Esquire 10/2016 Sarah Lahbati

THE FOOD ISSUE

MAN AT HIS BEST November 2016

EROTICA

by SARGE LACUESTA, SASHA MARTINEZ, AND GIAN LAO

SARAH L A H B AT I

Dirty Sexy Food

PHILIPPINE CUISINE IS NEXT

by CLINTON PALANCA

THE MISSING INGREDIENT

by A.A. GILL

10

ISSN 2243-8459

10

ISSN 2243-8459

9 772 2 43 845 007

9 772 2 43 845 007

THREE-COURSE DISCOURSE

by CHARLES ENGLUND, NOELLE DE JESUS, JOE AMERICA

N OV E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 2

TA B L E O F

GUTS AND GLORY

CONTENTS

Sarah Lahbati is far from just another showbiz personality.

But in walking her own path, she ďŹ nds that everything falls into place, and life always unravels as it should. p. 74

ESQ&A We debrief Natasha Reyes, a doctor and emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, who has almost a decade of experience in humanitarian ďŹ eldwork. p. 22

MaHB DRINKING Drinking to celebrate the closing of a deal? First, know the rules of engagement. p. 28

MaHB SEX Do women really notice your style, and does being stylish really make you more attractive? p. 30

MaHB GASTRO Eating at a buffet takes a little restraint, some planning, and a keen eye for the good stuff.

MaHB TECH The language of the Internet generation is becoming more visual, less verbal, and more confusing altogether. p. 34

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PHOTOGRAPH BY EDRIC CHEN

p. 32

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TA B L E O F

HOT & BOTHERED

CONTENTS

We asked poets and fictionists to write erotica about one of man’s most primal desires: food. p. 92

GIFT GUIDE Consider any of these exquisite gifts for the men, women, and children in your life. p. 38

WILD AND OUT This year’s H&M collaboration with Kenzo demands sartorial courage, but isn’t without classic pieces. p. 49

GOLDEN TIGER Onitsuka Tiger celebrates the 50th anniversary of the timeless Mexico 66.

MOMENT IN THE SUN Shield your complexion from harsh UV rays with these effective sunblock lotions. p. 62

BIG & BOLD Volume, texture, and contrast are turned up for the season. p. 118

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PHOTOGRAPH BY GABBY CANTERO

p. 60

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TA B L E O F

THE MISSING INGREDIENT

CONTENTS

After struggling with alcoholism, A.A. Gill discovers meaning in his own kitchen. p. 100

NOTES & ESSAYS Audrey Carpio on exotic fare; Richard Bolisay on getting a film done; and Patricia Barcelon on family recipes. p. 65

GOING GLOBAL After much heralding and persistence, Filipino food finally has its time to shine. p. 82

BUILT BY CHICKEN Few Filipino food chains are more iconic than Max’s Restaurant. p. 88

DISCOURSE TODAY Three articulate voices from different points-of-view discuss the current state of discussion.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED The Philippines’ youngest billionaire stands tall with his feet on the ground. p. 114

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GETTY IMAGES

p. 106

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A NOTE FROM THE

TASTE DINING IN ESTONIA, I dropped a piece of bread on the table, and I was admonished to pick it up, kiss its crusty skin, and murmur my admiration and thanks before eating it. It’s the least one could do for something whose entire existence is devoted to keeping me alive, I was told. Not only should I be embarrassed at my clumsy showing at the dinner table, I should be properly sorry to the food for my apparent disrespect.

Food is never just food. If there’s anything I learned from Doreen Fernandez, who I am lucky to call my teacher and mentor, it’s that food is a doorway to further investigations into culture, landscape, science, history (both national and personal); it’s a key to unlocking so much that lies beneath the surface, if you only knew how to look. It’s a skill that Doreen taught, to keep looking at food as if it were continually worthy of curiosity and attention, even if it was something that we encountered three times a day.

And so, for our Food Issue, we wanted to tease out some of these other, more subversive connections, while also looking at the bigger picture behind the banner year that Philippine cuisine has had. Clinton Palanca takes a look at Philippine cuisine’s undying claim to the global stage (p. 82), wondering if we’ve finally made it—and if we haven’t, how we could.

Gerardo Jimenez writes a companion piece to it, which throws the spotlight on to the producers behind the produce behind the cuisine (p. 86), an aspect not enough of us think about.

It’s never just food, because it is also this—it is image, and it is economics, and it is reality.

It’s other things, too. We approach the very concept of food with undying curiosity and respectful attention; and wonder and gratitude, too, because it’s such unearned luck for us to take so much pleasure out of something that we desperately need to survive. It’s the same with sex, which is perhaps why we all must keep that tenuous, primal connection between food and sex and pleasure in the back of our minds.

Much art has been produced about this relationship, and to that we’d like to add Edric Chen’s photographs of actress Sarah Lahbati (accompanied by a profile written by her friend, and our features editor, Audrey Carpio, p. 74) and a small portfolio of food-themed stories by Sarge Lacuesta, Sasha Martinez, and Gian Lao (p. 92). It’s never just food, not when it can also be pleasure and art and sex.

There is also an excerpt from A. A. Gill’s autobiography, Pour Me: A Life (p. 100), in which we learn about his relationship with food and drink—a lot of drink—and how it centers around his lost brother, a former chef, gone these many years.

Sometimes food is excess, and sometimes it is pain.

We really enjoyed putting together this emotional-rollercoaster of an issue, perhaps a little more than we should have, and we hope you enjoy it, too. —KRISTINE FONACIER

W H AT W E ’ R E E XC I T E D A B O U T

Gabby Cantero and Idge Mendiola are pros at shooting food.

This time, they did something different. p. 92

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Our managing editor, Patricia Barcelon, on the macaroni that held Teddy Locsin, Jr. together this last month. p. 68

How we talk when we talk to one another, from three writers who are usually at one another’s throats. p. 106

ICYMI: Writer Clinton Palanca, who writes our main feature for this issue, also released The Gullet: Dispatches on Philippine Food.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRUHLEIN ECONAR

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CONTRIBUTORS EDRIC CHEN is a portrait photographer working in

Los Angeles and Manila, who has shot the cover of our Food Issue two years in a row (he also shot Coleen Garcia for our August 2015 issue). For this year’s Food Issue, we worked with Edric to create a visual concept for the cover. The final output is a result of a lot of pent-up (and surprisingly political) emotions, both ours and his.

C O U L D E AT: Tim Ho Wan, every day H AS E AT E N : Mett, which is a preparation of raw ground pork popular in Germany; and bloody, raw shellfish in a poorly-lit canteen in Bangkok B U T WO U L D N E V E R E AT: Raw chicken

Magazine, Cosmopolitan Philippines, L’Officiel Manila, Rogue, and Benchmark. This month, Marga writes about whether or not your outfit matter to the woman you want to woo (It matters— but also, not really).

REGINE DAVID is a fashion

and fine art photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, currently traveling in Southeast Asia. Her work has been published in Dazed & Confused, New York Magazine, Photo Vogue for Vogue Italia, Vogue Hommes, People Magazine, and Elle Magazine. For this issue, Regine shot this year’s high-profile H&M collaboration with Kenzo.

H I G H LY R EC O M M E N DS : Victorino’s, and their bagnet chips MISSES: Archie’s Pizza in Bushwick, Brooklyn LO O K I N G FO RWA R D TO: A full-blown tropical Filipino Christmas

C U R R E N T LY O B S E S S E D

MARGARITA BUENAVENTURA

is the editor of Young Star, The Philippine Star’s lifestyle youth section. She also routinely writes feature stories for Preview

W I T H : Taco Vengo, especially now that they opened their new location.

WO U L D N E V E R E AT:

Dinuguan.

LO O K I N G FO RWA R D TO: #YSProm, Young Star’s 20th Anniversary celebration this month.

GIAN LAO was the Presidential Speechwriter for Benigno Aquino III throughout his sixyear term. As the speechwriter for thenpresident Aquino, Gian drafted major policy speeches, including the State of The Nation Address. He is also an accomplished poet, having earned a Loyola Schools Award for The Arts for Poetry in 2010, and a Maningning Miclat Poetry Award in 2013.

This month, writing about food, Gian recalls his lunchtimes at Malacañang Palace Compound with little fondness.

S E N T I M E N TA L FO R:

Food from places both disappeared and far: The disappeared Texas Chicken and Carl’s Jr. as well as the far Matsuya Gyumeshi WO U L D E AT: A nuclear ampalaya, if it meant saving the world from climate change L AST M E A L WO U L D B E : Mom’s spaghetti (Mathers, 2002)

photographer based in Manila, whose work has been published in GRID magazine. As a way to keep himself sane while studying Political Science and preparing for a law degree, he started taking photos of everyday scenes in college, eventually deciding to pursue photography as a career instead.

H I G H LY R EC O M M E N DS : Lágrima, and their lengua and buche tacos and burritos WO U L D N E V E R E AT: Any kind of bell pepper N OSTA LG I C FO R: The sisig from Almer’s in UST 18

ESQUIRE / NOVEMBER 2016

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LEE CACES

RENNELL SALUMBRE is a freelance

MAN AT HIS BEST

P O RT R A I T BY R E N N E L L SA LU M B R E

NOVEMBER 2016

Dr. Natasha Reyes stands at the forefront of some of the world’s most pressing crises as the emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontiérs.

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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___ E S Q & A

Natasha Reyes

AFTER NEARLY A DECADE IN MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES (MSF)— ALSO KNOWN AS DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS—NATASHA REYES IS A VETERAN OF HUMANITARIAN HOTSPOTS AROUND THE WORLD, INCLUDING LIBERIA AT THE HEIGHT OF THE EBOLA CRISIS, AND WESTERN VISAYAS IN THE AFTERMATH OF YOLANDA. HERE, SHE TALKS ABOUT WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN EMERGENCY DOCTOR FOR THE WORLD.

Interview by LIO MANGUBAT

ESQUIRE: For a lot of doctors, one of their most formative memories is seeing their first patient die. What was your formative med school memory?

NATASHA REYES: Actually, seeing my first patient, period. When you’re in med school, you get sucked into the daily grind of studying and just trying to pass. It’s super tedious, especially for the first three years, and my motivation just kind of flew out of my head.

You’re just focused on surviving. It’s only when you start seeing patients during the latter parts of your medical education that you remember, okay, this is what I’m here for.

My first duty in UST as a clerk was in pediatrics. There was a family who lived in the slums who brought their kids, who were suffering from diarrhea. It was like a slap in the face when you’re faced with the reality of the difficulties of some parents just to make sure their kids are healthy. Being in a med school in Manila, you can sometimes just live in a bubble.

I had another rotation, in surgery.

Kaka-start pa lang, and it was my turn to go and sit there. There was a patient that came in, and he was, I think he had a stab wound, if I’m not mistaken. And the

surgery residents opened up his chest and they did an open cardiac massage. I stopped breathing because I was so excited and I got dizzy and I had to sit down. It was…’di talaga ako nakahinga. Nahilo ako. I was so excited.

I took my internship at Makati Medical Center, and it has, bragging aside, a very good emergency medicine program. That really stuck in my head. I should have known by then that I would have stayed in emergency medicine, because all my memories are from emergency rooms.

ESQ: And from emergency rooms in Makati, you decided to become part of MSF? NR: I wanted an adventure after I finished my training, for one year lang dapat. I’m happy that I wasn’t dumped in the bush in South Sudan for my first mission. It was a gentler introduction to living conditions in MSF. My first mission was in India back in 2007. It was a rural area, but we had a house. The house had a squat toilet, and pag nag-iigib kami ng tubig, it would be full of bugs. So we would stretch a T-shirt over the balde and pour the water out.

We only had one computer for e-mails through a satellite phone. I was very, very isolated. It was my first time to work with people from different countries. It was also kind of a particular issue for me that you are CONTINUED

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I M AG E S C O U RT E SY O F S I M O N B U R RO U G H S/ M S F

MAN AT HIS BEST

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ E S Q & A

working with a group of people and you’re living with them as well. There were only four of us, so you have to get along with them.

My second mission was Kenya, and that was quite comfortable too. My third one was South Sudan, at ‘yun na. That was fullon MSF. You have little things you have to remember, like flipping over your rubber shoes every night kasi binabahayan siya ng scorpion. And before you wear them, tatagtagin mo. We lived in mud huts, and the toilet facilities were the most basic. Iba talaga ‘yung South Sudan. Hardcore.

In terms of African deployments, I’ve had had three South Sudans, two Sierra Leones.

I had Kenya, I had Libya. I also had Liberia.

ESQ: It was in Liberia that you worked in the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. How do you fight something like that?

NR: You don’t. With Ebola, until now, there’s no proven cure and there’s no proven vaccine. [With] some strains of Ebola, up to 90 percent of your patients can die. In our case, in this particular outbreak, our mortality rate was around 50 percent.

Maybe I can’t confirm the numbers...52 percent, if I’m not mistaken. And that’s actually pretty good. That means we were actually able to save people.

I think the first six or even nine months of 2014, we found ourselves pretty much alone, along with the Ministry of Health of each country, in fighting it. It took a lot of advocacy in our side, and the side of other actors, to get people to actually respond.

Ebola really exposed the weaknesses in the global public health care response.

With Ebola, you can only do supportive care. It’s very painful. The patients really suffer. And all you can do is support and make sure they eat, make sure they drink. Half of them die. Community mobilization was probably the key in controlling the outbreak.

Thankfully we weren’t the only ones working on community mobilization. First we were working very closely with the Ministry of Health, who had never faced Ebola before. So we did a lot of advice and support, and then we went to the community and you pass on [the] message. You have singers, you have skits, you have posters, you have radio shows, just to pass on the message. What’s key is that your message is appropriate for the culture and the context.

ESQ: How do you mean?

NR: For example, safe burial is key in controlling an Ebola outbreak, because a corpse of a patient with Ebola has high concentrations of the virus. When you have a corpse, you have a lot of body fluids coming out. But West African culture dicatates that the family touches the body, they bathe the

body, so it’s a lot of physical contact between the body and the family. In Sierra Leone, they even have this whole custom of getting a glass of water and putting the glass to the lips of the corpse, and then they drink also themselves from that same glass.

To try to control transmission from corpses, the Liberian government enacted a law that said that everybody who dies in Monrovia, the capital, is going to be cremated. MSF even imported incinerators to deal with the corpses. But the community did not accept that. It’s just so new to them, the idea of burning the body of your loved one—it was just incomprehensible to them.

So then they started hiding their corpses, burying the corpse in their backyard, or bribing the burial teams. Instead of

‘I think for the first six or even nine months of 2014, we found ourselves pretty much alone, along with the Ministry of Health of each country in fighting [Ebola]. It took a lot of advocacy in our side, and the side of other actors, to get people to actually respond.

Ebola really exposed the weaknesses in the global public health care response.’ reporting, like say, somebody dies in their house, they were hiding the corpse and burying it in their backyard. Eventually we dropped the cremation, and we worked with the government to assure safe burial.

You don’t just tell a community to stop doing this, stop doing that, you can’t do this.

You have to give them alternatives so they can actually have a semblance of a normal life. If you just block them from living their normal lives or from following their principles and their customs, you’re going to meet a lot of resistance. But once the community came on board, we started to really see the decrease in the number of cases.

ESQ: After working around the world, how did it feel to fly back home to work in Yolanda?

NR: My colleague and I were both in the Hong Kong office when the storm hit, and we arrived on the field the day after. It was quite overwhelming. My mom is from Samar, so seeing the devastation was quite difficult. Remaining objective was difficult because siyempre your heart wants to give everything. There was nothing. There was barely any water, and whatever water you had was prioritized for the hospital. We stayed in tents, and I was living on Hi-Ro and Skyflakes for the first few days.

Even if I’ve seen quite a lot of disasters in the past, it’s still something else when it’s your own country. When you’re working with MSF, you have to follow the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which means you have to maintain a certain objectivity. But when it’s your own country, it’s just hard to remain objective. I never had that problem in other emergencies that I’ve worked in the past.

I always say, though, that Yolanda was one of my most fulfilling missions. For one thing, the team I was with—the expat, field workers, and the local Pinoy colleagues that we had—it was just a great team to work with. Our local counterparts were survivors themselves, but they were there from day one. We arrived, and the staff of the municipal health office had already been working since the day of the typhoon.

They keep you going. Their houses were destroyed, they had people close to them who had died, pero wala, they still worked.

And they still would smile.

ESQ: The famed Pinoy resilience.

NR: In disaster areas, we would do distribution of shelter materials. For example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, when MSF did distribution of shelter materials, we had to really implement strict crowd control, with staff making sure that everything was orderly, making sure there would be no fights and that our teams would not be attacked. Now the same colleagues who did the same shelter distribution in Haiti were the same ones who did the shelter distribution in Guian, Eastern Samar, and they were saying, “We need crowd control.

We have to make sure security is good.”

The Pinoys in our team were saying no.

It’s okay. You don’t need to. And we didn’t need it at all. People were so orderly. My colleagues were absolutely shocked.

Sometimes we had go on boats to distribute the shelter materials in the outlying islands. There was one island that was completely flattened. It just a few hundred people as residents, and we knew CONTINUED

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MAN AT HIS BEST

___ E S Q & A

the number of families, so we allocated a certain set of iron sheeting, wood, nails, hammers for us to distribute to each one.

We were offloading those materials from the barge, and halfway through, the barangay captain said, “No, it’s okay. We have enough.” It’s that dignity that the people in Samar had, despite everything that had happened to them. I saw my country through different eyes.

ESQ: You mentioned neutrality and objectivity—something some countries don’t respect in the confl ict areas where MSF does its work.

NR: In war, there is always that risk that a hospital would be attacked or an ambulance would be attacked. But it’s one thing to be caught in the crossfi re, and it’s another thing to be directly targeted, be it by mistake or not. And right now we’re seeing an alarming number of health structures being destroyed and being attacked in conflict areas. Four out of the five members of the UN Security Council are somehow involved in the conflicts where hospitals are being targeted. There’s absolutely no accountability.

In 2011, I was part of the team that set up the Kunduz Trauma Center, a hospital in northeastern Afghanistan.

We were providing trauma care for a huge population. Over four years of its operation, we informed all the actors of our coordinates, we had identification on the roof, we had identification everywhere.

But last year it was hit by an American air strike, and it came as a complete shock to us. We were calling for an independent investigation, but it never happened. What’s happening now is that the ones responsible are the ones investigating themselves. So you can’t expect an impartial report from that investigation, for sure.

ESQ: But there was a UN resolution passed this year condemning attacks on medical workers and facilities in confl ict regions.

NR: And they’re completely disrespecting it. Who do you turn to when the members of the UN Security Council are the ones actually involved in these confl icts?

Kunduz was devastating, but it’s not an isolated incident. Hospitals in Yemen, in Syria, in Sudan are also being hit.

Personally, I’m very angry. You can have one resolution after another, but it hasn’t changed the situation on the ground. Every doctor and every medical worker should be furious. The rest of the public should join us in speaking out. Doctors are being killed for doing their job. We took an oath, and our oath is to treat the ill impartially. It’s part of our ethics, our medical ethics, and we’re being killed for doing that. I think we have to protect our medical workers, we

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have to allow them to do their jobs safely, and we have to make sure that patients feel safe when they’re being treated in a hospital. Everyone should be angry.

ESQ: Just yesterday, you talked about MSF to a group of medical students from the University of the Philippines. Can you tell which of them can hack MSF work?

NR: If you had seen me when I started, you would have thought that I wouldn’t survive. Actually, pumasok lang ako ng ER, in Makati Med, some of the residents who were already there asked—kind of jokingly but not—“Sigurado ka ba?” But I hacked it.

When you’re there, you adapt, you cannot tell who will do well and who will not do well. And people surprise you.

You’d think, you’re too fragile to be here, and they manage and they thrive in that environment. I think I did.

I don’t think I’ve ever been much of a princess, but before joining MSF, for example, I’d never done my business

under a tree. But it surprised me that I even thrive in those conditions. It became absolutely normal to go for months to live in a tent or a mud hut and not have a proper bath. It surprised me more that this is what challenges me and not the work.

I’m fi ne with the work. I’m fi ne with being in a confl ict area. I’m not going around blind to the danger, but I can manage it. I’m pretty secure in the way I handle security situations. And I had a lot of positions in MSF where I was responsible for the security of very big teams. It’s a lot of pressure, but I accept it, it’s doable.

The only times when I think to myself, “What am I doing here? I should just be home,” it’s always when it comes the living conditions. (Laughs) I adapt to it better now than before.

Ngayon I’m a pro. When I go back back to Manila, sometimes I’m talking on a phone, and I say “over” after every sentence. Parang nagra-radyo lang.

Dr. Reyes treats a woman who was stabbed during the 2008 post-election violence in Mt. Elgon, Kenya.

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ D R I N K I N G

Deal or No Deal

THE COURTESIES OF CONDUCTING BUSINESS OVER DRINKS.

By AARON AW Artwork by SEAN EIDDER

HAVE YOU EVER HAD ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS that start out with talking business in a Chinese seafood restaurant, over an exorbitant 10-course dinner, and then suddenly you’ve got a drink on one hand, a pair of dice in the other, and everyone is talking really, really loud? Now your shirt is undone and you’re belting out some corny karaoke song, and there are a handful of charming young women by your side feeding you sweet but obviously canned compliments.

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When a night turns out this way, you’ve probably just closed a business deal. Though in my experience, actual business-talk during these dinner meetings usually only last until dessert; you see, most of the work had probably already been done through e-mail days ago (because it’s 2016). The dinner and the karaoke and the dice and girls—are all just the cherry on top of a more consequential back-and-forth. Face-to-face meetings are more about sizing each other up, and getting a feel of how likable your new partners are going to be.

That said, you’re not friends, your relationship is purely transactional—so there’s a way to behave yourself when you mix business and alcohol.

One: It’s never too early to start drinking. If you arrive early, go straight for the bar. This is socially acceptable because, true story, the bar was invented for people who are alone.

Feel free to flatter. If you’re meeting with a woman, I find that it’s always a hit when you compliment their success. “I’m glad that it’s finally a woman making decisions in your company,” will make her blush. If it’s a man you’re meeting with, go for the jugular and talk about how much you envy him.

There are boundaries with flattery however, and I cannot stress enough how spouses, girlfriends, and relatives are off-limits.

Secretaries are off-limits too.

When ordering, try to consider who is picking up the check. If it’s the person you are meeting with, I’d suggest something in the mid to high price range. You wouldn’t want to look like an asshole. If you’re paying, I’d suggest something in the mid to high price range because, you wouldn’t want to look like an asshole. But if the company’s paying, order away and let your colleagues know that the company means business. Else the company look like an asshole.

Try to read the flow of the meeting. Some people can hold their liquor better than others. As a general rule, I like to reserve cuss words, political commentary, and uncouth remarks until after the fifth drink. At which point, everything is pretty much fair game.

And last, be vigilant of any indication that a deal is possible. As a joke, pull out a napkin and make them sign on it immediately.

Nobody wants to sign an actual contract while under the influence, but nobody wants to be the guy who signed a napkin and went to court about it. At this point, you’ve already gotten that deal, in principle at least—and principle should matter more than it actually does anyway.

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ S E X

Undressed for Scrunity

WHAT YOUR STYLE SAYS ABOUT HOW YOU ARE IMAGINED IN BED.

By MARGARITA BUENAVENTURA Art by MAINE MANALANSAN IN A CLASSIC CASE OF ROLE reversal, women think of men in clothes as much as men think of women completely undressed.

There must be some kind of psychology to this, but you’ll see what I mean when you ask what most girls will find attractive when comparing celebrity photos. Ask them which they would rather have: the Vin Diesel in a tank top and a pair of 501’s, or the Vin Diesel in a Hugo Boss three-piece suit? I don’t even like Vin Diesel, but in a suit, I’ll have it. I mean, it’s Vin Diesel…

In fact, I’ll go ahead and say that what a man wears when he meets a woman for the first time is more memorable than what he looks like. Sure, you have a great smile on and a perfectly respectable job, but trust me: Right after she runs this through her friends on WhatsApp, it’s what you wore that she’ll remember—that is, if it’s particularly bad. It’s not because the expectations in the dating field today are low (they are), but because your height, weight, girth, and money don’t speak volumes the way your shirt, trousers,

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and shoes do in matters of carnal relations.

You see a perfectly harmless Ed Hardy T-shirt—we see someone whose greatest fantasy is doing it under a ceiling mirror.

You think it’s a nice pair of suede loafers— we think you’re the type to snooze after a blowjob. And when a girl realizes this, she won’t spend her time going for someone who’ll be a waste of makeup.

It’s not that we all want someone fashionable, nor are we dying to make a guy over. We may judge what you wear and measure that against your ability to make a girl yell louder than she would on a Six Flags ride, but yes, it still depends on chemistry— sometimes, one woman’s disgust for muscle tees is another woman’s crack addiction. It’s all about relocating to the real estate that’ll best suit your sartorial choices. Those Ed Hardy shirts may find better company where the lights are red, and those Jesus sandals may find more fans among those who are in love with the rightful owner of your shoes.

But I also find too much stylishness in a man a little unattractive—if you spend too much time perfecting how you look, that’s definitely way less time spent focusing on me.

(And isn’t that why I got into this relationship in the first place?) My own barometer of how likely I’ll date (a.k.a. be with, biblically) a guy is never accurate. Years ago, I reported back to my closest friends that the American English teacher I met in Taipei wore a basketball jersey. I admit, my standards are fairly reasonable, but this, I almost couldn’t take. He had absolutely no qualms about the Chicago Lakers or San Diego Bull Dogs or whatever team staring right at my face as we drank beers on my hotel bed. As I smiled and laughed at the appropriate times, I kept thinking to myself, “Is this worth it? Is this really worth it?”

The inevitable happened anyway, and I was this close to needing a wheelchair to catch my flight home the next day. Needless to say, I am totally team Chicago Lakers now.

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MAN AT HIS BEST

___ G A S T R O

How to Navigate a Buffet OR STUFF YOURSELF STRATEGICALLY

By KARA ORTIGA Photographs by MIGUEL NACIANCENO

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BUFFETS are an interesting thing. On the one hand, the idea of indulgence sounds fantastic; but its monstrous quantity can sometimes be hard to swallow. My sister tells me that enormous spreads like these always make her feel uncomfortable, because one time during a buffet dinner at a snazzy hotel, a little girl, who was carrying a plate on each hand, suddenly stopped in the middle of the dining hall, bent over, and hurled all over its polished floors.

“It’s like that scene in Spirited Away,” she says wistfully, when the family in the Japanese cartoon had entered the magical realm, were enticed by food, binged, and as a curse was transformed into… well, pigs.

With premium buffets, you have to kind of be smart about it, else you leave with buyer’s remorse.

So: Choose your buffets carefully, they’re not all the same. Are you looking for one with unlimited beer, or one whose salad station is a thing to rave about? At the new Brassier on 3 at Conrad Manila, their Sunday Brunch offers a wider meat selection plus brunch cocktails. Fancy a lychee sangria or a cucumber gin to start your Sunday morning?

Look through the place first. Walk around. This is the place to do it. Don’t stock up on the lamb when you didn’t even check the Chinese corner yet—they serve quality peking duck! Navigate through the entire area, and take your time. Take note of the dishes you’re going back for.

For your first plate, go straight for the specials. It may be odd to begin with the main course when there are a hundred appetizers of every imaginable cuisine to choose from—but that’s the point. Cut to the chase and go for gold. What is this buffet’s star dish? Is it a Grade-A steak, or lobster? At Brassier on 3, we rushed to the carving station, whose succulent prime rib was aglow under the heat lamps.

After which, you can work your way to some of the smaller, supporting dishes. Do you want some salad, maybe go for the antipasti, or dig into the sushi? I went for the laksa soup station.

And then there’s dessert: pastries, a donut bar, flavored foam on sorbet, the classic chocolate fountain, matcha everything, and ice cream. There’s always space for dessert, and a sweet tooth needs to be satiated with at least a nibble of this, or a little bit of that. Pair with a nice cup of tea to end the meal.

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ T E C H

Is This How You Use the Poo Emoji?

GOD HELP A MAN—THE TWEENIFICATION OF TECH IS COMPLETE, AND ALL OF YOUR SMH-ING WON’T MAKE IT GO AWAY

By KEVIN SINTUMUANG

I L LU ST R AT I O N BY E WA M O S S

At press time, the most popular emojis on Twitter were , then . was number 116.

WHEN IT COMES TO DIGITAL communication these days, it’s a tween world and we’re just saying . That means “Hmm.” I know this because my new iPhone suggested it when I tried to text “Hmm.” Which made me feel .

Sure, Apple’s recent overhaul of its oncestraightforward Messages includes very useful adult things like the ability to send money, but its aggressive push toward a wordless language isn’t insignificant— Messages is one of the most-used apps on the world’s most ubiquitous phone, after all. Texts still feel too wordy after emoji translation?

There are GIFs and stickers to choose from now. Or make your pal’s screen fill up with balloons when he checks his messages. Now, that’s what I call disruptive tech!

It’s just the latest in some of the year’s splashiest digital developments seemingly aimed at those born during the Bush administration (W., not H. W.). Hearts and cutesy angry faces joined “like” on Facebook.

Snapchat, through the use of complex facial-recognition technology, lets you send videos of yourself vomiting rainbows or anthropomorphized as a panda. Meanwhile, LinkedIn, the most adult social network on the Internet, will be acquired for $26.2 billion but is still the go-to punchline for being a square.

It’s natural for mature forms of communication to spin off into the realms of the frivolous—how else to explain shows like Dating Naked? But we seem to be passing go and heading straight to . If the wild success and cultural inertia of these features are any indication, however, it pays to cater to tweens.

Oh, if only Gutenberg had made his press so that the young Manfrits of the Renaissance could vent about Latin class, his platform would’ve gone viral in months instead of decades.

So what’s a grown-up to do? You can just “like” things with a thumbs-up on Facebook.

You can continue to write texts with just . . . words. You won’t lose the ability to communicate with other humans.

Or you can try embracing your inner tween.

Being able to react with a heart on Facebook seems childish, but it’s efficient shorthand for expressing empathy. Swapping faces with someone on Snapchat may sound more disturbing than profound, but it is a form of self-expression. Likewise, emojis and GIFs are just more sets of symbols to make your point.

At the end of the day, as much as this makes me feel , it’s kind of and a break from the formality of email. And hey, if it’s too much, there’s always LinkedIn, right?

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THE WANT LIST

And now, the most stylish gifts for every man, woman, or child (or young person)

BY C L I F FO R D O L A N DAY

Here’s a truth: People are magpies attracted to very shiny objects, so wrap up the lightcatching spirals of the Bulgari B.zero1 collection in a beribboned box. These rings, necklaces, and bracelets are dazzlers, but they’re also infused with meaning. Created in celebration of the new millennium, they symbolize infinite beginnings. A perfect gift, we think. Greenbelt 4

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Those Young’uns For your children, including the young adults (who may or may not have a job at the moment), and your millennial underlings

Once you find out that the Leica Sofort is much like an Instax, in that it produces prints of your snaps right away, but made with the German engineering of the highend camera maker, you might just get one for yourself. Special focus is placed on self-portraits, because young people love that. Greenbelt 5

Visualize your teenager as a bag. The Timbuk2 Custom Bag Studio offers nine styles, 13 sizes, 106 colors, 30 panels, and 43 accessories for over seven trillion mix-and-match permutations. Whew. Once you’ve finalized your design, the bag is made in San Francisco and returns in about four weeks to Manila.

Bratpack, Greenbelt 5

Here’s how we describe Literary Starbucks by Jill Poskanzer, Wilson Josephson, and Nora Katz: It’s like all your favorite writers and book characters wandered into your favorite coffee house, and then had all sorts of misadventures, all of which are told with the appropriate nuances. Easy reading for people who enjoy a chuckle. National Book Store

Here are the reasons to give the gift of a Saladbox Man subscription: The contents can be up to thrice the value of what is paid; the box holds a mix of grooming and style products; and all that good stuff is delivered to the recipient’s doorstep. They’ll even print your dedication: “Dear Overworked Assistant: Always look sharp. From Boss.” saladbox.com.ph

So your hippie son has a side of rocker, too. Quite normal these days. The Northskull Gold Twin Skull bracelet expresses his variable moods, while also introducing a touch of decadent style.

Van Laack, Greenbelt 5

And A Few More Stylish Recommendations

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FROM KARA ORTIGA ASSOCIATE FEATURES EDITOR, ESQUIRE (AND PERPETUAL ITINERANT)

FROM NICOLE LIMOS MANAGING EDITOR, TOWN&COUNTRY.PH (AND BEAUTY JUNKIE)

FROM SASHA LIM UY TEAM EDITOR FOR FOOD AND DRINK, ESQUIREMAG.PH (AND HAPPY EATER)

Treat yourself to a California escape at the Korakia Pensione, a Mediterranean retreat with Moroccan-inspired villas surrounded by bougainvillea vines and oleander bushes. It’s been dubbed “one of the sexiest hotels in America,” so excuse yourself if you get lost in this daydream.

Bring a lover and maybe you’ll stay indefinitely. korakia.com

I wore the Polo Blue Eau de Parfum by Ralph Lauren for a week. It starts out neutral with bergamot and cardamom bringing in a fresh and bright burst. Then, I start to smell more like a man as its blend of heart notes (basil, verbena, sage, orris) and base notes (suede, vetiver, patchouli, and wood) settle all day. And by all day, I mean even after the after-party.

Rustan’s Makati

Take her to Atelier Vivanda. This Burgos Circle restaurant brings together two of French chef Akrame Benallal’s concepts: steakhouse Atelier Vivanda and cheese-and-wine bar BRVT. The piece de resistance is a massive 50-day, dry-aged Holstein beef that tastes brawny but delicate. The cheeses, which are imported seasonally, are also must-tries. ateliervivanda.com

ESQUIRE / NOVEMBER 2016

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11.2016

S T Y L E

Wild Thing A conversation between Kenzo creative directors, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, and the French h o u s e ’s l e g e n d a r y f o u n d e r, K e n z o Ta k a d a , b r i n g s t o life the latest designer collaboration of H&M. P H O T O G R A P H S B Y R E G I N E D AV I D S T Y L I N G B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY

Printed zips sneak in highoctane pattern to a padded denim parka.

Parka and jacket (worn inside) by Kenzo x H&M; shirt and pants

by H&M

HUMBERTO LEON and Carol Lim were handed the keys to Parisian fashion house, Kenzo in 2011, and since then they have continued the legacy of daring established by the label’s Japanese founder, Kenzo Takada. But the designers admit they’ve never really “played with the archives,” which is filled with crazy blueprints about volume, layers, prints, beading, and more, and so when they decided to partner with retail giant H&M for the latest installment of its designer collaborations, they took it as a chance to have fun—a lot of fun.

It all goes back to Takada.

“We wanted to make this like a three-dimensional conversation between us and what Kenzo Takada had started,” says Leon. The legendary designer shook up the fashion scene in 1970s Paris by, as Lims puts it, “breaking the rules with total freedom” and forming his own

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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language about what is chic for women (oversized dungarees, folkloric dresses, ethnic prints). “He experimented so much with fashion, and it’s that spirit of playfulness that we wanted to capture in the Kenzo x H&M collection,” adds Leon.

So all that good stuff has been put into a blender set on high. Leon describes the collection as a purposeful clash of “our prints, Kenzo Takada’s prints, our look, [and] his look,” which translates to the most spirited designer collaboration for H&M and something totally new for the Kenzo brand. Sure there will be references, but Leon promises that you won’t see anything like the pieces they’ve cooked up for the collaboration in the clothes you’ve bought from the modern Kenzo or even Takada’s Kenzo. “Every piece is a conversation between us and Kenzo Takada,” explains Lim. “Nothing is taken directly from the archives, whether we’ve used our prints for an iconic style, or refreshed the design to make it part of our world.”

And now, the clothes. Of course, there is a panoply of prints, colors, and textures expressed in an arsenal of classics: parkas, bombers, sweatshirts, and more.

As if creating beasts from an imaginary world, a new animal pattern has been pieced together out of several

wild skins, while the tiger stripe of Kenzo is rendered in the psychedelic shades of acid green and pink. Leon and Lim’s medallion print also reappears as tactile formations of rubber and beadwork. And for fans of the Kenzo sweatshirt, the famous tiger is reborn in a new patchwork logo surrounded by the words, “Kenzo Paris Jungle,” a fitting maxim for the zoo that has been created.

There is also a degree of ingenuity sewn into the clothes. “I love the reversible trench that you can unzip the bottom panel to turn into a bomber,” describes Leon.

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The iconic Kenzo tiger lies in wait behind a classic leather jacket.

Jacket by Kenzo x H&M; suit and shirt by H&M

Several pieces, in fact, are reversible, giving you more bang for your buck, and some lively adornments like a printed collar on a classic parka allows the option to turn down the intensity.

All that wildness is in the name of self-expression. “We’ve always believed that people should interpret fashion for themselves, and this is the perfect collection of statement pieces to mix [with your clothes], so you can play with your everyday wardrobe,” says Lim. Which is really what we recommend you do. Choose the more sober pieces and then put them together in a wearable way (as we’ve done in these pages—the goal is create a look that would not invoke bug -eyed stares from the ladies or questions from your boss). But if you are feeling courageous, then put on a graphic item like, say, that trench coat of mixed animal prints and then wear it with a white shirt. And if you are a person who can handle an overdose of fun, there are plenty of things (see: cropped tiger-print pants) that will satiate your appetite.

“We wanted Kenzo x H&M to speak across generations. We love that there’ll be 15-year-old kids who’ll be wearing Kenzo for the first time, alongside 20- or 30-yearolds who’ve been making Kenzo part of their wardrobe since Humberto and I started at the label,” muses Lim “Then there’ll be those who were lucky enough to have been alive during the time of Kenzo Takada, who’ll come to the collection for a taste of their heritage, and wear the prints and styles that they once loved all over again.”

There is really something for everyone—the young or old, those who want just a taste of fun or need a whole wardrobe’s worth of it, and, of course, you.—CO H&M, SM Mega Fashion Hall and SM Makati

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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“We wanted to push the prints, the colors, and the clashes, and make some major statements,� says designer Humberto Leon.

Parka, socks, and boots by Kenzo x H&M; turtleneck and pants by H&M

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ST Y L E

The ultimate get, if you are courageous enough, is this multi-pattern trench coat that is reversible and also convertible (a detachable panel transforms it into a bomber).

Trench coat and cap by Kenzo x H&M

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ST Y L E

Left of Center

When it comes to style, a little bit of rule-breaking is just fine.

I N T E R V I E W B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY OF COURSE there will always be the very classic derby—smooth and uninterrupted, perfect for every day. But the Singaporean footwear company Pedro also wants to tweak what works, so that even in the quiet sureness of a standby, you can stand out. And so that derby will have hiking boot influences, with eyelets as lace wranglers and a jagged sole that adds the right amount of bite. Elsewhere, in its fall collection, there are elastic panels, colorblock soles, felt details, or, for the adventurous, camo or plaid prints. Plaid? How do you wear these left-of-center shoes? “Pick out any color. For example, pick navy and then wear anything navy for a monochromatic look,” suggests Pedro’s fashion coach Vince Acop.

Style, for Vince, is “a matter of character” and dressing well means injecting your personality, camo or plaid included. Here, more advice from the pro.

particular group that feels dressing up is an effort. I’d like to tell them to be more expressive, and I think that would make dressing not feel like a chore.

THE BIGGEST MISTAKE YOU’RE MAKING:

Sticking too much to the norm. It’s like wearing the exact shoe color with the exact

belt color or thinking you need to button your blazer when you wear a blazer.

WHY YOU SHOULD BREAK THE RULES: When you follow the rules too much, it doesn’t give you room for enjoyment. It removes that room for making it more personal. So I’d advise men to be more expressive and break the rules once in a while.

HOW TO BREAK THE RULES: It’s trial and error.

You see what looks good on you, and definitely you will have phases. For example, in Southeast Asia, we somehow have the same preferences.

You know this very strong K-pop obsession that we have now? I think the challenge is making it personal. It’s getting bits and pieces of that and making it look like your own.

Greenbelt 5

HOW ABOUT SOMETHING NEW? From left: Eyelet hooks and jagged soles (and plaid!) adorn Pedro’s fall collection. Fashion coach Vince Acop wears his favorite pair from the line, a monkstrap with double buckles and pullstraps.

WHAT HE KNOWS: Style is really a way of expressing yourself. If you want to present yourself without saying or doing anything, you might as well do it in the way you dress. That’s what everyone sees first when they meet you.

HOW HE DRESSES HIMSELF: It’s about how I want to feel for the day. I know everyone will say, “Oh, it’s Monday again,” and dress up in a casual way, but I like to do the opposite. If I have a meeting, then I’d wear a blazer or a jacket. You feel more empowered. Dressing up really affects your overall aura.

NOW: Well, I think that, especially recently, men are more conscious of how they present themselves. They’re trying to be more creative with how they dress. They’re more experimental, which is something that’s very evident in Filipinos.

HOW TO ENJOY IT: We will always have this

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PORTRAIT BY JAYDEN TAN

HOW MEN DRESS

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ST Y L E

“Dreams of Forever”

by Andrew Loh Metal rivets, polycarbonate nuts and bolts, wire mesh, and string express the mighty koi.

A Tiger

By Its Tale Half a century on, the Mexico 66 is still a sexy beast.

B Y J O H N A . M A G S AY S AY

IN ONE OF THE MANY MEMORABLE SCENES from Kill Bill: Vol. 1, The Bride (played by Uma Thurman) sports a jumpsuit, borrowed from Bruce Lee’s 1978 hit, The Game of Death. Her samurai sword is drawn, ready to battle Gogo and The Crazy 88, and on her feet is a pair of yellow-and-black Mexico 66, poised to pounce. Though outnumbered, there’s no way this can turn against The Bride’s favor. After much gore and blood, the three-minute “Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves” sees The Bride victorious and, in the process, revives a footwear icon, which now has a millennial following.

It wasn’t the first time Onitsuka Tiger’s Mexico 66 created an iconic moment.

In 1966, just two years after taking his footwear brand public at the Kobe Stock Exchange, Kichahiru Onitsuka debuted the leather-and-suede running shoe—then called the Limber—for the Japanese delegation of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico. Japan went home with 11 gold medals, and ranked third among participating countries, following the United States and Russia in the games. But the real winner was the Mexico 66. It was a narrow shoe from toe to heel, slightly raised on the

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arches with a firm, slip-proof rubber sole. With its branded heel tongue, reinforced by two crisscrossed strips of suede leading to a vector stripe at its side, the sneaker made a distinctive mark that left the whole world wanting.

Since then, Onitsuka Tiger has never left the winner’s podium, with newer, better performing models released under the ASICS brand (the Tiger reformed as ASICS in 1977). But the Mexico 66 still remained one fierce and sexy beast. Valued as a cult classic better worn with raw, selvedge denim than nylon running shorts, the vintage sneaker has been reimagined in countless colorways and collab editions, snapped up by countercultures from prepsters to hipsters.

The Mexico 66 gained more street than sport cred, but a tiger can never really change its stripes.

Marking the golden jubilee of the Japanese footwear icon, Onitsuka Tiger drops the Mexico Delegation, a seven-piece collection constructed with the same suede, leather, and nylon mesh materials and the pyramidstamped coarse rubber sole, in the Mexico 66’s original color schemes. The word “Mexico” is also printed on the sock-liner and just below its stripes.

“We would like to show how our technology has evolved and how its style remains relevant up to now. We will keep on innovating ourselves, and keep on inspiring our consumers with newer designs and collaborations,” says Kenji Oh, marketing director of Onitsuka Tiger.

“With 50 years of history, we hope that you keep venturing with such a timeless and empowering shoe.”

The Mexico 66 celebrated its 50th anniversary with the exhibition, Different Stripes, at Singapore’s luxury streetwear dive, Pedder on Scotts. Onitsuka Tiger invited 50 visual artists and designers, including Japanesetrained industrial designer Andrew Loh, to create showpieces with an all-white Mexico 66 as their canvas.

“I struggled with keeping the iconic form and profile of the shoe, and I wanted to break out of it as well,” Loh reveals of his design, “Dreams of Forever,” which incorporates three-dimensional forms, technological precision, and ancient Japanese symbolisms that celebrate the innovative disciplines of the footwear brand. “I came to the conclusion that it’s a brand about craftsmanship and art. That’s why I used rivets, nuts, bolts, and metal mesh in months of meticulous work. I think it parallels how Onitsuka makes their shoes.” So among plastic grommets linked by neon wires, a strip of mesh is suspended as though in flight, forming the distinctive Tiger stripe.

“The texture of the shoe reflects the scales of the koi fish, which symbolizes longevity, an appropriate image for an anniversary,” he adds.

Also found in the pair’s insoles is a blue-and-red sketch. It depicts an aquanaut lost in a sea of traditional Japanese ornamentation, with Onitsuka’s legendary tiger seen at the side in an aggressive stance.

Loh says the image is like “Perspective”

by Elain Lim “being in a place outside Painted feet of time and outside of (and bones) let you walk reality,” which is a perfect in someone way of showing where the else’s shoes. everlasting Mexico 66 finds itself today.

Greenbelt 5, Glorietta 5, Shangri-La Plaza

“Echoes”

by Lionel Low May we present webs, virus growth, and the cross-sections of plants.

“Shīshī”

by AMIEN Here, two stone lions ready to protect your feet.

“Tongue Tied”

by Vik Lim Interchangeable tongues and long leather straps break up that old sneaker shape.

“I Fart Glitter”

by Bobby Luo When in doubt, add glitter because life only sparkles when you do.

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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GROOMING 2016

GROOMI NG UPGRADE 8/10

Sun Ban Stay away from my shade.

B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY

W E K N OW, W E K N OW. It can feel sticky and look shiny, as if you’ve fallen face-first onto a vat of grease.

But it’s good for you, and so we’re going to remind you that putting on sunscreen, one that wards against UVA and UVB rays, every day is a non-negotiable. We’re also going to bug you about proper application, because you’re probably not using enough of the stuff and applying it often. A good gauge of what’s enough is seeing white streaks as you put it on your face ( just pat everything onto your skin until the lines fade away). And after sweating it out, say, in front of your computer screen, apply again— and again. Clarins’ sunscreen forms a triple shield against

A R T B Y WA R R E N E S P E J O

UV Plus Anti-Pollution Sunscreen Multi-Protection Broad Spectrum SPF by Clarins, Reine Blanche Illuminating UV Shield

by L’Occitane, and UV Essentiel Multi-Protection Daily Defender by Chanel, all at Rustan’s Makati; umbrella by Fox Umbrellas at Signet, Shangri-La at The Fort; cap by Hermès, Greenbelt 3

the sun, pollution, and free radicals, while L’Occitane’s formula provides sun protection and, through the power of the Reine des Prés flower, boosts skin clarity. The fancy sounding UV Essentiel from Chanel protects from the outside, blocking sun rays, infrared, indoor lighting, and more, as well as from within, stimulating the protective proteins of skin cells. Also consider the use of a hat or an umbrella, or both at the same time. They provide even more protection against ageing’s ultimate enemy, the damn sun. We know it’s a big commitment, but you’ll thank us later. When you reach middle age, you won’t look like a pruney curmudgeon.

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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What makes a man click?

It’s all on

ESQUIR E | NOV EMBER 2016

NOTE S & ESSAYS

AU D R E Y N . CA R P I O O N E XOT I C FA R E PAT R I C I A BA RC E LO N O N FA M I LY R EC I P E S R I C H A R D B O L I SAY ON GETTING A FILM DONE

EDITED BY SARGE LACUESTA

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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THE FEAST OF THE GOAT

BY AUDREY N. CARPIO

PERHAPS FINDING HALAL GOAT MEAT ON AN ISLAND HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD IS LIKE FINDING MECCA. THE SAME WAY AN AMERICAN MIGHT REJOICE AT SEEING A MCDONALD’S UP A MOUNTAIN IN CHINA.

The goat was waiting patiently, tied to a tree, to which Ali led us with a kitchen knife. I had never witnessed an animal slaughter before. I’ve heard pigs being butchered from a distance, their snorty, high-pitched squeals eliciting temporary vows never to eat pork again. I’ve seen their drained, fly-spotted carcasses hanging off hooks along roadside butcheries on the way to the mountains. But the actual process of watching an animal die, where I have not averted my gaze and excused myself from being complicit in its death—this was my first time. The small goat—not a kid, not yet mutton—bleated sweetly, obliviously chewing on the grass that would be his last meal on earth. It was terribly cute, as all animals are.

My mother had opted to stay inside the house. She would not be party to this ritual execution. Dodoy, the caretaker, helped restrain the goat on the ground while Ali set to work sharpening his knife.

He grabbed the goat’s head and placed the back of its neck against his shoe. “Bismillah,” he suddenly said, then quickly slashed the goat’s throat, severing the carotid artery, jugular vein and windpipe. I had never heard that incantation outside of the Queen song, and realizing that the act was a sort of prayer or offering to God, even though it was not quite my God, relieved me of some of my squeamish guilt. “This is the Muslim way,” Ali said. “They do not suffer.” I can’t vouch for the latter, especially since the goat emitted a rasping cry as blood poured out of its neck into a small pit in the sand.

Now trussed and hung from a tree branch, the goat continued to drip brightred liquid. Ali made a slice on the top leg and carefully pulled down the skin in one piece, like a sweater being taken off. Then the bulging innards were removed and given to Dodoy, who was going to make papaitan.

My aunt, Ali’s wife, added, “This is the clean way of killing a goat. There’s no smell to the meat, you know?”

We were in Boracay to break ground for a restaurant we were going to put up together. As a thanksgiving meal of sorts, my uncle Ali killed a goat.

Ali was from Saudi Arabia, an employee

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at a Jeddah hospital where he met my aunt, a Filipina who was working at the ministry of health as a medical technician. They got married and remained there for 30 years.

They resettled in Davao City, my aunt’s hometown, and in their retirement years, they opened a little eatery that served what was basically Ali’s home cooking: Middle Eastern dishes like hummus and fattoush salad, shorba, a lentil soup, and stewed okra.

Theirs was an immigrant kitchen opened up to friends and neighbors, and it quickly became a popular spot. Soon they were able

to move to a slightly larger space that also moonlighted as a karaoke/piano lounge.

There was nothing discernibly Middle Eastern about the restaurant—it was a Monobloc chair and vinyl tablecloth kind of place—save for a tapestry of a camel, and a picture of Jasmine and Aladdin on a flying carpet, printed on a tarp.

It was there where I first tried the goat kabsa, Ali’s specialty dish. Kabsa is a rice-and-meat dish similar to biryani; you could call it the paella of the desert. A number of fragrant spices make up the seasoning: black pepper, cloves, cardamom,

together. I had no restaurateur knowledge, and my only experience in food service was the one semester I spent flipping burgers in college. However, I had faith in the goat.

Ali had dreams of taking his Arabic food to an audience beyond the Filipino friends and frustrated middle-aged singers in his small corner of Davao City. We found a 35-sq. meter space in Boracay, and after a year of cobbling together a workable kitchen and dining area from second hand equipment, Quiapo finds, and zero input from a design professional, Ali opened the doors to his new,

albeit still Instagram-unfriendly restaurant.

It took some time for the customers to come.

He would stay late at night handing out flyers at the clubs and bars (I was in Manila, being the silent, non-cooking partner). But he was certain the Arabs would arrive, banking on the tourism boom from the Middle East, with reportedly over 50,000 Saudis choosing the Philippines as their destination this summer (since the beaches of Syria were no longer an option), and the fact that they almost exclusively prefer—or are required to—eat their own kind of food, even when traveling.

I M AG E C O U RT ESY O F N E W YO R K P U B L I C L I B R A RY

saffron, cinnamon, black lime, bay leaves and nutmeg, but the flavors are always delicate and mild. Goat, meanwhile, is a viand popular in the southern Philippines, where a sizeable portion of the population doesn’t eat pork. I’ve always associated goat meat, which is more intense and gamey than beef or lamb, with “ethnic” cuisines (like North African and Caribbean) which stew them in sauces so rich and oily that they always gave me the runs. I was in Davao for the unlikeliest of reasons—to see if my uncle and I could go into business

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And come they did, after the long drought that was Ramadan. On a tropical island full of strangers, miles away from his adopted city, Ali finally felt at home. Each night at the restaurant was like a reunion with kith and kin. He would WhatsApp me photos of Muslims chowing down on goat and chicken, mostly Arab men with the occasional tourists from Malaysia and Indonesia, and the rare curious Korean.

He once sent me a video of an Arab man in boardshorts shimmying to an Arabic song in the middle of the restaurant after closing hours. I asked if the man was drunk, my uncle replied no, he’s just happy. Perhaps finding halal goat meat on an island halfway around the world is like finding Mecca. The same way an American might rejoice at seeing a McDonald’s up a mountain in China.

My staunchly Christian mother, who was helping me out, had misgivings throughout the whole process, convinced that the restaurant would end up as a recruiting center for ISIS. She was also concerned about the religious implications of halal food. I assured her that it’s pretty similar to what the Jews eat. My mom, who was raised Seventh Day Adventist, grudgingly had something in common with Muslims, they both don’t eat pork. They have a disdain for the pig as fervent as the Hindus revere their cows, as well-done as Trump likes his steak.

The food we eat is fraught with cultural sensitivities. As a food-agnostic omnivore, I don’t think about it that much, until I come face to face with a goat gutted in the name of Allah, or whenever my mom recoils from the lechon at Christmas parties. There’s a kind of food bigotry involved when faith dictates that my diet is more righteous than yours, that certain animals are unclean, or that one method of killing is more acceptable than others. There’s also the bigotry found in those who think nothing of eating Chinese food, Mexican food, or Middle Eastern food, but have no love or tolerance for Chinese, Mexican or Middle Eastern people, and we just have to look again to Trump and his taco bowl. Some folks get offended at cultural appropriation (“white people can’t tell us how to eat pho or bagoong suddenly becoming the next trendy condiment after years of being aroma-shamed in the West).

But strange and foreign cuisines can and do bring people together, if you keep an open mind and an open mouth.

Whenever there are more burqas than bikinis on the island and restaurant sales are good (even though that means more goats are being killed), I always remember to thank God for the Arabs.

Audrey Carpio Features Editor, Esquire Philippines

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MACARONI

BY PATRICIA BARCELON

IT WASN’T THE RECIPE I WAS AFTER, IT WAS THE MEMORY.

In my family, I am famous for my baked macaroni. It’s a thick, gooey, cheesy mess, much like the baked macaronis of ’80s children’s parties. The recipe came to me through slightly clandestine means. It was the recipe of my stepfather’s mother; a recipe she guarded like a family secret. When I would ask Lola how she made it, she would always reply, “I’ll just make you some.” It was one of Lola’s maids, whom I eventually inherited when I started my own household, who gave me the recipe. She was always there when Lola would make the baked macaroni and eventually memorized the ingredients. I began to experiment with the recipe, trying to tease out the magic ratio as I shredded the chicken in my hands.

We do not normally show affection. Our love is manifested through insults—cariño brutal, as an older generation used to call it. Insults… And presents. I always knew when my mother was extra-pleased with me because I would get more presents than usual after one of her many trips abroad. If mom wasn’t too happy with me, I’d probably get a token souvenir. My stepfather and I bond in a different way. Sometimes, it’s a TV show or a documentary or a book. Sometimes, it’s with fashion. While it would offend mom to hear it, my stepdad gets my taste in clothes and jewellery better than she does. We almost always bond best over food. It was through the baked macaroni that I tried to show him affection. He was my (more than willing) guinea pig. He always said it was delicious, and afterwards suggesting that I “Ah, need to work on the bechamel sauce a little more… it’s too thin.” Or, “Mmm… the chicken to tomato sauce ratio needs to be a little wetter…”

It took me ten years to get the recipe down to what my stepfather considered “perfection.” Most might scoff, thinking I am a culinary idiot for taking ten years to figure out a basic baked mac recipe. It wasn’t the recipe I was after, it was the memory. It was a taste that existed in my head, in my stepfather’s head. I was trying to recreate a recipe from memory—his memory. In this homey little dish, I try to convey something more than carbs and cheese, I try to give him a taste of the comfort of a home he once knew. So when his world was turned upside-down recently, I felt helpless. I felt clueless. While I couldn’t save him, I could at least prop him up.

We didn’t talk much while the anger raged, and I mostly kept to myself. My parents were in Singapore getting their yearly checkup. It helped to focus more on their medical tests, worrying about my stepdad’s blood sugar, or my mother’s cholesterol. It made no use to lecture them, frustrated and appalled as I was. They were my parents after all, and I’m sure my stepsisters were giving them an earful in Singapore. And it wasn’t me to give affectionate texts full of “I love you”s and “I’m here if you need me” the way some friends were doing for me. Hell, if my parents got a text from me full of hearts and flowers, they would have assumed my phone was stolen and they were being trolled.

My stepdad arrived the day before my mom did. I didn’t want to let the day go by without touching base with him, but at the same time, I didn’t want to bother him. I gave him a friendly, salutation: Mom said you’re home already. How are you doing?

I’m okay, he texted back, hours later. Don’t worry, he added. I found it sweet and ironic.

It was hard not to worry, for his safety, for his blood pressure, for his heart: the literal and the figurative one. But I couldn’t say it, so I messaged back, Okay, let me know if you need anything. I felt like a wuss.

I checked in on mom as soon as she landed in Manila. She sounded tired as her car navigated through the rainy roads.

Lamely, I offered her the press gifts I just got. Perfume? Lotion? Ah! Hand cream, you always like hand cream! No need, hija. I’m okay. I feel helpless again, but I know my parents. They prefer to weather the storms together, they try to keep an even keel by pushing and pulling on one another… most times it works. This time I feel like they need all the love and support they can get.

A day or two later, I texted my stepdad again. I still didn’t know what to say so I ask if there is anything I can cook for him, hoping he’ll say baked macaroni, partly because I can make that dish with my eyes closed, and partly because I know I’m the only one who can make it perfectly for him. I’m okay, he repeats. But I’ll make it for him anyway.

I always make the baked macaroni I give my stepdad myself. I’ve taught the recipe to my cook, and try as she might, she never gets the taste quite right. My cook is nicknamed Jocelyn the Magnificent, because her cooking is simply that: magnificent. But even with all her talent, she cannot recreate the taste of the baked macaroni. No one else seems to notice the difference, but I do…and I think my stepdad will, too.

I stir in the tomato sauce, coating the bits of ham and chicken in a thick, red paste.

There’s a lack of acidity, the tang that cuts the creaminess of the cheese, maybe the cook needs the tastebuds of a tongue who swears just as much as he does. I add a dash more salt. Stir in a bit more tomato sauce.

I M AG E C O U RT ESY O F N E W YO R K P U B LI C LI B R A RY

My face feels the heat as I scald the milk for the white sauce. I remember that old maid of mine, telling me how Lola would use up a whole giant bar of Quickmelt cheese on one recipe. Is it no wonder that my family is forever fighting the battle of the bulge? There have been so many battles online lately, which I freely admit I refrain from reading, but I know the gist. What my stepfather said hurt my head and broke my heart. I know it was unacceptable. But I don’t need to read further to hammer it painfully home.

I watch the cheese bubble turn golden, before becoming a burnt brown. Soon the melted cheese has covered the top of the dish with a golden crust of salty,

buttery, pasteurized goodness. My family is a wild and complicated entity made up of connections—some of these connections are biological, some, like the friends who have become part of the family dynamic, are forged through time. And in times of crises, that’s when the family should stick even closer, even though I want to throttle their necks quite often. The best families, I think, aren’t the ones that you see traipsing around in well-matched ensembles on Sundays. The best families are the ones that stick by you when the chips are down. The best families are the ones who call you out, lecture you over Viber, make you want to cry, before wishing you luck when you need to roll a hard eight. We may not see each

other often, and may fight way too much, but we never give up on each other, and we never let go. Even though, as I complained to my stepfather recently, “it’s so hard to be related to you sometimes.”

I messaged my stepsisters the other day, just to touch base and give a reassuring little wave across the internet. I don’t see my stepsisters as often as I should. I hope I get to see them when they visit next week.

I hope the family can sit down to a nice meal, and be able to talk, laugh, watch the grandchildren run around. I hope we catch up on things missed and new news.

Patricia Barcelon Managing Editor, Esquire Philippines

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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FROM COMICS TO FILM TO COMICS: ANG ALAMAT NG PATINTERO

BY RICHARD BOLISAY

THEN SOMETHING CLICKED. HE THOUGHT THAT INSTEAD OF COMICS PERHAPS TURNING IT INTO A FILM WOULD MAKE MORE SENSE, ESPECIALLY SINCE MOVIES, IN A WAY, ARE SIMILAR TO PANELS IN LONG SHEETS, ONLY IN MOTION.

One weekend in April 2015, Mihk Vergara and Dan Villegas, longtime friends and selfprofessed art geeks, entered the room of the VPF Creative Productions office, where the longlisted finalists for the 3rd QCinema International Film Festival had been invited to make their pitch.

Each had graduated with a degree in communication arts from Ateneo de Manila in 2004, and since then they had been actively involved in several media projects— from short films, features, and music videos to advertising and television gigs. Villegas started as a cinematographer for film and TV, and before working with Star Cinema— in commercial fare such as Forever and a Day, Unofficially Yours, Bride for Rent, and She’s Dating the Gangster—he had helped out in various independently produced movies, including Numbalikdiwa, Still Life, Huling Pasada, and Sabungero. By 2015, he was already a bankable director, with three features under his belt, and another one slated for the upcoming Metro Manila Film Festival. His career was doing great.

Vergara, on the other hand, had yet to direct his first film. After college, he became an apprentice of the artist Christina Dy and took on some production design work. He wrote for magazines and did AVPs, from Christmas parties to small-time product launches. At some point, he also managed a film site called Lagarista and directed music videos for the band Spongecola. He was swinging from one project to another—anything that required him to shoot, he took it. He served as the script continuity supervisor for ‘Wag Kang Lilingon and Super Noypi and as the assistant director for San Lazaro, but all these years there had been no clear window of opportunity to helm his debut feature.

Not until now. Facing the selection committee of QCinema, Vergara presented his project titled The Ballad of Meng Francisco, for which Villegas offered to be one of

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the producers. The panel, in the initial deliberations, liked the concept of a uniquely Filipino outdoor game used to tell a story of a young girl, the community’s famed loser, struggling to prove her worth. It was a thick script—over a hundred pages long—but an engaging read. It put the spotlight on patintero, which many children today are not familiar with, and at the same time depicted an endearing underdog adventure, something that kids and adults alike would enjoy. Vergara submitted an earlier draft of the script to Cinemalaya in 2013, but didn’t make it to the shortlist. Now, poised and beaming, he was ready to give it another shot.

“Meng started as a comic,” Vergara said, opening his presentation. In 2006, he and his friend Dave Alegre, a concept artist and illustrator, worked on a short strip in which the character of Meng Francisco, a 10-year-old girl in a community of competitive kids, first appeared.

As someone with a fondness for the likes of Slam Dunk, Battleball, Dragon Ball, and Naruto, Vergara wanted a sports/action type comic similar to his favorite mangas, particularly those in the vein of shonen and shojo stories that valued friendship and camaraderie. Their goal was to submit it to the 1st Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards—not to win, but just to put it out there, to see it develop once it was out. A few hours before the deadline, they were still on page seven, cramming and scrambling, hopeful and hopeless at the same time, but submitted it anyway. As expected, they did not win.

Alegre’s early sketches of Meng depict her with a straight face, wearing a tightly zipped jacket and a pair of green flip-flops, her waistlevel hair unkempt and with two pins on the side. Her shorts are comfortable and way above the knee, and in one image she holds a bag of chips—a posture that looks lazy but ready to fight when provoked, both boyish and girlish, one of those kids who is bored with school and would rather stay out than stay home. In one particular illustration, Meng is seen jumping with outstretched legs and glowing slippers, and in another she is beating down opponents in an exaggerated yet amusing display of violence. Based on these initial designs, Vergara and Alegre obviously focused more on character studies than the narrative, and some of Meng’s friends and challengers have also been revealed: Shifty Alvarez, Nicay Hernandez, Bitoy Francisco, Ahas, Bagets, and Kita K. These kids were already alive by then, ready to play with and against each other, but they needed a story that would pull them together.

Years passed. Alegre moved to the U.S. to work for Cartoon Network, and Vergara placed the material on the backburner. He’d work on it bit by bit, idea after idea, detail by detail. It would always be on his mind, fleshing it out until it could stand on its own. He knew he always wanted to tell stories, but drawing

wasn’t for him: he never got better at it. Then something clicked. He thought that instead of comics, perhaps turning it into a film would make more sense, especially since movies, in a way, are similar to panels in long sheets, only in motion.

When Vergara saw the 2002 Japanese film Ping Pong, about the friendship of two high school table tennis players, he knew that was how Meng should come to life.

Directed by Fumihiko Sori and adapted from the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, Ping Pong is an amalgam of many things—adolescence, companionship, sports, dreams, ambition, coming of age: all told in this hyperkinetic fashion—the two main characters and their journey contained in a world seemingly detached from the real yet strikingly familiar, touching on the core of youth and the quest for self-worth. The characters of Meng are younger than those of Ping Pong, but they share the same intense urge to fight and win.

Vergara asked the help of another friend, Zig Marasigan, to write the script based on his sequence treatment. Marasigan polished the descriptions and added the dialogue, allowing the structure to emphasize not only Meng as a goodhearted underdog but also her friends, t he Patalos, including a superhero named Z-Boy. Marasigan suggested making Meng a famed loser instead of a patintero star, punctuating her journey through tournaments and her relationship with her family. The comics idea had now turned into an exciting cinematic spectacle, with a clear trajectory for its lead and set pieces relying primarily on practical effects.

At the QCinema pitch, Vergara showed a short film he and Chris Costello made in 2013 titled Ang Maskot, based on a comic by the local illustrator Makoy. Quirky and entertaining, it displayed the kind of humor and sensibility that Vergara aimed to achieve in Meng, neither full-on mainstream nor heavily artistic, a mix of drama and comedy but with a dash of weirdness to carry his personality.

With Villegas onboard and promising material that had been in development for almost 10 years, Meng felt ready for delivery. Weeks later, QCinema made its announcement: The Ballad of Meng Francisco was given a new title and became Patintero: Ang Alamat ni Meng Patalo— and Vergara, like Meng, would need to assemble a team for a big fight. After years of waiting, he would now be directing his first film. *** Sometime in July, 10-year-old Nafa HilarioCruz, managed by the director Maryo J. Delos Reyes, entered the audition room on the last day of casting. With her long hair, brown skin, sharp stare, and steady posture, Vergara knew right away, after more than three months of search, that he got his Meng.

It was settled when Cruz acted opposite

I L LU ST R AT I O N S BY DAV E AL EG R E

him. “I cursed at her,” he said. “I screamed at her, just to test her. She didn’t flinch at all.

She seemed about to cry but her face was feisty, like she wanted to hit me but couldn’t.”

It also felt fortuitous for him that Cruz was the same age as the project, as though she herself grew alongside it and waited exactly for this moment. When she accepted the role, selecting the other actors to be part of Team Patalo and the opponents became easy. After a painstaking preproduction, the shoot started weeks later in General Trias, Cavite, where the community was quieter and the look of the film would appear more natural and timeneutral: a story that, despite its nostalgia, could actually be situated anytime.

On Vergara’s team were people who had long believed in the project: Bernard Dacanay and Villegas as producers, Marasigan as writer, Mycko David as cinematographer, Mikey Amistoso and Jazz Nicolas as music composers, Mai Dionisio as editor, Marco Ortiga and Monica Sebial as production designers, and Ira Villar as stunt director.

Eduardo Rocha and Fernando Ortigas of TBA, the producers of the highly successful Heneral Luna, stepped in and offered financial

support, enabling the team to further improve the production quality and make the film as sophisticated yet true to its nature as possible.

Considering the limitations that came with working with children, it took 16 shooting days, a reshoot of a climactic sequence, and hundreds of hours in post-production before Vergara felt satisfied and submitted the final cut of Patintero to QCinema. Its gala premiere on the third of October was jampacked, and the response from the crowd was overwhelming: there was shouting, cooing, and teasing, even rounds of clapping and stomping in particular scenes. “That would definitely go down as one of the happiest nights of my life,” Vergara said with a smile, remembering as though it happened the previous night. At the awards ceremony days later, Patintero received the Audience Choice and Gender Sensitivity prizes. Amid the long years of development, the undying wait for that much-desired break, and the pressure to meet the biggest challenge from himself, Vergara pulled through. And Alegre, whose hands had made Meng move and fly for the first time, saw the film when it was shown in the New Filipino Cinema program at

the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He was in tears.

But Meng wouldn’t go just yet. She would never leave a friend alone, let alone her creator. To Vergara’s surprise, this project would make another surprising turn. *** Undeterred by heavy rains on a dingy August morning, a sizable crowd in two long lines enters the SMX Convention Center, where the 2016 AsiaPOP Comic Convention will be held. It is a melting pot for comic book aficionados, with its huge space for exhibits and events, as well as a venue for those who delight in cosplaying their favorite characters.

This year Nicholas Hoult, Claire Holt, Millie Bobby Brown, and Joe Dempsie are the main attractions—the idea of getting celebrity guests being a staple of these events, publicity and fan service in one—but the attendees are also looking forward to joining the sessions with local and foreign illustrators, musicians, writers, and artists, not to mention meeting fellow cosplayers, all of whom are united by their passion for the medium.

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Vergara is already inside the venue. Printed on his black tee are the words, “Piko, Chinese Garter, Langit Lupa,” all beloved Filipino outdoor games. He sits at the booth designed with corrugated iron sheets, surrounded by standees and posters promoting Patintero, with a plasma TV on the side playing the trailer and some clips from the film. Today is another big day for him—it is the launch of the comic book based on Patintero. In a few hours he will be joined by the cast, all arriving as their respective characters.

At the Summer Komikon in April, Vergara had dinner with the key people from TBA— Rocha, Ortigas, and Ting Nebrida—and they looked into ways to promote the film and agreed on a release date in October.

The producers liked how it turned out and thought it had the potential to do well commercially. “Part of the marketing plan was to hit AsiaPOP,” Vergara shares, looking at the people walking in, “but we didn’t have anything big to show yet. So that’s how the comic came about.” He pitched the idea to TBA: a short collection of strips that looks into the lives of Meng, Shifty, Nicay, and Z-Boy. He would personally select the artists and talk to them, each of whom would do one character from the Patalos and draw a story.

The result is Patintero: Mga Alamat ng Patalo, copies of which are now piled neatly on his desk. It features the works of Arnold Arre, Mich Cervantes, Rob Cham, and Carlorozy Clemente, who, in not more than 10 pages, manage to make interesting back stories for each character.

In Arre’s interpretation of Meng, drawn in his characteristic clean and trim panels, she remembers the lessons she has learned from her brother as she plays the game herself— the speed, the timing, the movement, the art and technique to overcome every obstacle— and the magic of Arre’s storytelling is making it a touching portrait of her relationship with her brother: how patintero is not just a game but an important, deeply personal fragment of her childhood.

In the same vein as his previous books, Cham tells Shifty’s story with visual and comic clarity without the help of words. In one simple act of going to a carnival and playing ring toss, he is able to capture Shifty’s spirit—the innocence, playfulness, and competitiveness—as well as the devil-may-care attitude of a boy full of eagerness, who wears his tilted cap with pride. In Nikay’s story, Cervantes illustrates the grade-conscious girl’s studiousness, her committed obedience to her mother, and her avoidance to play with Meng’s team. But the temptation is sweet—and the moment of submission Cervantes gives Nikay, closing in four panels of two hands, is a beautiful display of belongingness.

Quite different from the texture of these three strips is Clemente’s Z-Boy story, which

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is rough and rugged, the bulk of which depicts his exploits as a young superhero before seeing Meng’s team and helping them. What it lacks in tidiness it makes up for overwhelming energy, with Z-Boy coming alive in every corner of the panels.

“I am proud of this little thing,” Vergara says with a smile, browsing through the book. “It’s a companion piece to the film, but it can also stand on its own. It is made by different artists, as varied as the personalities of the Patalos.”

It’s still early, and the illustrators will also come later for the book signing to help attract buyers and promote the film. As though recalling something important, he adds, “Dave Alegre actually did this cover,” and shows it proudly.

“It hugs everything in it, like an envelope. It only makes sense he designed this. He has

always been there since the beginning.”

Vergara smiles again. He hasn’t been getting enough sleep over the past weeks in preparation for this event. Perhaps a scene from his favorite TV show, Steven Universe, comes to his mind. Or the thought that he’s leaving for China next month for the screening of Patintero at a film festival in Xi’an.

Or that in October, he will return to QCinema with a short film, a new one, another piece of nostalgia but this time for action films.

When a young man with a backpack comes to the booth, looking curiously at the standee of Meng on the hood of a car, Vergara smiles again. It’s the first sale of the day.

Richard Bolisay Film Critic

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guts & glory sarah lahbati the

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She’s gotten into trouble before. She doesn’t quite follow the rules, nor the script that’s been laid out for a talent like her.

For Sarah, everything is falling into its right place

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I’M LOOKING AT A PHOTOGRAPH OF SARAH LAHBATI. Her normally luxuriant hair is a dull brown, her Tonga-tanned skin now sallow, and her eyes, which appear sometimes blue, sometimes gray, are weighed down by dark shadows. This is the face of a drug addict. A victim of bad choices and even worse dealers, possibly a future casualty of the War on Drugs: tomorrow’s headlines.

Girl, you look like Beyoncé, I say. “A haggard Beyoncé,” Sarah replies. She is showing me a photo of herself in methface as Valerie, the young woman she plays in the upcoming film Kamandag ng Droga, directed by Carlo J. Caparas (yes, that Carlo J.—is there any other one?) A singer in a rock band, Sarah’s character falls into the fame trap and ends up doing a bunch of drugs, which she inevitably gets hooked on. This movie, whose title translates to Drug’s Poison or the more poetic Venom of Drugs, is what some quarters might call a propaganda film, but what the producers describe as being made “in support” of the President’s campaign, although Duterte is not one of its backers.

Joining the cast are industry veterans like Christopher de Leon, Lorna Tolentino, Jackie Lou Blanco, and Sarah’s future father-in-law, Eddie Gutierrez.

I take it that all the actors must be on board with the President? Sarah answers in the affirmative. “Everyone in the film are supporters, otherwise, you’d be hypocritical.”

It’s a Sunday evening in the Lahbati-Gutierrez household, and Typhoon Karen has just left our area of responsibility. Zion is watching cartoons while other family members move in and out of view—there’s never not a Gutierrez around. “It’s an eye-opener for the youth, and I hope the message affects people in some way,” she continues. “I’ve been enjoying this movie because it has meaning, be artificially shackled to another actor in a facsimile of an arranged marriage and it’s not just another love triangle where I would be a slight to her individual talents. She’s too gorgeous, too independent, have to cry about a guy leaving me.” too smart, and too tall to have to share the spotlight. With 2.1 million followers Sarah Lahbati is not just another actress. on Instagram, she’s not doing shabby at all. And she’s totally fine with it: “I’d Political leanings aside, we’re looking at a justrather have a zigzag career than a shoot-up career where I’m unhappy and turned 23-year-old who is owning the ups and unsatisfied and untrue to myself.” downs of her life, the twists and turns of her career. Initially attached to GMA and now repped by VIVA and Star Magic, Sarah’s been working for six years, leading as a frog princess SARAH GREW UP IN SWITZERLAND, born to a Moroccan father and in an afternoon soap and dancing regularly in Filipina mother. As their only child, the days of her youth were imposed with noontime variety shows. To be clear, she’s not enrichment classes: her dad enrolled her in karate and football, while her mom one of those ingenues who gets paired up with put her in violin and ballet. She preferred the more athletic activities, and a similarly fresh-faced young man and then summers were spent swimming outdoors, while winters were for hitting the ’shipped as a love team for the next four years slopes. The performing bug was caught early on—for years, her mom would or more. Whether it was deliberate on her part always make her sing at Filipino parties and fiestas, until one day she realized or not, Sarah resisted that route. Her name she actually enjoyed entertaining people. was never spliced into an awkward yet catchy Religion, too, was a big part of her household. Her dad, who’s been to Mecca portmanteau with someone whom she was not and prays three times a day, naturally wanted his daughter to be a Muslim. “I in an actual relationship with. As a result, she learned Arabic, and I tried praying and I tried reading the Qu’ran, but it wasn’t might have missed out on the hype machine for me,” Sarah says. “My mom’s Catholic, and my best friend is a Christian. I felt that such a love team would bring, including like my heart connected with the Christian church.” In deference to her father, ready-made soap operas, rom-coms, book Sarah abstains from eating pork, to this day. deals, and that almighty chance to trend. On The rigors of a conservative, two-faith household and the pressures of being her own, she adds up to so much more, and to an only child sometimes brought out Sarah’s rebellious side: “I got in trouble a lot in school, but the kind of trouble that was tameable, like fighting with my math teacher and getting detention. I considered myself a good girl, but I can be rebellious if my buttons are pushed.” These little rebellions might explain how Sarah came to be the youngest Ultimate Survivor of StarStruck at the age of 16, faced criminal charges and became a mother at 19, and ended up on the Kardashian-like crazy train that is the It takes Guts to be a Gutierrez reality series for four seasons.

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After graduating from high school in Geneva, Sarah and her family were on holiday in the Philippines and about to head to Boracay when her mom heard about an audition at GMA, and encouraged Sarah to join. Most of us remember what we were doing that day, the Saturday of September 25, 2009. For Sarah, it was her baptism of fire, or rain, rather. “I had to commute by jeep, bus, and MRT to get to the place where the audition was. After the audition, that’s when Ondoy hit really hard,” Sarah recalls.

“I was in Taft and it was a swimming pool. Cars were upside down, pregnant women were trying to get help. It was a nightmare. I was like, what am I doing here? Do I really want to enter showbiz?”

It took Sarah six hours to get home that night. The next day, she got a call informing her that she was one of the finalists for StarStruck, a talent competition. She took the offer and everything that came with it, and from then on fell in love with the world of performing. Her father and her friends back home were all expecting her to return to Geneva, but she had made up her mind to stay in the Philippines to pursue this dream.

From the sparkling and ordered environs of Switzerland, Sarah plunged right into the chaos of a nation reeling from a natural disaster. “I’m kind of spontaneous that way,” she offers. “If I see an opportunity, despite me being afraid, I see that my hope is greater than my fear, so I just go and do it.”

I FIRST MET SARAH ON THE ISLAND OF MALAPASCUA. She, her partner Richard Gutierrez, and their son, Zion, were spending the December 2014 holidays there, as were my own family. Call time for the thresher shark dive was 5 a.m. every morning. It had been some time since either of us had gone diving, but Sarah proved to be a very quick relearner, and the dive-master noted how comfortable she was in the water. She kept pace with Richard, who would go down deep to take pictures, while I stayed a bit higher on the line along with a hundred other divers and noobs. On the banca, she told me that her dad, who liked to dive in the lake in Geneva, made her take the open water course when she was a kid. “It was so boring, in a pool during winter. I’d rather be home watching TV,” she said. It was only on a vacation in Egypt where she started truly enjoying diving on her own accord and not at the behest of her father. After a few days of diving together, I got the sense that Sarah and Richard were two celebrities who didn’t quite fit the mold. On December 30, while social media was blowing up with news of the DongYan showbiz wedding of the decade, Sarah mentioned in passing that she and Chard were supposed to be there. They had chosen the sea instead.

The SarahChard coupling is an interesting one, and not without its share of controversy. They first met at the story-con of a new primetime show they were to star in together. “It was a big deal for me and I wanted to present myself well, but I wasn’t expecting his mom [Annabelle Rama] to be there,” she remembers. “I was so scared of her, and the first thing she said to me was, “’Day, you should get bangs, ang laki ng noo mo.” She almost died of embarrassment in front of Richard. During the filming of Makapiling Kang Muli, the two actors bonded fast and hard. At that point in her life, Sarah had no intentions of looking to date or be in a relationship, as all she wanted to do was focus on her work. A little older, she now viewed acting as a craft, rather than a means to stardom, and she was keen to prove that she was more than just a pretty face. Richard, nine years her senior, harbored no such issues, and wooed her determinedly with flowers, chocolates, and food cooked by other people. It was hard to resist this perfect gentleman, Sarah says, and Chard is, by all means, her first real love: “We understood each other on a really deep level, we’re both such weirdos, two aliens made for each other.”

After a series of tweets she made in January of 2013, Sarah got embroiled in legal battles with the head of GMA. The network claimed she had gone on leave without approval, among other things. There was suing and counter-suing, and things got pretty ugly. In the middle of all this, Sarah found out she was pregnant. She was in Paris with Richard and her mom, who started getting suspicious when Sarah would suddenly and tearfully have a craving for Andok’s at eight in the morning. The couple had already discussed their future together, so they were mentally prepared for the possibility of having a baby. Richard was ready to settle down, and though Sarah was barely out of her teens, they both knew what they wanted. Not surprisingly, when the test came up positive, her mom was shocked, her dad devastated. Their good little girl was breaking all the rules of both Christianity and Islam by having a child out of wedlock. “I tried to explain to him that we are on the way there. That will happen, this just happened first.

I feel like in any person’s life, structure does not matter. If you feel like this is right for you, this thing you want to do, but it’s not appropriate for the month of January—you do it,” she says. This spontaneity, as she calls it, is what someone my age would call the wisdom of not giving any fucks. “That’s how I think, that’s how Richard thinks, and that’s the constant battle I have with my parents.”

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BUT JUST WHEN YOU THINK SHE’S SETTLED INTO THE SAFE, COMFORTABLE THRUM OF SHOWBUSYNESS, SARAH INTRODUCES ANOTHER P L O T T W I S T: “THISY MAY BE MY LAST I N T E R V I E W .”

The pressure to wed has been intensifying as each year goes by. Sarah was adamant about not getting married at 19, while she was dealing with so many problems. She chose to stay in Switzerland during her pregnancy, not simply to keep things under wraps, but to protect her growing fetus from the hate and negative vibes back home.

Rumors were circulating, and she was getting called all sorts of names, as we have come to expect from the darker recesses of Facebook and Twitter where commenters get drunk on schadenfreude. Still, thanks to her raging pregnancy hormones, she found herself depressed and lonely, particularly around wintertime. Richard, who had taping commitments in Manila, could only be with her for a few days each month. Fortunately, he was able to fly in the day she was induced to deliver. Zion, the young lion, was born in May 2013.

She returned to the Philippines in July that year, with no baby in tow. Entertainment reporters were already waiting at the airport, ready to pounce, but the only statement Sarah made was that she will indeed face the charges against her. (The cases have since been settled amicably.) Zion arrived quietly several weeks later with his grandmother.

He remained unknown, hidden from the public eye until he turned one, when he was officially introduced to the world. You could say that he absolutely steals the spotlight now, and I can only imagine the kind of future life he’ll have, knowing that he’s been welldocumented, ever since he was in diapers, endorsing milk brands before he could read.

“It was all worth it, finally, from being a young girl not knowing what the future held, to having meaning and a purpose to my life in Zion,” Sarah says with quiet conviction.

“I went back to work, I felt stronger than ever. I was so inspired, I felt so confident, no one could break my family.”

The day before her 23rd birthday, Sarah released her first single, “Bato Bato sa Langit,” a proper dance-pop track with shades of Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez. She’s in no rush to finish the album, though, wanting to take the time to create meaningful songs. She’s also in the first-draft stage of a book, which will be about “staying true to yourself.” But just when you think she’s settled into the safe comfortable thrum of show-busyness, Sarah introduces another plot twist: “This may be my last interview.”

She confesses that she almost backed out the day before the shoot for Esquire. Sarah knew her dad would have a heart attack if he saw these pictures—he doesn’t even like seeing her in shorts, much less all the other things she wears as ABS-CBN’s newly minted Dance Goddess. But what tipped the scale in the magazine’s favor was that she also didn’t want to miss out on this chance At this point Richard walks in the room, laptop in hand, working on editing the to be photographed in this particular hundreds of humpback whale photos he took in Tonga. I have a feeling he’s more moment of her life. She and Richard are passionate about his photography than he is about being in showbiz, and he talks seriously considering leaving everything optimistically about their escape plans. “The industry is getting stagnant, for us at behind and going back to school. “I’ve least,” he says. “The country’s going through a transition, and it’s not for everyone,” been thinking about studying, and Sarah adds. “We just want to keep our souls alive.” I can’t help but feel excited for the focusing on Zion and Richard. I’ve been three of them, getting to live like normal people do, somewhat. Within the hierarchy working nonstop, and you know how it is of Philippine showbiz royalty which they firmly belong to, Sarah and Richard are in showbiz, everything goes so fast you outliers. They’re mainstream, yet nonconformists; at the end of the day, they just kinda get lost a little. I don’t want to wait really want to do their own thing. until I don’t know myself anymore.”

Maybe the public will miss them, or maybe it will just move on to the next reallife love team and cute celebrity baby. But Sarah will get to fulfill her promises to her parents, to herself, and to her child: that she continues her education, keeps stretching her horizons, and be fully present for Zion as he grows into a little man. She’s not afraid of leaving showbiz; she’s more afraid of wasting precious time. One day, we’ll see an Instagram photo of them barefoot on a faraway island, newly married, and with little fanfare, just the way they like it.

PRODUCED BY KARA ORTIGA AND MIGUEL ESCOBAR • ART DIRECTION BY PAUL VILLARIBA STYLING BY RIA CASCO • MAKEUP BY JELLY EUGENIO • HAIR BY CATS DEL ROSARIO PRODUCTION DESIGN BY JUSTINE BUMANLAG • NAILS BY TRIPLE LUCK BROW & NAIL SALON (SPECIAL THANKS TO MICHELLE SY)

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When it comes to international success, Filipino food is always the bridesmaid, never the bride.   proposes a radical solution to being noticed on the global stage: Step 1—don’t care so much.

ART BY MAINE MANALANSAN

NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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fter many long years of wandering unloved in the wilderness, Filipino food has finally gone from being continually “on the cusp of being the next big thing,” to emerging from the shadows and moving into the limelight. At long last, our cuisine has gone mainstream. There are Filipino restaurants being written about in the New York Times, food bloggers enthusiastically embracing the vibrant purple hues of our beloved ube on their Instagram feeds, and no less than the Washington Post has proclaimed: “At long last, Filipino food arrives. What took it so long?”

(That’s the actual title of an April 2015 article.)

The food world might be second only to the fashion world in its relentless search for trends, and something can depart as abruptly as it arrives. Local is out, nouvelle cuisine is in again, molecular gastronomy has been supplanted by note-by-note, pho is the new ramen, sour is the new umami. The last thing we want for Filipino food is to be as fleeting— and inconsequential—in the public imagination as asymmetry in last year’s Spring/Summer collection.

What we want is for Filipino food to arrive and become part of the culinary landscape, not a faddish phenomenon. And it must arrive intact: just two months ago a New York Times article had a headline that began: “Filipino Food Arrives, in a Taco…” If we have to crawl into a taco to arrive, do we really want to be there?

No story about Filipino food is complete without mentioning the balut, which is what Philippine food was represented by in the West for years, the culinary equivalent of the Filipino natives who were brought to the U.S. and exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The fertilized duck embryo has travelled the world as our ambassador to provoke disgust and horror, as well as the flip side of the coin, to be patronized and embraced by those who want to show love for the savages—or just be cooler than their friends. For most of us who grew up with balut, the response of the white man was more amusing than anything; the balut was something that was simply there, a treat when the vendor came around at night or when an officemate happened to go to Pateros for a meeting. When Internet videos and Buzzfeed got around to it, Filipinos in the U.S. made the tragic error of mistaking attention for interest, and the race to the bottom for the weirdest food to

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come out of the Philippines and be waved in front of a camera was born.

The real interest in Philippine food began when French food and fine dining collapsed in the mainstream food world, and the superstar of the industry went from being Alain Ducasse to (briefly) Ferran Adrià and his posse, and then became Anthony Bourdain. Michelin stars gave way to pop-ups and food trucks; the elegant, built-up food styling of Saveur gave way to the irreverence and obsessive nativism of Lucky Peach. It’s a time when a bowl of a spicy fry-up at a hawker’s market can be as important and transcendent a gastronomic experience as a perfectly cooked quenelle

No story about Filipino food is c om ple te without m e ntioning the balut, which is what Phil ippine food was re pre s e nte d by in the we st for years , the culinary e quivale nt of the F il ipino native s who we re brought to the U.S. and ex hibite d at the 190 4 World’s Fair in St. Louis . at a French haute-cuisine restaurant. This is, in general, a good thing. Countries like the U.S., the UK, and even France, are beginning to discover that their migrant populations are good at other things aside from emptying dustbins; in the States, especially, the current interest in Mexican and Latin American food is ironic because most fine-dining kitchens have had Latinos in all but the top positions for some time now.

The availability of cheap air travel has a lot to do with it. David Attenborough’s rise to fame coincided with the advent of commercial jet flights in the 1970s, and this is why he was able to cut from hedgehogs to kangaroos to polar bears to drive home a point.

Today’s international travellers are no longer the type who eat canned food throughout the journey; an

adventurous, seasoned palate is something to boast about and slipped smoothly into conversation: “But of course, the commercialized Thai food is nothing compared to this unassuming street stall I happened to discover in Vientiane…”

It’s no less snobby than the old checklists of having been to Taillevent, Lasserre, Le Cirque, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons: you need time, and you need money (and because time is money, this amounts to the same thing). You need the wherewithal to go traipsing about the world and slipping into obscure sushi restaurants in the heart of Tokyo or an unknown hut serving the best ceviche in Peru. And then you need to be knowledgeable about it, in the days of classical cooking there was only one canon to be covered.

But the breadth of knowledge one must master to hold a proper foodie conversation has increased exponentially. And again, this is, mostly, a good thing.

Culinary tourism holds the same pitfalls as any sort of tourism: you can be curious, open-minded, and have only the best of intentions, but sometimes one’s mere presence is disruptive, not to mention a stampeding horde of tourists making a beeline toward one stall because it happened to get a write-up in the Financial Times or get rated by a Michelin inspector. Some very conservative Japanese restaurants have taken to quietly turning down reservations from foreigners because they “don’t want to become Jiro”—a box to be ticked, like having your photograph taken beside the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, as the teacher fawns attention on her pet student, Filipino food has been the nerd at the back of the class continually raising his hand and calling out. I don’t think any other cuisine has been so earnest about being taken seriously and so studiously ignored. America’s fascination with Latino food—and recently, with Korean food— has political underpinnings.

It has much to do with how America sees these communities as being foreign in origin but now essentially American.

Though Filipinos have had a presence in the United States since 1587 we have

never been a strong, coherent social force, for various reasons that are nobody’s fault.

America’s recognition of Filipino food—or more properly, Filipino-American food— is finally happening, but unfortunately comes at a time when there has been a bit of a pushback by a few of the communities whose food has become briefly faddish before being amalgamated into the great American cookbook.

“Cultural appropriation” is the phrase generally thrown around, although Lisa Heldke, a noted food scholar who was one of the first to write about it in an academic context, calls it “cultural food colonialism.”

This is especially evident in the toecurlingly cringeworthy videos of Americans trying balut and other Filipino food, which Filipinos gleefully share online as evidence of our presence in the mainstream cultural consciousness. We can take refuge in the fact that they’ve tried this with other cuisines, such as Korean and Thai and Vietnamese—though this is not equal-opportunity orientalism; Buzzfeed doesn’t run videos about Americans trying African or Middle Eastern food and their reactions to it.

The diversity of Asian culture, and the place of Asians in American society, makes us an endless source of novelty, our culture offered up as artefacts for American subjects to judge, and offer their disgust, perplexity, or nonchalant acceptance.

Fortunately, Philippine food in the West has gone beyond the viral video. Maharlika, Jeepney, Pig and Khao, Talde, Bistro 7107, Second City, Swell Dive, Ricebar, Lasa, Romulo Café, Le Servan, and all the others are in the shadow of Purple Yam, the successor to the pluckiest Filipino restaurant of them all, the now-defunct Cendrillon in the SoHo distict.

Why did it have a French name? Why did their adobo have coconut milk in it? Why were there traces of other cuisines on the menu? Although Cendrillon was a darling of the New York critics, and the Philippine food community was happy to see representation in the U.S. dining scene, the complaint was always that it wasn’t authentic. And it’s true, these restaurants aren’t authentic, not in the way they would be if a great earth digger carved out Dencio’s or Gerry’s Grill and flew it, suspended by cables hooked to a squadron of C-130s, to Brooklyn. The restaurants range from resolutely in-your-face Filipino, the most “authentic” you’ll get without going to a turo-turo in the back of a balikbayan box store, to “pan-Asian” or “Filipino Asian.”

Believe it or not, this is not as terrible as it sounds. Leah Cohen, for instance, arrived at Filipino food (even if her mother is Filipino) via a love affair with Thai food; her approach to cooking it is not an erudite, respectful one, but one which works for her. Do we need to slap her around for not being authentic? Then we’d have to slap

Columbian exchange? Does a recipe count as traditional if it has only been created a generation ago, by a restaurant chef rather than a village elder—as sizzling sisig (Trellis) or crispy pata (Barrio Fiesta) was? One of the more popular tropes in writing a food story is the “quest for the authentic whatever,” be it mole or xiao long bao or pinikpikan. It usually features a guide, a helpful local who, after rescuing the writer from tourist dumps, initiates him into the cultural context of the food (long digression on history and politics goes here) and ends somewhere remote and inaccessible, or in someone’s kitchen, savoring the dish as it was cooked since the bronze age, before slowdancing to folk music. All of this, of course, is utterly false. I don’t know what authentic is, but no one else does, either, and I think we can all agree that it isn’t that.

But the last thing I would want to be is a wet blanket at a time when Filipino food is having a moment, a movement, even. The chefs in the U.S. and other countries are mostly young, idealistic, maybe a generation removed from home but all the more enamored with the local foodways we take for granted because of it. There’s #FilipinoPride and representation and the need for white people to notice us and take us seriously; but there’s also a lot of honest cooking and good food being served up to people who are genuinely interested in wanting to know us better. And sometimes we have to bring the mountain to Mohammed: the two times that a Madrid Fusion event was held in Manila were quixotic and filled with internal politicking, but did Philippine food a world of good by having a genuine exchange of ideas beneath the paparazzi dinners and selfies with rockstar chefs.

The best Filipino restaurants, whether here or abroad, are those that don’t feel desperate for acceptance, just as the best Filipino food is cooked for Filipinos and neither toned down nor exoticized for white people; and the best thing that can happen for Filipino food is for us to stop caring what other people think. Here’s an idea: to push the boundaries of Philippine food so that Filipinos will be astonished at how simultaneously unfamiliar and authentic it is.

Do it so well that people will pay as much for it as they’d pay for a fancy meal at a foreign restaurant. Make Filipino food so refined that we start laying down the foundations of a Filipino cuisine.

Al though Ce ndrillon was a darling of t he Ne w York critics , and the Phi lippine food com m unity was hap py to s e e re pre s e ntation in the U. S . dining s ce ne, the com plaint was always that it was n’t authe ntic.

A nd it’s true, the s e re staurant’s are n’t authe ntic, not in the way th ey would be if a gre at e arth d i gge r car ve d out De ncio’s or G erry’s Grill and fle w it, s us pe nde d by c able s hooke d to a s quadron of C-1 30s , to Brook ly n.

Nicole Ponseca around for serving up a slapdash hodge-podge of Filipino culture— almost self-orientalizing—to sell Philippine food to New Yorkers. Each restaurant is the product of the owners’ and the chefs’ experiences and intentions. Somewhere I’d have to draw the line, for example at Filipino food in tacos: I don’t like it here, to begin with, and I don’t think we should be riding the popularity of Central American food like a stowaway.

Authenticity is getting to be a bit of a dirty word, anyway: no one quite knows what it means, except that they want it.

Does it mean made with ingredients that are indigenous to the place—in which case, how long does it have had to be indigenous; does it have to date from before the

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GROWING FOOD

It’s time for Filipino produce—and farmers—too.

BY GERARDO JIMENEZ

f this is the time for Filipino cuisine, then it may well be the time for Filipino native produce and ingredients, too. One exciting offshoot of the hard-fought campaign to popularize Filipino cuisine on the international stage is that it may also benefit the Filipino farmers who grow the produce essential for Filipino dishes, and encourage them to search and culture other indigenous produce. The sobering part, on the other hand, is that unless the farmers share in the economic rewards of this growing recognition for Filipino dishes, then this coming-of-age might be short-lived.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our culinary icons—there are so many to mention, with 2016 Asia’s Best Female Chef Margarita Forés first coming to mind—combined with the energy and creativity of an emerging new generation of professionals working in the food industry, Filipino cuisine has finally caught the attention of the global culinary scene.

The Department of Agriculture (DA), has led the way too. After so many years of focusing on major crops like rice, corn and cassava, the DA, largely through the work of Undersecretary Berna RomuloPuyat, has significantly shifted its attention towards the rediscovery and new-found focus on unique Filipino indigenous

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produce. Now, people are talking more about—and planting more of—such crops as adlay (also known as Job’s tears), pili, ube (purple yam), as well as cacao, and coffee, more than ever before.

It makes sense. What makes our cuisine unique is our unique array of local produce and ingredients. Furthermore, stressing produce unique to our country, and which grow very well in our country, places us at an advantage in the international market.

The yearning for local produce has been so palpable, that even in my farm— Malipayon Farms, where I grow specialty fresh produce using organic and biodynamic methods—I have learned to look out more for unique local crops. The effort, in close collaboration with the wonderful chefs who have taken the time to visit and share their ideas, has resulted in new produce, from “hip” lagkitan corn sprouts and stunning blue ternate edible flowers, to good import substitutes like “aruy-uy” nonspicy chillies (as a substitute, for example, to the Spanish Padron chillies), mustasa (mustard) and labanos (radish) microgreens, even alugbati flowers, to name a few. I’ll certainly look for more produce to discover. And rediscover.

Having Filipino dishes and produce in the international limelight is a welcome development that presents opportunities for our farmers to earn more. It may be a matter of survival. The reality is that while

all agricultural crops are grown in farms, the bulk of revenues is earned outside these farms, by players around the farmers, more than the farmers themselves. Farmers, particularly in our country, find themselves squeezed by the rising costs of inputs such as chemical fertilizers and insecticides, and the perils of weather risk and market risk. So much can be lost in one big typhoon as to bring farmers into debt. High productivity may be negated by a drop in selling prices, in case supply gluts occur. Plagued usually by the “one-buyertrader/several sellers-growers” environment, where one major trader usually monopolizes and dictates prices, the farmer is usually left with very little to grow and maintain his farming enterprise. This is especially true among small farms.

Climate change presents even potentially greater problems for farmers. Some produce that farmers have grown for a long time may not fare as well with the changing climatic conditions. Climate change may cause greater insect infestation, as plants are more stressed from unfamiliar growing conditions.

Growing more local indigenous produce, in combination with what farmers have grown for quite some time, may also increase the resilience of their farms to the risks they are exposed to. Farms become more ecologically balanced if a greater diversity of produce is grown. (Plants do have a way of supporting each other, by becoming more hospitable to organisms that help feed them more nutrients, and protect them from harmful organisms, if they do not use chemical inputs that may kill these beneficial organisms.)

In the end, deriving more profits from growing higher value produce is what will keep farmers in farming, and encourage their children to continue this noble work.

As Filipino cuisine grows in stature in the international culinary scene, what will sustain it is how it fares in the local front. Ultimately, it will force us to answer questions such as: How do we value our own local produce? Are we willing to pay more for local produce, so our farmers can earn more than the usual survival income? Will traders evaluate how they do business with the farmers who grow our produce, so that farmers can earn a greater share of the final value of the produce they have sweated out planting, and kept in the fields for weeks or months before they could harvest? Can farm workers be paid more for the important and back-breaking work they do?

Filipino cuisine coming of age is a big boon to our food industry and to our identity as a nation. It would be a big victory indeed, if our farmers could ride on it and lead a better-quality life. Or it could leave a sour taste, if our farmers or food producers stay poor in spite of the coming of age of our cuisine.

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Fried Chicken, For The (Filipino) Soul SAVO R T H I S D E L I C I O U S I RO N Y: O N E O F O U R M OST I C O N I C F I L I P I N O R E STAU R A N TS B U I LT I TS R E P U TAT I O N O N A M E R I CA N F R I E D C H I C K E N .

A N D N OW T H I S SA M E R E STAU R A N T C H A I N I S B R I N G I N G F I L I P I N O FO O D TO A M E R I CA—A N D O N TO T H E R E ST O F T H E WO R L D.

b y R E G I N E R A FA E L Portraits by RENNELL SALUMBRE A r t wo r k by M A DY M A R C E L I N O

Jim Fuentebella, VP for Marketing (left); and younger brother Dave Fuentebella, CFO. Both sit on the Board of Directors of Max’s Group of Companies.

ALL IN THE FAMILY The Trotas and Gimenezes circa 1959.

RONICALLY ENOUGH, the first time I really experienced a Max’s Restaurant fried chicken meal was when I was 18 years old, in Glendale, California. Yes, I did grow up in Manila. No, I didn’t live under a rock. In the ’90s, it was just that my family gravitated towards other spots like Whistlestop with its 24-hour breakfasts, and Racks with its baby back ribs. So when I had my first taste of Max’s iconic chicken—its crisp skin and juicy meat paired with sweet potato fries and that ubiquitous condiment mix of banana ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce—I was instantly smitten.

It turns out that 71 years ago, American soldiers felt the same way, but their first Max’s fried chicken experience was in a home along Scout Tuazon street in Quezon City. The year was 1945; Maximo Gimenez (or Max, as his newfound American friends fondly called him) and his niece Ruby Trota lived in a family compound across the base camp and would regularly invite American troops over for food and drinks. Ruby would whip up familiar Western dishes, like steak and fried chicken, eventually coming up with a special fried chicken recipe that was an instant hit. A perfect chicken recipe combined with Ruby’s never-ending generosity and first-rate hospitality was what initially launched Max’s Restaurant decades ago, and it’s what keeps it going today.

“Our lola was an incredibly generous host and it was through food that she was able to make people happy,” says Jim T. Fuentebella, one out of the seven grandkids who sit on the board of directors for the expanding Max’s Group—which, it should be noted, has rapidly grown to include 13 different brands (including both Filipino chains like Dencio’s and American stalwarts such as Krispy Kreme and Jamba Juice).

“That’s the soul of what defined her.” And the values that defined Ruby Trota are what continue to drive the third

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generation of Trotas, as they manage to preserve their family culture and tradition despite the change in dynamics—especially after the group became a publicly-traded company in 2014. Jim’s brother, Dave T. Fuentebella, expounds on the importance of family members sharing similar values. “We take trips every year, all of us cousins, and we spend time together eating, mostly,” shares Dave. “This is really part of making it work in the boardroom. Not all genius ideas happen in the office. The fact that we actually get along helps resolve things faster. We’re able to level up to the next idea.” The ability to separate oneself from the myriad roles each person plays—whether it’s the role of family member, board member, or a specific departmental role within the organization—greatly helps when making board-level decisions. And as Jim and Dave claim, everything they do stems from Nanay Ruby. Would it be something she would do? Would it be something she would be proud of? This driving force pushes the third generation to continue paying tribute to their beloved grandmother, mainly by treating customers the same way she

would. Max’s success can only be attributed to its pure intent of being a generous host—the same way Nanay Ruby was.

Throughout Max’s seven decades of existence, they have slowly done their part in putting Filipino food on the global map. With the first foreign branch opening in 1982 in San Francisco, California, to their more recent restaurant openings in the Middle East, their sarap-to-the-bones fried chicken has reached an even wider audience. More recently, Max’s has even gained recognition from the likes of Los Angelesbased Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold, who added Max’s to his list of favorite Asian fried chicken dishes, calling it “lightly vinegary, beautifully crisp” while emphasizing the importance of eating it with banana ketchup. This alone is a big deal.

“Our goal [when opening restaurants abroad] was to redefine Filipino cuisine. That’s why when you eat at Max’s restaurants abroad you’ll see signs that say ‘Cuisine of the Philippines’ instead of ‘The House that Fried Chicken Built,’ which is too vague for the market overseas,” explains Jim. The draw will

always be the winning fried chicken and sweet potato fries, but once people who are unfamiliar with the Max’s brand start trickling into the restaurant they’ll find other Filipino dishes worth loving, too. “All we need is a tipping point,” adds Jim. “Our fried chicken isn’t an acquired taste. It’s tasty and people enjoy it. Once people try it, then start opening themselves up to other Filipino dishes, an awareness for Filipino cuisine will be raised.”

Thinking back to my first dining experience at Max’s in Glendale when I was a homesick college student reinforced the notion that Max’s is synonymous to a true Filipino dining experience. From the sincere hospitality, to the comforting lutong bahay flavors of the dishes—and that stellar fried chicken, of course—I felt like I was home. It’s interesting to see how things come full circle for a homegrown establishment like Max’s Restaurant. What started out as pure generosity towards people from the United States has now turned into a growing food empire that serves Filipinos all over the world—and gaining international recognition to boot.

So here, an ode to Max’s iconic Original Classic Fried Chicken.

Thank you for being a reliable constant. Thank you for always being there, not only for people who crave for a taste of home, but for people who crave comfort in a home away from home.

Thank you for bringing global awareness to our wonderful country, proving that the Philippines is more than just balut or a mish-mash of turo-turo dishes. And of course, thank you Nanay Ruby, for allowing us Filipinos to continuously enjoy this delicious ride.

MAXIMO’S HOUSE The first Max’s Store in Scout Tuason, circa 1945, when it was still called South F Street.

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Hot & Bothered How could you forget the first time your lips touched...soft-shell crab sushi? The euphoria of the unlikely combination had you shuddering with delight, as you ravaged its soft, creamy body, before swallowing whole in a fit of bestial passion. This hunger—it is a lust of flesh for flesh; an unholy desire that makes savages of the civil. You only come to your senses when you finish, wiping clean your lips and your hands that are soiled with sin, left alone with nothing more but the remnants of your indulgence.

This month, we goad three writers into exploring their sensual relationships with food, as they look at their favorites with a salacious yearning that may make you feel uncomfortable, or at least, we hope, whet your appetite.

P H OTO G R A P H S BY GA B BY CA N T E RO

Xiao Long Bae

BY SAS H A M A RT I N E Z

THE PRAGMATIST IN YOU WELL UNDERSTANDS that there can be too much of a good thing; that there can be limits to the pleasures you commit yourself to. Even now, you draw closer to terminal euphoria: You had one, and then of course you had to have another—both sliding all too easily down your throat, that wash of heat and spice—and then the sixth slipped into you, and then the seventh, the eighth, and then with much reaching, the ninth. You are fanciful enough to think you feel them inside you, small pockets of satisfaction swilling then settling deep in your gut, even as your tongue marauds over the flesh inside your mouth to catch what lingers there.

But. You understand now, too, how capable you are of gluttony; how susceptible you are to petite, white, plump creatures that hold far too many secrets and as many wonders inside of them.

A curious greed has been ignited in you: You must consume all, all you can take, and then some.

The first encounter was storybook: They were spread before you in a loose rosette formation, the steam still clinging to the air around them misting their soft skin. (You thought of how that softness would feel against your lips—just your lips, no teeth, not yet, just that sure and slow rub of one tactile thing against another.) They were clean, tidy, and smart; disconcertingly scentless but for a whiff of meat. They did not beckon; they merely sat there, docile, awaiting your hands.

Your mistake was to assume submissiveness, when they were merely dormant. When you plucked one from its perch, and brought it to your mouth—when you relented and surrendered

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to your baser, more animal self, and sank your teeth against skin, puncturing that smoothness: There came the broth flooding your palate, washing away all thoughts, erasing all memories of banquets past. That hot and sudden sluicing, weaving its way in and out of the most private shadows of your mouth, running against your rawest flesh like a river in a rainstorm.

The heat of it! The fullness of that juice, that nectar; its lifeblood soon to course through you, and you need more. How alive you feel, and yet: How very much in want. Every fiber of your being demands assuaging. So you suck and you gulp and you swallow and you gasp, and you gasp because that gushing in your mouth was but a flick of time, and you are now left with an emptied velvet shell nestling on your tongue.

But even that sliver-and-slither of meat compels you.

It is time for teeth, more teeth, a full working of a mouth that’s become the locus of all the hunger within you. So you chew and you gulp and you swallow and you gasp—and before you know it, before the daze that’s descended over your brain lifts, you are reaching for another, another pinch of white flesh. Later, after a breath, you will learn all the variations of this pleasure: The roundness of vinegar, the sharpness of soy sauce, the shredded ginger biting back. They stoke that greed, whip the embers of your need into a conflagration. But that is much later. For now, that first swallow, that first frenzied whirlwind that took your mouth hostage: You need to take that breath, that long and ragged, shuddering breath. And when you regain speech—Oh, my little dumplings, you croon.

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Why the Durian has Thorns

BY SA RG E L AC U E STA

MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME HOW BEST TO ENJOY DURIAN. Her family is from Davao, and therefore according to family logic so was I, so it was a forgone conclusion for her: I would like it immediately, no doubt about it. After all, she was born into the land over which the durian cast its thorned shadow and its unguent smell. Didn’t everyone, in fact, call it, the “King of Fruits?”

She used a machete to open it. It was a tool out of place in the kitchen, a tool for the gnarled trees in the garden, a weapon you brandished when there was an unexpected visitor knocking at the gate late at night. When she split it open she might have been killing a man. Inside, it looked like how a man’s opened chest might look, after all the blood had fled it, flesh in flesh and flesh upon flesh.

From the very first time I encountered it, she wanted me to learn how to fully experience it. But it wasn’t only about the taste; it was about the whole thing, that massive, misshapen, asymmetrical beast, all of its myths and promises gathered into one large thing on our kitchen table, a thing with thorns.

Some people have likened its smell to rotten meat, or roasted onions, or a bit of both, but these are processed views, Western views, a kind of illiterate appropriation. When you smell a durian for the first time, you smell dark folds of skin, you smell the sweat of unknown exertions, the odor of odor.

People have died from it, she told me, proudly. Relations. She told me a durian fell on an uncle’s head, killing him instantly. All of seven or eight, I reached out and bravely touched a thorn with what must have been a tiny finger. I’ve forgotten how it felt; I must have drawn back too quickly to remember.

Inside the durian were chambers, like the chambers of a man’s heart, and nested in those chambers were its seeds, clustered in pairs, wrapped in fatty strings. With swift delight, she broke off a seed with her nails and slipped it into her mouth, and as her cheeks caved in while she sucked on the seed in her mouth, I saw that the thorns had left a patternless cluster of indentations on her face.

But I remember that my mother placed both her young hands on it, palms down, over the thorns. Then she bent down and pressed her face to it. To smell it first, although I could very well smell it from where I stood back. But it was not its real smell that I smelled, not yet.

At that point, my mother was not my mother; she was a woman, like any other woman, smitten into a reverie. At that point, I was no longer offended by the smell. I was offended by this act of plain, indisputable, unchangeable love.

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Trapped

BY G I A N L AO

IT WAS THE WORST POSSIBLE PLACE FOR THE WORST possible person. NEB stands for New Executive Building—a decrepit old structure in the city of Manila, by the river Pasig, kilometers away from McDonald’s, KFC, and other diet-busting yuppie comforts. It was my first job. And I displayed all the signs of being high risk: young, out of love and, most dangerous of all, hungry.

monggo came with a surprise: an aged and exquisitely shaped cockroach egg, which the cafeteria staff responded to with: “Ay, naisama siguro habang niluluto.” To this day, people still ask me, “Where did you eat in Manila? How was it?” I must speak the truth: I cannot say. It was always one of two things. It was good in a bad way. Or it was bad in a good way.

The cafeteria had all the makings of a sex dungeon in the wake of a zombie uprising. It was in the basement of a building beside the Pasig. The rats dashed from beneath one unclean refrigerator to the next. The yellowing walls were stained by god knows what, featuring old and pixelated photos of the food they used to serve—the labels in Times New Roman: camaron rebosado, chicken adobo, menudo, sisig. But even that eerie depiction was part of an unknown and glorious past. It was like entering the flat of a B-movie star—razzies in a banged up trophy shelf—who’d developed a full-blown meth addiction over the past decade. It was all pot belly, whisky breath and libido.

And I—this most unfortunate I—was hungry. Hungry for the heartless, soul-crushing cuisine—that nutritionless hell—those ketchup containers that seemed older than the world’s oldest dog, squirting a watered-down, strangely spiced tomato paste.

Nevertheless, we quietly sought escape. The latter years of that relationship were finally tainted with a word we never hoped we would use: infidelity. In the office, in hushed tones, some began speaking of BABY and SARGE. We received daily texts from them, promising deliverance from the monopolists of the basement dungeon. And the food sounded nothing short of luscious: p0rk ad0b0 40, kare2 40, ginataang sitaw & kalabasa 25, shanghai 5/1pc., sinigang na salm0n sa mis0 50. And how we rejoiced at the illusion of choice. The harbingers of BABY and SARGE would trek to the lands of our faceless providers to bring us the life-altering emancipation of other food.

I don’t remember the first meal I had in NEB. Or perhaps I choose not to remember. In our lives there are sensations that stand out and then promptly slide themselves into the hidden win32 folders of our memories. Over the past six years, my colleagues and I had come to accept and even… enjoy… suffering.

Few will understand the freedom that comes with lack of control: Of forgoing your bodily desires to enhance a future pleasure, of missing out on the 10 orders of liempo they prepared for the hundred people in the building, of being deprived of satisfaction until 2 p.m. to eat because the caf ran out of rice.

Punish a mouth enough and it will love what you wish it to. It will crave your soulless chicken curry, and the deprived will eventually smear orange curry sauce all over their lips and clean it up with their tongues. And yet there are magnitudes of abuse that even the willfully abused find abusive. Once, during the cafeteria’s infamous #MonggoFridays, a friend’s order of

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For weeks, and even months, we were safe. But only fools believe in saviors. In that godforsaken place they all wanted something from you: your will to live, your dignity, your soul.

Imagine the unbearable existential defeat of the missed order; the missing p0rk ad0b0 40 that condemns you a NEB basement meal; or the sinigang na salm0n sa mis0 50, bearing within its broth not salmon, but bangus, or some other limbless coldblooded vertebrate.

You will be glad to hear that I write you now from a better place. I am slowly recovering my palate in the abundant streets of Makati. And my only hope is others can take strength from my experience. Some nights, I still dream of being enslaved by the dungeon masters, but it brings me great comfort to hear that they’ve since changed. And sometimes I think: Maybe it was me.

Or us. Maybe we brought out the worst in each other. But either way, the NEB caf is better now—cleaner, happier. I hear they now serve short orders—pork chops off the grill, sisig on actual sizzling plates, copious amounts of steaming hot rice. Maybe one day, when I can trust myself not to spiral into my old, rotten self, I will return. But not right now.

P RO D U C E R K A R A O RT I GA FO O D ST Y L I ST I D G E M E N D I O L A M O D E L M A N I CA T I G L AO N A I LNGORO R9 V EOMMBIENRG 2B0E1AU 6 /T Y E S&QB UU I RTET E9

THE

MISSING INGREDIENT BY

A. A. GILL

HE MAY BE ONE OF THE WORLD’S FOREMOST FOOD CRITICS, BUT A. A. GILL SPENT HIS TWENTIES AS AN AIMLESS ALCOHOLIC—WHILE HIS BROTHER WAS LIVING IN PARIS, TRAINING TO BECOME A MICHELIN-STARRED CHEF. AFTER GILL SOBERED UP AT THE AGE OF 30, HE DISCOVERED NEW MEANING IN HIS OWN KITCHEN, COOKING JOYOUS MEALS FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY. THEN HIS BROTHER VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE.

I

woke up, my head on the sticky table, the radio chuntering, a streak of congealed, thick blood smeared in front of me as if a desperate, gory hand had gone to grab something—a knife perhaps—in self-defense or fury. And there was the knife. My own large French iron cooking knife, heavy as a rabbit, solid as a machete. I sat straight up, my ears filling with the terrible possibilities, the cold echo of an absent memory, a wiped tape, hands checking my face for gashes. The wall was spattered with matte-maroon blood, and not two inches from my face was the cold corpse. A grouse on a plate, surrounded by the traditional funeral ornaments of late August—bread sauce, fried bread crumbs, game chips, red currants, a bandolier of bacon, a sprig of watercress for modesty, a dish of congealed buttered cabbage. The floor was aflutter with feathers, evidence of a goblins’ pillow fight. I had plainly plucked, drawn, and cooked a grouse, made bread sauce by seething an onion studded with cloves and bay in milk, then added fresh bread crumbs and a scant teaspoon of dried mustard, white pepper, not black, and salt . . . then fried more bread crumbs in goose fat and put them in the warm oven, peeled and turned waxy potatoes, slivered them fine (I didn’t have a mandolin), dried them on a paper towel, and shallow-fried them in yet more goose fat, sprinkled them with salt and a twist of black pepper, shredded a white cabbage, poached it with the diced end of pancetta, tossed it in a walnut of butter with a teaspoon of its own poaching water—the red-currant jelly I must have bought in a bottle.

I’d done all this—knives, boiling fat, flaming hobs, ovens—dead drunk. In a complete blackout. Too shit-faced to eat and too ill with alcoholic gastritis. But all that wasn’t the weird thing, the mad thing.

The spooky, unhinged bit was that I’d done it twice. There were two grouse, a brace, with their bread and tatties and cabbage.

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There was no one else here. Nobody expected . . . no one peckish for an early grouse likely to drop by. Whom did I imagine I was feeding? Whom was I propitiating?

Was this a stuffed augury? Some hopeless offering to Bacchus or Pan or Loki? It wasn’t the first time it had happened: I had come round to a Victoria sponge; gazpacho; numerous shoulders, legs, and racks of lamb; and a tunnel-boned and forcemeat-stuffed chicken in a bain-marie. The only thing I’d forgotten about that was to turn on the oven—and then that I’d ever made it in the first place. It was discovered a week, or maybe two weeks, possibly a month, later.

There was something about the business,

the process of preparing food, that I found comforting, not in a greedy, finger-licking way, but the procedural business of making.

The mechanics of food: the sort of coloringin-without-going-over-the-lines satisfaction of crimping pastry, the simple progression of cakes and pies, puddings and soups. But one thing led to another; the mechanical skills were pleasing and calming; the repetition of action—chipping, folding, peeling, plucking, popping, gutting, boning, and rolling— metronomic, predictable, psyche-rocking jobs. People had done these things for generations, for thousands of years. There are few occupations as plainly worthy, as good, as

Making food out of earth and water and sunlight is a salutary blessing for those who have had their narrow lives made bitter and inedible uncomplicatedly worthwhile, as shelling peas or peeling broad beans or clarifying stock.

You join a tradition, something wholesome and decent that is older than the nation-state.

For me it was in stark contrast to the constant Catherine wheel of counter-convivial chaos and failure; the alarm of shrill depression. I liked the being of cookery. The moment, lost in simple actions.

I began to buy cookery books from charity shops, the detritus of house-cleared kitchens from the shelves of the dead. There was something touching about them, the stains and the smears and the dog-ears; they would fall open at favorite recipes and special

occasions. Simnel cake, made every Easter.

The repetition remembered in the page just as the recipe was forgotten each Ascension Day and had to be relearned. The marginalia: “Use Apricot instead”; “Doesn’t work!”; “Send to Trevor, Auckland.” And caramel-yellow crisp recipes ripped from papers and magazines for celebrity canapés and things to do with leftovers. I’d find photographs of picnics and birthdays, the label from a Champagne bottle that had commemorated something so memorable and so utterly forgotten, and once a letter from a wife: “I can’t go on like this . . . I’m leaving you . . . don’t try and find me . . . I don’t want anything from you . . . I wish you well, thanks for everything. . . this is the recipe for your Toad in the Hole.” He had kept the letter, not as a terrible reminder of departed love, but for the recipe.

And one thing led, as it inevitably does, to another. I began to acquire old bits of kitchen equipment, mangles and plastic egg coddlers, slicers and separators and timers, a singular apostle spoon, measuring cups, mixing bowls, the lost and discarded archaeology of family life, the Scotch spurtle that had stirred marriage, stirred the children to school, stirred retirement and bereavement. In the dying, shaming unhappiness of my drinking, something kindred and pitiful, something about all this worn-out, unconsidered kitchen equipment, the boxes of stuff shoved under secondhand-shop shelves of old shoes and board games and videos, everything 50p, touched me. They were familiar and had no value, but their leftover stumbling, blunted, chipped, and practical use was also noble in its exhausted simplicity.

They’d fed families, sustained homes through good and ill; they were the evidence of lives that I would never be able to live.

If you ask anyone

who collects or has a particular obsessive, repetitive, open-ended interest in the specific why they started, more often than not they will offer a story of quaint serendipity. A curiosity poked by a random encounter, a gift, a discovery in a junk shop, the tuna and beans, a discounted cookbook. This is disingenuous. Almost always a phony alibi. The truths of collections and obsessions are so fundamentally sensitive, they are too tearfully childlike to say out loud. I don’t have to look far to see where my overly emotional reaction to food came from. It was Nick. It was all about Nick. I don’t often talk about Nick, my younger brother.

I don’t know what to say. I avoid saying his name out loud. Nick disappeared, vanished, years ago. I don’t know how many years ago now, but I’m waiting for a call, a knock. When I go to a new city, I search the streets for him. I look at things and stuff and views, but I’m also

looking for him. Would I still recognize him? He’d be fifty-eight now. When I think about Nick, he’s always just in his twenties.

The last time he came to see me, he’d been having a furrowed time of it: angry, resentful.

His ambitious, single-minded life had been shredded. He came to my flat and we sat and talked in a way we hadn’t since we were boys, about old things, soft gentle things, our childhood holidays, Paris, girlfriends, brother stuff. Then he stood up and said, “I could do with some money.” I gave him what I had, £70, and a tweed shooting coat I’d just bought: It was cold. He got to the door and said, “I’m going away now. France maybe. But I’m not coming back.” “Well, don’t just disappear,” I said. “Give us a ring. Let me know where you are.” He smiled. He had a lopsided smile he used to deflect. We hugged. I think I said I loved him. I hope I did. And that was the last of him. Nothing. Not a hint, not a trace, not a court record, not a hospital, not a Salvation Army bed, not a bank account, not a credit card, not a passport, not a headstone. Recently our mother asked if I thought he was dead.

“He’s probably dead,” she said. I understand.

It’s a hypothetical fork—the dead you can mourn; abandonment is a choice that’s made

every day. All those days deciding that today I won’t tell my family I’m okay, or not okay. . . or alive. With the sadness there is also the throb of anger—I’m furious with Nick. The selfishness, the banked heat of his resentment. My father dying without ever knowing what happened to his son. Our mother. His kids. But there is also a voice that whispers: Everyone has a right to chuck in the hand he’s been dealt and get a new one if it becomes unendurable, unbearable. The penultimate option is to start again. I got that when I stopped taking the drugs. I stepped back into the world knowing that everything I did before had led me to this point, and that everything I did from now on had to lead away from this place, that repeating the past smarter or cuter wasn’t going to do it, that experience isn’t always the great teacher. Sometimes, mostly, it’s just experience that you could have done without. I understand all that about Nick, but I thought that after a year or two he’d be better, happier, and he’d call to show off a little. Look what I did without you. And to square the past, to put it to bed. But mostly I think he’ll call because he still misses me.

The year I was sent to school we moved out—rather, the rest of the family moved, sold

Adapted from the memoir Pour Me a Life, by A. A. Gill, to be published September 27 by Blue Rider Press.

the garden, rented a flat above Lloyds Bank on Kensington High Street. It was hard for Nick.

My room was let to a succession of lodgers, and when I came home I had to fight for a chair or a couch with the cast of whatever fringe play my mother was in. Meals were chaotic, noisy, competitive, and histrionic, would drift from one into the next. And then one day our mother came into the kitchen and said, “I’m not cooking anymore,” and that was it; she didn’t.

My father would leave £20 on the kitchen table every Friday and disappear, and I would shop—I was a frugal quartermaster, shaving enough for beer and fags—and Nick would cook. He must have been 13. It began with pancakes; he cooked a whole dinner party of different ones, savory and sweet crepes. Right from the beginning he cooked with a hunched intensity, a ferocious perfectionism. I have never seen someone fall with such ecstatic serendipity into a calling. Nick had never been a willing combatant in the family’s intellectual scrum; he never read books, polished pretentions; he had nothing to say about French cinema or Florentine frescoes; he was comfortably earthbound. Food and Nick were made for NOVEMBER 2016 / ESQUIRE

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each other. It is unnerving and compelling to watch someone expand into a craft that’s so unexpected and unexplained. We all liked our food, but mostly as a cultural and social signifier, as a setting for conversation, intellectual communion. I was a vegetarian.

Nick had found not just the thing he was good at but the thing that would set him apart and set him free, that no one could criticize or argue with or know more about than him. The stove that my mother had thought chained her as a servant to the old patriarchal idea of a family liberated my brother from the family. But in three years he was better at his thing than any of us would ever be at ours; he had a fierce, stubborn confidence and presence.

He left school at 15 and went to catering college. At 16 he left home for Paris to work as a commis-chef. He spoke no French, knew no one there, lived in a cold-water walk-up garret, learned the hard ways of classic French cuisine. A kitchen is called a brigade because it is arranged like an army corps. The bullying and the discipline are unrelenting, designed to exclude and weed out the weak, the bruised, and the imperfect.

They treat champignons with more care than the staff. As an English boy with not even kitchen French, he was bullied and mocked relentlessly, burned, cut, snubbed.

The list of cruel and painful practical jokes that commis have to endure is legendary. He worked split shifts, learned French during his break; laundering his whites cost half his wage. He told me that the proudest moment of his first year in Paris was when the dry cleaner, who had never acknowledged him, handed him back his neatly starched and folded uniform and called him Monsieur le Chef. Nick had no money, no friends, no sleep, but he had the respect of an eminent profession, in its capital city. One of the best moments of my life was going to visit him for a weekend with my father. It is the only time I can remember the three of us being together, and Nick was changed. Paris had been the city our dad had shown us; now it was Nick’s. He walked with a squareshouldered insouciance, wore the stripes of his burns and scars with a shrugged pride.

We stayed in a pension in the Rue de Buci above the market, and one day on a whim we went to Longchamp for the races; we’d run out of money—this was before credit cards—and pooled 30 francs and put it all on a plongeur’s kitchen tip. The horse came home. We took the winnings and went to La Coupole for dinner—the three of us, bright and happy, light-headed with the city and with the aura of Nick. We had marc and coffee, and Dad called for l’addition, pulling out our wedge. The manager bustled over, shook Nick’s hand, and tore up the bill. He bowed to my dad and said that as Nick was 104

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a chef it was a privilege to have this young man’s family. He was now theirs, folded like egg whites into the great tradition.

He went on to be one of the best, and the youngest, English chefs ever to get a Michelin star. My interest in cooking began as a way of being close to him; it

I avoid saying his name out loud. Nick disappeared, vanished, years ago.

I don’t know how many years ago now, but I’m waiting for a call, a knock. When I go to a new city, I search the streets for him. Would I still recognize him?

He’d be 58 now. was something we could talk about. There is no end to discussing food, and when my drinking got bad and I had a long summer of pitiful depression, I’d go and stay with him in Rutland, where he was the head chef in a hotel called Hambleton Hall, and we’d swap places. He’d be the older brother and bring me back delicious and thoughtful late suppers, and we’d go through cookbooks together. He was funny and fraternal and never asked how I was. Everything he knew—taste, texture, temperature, food— was the allegory of family. Life was merely the table that it came on.

People who think about food

when they’re not hungry aren’t normal, aren’t balanced. Everybody I’ve met along the way who’s been doing excessive, obsessive things to ingredients, making restaurants, working in kitchens, writing books— they’re not happy. They weren’t happy children. Nick wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy.

We’re not compelled to examine kitchens by a Falstaffian appetite; we aren’t the jolly trenchermen with a bonhomous desire to lay a better table. One of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food. That there is a soul in honest, loving dishes that are passed from the hand of the chef to the mouth of

a grateful diner, that you can trust a good cook. But it’s almost exactly the opposite.

Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised, and shamed people.

There is something in the pursuit of lunch that is therapeutic, allegorical, even redemptive. There is the pleasure of the business, the mechanics, the chemistry, the physics of food that soothes and calms.

There is the transformation: that you take one thing and through a series of votive actions, incantations, the application of fire and water and air, it becomes something else. In church at the altar, Catholics wonder at the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. Atheists sneer at this simpleminded delusion of faith, but none of them wonder at the equally miraculous transformation of flour and water into bread or spaghetti or a pancake or Yorkshire pudding or papier-mâché— how does it know? Or the ability of an egg to become mayonnaise, to go on and on and on transubstantiating a thin stream of oil into a thick emulsion, indefinitely. Cooks are always a little unnerved and awed at the alchemy of cooking. You know it will happen, you’ve done it a hundred times, but still the revealed truth of meringue is a dainty relief. Making food out of earth and water and sunlight is a salutary blessing for those who have had their narrow lives made bitter and inedible, and the spell, the concoction, the offering of food, is a wholly good thing from compromised hands. There is no part of it that is contaminated or equivocal or duplicitous. To feed someone is to make them, to wish them well, to add to their lives, to offer them warmth and comfort, well-being and hospitality. To give someone a diamond is to own them, decorate them, make them richer. But a baked potato gives them another day of life.

There is, in making food, a repeating of the past; that every Sunday lunch will apologize for or make better the past Sundays; like the offering left on altars, the sacrifice and libation given to gods, I’m always feeding the ancient hunger of the past, the absent mouths.

It’s difficult to explain. You want to remake, to restore, the things that make you sad, to feed the loneliness, the stutter, the loss, the fear, the frustration. To satiate it, to soothe it, to make it all bread-and-butter better.

Nothing can ever fill the void left by a disappearance or a death. When a tree is felled in a landscape, you still know a tree was there. But you learn to live with that new landscape. Nick will always be an empty seat at the table. We comfort ourselves with the things he loved the most, but no amount of nourishment can allay his absence.

All these years later, loss remains loss. A gingerbread man is not a man.

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11.16

ON DISCOURSE & DUTERTE

What do we talk about when we talk about politics in the age of social media? Charles Englund, Noelle de Jesus, and Joe American reflect on the difficulties of discourse.

A r t by F R A N TZ A R N O S A LVA D O R

Mambo Duterte or

HULING EL BIMBO?

It’s not a battle of good vs. evil when it comes to today’s political divide—a fact that a great many of us seem to have forgotten.

Chls Englnd makes a case for supporting the president’s reforms and continuing discourse.

IT DOES NOT HELP THAT YOU THINK I’m a blind follower, an apologist, a rude and crude supporter of a bloodthirsty maniac. You think I am a troll. Worse, you suspect I am a paid troll, or even a bot. For how can anyone in their right mind support such a foul-mouthed monster?

On the other hand, WE think you’re hopelessly naive, a bleeding heart easily manipulated by clickbait articles, an unconscious elitist who, similar to the past administration, is out of touch with the pulse of the rest of the country outside of the narrow Manila mindset that you inhabit.

You are a conspirator to the perpetuation of oligarchy in the country.

The ammunition we use is easily inventoried by now. Yours are: Dutertard, Dutertite, Duterter, Hitler, psychopath, bastos, troll etc. Ours are: Yellowtard (we know you were not necessarily a P-Noy supporter, but we know it’s damn annoying to be called one anyway), dilaw, ivorytower, biased, bobo, etc. So every day we open Facebook, we mark our territory, so to speak, and then just resort to these labels, labeling comments and each other.

It is pathetic and toxic. But also strangely exhilarating and hypnotic.

For why else do we keep on coming back? There is adrenalin in the discussion. We need to vent and be heard. “What the hell is this guy saying? I have to get in there and teach him a thing or two.”

Such is the state of our online existence now.

There have been many explanations offered on how we ended up this way. One that I found particularly insightful was that we never stopped campaigning. Even after the elections were over, everyone stayed in campaign mode. Criticism of the current administration started pretty much on Day One. Forget the 100-day press honeymoon. One of the biggest, if not the biggest issue out there, is this huge question mark: How much of this criticism is coming from genuinely concerned Filipinos, speaking about issues important to them, and how much of it is politically motivated? Nobody except those in the highest rungs of money and power can say for sure.

The other insightful explanation, most popularly attributed to F. Sionil Jose, is that we should recognize what the Duterte win in the election means. It is no less than a revolution, a movement for reform and drastic change in the country. In a way, Duterte is our (Indonesian President) Widodo. All over the world, people are repudiating governments that have marginalized them. Voters are rejecting traditional politics and politicians. No matter that the quibbles about Duterte also coming from a political family, there is no denying he is the first president from Mindanao, and is not part of the traditional Manila power elite. It was his strong record as a sympathetic and effective local executive that brought him to the national limelight, more than his family name.

This revolution politicized huge swathes of the population, even segments that have previously been apathetic or excluded from the national discussion. People who used to say “Pare-pareho lang naman sila” (They are all the same), and “Kahit sino ang iboto ko wala namang magbabago sa Pilipinas” (Whoever I vote for, nothing will change in the Philippines, anyway) suddenly could not be held back from the polling centers. I spoke to a Filipina OFW in Dubai who worked in the hotel convenience store. She has been abroad for 28 years, starting out as a maid in Singapore and Hong Kong, before eventually breaking into the hotel industry. She says 2016 was the first time she voted since she was in her early 20s. She voted for Duterte.

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This story can be multiplied millions of times. The simple fact is Nobody seems to recognize that the root of the divide is more due many Filipinos came to realize that the status quo does not work; that to different political priorities. Why are we always talking at cross the system was failing them. We hit the proverbial iceberg with the purposes? Because at the top of your list are EJKs and the burial of OFWs, the growth “strategy” that was no strategy at all, rather, the result Marcos at Libingan. At the top of my list is a move toward efficient and of the failure of other strategies to grow jobs at home. The unintended effective government, one that is sincere in its service to the people. I consequence of this labor export and diaspora was that millions of am for tax reform, higher fiscal spending and opening up to Foreign Filipinos saw first-hand that life did not have to be so hard. In other Direct Investment (FDI). I believe what Lee Kuan Yew said about the countries, they saw it is possible to have a functional government and Philippines is true: that the US-style setup of government has failed all that it entailed—clean, well-lit streets, low crime, adequate public us even before Marcos tried to change it, and I believe we should services, public transportation, etc. move to a parliamentary and federalist system. We need to break up Budget airfares and the Internet gave even more Filipinos a glimpse of our huge archipelagic country into more manageable and governable “the good life.” They saw gleaming Asian cities where millions have been federal states. I am concerned that the corruption we have always seen brought up from poverty in the span of a generation. The great thorn in Philippine politics may have links to drugs—narcopolitics, in other on the side is Singapore, a country that would have been euphemistically words. I am for peace in Mindanao and a tough stance on terrorists referred to as “shabby” compared to Manila in the 1970s. But there are and outlaws. I feel all these things are closer to happening with this many thorns in this crown of shame. We now see how Kuala Lumpur administration. Duterte gets all of this and is the best chance we have surpassed us, and then Bangkok and then Jakarta. Now it looks like even had since...forever.

Ho Chi Minh is about to edge us out. The saddest thing to hear is Filipinos Then there are the other issues where we just outright clash. I saying, “Naiwanan na talaga tayo.” (We have been truly left behind). am for a realist, multipolar approach to foreign relations. You want Apart from this mirror being held up to our faces, we saw how the to confront China and take a harder stance; I believe the best solution world saw us: a country of maids, of natural disasters, a people that could to the China problem is diplomacy and compromise. You believe in never get their house in order, an object of pity. Sure, we have Manny media freedom; I believe in media responsibility. Your model for the Pacquiao and the occasional opiates to our mortally country to go forward is the US system with all its wounded national pride. It still doesn’t help if you’re bells and whistles, and you believe the status quo is cleaning your master’s toilet. working. My model is Singapore and I believe we need Now imagine all these newly aware, newly politicized, to make drastic systemic changes or continue to be fed-up Filipinos. On Facebook. overtaken by our Asian neighbors.

Social media is To fail to understand that what happened was a You insist on decency and statesmanlike behavior; revolution, the birth of a reform movement (and an I’m willing to give the man a break. Yes he is a crude, loud a strange animal overdue one), is one of the reasons you are puzzled mouth with no filters. His comments make me cringe with assholes by the vehemence and passion of Duterte supporters. sometimes. He is imperfect and a product of his milieu, on both ends.

Facebook has only amplified that existing rancor. as a recent write-up of Manolo Quezon III (belatedly) Now I have never threatened anybody on social media, made clear. I have gotten used to it and am not shocked Balance is best or told anyone they should try being raped or killed by

by Du30’s politically incorrect speech anymore. And achieved by a drug addict. No matter how strongly I disagreed with the fact that many still are makes me just want to sigh not blocking someone, no matter how insulting, how arrogant, or how and ask, so what now? You can’t change him. He won’t much they tried to pick a fight. Then again, I do have a listen to your eloquent pleadings for more statesman like everybody who wide enough vocabulary and can argue back. You pick a statements. If anything, the more you call him Hitler, disagrees with fight with me and I can fight back and vent in many a way. the more he will retort and say something you don’t like. you, and by not But what about the millions of Filipinos now on Remember he had to be begged to take this job, and at Facebook who have a problem forming a sentence in his age he does not give a fuck. living in an echo either English or Filipino? Or those who are so insecure So whenever you accuse us of trolling and killing chamber. about their language skills that they start a fake account the discourse, let me just remind you: Discourse breaks and use memes? Is social media solely for the Ateneo, down when nobody recognizes the ironies anymore. It’s UP, La Salle, UST, San Beda, etc. crowd? Is everyone else when the likes of Princeton-educated Walden Bello, an a troll? It amazes me how that pejorative term has been ex-Senator, starts writing Facebook posts calling Duterte used so freely and indiscriminately by the anti-administration people, supporters short-penised dinosaurs; when academics and intellectuals basically to mean anyone who disagrees with them. like Randy David and Vince Rafael totally miss the point and say we are all Do trolls’ opinions matter less because they cannot articulate just looking for a father figure or a messiah; and when a media outfit like them well, or within socially accepted norms? (Whose norms?) How Rappler starts a “stop the hate” campaign and then effectively blocks frustrating that must be. and censors its own readers who are disagreeing with their articles and I am not excusing bad behavior, but we can’t forget the underpinning demanding better media (like a pikon child, Rappler then goes on to dynamic of the freshly-baptized, newly-politicized people. As said insinuate that Duterte supporters are really bots and fake accounts i.e. before, the Duterte phenomenon has done that. Anger against the past falling back on the paid troll accusation. I have now resorted to posting administration and the collective failure of the post-EDSA era has done pictures of my lunch just to show I am a real person). that. I just find it very strange that the same people who can sympathize Discourse suffers when the same people who turn the De Lima with drug pushers and addicts pushed to drugs and violence due to investigation into a gender issue, then turn around and abuse strong, poverty, cannot seem to sympathize with the expanded demographic influential pro-administration women who are speaking their minds, on social media, or with the inarticulate, overzealous troll. like Mocha Uson and Sass Sasot, with below the belt, slut-shaming and You know the other thing that bugs me to no end? That some of anti-LGBT attacks. you have characterized our political divide into a battle of good vs. evil.

Discourse is better served when we stick to the issues and seek balance.

Whether intentionally or simple-mindedly, some of the anti-Dutertes It is served better when we stop being so onion-skinned and whiney. After have resorted to demonizing him and all of us, the pro-administration all, it’s not like one side threw a rose and the other a rock. Social media is people, as “evil people” with no concept of human rights or due process. a strange animal with assholes on both ends. Balance is best achieved by The trick here is to try and gain a moral ascendancy in the argument, not blocking everybody who disagrees with you, and by not living in an which gives them carte blanche license to hurl all the abuse they can echo chamber. Perhaps there is a self-correcting element to our fights. muster. It even gives them, in their minds, the rationale, to disregard Perhaps like newlyweds, we are slowly whittling down each other’s rough what other (Evil! Misguided! Troll!) Filipinos think and believe in, and sides and rough arguments. Give an allowance for vehemence because move to oust a duly elected government. people are defending their political priorities and interest.

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Discourse breaks down when you persist in talking about only what is important to you. Worse you use it as an overriding reason for criticism and even ouster.

Because, let’s face it, what is really the end goal here? Will you be happy with apologies and promises to change? Even if a survey shows popular backing for the war on drugs, would you still insist you know better? Would you insist on “speaking for the poor,” when the poor themselves have already spoken? If we had a referendum on the Marcos burial and it showed the majority support it, or else don’t care, would you still insist and say, no, the vote was rigged? How does that reconcile with your belief in democracy and majority rule?

Will you ever be satisfied short of “regime change”? People are already suggesting it in broad daylight. Clinton Palanca, in a recent piece in this magazine, wonders how long before the antis can unseat Duterte. There lies the problem. I have the sneaking suspicion that your side has already given up on discourse. So what happens to my desire for a sincere and effective leader? For peace in Mindanao and terrorists eradicated? For a multipolar approach to foreign relations? For structural change in our form of government and to amend the constitution?

What happens to my wanting the Filipino to have some pride and say yes, the son of a bitch who stood up to the U.S.? My president. For my desire to see poverty reduced in the quickest possible way? For my desire to break from the old order that obviously does not work?

Only in the Philippines.

Our so-called democracy is so “vibrant” that we always get mired down. We forget that political will is anchored to political stability, and that stability rests on the robustness of our institutions, and on us. And what have we done for our political stability lately? Precious little. You want typhoons to throw the country into disarray. You cheer and politicize the Davao bombing.

You petition foreigners and feed them your biases, because really you know you don’t have the numbers at home.

As a people, we like to think with our hearts; and so we will always be prey to clickbait headlines and spin—because as rich in natural resources as the Philippines is, we lack in one very important resource: critical thinking.

Even some of our elite do not question the status quo. They share their Western liberal biases with the international media, who rely on the local press and the local elite as their eyes and ears on the ground.

I have always marveled at this country’s tradition of shooting itself in the foot, of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We are seeing it again. People are missing the big picture of a reformist movement by focusing on their narrow, single-issue agendas. If democracy and rule

of law gets supplanted again by the whims and vested interests of the Manila powers-that-be, then all hope is lost.

So what we have now is like two kids in a schoolyard fight. Shoving and testing each other. Gathering courage before somebody makes a move and throws the first punch. Somebody should just start it soon.

And then we can go back to the Stone Age. Let me put it bluntly in terms you would (hopefully) understand. And pardon the hyperbole, which I assure you is not that far off. Be careful what you wish for. If you haven’t realized it yet, this is the most popular Philippine president in a long long time. This guy is Mambo Duterte.

The more political dirt you throw at him, the stronger he becomes. If anything happens to him, there will be class war, if not outright civil war.

Visayas and Mindanao will secede. Your driver will go after you with a screwdriver. Your cook will poison your food. You think Duterte is a monster? He’s a pussycat compared to what comes after him if he is ousted or assassinated.

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IN THE TV SERIES MAD MEN, Bert Cooper, CEO of Sterling Cooper, advised his creative director, Don, not to fire the young Pete Campbell, who just betrayed him. “One never knows how loyalty is born,” he says. Over eight seasons, Campbell repeatedly proves his loyalty to Draper, perhaps because the latter did not fire him, though he could have.

For the Filipino psyche, loyalty evolves at the glimpse of a specific quality or set of qualities, a character trait or act, that at once causes a person to loom larger than life. Kindness or generosity.

Perhaps wit or approachability, or some other kind of coolness. One thing draws people to favor the whole package—lock, stock, and barrel. We might call this “pagkatao.” In Filipino, the word itself is telling; literally: “what makes a person a person.”

Pagkatao sparks undying love or hate. Pagkatao triggers loyalty.

When my daughter was 13, she loved Taylor Swift. She admired the singer’s creative output and her talent as a songwriter. In fact, Swift struck a chord literally and figuratively, thrumming girlish heartstrings everywhere. Once, on a visit home to the Philippines, she found herself in discussion with her cousins who at the time could not tolerate even the faintest praise for Ms. Swift.

My daughter gasped, “But why?” Her cousins shrugged. “She has too many boyfriends,” and “She sleeps around.” “Her songs are about the guys she dated.” “But what does that have to do with her music?” Taylor Swift’s music was very much beside the point. What mattered to her cousins was Taylor Swift’s pagkatao. In the same way that I still watch Woody Allen films even after his big Soonyi and Dylan Farrow scandals, my daughter continues to be a Taylor Swift enthusiast. We are not typically Pinoy, it seems.

Clearly, Filipinos are an ardent, intensely passionate people. We love as impetuously as we hate. The best supporters, we are unblinkingly, unwaveringly loyal. And on the Internet, we are also increasingly powerful with a capacity to enable that is inestimable. Our clicks have assured World Heritage sites, kept American Idols in the game, and sustained Friendster long after its expiry date.

Loyalty is why we ran the Beatles out of town after they snubbed Imelda Marcos, why we attacked Claire Danes and Dan Brown.

At te Peeta of

PERSONALITY POLITICS N ll Q. d J ss pond er s our nat io n a l penchant for per s onal it ies as oppos ed to pri nci ples , and s ug g es t s people c l im b down, calm d ow n, and real l y c onver s e … that is , if t hey w is h t o.

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P O L I C Y, N O T P E R S O N A L I T Y

However, it is consistently personality that moves us. That’s why celebrity endorsers are huge, and why we are constantly proclaiming our teamship via hashtag. At the pedestal of personality, we have voted into presidency a widowed housewife and an action film star. It’s also why we have too many celebrity senators and showbiz congresspeople, including even a champion boxer. Truth be told, there is rarely a practical explanation for our political choices. Our political parties likewise follow suit. “Ah basta, gusto ko siya,” is a go-to phrase unfortunately used with tiresome frequency. And of course, that’s a double-edged sword.

Few things can turn loyalty. Usually it’s when something extraordinary and unforeseen happens (or, hello, willful historical revision?), such that a particular pagkatao is altered and discovered anew by circumstances (like a multimillion-peso online campaign). It doesn’t help that Filipinos also have short memories.

This explains what has been happening since the president won the election. Of course, it was rampant in the campaign period, acknowledged as the most contentious election in 30 years. The reason

for the division in the populace, particularly, upon the social media landscape is subject for another article, one that should be penned by writers more politically astute than myself. Suffice it to say that historically, personality politics has been the pandesal-and-butter of Philippine governments.

See, for instance, how the national malady of personality politics is at play in the way people characterize the president as “Tatay Digong.”

It’s such a personal appeal and it’s one that targets not the mind but the heart. After all, the heart perseveres more vehemently in the face of onslaught. It is also an appeal based on emotion, which makes people blind. Ardent supporters seize the opportunity to see PRRD as a disciplining, temperamental father with the heart of gold. They love this president. (Granted, love has always been present in various degrees with every president we’ve ever had, even though our counterparts elsewhere are content to simply like their leaders). Love is what causes people to bristle and chafe at any criticism of him, no matter how reasonable or warranted. One does not criticize one’s father, after all, not without receiving some censure, anyway. And boy, do critics get that censure in great measure, and then some.

Love is also what leads the president’s loyal fans to construct defenses of him by presenting the offenses of the previous president, whom they hated. That’s how personality politics works. It is by far an easy thing to set off the strengths of one man by juxtaposing them with the weaknesses of another. Reason suggests though that despite the fact that contrast in interesting, a past president’s missteps, by virtue of being precisely…in the past…are in fact, beside the point.

Of course, similar dynamics take place on all the sides (there are more than just two). The vice president, for example, certainly seems like a good person, however, personality politics has of course, elevated her into a kind of unreal saint (our favorite personality) when in fact, she is only human and naturally capable of mistakes. Nevertheless the other side calls her a puppet or a poodle. No one is looking closely at her programs for poverty, which are promising.

TAN G L I N G AN D W R AN G L I N G

More than 100 days into the Duterte administration, and to be sure, there have been strides in the departments of transportation, agriculture, and the environment. Likewise, substantial political will does seem evident. Laudable programs have been unveiled, but that’s customary in the nascent stages of any new administration. The recent Executive Order to adopt the National Economic and Development Authority’s mission to triple incomes and wipe out poverty by 2040 is inarguably one of them.

Nevertheless, thorny issues remain that have dismayed some from the outset: the burial of Ferdinand Marcos at Libingan ng mga Bayani, unsavory alliances with family oligarchies the President claims to hate, his impulsive outbursts toward everyone from the UN to Obama, his unnerving posturing vis-a-vis China and the U.S., the inordinate attention paid to sex tapes and celebrity talk, and last but not least: his drug war’s alarming number of apparently state-sanctioned summary killings—at this point more than 3,500, and it only continues to rise. This last issue appears to trouble only some of the “disente elitista” and the (misnomered) “yellows”—words that have become more charged and damning than many others these days.

Supporters tend to sidestep these issues or excuse them, claiming the president was misquoted or that extra-judicial killings have been hyped up by so-called destabilizing forces like local mainstream media outlets (which they say have drug ties) and the international press (which they say is conspiring with the Liberal Party to oust the president).

Really?

Try to argue with that. Suggest that the drug problem as indicated by a number of studies is not of the magnitude described. It is frequently futile. You get, “Face it, you lost,” “He is duly elected,” and “Tatay Digong cares deeply for the poor.” Consider the truly absurd contortions from many to rationalize the president’s angry curse-laden outbursts. Try bringing up anything inherently problematic: the president’s own words regarding the drug suspects, corrupt police, the PNP’s hired guns, the police masquerading as tandem vigilante killers, provincial police quotas and collateral damage... all you will hear are crickets.

We buy much too easily into the pat and facile dichotomies that come hand in hand with personality politics: pro and con, good and evil, black and white, red and yellow (there are other colors out there), Madonna and whore, American imperialism versus Chinese influence, so much so that the dynamics of argument per se have apparently solidified beyond all shifting.

Instead there is self-righteous anger, strident hate and blatant misinformation directed at any who question, criticize or oppose the President’s policies. Insults are pelted across Facebook to the point that you almost feel the spittle. And it’s all because the criticism is perceived as being directed at the president’s pagkatao. And because we all have the predisposition, some of the criticisms are likewise levied that way, as they were levied against all the previous presidents. No one complained quite so hard back then; nobody discredited the press either.

WE WON!

The Duterterers have numbers—this is clear. As such, their task is simple. A version of mob rule that manifests in number of likes. Their guy is a simple man. He is good. He does good for the country. He wants only good. He is not from the elite. So he speaks off his plaid cuff and gets hot beneath his plaid collar. But he truly cares about improving the lives of the poor. What he says? It’s just…Dute-rhetoric.

Just follow. It’s simple.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. It’s quite complex. The solutions to a good number of the country’s problems require nuance and multilateral action. Rare is the sober discussion of actual policies or god forbid, discussion of the rationale behind these. No, everyone should unwaveringly support everything or shut up and get out of the way, because 16 million and 86 percent trust, damn it!

For them, everyone with reservations is dismissed as “yellow” or “anti-reform.” Not only have they consumed the Kool-Aid, they’ve also begun to mix it, using their cherries from all their cherry picking. They trade in tirades of post-factualism, binary thinking, flawed comparisons and faulty assumptions. And in the yawning gap caused by the absence of true exchange has sprouted highly charged personal attacks against whoever the flavor of the week is, from the ever-growing cast of individuals vilified only because they have the audacity to voice criticism: Leila de Lima, Raissa Robles, Walden Bello, Risa Hontiveros, Chito Gascon, Maria Ressa, recently Agot Isidro, countless journalists, entire media outlets and all foreign press (except when they are positive). God only knows who it will be next? Perhaps you. Perhaps me.

Much as I hate saying it, many days on the Internet, I feel that second only to the extra-judicial killings of drug suspects, the most unfortunate thing about President Duterte are his supporters.

S O W H AT ’ S YO U R S O L U T I O N ?

It’s not going to let up anytime soon.

Nevertheless, it’s time to sever the ties that bind us to personality politics. It’s time to restore civilized political discourse online, as anachronistic as the phrase might sound. While it’s true that social media has become a sort of battlefield where all manner of campaigns are run, does there really have to be a war?

We need to do more to unify rather than divide and find common ground, the way citizens should at the start of any new administration.

What’s more, changing the nature of online discourse may start to help heal the sad discord and the rifts that prevail between work colleagues, between friends, between family members: parents and children, brothers and sisters, indeed between husbands and wives.

For don’t we all want to be better than what we’ve been? Six years is frightfully long enough, but for a people divided, it will only feel twice as long. It’s true, unity is not apparently something the president’s staunchest supporters care at all about. Most just want to harp on who won and why, but really, they needn’t persist as they’ve been doing it to death. We know well who won.

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like, “I understand you are saying X, Y, and Z, and I get it, but how do even lobby for amendments in policy. Dissent is recognized in the you reconcile it with A, B, and C?” Even when you are being insulted constitution as the right to “petition the government for redress of and attacked? As Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” grievances,” so yes, there are citizens who have grievances. It does not mean they are not pro-Philippines. True, the President has done Stop using labels like pro- and anti-government. little in terms of unifying the people—a low-enough hanging fruit For that matter, especially refrain from using pro- and anti-Duterte quite easily picked. But then again, why should this task fall upon especially. There’s no point in it, and it only establishes warring government alone? sides. The campaign period is over, and he is president. What’s more, We should continue to highlight the good things that have taken disagreeing with his policies does not make you anti-Duterte. As place in the other areas of government. We should discuss topics that will Gideon Lasco says, “…it flattens your stances on many issues…” precisely have bearing upon us in the long run: federalism, for example, and what because it’s about the issues and the policies, not the person. And we happens post-Duterte. And we can and should certainly keep discussing are all pro-Philippines. the issues that we share in common. Some who voted for Duterte feel strongly against Marcos being buried in Libingan ng mga Bayani. We Do not isolate yourself ; always read the opposing views. know too that at this point, at these numbers, more are starting to feel Read even the out-and-out crazies. More people should, just to see uncomfortable with the drug war’s summary killings. There are some in the extents of it all and the influence on so many people. And read the government that have expressed ambivalence. They are not “yellow”— yellowest yellows you can find online—yes, they exist, too, and may they are on his side, and with any luck, might have his ear. lead you to the conclusion that you weren’t as “yellow” as you thought At the risk of calling for a new age-y kumbaya moment, it’s time to stop you were, when you consider the entire spectrum. There is no point in talking about Duterte’s pagkatao. It’s time to work harder to look beyond his preaching to the choir. What you read may make your eyes bleed, but superficial, personal idiosyncrasies in order to consider his policies solely. hey, no one ever died from reading.

Now, this is not to say that there aren’t any nefarious forces online: of course, there are. In fact, there does seem to be a legitimate concerted Get over the catharsis that comes from trollish behavior. effort to spread misinformation and even propaganda online. There It’s true that many people get off on it. They enjoy trading are those who deliberately spread patent lies, and that’s barbs and jabs, insults and scathing repartee. There is been highlighted recently by the list of fake news sites satisfaction in yelling, sadly. But in the long term, it only that have come out. Calling those who criticize “antishows you’ve lost it and weakens your overall stance.

Philippine reform” is yet another tactic. These reactions Be patient. Be respectful. Agree to disagree, because are evidently emotional responses to misperceived Some people ultimately, only time will tell who is right. threats on his presidency and attempts to protect Tatay argue, it’s only Digong from a feared ousting or impeachment, even social media; Engage only with those who welcome engagement. though hardly any evidence supports this as taking place.

Find the thoughtful, civilized posters and their groups— it’s not reality. those who are online to be vigilant citizens and truly Yet social examine the actions of government. You have to make M O V I N G F O RWA R D media is an an effort to find them—and to be one of them. When Some people argue, it’s only social media; it’s not reality. you engage with an opponent, discuss only policies.

Yet social media is an indicator, just like anything else. indicator, just Save your emotional ranting (also satisfying!) for your Some say, just quit social media. It is best to veer away like anything choir. Every president we’ve ever elected exhibited from the crazies who are incapable of listening, but don’t else. a few disagreeable qualities that often had little to do disappear outright. Keep reading—yes, even the crazies with their policies. Emphasize that policies have to be and their strident all-caps posts deserve a cursory scan, based on facts, as do investigations. Hold truth as the if only to stay aware of the dangers that lurk. all-important ideal.

In an entry on his blog titled “Note to Self: How To Engage With Others on Social Media,” writer and Our predisposition towards personality makes us lunatics in politics. medical anthropologist Gideon Lasco wrote: “Always consider the And the freedom and sometimes, the anonymity of the Internet makes truthfulness of what you’re going to share. Be discerning, especially this lunacy doubly likely. Recall how during the campaign period, the when people begin to trust in your discernment. Hold on to facts, to president said he had killed people? Recall when he said he had ties to evidence, to logic, to reason. And even when you are convinced that the Davao Death Squads? Recall when he intimated he knew who killed you are absolutely right, resist the temptation of humiliating people and the journalist Jun Pala? Recall how he has said he wants to kill three rubbing in the flaws of your contentions.” million addicts. Yet on social media, his supporters cannot stomach even the suggestion that the President has condoned summary killings.

To that I add: That’s the kind of mass delusion that needs to be tempered. Truth sways opinions, and so genuine discourse must continue, for that reason alone.

Listen closely, or in this case, read closely.

Truth can set us free.

This means not dwelling on the purpose of a person’s argument or in Ultimately, the cult of personality sets people up for tragic and fact even the people themselves, but actually paying attention to the devastating disappointment. Even presidents are only human; this substance of the argument itself. Many times, the squabbles take place one has good qualities as well as failings, some grave ones. Facing the because people are freely making assumptions. Ask questions and failings may be the most harrowing thing of all for the self-righteous, explain where you are coming from. Don’t assume that is clear—believe self-declared 16 million who celebrate his every decision. It is terrifying me, it hardly ever is. to contemplate what this might mean to those who love their president’s pagkatao so loyally, should they in fact find out that their hero, their Acknowledge the counter-arguments to your positions.

Tatay Digong, is wrong.

Far too few online do this, not realizing that acknowledging or even Some might choose denial. Some will blame others. Some will be like anticipating the counter-arguments to a particular position strengthens Javert in Les Miserables, who, destroyed by Jean Valjean’s mercy, so lost you own much more than simply ignoring them. and undone, he had to leap into oblivion.

And finally, some will be coldly pragmatic, fully willing and easily Conduct all exchanges with courtesy and respect able to trade the purported good Duterte’s government achieves for There is no need for bad language or name-calling. You may not agree 3,500 lives ended and certainly more to come. And indeed, that may be with someone, but at least, demonstrate an attempt to see where the the greatest tragedy for the people and for the country. other is coming from. A lot of good will can come from a simple phrase 112

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A Moet Expaatio,

AND A THANK YOU

At the beginning of President Duterte’s term, blogger J Acn bade a temporary goodbye to his readers, as a statement on behalf of decency.

THANK YOU TO ALL who have expressed their understanding and best wishes for me and my family.

There are a number of reasons for suspension of the blog. At the root, as many supposed, is a concern for my family’s well-being, cast against the unkindness inspired by a leader who seems to want to use threat to remake the Philippines in his own image, which, as far as I can tell, is without remorse or respect for the values of civility and laws that bind diverse peoples to one community for the well-being of all.

I am not a citizen and am not afforded the protections of citizenship. Indeed, there are obligations under my visa that I must respect. I also have an increasingly hard time staying connected because of Globe’s deteriorating service. It is hard to do research or respond to comments. I can’t maintain the quality of the blog I envisioned.

The tenor of the discussions is turning to crap with the arrival of Duterte agents who don’t come to discuss, but to flame the blog by challenging my personal integrity, seeking to restrain the blog’s voice, and demanding that we give the president time to show us the promise of his decisions. I grow disheartened with the arrival of this caliber of character and intellect, one that refuses to respect the elegance of the blog’s discussion format.

It’s a disease I don’t want in my brain or blog. It is not an accident. It is the way the Duterte Internet bosses run things.

Under President Duterte, I suspect that there will be a good many big winners and many, many, many big losers, and of the latter we already have over 1,000 plus their grieving family members. With more on the way. I get angry, too much, too often. We are losers, too, those of us who want nothing more than sincere, honest, earnest debate stripped of the gameplaying.

This government is unkind, is it not? On some days it seems a veritable ship of fools.

I say “ship of fools” with a wince, knowing that the motto of the blog is concocted from some long-lost literary chemistry with Edgar Lores: “O’ rise ye land of happy fools!” It is meant fondly to cheer the rise of the nation and grant respect for the travails foisted upon resilient, fun-loving, fiesta-warm Filipinos bound in poverty and struggle by a class of entitled, self-involved barons.

By way of example, I cite Senators Pimentel and Cayetano, grownup, adult men smart enough to pass the bar exam but not smart enough to figure out that a candidate who challenges a reporter

by questioning how smelly his wife’s vagina is just might not be in tune with modern standards of compassion and care found in human rights principles. Well, they excuse it and spin it as a joke and thereby hold no one accountable for one of the most gross verbal abuses I’ve witnessed in my rather lengthy life. And then there were others, many others, to follow.

All excused. Rationalized away by a set of people who deny that civility is important. Thus, we see the entitlements of the class of impunity. They say they have to kill people because the courts are slow, but they are escape artists themselves. And they help their fellow con men escape, too. They built the laws that make the courts work badly.

And so, as the bodies roll in, and these two characters hold to their positions, denying any respect for the integrity of democracy and decency, quite willing to enable the abuses of the Duterte-inspired thugs who threaten us and demand that we forgo our free speech rights so the President can execute his killings without anyone saying, “Hey,

STOP! That’s not RIGHT!” The number of intelligent, powerful people who are quite all right with things is astounding. And discouraging.

These people have control over the ship of fools. They are leaders or they are enablers.

My advice, my opinion, is so simple that I feel like an idiot having to tell any modern man or woman this: Stop the abuses. Stop the nonsense.

Understand and LIVE right over wrong, not “What’s in it for me?”

Drugs are a problem. Agreed. But exterminating a slice of Filipino humanity to justify a ruthless one-man rule... well, it’s a game we’ve seen played out in history time and time again, and it’s one game too far for this sailor. ...

Thank you all. Every single person who made this blog tick.

Thank you.

Spectacular.

I’ll be around. I’m not abandoning ship. Just pursuing a needed change to take care of my family, getting some rest and exercise, and being true to the terms of my visa. I will miss our eloquent, elegant arguments. But we graduate, you know? There are new ways to contribute...we can find them.

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WHAT I’VE LEARNED

INJAP SIA

39, FOUNDER OF MANG INASAL; CURRENTLY CO-CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF DOUBLEDRAGON PROPERTIES, AND THE YOUNGEST BILLIONAIRE IN THE PHILIPPINES’ FORBES 50 RICHEST LIST

I N T E RV I E W E D BY K R I ST I N E FO N AC I E R P H OTO G R A P H E D BY R E N N E L L SA LU M B R E

Making a fair decision isn’t always the easiest thing, but looking

back at my journey in Mang Inasal, I see how the business became stronger and stronger through making fair decisions. Whatever difficult decisions I had to make were made more difficult because they also had to be fair, but they paid off over time.

Conducting fair business opened up other doors of opportunities for

me. For example, the business I am in now, DoubleDragon, evolves with the same people [who I did business with in Mang Inasal].

This partnership was made possible because we’d been fair to one another since early on.

Courage is when you are able to make difficult decisions, and pursue those decisions even when they’re not initially perceived by other people as the correct decision.

I think majority of people base their judgments on the superficial. If you go a notch lower, deeper, you see a different picture. I think that’s the key, and I still practice that in everything—in the way you assess the industry, the way you assess the business opportunities, the way you assess anything. I always make it a point to look beyond what you see from the outside. I have noticed that most people base their decisions only from what is indicated on the business dashboard. But you will have greater advantage if you base your decisions before it even reaches the dashboard.

Building a business that will outlast my lifetime is the worthwhile pursuit. I’m not into building something short-term. Sure, I may make money out of a fad, but I’m not really too keen on that. I think Mang Inasal is well-designed and well-executed, and it was built to outlast me.

I have to remind myself from time to time that my business endeavors

should uplift everyone involved—that’s always the intention.

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Putting up a business in the beginning is more art than science. You cannot rely on a template for it. Later on,

when the business is more established, it becomes more science than art.

I consider myself a risk-taker. But I think there’s also a defensive side to taking risks, which is very important.

There’s a very thin line between being aggressive and being purely reckless; I’m aggressive, but not reckless.

I go full throttle most times, but I don’t go beyond the limits. Though every situation is different, and so

your limits vary, too. It’s like driving: The speed limit is different whether you’re driving on a small road or a highway, or whether you’re going straight in clear weather, or turning during rain. You have to adjust your limits to the factors around that specific circumstance.

You get first-degree burns at around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Most people might take their hands away at

of commuting by public jeepney every day, eating in the carinderias, and traveling to visit almost all the provincial cities in the Philippines. These all gave me a good foundation that I am able to make use of in my daily grind.

When a person starts to think that all his success comes

because he’s so good, he’s already off-track. I always remind myself that I’m here for a mission, and it keeps me grounded. I have to keep checking with myself, is this aligned with why I was given these blessings? Am I on track with my mission in life?

Up to a certain level, money makes your life more comfortable. Only up to a certain level. After that, you

don’t feel a significant difference anymore especially if you have set your personal contentment level low. But I still continue to work, no longer for myself but for a greater purpose.

the first sign of heat, but if you know that your limit is 100 degrees, you can tolerate up to 99 degrees. In the same way, you have to anticipate difficulties, so you know how far you can push yourself safely.

My first million made me more conservative. Earning

I think success is a series of correct decisions. Every

Making my first billion put my character to test. In

decision that’s made today was made because you thought it was right today; and, as a leader and a business founder, that’s your job—to keep making decisions all day.

For ten decisions you make, maybe seven will be perceived as immediately correct. While others may not perceive the other three decisions as right, however, if you’re blessed, it will turn out correct in the long run.

And that blessing comes about as a combination of instinct and guidance.

I think I had the confidence to compete locally [in the

province]; but it was different thing to compete with [businesses in] the larger, more sophisticated, the more organized and crowded cities like Metro Manila. Most probinsyanos like me don’t have the confidence for that— parang given na that you have less experience, you have less capability. Like in my case—I think I’d only been to Manila less than five times when I was expanding Mang Inasal—so it was like going to the Olympics after coming from a town sports league.

Over time I have come to realize that being a probinsyano

became an advantage—I discovered that when you are able to quickly learn the complex business ways in the big city and then mix those learnings with what you have naturally learned in the streets in the province, it will result in better decision and direction. I think if I had a different and more comfortable background, the decisions I have made over the past ten years would have been different.

I am thankful for all the experiences I’ve had—from my

childhood years growing up seeing our parents build their grocery store brick by brick, my high school years

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that first million was so difficult, that when I finally had it, I knew I had to take care of it because I have poured in so much sacrifice and hard work for it.

2010—I was 33 at the time—Jollibee bought Mang Inasal for P3 billion for a 70 percent stake. Having that sum of money in front of you, at 33, can make or break you. It’s an acid test of your personality, your character, your sense of self. I thank the values that our parents have instilled in us, their children, that made me able to stay whole and grounded.

I knew I did okay because I didn’t squander that money.

Money, fame, and fortune needs to be managed properly—I don’t know the statistics, but I noticed that most people, like Hollywood personalities, cannot preserve their wealth for a long period of time. I think a person needs a good solid value foundation built up over time to handle that special situation properly.

The best way to handle wealth is to pour your heart and

soul into making it. Knowing the kind of sacrifice it takes to make money is the best foundation to help you handle wealth. If you built something brick by brick, drop of sweat by drop of sweat, over a long period of time, you’ll naturally take care of it.

The first luxury I bought myself was a Rolex. It was

considered as a sign of achievement then. I bought my first and only Rolex in 2004; a few months later, I bought one for my father, my mother, my wife, my brother, my sister. I still keep mine, although I seldom wear a watch now.

For many years I have always tried to give value and

importance to family. At the end of the day, your family is your core. It keeps you whole, which is necessary as you navigate your life journey. Every member of the family has a role to play, it’s like a big basketball team.

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11. 16

STYLE KICK UP YOUR STANDARD WOOL SUIT BY GOING FOR A BRIGHT COLOR OR OVERSIZED PATTERN.

On Fernando Cabral (left): Suit by Kiton; vest by Roberto Cavalli; shirt by Thom Browne; tie by J. Crew; shoes by Pierre Hardy.

On Armando Cabral (right): Suit by Isaia; shirt by Etro; tie by Alexander Olch; shoes

by Tod’s.

Bold W h o s a y s f a l l ’s g o t t a be somber? Steal some moves from the Cabral brothers—hop off t h e b l u e - b l a c k- g r a y hamster wheel and turn up the volume on your seasonal wardrobe.

GOSTYLE BIG ON WARMTH WITH A COMFORTABLY CHUNKY SWEATER.

On Fernando: Sweater

by AMI Alexandre Mattiussi; trousers by Massimo Alba.

On Armando: Cardigan and sweater

by Paul Smith.

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STYLE

FEELING BRAVE? TRY A PATTERNED SUIT WITH CONTRAST PIPING. MORE SUBDUED? PULL ON A RIBBED KNIT.

On Armando: Jacket, shirt, trousers, and loafers by Gucci; tie by Paul Stuart.

On Fernando: Sweater and trousers

by Ralph Lauren; loafers

by Christian Louboutin.

SEARCH AND DESTROY CLOTHES BY (FROM LEFT) COACH, GIVENCHY, AND BOTTEGA VENETA

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STYLE

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A JACQUARD SUIT IS FOR THE MAN WHO MARCHES TO HIS OWN TUNE.

On Armando: Jacket and sweater

by Ermenegildo Zegna Couture.

On Fernando: Jacket and shirt by Ermenegildo Zegna Couture.

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STYLE

STATEMENTMAKING COATS TRANSFORM YOUR MOST FUNCTIONAL PIECE INTO YOUR MOST NOTICEABLE.

On Fernando: Coat by Fendi; jacket by Louis Vuitton; trousers

by Billy Reid; sneakers

by Armando Cabral.

On Armando: Coat

by Hardy Amies; shirt

by Canali; trousers

by J. Crew; sneakers

by Armando Cabral.

Opposite, on Armando: Coat and turtleneck by Etro; jacket and trousers by Michael Kors; boots by Scarpe di Bianco.

On Fernando: Coat and shirt by Burberry; suit

by Joseph Abboud; shoes by Bruno Magli; belt, PS by Paul Smith.

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STYLE

WIDE-LEGGED OR SKINNY, DARKHUED OR LIGHT, A PLAID SUIT CHECKS ALL THE BOXES.

Jacket (left) and trousers (right) by Giorgio Armani; jacket (right) and trousers (left) by Salvatore Ferragamo.

On Armando and Fernando: Shirts by Salvatore Ferragamo; shoes by O’Keeffe.

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WHEN STYLETHE WEATHER TURNS GRAY, GIVE IT SOME ZIP WITH A DARING COLLAR OR KALEIDOSCOPIC SWEATER. On Armando: Jacket by Prada.

On Fernando: Cardigan by Prada.

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T H I S WAY O U T

The Year in Food Crazes UBE, NOW THAT’S MY JAM. Filipinos were eating ube out of the womb, and before it was cool. Literally every other Pinoy dessert was purple—there was no way that was natural. Ube must have been the Ajinomoto of food coloring. Made from a tuberous root vegetable, ube halaya doesn’t taste like anything in particular, to be quite honest, and so it can never fall out of favor (looking at you, pumpkin spice and salted caramel). Who the fuck puts ube in a donut, then covers it in champagne icing and 24-karat gold? Will-yams-burg hipsters, that’s who.

Matcha was everywhere this year, but unlike the humble ube, that was somewhat elevated, the ceremonial and hard-to-produce green tea powder from Japan was flavorized and injected into every damn thing from beer, waffles, Kit Kat, noodles, face masks, and, of course, Starbucks. Real matcha,

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made from the youngest shade-grown tea leaves handpicked by Buddhist monks and ground into a fine powder using only the power of their mind, tastes like grass, soil, and Zen, and has no business being in a doughssant.

We also need to talk about salted egg. Whether you think it’s the new Sriracha or just an Asian phenomenon, three words: salted egg chips. McDonald’s Singapore churched out its first salted egg chicken burger in June, after the golden yolk showed up in everything from xiao long bao to spaghetti. The Philippines is doing the same with chicken wings, pizza, and croissants (I swear croissants are the sluts of pastries). Traditionally tossed in salads or topped in congees, this egg is best treated as an indulgence and not a right, because excess cholesterol and salt is not a good look on your arteries.

I M AG E C O U RT E SY O F @ M A N I L AS O C I A LC LU B

BY AU D R E Y N . CA R P I O