Grief

YOU DON’T have to be an anthropologist to know that there are cross-cultural differences in the way we “feel,” or at least in the way we express our feelings.  Even among Filipinos, Cebuanos and Ilonggos are generally more ebullient than, say, the Tagalogs or the Ilokanos.

Following the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, international news networks have noticed and commented on the discipline shown by the Japanese, not just in terms of rehabilitation efforts but also, on a very personal level, a restraining of emotions.  Quite often the news reports will refer to the bushido ethos, the way of the warrior, as the basis for this stoicism.

This is not to say the Japanese are unfeeling and totally devoid of emotions.  On one of ABS/CBN’s newscasts, which featured the evacuation of the Filipina wives of Japanese, there were heartbreaking footage of both the Filipinas and Japanese as they were about to be separated.  As the vans left the town with the women and the children, the cameras focused on one Japanese man crying as his hands went up and down. It struck me not just as anguished farewell but almost like a supplication to the heavens to protect his loved ones.

<strong>Shame</strong>

I could imagine though that after the cameras left, some of the crying men probably apologized to town mates for their outburst.  It’s all part of a shame culture, where public expressions of emotions, even in the most difficult times, are seen as inappropriate.

Cultures can be complicated in their prescriptions concerning feelings and emotions.  The website of Orbis publishing features a letter from Yoshi Nomura, a Japanese theologian, who writes about how, after days of searching through several shelters, a middle-aged woman found her elderly mother in a gym. He describes her walking slowly toward her mother, who was in one corner of a gym.  At one point she stopped and began to bow deeply to all the other people around her, apologizing because she was “monopolizing the good luck of finding a family member there, and began asking for forgiveness in tears for just picking up her own mother.”

The Japanese response to disasters has caught the attention of psychologists. On the National Public Radio website there was an article about the Japanese’s difficulty, or reluctance, to express grief and how this might adversely affect their mental recovery from the trauma.

There were several readers’ responses to the article, some in total agreement with the idea that Japanese stoicism is not healthy.  Others observed that the public sharing of emotions is very American or Western, and that no one has any business imposing this practice on the Japanese, who have developed their own way of grieving. In fact, one reader claimed there are studies showing that cathartic responses can actually delay healing.

I thought of our preference in the Philippines for “letting go.”  I remembered, too, listening to a radio newscast last week in connection with the announcement that China was pushing through with the execution of three Filipinos for drug smuggling.  The newscasters were able to get into the home of the family of one of the Filipinos, catching the mother’s hysterical wailing as she received the news.

Filipino cultures emphasize a public display of grief.  At wakes and funerals especially, it is almost a requirement to cry, together with verbalizing one’s grief. There’s a strong performance aspect to all this, where the degree of outburst seems to indicate one’s goodness as a wife, one’s filial piety as a child, one’s loyalty as a friend.

I often wonder if we might have borrowed this from the Chinese. I can never forget attending, in my childhood, the funeral of a Chinese classmate’s mother, and how elder relatives kept ordering the orphaned children: “Hao!  Hao!” which meant “Cry!  Cry!”

In a way, the mass media do that as well today with their cameras and microphones, almost obliging the tears and theatrics.  After hearing that radio newscast last week, I was worried that for the next few days we were going to get more of this reality TV-type coverage, capitalizing on people’s anguish and grief.  I am relieved that so far, we haven’t seen too much of that kind of circus, and I hope the media can restrain themselves especially today, the day of the execution.

Even without a new law, I wonder if the mass media shouldn’t come up with ethical guidelines on the coverage of people’s grief. In the case of the three Filipinos, I wonder about the children left behind, stigmatized because they carry their parents’ surnames, which have been printed and mentioned over and over again.  I notice that the wife of one of the Filipinos is interviewed always without showing her face, which is the wise thing to do, although the name of her husband has also been all over the news.  He will be leaving three children behind.

Featuring the families grieving will not change the Chinese government’s mind about the executions.  Neither will they build public sympathy.  In fact, the initial impression that I have from the people who call in to radio stations is one of an almost fatalistic acceptance of the sentence.

<strong>Quiet reflection</strong>

I do believe that the nation, as a whole, does grieve for the three Filipinos, and because it is a difficult case, involving a criminal conviction, grief comes with other feelings.  I have wondered if perhaps we might want to learn from the Japanese. Their restraint in times of grief is not so much a suppression of feelings but a turning inwards, allowing them to reflect, quietly and deeply.

We can’t keep blaming poverty here for the terrible situation the Filipinos are in.  They were not from impoverished families, desperately needing to become mules (drug couriers) to feed their families.  We need to ask ourselves if we have gone too far in raising our children to take short cuts, to take risks, to blur the distinctions between right and wrong.

We would do well to reflect as well on the death penalty, which we had until not too long ago. We wail about fate and malas (bad luck) on the part of the three Filipinos, to have been caught in Shenzhen and Xiamen rather than in Hong Kong, where, as we know from the Singson case, punishments for drug trafficking and possession are much lighter. The parents of the Filipinos also claim their children were framed and that the big fish get away. All that arbitrariness around the death penalty is what makes it so repulsive.

I have heard Filipinos argue in favor of bringing back the death penalty, but using lethal injection so it will be more humane. Now that three Filipinos must die by such injections, so far away from home and their loved ones, can we still speak of a humane death penalty?

With or without mass media coverage, we would do well to pause at some time today and observe silence for our three compatriots.  At some point during our silence, we might want to remember that in Rome, on days when someone is executed, the lights around the arches of the Colosseum, which was once used for executions,  are lit up to protest the death penalty, and to symbolize a world in grief.