Welcome To The Neighborhood: The words "public housing" often conjure images of hastily constructed concrete dwellings piled shabbily one on top of the other. Not so here, where Housing Development Board (HDB) units boast of tiled interiors, basketball courts, football fields as well as air-conditioning, gas, water, and garbage disposal systems. With eighty percent of the population living in public housing, it isn't hard to find entire neighborhoods such as this one, taken yesterday, consisting almost completely of HDB blocks.

I would later find out how complicated it was when, after an afternoon of jogging at the UP oval on Good Friday, I began to experience a slight but odd pain on my right knee every time I walked up or down the stairs. Since it came at a time when looking for a job and applying for scholarship programs usually demanded making most of my way in the city by foot, I decided not to be hampered by such a seemingly minor setback. After all, being twenty-two meant one was at the prime of youth, a phase in life where one was supposed to be immune from bodily inconveniences, diseases, and other things that plagued the old.

But a few days of abiding by the busy commuter’s routine only made the pain grow worse every time I exert effort on a bent knee, and I was practically reduced to limping up the stairs, relying solely on my left leg to pull myself up this simple 21st century banality. I soon realized how wrong this was when my other leg began showing the same pain, probably due to supporting my entire weight the whole time. Hyperboles notwithstanding, I saw each flight of stairs as another mountain to cross or descend from, each railing a harness for me to hold onto as I began my ascent and descent. Although the pain usually went away after a few hours of rest, it would recur with intensifying crescendo after prolonged periods of walking and stair climbing. Elevators and escalators, postmodern contraptions that I previously left alone for the pregnant, the old, and disabled, now provided a welcome relief, and I took mental note of their locations everywhere—at train stations, overpasses, malls, office buildings.

While I never consulted a doctor in the duration of my condition (I saw little reason why I should, since the pain usually went away after a brief period of rest), a little online research revealed a type of knee problem whose symptoms appeared to match mine. Patellofemoral pain, a general term that refers to a number of medical conditions that cause pain around the front of the knee, is common among runners, football players, skateboarders, and just about every sportsperson whose sport places great stress on the knees. Hence, the informal term Runner’s Knee. Its symptoms–pain around the lower front part of the knee when walking up or down the stairs, or sitting down for a long time with the knees bent—can only sound eerily familiar. Treatment ranges from the simple, do-it-yourself type—such as employing the RICE method (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevation)—to the extreme and expensive: surgery to scrape away rough edges of cartilage, or so says online medical gurus. I went for the former.

Young people, and by this I loosely refer to anyone in their twenties and below, often like to think they can get away with anything—and with good reason. After all, college students and twenty-year-olds don’t suffer from liver problems or die of lung cancer; chain smokers and alcoholics in their forties and fifties do. When wrinkles and heart problems are the least of one’s concerns, mortality is relegated to an abstraction, replaced by a false sense of one’s invulnerability. Even in other situations,  children and young people find complacency in the fact that parents are only too eager to bail them out of any fiasco: a failed subject, a brush with the law after a drug bust, a refusal to find work even after graduating from college, thus sustaining the illusion. My mistake was to think my body can withstand any sort of health abuse—excessive jogging, fastfood binges, improper sleeping habits, refusal to take rest to alleviate the pain—when in fact the human body, even that of a perfectly healthy twenty year old, has its limits.

While it took a few weeks of rest, my knees are back to normal, gliding smoothly in place again. I still shudder to remember how it had protested my weight at the stairs, threatening to collapse and begging for a wheelchair on the next flat surface. For that I can only promise to eat better, if not exercise with care.

Thanks to our colonial legacy, English in the Philippines has become the language of choice for the educated, the corporate professional in long sleeves, the cultivated scion, and let’s not forget of course, the altasociodad. “Let me out,” in this instance, would sound more intimidating than “Palabasin niyo (nga) ako,” if only because the former immediately places him in the company of cultivated scion et. al. This is especially so if one is mindful of diction, making sure to utter every word in a distinctly near-American accent.

I have been told there was a similar case in Russia when it came to the French language. Initial cultural influence of the French during the eighteenth century during the time of Peter the Great paved the way for the adoption of French as the language of the nobility, a trend that continued well into the 1800s and just before the October Revolution. Traveling to France, in fact, was then for the Russian elite an essential means of developing oneself culturally and intellectually. In our case, however, English was imposed during the American occupation through public school education, and as a result today we are one of the most, if not the most, Westernized country in Asia. Not that having English as a second language, spoken and understood in varying degrees by more than sixty percent of Filipinos, is a necessary evil of colonialism; it had its aftereffects for sure, but depending on which side of the fence you are in the debate, the effects can range from the advantageous –such as a readiness to interact and do business with the world at large, English being the 21st century’s lingua franca--down to the unsavory, if not abhorrent–such as cultural and linguistic rootlessness, not to mention the apparent loss of collective cultural memory. And at this point, I prefer to leave the rest of the talking to Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Spivak, and company, lest I lose myself in the post-colonial wilderness.

In any case, I was hapless enough to have come across such incidents more than twice now. The earliest I can remember took place during one of my morning rush hour rides in the MRT (Metro Rail Transit), a voluptuous woman in her forties trying to make her way out in a similar tangle of arms and armpits. As those who participate in the morning Makati-bound MRT rush hour are well aware, even just footspace inside the coach can be gold, and once train doors open it’s usually every man for himself. When the torrent of commuters began hustling and tackling their way in through the open door, the woman, realizing she might not make it out on time, started shoving those she could get her hands on to, yelling “Let me out, move out of the way, God damn you! God damn you!” From the way they dressed alone, I could tell that many of those who stood in her way trying to get in were blue collar workers from the lower tier of the social ladder.

English, in instances like these, has its proper place of expression; she could as easily have yelled in casual Taglish (a combination of Tagalog-English). Was she trying to assert her superiority, establishing herself as nobility for whom humble serfs must give way to?

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I observe a somewhat similar principle at work in talks of lineage and bloodline among Filipinos. For the life of me, I cannot remember how many times I have heard folks claiming that they are either one fourth American, one eighth Spanish, or one sixteenth Chinese. To be certain, centuries of intermarriage and trade with the Chinese, Indians, Arabs later followed by four hundred years of colonial domination by the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese is enough to make everyone’s ethnicity suspect; but I have yet to hear anybody claim that they are Filipino without appending it with a detailed mathematical breakdown of their ethnic composition, tracing their diluted ancestry to 19th century Spanish immigrants and half-Chinese lolos. Is there something wrong with being just Filipinos?

Interestingly, I noticed the opposite principle at work among Koreans during my year-long sojourn in South Korea, where keeping the ethnic bloodline pure and intact appears to be a national preoccupation. Compared to us Filipinos, Koreans are still relatively suspicious of foreigners, and from what I’ve been told a good number of men are not very happy with the idea of foreign men “taking” their girls (the advent of globalization is steadily changing this though). Locals often boasted to me of their “pure Korean” blood, although a confidant reminded me to take this with a grain of salt; Chinese blood runs through everybody on that Peninsula.

Being a Chinese-Filipino myself whose undergraduate thesis revolves around the peculiarities of hybridity, deterritorialization, and ethnic experience, I’ll be the first to say that discussions on ethnicity cannot simply be confined to either/or binaries, as if all the world was black and white. But I wonder whether conversations on lineage are instead a result of a deeply entrenched cultural inferiority complex on being Filipino, and displays of foreign lineage merely subconscious attempts to distinguish oneself from the rest of the so-called indio masses.

*          *          *

Speaking of English and the Filipino language, my attention has recently been drawn to the way Filipinos carelessly flaunt the term “neutral accent” to describe, with pride, our unique way of speaking English. In one online forum where I saw this term employed, one user, apparently Filipino, extolled the advantage of the non-native Filipino English speaker over that of the native when it comes to teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) by arguing that Filipinos, unlike their American or British counterparts, speak with a “neutral accent.” I saw this repeated in different variations in other online forums, such as a Filipino jobseeker claiming to speak English with a “neutral accent,” or an anonymous user who said that Filipino English is more easily understood than American English because it is spoken with a “neutral accent”.

Foreigners who read these oft-brandished remarks on Filipino English probably find themselves asking, “What exactly do these people mean by ‘neutral’?” Before we proceed, allow me therefore to give you a brief description, based on my own observations on its offhand use, of what appears to be the most likely meaning of this adjunct word “neutral.”

Unbeknownst to native English speakers on the other side of the planet as well as in nearby Australia and New Zealand, Filipinos in general refer to their native English speaker’s way of speaking the language as “slang.” Whereas “slang”  is frequently understood in standard English as a very informal way of speaking (such as saying “There ain’t nobody here” instead of “There is nobody here”), its use in Filipino parlance connotes English that is spoken with a certain drawl or twang; in other words, “slang English” is spoken English that is, confusing as this proposition may sound, nonstandard, unusual to the Filipino’s ears and not the spoken English that majority of Filipino speakers recognize it to be. Hence, it is not “neutral.”

From this definition of what a neutral accent is not, we can therefore more or less deduce what a neutral accent is. What is a neutral accent then? Simply put, a neutral accent is a type of accent where English words are pronounced the way it should be as far as Filipino phonetics is concerned. Being a literature major, I am not exactly an expert on linguistics or phonetics, but I think this is perhaps better understood by way of an analogy. In the mind of a native speaker of American English for instance, he or she does not speak English with an accent; it is the British speaker who does, with the Brit’s non-rhotic Rs and broader As, notwithstanding the Brit’s preference for “the underground” instead of “the subway.” For our American speaker, his own Rs are not more pronounced and neither are his As less broader than that of the Brit’s; he is merely pronouncing them the way they are regularly pronounced. The same is true vice versa, and may very well apply to the rest of the English-speaking world.

So it is, then, with the Filipino speaker of English who insists on one’s spoken English as “neutral.” To him, he is merely pronouncing each vowel and consonant the way he has learned to pronounce them properly in Filipino, and so pronouncing English in the same “proper” way would in effect constitute “standard” (and therefore “neutral”) English pronunciation. To wit, since the letter “i” in Filipino is properly pronounced similar to (but not exactly as) a long “e” as in that of “bee” or “treat,” the Filipino speaker for instance will pronounce the English word “hit” as “heet” or “kick” as “keek” with the intensity of the Tagalog “i.”

Now that we’re on the same plane, there are a few not-so-neutral things I would like to say. Let me start off by saying that the concept of the Filipino accent as the “neutral accent” is itself a misnomer for several reasons. The first and most apparent is that to claim to do so is tantamount to saying that our English pronunciation is the standard one, while theirs–the Americans’, the Indians’, the South Africans’, among others–is substandard, is “slang.” This is an absurd claim, of course. Even among the major varieties of English–be it British, American, Australian, New Zealander, Irish, South African–none is considered to be “standard” English, to mention nothing of its local and dialectical variations (Southern American English, Scottish English, African American English, the list goes on and on). If anything, ours is just as heavily accented as their English is to each other, if not less understandable.

Secondly, Filipino English only sounds “neutral” to us because it is what we have been used to all along, but an outsider, whose own linguistic upbringing gives him a different idea on how it should be done, can tell the difference. To borrow from C.S. Lewis, we are like fish who do not feel wet in the water because we have lived in it all our lives. Advocates of this term do not seem to realize how strange a Filipino accent sounds to a foreign ear, if only because the foreigner does not have the proper background in Tagalog to know where we are coming from.

Which leads me to my third point. Those fondly parading the term seem to ignore the fact that, in the words of one cultural theorist, we all come from somewhere–we speak, act, think, and in this case, pronounce words from a specific point of view and background–and therefore everything we say is always in context and is positioned. To declare that a language or an accent is neutral is to imply that it belongs nowhere, that it adheres to no side, when in fact everything we say is inevitably colored by personal biases, points of view, backgrounds, and precepts.

All this, of course, presupposes that there is a “standard English,” an English-ness safely ensconced somewhere in the Platonic world of ideas. Again, while I am not an expert on this topic, I have at least studied enough of it to realize that, contrary to popular belief, standards of language are not determined by dictionaries, grammar books, or academic bodies. As Filipino writer and English language scholar Butch Dalisay explains:

“Language—unfortunately or otherwise—isn’t graven in stone like math, perhaps to the distress of ruler-toting schoolmarms; one billion people saying “1+1=3” isn’t going to make it so. But if enough people—including influential writers and editors in places like Newsweek and The New York Times—say “different than” instead of “different from,” which I’m sticking with only because it’s what I’ve been used to, then the language will change; it already has.”

In the end, it is the speakers themselves instead of dictionaries or grammar books who shape and define the language, not the other way around. If enough people spoke English the way we Filipinos speak it, then standards will change, but in no way will it still come even close to being “neutral,” since there is nothing intrinsic in our pronunciation indicating that it should be so. Of course, it is problematic, especially in deconstructionist and post-structuralist circles, to assert that a certain way of speaking immediately constitutes a “standard,” but we’ll go down that rabbit hole another time.

Surprise, Jerome. Today’s Maundy Thursday. Happy Holidays.

But then again of course, it wasn’t just the cartoons. The days between Holy Wednesday and Easter always struck me as kind of eerie, especially so because of the kind of things I would hear from grownups: ‘Wag kayong magulo ngayon; patay ang Diyos (Don’t be rowdy these days. God is dead),  a statement that usually conjured images of a bearded man in a white robe descending from the skies every Good Friday to have himself whipped and beaten to a bloody heap and finally left dangling from a cross. Jesus, I then imagined, actually died every year on Holy Week, a claim which I now think originated from the country’s folk Catholicism. It’s a yearly tragedy that the inhabitants of Manila mourn by letting the city grind to a halt, transforming the country’s capital into a ghost town. Malls, supposedly an unstoppable money-making juggernaut that’s impenetrable to weather, natural disaster, holidays (step aside, Christmas, the Metro Manila Film Festival is in town), economic vicissitudes, and political upheavals (Robinson’s Galleria was bristling with activity at the height of EDSA Dos), shut down for these two or three days like slumbering concrete giants. EDSA, bustling 24/7 with every mode of vehicular transportation imaginable from recalcitrant tricycles to eighteen wheelers, becomes a desolate stretch of concrete from one end of Manila to the other. Once, after a visit to my late grandparents’ graves in an even more desolate cemetery, our family flitted from one closed establishment to another in search of halo-halo, a sweet treat for a week of ho humming that led us to a Chinese fast food chain–the only one we could find that’s open for business that time–attached to an obscure commercial complex in the streets of Quezon City.

During this season, the heart of the action, it seems, is in the provinces. Starting every Holy Monday, traffic in highways leading out of the city slow to a bumper-to-bumper crawl, a spectacle that lasts until Holy Wednesday when most of the urban dwellers have made their exit, stage north and south. In fact, it was while I was stuck on one of these trips as a child that I learned the Filipino idiom “Aabutin tayo ng siyam-siyam” (Literally “It will take us nine-nine,” awkward as this may sound), a hyperbolic phrase we use to denote the amount of time it will take to finish a task. I heard it from my mother, who was then on the wheel with a look of disapproval on her face while gazing on the line of cars clogging the freeway. We were on our way to Bulacan, invited by my now late uncle to spend the day in their home to experience Lent as it should apparently be experienced–by watching the penitensiya, of course, uncensored, uncut, in real time live action. Filipino folk Catholicism at its gory rawest.

Once there, those of us inside our uncle’s house dropped everything at the, well, the drop of a hat as soon as the first sign of the procession approaches. After all, if the crowds slowly gathering on the street shoulders are any indication, this was Box Office Lent. Blending among these myriad of spectators is me, patiently anticipating the approach of a band of topless men beneath the glaring noonday sun, their cloth-covered faces giving them the air of executioners leading a criminal to the gallows. Each one carried a short “whip,” actually a kind of rope of an arm’s length and which are attached to a bundle of cylindrical wooden sticks, clacking as these masked men swished the cat-of-nine-tails-like device from side to side and onto their backs, spattering driblets of red on those who come too close–a lesson I learned the hard way (don’t ask). Depending on how many hours the “penitent” has been at this, I would often see entire backs throbbing blood red with the ferocity of a freak sunburn–not hard to imagine considering they have been exposed to the sun since morning–as well as jeans spattered with dried blood. Once the spectacle has passed, things return to normal save for the fading cloc-cloc of wooden sticks from a distance until the arrival of the next procession. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Whatever else the grownups had to say back then, I now know that Lent is not always about gloom and doom. Elsewhere, business establishments in vacation hot spots have a field day from the influx of cash-flushed Manilenos. If anything, it’s probably the worst time to visit Boracay, where the horde of otherwise perennially busy young professionals, corporate executives, and movie actors and actresses baring their booty congest and drive prices up. Meanwhile, outside this fiercely Catholic country, life goes on as usual–no public spectacles of self-flagellation and atonement, no bearded man descending to earth every Good Friday to bring entire capitals to their knees. I remember spending Lent in Korea without even realizing it, until an email from my mother reminded me so. As far as the folks back home were concerned, Christ was dead, and yet there I was quietly sipping instant coffee in class as my German professor lectured on the importance of sustainable development. Once again, Holy Week had taken me by surprise.

Due mainly to my lack of general understanding of the area and my occasionally faltering IQ, I barely made sense of the detailed sketches that Ma’am Shirley gave me, except that I had to get into Intramuros somehow and find Manila Cathedral, wherever that was, because Bahay Tsinoy was there somewhere, just a few blocks off within the shadow of the Manila Archbishop’s seat, in a building named Angelo-King-something. For company, I invited a group of friends to enlist in this expedition into historical Manila, but as that sultry Thursday afternoon would have it, I found myself alone with my friend Andre, the only person I usually rely on for outings like these—particularly those that involve cultural relics and other things that today’s youngsters in general think only aging, disheveled academics care for. (Speaking of which, I think a lot of people from my generation miss out on the bonding that trips like this—cultural or otherwise—can provide.) Following the instructions of my mother, God bless her, who finished college in one of the schools inside the old city, Andre and I got off in front of a spacious yard that provided a grandiose view of the cathedral, a massive adobe structure that looks as if it had been chiseled out of a single block of stone. From what I had remembered, we were supposed to navigate our way in the maze of streets and old Spanish houses behind the left side of the cathedral, and there just ask around. Luckily, we didn’t have to. As I marveled at that place that modernity left alone, I made out the words “Angelo King Heritage Center” engraved on a pillar in a building in one of the street corners and excitedly told my companion that this must be it.

Inside, what welcomed us was a lobby furnished with marble floors and varnished wooden furniture—not exactly the things that come to mind when you think of Chinese, but considering that Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran, the organization that runs Bahay Tsinoy, is funded by contributions from wealthy Chinese Filipino businessmen, this comes as no surprise. For the museum, I had expected to see a plain room stuffed with dusty wax figures and books dating from the 18th century, but instead saw a labyrinth of displays that kept us occupied for about an hour. Never mind the whereabouts of the supposed sangley manuscript; the sangleys themselves came alive in those corners.

This is our story, the sign welcoming visitors to the museum said. Accordingly, pre-colonial trade with the Ming Dynasty brought Chinese merchants to settle in the archipelago, as evidenced by the various Chinese maps and documents mentioning the island of Luzon–Lu-Song, in Chinese characters—the largest island in the archipelago portrayed as an unimpressive concatenation of round rocks in the seas south of China. I was also amazed to discover that a Sultan of Sulu actually lies buried in China, having died there while on a visit to the imperial court. In fact, photos on display show that his descendants today remain as keepers and caretakers of the tomb, a mound of earth the size of a small hill in accordance with the customs of the time. Meanwhile, the arrival of the Spaniards opened new economic prospects to the Manila Chinese, who saw an opportunity to provide goods and necessities for the burgeoning colony. They even had a larger-than-life replica of a galleon, informing us how the 19th Century Manila Acapulco Galleon Trade brought income to many Chinese traders. And of course, who can ever forget the China? A collection of porcelain wares (not to mention coins and other artifacts) from the 16th Century onwards found in the country and elsewhere make up part of the museum. A miniature diorama of stone and clay figures also depict the numerous massacres and expulsions that the Chinese endured under Spain’s long domination, a genocide that nevertheless failed to curb Chinese immigration to the islands. La Tondena, the distillery that today is well-known for its rums, was actually founded by a Chinese, despite all its claims to Spanish elegance. And for all our stereotypes of the Chinese Filipinos as stingy merchants amassing a hidden hoard of wealth, it might come as a surprise for some people that the wax figures and photos depict these sojourners in pigtails engaged in manual labor: as barbers, as workers in textile and dye factories, as kargadors, as peddlers of various goods. From these immigrants did the mestizos eventually spawn, for while we use the word today to refer to a Filipino whose features are predominantly white, the word mestizo then, by default, referred to a Filipino of Chinese ancestry.

Upstairs, the replica of a two-storey colonial home give visitors a glimpse of what could have been an average mestizo household, consisting of a sala that opens into the kitchen and the bedroom—not very different,  it seems, from a typical Filipino house during the same period. Letters and documents written by renowned Chinese mestizos during the Spanish era, foremost among them National Hero Jose Rizal, sit enclosed in glass cases while in a separate section, their modern-day counterparts—records by Jose Mari Chan, treatises on law by former Chief Justice Teehankee—attest to how entrenched these immigrants have become in Filipino society.

Alas, we left the museum having found no trace of the facsimile that had brought us there in the first place—either this or I was too preoccupied to notice, especially since I had gone there assuming the elusive manuscript was sealed away in some vault in the upstairs library. By the time we could get to the library, however, the place was closed for the day—it was past five, after all, and outside the fading sunlight bequeathed Old Manila with a nostalgic glow.