Two ways of seeing us

On a flight from Incheon to New York years ago, the stark side of how we mirror ourselves as Filipinos turned on me in the guise of a hefty elderly woman who had sequestered my armrest. 

We broke the ice during dinner on the mackerel salad I relished but which had remained untouched in her palm-sized bowl; she had caught my covetous eye and quipped, “You want? I don’t know what it is!”

“It’s fish,” I declared as I arched my arm to pierce two chunks of it from her bowl. Encouraged perhaps by my gleeful chewing, she also took a piece but decided in the end, it didn’t taste close to anything she liked, and pushed the whole serving to me. “Why didn’t they just fry it?” she went on complaining, as she sucked on her beefsteak.

Later hinting deeper derision, she watched me roll my Bi Bim Bap into a spoonful of bean sprouts, with cucumber-and carrot-threads, ground meat, and steamed rice that I had doused with sesame oil and had spread red-pepper paste the Korean way.

She continued to berate how other cultures have so complicated the serving of such simple food like rice, and couldn’t believe how I liked it—was I a Filipino?

To this, I had laughed, suddenly realizing how our reflection could get skewed in other’s eyes. “Opo, naman,” I blurted out, echoing in the compact cabin air; I should have asked if she meant, could we really change identity on the mere love of someone else’s food?

But she had settled on her seat, brows still knitted, obviously both from unsated hunger and a sense of shattered nationalism in me. As I sipped my tea, my thoughts reverted to Kim Eun Kyung, the young Korean woman, who had wanted to marry a Filipino.

She had taken the window to my aisle seat on the first leg of that New York flight from Manila on her way back home to Pusan after four months of studying English in Baguio. Anxious to practice her newly acquired skill, her voice tinkled with my every retort, for her, a sign that I had understood her.

But more fascinating, for me, would be her desire to go back and, if possible, live in the Philippines. I could not decide whether I should prop this up or quell it—would she trade in her country that had been of late, then, obviously oozing wealth?

Apparently, progress hardly mattered as she had wished for “the very relaxed lifestyle” of Filipinos, obviously an enticing counterpoint to the disciplined and focused life into which she had been born—she even declared, she would marry one, if luck would decree. We both giggled over this, she, perhaps quite embarrassed from revealing a secret just then, as I, dismissing her infatuation and making light of it, fearing she might regret it.

Musing on the exchange later, I realized, indeed, how much romance in Philippine life inspires onlookers—to whom the horrors of nothing much to do, and thus, of poverty, lie hidden. How could she know the layers of despair beneath the friable ease among, yes, romantic Filipinos?

And because we focused on her still-fresh joys, I didn’t have time to chime about my week-stay in Seoul years before then—their culture, for one, which got me hooked on Korean telenovelas in the months I would be back home in Manila, infrastructure that (till now) remains a fantasy for the Philippines, the countryside, where agrarian reform, which the Philippines had forged ahead, already the ideal (still possibly a century away for Filipinos); but more especially, my taste for Korean food, which flights on Asiana had since enhanced.

Glancing at my seatmate, by then, softly snoring, I couldn’t resist this thought: What if, instead of me, Kim sat beside her? Or worst, turned out to be the future mother-in-law?