Tag: writing

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.
    ↩︎
  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/.
    ↩︎
  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
    ↩︎
  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
    ↩︎
  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/
    ↩︎
  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/
    ↩︎
  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.
    ↩︎
  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/.
    ↩︎

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.

acknowledgments

The other day, a friend from grad school emailed me for a copy of my dissertation. I knew my work was embargoed, but I went to check the university website and found that my PhD thesis, titled Tracing the Roots of Disjunction: Dutertismo and the Discourse of Liberal Democracy in the Philippines, had already been uploaded. It struck me that it’s been a year since my research findings seminar (RFS), when I presented an overview of my research to a general public (the seminar was in hybrid format; over 100 people, most of whom I didn’t personally know, registered to attend via Zoom — though ofc only a fraction of that showed up, haha). After the RFS came revisions, then the viva, then more revisions, before I finally submitted the final draft in September 2021. Since then, I had not taken a look at my thesis again. I have been very, very busy. Also I was avoiding the anxiety that came with the pressure to revise and publish, which I knew would intensify the moment I re-read what I wrote for what seemed like the thousandth time. But browsing the thesis now, I feel a little amazed that I even managed to compose a 200-page essay that doesn’t read too badly. There are many arguments I could still have developed, points I could have more tightly tied together, but as it stands, and from my less di/stressed and anxious vantage point now, I can say that that work is something I can feel proud to have written.

Slides from my RFS presentation

I read somewhere that in some cases, the best books tell us things that we already know but have no language to express in a systematic fashion. I hope that somebody out there experiences a moment of profound understanding with the midwifery of my writing (or is that too presumptuous an ask?). In any case, at some point (ideally, a quickly approaching point) I should get to the work of revision and publication and research dissemination that is my obligation as a publicly subsidized scholar.

But for this blogpost, I wish to record the full version of my thesis acknowledgments. (The submitted version is a bit truncated so as not to appear too self-indulgent, as well as to skirt politically sensitive remarks. The full thesis and relevant front and back matter may be downloaded from the LU Digital Commons website, while the TOC, introduction, and conclusion may be downloaded from my Academia page). The acknowledgments section, quite literally, was the only part I actively enjoyed writing. Much of my thesis deals with heavy, sometimes horrific stuff (I remember those weeks I spent collecting, sifting through, and analyzing snuff photos and videos of extrajudicial killings, or reading interviews with victims’ families, or following flame wars between “DDS” and “Dilawan” on social media, etc.), so I couldn’t say that I experienced research and writing as pleasure. I think I got through the whole ordeal by sheer doggedness (as a Taurus) and a desire to make sense of what had seemed utterly senseless to me. But writing the acknowledgments, I was able to look back on the conversations and company I shared with people who deeply cared about me, my work, or their own intellectual and political pursuits, and thereby inspired me to continue my efforts, even when writing seemed most pointless. It’s helpful too to remember that I owe a debt of gratitude to so many people and institutions, and that one of the best ways of repaying them is by persisting in the labor of education, conscientization, and pakikialam, in its senses of caring, curiosity, knowing, and intervention—that is to say, pakikialam as praxis.

Profs and grad students from the LU Department of Cultural Studies
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote the bulk of the material that would constitute the chapters of this thesis during a time of political upheaval and the unravelling of “normality,” both in the Philippines, my home country, and Hong Kong, where I was living. In late 2019, the large-scale public demonstrations against the Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) that evolved into a mass movement for democracy and government accountability to the people of Hong Kong intensified with the escalation of policing tactics and polarization in society. The violence that attended clashes between protesters, counter-protesters, and police, the closure of transportation hubs, the siege of university campuses, the mass arrests of students and other dissenters, the disruption of normal campus and public activities, and the general mood of anger, distress, and despondency that pervaded classrooms made research, teaching, and writing at times nigh impossible.In 2020, the global spread of COVID-19, subsequent lockdowns, economic contractions, and heightened collective anxiety and grief over unemployment, immobility, isolation, militarization, racism, disease, and deaths further strained social relations and the rhythms of daily life, work, sleep, and sociality. Amidst a climate of political and pandemic turmoil, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the support and encouragement of so many people. 

I thank my chief supervisor, Tejaswini Niranjana, for her generous and dedicated mentorship. Teju read and commented on countless of my drafts, and was unstinting and honest in her feedback. Our conversations taught me how to engage productively with criticism, to ask difficult questions, and not to be satisfied with easy and settled answers. Working with her closely as her teaching and research assistant, and witnessing the time and energy she poured into teaching, research, publication, administration, artistic and academic collaborations, and the cultivation of communities and institutions of scholarship has been deeply influential to me as a young female scholar who still wishes to stay in academia, in spite of its manifold problems and difficulties. Beyond work, Teju also made sure that I ate well, met interesting people, and made time for rest and activities I enjoyed—things that I tend to neglect or that elude me when I feel unsatisfied with my writing progress. For her concern and support, I am grateful. 

My co-supervisor, Anjeline de Dios, read the first full draft of my thesis and gave useful suggestions for organizing and tying together a diverse range of materials and conceptual frames. I thank her for holding space for the sprawling messiness of the work I initially presented, for her creative insights and guiding questions, for listening to and through me, and for offering me new perspectives and vocabularies with which to consider not only my thesis material, but also my experiences. Her friendship, conversation, art, and lunch/dinner treats have nourished me. 

I thank the members of my examination panel, professors Isaac Hui, Lisa Leung, and Rolando Tolentino, for the careful attention they paid to my work, and for their detailed and helpful feedback. My thesis defense, I felt, was tough but fruitful. I may not have been able to incorporate some of their suggestions in this iteration of my research, but I look forward to revisiting and more fully engaging with their valuable critiques and questions when I revise this work again for publication. 

I presented early drafts of the chapters of this thesis at various conferences, including the 14th Singapore Graduate Forum on Southeast Asian Studies at the Asia Research Institute, the 2019 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference at Silliman University, and the 2021 International Political Science Association Virtual World Congress. I thank my interlocutors in those conferences for sharing their thoughts and suggestions. During crucial stages of writing and revision, I benefited from the advice, criticism, encouragement, or practical assistance extended to me by Heidi Emily Abad, Lai Besana, Ayrie Ching, Honeylein de Peralta, Alexandra Dias, Carman Fung, Haewon Lee, Lumberto Mendoza, Audrey Rose Mirasol, Median Mutiara, Timothy Ong, Abraham Overbeeke, Loi Panganiban, Nini Peng, Carlos Quijon, Purple Romero, Shah Salleh, Aileen Salonga, ‪Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr.‬, Naoko Shimazu, Julian Tejada, Carmina Untalan, Vyxz Vasquez, Clod Marlan Krister Yambao, Soo Ryon Yoon, Yukito, and Tobias Zuser. 

Attending one of Wataru Kusaka’s conference presentations in 2014 and reading more of his work inspired me to pursue this research. The regular writing workshops and check-ins I had with Ping-hsiu Alice Lin kept me motivated through the difficult months of 2020 and 2021; her comradeship and thoughtful observations, questions, and suggestions made the long and recursive process of researching, writing, and revising this thesis more enjoyable. Darren Mangado has read innumerable drafts of this research in various forms and stages of ideation, polish, and coherence (or the lack thereof). I thank him for his painstaking attention to structure and argumentation, incisive comments, and affective labor. 

At Lingnan University, I met dear friends—Iting Chen, Toto Lee, Kelvin Wu, and Dayang Yraola—whose company, conversation, understanding, care, and cooking have sustained my life in Hong Kong these past four years. I thank them and my other officemates and peers, particularly Josie Kuhn, Helen Meng, Cuiyan Wen, Ge Song, Lili Lin, Chun-lean Lim, Chor See Chan, Lady Partosa, Kervin Calabias, and Chang Qu for our shared meals, ordeals, musings, and laughter. I am fortunate to have found my way to the Department of Cultural Studies (CUS) and the broader Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) network and be part of a supportive community of scholars, whose political commitments, critically engaged and locally relevant research, pedagogies, and kindness have often inspired me. It has been an honor to converse with and learn from professors Ackbar Abbas, Roberto Castillo, Stephen Chan, Anjeline de Dios, Lai-Tze Fan, Rolien Hoyng, Po-keung Hui, IP Iam Chong, LAU Kin-chi, Lisa Leung, Tejaswini Niranjana, PUN Ngai, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Denise Tang, Yvonne Yau, and Soo Ryon Yoon, as well as visiting professors CHUA Beng Huat, David Scott, Nishant Shah, and TAN Sooi Beng. The warmth and assistance of our administrative staff Josephine Tsui, Cathy Tong, MAN Shan Shan, and Amber Chau helped me settle into the rhythms of Hong Kong university life. I also thank CUS alumni Ted Cheng, Chow Sze Chung, Anneke Coppoolse, Mikee Inton-Campbell, Jay Lau, Sonia Wong, and Tobias Zuser for sharing their experiences, advice, and projects, the variety of which helped me appreciate the richness of doing cultural studies.  

My professors at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman—Maria Rhodora Ancheta, Conchitina Cruz, Judy Ick, May Jurilla, Anna Felicia Sanchez, Lily Rose Tope, and Zosimo Lee—have read my work, endorsed my applications to jobs, scholarships, and graduate school, and written me numerous recommendation letters throughout the years, even when I did not get some of the things I applied for; I thank them for their guidance and trust, and for modeling commitment to their students and colleagues. I appreciate my colleagues in the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature (DECL) for holding the fort through distressing times; with their support, I was able to pursue graduate studies. I also thank Rosanna Dacanay, Annie Ilagan, and the late Julie Cordero for patiently reminding me to accomplish paperwork and helping me navigate the mazes of university bureaucracy. 

Zaxx Abraham, Aviva Domasian, Jerome Furing, Jean Lau, Totoy Mendoza, Josel Nicolas, and Cassandra Teodosio, thank you for being. To my friends in UP Lingua Franca (Elders cohort) and UP Writers Club, thank you for hearty and heartening chats and e-numan. Thank you to Jaja and Kat of the Bad Vibes podcast, whose episodes have seen me through the blues of writing and social distancing. Joana Medina’s yoga classes over Zoom have helped maintain my sanity since the pandemic began. The music of IU and DAY6 kept me company through many sleepless, tired nights. 

I thank my family for their affection and respect for my personal and professional decisions, even when they do not quite understand or approve of them. Knowing that they have my back has given me the courage to live the sort of life I would want to sustain. My parents, Rosemary and Virgilio, have always tried to give me the freedom to pursue my passions within reason. My uncles, Jov and Oliver, have done so much to support me in my endeavors. I thank my siblings—Elizabeth, Kate, Karen, and Erwin—for keeping things together and for entertaining my many mundane requests for help and for photos and videos of Baki, Barney, and Bingo.  

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to the courageous activists of UNIFIL-MIGRANTE-HK, GABRIELA HK, and their allied organizations and individuals, who tenaciously and joyfully work to advance the politicization, conscientization, rights, and welfare of workers in Hong Kong and in the Philippines. I especially thank all of my interlocutors for sharing their experiences, thoughts, hopes, and advice. I write this with deep gratitude for their with-ing, their pagbubukas, and their patient guidance in the arts of making possible. Mabuhay po kayo.

Earlier, I sent a message to a professor whose writings have been profoundly influential and generative for me, thanking him for his work and for his encouragement of junior scholars. He congratulated me and said, “Welcome to the Permanent Head Damage club, Dr. R——-!”

SETs and super says

I read my SETs (Student Evaluation of the Teacher) today. The first thing I noticed was that it looked different from previous SETs I’d read (four years ago…). Gone were the multiple pages of numericized performance descriptors that I used to skip. Instead, those were whittled down to 15 items in one neat table. Following that were two questions demanding qualitative answers:

  1. In relation to your learning experience in this class, what does your teacher do that you find very helpful/effective?
  2. How do you think can the teaching in this class be improved to enhance your learning experience?

Maybe because the students I taught last semester were a bit older, the answers to the questions were a bit more mature (I used to get comments about what I wore to class or other matters of appearance, for example). I’ve been teaching college students since 2013, so there wasn’t much that was new in the feedback that I received, except comments particular to the remote learning set-up. Some suggested the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) other than Google Classroom — for example, Canva or Discord. I’m still meditating on whether my resistance to this derives from concerns about access (especially when many students don’t have a regular or stable access to the internet or to fast bandwidth speeds), or because it would take too much work to migrate my materials and pedagogies to yet another platform. Maybe I like the idea of sticking to Classroom precisely because it’s austere, no-nonsense. When I see Classroom, I expect to focus and work.

Other suggestions concerned workload (they wanted less of it, as usual, though one outlier actually asked for more activities and exercises), my manner of giving feedback (“harsh”), and my persona (“intimidating” — but also “funny” and “engaging” — it’s a weird mix). One of my auntie teacher friends told me it’s easier for students to learn when they aren’t scared. I like to be always a little scared of saying something foolish. It makes me more careful about how I think, what I articulate. When I make a mistake, I want to feel it, to smell the stink. Then I figure out what to do to avoid stinking, without holding back my desire to question, to engage, to share what I think and what I know. Some students like this, some don’t. I can’t please everyone (though as a Libra Moon, I could try), and I don’t mean to. With RUPP revived on Reddit anyway, students can choose to avoid the sort of personalities they don’t want to face. Then, they graduate and realize that there are many sorts of people in this world they can’t help but learn how to deal with.

But anyway, I picked up some helpful things that I plan to apply next term. One is lessening the frequency of discussion prompts, and making this activity a collaborative effort rather than an individual one. I’ll create discussion groups of maybe three to five students to maximize opportunities for peer learning and multiply the voices and perspectives for thinking through the prompts. (I doubt that anyone reads the discussion prompt answers of all of their classmates.) Another is increasing the number of synchronous sessions, especially when students have the means to attend them. (I’ll ask my classes to answer a survey about how many synchronous sessions they want.) Frankly, it would make my life easier to have more synch sessions, since asynch ones take two to three times more work to prepare and process afterward. Lastly, I’ll make deadlines more flexible: a range (maybe a week) rather than one fixed date. I won’t give deductions for late submissions, but I won’t give feedback on late submissions. If they want early feedback, they will turn in exercises and drafts within the one-week submission period. (Because time and energy are limited, no one can escape the reality of tradeoffs.)

I also aim to explain more fully, next term, my reasons for not giving numerical grades until the end of the semester. I’ve been reading resources on ungrading to develop my vocabulary for articulating what I already knew as an obsessively grade-conscious undergrad: that working primarily in the service of the grading system has a way of making mere numbers mean more than the struggles and joys and creativity of learning. I was hell-bent on getting straight 1.0s back then — I cried if I got anything lower than a 1.5 — and looking back, I see that it diminished rather than enriched my experience of university and flattened my conception of myself. Looking back, I think that it was incredibly silly to measure myself with a number, when my (future) colleagues cared more about my competencies and my conversation and my work ethic and my personality more than whatever digits were in my transcript.

I had some time in the morning, so I made a Tumblr blog, filling it with notes-to-self from the planner I kept while I was writing my dissertation. I guess I revisited those notes because while I gave myself a few months last year to ease myself back into teaching, this year I know I must work on publications in earnest if I’m to survive in academia. I guess I missed having a trusted mentor to turn to when I’m stuck with writing, but I’m an academic adult now, I have a piece of paper that says so!😆 (There’s this illustration in PhD Comics, of “The Grad Student Brain.” I may not technically be a grad student any more, but it still speaks to me, haha!) Anyway, the blog is called “super says” because many of those ideas, I got from my supervisor. Some of them, she directly said to me, some of them I thought about post-thesis consultations with her, some of them I remembered from my own teaching practice but sort of forgot as I inhabited the identity of “student.” You can check out the Tumblr blog here, if you feel like some writing and research-related pep talk. (As Super said, I’m paying the lessons forward. This is free labor, I don’t earn a single centavo from this blog, you’re welcome.)

a portrait of Super that I drew right before she left HK

Some last bit of news: my appointment papers have come down, I’ve officially been promoted from Instructor to Assistant Professor — to my great relief, mostly because I have more familial and financial obligations now. But also, I’m glad I can finally change my email signature. Hahaha. (Titles my change, but my workaholic nature stays the same, though I’m managing it better now. I’m getting older, after all.)