PARADOXES FOR A NEW YEAR
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
December 27, 2004
In Holland, there is a place called Soesterberg, a village located on the road between the municipalities of Amersfoort and Utrecht. The name of the village in Dutch means "mountain of Soest," which is rather interesting: among Soesterberg's highest peaks are the speed bumps on its main road and perhaps a few neighboring landfills.
In Amsterdam, a most gratifying coffee to have is called koffie verkeerd. The grind and the beans used may be different but the mixture follows the same principle as the Italian cafe latte or the cafe con leche of Spain. At any time of the day, this Dutch coffee tastes just right. In Dutch, koffie verkeerd literally means "wrong coffee."
Mordechai Vanunu, whistle-blower of Israel's secret nuclear weapons program and imprisoned for 18 years, has been called traitor and madman and even more terrible things by the Israeli government. Recently, despite remaining under house arrest in Jerusalem, Vanunu was elected rector of Glasgow University in Scotland. The traitor-and-madman was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 by Nobel Prize laureate Mairead Maguire, who received the award in 1976 in recognition for her work for peace in Ireland.
In The Book of Embraces, the writer Eduardo Galeano reminds us that Napoleon Bonaparte, the most French of Frenchmen, was not French and that Joseph Stalin, the most Russian of Russians, was not Russian. "North American blacks, the most oppressed of peoples, created jazz, the freest of all music. Don Quixote, the most errant of knights, was conceived in the confines of a prison."[1]
Wasn't Che Guevara declared "completely unfit for military life" by the Argentine military?[2]
"You look nervous," says the hysteric. "I hate you," says the lover. "The economy is in good health," says the Philippine government. "Everything is under control," says the Philippine military.
"Metaphysics must flourish," wrote the great materialist Charles Darwin in 1838.[3]
The World Bank is fond of homilies. Just recently, the Bank exhorted the world once more to pay attention to the consequences of environmental degradation. "Climate change is a critical challenge for humanity," said the Bank. "Like most things, it will hit the poor hardest."[4]
The main cause of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. The main solution to the problem is to switch to renewable energy. Seventeen to one: the ratio of World Bank funding for fossil fuels and renewable energy, in favor of fossil fuels.[5]
The World Bank last year: "The global economy is working!"[6] This is a bank which stands for the truth.
At the end of 2003, the wealth held by millionaires world-wide reached $28 trillion, a figure greater than the annual gross domestic products of the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined.
In North America, the wealth controlled by individuals "jumped 45 percent from $2 trillion in 2001 to over $3 trillion in 2003.
Class struggle: how the seriously rich separate themselves from the merely well-off.
DaimlerChrysler is selling its new SLR sports car at $450,000 and there's a long hoi-polloi waiting list. Soon, Volkswagen will introduce a sports car priced above $1 million. Watchmakers Patek Philippe, Rolex and Breguet are selling watches priced at over $200,000. But who needs pedestrian emblems of affluence when one can choose limited edition watches running in the millions?
Owning a 30-meter yacht used to be a hoot; now it's just a boring buoy. For the loaded, like Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., interesting is a 120-meter yacht which cost $250 million to build and which "will cost more than $100 million a year to run." Among its many impressive qualities, Allen's cruiser also has a basketball court, a music studio and a personal submarine, which is said to be capable of plumbing for prolonged periods of time the new depths of today's global economy.[7]
One evening in the final month of another short-lived year, right outside the house of the feisty TV reporter Maki Pulido, in the center of one of the fetid hearts of Metro Manila - that hopelessly poisonous metropolis built on fumes and peopled with souls drifting with nihilism and despair - in a tiny and impossible patch hundreds of flickering fireflies appear silently and circle an Ipil tree. A reminder, perhaps, that the grace of life is not so easily quelled.[8]
NOTES:
[1] Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, W.W. Norton and Company, 1992. The first sentence after the Che paragraph - "You look nervous," says the hysteric. "I hate you," says the lover. - is also from Galeano. The sentence is an excellent opening for the comment on Philippine politics.
[2] Jorge Castaneda, Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, Bloomsbury, 1998
[3] Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch, Vintage House, 1995
[4] Energy Security for Development, speech delivered by Jamal Saghir, World Bank Director of Energy and Water, at the opening of the Energy for Development conference in The Netherlands, December 13, 2004.
[5] Jim Vallette, Daphne Wysham and Nadia Martinez, A wrong turn from Rio: the World Bank's road to climate catastrophe, research and policy brief by Sustainable Energy and Economy Network/Institute for Policy Studies/Transnational Institute, December 2004
[6] "Poor but pedicured," George Monbiot, The Guardian-UK, May 6, 2003.
[7] "Individuals whose ship has really come in find bigger ways to flaunt it," Robert Frank, Wall Street Journal-Europe, December 14, 2004.
[8] In fact, according to Maki's husband, Boyet, in the infinitesimal patch, around Ipil trees and banana trees, frogs were also breeding, needle-bodied dragonflies were abuzz and slugs and snails slithering about.
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Monday, December 06, 2004
THIS CHRISTMAS OF JOYCE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
December 6, 2004
There was of course no need for an apology but Joyce said sorry nonetheless. That really is my name, she said sheepishly.
My last name is Jimenez but aside from this, said Joyce, she had little else in common with a similarly named young Filipina actress who not too long ago had taken rapt Filipinos on trips down mammary lane.[1]
She is Joyce Jimenez, twenty eight years old, a wispy and articulate Filipina mother of four, a domestic help in Hong Kong. Or, rather, was a domestic worker in Hong Kong.
We met in the majestic Chek Lap Kok airport of Hong Kong the other week. Joyce was having trouble with the Chinese woman manning the Philippine Airlines check-in counter. The woman was insisting that Joyce pay a considerable amount because the bags she had checked-in were over the prescribed maximum weight per passenger.[2] But of course. Joyce was bringing home everything she had. She was terminated last November.
Joyce graduated from the Far Eastern University in 1997 with a degree in nursing. But she never got to take the board exams; she got pregnant, which in this fair and just world is somehow often equivalent to a career-ending development.
Hong Kong was the first overseas work of Joyce. Before that, she was a tired mother working as a pharmaceuticals saleslady in the province of Bulacan, a job which yielded little income. Before that, Joyce was a full-time tired mother struggling to make ends meet based on whatever her frequently missing husband would bring home.
One day, as many similar stories go, the ends just would not meet. Joyce decided it was time to try her luck abroad. She went to an employment agency to apply. There she was told that she had to take out an outrageous loan of 75,000 pesos from the agency itself before her papers would be processed. The loan, she was told, would be repaid through her Hong Kong salary.
"I went for the loan. I've some FEU classmates working as nurses in the US," Joyce recounted. "They told me some time ago that if I was able to accumulate eight straight months of employment as a maid in Hong Kong, they'd be able to get me a job in the States as a nursing assistant."
After only one month of work in Hong Kong, Joyce was fired.
"From the very beginning, she never liked me," said Joyce of her employer. One of her employers at least, to be fair. Joyce worked for a middle-aged Chinese couple with two girls; the husband was a kind lawyer in a prosperous Hong Kong firm. His wife worked as a secretary in a small trading company, and she despised Joyce.
"I don't know; she must have gone over my biodata," said Joyce. "Our first meeting, the wife was already angry. She pointed her finger at me and shouted that she didn't care if I was a nurse." Joyce often worked till two or three in the morning and would wake up at five but nothing Joyce did satisfied the wife.
Nursing insecurities, the wife would shower words of abuse on Joyce daily. "Except for one time when things got physical, I think I'm lucky I only received bad words," said Joyce. "That one time I was boiling water. The wife shoved me hard from the back because I didn't arrange the food in the refrigerator to her liking. I sidestepped the stove in time," Joyce said.
The feng shui of believers in Hong Kong: invite luck by choosing your domestic help well - a maid with a round lucky face or a maid born in the year of the dragon. The working class feng shui of Arroyo's Strong Republic: roll the dice; luck is a sane foreign employer.
After a day's grueling work, Joyce would confront her shadows in silence. "I hated the silence the most," she said, her youthful face framing her listless eyes. "It's when I miss my children the most."
"My employers doted on their eldest girl and they didn't hide their bias from the younger daughter," she told me at the waiting area of the airport's Gate 16. "What a shame," said Joyce. "They were both good children and we got along quickly even though the older one was starting to emulate the rudeness of her mother. Nothing I did ever pleased their mother. If I did the laundry she'd shout at me. If the girls ask for me to sit beside them so they could sleep their mother would hate it. But I resolved to endure it all just to complete my eight month employment."
After a month she was ordered to leave.
At least you will be with your kids this Christmas, I said softly but Joyce was no longer listening. "I wanted them to have something," she said more to herself.
In her first week away from her country, she said she feared her first impending Christmas away from her children. And yet now, apparently defeated and waiting for her flight, she dreaded returning from nothing with nothing.
She knew her kids looked forward to seeing her again after her absence. But she also dreamed of sending home a little more instead. Maybe a few new clothes. A little special food on the table. Perhaps some toys. A little more - just a little more - of what they haven't had.
NOTES:
[1] "A trip down mammary lane" is from the writer Jessica Zafra.
[2] It was the evening of November 25 to be exact. I was behind Joyce and I didn't have any baggage to check-in. I asked the Hong Kong airline official to just transfer the heavier bag of Joyce to my share so that she wouldn't have to pay overweight charges and to just paste the baggage claim stub on Joyce's ticket. We talked soon after and did not finish till it was time to board.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
December 6, 2004
There was of course no need for an apology but Joyce said sorry nonetheless. That really is my name, she said sheepishly.
My last name is Jimenez but aside from this, said Joyce, she had little else in common with a similarly named young Filipina actress who not too long ago had taken rapt Filipinos on trips down mammary lane.[1]
She is Joyce Jimenez, twenty eight years old, a wispy and articulate Filipina mother of four, a domestic help in Hong Kong. Or, rather, was a domestic worker in Hong Kong.
We met in the majestic Chek Lap Kok airport of Hong Kong the other week. Joyce was having trouble with the Chinese woman manning the Philippine Airlines check-in counter. The woman was insisting that Joyce pay a considerable amount because the bags she had checked-in were over the prescribed maximum weight per passenger.[2] But of course. Joyce was bringing home everything she had. She was terminated last November.
Joyce graduated from the Far Eastern University in 1997 with a degree in nursing. But she never got to take the board exams; she got pregnant, which in this fair and just world is somehow often equivalent to a career-ending development.
Hong Kong was the first overseas work of Joyce. Before that, she was a tired mother working as a pharmaceuticals saleslady in the province of Bulacan, a job which yielded little income. Before that, Joyce was a full-time tired mother struggling to make ends meet based on whatever her frequently missing husband would bring home.
One day, as many similar stories go, the ends just would not meet. Joyce decided it was time to try her luck abroad. She went to an employment agency to apply. There she was told that she had to take out an outrageous loan of 75,000 pesos from the agency itself before her papers would be processed. The loan, she was told, would be repaid through her Hong Kong salary.
"I went for the loan. I've some FEU classmates working as nurses in the US," Joyce recounted. "They told me some time ago that if I was able to accumulate eight straight months of employment as a maid in Hong Kong, they'd be able to get me a job in the States as a nursing assistant."
After only one month of work in Hong Kong, Joyce was fired.
"From the very beginning, she never liked me," said Joyce of her employer. One of her employers at least, to be fair. Joyce worked for a middle-aged Chinese couple with two girls; the husband was a kind lawyer in a prosperous Hong Kong firm. His wife worked as a secretary in a small trading company, and she despised Joyce.
"I don't know; she must have gone over my biodata," said Joyce. "Our first meeting, the wife was already angry. She pointed her finger at me and shouted that she didn't care if I was a nurse." Joyce often worked till two or three in the morning and would wake up at five but nothing Joyce did satisfied the wife.
Nursing insecurities, the wife would shower words of abuse on Joyce daily. "Except for one time when things got physical, I think I'm lucky I only received bad words," said Joyce. "That one time I was boiling water. The wife shoved me hard from the back because I didn't arrange the food in the refrigerator to her liking. I sidestepped the stove in time," Joyce said.
The feng shui of believers in Hong Kong: invite luck by choosing your domestic help well - a maid with a round lucky face or a maid born in the year of the dragon. The working class feng shui of Arroyo's Strong Republic: roll the dice; luck is a sane foreign employer.
After a day's grueling work, Joyce would confront her shadows in silence. "I hated the silence the most," she said, her youthful face framing her listless eyes. "It's when I miss my children the most."
"My employers doted on their eldest girl and they didn't hide their bias from the younger daughter," she told me at the waiting area of the airport's Gate 16. "What a shame," said Joyce. "They were both good children and we got along quickly even though the older one was starting to emulate the rudeness of her mother. Nothing I did ever pleased their mother. If I did the laundry she'd shout at me. If the girls ask for me to sit beside them so they could sleep their mother would hate it. But I resolved to endure it all just to complete my eight month employment."
After a month she was ordered to leave.
At least you will be with your kids this Christmas, I said softly but Joyce was no longer listening. "I wanted them to have something," she said more to herself.
In her first week away from her country, she said she feared her first impending Christmas away from her children. And yet now, apparently defeated and waiting for her flight, she dreaded returning from nothing with nothing.
She knew her kids looked forward to seeing her again after her absence. But she also dreamed of sending home a little more instead. Maybe a few new clothes. A little special food on the table. Perhaps some toys. A little more - just a little more - of what they haven't had.
NOTES:
[1] "A trip down mammary lane" is from the writer Jessica Zafra.
[2] It was the evening of November 25 to be exact. I was behind Joyce and I didn't have any baggage to check-in. I asked the Hong Kong airline official to just transfer the heavier bag of Joyce to my share so that she wouldn't have to pay overweight charges and to just paste the baggage claim stub on Joyce's ticket. We talked soon after and did not finish till it was time to board.
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