Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

He raised his children, my mother his eldest, in a manner she remembered as largely comfortable. It was due, I am told, to the enterprise of the Beautiful Wife, a registered nurse, who was the axis of my grandfather’s rapidly turning world.

In the late 1950s, after the war, a joint committee proposed a new name for what had become the capital’s main thoroughfare. They called it Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, for a journalist and scholar who had championed Philippine independence from Spain. By the time Marcos called for snap elections in late 1985, the highway had a shorthand: Edsa.

In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protesters filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes.

My childhood may have revolved around books, but I had no compulsion to write stories of my own. I did not want to be a writer. I wanted to be written about.

In a country where more than a hundred languages are spoken, a command of English, much like pale skin, is a signifier of privilege.

Every death squad cop carried two guns. The first would be for killing—head and chest, bang-bang—the second for evidence. A homemade .38 caliber, for example, abandoned in a puddle of blood beside a dead man’s hand, provided an excellent basis for investigators to claim the victim had been killed in a firefight. “The cops would always have that gun in reserve,” Matobato said. “Someone gets killed—he gets a gun.”

At best, the bullet drop was an expensive inconvenience; at worst, it cost people jobs and jail time. Terror of a bullet drop swept over travelers, particularly overseas workers. Jason, like many others, took to wrapping his suitcases in plastic. He even traveled with a roll of cling wrap stuffed into his hand-carry, in case a suitcase inspection required rewrapping. He personally knew no one who had been victimized, but he wasn’t going to risk it.

Jason saw Filipinos as gullible folk, always willing to leap onto the next bandwagon, always looking for the next racket, quick to outrage, quicker to forgive, susceptible to tall tales and taller accusations, devoid of social conscience until they felt threatened, and so perversely loyal that they made decisions at the cost of their own interests. Idiots all, he said, largely simple-minded.

There is, however, a fourth meaning. In 2015 the OED appended what it called a draft definition to the official entry. Salvage: Philippine English. “To apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.” Our use derived first from the Spanish. Salvaje, an adjective introduced by the conquistadors, translated into “wild.” My people took salvaje and adapted it into our verb salbahe. “The way it is used in Filipino is different,” the historian Ambeth Ocampo told me. “Sinalbahe means that the person was savaged, not that the person was good, bad, or a savage. Then we made the Spanish adjective into a verb, sinalvaje, and read it with the j into a g.”

Fidelity to the active voice is an early dictum in journalism and in most other writing. “Never use the passive where you can use the active,” intoned George Orwell in his 1946 Politics and the English Language. The habitual use of the active voice “makes for forcible writing,” wrote William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. “Use the active voice” remains Rule Fourteen in the fourth edition of The Elements of Style. “Passive voice,” wrote the late journalism professor John Bremner, “is preferred by the weak, the cowardly, ashamed to name the fink who told them what they are evasively telling you.”

“That’s the thing with Filipinos. They put on a uniform, and suddenly they think they’re kings. Even during the pandemic, even in the villages, even if they’re just security guards. They’re so proud of their outfits, their vests, something changes inside of them. Clueless morons thinking they’re enforcing the law, but really they have no goddamn clue what they’re doing.”

When it comes to elections, he says, Filipinos are still fucking morons.

Mabuhay. “To live.” A greeting, according to our dictionaries. The Filipino aloha, say the travel guides. It is the salutation extended by the tourism services, the cheerful greeting of every pageant queen, the cursive sign over airport lounges, the Monday special in Fil-Am restaurants. No Filipino born in the Philippines opens a door and sings out mabuhay. We pick up the phone and say hello, good morning, how are you, how may I help you—yes? Mabuhay is a performance, offered up to the outside world as its public face.