Vignettes of my life in Asian film (awow?)

I always wondered why Asian movies had this gravitational pull on not just me, but most of my friends. It always felt like there’s a personal touch to it that captures struggle and makes it universal. Or, I’ve always known that, but I just seem to forget to be weird about it a.k.a. lose all semblance of being normal and have unsolicited commentary about how it (like this entry). 

I’ve since resuscitated this blog with the vigor of a girl who has just been given her first lipstick (which was last week, when I went on a bender and decided to Write Again), 

I think it’s okay-ish for me to preface my comeback with a list of films, a la-2014 Audrie sans the unnecessary keyboard smashing and Twitter-speak I used to think were cool when writing essays. (But I’ll never let go of typing ‘anyhoo’ because I profusely depended on New Girl and Jess lingo during my formative years and 2023 is the year of embracing the cringe to entrench freedom.)

Anyhoo, this is another unprompted opinion-slash-discussion piece on my favorite Asian films, excluding the ones from the Philippines because it deserves a stand-alone spotlight of its own. As a Hilda Koronel stan I think I’m doing myself (and this planned “piece”) some justice.

Around two years ago, I moved out of my family’s house because my first job after my (quite long) stint at the newsroom required us to work on-site in Makati (and personally I wanted to be on my own after deciding that staying in that environment burned me out). A lot of shelving out money from my savings had to be done so it really felt major and big girl-y. It wasn’t until a year after that when I found One Million Yen Girl (2008), where a girl moves out and finds an apartment every time she earns one million Yen. Through the menial jobs she manages to get hired for, Suzuko, the protagonist, always finds it either too hard to live or too suffocating due to the people she meets along the way.

In one particular scene, Suzuko is seen writing down her budget computation as she tries to make ends meet and, of course, to earn her next million. This, I believe, spoke to me on so many levels, along with the part where she idly waits at the coin laundry station for her clothes. So many of my days when I started living alone moved along those same lines–the mundanity of errands, the peace grocery shopping gives me, and the overall mixing of peace and chaos. I could be lying in bed in silence but in my head are endless computations of my monthly bills. 

My childhood always felt like everything was on fire, deeming everything I do to be urgent, even when playing or studying. I still couldn’t explain why it was so, but that’s how I would describe it if someone asked me to say what’s at the top of my head. I always wished for it to be otherwise, where an emotional crisis is unusual.

(If this movie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, it’s the ever so hard dealings of Philippine bureaucracy and overall system. This is hardly the point why I thought of writing about this but life in Japan seems so smooth and serene, completely the opposite here. It would’ve been easier to romanticize what I was going through during my first few months of independence if I had the same setting as Suzuko: the many moments she felt alienated but hushed and consoled by the sceneries, the bike lanes, the peach-picking moments, the crickets humming in the background. I’m going out of tangent here but as a domesticated woman who relies on her home routines to keep her sanity, these things are of unmatched caliber.)

It’s not that I am her, of course. I still come from privilege because I had job security and despite my financial woes I still managed to float through the bills and other finances a.k.a. impulsive purchases of books and snacks, whereas Suzuko wass always chasing something just to fend for herself and survive daily struggles without starving. It is so easy to blame Suzuko for much of her problems, to vilify her for the choices she made but we are remarkably forgetting that she is stripped of the privilege to choose. Most of us tend to decide on the next best option if the first one is unattainable. 

My attachment to this film, I digressed, was how it limned on mundanity and purpose, both coinciding as a call-out to those who are always given the option to choose (a privilege!) and not feel any burden nor obligation to be responsible for–something people my age tend to just gloss over and take for granted. This was heightened when TikTok became my pastime and I kept seeing people who can have whatever they want in one click, materialized in 30-second or one-minute vlogs about recent purchases or hauls. One time I got upset over how this girl (a student, obviously younger than me) went grocery shopping for snacks to fill her fridge, explaining through a voice-over that she doesn’t have a certain budget for food because she doesn’t want to deprive herself of good snacks to munch, all the while living in a luxury condo in a major CBD in Taguig. In one scene, Suzuko can be seen mulling over which vegetables she could check out, careful to not toss her budget up a notch. In another, she is seen listing down her expenses while tapping on a calculator. Things like this made me oscillate between my reality and hers: it felt like a hug that authenticated my struggles.

To an extent, another tremor that triggered my liking to the plot’s seamless portrayal of yearning was her relationship with her younger brother whom she leaves behind with her parents. I priorly didn’t want to go down that path but that tenet of my life begs to be volumized, not shrunk. Leaving home meant leaving my siblings behind. Shielding myself from the anxieties I felt at home meant shielding me from my siblings’ love and bond. I’ve shared a daily life with them since they were born and to decidedly be peeled off of it is gut-wrenching. Years after that big move, this year, I only saw them once. But contrary to the movie, the longing for my kid siblings couldn’t, for all my efforts, precipitate a return to my family. 

Much of this narrative about returning and leaving was also dominant in another favorite, Microhabitat (2017). When my dream of being independent was fully realized, a compromise between needs and wants also took place; I wrestled between giving up survival essentials and clinging onto the worldly matters that (I thought) would be sources of perpetual joy, as long as I kept them and saw them everyday, scattered around my apartment. 

The protagonist, Mi-so, is a thirty-something year old woman who (alarmingly) gives up basic necessities (read: her rent) to keep close to her most prized luxuries: cigarettes, whiskey, and sometimes her boyfriend, an aspiring cartoonist who’s also economically challenged like her. Working as a housekeeper, Mi-so’s income is obviously not enough to cover her expenses, not to mention the fact that she has to regularly issue herself a medication for a rare syndrome that makes her hair turn gray. When her landlord decides to raise her rent, Mi-so arrives at a head-turning decision to keep afloat her priorities: she gives up her apartment, makes a list of her old bandmates-slash-old-friends, and contacts them one by one to stay with them at short intervals of time, ultimately a house to house project of hers. All this just for her to afford cigarettes and whiskey.

During her stay with her friends, Mi-so was met with differing welcomes. Mi-so becomes the static pole of the narrative in a sense that these people she encounters have all made decisions that propelled a 180-degree turn lifestyle; Mi-so is still unable to comprehend how money changed them, and how money can change her and her lifestyle. Conversely, the bandmates can’t wrap their head around how a person like Mi-so rawdogs a life devoted to smoking and drinking. 

I can’t exactly say that I was once her, nor am I planning to delightfully pursue her sojourn across cities for a bed to sleep in. But I grew up moving a lot due to my parents’ erratic relationship. I went from house to house, with different people looking after me. There were weeks where I’d spend my time just floating across Metro Manila and sometimes outside the capital, thanks to my mother and grandmother’s multiple relatives whom I don’t remember at all now. It felt nomadic and exhausting on my part, and I carried that with me until earlier this year, when I moved in (and out) of my third apartment in two years. Sans Mi-so’s questionable choices, it felt familiar for me; there were so many spaces I slept in, yet so very few of it felt necessary because I was too young to reckon any of it as a formative moment. I grew up seeing my imagined perfection of a life lived by others around me: a stable, functional family, without the leaving and packing of bags and riding buses to escape something I couldn’t wrap my head around. 

Microhabitat might just be one of those viewing experiences where it isn’t subtle on reinforcing a realistic ethos of an economy–South Korea is refreshingly painted as not a cradle of cutesy haven of quirky cafés and verdant walkways and parks, but an unromanticized terrain of reality: rent is impossibly unattainable, and is completely the opposite of what K-dramas typified as the norm in the country. The film stands as an important reminder on situational independence and financing yourself, but without coming across as preachy. In contrast to those who have it “easier” than Mi-so–her former bandmates having the luxury of living in a home, the promise of a hot, home-cooked meal at any moment, and the option to be materialistic–they, too, have the forced practicalities they have to take into account. The ballooning amount of housing loans, the lack of kitchen skills and having to rely on someone to cook, the inability to clean and be organized–all addressed by Mi-so who seems to be the catalyst who unconsciously teaches us (them) a top-billed reflection in Not Having it All in Life.

Subtleties aside, it’s a kind of self-introspection that necessitates a moment to portray one’s own reality; it’s most definitely not the corny execution of the adage “be grateful,” but more of an entertaining yet reflective aide-memoire that is “you’re next.” As someone who lives in an economically challenged country, it’s either the homelessness I can suffer from, or the emotional turmoil of being dealt with by either of her bandmates’ personal crises. Adding to that would be what my friends always talked about when the topic of money and careers comes up: “I’m one hospitalization away from bankruptcy.” It rings true and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it everyday because accessible, if not free, healthcare in this country is elusive and will probably remain so in the forthcoming years. 

Shirkers (2018) almost twists the knife in the same manner One Million Yen Girl carves out a girl’s mission to address their derailment, within the creative industry, a repressive family, an abusive system, or just life in general. In this auto-documentary, Sandi Tan, its writer, director, producer, and editor, revisits and attempts to trace back where her lost titular movie had gone after a white  man seemingly stole it. It might have seemed to be intended as a meditative exhibition of girlhood, friendship, and creativity,, but a movie about such subject loses its meaning when themes of heartbreak, the unraveling of pasts, and unpacking the self is excluded–and Tan perfectly captured it in this caper of a flick, a semi-detective movie that I’m very endeared with in spite of its hard-hitting intimations of Asian resilience preceded by frustration.

The dreamy cinematography itself gives it away: it’s a hazy recollection of a youth filled with guileless vigor and blind idealism. In the picture, Tan, a bespectacled teen in 1992, is a recurring figure of commitment and boundless grit for anything cool and youthful to help her build her career in the creative industry. For Tan, making a movie was the very apex of that ambition as a youngster. During the production, though, Tan was under the influence of an American who fooled her and her friends-colleagues, ultimately stealing the movie from them. Years later, the movie’s raw footage resurfaced–but the sound that went with it was lost, leaving the film unfinished forever. Shirkers was the product of the search for the film’s missing parts.

The melodrama that surrounds the documentary couldn’t be more perfectly described as Tan’s attempt to locate a part of herself, of her life. Lest she wants to live within the disaffect, Tan would not have gone to such great heights in the making of this project. She ultimately earned it by the end of the documentary. The American man (whom I refuse to even name here despite the specter of this presence that loaned the documentary its jarring, dark themes) may have caused the girls the project of a lifetime, but they ultimately got it back, named the narrative back as theirs. The white man no longer has the last laugh on Shirkers. The girls do. 

Reclaiming something you know you own isn’t always a creative journey, nor dreamy and romantic as Shirkers. But it is momentous and is built on the remnants of what was once taken. I personally cannot name anything about myself that I need to reclaim, nor can I point to anything in particular that deserves any fuss or attention like Shirkers. I would say maybe my girlhood but I’d sound like a broken record. I’m not downplaying anything remotely about my past life as a bouncing little girl; I’m still living through some things I know I’ll eventually need to move on from. Maybe my Shirkers moment would come later in my life, I’m not sure.

I’m not an overlooked artist in the creative industry either, so there’s nothing I could claim mine, except maybe this blog and my journals (that will remain private until I leave this mortal plane). If there’s anything, though, I think it would be my personal view of myself and how I used to treat myself. I believe I’ve outgrown many things now, like religiously watching around ten films a week even on school nights then proceeding to write about it, mixtapes, and finally, even dreaming of a creative career that allows me to do Creative Things that are, frankly, almost always elusive for ordinary Filipinas like me. 

Like the girls in Shirkers, unless you have the right surname and the right funds, you’ll make it big. It’s the saddest reality I’ve long trained myself to swallow and move on from. They didn’t have much power then over the opportunist American who took away their dreams, much less the money and other means that could have helped them foreground the man’s culpability. Years after graduating, the glittering novelty I used to attribute to writing faded into a silent resentment for quite a while now because it has felt more like a thankless job, and less as a refuge. I put it aside not with fierce indignation for the prospect of “greener pastures,” or because I was just being “smart” with my career choices. I absolutely hated it and dreamed of being anywhere but wherever I was (at a newsroom and eventually under print broadcast). 

But in those years also (somehow) grew an anti-vulnerability against the frustrations I had towards creating. I guess. I mean I found the drive to revive this blog again. I found the time and energy to save this essay again on a newly organized Google Drive. I’m back on Mubi (not yet subscribed) to browse more films I know I could trust to give me a good time–and a learning experience. I’m committed to new activities and hobbies like getting stressed over F1 and saving money for Sonny Angels. In Gen-Z speech, I’m back on my bullshit, whether new likes or old loves. 

Reclaiming is funny business, I gather. Mostly necessary, as it compels me to fall back on something inside me that’s always been there that (re)surfaces at different points of my life. I’m glad I thought of this, relating all these emblems of myself in Asian movies, just like old times: 2014 afternoons at the fifth floor of UST Library as a starry-eyed college student who had a million selves she’s trying to serve and honor. I hope she fares well moving forward. There’s so much to write about, and reclaim. 

mumbling "i'm just a girl" for the remainder of 2023

I got my own copy of Rookie Yearbook 3 yesterday from the mail and I couldn’t explain what I felt while leafing through its worn pages. Wistfulness, if not nostalgia, dominated–there’s still this rager inside with whatever’s left of what was extinguished when reality compelled me to be practical. I had a good eye scrolling the other week; If it weren’t for a friend's post saying that she bought one, I wouldn’t have arrived at this Conclusionary Emotion (It’s from a warehouse sale I ordered from and I only got it for P99, a total of only P137 including the shipping fee. If you told 16-year-old me that I’d get it for more than quadruple of its original price nine years on, I would have laughed; one copy used to cost almost P3,000, excluding the shipping fee.) 

The year was 2008 and I’ve just been given my own PC set at home, complete with an internet connection. It was the peak of Windows Vista and I always had the best time coming home to it from school; weekday afternoons meant scrolling thoroughly across varying gaming platforms, poring over Disney edits on YouTube (my favorite was High School Musical edits of Troy and Gabriella while a cloyingly sweet pop music plays in the background), and of course the endless pages of blogs I’ve read. I read opinion pieces, pages upon pages of fanfiction, learned how to copy-paste articles from international websites in lightning-speed mode before the paywall activated the scroll-canceling screen of grey on my face. All these efforts, all the hours owed to being online, fortunately–if sometimes regrettably–built my long-standing claim that I want to write, I should write for a living, I will die a writer. It's flooded with cliche, that thought process, considering how my career trajectory over the years spouted from me resenting everything I did to save face and be perpetually known as a writer. I actually believed that being “raised by the internet” garnered me the right to document whatever there is to document. I'm literally the most embarrassing person I know.

I have Tumblr to thank for that part of my pre-adolescent years, my cliche grrrl-power arc–I saw people my age get too in-depth with how they felt toward something so trivial, like their lunch food, wax poetry over an episode of a sitcom, or express this kind of glow they feel for a song, a poem, or a book. It influenced me to be an introspective 12-year-old who would yap about her crises: are mismatched Chucks cool? Is cutting my own bangs rebellious enough to send my Dad into a frenzy of remorse for not allowing me to go to a Mayday Parade show? Am I tweaking my Greying by Gabrielle Wee Tumblr theme enough for people to find me laid-back but still cool and a bit rough on the edges because I listen to The Strokes and The Psychedelic Furs? There was always something inside that needed to punch its way out to be seen, to be heard, to be read. What started as a penchant in asking my mom to buy me the newest Total Girl or Candy Mag issues ended up being a stepping stone to a girlhood owing its shelf life to dreaming of a life à la-Andy Sachs.

Then came Rookie Mag, a virtual dream that I treated like a best friend, a sister I come home to every afternoon after school with a few simple clicks. It was a refuge of all sorts, an educational trip to survive girlhood and how to actually live it in the style of kitschy, dreamy zine. It became my first online friend, my own garden of plans as a teenager who wished to be like Tavi Gevinson: a self-serious online savant, a genuinely cool word fairy, always knew what to say and how to translate it as doodles and collages. Much of what I know now about pop culture–Greta Gerwig, Broad City, film photography, Sonic Youth, and the Fanning sisters–and life’s in and outs, I learned from Rookie during my formative years.  

My wild guess on its personal pull on me is that it somehow serves as a reminder that my 26-year-old anxieties could still be weathered by parsing through material that serves as guides for 12- to 15-year-olds. That version of me, an older cohort-slash-reader of this record of eternal youth, could be likened to finding a puzzle piece that completes the navigation process of Growing Up and Making Decisions.  

Every time something from my childhood (or teenhood) resurfaces, I sort of ruminate, limning on the identities I'd had over the years, hence the moments (days) I pored over this thick book that bridges me to a life I used to have, which I lived through a bit too fast for my liking. And that’s all there is to having this book with me: seeing glimpses of my past quirks like mixtapes and artists from my young adult years: deciding that it has been too fast, too quick for me to see the ending of. So owning a piece of my past can be a bit of a special montage-viewing experience.  

Being in a corporate job is not always gratifying. Sometimes it’s thankless, sometimes you’re just thankful to end the day because you know it’s gonna reflect in your next paycheck. What I treat as a highlight may not be the same for those who do it by heart, with purpose. For me it’s not an office day without doing my makeup, arriving at the office in style (mostly, if not everyday), drinking my coffee in my favorite insulated mug, and admiring my desk setup with my three Sonny Angels. I do my tasks diligently and never miss a deadline, but I may be the shallowest, most useless fixture in this setting. Nobody has to remind me that I was handed this job because of my privilege; I remind myself of the fact everyday so I try to be good at it and not appear like an ingrate. It felt like implanting my own agency when I started entering free Google courses on mastering Microsoft Excel, planning corporate strategies and branding. I wanted to be relevant, I wanted to be useful, I wanted to stop believing that everything I do should be glamorous and cutesy, Lisa Frank-esque. The only time it should be will be how I decorate my desk, hence the Sonny Angels on my right to “watch” over me.

There’s no contextual meaning behind why I added this anecdote. Maybe I wanted it to sound like a situation-versus-desire scenario; it’s not. I’d like to think that this is me heralding my girlhood with respect to how my late-twenties panned out. Not totally what I envisioned, but somehow just floating with lots of looking back on the island of teenhood and how it feels fast-forwarded with circumstances that I couldn’t help. 

Revisiting my past like this, even writing extensively about it, feels like a taxonomy of sorts filled with feelings that will once become previously-felt emotions too in the long run. Teenhood lasted me a full lifetime, but was still so fleeting, so limited and short-lived. There have been numerous moments I remember from those years, and like most adults my age, I would give anything in exchange for me to be young again and be free from the limitations set by myself and the environment I grew up in. 

Coveting youth, taking ownership of my past, and establishing my self-will on all things ‘me’ didn’t always have to be sad. I thought otherwise when I first laid my hands on this particular Rookie book. It felt like I was gonna mourn what once was, the first time I held it, and grieve the lost time I used to spend on reading old material or collecting magazines. But it didn’t feel like grief at all–it was still the same, still a bit rusty on some parts but wiser nonetheless, with the age that came with it.

So the reflection and recording, the writing of a whole ass essay on finding a piece of myself and how I felt about it, is me finally paying back what I owe myself all these years: a space for acknowledging every stage of my life, both the good and the bad, the dumb and the wise (mostly clueless). In the different stages of life I’ll arrive at, there will always be little Forevers that will accumulate, which I will, most probably, come back to and rewatch like comfort episodes from a comfort TV show. 

I’ll always end up looking back on my younger years, and be emotional over it. Never in a Fuck-Time-Passing Vibe, (although it would’ve felt as such if this were in 2018) but in a Life-Is-Funny Vibe. I’ll never be that kid again, and I’ll never be that woman again–all pertaining to particular stages of my life. Transitioning is not as scary as it did before, awful parts and all. Somehow knowing that everything in life has a temporal aura is a comforting thing. Yes, I’d always be pining for certain parts of my life to happen again, or to have some semblance of what it felt like before when the world wasn’t as crazy as it is now, but it is what it is. I can be cold and bitter over the fact that time is not slowing down for me, not for anyone, but it’s up to me if I want to roll with it with my 14-year-old mind, or be present for my nearing-her-30s self, while still carrying my 14-year-old heart with me in the shape of a book I received not over a week ago. 

Allison from The Breakfast Club said that your heart dies when you grow up. I used to always carry that with me, through high school and college. But I wish some time machine could take me back to that moment of pure belief and whisper to my young ear that no, it’s not fully true. Maybe sometimes it brings some truth to it, but most of the time it’s just me being upset that the world is too real for me to receive what I want, or for me to experience some tenderness when everything feels cold and concrete-hard. I was a cynic growing up. I thought being that way cushioned whatever heartbreak I’d experienced and saved me the pain and hassle of being human, excluding myself from the time it exhausted for complaining. I bemoaned the fact that the Vans Warped Tour never reached my country, but I’ll never cry over a boy, I thought. I was dead wrong. Heartbreak shaped me and taught me so much about myself, partially thanks to Chiquitita by ABBA. 

There may still be moments where I wish I understood what my teenhood was about, and most especially why it happened the way that it did. But I no longer wish to stay there, as it kind of lessens its impact in my (present) life, all the while losing the sincerity I feel towards it. There is nothing for me to forgive from those past selves I came to know and sit with, for there was nothing wrong with how I let it happen; not even the lack could cancel out the full and good ones. More importantly, I don't need to understand all of it. These books, archived websites, glossy magazines replete with tutorials on how to make beaded bracelets or homemade hair dyes, and the monthly updates of Batrisha Comics, old journals and keychains, are minutiae that serve as a reminder of an era whose lifespan lasted as soon as I started Googling about sanitary pads and what diets should I practice to be thinner. My world suddenly became scary wide then, a bit too loose in some parts that I found hard keeping close and tight around me–and it was supposed to be that way. I can’t always chase after an outcome that best fits the scene in my head. This is what my whims, quirks, and hobbies are for, to pad whatever disappointment I choose to moan about and to retreat to. If it weren’t for my (rather shallow) crises, I wouldn’t be so committed to any of these. 

I was wrong to assume that being a writer is a glamorous choice, or to decide that anything I partake in would come easier, notwithstanding my degree or the university I graduated from. In college I thought it was gonna be a breeze, because I spent two years in the school organ having my own desk, having free rein over the choicest coverages for the arts and culture beat. It gave me no chance to thwart my expectations in the coming years as a journalist by practice. The movies I watched and the TV shows I spent my time absorbing were all wrong, and admittedly I lacked the contextual knowledge about the real world. And it’s thankfully so, as I can confidently pronounce now as a 26-year-old that it's okay, I turned out okay. Not everything is as it seems, and I continue to be grateful for that.

Remembering should suffice, always. I owe that to myself (I think), if I can’t remotely fulfill any dream or plan I had for myself. Every recalled song, movie, or pop-culture event that I closely followed then, is an act of pouring what I can for my younger self in the form of chronicling a single feeling and expanding it into vast meanings, as wide as the ever evolving world (and life) I used to be scared of. Re-telling is a form of self-love, I believe. It can’t change the world, no. I don’t certainly contribute anything useful for society by writing this down; I’d be delusional if I believed so. But maybe this is me doing myself a favor by recognizing that I can never be anyone else, and that this little piece of writing belongs to me, along with the time and emotions and other pieces of media I claim to love. 

Several years ago, I used to always check prices of every Rookie Yearbook that came out, even months after its first press came out just to imagine if I could afford them. As expected, my parents didn’t agree because it cost a fortune. Understandably so, because as a working class family, buying a P3,000-worth book couldn't be justified. I wish I knew back then that I’d only have to wait around 12 to 13 years to physically own and hold one in my hands (and a signed copy at that!). And that the time it took was an ultra necessity for me; the in-between years served as a prologue.

It’s all in good faith, and timing, this little, minor moment in my adult life. A mere blip in the radar, but consequential nonetheless. And because this is the first time in years that I wrote something for myself.