By Cate de Leon

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I RECENTLY attended an anthropological lecture on Philippine tribes by Prof. Cherubim Quizon at the UP College of Arts and Letters. But what interested me more was not the lecture itself, but the very first question posed by a woman in the audience, a professor in speech communication. Her words:

“While I honestly enjoyed learning about our ancient origins, I have to admit that I’ve always had a very colonial mindset. Because it seems that if we were to go back to our roots, the result would be entirely regressive. I don’t even know how to answer my students’ queries on nationality; because when they graduate, the only jobs waiting for them are those in call centers. So kindly help me out. Right now I can’t see the point in cultivating who we really are as Filipinos.”

It was a question I have also been asking myself—and I wondered if anybody in the room was capable of answering it objectively. And not with irrelevant passion and poetry, which was all being Filipino had become to me.

A man in the audience stood up and started his speech by clarifying that he was not a nationalist, but a humanist. He said he specialized in analyzing the structure and maximizing the potential of the human being.

Referring to Quizon’s lecture, he re-stated that three very important words in the Filipino psyche are ‘kamag-anak’ (kinship), ‘kasama’ (companionship), and ‘kakilala’ (acquaintanceship).

To more effectively explain the given terms, he gave both new and old examples, like how he once brought home a can of corned beef, knowing it was his family’s favorite. He returned a week after to find the can untouched. Why didn’t they eat it, he asked, and they explained that the neighbors might catch a whiff of the food as they cooked it, and then they’d feel obliged to share.

He also cited how hospital rooms in our country have to have two beds—one for the patient, and another for the bantay (caregiver). And if you plan on bringing a get-well-soon gift, it must be food so that the bantay can have some as well.

The fact that we like to eat in groups was also taken into consideration. Whether it’s lunch, dinner, or merienda at a fishball stand, we like to invite other people to eat along. And when we see a friend eating by himself, we ask why he is alone and if he’s alright, even offering him our company.

If you’ve ever thrown a party, you probably know the frustration when no one calls the R.S.V.P. number. Now the thing about R.S.V.P. is that you’re asking the person individually if he/she is coming to your party. But Filipinos don’t like the thought of showing up alone at social gatherings. As a result, all the days leading up to the party are spent asking around and waiting for confirmation from friends on whether or not they are going as well—because as guests we want to make sure we’ll have enough people to talk to (kausap) when we get there.

The speaker also gave examples highlighting our other traits, like how we prefer to have all the sauces and seasonings laid out before us so we can concoct our own dips, as opposed to how in restaurants abroad, people simply eat the food as it is served.

He added that even the recurring tendency among Filipinos to be late for everything, such as dates, classes, meetings, and appointments, is due to how we’ve always had a timeless concept of time. The terms “sharp” and “on the dot” most certainly didn’t come from us. In band rehearsals, for example, the processes of tuning up and making music often overlap; there is no definite end to the former and beginning to the latter.

Recall too how at the end of social gatherings, we linger in each other’s company. Even the goodbyes take forever. One moment we’re saying goodnight, the next we’re laughing and sharing a short anecdote, which for some reason we forgot to tell earlier when it was still time for exchanging stories.

The speaker summarized, “As a people, we’ve always been highly relational and participatory. We are not innately individualistic and authority-centered as the Americans are—as we’ve been trying to be. That’s why most of us don’t follow traffic rules, and we throw our trash where the sign says we shouldn’t—because we’re not used to simply being told what to do by some “other.” Instead, we’re geared towards co-creation and cooperation when setting goals and accomplishing tasks. But sadly, these qualities have not graduated into a civic consciousness. (Not to mention that) we have absolutely no national consciousness.”

Hearing him say these things, I began to understand that perhaps the real problem lies not in how we’ve been falling short of certain standards, but in how we still knock ourselves out trying to be something that we’re not.

For the most part of my life, I’ve been guilty of having (and denying) a colonial mindset. But I don’t blame myself for it because as a young and eager-to-learn student, it was all I was made to understand. The concept of being proudly Filipino was taught to us in abstract and vague terms. We never really knew what to be proud of.

Colonial mentality, however, was more concretely demonstrated to us. A perfect example was how popular I was with my high school teachers and classmates, just because I spoke fluent English. I highly doubt they would have looked up to me as much had I been just as skilled at speaking Tagalog. It was only in my college years at the University of the Philippines that patriotism started to make practical sense, and was no longer just a sentimental, moral obligation.

As music majors, though we studied the works of western classical composers, we were also educated on and constantly reminded to practice and cultivate our own music—especially if we were to go on international tours.

“So what if you can give them a perfect rendition of, say, Bach’s choral works?” one of my professors used to say. “They’ve heard such pieces countless of times before. And don’t you think it would be absurd to travel all the way to these faraway countries just to give them yet another taste of their own music?”

If you apply the same reasoning to how we look up to English-speaking people, you’d realize how pathetic and inferior it is for us to prize something that is so common to the British and Americans—which is why I have since ceased to be ignorantly cocky about being ingglisera (English-speaking).

Not that speaking foreign languages, flying to other countries, and learning from other people is a bad thing. It’s one of our biggest assets: how easily we can communicate, relate, and adapt to other cultures, especially since the advent of globalization.

But we’re also urgently in need of finding our true identity. And until we do, we’ll be perpetually stuck trying to fit into governmental and societal structures handed down to us by our colonial captors. Until we figure out a system of living that will truly work for us, especially in this modern age, our society will remain just as dysfunctional as it has been for the longest time, with most of our fresh and highly educated graduates trying hard to ease into fake, second-rate American accents in order to get by.