‘Graciosa’

PINOY KASI

‘Graciosa’
By Michael Tan

Inquirer
Last updated 00:10am (Mla time) 06/06/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- “Can we look at these two units?” I asked the cell phone vendor. I was in Greenhills with a friend and each of us had spotted a unit that looked interesting.

The clerk frowned and said, “Isa-isa lang.” [“Let’s do it one at a time.”] Fair enough, I thought, maybe she’d had people running off with the phones, but I felt her voice could have been more congenial.

So, she pulled out one unit to show my friend, and after he was through, took out the other one for me to look at. I wasn’t really that interested, partly thrown off by her demeanor, so I quickly returned the unit to her with a “Salamat.”

She scowled and muttered, “Sayang lang oras ko.” [“My time was just wasted.”]

My friend watched me nervously, knowing how I feel about impertinence, but I figured, it’s the end of a long day and I’ll just let it go at that.

Bad business

“Graciosa,” I fumed on the way home and my friend, who’s younger, asked what it meant. “Graciousness,” I translated, only to get another blank look. And I realized, that’s it, we’re raising a new generation of ungracious Filipinos.

You see it all around you: in the way people push you aside as they try to get through a crowd, clerks who toss your change back at you, people who answer the phone with “Ano ’yan!” [“What’s that!”], bureaucrats who won’t look at you as you transact business. All this is going to be disastrous, considering how our economy depends so much on graciousness. We have millions of Filipinos working overseas, many in countries where graciousness is essential. And locally, we want to promote tourism, call centers, retirement villages, yet most of the younger Filipinos (and I bet quite a few older ones as well) have no sense of graciousness.

I’m talking about more than the good manners and right conduct norms we picked up in school. It’s also more than the artificial “Good morning, sir/ma’am” that everyone seems to be doing now in malls and stores, done so mechanically they might as well be greeting a school of hermaphrodite milkfish.

Graciousness means the little extras that go a long way, the “thank you” and the smile, even for the most routine work done; the “please,” the “po,” the “palihug” (in the Visayas) that go with every request -- again, no matter how small. It’s making an effort to move closer to a customer to hand over an object, rather than hurling it. It’s hospitality -- plus, a way of saying “You’re special,” serving fresh fruit juice instead of some soft drink or powdered drink. It’s also the “pinipig” you add to the chocolate -- thank you, Aunt Gilda, who whips up the richest “tskolate eh.”

Class

We tend to think that graciousness comes with being upper class. Not quite. Graciousness is very much alive in the most remote of our villages, with the poorest of the poor in the boondocks (“bundok”), where people welcome you into their homes, give you their best room (or, for very poor families, their best “banig,” or sleeping mat), slaughter their only chicken or pig and when you try to stop them explaining you’re vegetarian and can’t bear to see animals slaughtered, they take out their one and only can of “carne norte” (corned beef). Graciousness means going out of your way to help, and that’s literal in many parts of the country. Ask for instructions to someone’s home and you automatically have a guide accompanying you to that place, even if it’s five or six mountains away. And no, they’re not going to ask you for a tip.

So, why are we losing this graciousness? Partly it’s urban life eating away into our soul. To survive in cities, we think we need to be tough and brusque.

But I’m realizing, too, the rot goes back to when Filipinos began to internalize the values of our feudal lords. Among their peers, landlords observed proper etiquette and had some degree of graciousness, but toward lesser mortals, who were 95 percent of the Philippine population, it was pure and unadulterated arrogance.

I had friends who worked as flight attendants in Philippine Airlines and who told me how, on flights to and from Bacolod and Iloilo, they had to deal with wannabe “hacenderos” [plantation owners] who would lug in heavy bags that they would drop on the floor. Never a “please,” never a “palihug” from the haughty passengers, the attendants were expected to know that they should lift the bags and put them into the overhead bin -- and say thank you for the privilege.

You see it, too, with domestic helpers, who have mastered, through imitation, the imperial tones and habits of their employers. I worry in particular about the “yaya” (nannies), who pass on this class snobbery to the young children they’re caring for. When their wards grow up to be insolent brats, the parents wonder why they became that way.

Eventually, that lack of graciousness, combined with class snobbery, spread like a virus, transforming us into paragons of rudeness. And the poorer one is, the more one gets the brunt of this ungraciousness. You see it in the malls: the lower the income group they cater to, the more ungracious the sales clerks, bored, overworked and suspicious of their customers because they’re not rich and might steal the goods.

Like the wind

I try to understand when someone is ungracious because of a long day’s work, but, whenever possible, I also take it up with them -- graciously, sometimes with a bit of teasing -- because I know that if I don’t call their attention to their lapses, they would eventually offend someone less tolerant, and that would cost them their job.

I’ve found that graciousness can be useful even with the mean and the vicious because it rattles them, gets them even more nervous as they wonder if you’re preparing to take action against them—very graciously, of course. And sometimes they’re right.

“Xing ru feng,” my Chinese meditation teacher recently exhorted our class. Move like the wind. To demonstrate, she took a few steps to emphasize the importance of being light-footed, then opened and shut a door ever so carefully. “It’s more than politeness,” she explained, “it’s respecting others, being conscious that you don’t end up disturbing others.” Graciousness includes the gentle handling of any object, an expression of our respect for its value.

Society ritualizes graciousness so it can be taught, eventually becoming embodied, meaning it becomes part of our body, reflected in our speech, our gait, our facial expressions, our hand movements. It’s the way, too, all our movements come together to give us what we call in Filipino “dating,” the impact we have on people. It’s never stiff, as when we “behave” only because we have to. Neither is it contrived, as when politicians perform. Never directed, never scripted, graciousness touches people because it emanates from a kind of choreography of the heart.