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.

life like poetry

It has happened. After over three years of successfully dodging COVID-19 by mostly staying in, masking outdoors, avoiding crowded places, and getting vaccinated and boosted ASAP, I finally got infected. Two days of fever, headache, muscle pain, and a runny nose got me taking a rapid antigen test et voilà! Two red lines. Now I have to cancel a New Year’s trip to Hong Kong, spend on meds and more testing kits, and isolate in my flat instead of greeting 2023 in the company of family and friends. But at least I get to write this entry as Mercury begins its retrograde movement. After all, Mercury Rx encourages slowing down, turning inward, taking stock.

I type this sitting on my pallet bed in my new apartment, for which I signed an annual lease back in August. I spent quite a pretty penny on furnishings and fixing up the place, but I was lucky to get this before rents started surging again as COVID restrictions eased and the city resumed face-to-face activities. My new apartment has a tendency for dampness (which means I have to check my furniture for moulds during humid months), but it also has an unobstructed view of the sky at dusk. It doesn’t get too much direct sunlight, which is killing my potted oregano, but keeps the rest of my house plants (monstera, sanseveria, pothos, portulaca, peace lily, aglaonema, and even the tomato hanging on the windowsill) happy enough. In the mornings, I make coffee, sweep and mop the floor, practice yoga, light candles and oil diffusers in the shower, and prepare for class; after class, I cook and eat my one meal of the day, wash the dishes, and watch the sun set. In the evenings, I read or listen to audiobooks or meet friends or mark student work or write emails and schedule them for sending in the morning or watch Netflix while balancing on my Indoboard or buy groceries or take out the trash.

Life is as hectic as ever (especially now that I have increased personal and professional responsibilities), but I am enjoying the day-to-day labor of maintaining my life. Housework takes up so much time, even if one lives alone, but grad school taught me to appreciate with vehemence the pleasures of cleaning and tidying the house as a practice of clearing a cluttered mind. I’m just grateful to be able to have my own space, filled with carefully chosen things that support my living, a space that, though thoroughly fitted to my needs and predilections, is ready to welcome people I cherish so we can share some time together.

In an early get-together this holiday season, my friend A. asked the company to describe their year in three words. I believe I answered “slowness,” “stability,” and “contentment.” A. remarked, Oh that’s wonderful. I replied that I wasn’t so sure that this was wonderful, for contentment could easily turn to complacency, stability to stuckness, slowness to sloth. But my friend J. said that it’s okay to take our time and to rest, that it’s foolish to expect ourselves to perform on top level all of the time. Our lives have seasons of productivity and receptivity, of incubation and flowering. The important thing is to listen to what our being requires in each different season, and to do the needful to achieve our purpose and protect our long-term happiness.

I may have described my year as slow, but reviewing my calendar and journal, I realize that so much has happened just these past six months. Not only have I moved residences, but I also was suddenly asked to assume an administrative position that had me spending literally every waking hour of a whole month (or two) responding to emails, collecting, organizing, and analyzing data, and making plans that impacted both students and faculty — and I’m supposed to do this every semester henceforth (at least for the next year or so). I presented a paper at an international conference, designed two courses from scratch, submitted the final revision of a book chapter on Dutertismo’s “war imaginary,” wrote more peer reviews and proofread papers for friends, taught three different hybrid face-to-face classes, attended academic and artist talks and exhibit openings, talked to tattoo artists, visited museums and galleries and cinemas. I signed up for a month of in-person ashtanga classes in QC, went on a few out-of-town trips, got a few more tattoos, saw Epik High perform in the New Frontier Theater, celebrated the wedding of two good friends, went swimming in the renovated UP Pool. I marched in the SONA rally, supported fundraising drives for disaster response or for the bailing out of political prisoners, began work as part of a research cluster on mediated politics for a cultural studies conference happening in Ahmedabad next year. I’ve recorded and edited so many video lectures (some of which are uploaded to my Youtube channel), participated in a panel discussion on the rhetoric of text-based electoral campaign materials, and advised a couple of my former Eng 13 students, whom I encouraged to participate in an international academic essay writing contest on South Korea-ASEAN relations. (They won first place in the sub-theme “Enhancing Mutual Cultural Understanding,” besting 22 other participating teams of undergrad and graduate students from around Asia, of course I’m proud.)

It’s good to list things in this manner. Now I feel like I haven’t been so lazy this year after all.

Whenever I feel anxious or discontent about my life and the speed with which I traverse my path, I allow myself to recognize how far I’ve walked, even if, to someone looking from the outside in, I seem to have only returned to the same place. But I see that the life I’m living now is very close to the life my twenty-something self dreamt of in her rented room in the attic of an old house in Sampaloc. Granted, I’m not living, as I had fantasized, in a small town near mountains and the sea (like some Seoul-weary character in a “healing” K-drama), but I am doing the sort of work that I have always wanted to do with people whom I generally respect and like. I maintain great latitude in structuring my time (even if I do sometimes still end up overworking), and I earn more than enough for my own keep and occasional luxuries (tattoos, mostly, though inflation sure is cutting into my disposable income).

If I wanted more, I’d probably want a richer, deeper, more layered experience and knowledge of what I experience and know now — by honing my learning and expanding my skills set, seeking feedback and guidance from people who are wiser and more seasoned and better connected and kinder than me, following my curiosity to new fields of inquiry, new people, new conversations and genres of communication.

Though I am generally happy with the life I have made with my family and friends and colleagues who’ve stuck around, of course there are moments of doubt and sadness — like when my friends from (overseas) academia asked if I weren’t unduly chaining myself to an institution when I could possibly find “better” positions elsewhere, or when, at my friends’ wedding reception, all the guests with romantic partners were asked to stand and dance with their lovers and I found that, remaining seated, I was in the tiny minority. But such moments, as emotions do, come and go, like the rain. Now that I am older, I have learned not to attach too much significance to what is fleeting, and instead consider what I truly need, what I yearn to do with this my one life. What and whom do I stand for? What do I work for, in whose interests? What will fulfill me? I think about these questions, too, when I feel guilt about not living a more activist life, a life that is given to fighting for the rights of the most exploited and oppressed in ways that are direct and immediate and make a concrete difference in a specific community. But I know myself and know that there is only so much that I am willing to sacrifice — at least, at this point in my life, when I am only beginning to enjoy the fruits of my dogged labor of two decades. We have to lie on the bed that we have made. We can try to do good wherever we can.

In her mid-August 2022 tarot and astrology reading for Taureans, Amber Khan (a.k.a. The Quietest Revolution) said:

What’s the point of living life in the meantime? [What’s the point of being] stuck when you could be moving forward, when you could be driven and focused every day, and every minute could mean something because it’s taking you somewhere? … every step after step after step is taken with purpose. … And  you got to do the work everyday, everyday, everyday — everyday you build on the work from the day before, and that’s just what it is. …

When you have these lapses, it is very, very important to get back on the road, get back going in the right direction. Remind yourself what that direction is. Why? Why are we going in that direction? What’s the motivation? Why, just to win? … Just take all the money in the world and stuff it in our ears and sit on a big pile of it? And eat whatever we want? Is that what it is? No. What does a Taurus want? Beauty, romance, the thrill. Love, sex, food, indulgences, a gorgeous view, a gorgeous person, a gorgeous connection, something nice to eat, a comfy set of clothing, and an even comfier sofa. Someone soft and strong to sit next to you. To reduce you to just a bunch of indulgences, or [just someone] who loves money for the sake of loving money is so banal *laughs* and so inaccurate. This life is like poetry to you. A moving painting. A ballet. Your direction is clear, and it always has been, it will always go in that one direction: the aesthetic — the beauty of it, the romance of it, the taste of it, the feel of it — that’s all there is.

So you know where you’re going and you know where you’ve been. Well, that puts you in great company. Now put your head down and go back to work. 

And get back to work — with a smart plan — I will (well, at least once I recover from this bout of pandemic flu…). In the coming year I resolve to keep on walking my path, through hills and gulleys, through asphalt and dirt road, across streams and forests (or plain ol’ EDSA traffic), eyes wide open to my surroundings and my map and potential meet-cutes along the way. And I will keep my mind and body strong and pliable, so that I can accomplish what I need and desire to do without losing my balance or my bearings.

May we all keep in good health — upon which everything else rests — this coming year. Take care. Good luck.

san nin hou!

fu fu sang wai, gung zok sun lei!

How shall I tell you about the year that was since we last spoke? Things kept happening one after the other, I’ve barely had the time to catch my breath, much less to process all that’s come to pass.

I could say, The year just zipped by, I can barely remember a thing! But that’s not true. All year I sat at my desk facing the monthly calendar I updated every day, every day I checked off items in my weekly planner, every start of the week I listed all that I had to accomplish in the next six days. I ate once a day, accounted for my time by the hour, and saw my schedule even in dreams. So I can tell you that from January to April 2021, I went on occasional mountain hikes or protest demos, and I drafted, in full, the main chapters of my dissertation, stitching together and patching up holes in earlier drafts with the help of my supervisor and writing accountability partner; in May I presented my research findings in a public seminar, wrote the introduction and the conclusion, fixed the bibliography, and submitted the exam draft to my committee; in June, I defended my thesis, passed the viva with distinction and with revisions, and received a bouquet of sunflowers and a Chinese name from my friends, who had prepared a dinner party to celebrate with me. I still remember sleeping on the black leather couch in my friend’s living room, waking up to a breakfast of dimsum and black coffee, and listening to Ka Wai and Iting discuss at the table the merits of this or that Chinese character for the name they were composing for me (Iting said, at one point, Yes, yes that symbol is quite alright, but it sounds like a grandma’s name!). In truth, I treasure 葵思琳 more than my thesis distinction; whenever my Chinese friends read this name, they tell me that it suits me exceedingly well.

In July, I got a new tattoo, which ran the length of my left arm, shoulder to wrist. I took three or four trips to the nearest LBC branch, lugging backpacks and suitcases, sending back to QC, box by box, the life I had made in HK. I shipped half of my belongings home and gave away maybe a quarter. The rest I carried or stored in the office. On the same night I presented a paper at an international political science conference, I moved out of the campus hostel. I finished packing right after our panel’s Q&A and hailed a taxi to the next district at 9 PM. I worked on my thesis revisions in a vacationing professor’s house. Sometimes I slept on her bed, sometimes on my yoga mat on her living room carpet, sometimes on her couch. Sometimes I took the bus and then the train to the campus to work all night in the postgrad office, like I did in my first year, falling asleep with my socks on, lying curled on the tiny blue-gray sofa at 7 a.m. after hours of binge-drinking coffee and tea and Pocari Sweat while typing. I spent many, many nights hard at work — I pushed myself past drowsiness, past tears, past migraine, past exhaustion, because I knew that I was racing against time — my student visa was expiring the next month. On one of those nights, I had dinner with an acquaintance; afterwards we took a stroll in the esplanade along the river, and sat by the pier, talking about grad school and what came after. It was a gloomy discussion, filled with anxieties about the glutted and contracting academic jobs market, the pressures of publication, the cutthroat competition, the low wages for overworked contingent faculty. Suddenly he asked me to sleep with him. He didn’t put it so crudely, of course. He said he wanted to see my tattoos, to touch them, all of them, someplace else, somewhere where we could be alone all night and rest. But I knew he was married (I always do my homework before spending any amount of time with men), so I stood up and said brightly, Oh look at the time!! I need to work on my thesis revisions now, goodbye!

In August I interviewed a few local tattooists, and got two new tattoos, making all the skinfriends I’d made since January of that year four. My last two tattoos were by men (all my other tattoos — they’re about 15 now — were by women). For one of them, I took off my shirt, and then my bra, and stood in front of a body-length mirror while the tattooist measured the space between two breasts, then between my breasts and my navel, so that he could align the stencil correctly. I took it as a mark of his professionalism, and of my personal triumph over past trauma, that I was unabashed to be so naked alone with a stranger. That tattoo took five hours to be cut and inked into my abdomen. In that space of time I rested in the thought that I was nothing more than canvas that happened to be breathing.

When the professor arrived back from her vacation, I moved from her house to a hotel, where I spent a week, cheered for the contestants on Girls Planet 999 in bed after work, and learned how to skateboard in an empty parking lot. Then I moved from the hotel to my friend’s house, sleeping for a few nights on his couch, washing my clothes in his laundry room, sharing the bathroom with three other housemates. The morning I moved in with my backpack and my balance board and two large suitcases, I sat on the couch and started crying; K. didn’t know quite what to do, so he just sat there with me. When I was done crying, A. made me bowl of warm oatmeal with vanilla yogurt and seeds. (The easiest way to placate me when I am sad or angry is to feed me.) We would have dinner or lunch or breakfast together a few more times after that, K. and A. and Z. and I. Then, at the end of August, on a morning dark with heavy rain, I took a taxi to the airport and moved back home. In quarantine in September I formatted my thesis and submitted the final draft for printing. I prepared for the classes I would be teaching. I cancelled my Hong Kong bank credit card and changed my contact numbers. I balanced on my Indoboard while watching Hometown Cha Cha Cha. I moved into a nigh-empty apartment that I leased from a friend, filled it with secondhand furniture and plants, and braced myself to face the life I had suspended four years ago.

Now the semester is over, and the next one is starting in a week. In the last quarter of the year, I taught remotely, participated in a three-night international writing workshop on postcolonial literary criticism, did research for a museum, attended rehearsals for a mobile sound art performance, helped plan a conference on the relevance of English Studies in the postcolonies of Southeast Asia, graduated and got my PhD diploma, applied for promotion, applied for a conference, wrote peer reviews for journals, drafted an abstract for a special issue, copyedited manuscripts and proposals for close friends, marked hundreds of student drafts and exercises, went on a date (a dud), went on a hike (with my lovely friends), cared for my family (all of whom got COVID during the Omicron spike), visited the hairdresser who’s been cutting my hair for the past decade.

Tomorrow I have registration advising duties again; I submitted last semester’s grades just a couple of days ago. I’m not done with my course packs for next term. I haven’t even read my SETs. I have to finish peer reviewing an article for a journal this Friday. I have to begin preparing for a panel discussion at the end of the month. More than anything, I want to hit a pause button for life right now and sleep for a thousand years.

I’ll try to write more here in the coming weeks. There is so much that I want to put down for my older self to read, before all those memories fade, before I lose sight of all that’s been changing, all that has changed.