MY grandfather was the first sanitary inspector of the entire island of Ticao. Regularly, he would go to the Masbate mainland for a meeting. He would return taking the last boat trip and also the last bus (there was only one bus then plying the length of the island).
All of us would be excited to meet him with his pasalubong of tiny, soft muffins in a brown bag. We knew it was the same kind of muffin because oil blots would mark the paper container. When we moved to the city of Naga, there were more varieties of muffins and other pastries in the new place, but our grandfather, Elpidio Genova, would still bring us pastries and other things from the island. In our young mind, the gift was unnecessary because our lolo could just buy from the many bakeries and pastry shops in the city. But my father had an explanation: The muffins, or any of those special bread we received from him in the simplest of brown bags, had a value greater than the more expensive and fancier cakes he could buy for us. The gift crossed the sea and traveled on land, a trip that in the late 1960s took the whole day.
As a student of anthropology, I would find an engaging explanation from the great French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, who wrote in 1925 a book called The Gift. In that book, Mauss developed the theory that a gift is more than a material offering. For him, the material and the spiritual are blurred or the line between the two transcended to make the gift magical.
For Mauss, the one who sends or gives the gift gives a part of himself. Certainly my grandfather gave a lot of himself in those many occasions that he took care of the fragile container of the muffins he was assured would make us happy. If not, perhaps, for the fact that he stayed with us finally, he would have packed the same soft muffins over and over to give to us.
I remember my grandfather now, more than ever, when a great portion of this nation’s population is up in arms against the present obsession of the Bureau of Customs to tax balikbayan boxes, which are gifts. Relatives living abroad are looking at the things they have gathered and are still gathering and feeling a sense of helplessness. The box or boxes in front of them are now objects of anxiety rather than joy. Many are shocked that these boxes are now classified as forms of smuggling.
To the overseas Filipino workers, the Customs is another bureaucracy added to those that are supposed to work for their benefit. Name them: the Department of Labor and Employment, Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Government Service Insurance System, Social Security System and the
Bureau of Immigration. Now here is Customs newly customized to look at what these workers are sending home. It has come to its attention, if we are to believe its premises, promises and press releases, that the balikbayan boxes are being used to send goods that are for sale. These practices should be put to a stop, a certain Lina who heads this bureau screams.
As with any kind of law or regulation this government enforces, the latest preoccupation is antismall people. This reminds me of what legislators have been complaining all this time that the so-called
Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is engendering dependency, and that poor people remain poor because they are not sweating enough. As if our politicians in both houses of Congress are working.
I am angry. Like many Filipinos who have brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles, and cousins working abroad, I am aware of what goes into those boxes. These are small gifts—shoes of all types, photos of which were sent to a favorite uncle, magazines acquisitioned for a year or years, boxes of chocolate that were bought on sale, are results of saving for months so these special dark and white delicacies could be shared on All Souls’ Day or death anniversaries or Christmas
gatherings. Are some of these goodies for sale? I think some are, but they are afterthoughts of a laborer who is simply proud to show siblings and kin the nice things available abroad. No talk about scrimping or dutifully saving; what are laid on the table or what are revealed after the huge luggage has been opened are gifts of oneself. The distribution of these nice and “expensive” things is a magical moment, filled with laughter, banter and happy talk.
As for the smuggled goods, they are not in balikbayan boxes, but in crates that are not products of savings and having two or three jobs, but of a capital that accumulates and grows because they escape taxation.
I like to join the thousands of people hurling expletives at Lina and the entire Customs bureau. But I want to refer everyone to my former publisher, Teddy Boy Locsin, who has reserved the utmost obscenity and has hurled it with the might of the righteous at Lina. I would like to pray at this point that the ghost of some past would visit all Customs officials and the commissioner and scare their conscience. I wish I could summon the spirit of my dear grandfather so he could share with them his gifts of muffins and honesty.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: jimbo Albano