The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  The crowds, both on the coaster where I’m on and in Thomas & Mack Center in Vegas, quiet down to solemnity. The midmorning air is thick with anticipation, but otherwise light and brisk; where I am, a constant breeze blows from the South China Sea. The landscape of fields and palm trees outside is framed by plaid cotton curtains that undulate through open windows.

  “Why aren’t you singing along?” I nudge my companion, a young Filipino call center agent whose job entailed pretending he was in Illinois. “All of you guys sing, don’t you? Ha-ha.” He shushes me, the vulgar American, just when the crowd on the bus goes from funereal to euphoric. I turn to the TV and find out why. Pacquiao is shown in his dugout. An otherwise goofy-looking fella, his hair is parted in the middle, his forehead covered by a very rebellious-teenager-in-the-90s “No Fear” bandanna. He is sparring with Freddie Roach, showing off the speed and footwork that have made him famous, an unprecedented global popularity in which “pound for pound king” is the most recent, near-unopposed accolade. The song wraps up to thunderous applause.

  By now everyone on the bus is sufficiently riled up. When the Mexican national anthem is sung next and Morales—whose mestizo features are Pinoy telenovela staples, a reminder that both had sprung from Mother Spain—appears onscreen, the boos arrive on cue. 1 A plastic water bottle comes flying from somewhere, hitting the back of the conductor’s head. “Aray!” he yelps—“Ouch!”—eliciting nervous chuckles from those of us in the back. When the offended party breaks into a smile, it was so tense that I thought for a second I was at a Liverpool-Chelsea second leg showdown in Anfield, not in the middle of nowhere in the boondocks.

  And the fight hasn’t even started yet.

  Welcome to the Philippines. The world’s top exporter of coconuts and seafarers, bananas and mail-order brides. America’s (unacknowledged) colonial project. Pacquiao country.

  Here, the hype that surrounds every Pacquiao fight is a relentless media assault, like the Superbowl only cruder and less sophisticated, more carnivalesque. It was an inescapable weeks-long mania that reaches even the most far-flung barangay, the minutiae of the already-mad daily life. In the days leading to the fight, in between his many commercials for painkillers and cement and Head and Shoulders (or “Hidden soldiers,” a barb on Pacquiao’s regional accent), expect to find on the primetime news constant, tireless, unending segments on: (1) Pacquiao’s training regimen, including the number of crunches he has managed to do for the day (1,400), his diet (raw oatmeal, milk, honey, cured beef tapa and chicken broth soup tinola ), and a token comment on the intensity of his training sessions (“very intense”); (2) the latest anecdote from the ballroom courtesy of his mother, Dionisia—shortened, in this nickname-crazy nation, to mysterious-sounding Bond-style “Mommy D”; (3) the predicted lack of traffic in all major thoroughfares on fight day as well as the dip in crime rate all over the country, indicative of the wide-ranging moral codes of Pacquiao’s fan base; and (4) the possibility that he might run for president someday (plus the fear arising from the possibility that he might run for president someday). Once I even caught a feature on his wife Jinky, who, after an undisclosed number of cosmetic surgeries, has started to resemble Sandra Bullock. 2

  In my many taxi rides to the US Embassy to arrange Fulbright-related paperwork, no cab driver, not a single one, has failed to talk to me about Pacquiao. As a responsible soldier of social science, I dutifully quiz them with important anthropological questions: Why do you like Pacquiao? What is the source of his popularity? What does it say about the modern Filipino? Why is your meter running with the same blinding speed as his lateral footwork?

  Their answers, in halting but assertive English, further prove that taxi drivers are indeed the philosophers of our time. 3 Confronted with The Pacquiao Question, all of them smile a toothy smile, scratch their heads, and say something barely linguistic. I am always reminded of another tongue-tied guy with a shy, mischievous grin, the same faltering tongue.

  The cab drivers are Pacquiao.

  Minutes into the fight, people make their way from their cute little thatched huts on the roadside to our bus. A free show. While more than 90 percent of Filipino homes have television, there’s still a handful of households, in isolated communities outside Manila, that don’t get the daily dose of noontime variety shows and telenovelas. By the time the opening bell rings, it’s standing room only aboard the coaster, the aisle is jam-packed, and my companion and I had to crane our necks to get a good view of the tiny screen.

  I am not a fan of any sport, save for an abbreviated spell of awe over Roger Federer, ruined more or less by his perfection. It is riveting to be on that bus, amid that sea of Pacquiao fanatics. All the pre-linguistic grunts and barks. The amorphous idea of “nation” all of a sudden corporeal, a commotion, an almost malevolent tingle in the skin. Even my companion, a meek, hospitable Manileño, will hit the side of my arm every now and then, in his eyes a new agitation I had never before seen. At the end of the first round, another empty water bottle flies to the front, this one landing at the TV’s bottom frame.

  I hope for everyone’s sake that Pacquiao wins.

  If you’re like me, 4 you know that there are certain inalienable truths in this world: (1) modern man had only been around for 40,000 years, a result of turbulent, breathless evolution; (2) said evolution is responsible for a majority of our motions and instincts; and (3) in the Philippines, Emmanuel “Manny” Dapidran Pacquiao is the man.

  Or, rather, the everyman. Slight of frame, hair damaged by cheap highlights, and dark skin darkened still by a loving tropical sun, Pacquiao is a smorgasbord of Filipino physicality, which a walk around Manila’s streets should easily confirm: Pacquiao’s almond eyes on an itinerant cigarette vendor; his straight, fine hair on a jeepney driver; his high cheekbones on a harried-looking bureaucrat type; his vacant eyes on a senator. “Emmanuel” is embarrassingly Christian. “Dapidran” is indigenous. “Pacquiao” is most likely of Chinese origin. He is a walking, jabbing, code-switching Pinoy trope. His father abandoned his family when he was young, and he stowed away on a boat to Manila. 5 He loves playing basketball, talking on his cellphone, and begins and ends every training session with a memorized prayer. His English is, you know—basta ! He likes videoke so much that Roach had to impose a nine PM curfew during nights leading up to fights. 6

  It is no wonder, then, that when Pacquiao is lavished with tags like “Pambansang Kamao” (national fist), it is without any of the irony that would have attended such a blatantly patronizing nickname. They mean it. In the same way that the national fruit is mango and the national bird is an eagle that eats monkeys, the fighter’s fist—the left, Pacquiao being a well-known southpaw—is tasked with a collective narrative, mythologized by a people long mired in suffering and who desperately need a redemptive knockout outside the proverbial ring.

  Philippine history is replete with setbacks, terrible knockouts. Before the nation could be named after a Spanish monarch, before the 7,000 or so islands off the coast of mainland Asia could be gathered in a flimsy assemblage, an interruption had sailed forth from Madrid. The Pacific wasn’t even named yet; the United States, sporadically occupied by a bunch of agrarian and hunter-gatherer tribes. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, famed for the world’s first circumnavigation, was killed in a tiny island off Cebu in central Philippines. 7

  But the discovery of the palm-fringed shores; the bountiful-looking sea; and the many brown, gold-clad potential converts was enough. Madrid locked in the far-away coordinates and sent one expedition after another. The Spanish stayed for nearly 400 years, until that empire waned and the Americans took over, staying for another half a century. The connection came with a cost; during World War II, Manila—its Spanish plazas and American rotundas, the so-called Pearl of Orient, easily one of the most picturesque capitals in the region—suffered the greatest destruction, second only to Warsaw.

  And so a fatal combination: the hooks and straights of wars and conquest and the final pa
ralyzing uppercut of freedom. 8 In the aftermath, in the country’s first few decades on its own, hope blinked in the radar bearing the assiduous name of Ferdinand Marcos. We all know how that turned out. We are all familiar with the shoe lady. 9 The leviathan, licentious spending. The conjugal dictatorship. The corrupted institutions. The ruined social fabric. And later the outrage. I myself was ten when I saw the grainy footage from the little-known nation on TV. There were tanks on the streets, helicopters overhead, and people. A swarm of brown bodies on a wide avenue. My parents, a young university instructor and a beginning novelist, watched with rapt attention. Little did I know that my father (the novelist) had then started to craft in his mind the germ of what would be the novel that would take him away from us. 10

  Ten years before the “People Power” revolt, on a humid October morning, the dictator that people would drive out of Malacañang was at ringside in what would be known around the world as the “Thrilla in Manila.” Marcos had successfully campaigned to sponsor the fight between bitter rivals Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, a move seen by most as an attempt to divert attention from the growing discontent following his declaration of martial law three years prior. There were less political sideshows: Mrs. Ali flying in to Manila after seeing her husband introduce his mistress as his wife to the Marcoses on a televised public event; Frazier’s camp deciding to leave sweltering Manila to train in the cool mountain resort town of Baguio (where Pacquiao sometimes trains); and the appointment of Filipino Carlos Padilla as match referee despite complaints from promoter Don King that any Filipino would be “too small” to handle a heavyweight fight. 11

  The bout took place in Araneta Coliseum, now a slightly feeble circular venue but which used to be the largest indoor stadium in the world. Beside it stood the country’s first mall, christened, not so surprisingly, as Ali Mall. At one point in the match, it got so brutal that Imelda reportedly had to look down at her feet (which among the 3,000 pairs she was wearing, no journalist bothered to know) and the president repeatedly winced in vicarious pain. Frazier’s trainer Eddie Futch threw in the towel between the 14th and 15th rounds. “I want him, boss,” pleaded Frazier, left eye swollen shut. “No one will forget what you did here today,” he was told. Thus ended the bout that Ali, himself sporting a battered jaw, described as “like death . . . the closest thing to dyin’ that [he] knew of.” He lost five pounds due to dehydration, he said, the punishing heat; Frazier’s estimate of the ring temperature? More than 120 degrees.

  Did “Thrilla in Manila” add ten more years to the dictatorship? It’s hard to say. Some 27,000 fans trooped to watch the show, numbers that even high-stakes basketball championships have a hard time approaching, even today. The bloodbath, it seems, amused them, although Filipinos are generally not a rioting people. 12 Years later, Marcos political rival and exiled senator Benigno Aquino was shot dead in the tarmac of the airport that would be named after him. Millions poured into the streets. But in the crowded church, where his bullet-riddled body was laid out for all to see, there was anger, surely, but also a lot of singing and laughter, a fiesta-like atmosphere. This prompted journalist Pico Iyer, who was there, to lament: “It was the happiness of the Filipinos that made me saddest.”

  So what is it that boxing and Pacquiao reveal about the implacable Filipino happiness? Gallup polls on happiness have consistently placed Filipinos as among the happiest—and most emotional—in the world. If boxing is an expression of repressed aggression, is watching it a form of vicarious violence, then? How do we account for this schizophrenia?

  When Pacquiao lands the left hook and sends Morales falling to the canvas, the 45-seater shakes with overjoyed human beings. As an anthropologist, I was trained to think that all human transactions carried a resonance beyond itself, a world of culture and history imbedded in every gesture. The Aristotelian definition of happiness anchors it on reason, which seems, in the case of the Filipino variety, a little suspect, if not downright silly. Just have a look around. Grinding poverty? Check. Twenty typhoons a year and a prime lot in the Pacific Ring of Fire? Yup. Institutions that barely function? You bet. Here, then, happiness is obviously a form of strength, a subversion even, a modus of survival, even if at times it appears superficial and misplaced.

  Besides, for all of boxing’s brutality, there is lyricism in its rhythm, too, something that dreamy, romantic Filipinos perhaps recognize. It is almost too facile to ascribe too much significance in this metaphor, but this incongruous combination of lyrical violence is default in Manila, where beauty is scarce, and which flourishes side by side with the hideous. There is pride in that stubborn independence, I think, whether it is on the canvas of the boxing ring or history. How did that killer song end again?

  The record shows

  I took the blows

  and did it my way.

  Endnotes

  1 Contact—and animosity—between Mexicans and Filipinos date back centuries. A precursor to the zealous and lucrative boxing rivalry, there are records of cockfights between so-called Manilamen, who jumped ship from stalled Spanish galleons, and Mexicans in the area around Louisiana at the turn of the 17th century. A colonial Vegas, if you will, absent the savvy fight promoters, pay-per-view deals, and gargantuan ad revenues. 2 A running joke hereabouts: When the Rapture supposedly happened, only Manny and Mommy D. were beamed up in the Pacquiao household. So the boxer asked God, “But Lord, what about my wife? She is also a good Christian.” “Oh is that your wife?” God asked, at which point Mommy D. quipped, “Ayan. Belo ka kasi nang Belo” (“See? You’re always going to Belo”). Belo is the most highly sought after cosmetic surgeon in the country. 3 In this country, where billions of pesos are lost to monstrous gridlocks every day, cabbies have understandably more time to consider their thoughts, aided, more often than not, by radio commentators who may not have the fluency of NPR anchors but ably compensate for it with sheer forcefulness. I am always happy to listen to their diatribe on such diverse topics as foreign policy (“If Americans in Clark, they clean Pinatubo! Tsk-tsk.”), homeland security (“Muslims, so violent, must be banned near airports, five kilometer radius, if you ask me ha?”), and conflict resolution (“Just bomb Basilan! Wipe out Abu Sayyaf. People should sacrifice.”) 4 An anthropologist studying contemporary urban phenomena in sprawling, putrid Third World Manila. 5 Invoking the following realities: the archipelagic backdrop; the world-famous beaches; and the biggest maritime disaster in history, which makes the sinking of the Titanic look like a minor sea mishap. 6 A pervasive myth, the truth to which several friends had asked me, concerned: Is it true that singing Sinatra’s “My Way” in public in Manila can lead to a painful death by stabbing? A slew of bar brawls here reportedly began with a drunken rendition of the song, leading some bar owners to ban it completely or scrap it off the videoke list. This was never conclusively proven, but that opening—“And now, the end is near / and so I face, the final kar-teyn.”—still sends shivers down some people’s spines. 7 Not to take anything away from the island chieftain Lapu-Lapu (no doubt a great military tactician, how else did he offset the Spaniards’ superior weaponry?), but some say that the province’s world-famous, Bourdain-endorsed roasted suckling pig lechon was served to Magellan and his men by another chieftain the night before his attack and so was just as responsible for the trouncing. The score, if you’re keeping tabs, is cholesterol 1, imperialism 0. 8 The United States, in a final imperious, if clingy, touch, deciding to grant Philippine independence on July 4, 1946. Philippine independence day had since been reverted back to June 12, the day when the country declared freedom from Spain. See? the pro-expansion block in the US Congress asked, it wasn’t really imperialism. It’s more tutelage . 9 At the 1973 Miss Universe pageant in Manila, Imelda allegedly elbowed Miss South Africa. “Your dad’s in the mining business? Me too!” She then points, one by one, to the paintings and sculptures around the Cultural Center, “That’s mine! That’s mine! That’s mine!” 10 The Ruined Plans of Madmen (unfinished) is loosely based on the li
fe of a member of Nixon’s Vietnam War committee who helped plan the unrealized nuclear strike on Saigon after a successful anti-communist campaign in the Philippines. My father went to Subic to do research and eventually decided to stay there, with nary a plan and explanation. 11 Cue parallels with the Dean Worcester photographs and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, in which indigenous head-hunting, dog-eating Filipinos were exhibited, in order to prove that there was indeed a civilizing task to be done across the Pacific. 12 Owing, perhaps, to the fertile land, the bountiful sea, the clement weather. Good-natured people typically evolve out of kindly, abundant surroundings, the absence of need to fight over resources.

  24

  U nknown to them, we could tell when they were listening in on our calls. Common signals included a sporadic choppiness on the line, a Darth Vader echo even for agents like Karen, who was known all over the operations floor for hiking her already high-pitched voice whenever she spoke to a male heterosexual caller.

  “Don’t know what you guys are talking about,” she said when we brought it up during a yosi break. We shrugged and had moved on to something else when she cried, “Fine! Just stop badgering me!” She took a quick drag at her menthol. “It’s a strategy. Sounding girly and helpless. Letting them think they have the power. Men like that. They let their guard down and shit. Then I sell them something they don’t need.”

  What psychological depth, we thought. Many among us didn’t have units in psychology. We were graduates of applied math and sociology, biology and philosophy, communications and liberal arts. A lot of us were liberal arts graduates.

  But the feedback could get too loud sometimes, and distracting. “What was that?” our bat-eared caller would bark, catching the echo. We were mandated by federal law to admit, at the slightest insinuation, that the call was being recorded. When we did, the customer would sometimes go ballistic, say something like “I knew they were listening in on my calls!” or lapse into rehearsed nostalgia: “It’s never been the same after September 11.” Sigh.