Sorry

 

Two office workers wearing ties, drinking Coke with their rice
and menudo, sitting on a table near the cashier’s pesos, laugh over
their plates. Stealing smiling glances at me standing by the cashier
ready to pay for my rootbeer with my devalued currency, they are
laughing by the thought that hates me for being primitive wearing
my pasiking with a choker hanging on its back made with coconut
            shell beads.

The brown-shirted one has an old theory, his local brain cells tells
him I’m gay for having this proclivity for these local, organic stuff,
equating me with interior designers with facile ideas of Filipinizing
rooms. The blue-shirted one, wearing imitation CK sun-glasses
he got at a tiangge of fakes, prefers to think it’s just an insanity,
concluding I’m a straggler still living in a war period of the mind
            before good

Christianity came with the royal Magellan. All this mumbling and
laughter as I, sole other in this lowly canteen setting for employees,
pay for a rootbeer at the guardian of our economics, store cashier.
I’m sorry, tie-wearing careerists of corporate empires, I forget I’m
living in the age of globalizations and imbalances of trade. I forget
the unwritten rule of our times—dictating each Filipino wear
            the global uniform

approved by the Group of 7/8, every single 1 of us, all classes, all
tribes, wearing the logos of imports. I hope you’ll understand I’ve
only been brainwashed by a vestige of nationalism on the quality
of certain indigenous products. I hope you will tolerate—by your
democracy—my paeans to tourism, to vanishing trades; I never
meant to insult local importers’ and foreign exporters’ preachings
            on superior items.

 

 

---Mary 23, 2002 (Ortigas Center)

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2004 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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