This think piece was originally commissioned by fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company and presented by the author — in slightly different form — as part of fu-GEN’s series Digital Connections in 2021.
Hello everyone. I’m C.E. Gatchalian — my apologies, C.E. Gatchalian, I’m pronouncing it the original Tagalog way now — but you can call me Chris.
First off, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m livestreaming today from the unceded — meaning unsurrendered — and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, colonially known as Vancouver.
I just started this webinar with a land acknowledgment. A friend of mine, a settler, is of the belief that unless we truly intend to completely dismantle the colonial nation-state as we know it and return all the land to its traditional caretakers, such acknowledgements are meaningless and, worse, hypocritical. I know that some Indigenous folks share this view.
And this leads me to reflect on some of the issues the last eighteen months have brought up for me — issues related to how we moved in the world prior to the pandemic.
Okay, let me rephrase that: issues related to how I moved in the world prior to the pandemic.
(Prior to the pandemic, for example, I would have been less reluctant to use the royal, colonial “we.” See how quickly I corrected myself just there? I’m learning.)
So. Looking back at my modus operandi shortly before the pandemic, I was moving on the surface of things, going through the motions, putting only as much effort as was necessary to get by.
Simply put, the first two months of 2020, I was exhausted. I felt it in my body. One could attribute it to SAD — seasonal affective disorder — a condition that Vancouverites are particularly prone to, given our unremittingly grey winters.
But it was more than that, I think. I was running on empty. My raison d’être — or my life mission, the Nietzschean “heroic goal” that gets me up in the morning — had lost its lustre, had become a dreary wake-up call rather than a lofty riff from angels’ trumpets. I was forcing every gesture. Everything felt heavy. But I’m a mullard. And a pleaser. So as empty as I felt — as empty as I was — I kept rowing and rowing. Forcing. Producing.
Then on March 16, 2020, the world stopped. Do you remember what you were doing that day? As in, exactly what you were doing that day? Like how you remember what you were doing when John Lennon died, or Princess Di, or Kobe Bryant?
Well, I don’t, and if you don’t either, maybe it’s because it wasn’t a crash out of nowhere, but something that felt inevitable and boringly, numbingly right.
On March 16, 2020, I think I shrugged. I just shrugged.
I don’t think I gave it much or any real thought the first two weeks of the lockdown, except as an opportunity to reboot before returning to the proverbial treadmill.
And then, as the lockdown dragged out and on, and as each one of us — sorry, old habit, and a bad one, I was totalizing — as I, like a scorpion, tuned out and turned in, there was nothing but thoughts. Thoughts were all I had.
Some of these I remember with crystalline clarity. Despite the whirl of them in my head, multiplied and magnified by the external deadness of lockdown, some managed to stand out from all the rest, like pinkish pearls in a flurry of snow.
Such was the tragic beauty of a mind in lockdown.
Some of these thoughts were, oddly enough, about Ayn Rand.
Like many, I first discovered Ayn Rand when I was in my teens. She is most famous for two enormous doorstops of books: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, both of which I devoured in hungry, predatory succession. I wasn’t particularly bothered about their cartoonish plots and turgid prose; these two novels were like intellectual cocaine, filling a need that for me at age fifteen was insatiable: affirmation and validation in the face of a hostile and hateful world.
Coz I was bullied as a kid. K to 12, bullied. Some years were worse than others. But yeah, it was my baseline. Macro and micro. Bruised eyes, bruised ego. A brown queer bookworm. An obvious, easy target.
This isn’t something I’ve talked about much — I think I downplayed it even in my memoir — because I’ve been conditioned by neo-liberalism to never “play victim” and conditioned by cis-hetero-misogyny to be ashamed of weakness.
In Atlas Shrugged, the world stops. The world’s corporate, artistic, scientific, and intellectual elite go on “strike” to teach the useless, brainless, and, God forbid, altruistic masses a lesson: that, without the selfish elite, the world would go to shit. Rand’s dystopian vision kinda came true eighteen months ago, but for a different reason, I think, than what Atlas Shrugged posits. Reality went on strike against the very creatures who’ve turned a blind eye to it, grinding industry to a temporary halt so that Nature could come up for a bit of air.
Atlas Shrugged celebrates a world in ceaseless, perpetual motion where nothing matters but achievement, where we’re only as good as what we produce. Therein, according to Rand, lies the path to transcendence. And, like just about everyone, I was hungry for transcendence.
My reasons for adoring Ayn Rand — and why I still, despite my long, messy, hard-earned political evolution from classical liberal to neo-Marxist, have a soft spot for her — can be summed up in two simple words: “fuck you.” Coz despite the occasional well-taken insights her philosophy offers on such lofty topics as metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics, “fuck you” is, essentially, what her world view boils down to.
And for a brown queer bookworm who was convinced the entire world despised him, the words “fuck you” were pure and utter magic.
Rand wrote another book called The Virtue of Selfishness. My ex half-jokingly calls that book my Bible. And you know what? He’s right. It was my Bible for a few years. And when the pandemic forced us to retreat inside our houses, behind our walls, a lot of us — sorry, I — went deeper still: into ourselves. Into, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, the solitary confinement of our own skins. The world stopped precisely where the inside of my skin began.
Hence, the virtue of selfishness. And reflections on Ayn Rand.
As an only child, being alone was always my default. Since the outer world rolled out no welcome mat, I fetishized the inner. So down the path of unchecked, spiralling narcissism I went. Everything I encountered in the outer world simply confirmed what I already thought of it. This, though, was true: the world was racist and homophobic. My choice: I could jump off a cliff and die, or claw out some way to survive.
Unbreached will-to-power. Unfettered personal liberty. Trust your mind, trust yourself. Screw the masses, screw conformity.
Egoistic, egotistic, anti-social, narcissistic.
Filipinos have a massive inferiority complex.
Sorry. Filipinx have a massive inferiority complex.
Sorry. I have a massive inferiority complex.
As a brainy queer kid from a single-income, working-class brown household, the philosophy of Ayn Rand pointed a way out. Her books were what neo-liberalism made most readily available for poor kids like me with a decent brain and healthy ambition. If there were alternatives, they weren’t on offer. But Ayn Rand got me through.
So, during the pandemic, I’ve been thinking about how I’d been living with an Ayn Rand mindset long after I thought I had discarded her, and, more generally, about the paradox of things being simultaneously horrible and empowering: about how something that is ultimately poison can be necessary medicine in the short term.
Narcissism as medicine. It got me through. And honestly, this occurred to me: is narcissism such a bad thing if one believes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no one else can possibly love them? Narcissism is the consequence, not the cause, of social ills. Even if the world doesn’t actually hate you, even if it is just in your head, there are reasons they’re in your head — neurological predispositions being only half the story. Society is fucked up, and it’s fucked up our minds. So … why not narcissism? Why not anything, short of murder, that might provide some comfort? That society pays so much lip service to condemning narcissism is pretty rich given how, for the last 250 years, it’s been shredding itself into billions of unrelated individual selves.
Narcissism. The first Asian I lusted after was Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, the handsome, hunky star of such Wong Kar-Wai films as In the Mood for Love and the queer classic, Happy Together. In my twenties, I justified not sleeping with Asian men on the grounds that it would be “narcissistic” to pursue fellow Asians. I became very creative around rationalizing my internalized white supremacy.
In late June, when things started opening up in Vancouver, I got wind of a Wong Kar-Wai retrospective at my favourite movie theatre. Most of the films starred Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. Single and sex-starved, I promptly bought my ticket to the 1994 gem, Chungking Express.
I left the movie theatre with “California Dreamin’” stuck in my head, playing as it did through much of the second half of Chungking Express. Life, via this film, was beckoning again, cracking my shell and gently taking my hand.
But that song, that song though. Who did that song?
(This is a quiz. Audience participation. Who did that song? Those of you old enough to know.)
The Mamas & the Papas. The band that defined the 60s counterculture. Its breakout star was the last of its members to be asked to join, coz they thought her unbankable. Read: too heavy. The fiercely intelligent, sharp-witted, silken-voiced Mama Cass.
Mama Cass, who died when I was eight weeks old, who everyone still thinks died from choking on a ham sandwich. Actually, she died of heart failure, caused most likely by years of yo-yo dieting.
And I think about the heavy girls I gravitated toward when I was a kid, coz they seemed to gravitate toward me — or at least, not think any less of me coz I was a bookworm and burgeoning queer.
And I think about this phenomenon of gay men and their “fag hags,” how the women we chose for this role were often, though by no means always, heavy.
My hag certainly was. A rich straight white girl. Unlucky in love. One of the first people I came out to.
And she’d hang out with me and my buddies, go to the clubs and get drunk with us. She’d gently counsel us on the travails of our love lives, and we’d drunkenly voice our undying gratitude to her.
And I think about the fat jokes we’d tell behind her back — some of which she was the subject of — and how much we pitied her.
And I think about how we told those jokes, with a relish that was also a release — of the pain that had been inflicted on us, that we were helpless to not pass on to others.
And just as I’m about to self-flagellate over how badly I treated my friend, it dawns on me that she very well could have been making jokes behind my back, that for all her declarations of allyship, it was all joyous slumming.
And I think about all the reasons why people come together, fragile alliances against common enemies. And I wonder if bonding always has to be negative, if we can ever come together out of love instead of fear.
Then I think, is coming together out of fear such a bad thing? Maybe, as marginalized folx, we have no choice in the matter. And maybe, as marginalized folx, it’s not our problem to solve.
I think about the misogyny and transmisogyny of many gay men, how our public trans-inclusive feminism is belied by our private banter.
I think about fatphobia, my own and gay men’s in general, and our narcissistic desire to look as buffed as our high school torturers.
And how this is yet more evidence of the vicious cycles we need to liberate from, and, for a second, I wonder if it’s truly possible to escape them.
Just for a second, though. I’m an optimist at heart.
I told one of my writer friends that I was researching Ayn Rand for a novel. He said, “Don’t be ashamed. If nobody studied cancer, we wouldn’t have oncology!”
“The white race is the cancer of human history,” Susan Sontag — a white woman — once wrote. She later apologized for that statement, saying it was insensitive to cancer patients.
In my memoir, I call Sontag’s statement extreme. Some of my readers have responded that it’s the hard, ugly truth.
Not all white folks are bad, I remind myself — ever conscious of white fragility, even when there are no white people around. And then there are folks like the well-to-do white family my friend — a doctor — told me about a while ago. She asked them if they required additional “house help” to care for their recently hospitalized matriarch. “We’re good,” they replied blithely. “We have a Filipino at home.”
And the white guy on the bus whom I overheard talking about his Filipinx girlfriend. “Filipinas are the best,” he said. “They’re so loyal and faithful.”
And the white people over the years who’ve told me how much they “love” Filipinx folks — like this wealthy West Side white woman whom I worked for briefly. Lighting up when I told her of my ancestral background, she said, “I love Filipinos! You’re all so family oriented and Christian.” A comment “young me” would have taken as the highest compliment.
Two months ago, Hidilyn Francisco Diaz, a weightlifter from Zamboanga City, Philippines, made history by being the first Filipino athlete ever to win an Olympic gold medal.
Lest you further interrogate my leftist creds now that I’ve admitted a lingering soft spot for Ayn Rand, let me be very clear: I couldn’t care less about the Olympics. However, this particular “Olympic moment” struck a chord with me for reasons that are undeniably atavistic and tribal.
Coz someone forgot to tell Hidilyn Diaz: you’re not supposed to do this.
Coz someone forgot to tell Hidilyn Diaz: Filipinos can’t be anything other than upholders of other people’s privilege.
Coz someone forgot to tell Hidilyn Diaz: Filipino women shouldn’t expect any selfish rewards for literally carrying the world on their shoulders.
On July 26, 2021, Hidilyn Francisco Diaz, a four-foot, eleven-inch member of the Philippine Air Force, lifted a combined weight of 224 kilograms over her head — a feat she performed in Tokyo, capital of Japan, one of the many countries that colonized the Philippines over the years.
A woman is her macho country’s first ever Olympic champion.
A revenge fantasy on multiple fronts. Which is why I kinda get Duterte.
He’s a thug and I condemn him. But I won’t lie and say I don’t get him.
He’s not much of a Christian, and — surprise — neither am I. And I’m certainly not enough of one to always turn the other cheek.
When I’m wronged, it’s “Duterte-energy” that emerges in my stomach, unresolved trauma masquerading as big-boy rage. “Big boys” rarely acknowledge the true source of their rage. And when you don’t acknowledge the truth, you ultimately feed on yourself.
Ayn Rand would call trauma — any trauma — “accidental,” not “essential.” And your feelings, she would say, are neither here nor there. Neither, for that matter, are your race, gender, class background, etc. All that matters, ultimately, is what you achieve.
In an interview she gave after receiving her gold medal, Hidilyn Diaz got all effusive about God and Jesus. I sighed and rolled my eyes. Oh, God, she’s one of those.
And then the very next day she did another interview, voicing her support for trans athletes competing at the Olympics.
Duterte is pro-queer. There are open queers in his administration.
Machismo is rampant in the Phils, a country that’s had two female presidents.
“It’s complex.” A take so common it’s almost a truism — or is it? Have we so completely forgotten complexity that it bears constant repeating?
I think it could go both ways. We could just shrug and say everything’s complex and sit perpetually on the sidelines. Or we could go in, parse, dig, and get dirty.
When Hidilyn Diaz made that lift that won her the gold medal, what was she lifting besides cast iron and stainless steel?
The spirit of a traumatized and impoverished people? Sure.
And. It was just a lift. In a sports pageant that’s the walking, talking embodiment of neo-liberalism, organized by an outfit whose greed and corruption know no bounds.
That said. It was a long-awaited “fuck you” to the world on behalf of Filipinos both in the homeland and dispersed in all seven continents of the globe — including Antarctica.
As in: fuck you, we’re more than upholders of other people’s privilege.
So, all my fellow Filipinos and Filipinx who are watching this, altogether now, just to get it out of our collective system: “fuck you.”
[Pause.]
May I offer?
The next time you say “fuck you” to someone, make it mean something new. Make that “you” not the personal, singular, individual you of Ayn Rand, but a collective “you,” which includes all of who you’re talking to, the systems they were reared in, and all the different histories — their own and others — they carry in their bodies.
And as for the word “fuck,” remember that people fuck — for love. It’s messy and there’s pain, but, after and always, one way or another, there’s clarity.
So, fuck you all. Thank you for watching.