dismal reality?

Life, like time, doesn’t stop, even at airports.

Manila, PH -- a short break from all the exciting office paperwork (short being relative). just had to let you in on conrado de quiros' inquirer column today:

I flew back late last week, a bone-jangling trip because of a nine-hour layover in Bangkok. It was an outrageous arrangement made less so only by the fact that the fare was reasonable in an unreasonable peak season—Filipinos flew south, or east, like migratory birds on Christmas. I was glad when the first rays of the sun touched my skin in Bangkok, and was able to take off my coat after what had seemed like (coming from the United Kingdom) the Ice Age. Time has a way of expanding in the cold, and I’m not sure that that isn’t so physically as much as psychologically.

The sunshiny feeling however was dampened by a pall of cloud that fell on me upon seeing fellow Filipinos at the gate for the Thai Airways flight to Manila. It was like having a mirror put on your face telling you, to your eternal shock, how you looked. Or it was a photograph that carried the caption, “What has happened to us?”

No, I didn’t mind the cheap cologne and the huge balikbayan boxes and the shoving rush with which we comported ourselves—the impressions of that person who wrote about OFWs sometime ago and who earned their everlasting ire. I too was dismayed by that article, though more because of the grand illusions of the observer rather than the dismal realities of the observed. The idea of looking down on one’s own out of a sense of belonging to the upper side of the social divide and possessing superior (really just expensive) tastes is never pleasant. It’s also rubbing salt on wound, when you contemplate the depths of sacrifices the OFWs make, not least the longing for home in the cold and desolate places they’re in, just to keep their and their loved ones’ heads above water.

In any case those impressions were nowhere in evidence in the Bangkok waiting area. There was no cheap cologne wafting anywhere, not even in the plane itself later on; no huge balikbayan boxes, or at least I did not see them because we were past the check-in area, though most everyone seemed to have strained the limits of the allowable hand-carried luggage; and no mad rush to the door, only an eternity of waiting to endure—quite literally miles to go before you slept. There was, however, more than the usual share of noise.

Coming from a country that seems dedicated to talking in hushed tones, an impression deepened by the breath of winter, the sudden and precipitous rise in decibel levels could not escape notice.

That was so moreover since I was trying to catch some sleep and had sunk into a row of seats fully lying down face up, grateful for the luxury, my head cradled by the book I had been reading, and a group of compatriots nearby seemed determined to tell the story of their lives, emitting cackling laughter at almost regular intervals and making respite elusive. They looked more like NGO types than OFWs. I don’t know if they worked there or were coming home from a conference, I didn’t much care one way or the other in the state I was in. I fidgeted exaggeratedly to hint at the unwanted, indeed much-resented, intrusion. I should have known people who were oblivious to their surroundings to begin with were not likely to catch hints, subtle or broad. And alas, I was too tired and too, well, Asian (that’s another story and an interesting one) to be confrontational.

That also made me notice something else, which is that, unlike many other people in the airport, no one among our compatriots was reading. Even outside the gates at the duty free area, solitary Filipinos did not relieve the tedium, or passed the time, or seized the moment—however you regard time, as enemy or ally—reading. They did so—shopping. Window or otherwise, and such as one can shop with the meager amounts one has.

That was what dimmed the sunshiny feeling in me. I wondered where we would be down the road, maybe five, 10, years from now. Let me be clear: I do appreciate what OFWs and other Filipino migrants abroad are doing, heroically if completely unintentionally keeping our collective heads above water by sending millions of dollars of remittances back home. Heaven help us if something should happen to that. But you wonder also if the gap between us and our neighbors in terms of level of education or sense of aspiration or capacity for ambition, however you put it, isn’t widening over the years, as shown by the difference in attitudes and behavior patterns of various nationals in this airport. You wonder how long a people who exist more and more on survival mode, content to keep the status quo, can compete with other peoples who are determined to better themselves every day (not least by reading) the better to conquer the world. Life, like time, doesn’t stop, even at airports.

I remember what the late Raul Roco once told me, which was when he first went abroad during the early ’60s as a youth representative to a leadership conference. Then, he said, you would really be proud to be Filipino, the Filipino enjoying the reputation of being one of the most educated Asians, possibly next only to the Japanese. I felt the sting of pain and anger again at the thought of what corruption really meant—little helped by the knowledge that a bunch of benighted Filipino officials, who neither read nor wrote, who merely lied and stole, were even then winging their way to some of the most expensive places on earth using taxpayers’ money to give vent to their shopping instincts—which is depriving this country of money that could go to enabling most of us to read and write. The better to go out into the world with a desire other than to torment people who are trying to sleep.

You always long desperately to come home when you are abroad. The only thing is what you are coming home to.