Buhay Bangkok

 

I once had an interesting discussion with several Thai officemates about Thai romance movies. One of them, Oddy, said that Thai love films always follow a predictable storyline: Rich boy marries poor girl.

 

I’m familiar with  that, I said. Filipino films also have such a theme. How about ‘rich girl marries poor boy’? They looked at me in mock horror. A film with such a storyline wouldn’t be popular, Oddy and Bell said. Why, I asked. Their explanation: Because in Thai culture, it doesn’t look good if a rich girl marries a poor boy. Or a poor boy marrying a rich girl, for that matter.

 

Reflecting their society’s disdain at such an unlikely union, Thais even have a colorful proverb for it: “Nu tok tunk kao san (‘Mouse in the rice bin’).”

 

Although in Filipino culture, such a thing happens, it (or at least the poor boy himself) does not suffer from the stigma of such a relationship (‘Lucky mouse!’ I exclaimed, upon hearing of the Thai proverb).

 

This occurred to me while I was listening to the song, “Prinsesa” as sung by new rock band 6-Cycle Mind. This rock ballad popularized by the band Teeth in the 90s tells of the professing of love by a guy who—as the lyrics suggest—might come from a social class lower than the object of his love. Yeah, I know, we Filipinos love putting women on a pedestal—in chivalric fashion inherited from Iberian forbears, but literary works being open for interpretation, I’d interpret ‘prinsesa,’ ‘dalhin mo ako sa iyong palasyo,’ ‘sa yong kaharian’ and other such words in the lyrics as suggesting that the lady comes from an affluent family.

 

The song’s popularity after all these years suggests that it has struck a familiar chord among its listeners: ‘Poor-boy-marries-rich-girl.’

 

Another similar-themed song would be “Jopay” (by a band whose name I can’t recall just now). Instead of a rich girl, the song’s narrator sings of his love for Jopay, a TV singer-starlet who used to be popular a few years back. In Filipino culture, fame equals fortune.

 

Then there are the movies. The late Fernando Poe Jr. played a farm hand who fell in love with the hacendero’s daughter, a role essayed by Sharon Cuneta, in a film shown in the 90s. How many Robin Padilla films banked on this tried-and-tested formula? How many showbiz stars built their careers on such plots? I can not enumerate at the moment all the Tagalog films with such themes but I’m sure there have been such popular movies all these years, able to touch base with the secret longings and hidden hopes of their viewers.

 

Film, as with any other art form, both reflects reality and influences human behavior. If movie-goers keep on seeing movies glorifying this ‘poor-boy-marries-rich-girl’ theme, then I’m sure the social stigma—if there is—would be replaced by tolerance, if not acceptance.

 

Disdain for such an affair among Thais can be explained by their society’s patriarchal structure. As Oddy explained to me, Thai men are expected to be good providers. Hence, Thai women are on the look-out not just for handsome guys, but preferably men with a stable job.

 

In our own society, I observed that a ‘poor boy-marries-rich-girl’ scenario is seen both as embarrassing and commendable. How could this be explained? Is it our Asian, patriarchal side reminding males to be good providers? Or is there a strong tug from our European ancestors, who came up with such proverbs as, ‘A man gets wealthy either by being born into it, making it, or marrying it.” I recall the character of Dr. de Espadana from Rizal’s Fili, an impoverished Spanish doctor with a limp, who marries Dona Victorina de Espadana, thinking she’s a rich insulares, thus a step upward for him in society’s steep ladder.

 

In real life, I was also a witness to such unions. Several relatives from both sides of the family, in fact, are in such situations. The girls were usually from better-off families. Worse, several years of marriage did not improve matters. The guys—out of a defense mechanism borne out of inferiority complex? Sociologists would love studying these case studies for weeks!—always end up being heavily dependent on their respective wives, or worse, in-laws.

 

It’s always a source of both embarrassment and amusement for me whenever I hear of the latest caper from these relatives of mine. The tales would be fodder for the next tearjerker: Wife leaves the country to work as an OFW while husband lolls around the house or passes away the time playing tong-its with his buddies, his main concern the arrival of his wife’s remittance every end of the month.

 

My father, who is of Ilocano-Capampangan stock, offers a regional-centric point-of-view in such matters: He sneers at Tagalog males, many of whom he says, are lazy and let their wives do the hard work, if not play the role of family bread winner. He then goes on to cite Tagalog friends, neighbors and co-workers whose domestic lives apparently help validate his hypothesis.

 

Funny, but he did not notice the irony when he kept pushing me (when I was still fresh from college) to woo a girl from Mindoro who had worked in Hong Kong and invested in several rice fields in her province. Then there was the lass who hailed from Quezon province whose family are landowners. You’d be one lucky guy if you catch any of them, he would always egg me. His attempts at helping me snare the right girl with the right credentials are funny enough and deserve a separate telling. Looking back, though, I asked myself, did my father see me as a lazy guy whose fortune in life lay in marrying wealth? I would have been another mouse let loose in the granary had I given in to his paternal coachings.