The American colonists then installed universal education throughout the archipelago in the guise of the public school system. First soldiers, then later thousands of professional teachers known as Thomasites, took charge of these schools, spreading English as a medium of instruction. Soon, a country with some 170 languages spoke which each other using English as their lingua franca. The Americans united the disparate island cultures of the archipelago through the propagation of English and the public school system, coupled with the promotion of a pacifist, Jose Rizal, as national hero.
Perhaps as a reaction to this emphasis on American studies, nationalistic Filipinos in the 1970s and 1980s had a raw idea of national identity. In their active search for identity, they rejected America as a hypocritical and exploitative colonial power—true enough as with most colonists—and resorted to “nativism”. I remember frequent anti-American demonstrations in front of the American Embassy. It was only a matter of time before political leaders instituted reforms in the educational system.
Later, the Philippine Republic instituted changes, not only in history textbooks, but in the national symbols as well. For example, it moved the celebration of Independence Day from when it was recognised (4th of July, 1946) to when it was declared (12th of June, 1896). It changed place-names from American to Filipino: “Dewey Boulevard”, named after Commodore Dewey who defeated the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898, was changed to “Roxas Boulevard” after the second president of the Philippine Republic. More importantly, in the 1980s, in its effort to supplant English with Filipino as lingua franca, it changed the medium of instruction in schools from English to Tagalog, the language spoken in northern Philippines including Manila, the most populous region in the country.
I recall that, when I was a pupil under the Spanish nuns, the school encouraged—not uncommonly—the practice of fining, at five centavos per word, those who spoke Ilonggo, the language my family used at home, including autonomic expressions like “Ay” or “Oy”. In due course, I and perhaps some classmates as well became coordinate bi-linguals so that now we can as easily think in English as in Ilonggo, i.e. not needing to do translations in our heads. The National Language Tagalog, however, was taught only as a second language and I never became as proficient in it.
I noticed key linguistic changes as soon as I came back in 2004. Nowadays many Filipinos cannot speak English fluently, instead they use an odd mixture of English and Tagalog called “Taglish”. But I also notice that many have a stronger sense of their being Filipino. That said, being Filipino remains subordinate to their sense of being, first and foremost—a member of their family, and secondly—a member of their relations, and then their province.
Was it worth the price? In order to promote a greater sense of national identity, were we ready to sacrifice our competitive edge? We used to call ourselves the only English-speaking country in Asia (never true), then the largest English-speaking country in Asia (also never true). Whatever the case might have been, we generally spoke “proper” English. Now, thanks to our good ear, those who speak “proper” English can still largely ape American accents, and the country remains a sought-after base for call centres. Social media has also helped in giving those with less English proficiency additional exposure to the language.
In short, my defence at my failure to develop my sense of nationality is that, in my youth, my family and social circumstances were not conducive to forming a Filipino national identity. That this did not also happen to the other members of my family, to my schoolmates and other friends, I don’t know why. When all is said and done, the overriding question of course remains, does it matter? How important is national identity?
Sir Walter Scott writes about national identity as the driving force behind one’s honour, although to him it only comes in a single package. As discussed above, identity does not work that way. It is multifaceted and ever evolving. The philosopher John Stuart Mill more critically writes about the value of forming a strong national identity. Individuals, he says, need it in order to lead a meaningful life. Democratic polities need it in order to build a strong society.
As for me, I do not share the ideals and principles that bind the Filipinos together as a nation. For better or for worse, I do not share their characteristics of culture, religious beliefs, and values. Yet, it is only recently that I have decided there is nothing wrong with the way I feel, and that there is no need for me to reintegrate into Philippine society. My years abroad—living in the UK after America and spending time in Germany—made me a different person, and trying to fit right back in would have been to deny the personal growth I achieved during those years. A great deal of dissonance in my life had left me uncomfortable until I accepted the fact that nationality is simply not an important part of my personal sense of identity.
The Amphibians Are Coming
Increasingly, I also realise I am not alone. There are many other people like me. David Brooks in his article in the New York Times on 15th of February 2018 calls us “Amphibians”. We can swim like fish in water, but nonetheless can also move and live on land; thriving in different cultures without necessarily fitting perfectly in one. Amphibians include cultural refugees like me, expatriates who on repatriation find themselves in difficulty readjusting to their home cultures, and those who decide there is no longer the need, nor the will to fit in. For us, integration and reintegration have become an option, not an obligation. It can be liberating, as Amphibians don’t need to care about the local culture anymore. They have become citizens of the world.
Theresa May’s oft-cited remark was widely circulated: “They (Britons who voted to remain within the European Union) find your (Brexiteers’) patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial. If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” I was at my doctor’s clinic in London when I heard this and told him of it. A bonafide Englishman, Londoner, and Remainer, his tart reply was, “What’s wrong with that?”
I expect that, with increasing expatriation in a more globalised world, we Amphibians will increase and multiply. We can pick and choose certain facets of one culture, combine them with elements of another in the process of self-invention, forming a different but nonetheless coherent and, hopefully, equally strong sense of personal identity.
With this personal identity comes a more objective perspective that can be of use in the development of our societies. We are able to connect with disparate communities, taking on the beneficial role of being a bridge to different cultures. Of course, the role of change-agent is never easy, for in the process of self-invention, we often lose assurances of order, of place, of social norms of conduct. We might have gained freedom to write our own moral code but we have lost an anchor and must embrace moments of loneliness.
In order to manage our new roles, we must learn how to sell our persons or risk rejection by the group. I remember I have always been achievement-orientated, perhaps in a subconscious desire to be respected by my family and friends. Yet, I had to live in another culture in order to reach some modicum of socially perceived success that I could never have achieved in my own country. However, now that I am back in the Philippines, I must remember what I as an individualist operating in the collectivistic setting of the Philippines must do in order to be accepted. For instance, I am still learning the art of making balato, sharing what members of the group I wish to cultivate think I possess, so they can participate in my “success”, even if these perceptions are not necessarily accurate.
As I have said, it is not easy to be an Amphibian.
Gender and Identity
There is in Philippine mythology a story about the sun and the moon fighting each other over who would illuminate the sky. A show of force ensues wherein the moon proves to be as strong as the sun. Finally, they agree to share the duty—the sun would illuminate the sky during the day and the moon during the night. The sun is of course the male, and the moon, the fema
le. In old Agta myths, there is gender equality.
Some history writers claim that the status of women in pre-colonial Philippines was equal to that of men. Others even assert that Philippine society at that time was matriarchal, i.e. power resided in women. It would also seem that residence patterns were matrilocal, meaning husbands moved to the village or town of their wives. Kinship was traced bilaterally. I don’t know how strong the evidence for these claims are, but when the Spaniards came during the 16th century, they found that women participated fully in community affairs. They were traders, they acted as priestesses in religious ceremonies, they achieved positions of power. Inheritance rights saw that benefits were equally divided among siblings, with women allowed to own property. Further, women held the purse strings of the household, which naturally gave them much leverage.
The Spaniards carried with them the patriarchal systems of Europe. According to the Spanish Civil Code, still largely followed in the Philippines today, the husband is the administrator of the family assets and therefore in cases of conjugal property disputes, it is the decision of the husband that often prevails. Divorce is illegal, but until relatively recently, the penal code on marital infidelity stated that a wife might be found guilty of adultery if she had sexual relations with a man other than her husband and could therefore be subject to incarceration. However, a man might only be accused of concubinage—in practical terms, seeing his mistress regularly and supporting her. Thanks to the efforts of feminists—still a dirty label in the country today—the law has been revised to six years’ jail term for any adulterous person.
A great believer in epigenetics, I do not find it surprising that, with the super-imposition of Western patriarchal norms, the Philippines has retained much of its past traditions regarding the roles for women. Filipino women remain strong. Perhaps the ways of our ancestors were imprinted upon us many generations ago and still influence our actions and attitudes today.
As I mentioned earlier, as a young girl, I played most often with my boy-cousins. I was not aware that I was a girl, that I was different, even as I pooh-poohed the make-believe house and sari-sari store of my sister, cousin, and their girl playmates with their potsherd “money”. For myself, although I was confrontational, I was not excluded from the games of my boy-cousins. I remember I once had a physical fight with my brother who was seven years my senior, because I caught him cheating—apparently, he was not taking our game seriously. It was my mother, herself feisty, who disapproved of my behaviour. She cited her friends, who admonished her to encourage me to be soft spoken and mahinhin (artfully shy)—to become the Jose Rizal-type Maria Clara (a mahinhin character in one of Rizal’s novels). My guess is that there was the push and pull of strong but sweet and gentle Filipina (Fipino woman).
Even as women held, and still frequently hold, the family purse strings, even as they have as much opportunity for education as the men, a wife should never contradict her husband in public because of the potency of the shame culture. For the Filipino male, being shamed is a catastrophe, and so the saying goes, “Hindi baleng hindi mo ako mahalin, huwag mo lang akong hiyain.” (It doesn’t matter that you don’t love me, just don’t shame me.) Instead, the role of the woman is to protect her man—be she his wife, his office assistant, or his agent. It is often she who saves him from tedium, from performing the task of day-to-day management of his affairs, and not only in his personal life but in his work functions as well. No wonder the Filipina is often accused of spoiling her man.
However, my awareness of this role-typing for women was awakened only much later in life. When you can’t see someone you need to speak with, when you can’t get the job or the promotion despite your own belief that you deserve it, when you get less pay than your (male) colleague with supposedly the same rank and the same responsibilities; in general, when you are treated one way and not another, how do you know that it is because of your gender? Or, for that matter, when I was residing abroad, your race? I always ascribed it to some other reason.
Perhaps it was just as well, because failures didn’t faze me. Instead, because I thought such outcomes were within my control, I simply tried another way. Thus, as a twenty-three-year-old tour guide at the UN Headquarters in the 1970s New York, when the job was considered glamorous, much like that of a flight stewardess, a supervisor publicly commented at one of our regular briefings that she couldn’t understand why I was hired. It was not as though I met the requirement of fluency in at least two major UN languages. Perhaps, she said, it was because I was pretty. I felt complimented, not conscious of the fact that it was meant to be an innuendo. As a matter of fact, she must have been correct. I had interviewed a senior diplomat in charge of public information at the UN for a university project. I don’t remember the details of the interview but at that time, I was naturally and innocently flirtatious, so we could have engaged in some sort of verbal fencing. Later, he tried to “collect” by inviting me to dinner at his place, and in a deliberate effort to distract him, I spilled the red wine from the glass I was holding onto his white sofa and white carpet. Although he was far from pleased, I was none the worse for it. Thinking back, I don’t know what the “Me-Too” Movement in the US now would have thought of it, whether they would have considered it sexual harassment regardless of how little or how much a role the woman played in such encounters. In any case, I was quite confident that I knew the limits and felt that I always had control of the situation. Perhaps I was simply lucky.
On another occasion, a superior told me he was a member of NATO—No Action Touch Only. I retorted that I too was a member of NATO—No Action Talk Only. These little jibes would continue, more talk indeed but really no touch and no action. I was not conscious of it as sexual harassment, instead I simply thought it was one of the rules of the game, play them as far as you can, and get on with your job.
It was not until I taught at the business school in the 1980s, whilst I was already in my thirties, that I became fully aware of issues faced by career women in the Philippines. I had previously thought that as holders of the family purse string, Filipinas were capable, and even possibly, the dominant partner in marriage. It was only whilst interviewing our research project’s women respondents that I lost my innocence—with all the gallantry of Filipino men, things apparently were not what they seemed. In due course, I realised that I myself was facing similar issues to those of our respondents!
I had wanted to study the ways Asian family firms professionalised, documenting those firms that had grown in size and had adopted bureaucratic procedures successfully. I had submitted a research proposal for funding at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Their feedback: they liked the methodology but could I use it on successful career women instead? I initially resisted—Southeast Asian women, I asserted, were not like those in the West. We were already liberated!
Persuaded by the dean, however, I eventually, reluctantly consented. And so was born the project called Women Managers in Business Organisations (WMBO) conducted in the five Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand— the original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN.
My staff and I organised surveys across these five countries and interviewed approximately forty of the most senior women managers we could find. They included women from two sectors: corporate management and entrepreneurship. The eventual aim of the project was to identify success factors and to incorporate them in the design of workshops for women managers. We were to write teaching cases based on the career management of these successful women, and then test run them in the conduct of workshops targeted at their more junior colleagues. The five-year phased project was then supposed to downstream the design of and tools for these workshops through different business schools in these five countries.
We later decided to separate corporate women from women entrepreneurs because their career experiences significantly diverged, with corporate w
omen holding the short end of the stick. It seemed the colour of money knows no gender, so do family contacts, and we had some of the biggest women entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia who had not experienced the difficulties of their corporate sisters. We henceforth decided to focus on professional corporate women managers.
It was a period of sensitisation for me. The sacrifices made by these ambitious corporate women— their problems of balancing career and family life especially when their husbands were not fully supportive, their lack of mentorship opportunities in a male world where they were excluded—resonated with me and opened a new vista. I became aware of my own situation. I was one of only four female faculty members out of almost forty when I was recruited in 1980 as Associate Professor Level 1—still only a mid-level position. (Later a fifth woman who had been working in research was added to the teaching staff, and in a short period was promoted one rung higher than my rank, and I was made to report to her instead of to my old male boss for what I thought were political reasons.) At around the same time, another woman was denied tenure reportedly because it was deemed unacceptable that she had to leave at four o’clock to pick up her child from school. Since the policy was “tenure or out”, she had to leave the business school. When my turn came, I waited for the tenure committee to assess my six years’ performance and let me know whether I had tenure or whether I was out. Until the time of my departure more than a year later, I had not heard from the tenure committee; I presumed this was because they did not know what to do with me.
When Turtles Come Home Page 16