Our Hunger for Roots

The following remark about the Philippines from A Short History of South-East Asia (4th Ed) drew my attention:

". . . contemporary Filipinos lack a concrete pre-colonial history from which they can draw inspiration and create national myths. There is nothing in the Philippines' past remotely comparable to the golden eras of Angkor in Cambodia, Pagan in Burma or Majapahit in Indonesia." (page 125)

Not only do I agree with this, I could also feel it. There is hunger among Filipinos for a glorious past that simply wasn't there. We resented the Spanish, the Americans and the Japanese who colonized us, but we could find no national identity beyond what these conquerors had provided us.
The book went on to say,

"There is only a pattern of regionalism under the control of local trading families and kinship networks."

The book was written for business executives who wanted to do business in South-East Asia. In the words of the editor Peter Church, "much of the history of the region has either been written ... at a much greater depth than is required ... or has been written in an abbreviated form for tourists" (Preface vii). The book therefore was an "attempt to find a middle path which will give business and other readers enough detail to have a sense of the history of the different countries and their people" (Preface).

I think the book's assessment of Filipinos is fairly accurate (except for one slight correction in the detail, see note below).

We Filipinos can't change our history. What we don't have, we simply don't have. Period. There's no sense of pursuing the issue.

There's no use either to invent a history that will fill up the vacuum in our identity. Not only is that exercise futile, it can even be catastrophic. As it is, we are a highly regionalistic society with a feudal structure. I used to not believe in that. Now I do.

But we can change what to think about it and do about it.

To me, this is the unfailing truth though: the Filipinos of today are the roots of the Filipinos tomorrow. Our children shall reap with whatever we do with what we have now.

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NOTE: The book erred on page 130 on one detail. It was General Emilio Aguinaldo, not Apolinario Mabini, who declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898.