Jack The Scribbler

Chip Tsao should take a break from beating deadlines.
Or perhaps even quit the writing business altogether.
Just recently, the Hong Kong-based writer wrote a column that failed to bring his message across to his readers.
Not that that’s such a big deal.
Many of his Filipino counterparts are a chip off the old block.
Even on slow news days — in which deadline beaters have more time to check their facts, grammar, and sentence construction — Filipino journalists regularly fail their readers, a fault of either their education, intelligence, career choice, or their publishers.
Of course, I may be unduly incriminating myself, being currently employed by a media company.

Hong Kong-based columnist Chip Tsao said he was being satirical when he wrote that the Philippines was a "nation of servants." Photo courtesy of www.pep.ph

Nevertheless, as a struggling semi-professional humorist, I have yet to encounter a situation similar to the one faced by Tsao a week or two ago.
Our man in Hong Kong was roundly criticized for writing that the Philippines was a “nation of servants,” in a column entitled “The War at Home.”
The remark prompted many Filipinos — especially leftists who have nothing better to do — to openly condemn what he wrote, express their heartfelt indignation, organize demonstrations, and pressure Manila to file a protest against Hong Kong, and its parent company, China Inc.
In less than 48 hours, Tsao and his publisher apologized, with our man saying that what he wrote was, you know, satire.
Like most bloggers and self-proclaimed journalists, I remain grossly uninformed about abstruse issues that govern humanity, including, but not limited to, the life and times of crazy, middle-aged Asian men (i.e., myself in a few years).
But I’m not exactly stupid, despite appearances to the contrary.
I happen to know a thing or two about satire, having read the Bible when I was in seventh grade, Gary Lising’s “How Green is Your Mind?” in high school, and Amado Guerrero’s “Philippine Society and Revolution” as a zit-faced college freshman.
Upon hearing Mr. T use the “S” word to justify his writing, my built-in bullshit detector went off, a device whose batteries I thought had long expired.
I went online to see what the hell the whole thing was all about.
I read Tsao’s column. Several times.
It was satire, no question about it.
But it was not that well-written.
As a result, functionally illiterate Filipinos — including those who believe that Al Gore invented the internet — were misled into thinking that Tsao was serious.
Owing to his failure to make his point obvious, Tsao should apply for a sabbatical while taking comfort in reading the badly-written comments and/or reviews about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
But at the same time, we Filipinos should get a grip.
For starters, we should stop being oversensitive.
Filipinos are fair game, much like Americans and Australians, Canadians and Kazakhs.
And that means no unnecessary outbursts of patriotic sentiment, no overdramatized acts of nationalism whenever someone makes a pejorative comment about us and our country.
After all, however anyone looks at it, there appears to be very little to rejoice about being Filipino nowadays.
And our collective inability to appreciate satire, however poorly-written, doesn’t really help our race any.

It wasn’t easy.
Not for regular Filipino males such as myself who place very little premium on physical appearance and cleanliness.
But it had to be done. And quickly.
Yes, ladies and lesbians, gays and gentlemen, trannies, tramps, and tarts, butches, bitc*es, and bastards, I had a facial.
I’m not exactly proud of it.
Allowing a stranger to smear mud, oil, and fruit extracts on your face is a decision that doesn’t come naturally to most men. Or at least not to me it doesn’t.
Sure, it’s clean. It’s probably even healthy.
But even in an age when metrosexuals and fashionistas reign supreme, I remain skeptical whether men should get regular facials at all.

This is a photo from fotosearch.com. The male in the picture is obviously not me.

Whatever happened to good old soap and water?
Have they gone the way of the pager, the 56k dial-up connection, and — with all due respect to communists — communism?
Apparently, they have, at least for some males excluding myself.
An informal poll I undertook via text messaging indicated that some of my friends use facial cleansers, others use astringents, and, as expected, a few had regular facials.
It’s still soap and water for me.
They remain my weapons of choice in the daily struggle against stubborn dirt and noxious body odor, a never-ending war in which I occasionally lose.
Despite their easy availability, I know well enough that sometimes soap and water may be insufficient or inappropriate in certain instances.
Which explains why the only time I agreed to get a facial was a few hours before I got married. This was seven years and seventy-seven pimples ago.
I did it for my bride, the occasion, and our guests, some of whom I have never had the misfortune of meeting again. But that’s another story.
My latest decision to get a facial involved no such grand event.
One day, while at the office, a female co-worker lunged at me without any explanation at all.
With nothing but her bare hands and a maniacal smile on her face, she attacked my left cheek and tried to pierce what she correctly diagnosed as a whitehead, also known as a non-inflamed pore blocked with sebum, according to Wikipedia.
“Hold still,” she told me, her right palm pushing my nose up, threatening to deform it.
“I’m good at this.”
Seconds later, she pressed her thumbs together in an effort to remove the offensive pore.
She failed. The stubborn sebum stayed secure, subcutaneously speaking.
It didn’t take long for me to get the message.
So the next day, I decided to go the whole hog.
I went for the facial after I got a haircut.
The process took more than an hour.
Eyes closed, I lay prostrate on a reclined barber’s chair while a clear, hollow tube the size of a pencil sucked away at the accumulated facial dirt of the past seven years.
It wasn’t an easy job for Facial Vacuum Guy, who said that his harvest of my facial debris was his most bountiful in recent memory.
Nor was it a walk in the park for me.
All throughout the procedure, my legs fell asleep, my butt turned numb, and my back incurred so much pain that I wished for a paracetamol overdose.
But then again, who was I to complain?
These vexations were just the price of male vanity.

——-
Also published in GMANews.TV.

When in Rome, ape the locals.
Or go native.
Or at least try to act like you know your way around.
This is not difficult, especially for Filipino tourists visiting the Eternal City for the very first time.
Filipinos, after all, are to cultural adaptation as the Chinese are to producing pirated DVDs. And just like illegally-copied video discs, the said Filipino trait remains unfettered by regional restrictions.
But then again, this trait — as far as Rome goes — appears to be irrelevant.
Romans are still likely to be irritated whenever strangers interrupt their routines by asking them for directions.
Just like sharp-tongued New Yorkers, Romans have perhaps nurtured a dislike for tourists, simply because their city has too many of them, Filipinos or otherwise.
Besides clogging buses and trains, these visitors delay pedestrian traffic by reading street signs, studying maps, and posing for pictures.
How does it feel like to live in a city absolutely swamped with visiting foreigners?
I barely have an idea.
I live in a city notorious for being the Philippines’ squatter capital and I’m pretty sure that that’s not a top tourist attraction.

This picture was taken in Rome after being awed by the Fiat 500.

What I do know is that for the first half of 2006, approximately six million people visited Rome. The Philippines — which is 60 times larger than Rome — only had 2.8 million visitors during the same year.
So what does this mean?
There is a shortage of Romans patient enough to give directions to the next bus stop while there is a surplus of Filipinos — at least 30 to a tourist — all too willing to answer any questions under the sun, proud of their abilities to communicate using broken English, complemented by various hand and facial gestures.
This discrepancy posed a problem for my wife and I when we were about to leave Rome and the bus we needed to catch was running late.
If we missed the bus to the train station, it might take awhile before we could board a train to the airport. A later train to the airport might mean a delayed connection to Paris, compromising the last stop of our European adventure.
We had become so desperate that we considered taking a cab. The idea was quickly dismissed when I learned that it might cost me an arm, a leg, and my other organs, unsavory and otherwise.
Why was the bus late?
I didn’t know but I was tasked to find out.
Armed with my poor English speaking skills and my atrocious Italian, I ambled to the station attendant and asked when was the bus arriving.
She answered me in broken English and then she shooed me off.
Was this racism?
Were my questions being dismissed outright because I wasn’t white? Was I making a fool of myself because I didn’t know how to speak their language properly? Was I being treated unfairly because I was overweight and therefore used more soap than thin people?
I didn’t know.
But I found out soon enough.
As I sat beside my wife in the waiting area, I saw various other tourists — some of whom spoke in English — getting the same treatment that I got. They asked the same set of questions that I asked but they were summarily dismissed, like appeals of lawyers with losing court cases.
Not long after, the bus arrived, making us consider the incident with some measure of fondness. (We did catch the plane to Paris, after all).
My wife and I loved Rome — we still do — despite having stayed for less than a week. And no bus station attendant, no matter how ill-tempered, was about to ruin that memory for us.

(This piece was written after a trip to Europe in 2007. It was finished more than a year later when a temporary alcohol shortage prompted me to do something else on a Saturday night. It was also published in GMANews.TV)