Extreme title on the part of the author? Maybe, but she has a point. The ambitious, the intellectual, the highly skilled- of course they go where they make money. Sadly many may not have their degrees accredited and wind up driving taxi cabs or minding rich families children, but even so they make more money! And yes, the reverence for the evil Marcos rule saddens me, as well. Aside from those who remember the bloodshed, the grand larceny, the disappearances, there is a whitewash for certain among those who value nationalism over reality. Short memories indeed!Becoming a population of idiots
By Isabel Escoda
Inquirer
09/24/2007
I HEARD a radio broadcast recently, during a visit to San Francisco, by someone named Michael Sullivan who spoke of feeling "incredibly sad" at the sight of something in Manila.
His radio essay was aired over NPR (National Public Radio, the US equivalent of the BBC in London to which I tune in regularly in Hong Kong). It was a thoughtful, incisive piece without a hint of disparagement or condescension; he seemed genuinely sorry about something which, to him, reflected an unfortunate aspect of the situation in the Philippines.
The sadness felt by Sullivan (whom I Googled and learned is NPR's South & Central Asian correspondent) was apparently caused by the sight of long queues in front of a building in Manila known as the POEA [Philippine Overseas Employment Administration-ed], which he spelled out. The other countries in Asia which he covers are famous, as everyone knows, for exports such as cars and TVs (Japan), clothes and toys (China), computers and flowers (Taiwan), gems and textiles (Thailand), and furniture and handicrafts (Indonesia).
Sullivan's depression apparently stemmed from the fact that the Philippines' main export is its citizens--10 percent of the population, he stated, are migrant workers abroad. Describing the lines of people outside the POEA building as "looking excited but nervous," he noted that "most looked weary and resigned."
He interviewed an Emilio Antonio who told him he was glad to be working overseas because "We are like beggars, we cannot choose." Sullivan then spoke to a woman who said she was looking forward to earning $400 a month as a housemaid, even as she was leaving her husband and children behind. Their stories reflected the old cliched dream of going abroad to better one's lot, and the sadness which many of the migrant workers feel at leaving home.
On my flight to the United States, I had read "The Inheritance of Loss" by the fine young Indian writer Kiran Desai, who won the prestigious British Booker Prize this year. Recounting the lives of Third World nationals who immigrate to find work in the West, she tells a story of a young Nepali man struggling with demeaning dead-end jobs in New York City. And she also describes an Indian professional who has done well in the Midwest. When the professional's father arrives from India to visit his son, Desai describes the son's feelings thus:
"He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty ... never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by the journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there he had at last been able to acquire poise ... "
This made me think of transplanted Pinoys and the pride we feel for those of our "kababayan" who do well abroad, even as we often forget the multitudes who struggle abroad and end up at the bottom of the pile.
Desai's earlier book "Hullabaloo in a Guava Orchard" (1998) is about a young man named Sampath who starts out as his family's black sheep who then morphs into a sage when he decides to alter his life by establishing residence atop a guava tree. Befuddled people who first think he's mad soon decide he's a mystic; they come from far and near to peer up at the branches to ask him questions about life, which he answers in convoluted riddles.
In this book, Desai has a passage in which she mentions a member of the "Indian Atheist Society" observing Sampath perched on top of the guava trip while crowds gather around him, hanging on to his enigmatic answers and words of weird advice. This prompts the atheist to think that "People like Sampath ... obstructed the progress of this nation [India] ... they smothered anybody who tried to make a stand against the vast uneducated hordes, swelling and growing toward the biggest population of idiots in the world, even as miniscule little countries like Taiwan and the Philippines were forging ahead ... "
This may be a curious statement to make, even though Taiwan and the Philippines are indeed "miniscule" in population compared to India, the world's largest democracy. Though Taiwan has in many ways been ahead of India technologically and commercially, considering the Philippines as "forging ahead" poses the question as to which field--in politics perhaps? With corruption in India often exposed and punished, this makes Desai's comparison interesting.
So even as Filipinos today demand the ouster of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, she apparently still doesn't rank with TI's most corrupt leaders. The irony is that, even though we're notorious for having short memories and forgiving natures, we have some perverse citizens who clamor for Joseph Estrada's return as well as those who revere Ferdinand Marcos. In fact, the recent report about new school textbooks extolling Marcos as a great leader shows how history is being whitewashed and rewritten. Such a travesty of the truth is, no doubt, due to the machinations of those surviving Marcos relatives in various positions of power--not the least of them the bizarre Imelda, who persists in making the Philippines (to borrow the words of Desai's atheist) "look like growing toward the biggest population of idiots in the world."Isabel T. Escoda has written about Filipinos in Hong Kong in her books "Letters from Hong Kong," "Hong Kong Postscript" and "Pinoy Abroad."
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=90464
For those that mistakenly think the killings and fascist rule ended with the evil pair Marcos, a reminder that Arroyo is not so clean as many long to believe. Not learned the lessons of the past is an understatement. Our country deserves better than the same old crook under a different and more subtle guise, and the time has come for her government to understand that they must offer our people more than being better than the Marcos! Our young need jobs, stable education, services, and these infrastructures and opportunities are the only way to prevent the slipping back into desperate poverty. I hope, for what else is there to do.
