01/06/2020
Dateline: May 31, 2020
76th Day of Quarantine
Walking down Legazpi Village, I hollered at my friend Marie to cross the street to avoid an unmasked pedestrian. “This is now the new normal”, said my other friend Martin who was astride me.
“The new normal”, I thought. But what is normal? Sometimes it’s slow like ancient stained glass settling on cathedral walls. But sometimes it’s precipitous, driven by upheavals that shatter the glossy veneer of our burnished lives.
I remember the stories of the second world war from my great-aunt Amparing (Mary Morris). She recounted to me how she lived a charmed life in Manila during the ‘40s. Caught in a lockdown in their hotel (Pons) in Intramuros, she recounted tales of horror, as food grew scarce. Their once aristocratic tastes assaulted by the pain of hunger, they descended on rotten rice recovered from Manila Bay, roasted banana trunks, and when there was nothing left, boiling and eating the feral cats that roamed their holdover in Intramuros.
In contrast, my mother told me a different version of the war. My grandma abandoned her equally patrician home in Makati. And with her brood, they fled to the safety of the mountains of Tanay. In the evening they would cook rice and coconut and in the morning sell their rice cakes in the towns of Rizal. It was backbreaking work, but they never went hungry - thanks to my grandma’s ability to quickly transform herself.
As one sociologist put it, “the instant the disaster strikes, life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a certain principle, a creed or purpose. It is shaken, perhaps violently, out of rut and routine.”
We may have never imagined that we can bake, or cut one another’s hair, or buy or sell stuff online. (But) “In catastrophe”, says author Jon Mooalem* “there is an opportunity for transformation”. Upon closer examination, the new normal is not driven by the calamitous force outside us. Rather it is the transformative power that rises to the occasion within us.
*(This Is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together, 2020).
