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Manila
A city built on the God’s dunghill
There is a foul legend about the Philippines, according to Francisco Sionil Jose, a Filipino writer: “When God created the world and was fatigued by His labors, He sat down to shit and this shit is this group of islands.”
In the smoke-filled and foul-smelled city of Manila, where people spill over from all over the country like flies are drawn to carrion, I found the Filipinos under the total surrender and subservience to the oligarchic power and establishment.
Contrary to the Koreans whose cultural values are still esteemed among people despite of gradually losing its patina at the invasion of McCulture, the Filipinos appear to be totally complacent and absorbed with the cultural influence of Occidental invaders, Spanish and American colonization.
In other words, the colonization was such totally and absolutely rooted in the minds of people that the Filipinos do not seem to feel the shame of lacking the national heroes, homegrown culture, or indigenous characters.
The Filipinos were made poor on purpose by their colonizers…so that they would be enslaved to work to death, while their masters wallow in sybaritic comfort.
With a glance, you could tell immediately the Philippines are the country where the powerful oligarch maintain the disparity between the rich and poor, as in the colonial era where hacenderos (landlords) and illustrados (intellectuals) were expropriating the rice paddies of the uneducated Ilocano peasants.
Three hundreds years occupied by the Spanish tyranny, three years overrun by the Japanese, and forty years dominated by the American exploitation have planted the indelible scar of subservience to the Masters in people’s mindset, in which process the Catholic Church played a major role keeping the Filipino people suffer so that they could receive the final reward that only God could bestow.
The Church was not interested in justice or in the abolition of inequality, and the God that the Church introduced to the Filipinos was a God of white people who were the oppressors of the Filipinos.
On the third day of my stay in Manila, I, a slumming foreigner, not as a philanthropist, have visited, under the guide of a hired cop-cum-chauffeur, the notorious ghetto of Tondo (the Smoky Mountain) in the outskirts of the City.
This wretched town to which the poorest of poor were shackled permanently was livable only in the mind, and for the villagers, it is not culture, free speech, or human right to be concerned about, but clothing, food, shelter, and medicine for kids and education not for a degree from Diploma Mill but to get a decent job. You don’t need a speech here in Tondo.
A bottle of cheap liquor and a pack of cigarettes were all needed to be invited into a ramshackle hut at the entrance of the slum…no running water, no toilet facility, no sewer system, but a dirt-floor walk-in vestibule-cum-kitchenette and one sleeping room divided with the soiled curtain of thin burlap cloth. A middle-aged man of the hut coughed through his gap-toothed mouth, swooshing the swarms of black flies away from his emaciated body and began to talk his bio, in vino veritas.
A sudden shower of the passing rain was the godsend opportunity both a gaggle of rambunctious urchins for taking a bath and a swarm of women for collecting the buckets of potable water.
The rows of the hairpin passages were instantly flooded into the gorges that water gushed into the living quarters where we sat in the puddle.
Three giggling kids barged in from nowhere, bare naked on top with wet underpants and no shoes.
I followed them into the sleeping quarters, which were barely spacious enough to accommodate “minnows”, not a 6-foot man like me.
I measured the room where the copulation could only be achieved in an upright missionary position or a crouching dorsal posture by the female counterpart.
However, Filipinos are fecund parents due to the stern admonition from their Cath
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