The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Like me, most people perceive billionaires as simply waving a hand for their whims to materialize; whatever they do hardly figures in thought. And because the senses, especially of sight, translate wealth by sheer magnitude or sheen, it finds equivalents in everyday things.
To most Filipinos I’ve known, who see a kind of lotto-win in a mere one hundred dollars, indeed, billions must be just letters strung into a word. How fascinating that it also sounds like eons, a visiting cousin had quipped as we waited for our turn to pay for a small basket of goods at the Asian supermarket—because forus, it would take eternity to earn it.
Ahead of us, a woman and her companion had been unloading from three carts, what seemed to me, goods for a fairly sized sari-sari store, and fresh meat and seafood for weeks perhaps, which I overheard rang up to CAD 560 something (P20,700 thereabouts), ‘’not the kind of wealth I understand,’’ my cousin quipped.
“Lalo na ho sa akin,” butted in Mel, the Filipino behind me, who would walk with us to the cafeteria where, by now famished from the smell of the fresh-packed dimsum, we had grabbed, elbowing others in the race, consumed in minutes—a kind of feast at a steal-price of $2.59 a box, with shrimp and shark’s fin, Shitake mushroom and sticky rice discounted by day’s end. Where numbers fade into their equivalent in our senses, taste being the most real right then, we had chorused, “Ang babaw ng kaligayahan.”
I almost added, “at kayamanan.” But instead, I wondered aloud if the woman’s wealth, we had just witnessed, allowed her to eat the kind of dimsum that sated us, but perhaps, unlike the tight table we shared with others, who bit and chomped in single chopstick spears in an eye blink; I imagined she would have hers on a chandelier-lit marble table and served on fine porcelain that came with ivory chopsticks. Mel tilted her head, and with eyes narrowed, disagreed.
Not her kind, apparently, sharing what she knew of a friend’s employer. “Mga sobrang yaman, hindi ho nakikita sa labas o sa ganitong lugar,” she added. Mel’s friend cleans the children’s wing in a palace-like mansion in Shaugnessy, west of where we live, even hardly sees the matriarch, her employer—half of the year, most of the mansion would be vacant with the owners vacationing somewhere, mostly in Europe; what they do? Mel’s friend has no inkling, and could only describe their lives as “sa panaginip lang, parang sine.”
An OR (operating room) attendant in a Riyadh hospital before she immigrated here, Mel also takes care of an often-empty five-bedroom, (mukhang palasyo din pero moderno) house in Point Grey, an area also lined with millionaires’ homes. For keeping the sheen of the marble floors, vacuuming the carpets of lint and invisible dirt, changing the water of peonies, lilies, fragrant roses in crystal vases, the likes she has never seen—Mel takes home a “fat pay check” (much more than a caregiver’s), plus transportation allowance, and bonuses like using the laundry for her own—that afternoon, all fresh in her duffel bag.
“So no chance of you ever thinking of the OR again, I suppose,” I asked. She admitted to her thinned out self-esteem, which has deterred her from going back home and limiting friends, but, “I often tell my husband, (who petitioned for her), ‘eh ano?’ I have more than enough to buy what I need and want, as well as extra to send home.” Besides, she added, she virtually lives in a mansion, and even feels she owns it, being by herself most times.
How does a million, much more a billion dollars or pesos feel or taste anyway? That early evening, already on to our sesame balls (buchi), we, with Mel, in the lead, chimed in accord, “like what we just ate!”