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.