Tantingco: Time to turn the page

I THINK everything that needs to be said about the hostage incident has been said already, and we are now just allowing ourselves to wallow in masochism and melodrama.

I think we've blamed ourselves enough, eaten more humble pie than we should, and flagellated ourselves beyond what is necessary. We've also learned all the lessons that needed to be learned.

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If they continue saying all those hurtful things about us, or if they continue telling those cruel jokes, well, let's just grit our teeth and bear it.

Everything they say is true anyway: we did bungle the rescue, we did smile when we weren't supposed to, we did pose for pictures in front of the bus, we did drape the flag on the killer's coffin, and we did mix up the names of the dead.

It was an endless domino of errors that played out live and in living color in TV sets across the world. It painted a different picture of us-from the Filipino as Hero, we became the Filipino as Bumbling Idiot.

People Power, Cory Aquino, Manny Pacquiao, Efren Peñaflorida, Charice
Pempengco, the Pinay chef at the White House-all the names and things that made us the darling of the international community were erased in an instant and we were exposed as an incompetent, clumsy, disorganized, hopelessly corrupt Third World country.

But please, can we now turn the page and change the national conversation?

Can we start picking up the pieces of our shattered self-esteem, before we ourselves start believing the nasty things they say about us?

With all due respect to the grieving families and to the panel that's still conducting an investigation-can we please start talking of other things? We really, desperately need to stand tall again as a people.

The Chinese people -- I'm sure they'll be the first to forgive us our trespasses. Not only are they our neighbors, they're our family, too. We have a common history with them, as well as a common culture. They came to this archipelago thousands of years before the Spaniards did, trading with us, settling here and starting new lives and families among us. They helped build this nation.

The ancient Chinese took advantage of the trade winds blowing in the South China Sea and sailed to Manila every year, bringing silk, porcelain, gunpowder and even sewing needles. In return, we gave them gold, venison and indigo.

It was the colonizers from Europe that gate-crashed into the neighborhood and disrupted these ancient ties.

Spanish ships, for example, attracted Chinese pirates to our shores. Spanish abuses pushed Chinese merchants and migrants to pick up arms and fight.

Throughout history, the poor Chinese rebelled regularly, and they were regularly massacred. The worst part was, the Spaniards recruited Filipinos to carry out these massacres.

We Kapampangans participated and sometimes led those massacres. In one massacre, Francisco Laksamana and 4000 Kapampangan soldiers hunted down Chinese rebels up to the hills of Antipolo.

Even the Sonsongs of Macabebe (including Felipe, our candidate for beatification) were among the participants, although they, too, eventually turned against the Spaniards.

Many colonial Spaniards had nothing but disdain and contempt for the Chinese, whom they accused as being dirty (Did they spit into their bowl of mami? Did they use cat meat in their siopao?) and dishonest (Did they make cupit?)-pretty much the way the Nazi Germans imagined Jews to be.

Fray Diego Bergaño, OSA, the Spanish missionary who compiled a Kapampangan dictionary in 1732, couldn't hide his disdain against the Chinese by injecting sarcastic asides in his definitions.

In one entry, Bergaño wrote "like a sangley deceiving an indio in his deals." In another, he wrote "like the false smiles of the sangleyes." There's more: "like the sangley who extracts extreme profits" and "unfinished, done half-way, deficient, not well executed, like the work of the sangley."

(Sangley was the preferred term for the Chinese during colonial times. It came from the Hokkien Chinese word seng-di, "business.")

Bergaño also described where the Chinese settled in Pampanga (menasa nong
sangley ding uaua, "the mouths of rivers are swarming with Chinese") and how they put up their settlements (tambac, "like what the sangleys do along the bank of a river close to their houses, forming a terrace or accretion to their property").

Two villages in Pampanga were named after the Chinese settlement Parian in Manila, one in Arayat and another in Mexico.

When the British invaded and occupied Manila in 1762, the Chinese plotted with the British to kill all the Spaniards who had fled to Bacolor, Pampanga. The plot involved thousands of Chinese from Manila joining forces with thousands of Chinese in Guagua through the Pampanga River, and then attacking Bacolor on Christmas Eve.

When the plot was prematurely discovered, the Chinese in Guagua were expelled and prohibited from resettling in Lubao, Sasmuan and Macabebe, which were the entry points to the province from Manila Bay. The gobernadorcillos of Apalit, Calumpit, Hagonoy and Malolos were instructed to pursue and kill any Chinese that still lingered in their areas.

Gov. Simon de Anda had at least 150 Chinese in Guagua massacred; others committed suicide. Historians refer to the bloody event as "Red Christmas."

But come to think of it, the sangleys that we pushed around in history actually came from a great nation whose civilization is probably the oldest and most glorious on earth.

The sangleys that we disdained, mocked and massacred were the same people that invented paper, the compass, printing, fireworks, abacus, etc., capable of producing such sublime magnificence as the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, and the Analects of Confucius.

It's part of their greatness and wisdom as a people that despite the terrible stereotyping heaped upon them, despite the shameful episodes in their history like their addiction to opium (sold, by the way, by the British who needed the money to pay for the tea they wanted from China), they still managed to become the biggest and most progressive nation in the world.

We, too, should overcome whatever damage our inept, bumbling and corrupt government has inflicted on our culture, society and national psyche. Like the Chinese, we are a mix of good and bad but we, too, can rise to greatness.

I just find it so ironic that it's the people we killed in that bus who would teach us this lesson.