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Friday, August 18, 2006
Yap: To Live
By Januar Yap
Meanwhile
“To Live” is a film by one of my favorite directors Zhang Yimou, the same artist/storyteller who brought you “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Not One Less,” “Road Home,” and the more recent “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers.”
Well, this won’t be about the film and my imagination moves into “infinite forkings,” to borrow writer Jorge Luis Borges’ phrase. The film virtually begins when the main character steps back to square one, penniless, and saw his life moving on alongside China’s colorful history, including the cultural revolution. A pretty mix of patience and optimism by the people, the film asserts, were the right ingredients for the now prosperous China.
I just read the speech businessman and philanthropist John Gokongwei Jr. delivered at the Ateneo sometime in 2002. Recently though, on his 80th birthday, the gentleman does a Warren Buffet, donating a cool P10.25 billion for good causes.
In case you don’t know, Buffet, nicknamed the “Miracle of Omaha,” is an American stock investor who amassed a fortune from smart investments and swore last June to give 85 percent of his wealth to charity. A bulk of that charity goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, another enormous effort at alleviating poverty, boosting health care and fighting Aids in the Third World. Bill and Melinda Gates along with rockstar Bono were chosen by Time as Persons of the Year in 2005.
I particularly like the idea of making mercy scientific. You don’t heave a chunk of wealth as though it was some grinning personification of some guilt you want to rid yourself of as quickly as possible. Some method, some milestone that’ll elevate charity work as a science, some equation a friend says that may be second act to Einstein’s, guess that’s essential. That’s what I hope to see in Gokongwei’s P10.25B.
On the other fork, I remember Oseola McCarty, the 75-year-old African-American cleaning lady who donates her lifetime’s savings of $150,000 for a university scholarship program. I remember her photo, too, when Time featured her—a shy lady reluctantly emerging from behind a tree.
In the film “Scent of a Woman,” the blind Lt. Col. Frank Slade gropes for his glass of Jack Daniels, and says, “God, you’re touching.”
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (August 18, 2006 issue)
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