chang ruled in the Joseon era in “Kingdom,” which IT programmer Nico Martinez found vital “in learning about [Korea’s] historical culture.”
“Zombie Detective” gives the genre a comedic tone. (netflix.com)
Early zombies
Linguistically, zombies go back to Central and equatorial Africa. The Mitsogho of Gabon use “ndzumbi” for corpse while Kikongo speakers use “nzambi” for an ancestor with superhuman abilities. “Zumbi,” or someone returned from the dead, is a common term in Angola and the Congo, explained Christopher M. Moveman in “The Dark History of Zombies” by TedEd.
Historically, zombies emerged when France and Spain enslaved the Africans and put them to work as laborers “who needed neither food nor rest, and would increase wealth of their captors,” continued Moveman. The laborers were transformed through voodoo – a religion combining African beliefs with Catholic traditions — by a “bokor” (sorcerer) able to “capture a person’s soul and turn it into a soulless ‘zombi’ that will perform their bidding.”
Zombies entered politics when America invaded Haiti in 1915, and began their racist propaganda against the Haitians by spreading false stories of devil worship, human sacrifice, and zombies.
The undead debuted in “White Zombie” (1932) as zombie slaves working in a sugar cane mill operated by a Haitian voodoo priest. They appeared as cannibalistic monsters — one of the two popular zombie traits — when “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) premiered. The term “zombie” came from the audience when the sequel “Dawn of the Dead (1978) was released. The other trait, a fetish for brain as food, was introduced in “The Return of the Living Dead” (1985).
The dead are brought back to life with a plant in “Kingdom.” (netflix.com)
Undead reinterpreted
Hailed as the leader in rebranding the undead, K-drama is undoing what Moveman described as the “erasure of the zombies’ original significance by American pop culture.” Zombification originally represented the horrors of enslavement that Haitians suffered because “in Haitian culture, zombies are commonly seen as victims deserving sympathy and care,” he said.
Moving away from the zombie-as-monster trope, K-drama deconstructed zombification as a contagious phenomenon, which first appeared in “28 Days Later” (2002), in a two-pronged approach. First, it wove in themes — i.e., anomie, bullying, class system, political corruption, and urban isolation — resonated with the global audience, and refocused the audience’s gaze on zombies from monsters to victims. In AOUAD, the zombies emerged from a rage virus manufactured by a father hoping to help his son fight the bullies and enablers at school. AOUAD and the “Kingdom” series also touched on the politics of class system that favors the affluent and disregards the underprivileged.
Second, it introduced strong feelings. Scenes of friends, family members, and lovers torn apart amid a collapsing civilization take the viewer on an emotional roller coaster ride.
It’s the calm before the zombie plague at Hyosan High School in “All of Us are Dead.” (netflix.com)
“AOUAD effectively introduced emotions [like] love and worry you have for the characters, and K-drama highlighted all aspects of humanity by questioning the one thing people fear most — death,” explained Amani.
Without a doubt, K-drama’s innovative reinventions have recharged the zombie genre. However, creativity isn’t a license to gloss over historical context despite the uniqueness of the zombie reincarnations. Having turned the shows into vehicles of social commentary, K-drama shouldn’t let up, especially now when people have become zombie-like and inured to social issues like poverty, human rights, and discrimination, gender inequality, bullying and violence.
These days I feel like I have burning coals strapped to my head and my feet. Staying in front of the fan used to be enough to stop me from feeling hot and bothered, but I have since added gulping down frosty water except it is too plain. Beating Manila’s scorching heat has become an enervating full-time occupation, second to keeping tabs on the anxiety-inducing election campaigns. Dropping by Robinsons Magnolia made cooling down delectable with Meet Fresh one mid-day.
Meet Fresh is a dessert restaurant on level three. Chit-chatting with one of the crew members, she said that her favorite icy grass jelly signature was the restaurant’s best seller. Priced at P260, it is a mélange of taro balls, grass jelly shaved ice, and grass jelly. But the Hello Summer series particularly the mango milk shaved ice was what piqued my interest.
It is a bowl of a tower of shaved ice drizzled with mango purée and milk. Its base is ringed with chunks of fresh mango and the spire is crowned with custard ice cream. To enjoy: Gently scrape the ice tower with the duck spoon and top it with the mango squares or slide the spoon from the ice cream down the snow-like ice tower and straight to the mango chunks. Costing P350, the portion is meant for three to four people, and so it’s more than enough to keep two sweltering in the May heat cool to the point of feeling arctic.
Meet Fresh’s start goes back to Taichung’s Feng Yuan District in Taiwan when Dong Fu opened it for his older siblings in 2007 said an article in jiarenfamily.com. To this day, the restaurant follows two key principles: serving healthy desserts, tea in all is varieties, and treats without preservatives, and making each item fresh every day.
Being a Taurean, he is set in his ways like he believes that caramel cake — his favorite — could only come from Estrel’s. In the same manner, he holds ube from Calapan and leche flan made by Lola Pacing as the best, using them as the standard to measure those made by others. There’s no arguing with him about this. But he’d argue about other issues that would make your head spin, and so you better have a sound argument because he — my father, Edel Garcellano — didn’t suffer fools with their vacuous repartees. He didn’t launch into histrionics or raised his voice when faced with irrational views, but with him having read the entire picture done to the conclusion, I knew his thoughts would be elsewhere like our cats and the PBA games.
Edel Garcellano by Karl Castro
Reading was as natural as breathing to him being a literary critic, novelist, essayist, and poet. He’d asked me via texts what I was reading when I lived overseas. He’d also send titles of books for me to check at either Kinokuniya or Borders. He’d be disappointed because I’ve been remiss in my reading; I finished Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko” three weeks ago and hardly progressed with the “Celtic Myths” anthology.
I associated reading with my Pop and his departure made picking up a book difficult. What was once easy-peasy was now a herculean task, as the words on the page just swirled to no end. My thoughts would always meander to that horrific day two years and 11 days ago when I received a call saying he’d left us, and getting home was impossible because of the lockdown. Yet reading is what stays that memory and the perennial questions — Where is Pop? Why isn’t he here? Why did he leave? — which go round and round in my mind like a hamster in a wheel.
Then I remember what my mum said. She’d remind us to not be sad and cry so his journey to the great beyond wouldn’t be hampered. I try my best especially when I see photos of friends, former students et al. of their fathers’ birthday celebrations on Facebook. Simultaneously, the green-eyed monster always stirs as the heavy mantle of sadness settles in my heart.
Still, I try like today. It’s Pop’s birthday so it’s a good day.
We sang the birthday song in the morning and blew out the candle on his favorite cake my cousin Via got for him. Although set in his ways, I know he’d approve of me having a slice of Estrel’s for breakfast on his 76th birthday.
This was the last article I wrote for OpinYon’s print edition Feb 28 – Mar 06, 2022 issue, but was never uploaded on the website. It was also the final issue involving editor Pergentino Bandayrel and team (including me).
That many young Filipinos voting for the first time in the May elections are handicapped by a lack of knowledge of Philippine history is appalling, but not surprising. After all, it has been eight years since Philippine history was last taught in the classroom. It was removed from the secondary curriculum as a dedicated subject when the Department of Education introduced the K to 12 program.
Although technologically savvy, young Filipino voters are mostly “tutored” on Philippine history by trolls on Facebook and YouTube, which are an abyss of disinformation, and are clueless about martial law.
They are “malleable and vulnerable because they don’t have the luxury of knowing the past,” said Victor Andres Manhit of Philippine Stratbase Consultancy in a report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer by Cathy Cañares Yamsuan . Collating figures from Philippine Statistics Authority etc., Stratbase put voters between the ages of 18 and 24 at 13 percent, 24 and 34 at 19 percent, and 34 and 44 at 17 percent.
“[About] 50 percent of the voters have no recollection of martial law…[and] sometimes what the influencers say becomes truth. Without [the young] knowing it, their minds are being shaped, influenced, or manipulated to an extent,” said Manhit.
Trolls continue to spin yarn about Philippine history, skewing young Filipinos’ perspective and jeopardizing their future. How did disinformation come to this alarming stage? What can be done?
OpinYon Feb 28 to Mar 6, 2022 issue
Rewriting history
History is always being rewritten, with either events playing out themselves or experts writing about new findings based on meticulous studies.
Said Dr. Maria Serena Diokno in her talk “Historical Revisionism and Negationism”: “Positive scholarly historical revisionism is good. It’s necessary and the job of historians like us. The goals are to correct a historical error, to bring out a newly discovered fact, to introduce a well-founded historical interpretation, and to discredit a baseless, false interpretation. But scholarly historians only use verified authentic sources.”
Now, she said, things are a bit muddled because of so much “false news in the media.”
Diokno, a former chair of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, was one of the speakers in the webinar “Essential Truths on the Martial Law Years” hosted by the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission on Sept. 21, 2021.
Times have changed and history is being altered indiscriminately. Social media is flooded with what Diokno called negative historical revisionism or the distortion of history. With the absence of discourse on Philippine history, trolls spread disinformation on martial law, legitimizing it and making it and its enablers appear pleasing.
Floyd Buenavente, a digital marketing consultant, told OpinYon that “people aren’t interested in objective truth.”
“They consider social validation supreme…, [and thus] descend to tribalism instead of critical thinking,” he said.
Buenavente is in a unique position of having two families with varying political beliefs. His biological family raised him on the notion that Ferdinand Marcos was the quintessential Filipino — “highly intelligent, [a] bar topnotcher, excellent speaker [and] with a photographic memory.” His adoptive parents were victims of martial law.
“Dad was arrested without a warrant and sent to a safe house, where it was jokingly said the only safe people were the military. He was tortured physically and psychologically for six months…He lost all of his front teeth, experienced extreme post-traumatic stress syndrome, and bouts of depression,” he wrote in “Rights and due process — for the Marcoses,” a commentary published in the Inquirer in November 2021.
Diokno finds negative revisionism objectionable, as it has led to “historical amnesia and the myth of a hero.” She cited Marcos’ burial in the Libingan ng Bayani as an example of historical amnesia with its erasure of the historical and structural traumas of martial law and his elevation to mythical hero.
The problem is compounded by what Buenavente sees as “the lack of pushback from people who know better, the failure of academic institutions in cementing [the] proper teaching of Philippine history, [and] the previous governments helping in the rehabilitation of the Marcos family after they were allowed to come back to the country.”
Golden era?
The trolls’ constant peddling of martial law as the Philippines’ “golden era” has been rebutted by economists, historians, and truth-tellers. Filipino economist JC Punongbayan, for instance, refuted the claim circulating in social media that the country was the richest in Asia during martial law. Using TikTok uploaded on Twitter, his table listed the nations in order of decreasing GDP and lead based on GDP per person.
“…As early as 1965, some Asian countries — Hong Kong, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and Singapore — were richer than us,” read Punongbayan’s TikTok caption.
Sociologist Randy David said the Philippines’ “golden era” was before Marcos became president in 1965. He defined it as a time when basic needs — food, shelter, education, health care, and personal safety — were not luxurious privileges. “Apart from the prices of food and other necessities, there was much less hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, and helplessness in the face of illness. People felt secure in their persons and in their homes. They trusted the police and the justice system. They held teachers and civil servants in high regard,” he wrote in his column in the Inquirer in early February.
Similarly, Jesus P. Estanislao, former finance secretary (1990- 1992), and Jose L. Cuisia, former Central Bank governor (1990 -1993), explained life under the “Marcos economy” in a commentary in the Inquirer in early February:
“Under such a regime — with quantitative restrictions or even a total ban — many of the consumer items they take for granted as being readily available through an open market were not within reach…Ordinary fruits as apples, oranges, and grapes were allowed in only during the Christmas season. Water was not available in many parts of Metro Manila.”
The so-called “Tallano gold” that supporters of presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr hold as biblical truth has been discredited. Prof. Francis Geologo shot down this fool’s panacea in the webinar “Searching for the Gold — Debunking the Myths on the Tallano Gold and the Marcos wealth,” which was hosted by Akademiya at Bayan Kontra Disimpormasyon at Dayaan (ABKD) on Feb. 12.
Historical documents, argued Gealogo, an Ateneo de Manila University history professor, make no mention of a Tallano-Tagean family ruling Southeast Asia or “the commission from the ‘royal family’ to Marcos and Father Jose Antonio Diaz.”
He belied the existence of the “Maharlikan Empire,” which history books say was only a family of datu, and not of nobility or royalty.
The truth
Buenavente says fighting disinformation is necessary to stop the lies from multiplying and exposing ourselves to “a bleaker future [and] more evil people like the Marcoses and Dutertes.” He counters disinformation by engaging people who deny martial law with scientific and empirical data. He also tries to understand people’s choices and holds back judgment on younger people who trivialize martial law.
Diokno combats false news by asking questions: “Is the author credible? Does s/he have a stake in the content of the narrative? Is the content factual? Are the interpretation and conclusion based on evidence?”
She refuted the misconception that people who didn’t experience martial law shouldn’t be complaining: “Physical presence is not a prerequisite to understanding the nature of historical or structural trauma.”
But Buenavente says some people need to experience it, if only through the creative pedagogy of ‘acting out,’ a method learned by The Martial Law Chronicles Project (MLCP) from actors of the Philippine Educational Theater Association. He is a member of MLCP, a community that holds dialogues with private and public school teachers on martial law and historical revisionism.
To start the discussion, MLCP blindfolds the participants — with consent — and have them do simple exercises with noises and taking orders within a set time. This is immediately followed by a conversation on how they felt.
“[The] experiential approach enables [them] to empathize more with victims,” he said.
Fact checkers
Media organizations, academic institutions, and other groups have upped their game against trolls.
ABKD was launched in November 2021 as a watchdog against fake news and disinformation, and to help fight election fraud. It’s part of #FactsFirstPH and a member of Tsek.ph.
#FactsFirstPH was launched on Jan. 26 to combat disinformation through a multilayered approach, with its partners beginning with media groups verifying and publishing the truth and ending with lawyers finding ways to deter the spread of lies.
Tsek.ph was formed in 2019 to address the spread of election-related disinformation and was revived this year. With help from ABS-CBN, Vera Files, ABKD, etc., its fact checking has expanded to claims on platforms and campaign promises of candidates, personalities, etc. and election-related posts on social media.
Founded in March 2008 by Filipino women journalists, VERA Files led the way back to true newspaper reporting. Propelled by truth — Vera is Latin for true — its three-part series on Ferdinand Marcos in July 2016, for example, put to rest the lies on his alleged war heroism. File No. 60 is Marcos’ claim of being a guerrilla leader and founder of a unit called “Ang Manga Maharlika” (later changed to Ang Mga Maharlika), which the US Army repudiated. It’s part of the 1, 401 files on guerrilla unit recognition series documenting anti-Japanese resistance in World War II, in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Authors Joel Ariate Jr. and Miguel Reyes wrote: “Captain Elbert R. Curtis, who handled Marcos’ claim for recognition for most part of July 1947 to March 1948, came to two conclusions. First, Ang Mga Maharlika unit under Ferdinand Marcos is fraudulent and, second, inserting his name on a roster other than the USA Forces in the Philippine Northern Luzon roster was a malicious criminal act.”
With trolls working overtime on social media, attaining zero disinformation is next to impossible. But the line must now be firmly drawn between disinformation and fact, between historical distortions and historical truths.
History should serve humanity, not the vested interests of a few.
K-drama’s Tae-moo proves his position wasn’t an offer of sinecure. The impeccably dressed Harvard graduate increases the sales of their mandu and kimchi products in the domestic and international markets. He redevelops kimchi — substituting anchovies for fish sauce to appeal to foreigners — and makes ready-to-eat tteok-bokki available in supermarkets.
Part of Tae-moo’s ilk is Lee Young-joon, Yumyung Group’s Vice-chairman in the 2018 rom-com “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim?” Played by Park Seo-joon, the gorgeous US-university graduate doesn’t tolerate errant employees and fires one of the wayward directors. He’s meticulous, reading through every business proposal, contract, etc.
Park Seo-joon as vice chair Lee Young-joon (@bn_sj2013)
By being egalitarian, acknowledging those who work well and penalizing those who flout company rules, Tae-moo and Young-joon shatter the chaebol’s careerist image. By choosing to marry outside of their class, they dismantle the social hierarchy, and thus advocated social mobility and protest against arranged marriages. Tae-moo falls for one of Go Food’s senior researchers, Shin Ha-ri. Young-joon is smitten with his secretary of nine years, Kim Mi-so.
the aura of vice chair Lee Young-joon (@bn_sj2013)
The duo is more than acceptable compared to their opposites: Jang Jun-woo, Babel Group’s maniacal chair played by OK Taec-yeon in the 2020 “Vincenzo,” who gets a taste of his own medicine, and Kim Won, Jeguk Group’s (JG) martyr chair played by Choi Jin-hyuk in the 2013 “Heirs,” who sacrificed love to keep JG in the family.
With their hierarchical world and despite their wealth, real chaebol top executives are bitter pills to swallow. But K-drama makes co-existence possible: Kang Tae-moo and his ilk live in an honest world filled with opportunities and love that knows no boundaries, as they cross lines and allow lines to be crossed.
Accepting the chaebol world of K-drama is effortless in this time of political influx. It’s a place where chaebol power doesn’t trample on humanity and dreams.
NAME
Samsung
SK Group
Hyundai Motor
LG Group
Lotte
YEAR FOUNDED
1938
early 1950s
1947
1947
1948 in Tokyo; 1967 in South Korea
RANK
first
second (was originally ranked third, but outranked Hyundai Motor after 12 years because of SK Hynix)
third
fourth
fifth
HISTORY
started as food exporter to China
started when Sungkyong Textiles was acquired
started as a small construction business
started in chemical and plastic industries
started as maker of chewing gum
BUSINESS
electronics and technology, finance, engineering, an affiliated university, and amusement park
construction, shipping, marketing, internet, and wireless broadband
Kang Tae-moo arrives in Seoul from New York and heads straight to work. The tall, handsome heir to Geumhwa Group, a chaebol founded by his grandfather, Chair Kang Da-goo, snubs his inauguration ceremony as president of subsidiary Go Food. He also fires a company executive for misbehaving.
The chaebol has always been associated with corrupt executives, but K-drama has given its image a grand makeover featuring Tae-moo, played by Ahn Hyo-seop, in Netflix’s new rom-com hit “Business Proposal.”
Kang Tae-moo, the new chaebol-heir has arrived (photo from @imhyoseop)
Big conglomerates
Emerging during the Japanese occupation of South Korea before the end of World War II, the chaebol groups — large family-run business/industrial conglomerates — were modeled after the zaibatsu, Japan’s industrial and financial conglomerates. They’ve enjoyed government support in the form of special loans since the 1960s, and gained prominence under President Park Chung-hee (1963 -1979) whose export-driven administration “prioritized preferential loans to export businesses,” according to a backgrounder by cfr.org.
Wielding massive influence in politics and keeping the wealth within the family through the decades, their presence is deeply ingrained in South Korea’s national psyche that “large conglomerates and Korean economy cannot be separated from politics and the culture and history,” remarked Yonsei University Prof Rhyu Sang-young in the same backgrounder.
Their symbiotic relationship allowed chaebol groups to lobby for legislation in their favor and the government to ask for “financial support during campaigns…often touting chaebol economic successes as national ones,” continued cfr.org. But the prime mover of one of the largest world’s economies seemed to have changed into simply being a government financier, leading to what critics have highlighted as the downside of the quid pro quo: embezzlement, bribery, tax evasion, and avoidance of military duty.
Clamor for chaebol reform rose and gained momentum between 2016 and 2017 when President Park Geun-hye (2013 – 2017) was sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment for soliciting bribes.
Reforming chaebol
Park’s predecessor, Kim Dae-jung (1998 – 2003), was set to crack down on chaebol groups with the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act, which banned cross-shareholdings among companies that belonged to the same group, and limited equity investments and reciprocal debt guarantees. But the 1997 financial crisis happened, and all he could do was appoint external directorswith the authority to demand consolidated financial statements and attach legal liabilities to the position of chair, said a report in eastasiaforum.org.
Lee Myung-bak (2008 – 2013), Kim’s successor, halted the little progress made by abolishing the total equity investment ceiling system.
President Moon Jae-in (2017 – 2022) picked up the baton for chaebol reform with the Commercial and Fair Trade Act, wanting to improve rights of minority shareholders, strengthen separation of ownership from management, and end circular or cross-shareholding, a practice that keeps control of the conglomerate in the family through a series of capital contributions to companies within the family business group.
President Yoon Seok-youl, who assumed office last May 10, has pushed chaebol reform to the back burner, focusing instead on “[supporting] business leaders who create jobs, [easing] regulations, and [cutting] taxes for companies that bring their factories back home from overseas, said a report in The Korea Herald.
He was expected to pursue chaebol reform being a former prosecutor general who doggedly investigated and indicted leaders of major conglomerates, i.e., Samsung Electronics vice chair Lee Jae-yung for bribery and embezzlement in 2017, SK Group chair Chey Tae-won for embezzlement (without detention) in 2012, and Hyundai Motor chair Chung Mong-koo for embezzlement (with detention) in 2006.
President Kang Tae-moo (Netflix screenshot)
But reforming the chaebol groups’ hierarchical culture is underway. Top executives are encouraging employees to call them by their English names because Koreans are unable to call their bosses by only their Korean names, said an article in The Korea Times. For example, it’s “Tony” for SK Group chair Chey Taewon, “JH” for Samsung Electronics vice chair Han Jong-hee, “KH” for Samsung president Kyung Kye-hyun, and “Sam” for Lotte Group vice chair Kim Sang-hyun.
They just killed Gomburza with their eyebrow-raising answers of Majoha and Marjo when asked what the acronym was of the three priests sentenced to death by the Spanish colonizers on trumped up charges of treason and sedition. The two girls were in a televised quiz on Philippine history in an episode of Pinoy Big Brother, a local reality TV show that has become a stepping stone into show business.
Amid the general reactions of laughter or dismay was presidential candidate and labor leader Leody de Guzman’s lamentation. “The incident, even if seemingly a small matter, demonstrates the bigger problem of limited knowledge and lack of importance shown by the youth toward our history and greatness of our forebears,” he said in a report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
If Philippine history had been taught in high school, it would have been a cinch answering Gomburza, but they were never tutored properly. Instead, they were schooled on glossed over historical truths of the Philippines’ past.
Dark Memories — outdoor photo exhibition
Dark memories
Gomburza and the martial law victim-survivors were at the academic oval at the University of the Philippines, Diliman (UPD). They were featured in the photo documentary Dark Memories: Remembering the Victim-Survivors of Martial Law by Rick Rocamora, which by far was the biggest classroom for a Philippine history lesson ever since the subject was excluded from the K-12 curriculum in 2014.
Hanging above and around the oval, Rocamora’s exhibit was the fifth activity of UPD’s annual Arts and Cultural Festival, which opened on Feb 21 with the theme of Kamalayan: Pamana ng GomBurza @ 150. It pays homage to the victims-survivors of martial law who, like Gomburza 150 years ago, fought to uphold the rights of Filipinos and, in the process, continue the fight against historical revisionism.
“Dark Memories: Remembering the Victim-Survivors of Martial Law” at UP Diliman oval
The works of Rocamora, a Muslim-American based in Oakland, California, have always focused on the trials and tribulations of humanity. In the US, he highlights issues about immigrant rights, the immigrants’ contributions to America, and civil liberties. In the Philippines, he focuses on inequality and human rights.
Martyred priests
Gomburza — Mariano Gomes, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora — were sentenced to death by garrote by the Spanish authorities on the pretext of instigating the mutiny in Cavite on Jan 20, 1872. The mutiny, in fact, was led by sergeant Fernando La Madrid with 200 soldiers from the Engineering and Artillery in Fort San Felipe and laborers. They protested the cancellation of their exemption from paying taxes and forced labor.
The uprising resulted in the mass arrest of people tagged as subversive like Gomes — spelled with an s, not a z — “the oldest and most venerable of the three priests [who was] well-loved by the Bacoor parishioners [and] known for his anti-Spanish sentiments,” wrote Ambeth Ocampo in his column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Similarly, Burgos’ advocacy for reform in the Spanish rule in the country implicated him in the mutiny while Zamora’s complicity was due to his gambling. His ‘guilt’ was established based “on a note in his confiscated mail, an invitation to a card game that read, ‘Grand reunion…our friends are well provided with powder and ammunition,’ which referred simply to money for an overnight card game,” elaborated the Filipino historian.
At their execution at Bagumbayan (now Rizal Park), Gomes was “calm and resigned to his fate.” Zamora suffered a nervous breakdown and Burgos, “voicing out his innocence,” had to be restrained by 12 friars.
Reclaiming history
Pitying the girls should be in passing because obliviousness is unconscionable, yet it wasn’t surprising. Not teaching Philippine history — a narrative replete with struggles against injustices first stoked by Gomburza’s execution — for the past eight years has resulted in normalizing ignorance, trivializing the struggles of our ancestors, and justifying blue pencil work on historical truths particularly martial law. An equally chilling effect is the rapid spread of historical revisionism through social media platforms.
“Historical white washing is finding new homes. Pro-Marcos propaganda is now proliferating on TikTok and YouTube that appeal to Gen Z — ushering a new era of fun, hip, glossily edited content that is harder to regulate online,” wrote Regine Cabato and Shibani Mahtani in The Washington Post.
Philippine history must be brought back to the classrooms to educate the youth on how our ancestors unfettered the Filipinos from injustices alongside the importance of valuing humanity. Knowing the country’s history will not only prevent the ‘killing’ of our forebears again, but it can help chart a future towards a just way of life apart from reclaiming our real collective history.
It’s only in the Philippines were working abroad has a distinct label with all the possible connotations. It’s also only in the Philippines were seeking employment overseas is generally not a matter of choice, but of great necessity including the matter of returning home permanently. It’s just not possible because people are depending on the regularly remitted money. The OFW’s plight is one of the issues that needs addressing by the incoming president, which, hopefully, goes beyond the conventional bilateral agreements and streamlining OFW services.
The article — my seventh — appeared in the Feb 21 – 27, 2022 print edition of OpinYon, but was never uploaded on the website. OpinYon was revamped and relaunched in January under the new editorship of Pergentino Bandayrel Jr.
There is always someone in a Filipino family who’s working abroad. These five women are part of the Filipino diaspora to various parts of the world, driven to leave either by personal dreams or circumstance.
Niña Sarmiento is a quality assessment engineer who has worked abroad for 17 years. She was in Singapore for a few years before Ireland beckoned her with a better prospect.
Era Pedrigal replaced her friend working as a domestic helper in Singapore. She stayed for 15 years there before moving to Spain, where she has been working for the last 14 years.
Harriet Limbo returned to the Philippines after five years as a grade-school English teacher in Indonesia.
Hazel Lagos has been an assistant manager at Pizza Hut’s call center in Singapore for 11 years.
Pauline Tarnate has been working in Bahrain as a hotel receptionist for four years.
Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are plentiful, their stories mostly about how they survived hardships through their grit. Several agencies are handling their issues, including the newly created Department of Migrant Workers (DMW).
But do they need another agency?
OpinYon Feb 21 – 27, 2022 print edition
New agency
The DMW went into effect last Feb. 3 after the law was signed on Dec. 30 by the President, but details such as the appointment of a secretary to lead it and the transition team, the departments to be absorbed, and the budget to be allocated have yet to be decided. It’s tasked to protect land- and sea-based OFWs, especially the undocumented, and to resolve issues of red tape, recruitment, repatriation, etc.
The tasks outlined are commendable, but Dolores Balladares-Pelaez finds them unnecessary because of the various agencies already in existence.
“The problem is after the implementation of the programs available. Many end up not being helpful…It may seem [the government] wants to simplify things. But it’s actually aggravating the labor exploitation policy, it’s institutionalizing it,” Balladares-Pelaez, who chairs United Filipinos, a human rights group in Hong Kong, and works as a domestic worker, said in a South China Morning Post (SCMP) report.
Jean Encinas-Franco, associate professor at the University of the Philippines’ Department of Political Science has parallel thoughts. “The DMW sends a message that we’re going to be in this program for the long haul…It institutionalizes labor exploitation as a policy,” said Encinas-Franco in the same report.
OFWs have other measures in mind that would be more beneficial if implemented. Sarmiento sees the need for an accessible agency offering assistance 24/7. “Persons being maltreated in the middle of the night shouldn’t have to wait for the next working day to contact the embassy. Most of the time, these people are too afraid to reach out to the local authorities,” she explained.
In terms of other forms of aid, Pedrigal wants full medical assistance from the government, while Lagos wants support for “legal battles against oppressive employers.”
Helping returning OFWs is another pressing matter. “We prefer to see a program supporting those returning to the country and [looking] into ways to absorb them. We made that proposal to the government and they didn’t listen,” said Balladares-Pelaez.
Filipino deployment
A total of 2.2 million OFWs worked abroad from April to September in 2019. It dipped slightly to 2,180, 645 in 2020, but saw a strong deployment of domestic workers to the Middle East and Hong Kong. Similarly, health care workers, a staple labor export, became more in demand during the pandemic, with more than 3, 300 nurses leaving for Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Germany, and Singapore. (The government put a ceiling of 7, 000 workers to be deployed annually to prevent a scarcity of nursing staff in the country.)
Deployment was low during the pandemic, but it wasn’t brought to a standstill. An estimated 676,000 Filipino workers still left the Philippines from January to November 2021, according to Statista Research Department.
When President Ferdinand Marcos launched his labor export policy in 1974, it resulted in an exodus of Filipinos abroad for better pay. Their remittances bolster the economy to this day; they are now hailed as “modern-day heroes.”
Yet, as Filipino sociologist Randy David wrote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer early this month: “[The] workers’ remittances solved the regime’s short-term need for cash, but it created a consumer-based economy that has concealed the sharp inequalities and injuries inflicted by a neoliberal economic order.”
Remittances totaling US$31.59 billion from January to November 2021, up by 5.3 percent in the same period, buoyed the economy through the pandemic, said a report in the Inquirer. Workers in the United States accounted for 41 percent of the remittance flow, with those in Singapore coming in second. This was followed by OFWs in Saudi Arabia, Japan, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Taiwan, Qatar, and South Korea.
OFW life
A better life is a universal aspiration that should be possible in one’s home country, but in the Philippines it always means seeking employment overseas.
Sarmiento’s life goal was “to buy a house, have a comfortable life with a disposable income for travel, and a cushy retirement fund.” But the steep job competition pushed her “to try [her] luck abroad.” Tarnate packed her bags because of the “employment stability and firmer law implementation” abroad. Lagos left for “career exposure” and a desire to try living overseas.
But working abroad isn’t always easy, as those left behind in the motherland are wont to think whether out of willful denial or toxic positivity. On the contrary, OFWs struggle against homesickness and loneliness. (In my case, I had anxiety attacks while working in Singapore, prompting doctors to prescribe a tranquilizer.)
Aggravating the emotional distress is the prejudiced perception of being a second-class citizen. Sarmiento battled discrimination at the office repeatedly. “It’s hard to be a non-white, female foreign worker. No one would easily take my word. I always have to double my efforts to be considered at par with my male counterparts,” she said.
Another source of pain and conflicts for OFWs is Filipinos’ backstabbing and betrayal. “Filipinos are jealous of other Filipinos,” observed Tarnate.
A Filipino working abroad has had to live with the label of OFW. Is it a pejorative demarcating the commonplace working class from those leading lives of leisure? Or is it a compliment?
It’s a badge of honor for Pedrigal because they’re the Philippines’ modern heroes who command the respect of both compatriots and foreigners “since [they] contribute billions to the economy.”
Lagos is proud because “I know that not everyone will be able to survive and adapt to the hardships of working abroad.” She believes that foreigners employing Filipinos are “appreciative and grateful because they’re the most hardworking and resilient workforce.”
Limbo had always associated the label with “love for family and the Filipinos’ good characteristics.”
Sarmiento argues that the label knows no nationality. “All foreign workers are the same no matter from which country. [They] either have better opportunities or are rejoining their family.”
Assisting OFWs
OFWs have surmounted overwhelming odds while keeping sanity and soul together in the name of family and dreams. Their survival is fueled by the unrelenting belief in seeing the silver lining — i.e., cultural exchange, higher income, independence.
Is the DMW offering anything different? Its promise of enhanced services is overshadowed by skepticism because promptness has never been a strong suit of any of the local agencies. The problem lies, not in the lack of agencies, but in the bureaucracy and in the weak implementation and enforcement of legislation concerning OFWs.
Pivotal in ending the conundrum is the creation of local jobs. The endgame should be veering away from overseas deployment and providing a catch net for returning OFWs. “[The DMW] is not a step towards breaking our reliance on labor migration,” Sentro, a Filipino labour rights group, said in the SCMP report.
Some OFWs are fortunate, like Sarmiento whose job isn’t vulnerable to exploitation, but others are not. And they need support more than ever, until such time that they’re no longer exposed to danger, or even need to leave home to work abroad for a better life. #
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Liana Garcellano has clocked more than 20 years of overseas work and living. She taught English and English lit in Singapore before becoming a business travel magazine editor in that country. She moved to Jakarta to head a school’s Cambridge Preparatory Program. In year two of the global pandemic, she returned to the Philippines.
Leslie Sansone would have loved leading her walkers through the oval at the University of the Philippines (UP), Diliman. Walking one round is equivalent to 2.2 km, which is more than enough for a workout for the walking advocate-guru and her troop.
The UP oval is the place for Quezon City residents to walk or jog. It’s the closest to nature — stately trees circle it — anyone can get to in the city.
the oval at the UP, Dilimangolden sunset at the oval
Better choice
That walking is always rated as a poor cousin to running isn’t that surprising. This is because, said John Ford in a report in nbcnews.com, of its “larger muscle recruitment, greater forced exerted and faster motion capability.” But the certified exercise physiologist acknowledges in the same breath, that “walking is a…good form of exercise and can help…[with] fitness and weight-loss goals.”
Walking, in fact, might even be a better choice for people who can’t run or don’t like running as exercise. Physically, walking improves cardiac health, endurance, and blood circulation, etc. Mentally, walking leads to a healthier mental state according to Stanford University study “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.”
In the same report, study authors Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz said, “Walking had a large effect on creativity. Most of the participants benefited from walking compared with sitting, and the average increase in creative output was around 60 percent.”
The type of creativity is known as divergent thinking, a way of coming up with varied creative responses through exploration, as opposed to convergent thinking, which only has one correct or conventional response.
Another study in the nbcnews.com report said that walking in nature “[reduces] ruminating over negative experiences, which increases activity in the brain associated with negative emotions and raises risk of depression.” When the gym closed during the pandemic lockdown, walking became my exercise program in Indonesia. I walked around my neighborhood — with its tufts of greenery– to lift my mood and relieve anxiety and homesickness.
Playground
The UP oval during my university days was where you’d always see members of the UP Mountaineers make their usual run look like a stroll in the park. Joggers strode effortlessly on the asphalt while cyclists sped around them for their pre-velodrome run. Spectators turned the oval into a “viewing deck” in December for the annual UP Lantern Parade.
the sunken garden on a Saturday afternoon
Inside the oval was the sunken garden where students sat to decompress from their day’s classes. Despite lacking regular manicuring, the sunken garden hosted the yearly UP Fair, lovers, impromptu picnics, and soccer scrimmages. It was my playground every time Mike Villadolid, coach of the UP Ladies’ Football Team, held our practice sessions in it. With the ground softer than the pitch at the back of the College of Mass Communications, it felt like we were running on sand.
football at the sunken garden
A couple of decades later and post-lockdown, the oval remains the walkers’ choice with its majestic trees, golden setting sun, and cool breeze. Walking at the oval one Saturday afternoon, breathing in the air thick with hope amid the chaos of the elections, was revitalizing.
Walking is vital and, as Sansone said, “walking is life,” and so, out on your walking shoes now.
Simplify and Breathe 