it’s raining in sagada whoa-a ang lamig / Q4 report

It’s only 8 PM on a Tuesday in Sagada as I write this, but already it feels like 10 PM on a Friday night in Cubao. Across the street from our hostel, in front of the town hall, some kind of holiday thing or night market is ongoing – food vendors under tents selling coffee, cookies, fries, dumplings; a band playing karaoke hits for open mic performers; teenagers huddling and whooping and laughing loudly in the streets. Somebody is singing Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” way off-key amid the rumbling of passing “tuktuks” (what they call tricycles up here, interestingly, as if we’re in Bangkok or something), and my roommate is on her phone, in bed, chuckling.

Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy, as usual. I’ve been ill this past week or so, too. I’ve fallen ill (or gotten injured) practically every other month this year, which really isn’t like me – I’ve always had robust physical health even when my mental health was shit – but perhaps this is what it means to get older. I attended Christmas parties three evenings in a row (amid chronically late nights because December busy-ness) and promptly went down with a cold, barely three weeks since my last one. The excesses of one’s twenties that one always got away with, now one has to pay for with interest. On the plus side, I feel so much more stable and resilient, mentally and emotionally. BJJ and regular exercise and healthy food and sufficient rest definitely help, as does maintaining mutually supportive relationships, hanging out with people one respects and likes and feels affection if not admiration for. The Sturm und Drang that tossed me around in my twenties feels like a distant memory, even if I still tear up a bit when I read some of the entries I wrote back then here.

Anyway. Haven’t I been writing in this blog with the frequency of a quarterly company report? So let’s go with that conceit for a bit. I have mostly work to talk about, actually. (Or: nothing much has been happening in my life outside of work, so at Christmas parties I drink rather than dole out tea.) Since I last wrote here in August, I’ve been preparing in earnest for a summer school we’re hosting next year. This meant convening an organizing team, doing research, drafting and workshopping concept notes, drawing up budgets and schedules and committee assignments, doing site visits, showing up for academic and cultural events to talk to and invite people, corresponding with collaborators. It feels like such a huge responsibility, but thankfully I’m not alone, and I do appreciate the encouragement, assistance, and concrete help of the colleagues and friends I’m working with. I’m just trying to walk miles with ease in the shoes I’ve been asked to wear and figure out the proper speed and gait and latitude of movement so as to move with some grace. But now I still feel like an awkward foal. I’ve been in managerial and leadership roles for all of my adult life, of course, but not at this scale, and I’ve always been more comfortable acting in the background, in a supportive capacity, and being very competent at that. It still feels strange to be expected to be the one calling the shots, rather than being handed down a decision or a plan or a set of tasks and obligations, and simply executing that well. But one learns by doing.

I’ve been teaching my literature classes, as usual, and generally enjoying them, even if the sem feels so weirdly punctuated by unplanned breaks and schedule changes. I’ve been handling admin work, as usual. I’ve gotten the hang of these particular kinds of work and the challenges they typically bring, so I’m not struggling too much in these areas — but the reality is that they’re both time- and labor-intensive, and thus take much of my energy. Still, though there are hectic and difficult and trouble-filled days, I’ve learned how to deal with them.

I presented at two international conferences this year – one on theorizing global authoritarianism (held in June in Seoul, but I participated online because visa issues) and one on post-pandemic futures (held in July in Ahmedabad), where I wrote a paper and contributed to the making of a short film for our panel on mediated politics and religion. For the latter conference, I also spoke in a plenary roundtable discussion for the launch of a book on the internet in India, where we discussed issues about internet policy and digital governmentality, state surveillance, citizenship, censorship, and freedom.

The conference in India was the first in-person international conference I’ve attended since the pandemic started in 2020, and the stress of preparing for it – including not just the research and writing and video editing, but also the three streams of bureaucratic paperwork I had to accomplish to be able to go there, while dealing with Midyear admin work – meant I was ill for much of the week leading up to the conference, and was still coughing and sniffling two days into it. (Since I got COVID in late December 2022 to early January 2023, I’ve kept test kits handy and know I’ve only had regular flu and colds thereafter, even if those were bad enough for me to take bed rest for days at a time.) Still, it was worth the effort. Coming from that Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference, I went back to the everyday grind enlivened by encounters with friends old and new. It was wonderful to reconnect with my grad school friends and professors (even if not all news was good), and to hear about what colleagues have been up to in their lives and life work in academia, activism, or art.

In 2023, I gave three invited talks at hybrid seminars in my university: one in late January on blended teaching and learning, one in March on the use of Al text generators in writing classes, and one in early December on decolonizing English Studies. The first two talks were recorded and uploaded to our department’s Facebook page, and together have about 6,000 views, which is… wild for academic talks? The third one might also be uploaded by the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies by the by – links to the recordings in my portfolio.

Last August, I wrote an essay on the politics of the photographic representations of Apo Whang-Od. Last week, I submitted the mid-project progress report for a research grant I got this year, and come January 2024, I’ll be writing proposals for extension grants to fund the summer school activities in August 2024 — while dealing with correspondence and registration matters for next term, while holding consultations with students and finishing the marking and grading for this one. I really need to publish academic articles next year, if I’m to apply for tenure in time to not be axed.

I also returned to Hong Kong for a brief visit last October, but let me tell you about that nostalgia trip another time. Already I feel a bit dizzy and tired just thinking about January and the rest of 2024, but it’s still December now, and I’m technically on holiday vacation, though of course I brought my tablet and some work to do.

It’s 11 PM. The night market and open mic event have closed. The teens have gone home. The lights in my hostel room are off. Outside, it’s raining, and inside, my roommate is snoring lightly. I should start preparing for bed too. I’ll think about how to Do All the Things next year, and not get sick so often. I need a reboot and reprogramming. I think about work and fulfilling my obligations to institutions and to other people so much, honestly, but I want to prioritize taking care of myself too.

batok, beauty, and branding

Photography by Artu Nepomuceno for Vogue Philippines (April 2023), image from Teyxo.

In April 2023, VOGUE Philippines published their seventh issue, which, so to say, made a splash around the world. On the cover was the kind of woman hardly ever seen fronting fashion glossies: her white hair streaked with gray, her skin nut-brown and spotted and wrinkly and covered in faded blackwork tattoos. The woman’s (Christianized) name is Maria Oggay, but she is better known as Apo Whang-Od—and to this name is often attached other distinguishing epithets: “ancient,” “iconic,” “legendary,” “traditional,” “treasure,” “tribal,” “only,” “oldest,” “last.” In stark contrast with the publication’s cover images for other issues featuring young, thin, moisturized, and conventionally attractive bodies wearing fine jewelry, tailored suits, or haute couture, Whang-Od, now 106 years old, wears strings of colored wooden beads, a black spaghetti strap top, a woven skirt, and dinumog earrings. The costuming for the cover emphasizes her indigenous identity—but this is VOGUE, not National Geographic or Anthropology Now, and this issue is all about beauty. There are no native huts or rice terraces sighted in her studio photographs. She is poised, posed against a tan backdrop with the subtle sheen of leather. Her lips are luxuriously painted in oxblood red.

When the magazine issue came out, the dominant tone of its readers sounded celebratory. They lauded the editors for making such a bold choice, defying ageism, colorism, and various codes of beauty that are rooted in privilege and realized through disciplinary aesthetic labor (a ten-step Korean skincare and make-up routine, a gym membership and fitness regimen, manicures and massages and haircuts, etc.) and the regular expenditure of disposable income on aesthetic commodities. Here on the cover was no fashionable socialite or showbiz It Girl of the moment, but a bearer of culture, history, fraught indigenous and contested national identities. As the photographer Artu Nepomuceno wrote in an Instagram post, his image celebrates “the beauty of time, the beauty of family, the beauty of love, the beauty of our elders, and the beauty of being Filipino. … what this means for our country and as humans together is even greater.”¹ Audrey Carpio, the author of the cover story, went further. Talking about Whang-Od and her almost single-handed revival of batok tattooing by freeing it from the strictures of tribal customs and sacred rituals and making it accessible to outsiders for a monetary sum, Carpio suggested that Whang-Od’s popularity, drawing crowds raring to get inked the “traditional” way, “can be seen as a step toward decolonizing aesthetics, reclaiming our bodies, and reconnecting with our roots, our selves.”² That batok tattooing has also seen a revival among Filipinx in the United States and elsewhere is perhaps a testament to this longing for a pre-colonial history and identity, so largely erased by the colonizers that it must be imagined and reconstructed, if not invented and mythologized.

But there were other voices in the hubbub of responses, voices that were no less reverential of Apo Whang-Od, but were not so celebratory of the Vogue feature. Some of these voices raised the issues of cultural appropriation³ and commercial exploitation,⁴ which are less about the cover and more about the broader context of the practice of traditional tattooing in the capitalist present. In Whang-Od’s girlhood, ritual scarification was a mark not only of tribal identity, but of honor brought to the tribe. Men had to prove their martial prowess before meriting a tattoo (some tattoos, like eagles across the chest, were reserved for specific manifestations of valor, such as a successful headhunt). Women, on the other hand, earned their tattoos upon puberty. Their tattoos enhanced their attractiveness, signifying their family’s wealth and status (for then, as in now, tattoos did not come cheap), their fertility, and their capacity for enduring the pain of pregnancy and childbirth. These days, however, anyone with a few thousand pesos (though it cost only a few hundred pesos ten years ago) could get a Kalinga tattoo.

Other critics pointed to the hypocrisy of celebrating—on the cover of a magazine meant for the consumption of the Westernized, metropolitan, educated upper-class, no less—one “token” or exceptional representative of the country’s indigenous peoples (collectively known as lumad) while turning a blind eye to the manifold injustices faced by the lumad, such as poverty, dispossession of ancestral domains, development aggression exacerbating natural disasters, and state violence, including unlawful mass arrests, murders, the closure of lumad schools and the aerial bombing of lumad communities.⁵ As Alice Sarmiento wrote in her Rappler article on Vogue Philippines’s April 2023 issue, “What demands confronting is how such levels of economic prosperity and cultural visibility [accorded to Whang-Od, and by extension her community in Buscalan] can sit side-by-side with the unsexy systemic issues of uneven development and extraction that confront many indigenous Filipinos – including the Butbut [tribe].”⁶

***

Scans from Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern by Lane Wilcken. Photos by Farlet Vale.

I’ve met Apo Whang-Od thrice. The first time, she gave me my first tattoo, back when trekking to Buscalan wasn’t a thing conyo college freshmen did over the Christmas break to get batok and get wasted on bugnay. I didn’t come there to get a tattoo, but to accompany a friend who sought one from Apo. But while hanging out in Whang-Od’s relative’s hut, I found a copy of Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern by Lane Wilcken,⁷ an American sociologist and tattoo practitioner with roots in the Philippines. I ended up getting inked with one of the sigils pictured in the book: the ginawang or hawk motif, messenger of the gods. I received the tattoo early in the morning of New Year’s Day many years ago. Whang-Od started tapping the tattoo, then stopped halfway, and had her grand-niece and protegé Grace Palicas finish it. That I got the tattoo on the first day of the year, that it was half-done by Apo and half-done by her successor, and that the tattoo was this particular symbol had great personal significance to me back then. But now I realize how inappropriate it was for me to pick an indigenous tattoo from a book written by a Nevada-based Filipinx instead of looking to the mambabatok for guidance. The ginawang is actually an Ifugao motif, not Kalinga (the ethnic group from which Whang-Od hails). But that didn’t seem to matter to either Whang-Od or Grace, who worked from 6 AM to 6 PM that day to cater to the requests of tattoo tourists, many of whom also picked their “traditional” tattoo designs from a sheet of paper tacked on the wall.

Although batok is often framed in magazine features, travel blogs, and documentaries as “intangible cultural heritage” if not a threatened and highly spiritual and rarefied art, what struck me in my sojourns to Buscalan was the quotidian labor of it. Hand-tap tattooing (batok) is a physically demanding practice, much more than modern machine tattooing, both for the giver and the receiver of the tattoo. And yet here was this 90-year old woman (Apo was around 90 when I first encountered her) hunched over other people’s bodies all day with her stick and thorn and charcoal ink, “clocking in” and “clocking out,” working diligently and steadily, mostly in silence save for the steady tok-tok-tok of her tattooing stick. The day after I got my ginawang inked, Apo took a break from tattooing. When I asked Grace where she was, Grace said she was back in the fields, farming. Indeed, in many interviews, Apo Whang-Od has talked about pambabatok as just a job that puts food on the table, even as she expresses hope that the cultural practice would live beyond her.

L: Photo by Allan Barredo, 2013. R: Photo by Adam Kozioł, 2013.

If one searched for images of Whang-Od, especially those from before the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, one would most often see her depicted as either a tribal woman (as in the preceding photos), or a tribal worker, a traditional tattoo practitioner enmeshed in other relations of kinship, cooperation, and competition in the community (as in the photos from Wilcken’s book above). That is to say, her image has usually been framed anthropologically. In more recent years, with the circulation of images, narratives, and knowledge produced about her, her craft, and her village,  Whang-Od has also become something of a tourist attraction—and photographed as such. I have viewed dozens of such tourist photographs with Whang-Od, and rarely have I seen her smiling in them.

The last time I visited Buscalan in 2016, I asked to take a photo with Whang-Od, something I hadn’t had the chance to do before. She hesitated initially, then let herself be coaxed into it. Grace who was with us translated what Whang-Od said: she didn’t want to be photographed because she felt that she wasn’t beautiful anymore. (According to local gossip, Whang-Od in her youth was famed for her beauty, and men would fall all over themselves to curry favor with her by, for example, making sure her household was never out of chopped wood for kindling)

With Apo Whang-Od and Grace in Buscalan, 2016.

That memory informed my initial reaction to the Vogue pictorial. For sure, the magazine is a commercial enterprise that peddles consumerist fantasies and products by adopting a feel-good liberal “progressive” stance in representing beauty, glamor, and feminine strength. I understand the context for why some people are offended by its commodification⁸ of a cultural icon who belongs to a historically marginalized population, and whose tattooing practice has been insufficiently honored by the gatekeepers of national culture and artistry due to it having the “taint” of profit-making.⁹ But this I also know: I’d never seen Apo Whang-Od smile like she did for that magazine feature. She seemed genuinely delighted to be a Vogue girl—beautiful, empowered, modern. It’s such a departure from the usual ways in which she has been depicted. And yes, she is a bearer of history, culture, fraught indigenous and contested national identities. But also, sometimes Apo Whang-Od may just want to be Maria Oggay.

Image from Vogue Philippines (April 2023)

Notes

1.  @artunepo, Instagram, April 1, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CqdfBStPLdS.
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2.  Audrey Carpio, “Apo Whang-Od And The Indelible Marks Of Filipino Identity,” Vogue Philippines, March 30, 2023, https://vogue.ph/magazine/apo-whang-od/.
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3.  See, for example, the 2021 controversy over Nas Daily offering a steeply priced online course on batok tattooing supposedly to be taught by Whang-Od — without the consent of either Whang-Od or the Butbut tribe. https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2021/8/4/Nas-Daily-Whang-od-Academy-backlash.html
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4.  As in the 2017 FAME Trade Show held at the World Trade Center, where Whang-Od was flown in from the Cordilleras to tattoo some 200 lowland city people over the course of three days. https://www.bworldonline.com/editors-picks/2017/10/25/66064/art-appreciation-appropriation/ ; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41717665
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5.  Niña Diño, “Dwindling numbers: Lumad schools continue to suffer closures, attacks during pandemic,” Rappler, September 18, 2020, https://www.rappler.com/moveph/lumad-schools-continue-to-suffer-closures-attacks-coronavirus-pandemic/
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6.  Alice Sarmiento, “The Mark of Buscalan: Whang-Od, Vogue, and difficult conversations,” Rappler, April 11, 2023, https://www.rappler.com/life-and-style/arts-culture/mark-of-buscalan-whang-od-vogue-difficult-conversations/
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7. Lane Wilcken, Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern (Schiffer, 2010). ↩︎
8.  As of writing, the April 2023 issue is sold out; if you wanted to buy a copy from secondhand markets, you would need to pay three to four times the magazine’s original retail price.
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9.  Analyn Salvador-Amores, “Whang-od as a brand name,” Rappler, October 25, 2017, https://www.rappler.com/voices/imho/186345-wang-od-brand-name-tattoo/.
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hey june, don’t make it bad

There’s a buoyancy to my days lately, despite, or perhaps even partly because of, all the work to be done. There’s marking and grading to do, and conference papers (two!) and curricular revisions and spreadsheets and organizational work and travel plans. The usual and unending stream of obligated communications. But even though I’ve calendared action items and deadlines all the way through to September, I feel more excited than overwhelmed or oppressed.

Lately it’s been easier to recognize the direction of my doing, the activities and relationships that bring me happiness, and the sort of work that I value and that make me feel valued. Such recognition allows me to make quick decisions: to say yes to this and no to that, to reach for an opportunity and let go of another, to accept that invitation or leave this situation… editing my life, as it were, for a sense of meaningful striving, rest, and fulfillment, instead of filling it with thing after thing after thing — a shortcut to exhaustion, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy.

Doing All The Things, Wanting Everything Now — the past decade or so of my life was so fraught with restlessness and discontent and busy-ness, and sometimes I still castigate myself for not being as ambitious and driven and productive as I think I was when I was younger. But now I see that my present is much healthier and happier — I feel more connected with my family, friends, and communities of practice, I get enough sleep, I have time for exercise and play, I have a more relaxed relationship with food, a greater appreciation and kindness for my body, and respect for capabilities and limitations, be they others’ or my own. For a very long time now I haven’t even desired to die. I like my life and where I am and whom I’m with these days, and I’m curious to discover what else I can be and where else I can go, and — and this is new — what more I can do to be in service of institutions and people and goals I care about.

Last weekend I traveled way up north to meet my friend and yoga teacher, who’s based in Ilocos and holds weekend wellness retreats every month or so. I don’t often have the time to while away on 12-hour bus rides, but every May (my birthday month) I try to go somewhere I haven’t been to, and try something I haven’t done before. So this year it was Pagudpud and surfing. 

After a day of much walking, eating, sleeping, and backbending, my travelmates and I learned surfing one sunny morning from a guy named Kinglord (“Kuya ang boss naman ng pangalan mo,” I joked, though his parents must be religious). After practicing standing on the board on land, I lay on the board and paddled out to sea, not too far away from the shore, where Kinglord was. King would orient the board and watch out for the right wave and tell me to get ready and shout at me to stand as the wave propelled the surfboard and me on it forward. Yet, for all of my concentration, whenever I felt the force of the wave, I found myself unable to stand. Instinctively my body sought to maintain broad contact with the board in kneeling or crouching position. This, my body seemed to protest, is the safest, most stable orientation for us, so why are you pushing to stand?? That one time I almost got on my feet and stood upright, I fell right off. I think I have to fall off many more times before I can learn to get high up on my feet.

Later, hanging out in the sea with the women I shared a rented minibus and accommodations with, I watched Kinglord and his friends on their surfboards with a wistful envy. How powerfully they paddled, how lightly they got on their feet and coasted on the crest of a wave, how gracefully they fell, with a little hop and twirl to the side, smiling, as if they were only falling to lie on a very soft bed.

A friend I once made on a beach told me that what he liked about surfing was feeling the power of the water course through his body, as if he and the wave were one. No fear, no ego, and no overthinking, just the thrill of being part of a great and indomitable force.

I know I can feel beyond the jitters brought by any situation where I lack mastery and control, but it takes me a long time, multiple failures, and many tries. I know I have quite the stamina for trying, but as I get older (and as I gain more resources, more responsibilities,  more connections, more plans, more things of value), I fear that I become more attached to feeling safe, and consequently less willing to risk my hard-earned stability.

When I was in my early twenties (and before mobile data and Google Maps were mainstream), I used to take only a point-and-shoot film camera and a basic phone and a book or a Kindle with me on hikes and travels — I would print/write down all the information I needed for my itinerary beforehand, get physical maps at the port and annotate them, ask people for directions when I was unsure. Sometimes I’d ask people with digital cameras to take photos for me and email them afterwards. This was how I made both passing and enduring friendships and got into (mis)adventures as a solo traveler (as amply documented in this blog for the past decade!). The idea was to be open to strangers and to be very deliberate about what I chose to commemorate, and not be ruled by the tyranny of documentation and “sharing” (though we all know that being networked and communicating in networks is not the same as being connected). Now I comply with the compulsions and the hailing of the smartphone, like everyone else.

We spent three days together, but I didn’t talk much with the women I shared a rented minibus and accommodations with last weekend. Everyone was on their phones practically all the time, everything of beauty and good taste and consumer power and self-making (as this lends itself to self-branding) incessantly documented in static and moving images — an ongoing performance for an anticipated audience. Maybe my vibe was aloof (I don’t often manage or even try to throw that off), maybe it’s an introvert thing, for small talk to feel so pointless. But don’t you think it’s impossible to have a substantial conversation with someone when their eyeballs are screwed to a screen, recording, posting, replying, browsing?

We talked about the food and the weather and how we knew the teachers facilitating the retreat and how long our yoga practice has been. As this was a retreat, we also had designated moments for talking and sharing insights in a circle, but I don’t remember a single deep conversation with a stranger-turned-twelve-hour-friend or two-day-boyfriend. I miss that shit. Talking off tangents, running after a thought, telling stories you haven’t verbalized before, or stories you’ve refined through successive retellings, or stories you’ve made up on the spot just to stake a plot point and get a narrative arc going. Telling stories knowing that farewells are for good and no follow request on Facebook or Insta is gonna come. Philosophizing without feeling dumb because it’s hard to feel dumber and more irrelevant as a human than when you’re facing the immensity of the sea, the ever-shifting horizon, the sunlight and the wind so strong that you can’t help but squint and blink and blink.

During the opening and closing talk-sharing circles, many of the women started crying. They were going through Something, they intimated vaguely, something to do with careers or relationships, their sense of identity. I listened respectfully and thanked them for their sharing, but I could not cry with them. Instead, I said, I am grateful to have a restful weekend. I also said, I am so glad to see my yoga teacher-friend, whom I first met over ten years ago on a trip to Ifugao, when we were both fresh out of college and figuring out our place in the world. She wasn’t yet a yoga teacher nor a single woman back then. How inspiring it is, I said, to have witnessed how she has cultivated her yoga practice and community.

Some women cried again during our final rhythmic yoga class, which set vinyasa sequences to pop tunes. When my teacher-friend played Sia’s “Saved My Life” with its thumping, ponderous melody that stands in for lyrical complexity and emotional gravitas, I felt acute irritation. “Turn your mind back to the time when you felt at your lowest and darkest and most vulnerable,” said the yoga teacher as she raised the volume of the music, the better for us to feel the feels. “Who was there for you?” My breathing went out of synch with my movements when I couldn’t block out the bass and Sia’s voice reciting boom, boom, boom / beats my heart, heart, heart / in the dark, dark, dark / fall apart, part, part. I finished the flow without rolling my eyes. I’m no stranger to shadow work, but this ain’t it.

I kept thinking back to earlier that morning as well as the previous afternoon, when we had sat around idling, waiting for the establishment’s staff to wipe down the floors of the hall before we started the yoga classes. I kept wondering why we didn’t just wipe the floor ourselves when there were so many of us. And while we were practicing yoga in the shade and many of the women were tearing up to boom boom boom beats my heart, surrounding us were day laborers, brown as betel nuts, digging up the soil for ornamental plants to root down under the severe sun.

I wondered if I would attend any more of these yoga retreats for women of a particular class.

We returned to Manila on Monday morning, after about twelve hours of traveling. I was swamped with work that day and I was pretty tired by the afternoon, but still I hauled myself to our biweekly Brazilian jiu-jiutsu (BJJ) training that night.

BJJ’s been my ballast these past few months, keeping me afloat in the midst of the incessant deliverables and deadlines of our fast-paced and packed academic times. I got into BJJ back in March because I was looking to seriously train in some martial art (I flirted with arnis and judo in university, with boxing and muay thai and dragonboat and tai chi post-graduation, and with karate in grad school, but could sustain none of these practices; sports-wise, my most enduring engagements have been with hiking and yoga and the pain olympics of tattoos). I wanted to train in martial arts to rein in the latent and summer-heightened aggression I could no longer inhale-exhale-downward-dog-upward-dog away. Joining a BJJ gym has proven to be one of the best decisions I’ve made this year.

I’ve been monitoring my weight and body composition (muscle mass and fat percentage) since January 2022, doing weigh-ins weekly to fortnightly on a smart scale, and yesterday my smart scale app recorded the best stats I’ve had in the past 18 months — not by any huge margin, but at this age I’m elated by even incremental progress. Guess I’ll be sticking with jiu-jitsu for the long haul, and supplement it with yoga and pilates as usual, and maybe a bit more swimming and weightlifting. BJJ is such an all-rounder activity for me, with its strength, cardio, flexibility, balance, and coordination training, plus it’s really fun and keeps me cognitively and socially engaged too (thankfully, my teammates, almost all of them straight males, are pretty decent guys I actually enjoy spending hours every week grappling and sweating and stinking and bruising and laughing with.) How I am now isn’t the fittest I’ve ever been, but it’s the happiest, I think — at least my moods are a lot more regulated, I generally get sufficient rest, and even when I have a lot of work on my plate, I don’t feel as easily (di)stressed. 

It pleases me to exert my will upon my body, to discipline it, as if doing so would also make me more effectively act in the external world. In this way my body functions as a site in which I exercise and exorcize my anxieties, even as my anxieties live within it. This relates to why I am so taken with tattooing too. So much of the diverse range of body modification practices (from piercing and tattooing as well as gender-affirming surgery or hormonal therapy or even working out with the aim of changing one’s body composition) is about progressively aligning the image we see in the mirror with how we feel or hear or see ourselves from the inside, and in so doing more firmly tethering and orienting ourselves in the surrounding world. To me, body modification is about inhabiting one’s mortal coil in this mortal plane with more lightness and ease by cultivating a keener sense of identity and agency.

I think this is also why I enjoy BJJ so much. It’s an exercise in materializing one’s will, exerting it upon not only oneself but also another. BJJ, as I understand it, is all about control — controlling one’s mindset, controlling one’s movement, controlling one’s sparring partner, controlling the game by systematically disabling one’s partner from resisting one’s will. To many, “control” reeks of violence, and yet all this is often done slowly, smoothly, patiently, consciously, judiciously, carefully; jūjutsu (柔術) literally means gentle art or technique. All players are attentive to the tapping that signals the desire to exit the game.

I’m only just starting out, but I feel that this practice will teach me more about stability and risk, hardness and vulnerability, structure and spontaneity, and confidence and humility than what I can articulate now. I consider with anticipation the lessons to come.

oma omagahd / workworkworkworkwork

(somebody do a mashup of NewJeans and Rihanna)

My brain cells most days these days:

I can’t quite believe it’s May now. May! My birthday month as well as my most hated time of the year (mostly because of the summer heat, but I reckon it’ll be hellishly hot in June too). If I didn’t keep a detailed weekly planner, I wouldn’t know where the first quarter of the year went.

Where the first quarter of my year went, aside from the usual class prep and marking stuff and faculty meetings and GE coordination and house work: in January, a couple of grant applications, a couple of work-related out-of-town trips (a moving sound art performance in Baguio; a guideship hike with Trail Adventours in Mt. Pinatubo); I also spoke at a webinar on blended learning pedagogy. In February: another guideship hike with TrailAd in Mt. Daraitan, a trip with friends to Quezon, registration activities, completing a tattoo sleeve. In March, a weekend in the province for my lola’s 90th birthday, a meeting with collaborators for a conference panel, field work, an abstract for an international conference on authoritarianism. I served as one of two resource persons for a webinar on AI and the writing classroom, and, for my health and sanity, I started attending jiu-jitsu training (now it’s become the activity I look forward to the most every week). April’s been occupied by errands relating to a grant I applied for, a conference beleaguered by overseas registration problems, and organizing work for academic activities involving a visiting researcher. I’ve been busy even through the two-week break last month, though I was able to catch up on sleep and rest during Lent.

This month, I have to design a PhD course and begin drafting papers for conferences in June and July (and because those are both international conferences, I will also have to do a pile of paperwork for visa and travel arrangements, conference grant application, etc.) I suffer insomnia sometimes, thinking about my ever-lengthening to-do list. Sometimes I’m tempted to just forgo weekends with family and to make myself scarce to everyone but my students and professional collaborators to focus on tasks, but then my mental health would suffer too. Working in the academe just means a constant state of busy-ness, though I must say that I enjoy it all, even tasks that involve low-level cognition and grunt work (like preparing meeting minutes or even ordering snacks for a public lecture), knowing that even the most invisible and un(der)valued of my labors help keep the institutions and communities of knowledge and practice that I care about going.

I’m confronted by the question of value these days, specifically of the value of the work that I do, and, consequently, of my own value (given that my sense of self is so intertwined with the work that I do). I feel like I do so much to maintain my personal and professional well-being, and yet because much of the work that I do is “labor” in the Arendtian sense (i.e. not necessarily resulting in tangible and durable products, which is what distinguishes “work” from “labor” in Arendt’s typology of human activity in The Human Condition), that activity, which is not necessarily productivity, is rendered illegible to others and thus unseen and unvalued.

It’s not that I feel unappreciated—like sometimes, students write to me telling me about how I’ve inspired them or got them interested in literature or social issues; just last week, a student of mine from ten years ago(!!!), who now teaches in the same college as me, approached me to say that having me as a teacher made him want to work in the academe as well (for better or for worse, haha). Colleagues thank or congratulate or compliment me when I give a good talk or take care of backend administrative stuff in a way that makes everyone’s lives a little bit easier, and even consult me on matters of pedagogy. But as certain friends like to remind me: being appreciated and knowing that your work benefits your institution or community is not the same as being seen as successful.

In academia’s reputational economy, to be “successful” means to have a lot of publications in “high-impact” avenues to one’s name; to be “successful” is to be invited to speak at conferences and podcasts and TV programs; to be “successful” is to be part of a network of other highly visible public/promotional intellectuals with large followings on Twitter or Facebook, posting about their new collaboration or journal article or newspaper column or edited book or transnational Zoom meeting with other Important People every other week or so. I’ve nothing against all that, of course — I understand that in the age of communicative capitalism, it’s not enough to just do good work; news about the good work done must be trumpeted and shared and circulated and remediated widely to “matter.” More importantly, a certain level of prominence is necessary to get projects going, especially when funding is scarce, competition is tough, and the academic jobs market is generally in bad shape. But can there not be other ways of framing “success”?

One evening, after a day full of the work of institutional coordination, I mused on FB:

As I get older, I realize more and more how I prefer to work in the sidelines and in the background. Like, I want to do my own thing in the spaces where I have some influence, and then lend my time, talents, and energies to projects and pursuits led by people whose vision and leadership I trust. I have absolutely no desire to be any kind of frontperson, is what I have realized. I don’t even like being in front of the classroom or on a stage all that much, which is why in class, we sit in a circle, haha. I want to believe that the work is its own validation (though ofc more perks and “impact” and “engagement” and influence come with recognition and attention). I think I would be very happy if I could exert influence while staying in the shadows.

And yet, when, sitting at a table surrounded by Important People in a meeting I had helped organize, I was largely ignored by senior colleagues, I did feel a bit miffed. They didn’t ignore me because I didn’t deserve to be there (I mean, I was the most junior scholar there, yes, but I’d probably be the one working the hardest if the project pushes through), but because they didn’t know me. I hadn’t really tried ever to be known.

Later, another senior colleague, in an unrelated context, told me: “Your work is your name card.” By “work,” he meant publications. Hearing “work,” I thought of other things. I thought, I’ve worked hard all my life for goals and principles that I value. My work has created value (even if that value accrued to institutions or other people, like books I’ve edited that won national book awards, or students I’ve helped get scholarships or win competitions.) My work has been done quietly, largely invisibly. Does that mean that it is not also important?

Recently, a friend said to me that she felt frustrated that I’m not directing more of my energy to producing work that would actually raise my public profile. She said, I know you’re doing a lot of good work in class and in the department. But you’re overshadowed by your peers. You know I find you so smart and capable and beautiful, and it’s sayang if you’re not more known. I really hope that your career would take flight, be it as a scholar or an artist. So be more confident.

Building value in a reputational economy, is not, for me, simply a question of confidence, because I am very confident in my areas of competence. It’s a question of what I do and don’t like (which drives motivation), and the thing is that in a world that values views and engagement as indexes of success, I would rather not draw attention (except in the context of academic discussion, like in class or in conferences — and one doesn’t get widely known just because of such activities, no?). Even though I’ve developed some social skills for survival, I’ll always be an introverted person who has to work doubly hard all the time just to appear sociable, and that eats up energy that I could direct elsewhere. I don’t know if I don’t feel like being known because I’m selfish or unselfish, because I want more freedom and independence to be myself, or because I’m lazy and undisciplined, because I don’t have a big ego or because I’m a coward. But it’s something to think about for sure as I turn older again this week.

But this I know: “success” to me is less about external validation or reward, and more about an inner sense of meaning and fulfillment about what I do. I must feel that the work I do is meaningful and enjoyable, that it helps me grow and learn, that it contributes to institutions I care about, that it benefits my community, even in unacknowledged ways. “Success” to me also means living a sane and healthy and happy life, feeling like I am worthy and whole. And I don’t want that sense of worth to rest on what other people think of me.

Haaay. The enduring lesson of my first Saturn return seems to be that I need to keep creating new personalities to get by in this world. I may like myself sincerely, but situations involving other people always seem to call for other mes for my efforts to be effective. This must be why people get into intimate relationships: we may all have to “prepare a face to meet the faces that [we have to] meet” (as T.S. Eliot wrote), but if there were even one person who knew both our basic self and our multiple and layered personalities, and still liked us and appreciated our qualities and tried to understand us even when we’re being difficult, living day to day would feel a lot less like work.

alchemy of souls season 2: making light of shadow

In his review of Alchemy of Souls: Light and Shadow in the SCMP, Pierce Conran writes:

I echo Conran’s opinion that 1. There is little dramatic tension to make the story compelling; 2. S2’s worlding is very shaky, and; 3. The main leads have no chemistry.

I would add that those three problems boil down to poor plotting and pacing (which itself is a function of plotting, if plotting is the arrangement of events through time), and characterization (which is a function of writing, direction, and acting).

Despite my great love for Alchemy of Souls Season 1, I didn’t feel much of anything aside from dissatisfaction with Season 2, so I had to break down why.

Problem 1: S2 tries to do too many things in too little time, resulting in shoddy plotting and pacing.

Problem 2: Shaky worlding, with vague magical rules and relic-enabled deus ex machina galore.

Problem 3: Character development.

In the discussion below, I try to explain the repercussions of the problems outlined above in sustaining the sort of audience investment that drove Season 1 to global success.

Jang Uk and Go Won have heaps more chemistry in S2 than Jang Uk and “Jin Buyeon”/Cho Yeong.

Problem 1: S2 tries to do too many things in too little time.

S1 ended on literally high-octane tragedy, so S2 had to deal with a lot of grief and guilt for so many of its characters — principally Jang Uk, who not only lost his love and his raison d’être, but also his very life at the hands of that beloved. Sure, he reincarnates through the ice stone, but like what’s the point of being brought back to life? He becomes nigh invincible in S2, but he’s basically used by the corrupt Unanimous Assembly as a soul shifter assassin, is not allowed to use his abilities for anything other than killing, is haunted all the time by dark spirits who want his power, and is guilted or avoided or pitied by everyone for knowingly harboring a murderous soul shifter who runs a sword through him in the end. Through much of S2, he’s a profoundly broken man. He can’t get closure because he can neither understand Mudeok’s actions, nor lay his hands on the villain who used his lover because that villain has returned to his King’s good graces. Jang Uk, the most powerful mage in all of Daeho, can’t even kill himself.

It’s not only Jang Uk who’s grieving; the other characters lost so much too. Lady Jin lost her daughter and her husband and her trustworthiness as Jinyowon’s leader. Cho Yeon lost her father and her betrothed and has to stay locked up in Jinyowon catering to her mad mother’s whims and watching over a fake, feckless sister for three years. Park Danggu lost his fiancée and his friends. Seo Yul lost his health and his clear conscience. Park Jin lost his position. Go Won, in initially joining hands with Jin Mu, almost lost himself. But S2 rushes through all of these losses, because the drama wants to show us other things. The weight of grief is tossed around, and so in the end nothing feels too heavy or too important here.

So on the one hand, S2 is a story about how to deal with grief. But it’s also a story about how to love again when you keep falling through the trapdoors of memory and self-loathing and regret and pain. That story needs time to develop too.

Last season, we journeyed with the characters through like 18 episodes before Mudeok even admits to Jang Uk that she loves him so much that even with her hands already on the ice stone, she’s willing to give up her desire to reclaim her great power so that they could save their friends and be together. In S2, the leads marry by episode 2 — and then spend half the season avoiding or mistreating or misunderstanding each other.

This misunderstanding is compounded because Buyeon doesn’t even know herself. All she knows is that she’s Jinyowon’s heiress, and she’s been locked up for three years. She remembers nothing of her past. She questions nothing in her present circumstances, even in her desire to escape them. What’s her interiority like? I don’t think that even she knows. So how can she believably sound the depths of Jang Uk’s pain? For this reason, I sympathize with jealous Heo Yoon-Ok when she scoffs and tells Buyeon, You don’t know anything, do you?

Given the above, it’s not difficult to understand the lead couple’s apparent lack of chemistry. Their characters are drawn together less by profound feeling (think of the frivolity and pragmatism of Buyeon’s marriage proposal, the limerential quality of her attachment to Jang Uk) as by the demands of the script and the pressures of a fandom that wants a “happy ending.” So when Jang Uk and Buyeon share that deep kiss in episode 7, it doesn’t feel passionate; it feels forced and manipulative (especially towards the audience). For all their quibbling as a married couple, the two still lack compassionate knowledge of each other, as Jang Uk spends more time avoiding Buyeon at home than getting to know her. S2 tries to spin this by saying that their souls recognized each other all along, but I’m not buying it. By S2, the leads have become markedly different from their characters in S1, given that so much in their circumstances and social roles have changed, so they are essentially getting to know each other all over again — a process that, again, S2 rushes through.

S2 OTP: Kim and Jin. If you’re watching S2 for love, I’d look to these two rather than to Uk and Yeong.

So far we have at least three narrative threads: grief, romance, and self-discovery, especially in the case of Buyeon/Cho Yeong who has to learn who she is beyond the walls of Jinyowon and the dictates of her controlling mother. But the thematic preoccupation with self-discovery also applies to the Crown Prince who feels like an impostor, the Queen who loses her sense of identity and dignity after she losing her beauty, Park Jin who steps down as Songrim leader to become the town’s most fearsome cook, and even Jang Uk himself, who has to find a new reason for bothering to live. None of these three threads are given enough time and space to unravel and be wefted into a rich but coherent tapestry.

The warp through which the above threads are wefted: the continuing power struggles over the ice stone and the bane of soul-shifting that it has enabled. Supposedly, the characters’ personal struggles are framed by the implications and the consequences of the ice stone remaining in the world when it should have been destroyed, and being used for forbidden magic. In this crime of avarice or malversation (especially in the case of Lady Jin, who betrayed the trust of her guardianship and used the ice stone for personal reasons), all the powerful families in Daeho are implicated. So S2 is also a story about the pitfalls of greed and the need for accountability. 

The show tries to tackle all of these issues — in just ten episodes. If it wanted to develop so many broad themes, they should have shot for a more extended run, or simplified the narrative. The plotting and pacing wouldn’t have been so sloppy if the storytellers had decided on the primary force driving the narrative — be it the milieu (i.e. the state of Daeho with all these soul shifters running amok)? The idea/innovation (i.e. the question of the mechanics of soul shifting and how Mudeok’s petrified and revived body grew the old, cremated Naksu’s face)? The characters (enter all of the emotional threads detailed above)? Or the main events of the plot — Jin Mu’s scheming, star-crossed lovers reuniting. (Cf. Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient.) But the storytellers decided to do a bit of everything, at the expense of narrative development.

A beef: Why don’t we see Jung So-Min as Buyeon in S2? The child is not convincing as a powerful priestess.

Problem 2: Shaky worlding.

What attracted me to S1 was the sophistication and detail with which the world of Daeho was developed. We learned about its history, its cosmology, its geography, the nature of its magic (resting on the ability to harness the power of water as it changes form — liquid to solid to gas and back), its social institutions and its social order and the customs and power struggles therein.

In S1, we were eased into understanding the rules of that society, including for magic. We understood the stages of magical training, from jipsu (the ability to gather the energy of water), to ryusu (the ability to gain energy from the water gathered), chisu (the ability to control the water in the atmosphere itself, to generate and direct the flow water where there was only air, or to turn drenched objects dry), and hwansu (the ability to turn water to ice to fire to air and back — essentially what the ice stone does: the transformation of matter, the transmutation of elements). We understood why the alchemy of souls was forbidden sorcery: while “legitimate” magic worked only with the exchanges of energy through the manipulation of physical matter in the concrete world, the alchemy of souls changed something that transcends material reality, something metaphysical and ineffable and essential: the soul itself. Severing the soul from its bodily vessel causes existential cracks so deep that both body and soul leak energy (hence, running wild and petrification have both physical and spiritual manifestations — one’s body isn’t just desiccated, one’s sense of humanity and selfhood are eroded too — unless the shifting soul finds a body that it can feel at home in because the new body is so much like the old one).

We could get into debates about how the soul in the show is figured like some tennis ball that you can pick up from one container and simply shoot into another, but the point is: the magic had clear rules. Not so in S2. From the question of Buyeon’s body growing Naksu’s face, to the various relic-enabled magical shenanigans and switcheroos, the explanations were never very convincing. It was like, Oh you have a problem? We have just the relic for that!

Last season we had the soul ejectors and Gwigu and the mirror and the yin-yang stones and the bells and the bloodworm. This season we had the lamp and the tracking thread and the worm and the lake creature and the mouse and the sorcery-exposing potion and the phoenix earthenware and the fire bird and the portal-making turtle and the soul ejector injected into human flesh and the zombie ice stone in the skeleton in the prison in another dimension, and… and… This tendency to introduce some new magic every ten minutes for every problem very soon starts to feel like deus ex machina. And this is a problem because if everything can be solved so easily by heading over to Jinyowon or simply calling the all-powerful Jang Uk, why should we care about these supposedly dire situations?

Problem 3: Character development.

Cynical sadboi Jang Uk, I can understand. Even deranged Lady Jin, we saw coming, the way she desperately bought into So-i’s fakery in S1. But smart Seo Yul refusing to get his illness checked for three whole years? (Okay maybe deep down he felt so guilty that he just wanted to die a slow, painful death.)

My main beef with characterization is the way Naksu/Buyeon/Yeong is written and rendered. What endeared Mudeok to so many in S1 was her wily feistiness, coupled with both confidence and pride and real strength and influence (for she knew how strong and skilled she had been, and could well read and manipulate the people around her), but also her vulnerability (as Mudeok, she was dependent on Jang Uk — a difficulty and a disgrace for someone who’s relied on herself all her life — a dependency that only grew once she realized she was deeply in love). Mudeok can be — and often was — savage and unctious and caring, all at once. I feel like this is as much a strength of the writing as it is of Jung So-Min’s skill in expressing the complexity of her layered (or nested) character/s. The woman even used different ideolects for each persona!! As a result, viewers had a very nuanced apprehension of Naksu/Mudeok and Buyeon as characters trying to navigate complex subject positions (i.e. Mudeok is both servant and master. Buyeon is both a blind peasant orphan girl and a powerful noble heiress).

This is sadly not the case for S2 Buyeon/Naksu. Go Yoon Jung is a competent actress, but she’s very one-note in her delivery. If she’s sad, she can only be sad. If she’s calm and determined, she’s only that. Whether she’s pining or moping, saucy or cutesy, she expresses one emotion at a time, and is straightforward about it. There are no layers to peel back in her performance. The brevity of her 10-episode stint (compared to the 20 episodes/almost three months we spent with Jung So-min in S1), combined with the way her character is written (annoyingly feckless much of the time, and rather pathetically lovelorn when it comes to Jang Uk) means that Jin Buyeon/Cho Yeong never becomes a character I feel invested in (like a friend’s new jowa whom I know she’ll dump or get dumped by in three weeks). I was more interested in Jang Uk’s other relationships — with the Crown Prince, with Park Jin, with Danggu and Seo Yul and Maidservant Kim and with himself.

In conclusion

I meant this response to be a short Instagram post, but as it turns out, I have a lot of feelings about S2, not many of them very good. Sure, it’s comforting to know what happened to the characters after that heartwrenching cliffhanger ending in S1. I liked spending a little bit more time with them in S2, and seeing how characters like So-i and Go Won redeemed themselves, and how Maidservant Kim and Park Jin lived happily together, bantering over household chores. It’s good to know Jin Mu got his comeuppance through the same sorcery with which he destroyed so many people’s lives (but let’s not talk about his “replacement” actor’s cartoonish acting — like why does he have to raise one eyebrow every two seconds?). There were also some very touching moments, like when Buyeon suffered through her mother’s tracking thread torture in order to live the life she has chosen for herself, or when So-i tells Seo Yul that he made the world look clean and bright for her.

But despite all the entertainments S2 gave (including its cloyingly too-happy ending), I prefer to think that ALCHEMY OF SOULS ended in S1, and that Jang Uk is taking his time to heal his wounds, carrying his grief until it becomes lighter and lighter as he walks through the soul shifters’ forest and down to the soul shifters’ cliff to gaze at his beloved’s watery grave.