I've been working on my book. Here's an excerpt.

Riding on the Waves of Life, I Watched a Thai Crown Princess and a Con-Heartist Sing a Yeng Constantino Classic

The humble pap smear is the workhorse of any pathology practice. Invented in the 1920s by Georgios Papanicolau and improved over the following decades, it has been used to screen certain types of cancer, especially cervical cancer. And if my colleagues are to be believed, it is the one part of specialty practice that many pathologists dislike. Why? Pap smears, especially ones that are conventionally prepared, take a lot of time to examine. Depending on the experience and skill of the reader, a typical pap smear can take anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour to interpret. One would typically receive around ten of these, even more. And the payoff? Before rates were standardized, it was not uncommon for the professional fee of one smear to cost around 50 pesos, and I’ve heard unsubstantiated horror stories from colleagues that pegged the price even lower. It’s a lot of effort for very little renumeration. But each slide is a patient waiting for a result, and the work has to be done. For people just starting out their practice, procedures like pap smears are their lifeblood. In fact, some of that sweet, sweet cervical money helped finance this book.

As a fresh diplomate, reading pap smears was one of my first jobs. One of my most prominent pap smear gigs at the time was in a clinic in Makati, where I went to the lab in the late afternoon or night twice or thrice a week and interpreted smears. Reading pap smears is a very boring activity, so one tends to listen to podcasts or watch something to distract from the drudgery, but not divert one’s attention too much as to affect the work. Luckily, outside our little lab was a TV that had either GMA or GMA News TV on. During work, or while waiting for the slides to be processed, I’d go outside and watch a few shows or just listen in from the inside.

It was then that I started to watch a Thai drama called Waves of Life. Based on a 1982 novel of the same name, the show is the third adaptation of the source material, with adaptations reaching as far back as 1983. The premise is as follows: a popular albeit misunderstood actress accidentally runs over a woman while driving a car. In previous adaptations, this is due to substance abuse; this latest drama attributes the crash to something more sinister. The poor woman dies and leaves behind her fiancée, who swears revenge on the person who killed the love of his life. But revenge isn’t as simple as it seems.

Waves of Life, and other Thai TV programs like it, are what is collectively called lakorn (which is just the Thai way of saying ‘TV drama’.) Lakorn have existed ever since the beginning of Thai television; the first lakorn aired in 1956, just two months after the establishment of the first Thai television station.

Unlike their Filipino counterpart the teleserye, which usually lasts for half a year to a year’s worth of half hour/hour-long episodes, a lakorn usually spans around 15 feature length episodes over the course of a couple of months, in structure more closely resembling a K-drama.

What attracted a lot of Filipinos to Waves of Life is of course its central couple: Mark Prin Suparat, who played Sathit, the fiancée of the dead woman, and Yaya Urassaya Sperbund, who played the misunderstood and kind-hearted Jeerawat. Both have extensive careers in TV, however both have only a handful of movie credits to their name. Filipino fans treated them as they would treat any local love team, and their popularity only grew from here.

Waves of Life is strengthened by great performances not only from its central cast, but also its supporting cast members. That said, the show is not perfect by any means: it’s limited by its television budget and the show is full of filler moments. For example, in one scene, our main character Jeerawat gets into a tickle fight with her friend Dao (Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich) because the latter wanted the former to try a foot bath she bought for her.

Regardless, almost as naturally as breathing, I became a fan of the show. When I wrote a novel in 2018, a sprawling, meandering work of sentimental pap, I based some of the characters on the people and actors from Waves of Life, thinking that in the extremely unlikely event that my novel would get adapted, I would cast them in those roles. It is entirely irrational, but this is how a fan is created, I guess.  

Waves of Life would be followed up with The Crown Princess, which paired Urassaya Sperbund with her main onscreen and real-life romantic partner Nadech Kugimiya. Sperbund plays Alice, the titular princess of a small country called Hyross, who runs afoul of potential assassins on the day of her coronation. She is whisked away to Thailand, where she meets Davin (Kugimiya), the hunky Navy commander assigned to be her bodyguard. The show, while more action packed and less romance oriented than its predecessor, proved to be even more popular than Waves of Life. At the time, of course, I had no idea how popular these two were in the Philippines; I remembered that on the same year local cinemas screened Brother of the Year, a fine yet ultimately forgettable romp starring Yaya and Sunny Suwanmethanont. Sunny visited the Philippines earlier that same year to a rather tepid response, so when it was announced that Yaya would visit next later that year, I expected the same kind of response and went, expecting a small crowd.

What happened instead taught me a valuable lesson: never underestimate the fervor of a local fandom. I arrived in what I thought would be a reasonable timeframe – two hours before the scheduled start of the program. When I arrived, the line for the show reached all the way from one end of Ayala Malls Circuit to the other – approximately 300-500 people long. People had been lining up since 7am – long before the mall opening. The place was absolutely packed. People had made streamers, posters and fans with Yaya’s face on them. There were actual regional chapters of her Philippine fan club on there! Regional chapters!!

I think no one was more surprised that day than Yaya when she finally arrived at the stage. Neither she nor I expected a crowd this huge. After the day’s proceedings she promised she would return again, and told all of us that she had a couple of lakorn on the pipeline. 

Four years later, she would make good on that promise, returning to the Philippines with Nadech in a paid event at the New Frontier Theater. I was still a fan, and four years after that fateful day many things had happened in the interim. Nadech recently starred in The Con-Heartist (2020), a caper comedy co-starring with Baifern Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul (herself a well-known Thai star in the Philippines, thanks to her breakout hit Crazy Little Thing Called Love (2010)). Yaya had roles in a handful of series here and there, but also starred in what is probably her best movie to date: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Fast & Feel Love (2022). In it, she plays Jay, a woman with no dreams of her own who devotes her life to support Kao (Nat Kitcharit), a professional speed stacker in his 30s. Jay’s been a fan by choice for most of her adult life when she suddenly realizes she wants something else, and departs. 

It’s kinda strange how reality and fiction intersect, doesn’t it?

I went to Araneta alone. The news outlets talked about how the president’s approval rating as still pretty decent, even though our economy was tanking and the prices of goods were soaring. I joined a bunch of people inside the theater, having paid for the ticket with an option for a meet and greet - one paid for by honest to goodness pap smear money. I had brought along a copy of my book – the book partly inspired by those lazy nights reading pap smears and seeing the two of them – and gave them to the staff, with them promising to send over my gift to the duo.

Despite the tickets in the higher tiers being relatively pricey, a substantial amount of people sat in the premium seats. This was the first time I was in the company of people who understood my interest in this couple, and I totally get the sense of community that we got from our communal appreciation of these two actors. A few years before we talked with various members of local fandoms – Noranians, Vilmanians, Sharonians – as part of an episode of our podcast Third World Cinema Club that never materialized. What was evident in those interviews was the passion and commitment these people had to be able to pay tribute to their idols. My two seatmates were a pair of bank workers in their forties or fifties who came all the way from Mindanao. They’d gone off work earlier that day, gone on a plane all the way to Manila, and planned to come back the next day in order to rest for Monday’s work. One of them even had custom bags made with Nadech and Yaya’s picture on it. She took out a pentel pen and showed it to me, telling me that she intended to have the bag signed.

“To tell you the truth,” one told me conspiratorially, “I’m a fan of just Yaya. I prefer her paired with Mark (Prin, her Waves of Life co-star.)”

Contemporary fandom is, by nature, closely intertwined with human history. As social animals, humans tend to group together and form ‘tribes.’ It’s an evolutionary advantage; being social gives us access to support and resources and helps us survive. Many etymologies of the word “fan” have been proposed over the years but my personal favorite is the proposed origin from the word “fanum” or shrine, its devotees afflicted with an insatiable frenzy. Performers and managers who recognize this human desire to idolize construct a public self that they present to fans and audiences – a confluence of meticulously crafted outward facades with a tinge of one’s private life that, when done correctly, is irresistibly addicting because it feels just real enough. Creators and artists also cultivate a relation with fans, where the distance between someone and their fan gets particularly close, perhaps too close for comfort. This is done via various fan events that are often very interactive and personal. (Fan events like the one at the center of this essay.) Often, parasocial relationships are created here, in good and bad ways.

This phenomenon has existed for many years, perhaps as long as performances and performers have existed – and the phenomenon takes many different forms worldwide. The British engage in what is essentially state-sponsored idolatry in the form of the royal family, where politically powerless figureheads on the British taxpayer’s payroll have their lives scrutinized and observed in great detail by the media.

We have already partially discussed how Filipinos engage in fandom, but now let us talk about how we engage in our creation of love teams – basically, our version of shipping (in fanfiction parlance, rooting for two people to get together romantically).  However, these relationships, regardless of whether they are real or not, are crafted by movie and television studios in order to make bank on whatever productions will star the couple. The most extreme version of this is Aldub, the pairing of Maine “Yaya Dub” Mendoza and Alden Richards that stemmed from an organic moment on the daily noontime program Eat Bulaga. The showrunners of Eat Bulaga recognized the potential of this moment and paired the two: in subsequent episodes of the series, Eat Bulaga’s Kalyeserye would depict the two courting each other and getting into a relationship, even going as far as to show an actual (fake) wedding. Years after the two have moved on, with one (Mendoza) engaged to someone else as of this writing, there is still a small but significant portion of the fanbase that still roots for the original love team, spreading QAnon-like conspiracy theories that Richards and Mendoza are actually secretly married with a hidden child. The line between admiration and obsession is very thin.

In India, movie stars (especially action stars) are revered and idolized, sometimes in extreme ways. Rinku Kalsy’s For the Love of a Man (2015) is a documentary about the fans of movie actor Rajinikanth, whose larger than life persona reminds one of our own obsession with Fernando Poe Jr., only on steroids. In one scene of For the Love of a Man, a peanut seller mortgages his wife’s jewelry (worth around 40,000 Philippine Pesos) for a fan event he is helping to organize with utmost conviction in his eyes. You know that if he had the chance, he would do it again. In the eyes of some of these fans, Rajinikanth is a God.

Perhaps no society has taken full advantage of the fan’s relationship with their chosen idol than the Japanese. A prototypical example is Yasushi Akimoto’s AKB48 and its many sister groups. Formed in a small theater at the top of a Don Quixote in 2005, Akimoto conceptualized AKB48 as an idol group whose idols you can meet. But the circumstances of those meetings are heavily controlled by management: tickets are a very limited resource and are given out in a lottery system (believe me, I’ve tried.) Picture taking is prohibited, and pictures of your preferred idol are usually only sold in the theater or through third party sellers. Commoditizing human interactions is probably the unholiest of unions between capitalism and human nature. Idols are presented to the public as pure and virginal ideals for fans to worship, even though the real person behind the façade is less than ideal. Satoshi Kon recognized this quite presciently in his opus Perfect Blue (1997), way before social media evolved into its present form. When the pure façade is cracked, fans often lash out in violent ways. Some idol groups have an unspoken “no dating” rule, and idols who have that rule broken have some fans that make a show of destroying their merchandise. For the poor idols who dared to have a relationship, some are suspended, some leave the group voluntarily, and some respond in extreme ways: Minami Minegishi shaved her head and publicly apologized after having been pictured coming out of her boyfriend’s apartment – an innocuous act for the rest of us, but a cardinal sin in the world of idols.

The social capital artists gain from these interactions are prone to exploitation as well. Some people have leveraged their popularity as actors and actresses into political careers, an act that is not exclusive to the Philippines but one that has made a significant impact on our society.

Here in the New Frontier Theater, however, most of the interactions are good natured. Nadech and Yaya finally came out, and a continuous, rapturous wave of screaming commenced. Members from the VIP section started flocking to the empty seats of the VVIP section, to the exasperation of security and ushers. The security people tried to direct them back to their seats, but it was no use. The people in the VVIP section let their fellow fans join them, and the hierarchies separating us broke down.

Yaya and Nadech each have a song number of their own, then they go on to answer fan questions. This is where the interactivity reaches its peak, and the duo feels comfy with the audience. Of course, there aren’t a lot of weird questions (i.e. when are you getting married?) because the two of them choose the questions from a board. Nadech says that he wants to visit other places in Manila, and for leisure instead of for work. Someone in the back loudly suggests that Nadech visit their house, which was met by laughter. Of course, Nadech wouldn’t really visit that fan’s house, but perhaps the point is that the fan knows that he knows that the fan wants him there. 

Yaya and Nadech ended their song numbers. The next segment was a punishment game, a Dating Game-style affair where one would ask questions to the other, and see if their answers lined up. If the answers didn’t match, the loser would pick a punishment to perform. The “punishments” aren’t really punishments: expect no Fear Factor style centipede eating here (though the audience did tell the duo about Balut). Most of the punishments were innocuous, like eating polvoron or Chickenjoy (the audience loved that), or singing a few lines from their favorite songs. We all had a good laugh when Nadech kept drawing the sexy dance punishment.

For the final act, Yaya and Nadech came out in traditional Filipino attire: a Terno and a Barong Tagalog, respectively. As a surprise treat for their fans, they sang Yeng Constantino’s hit song Ikaw. This, despite them knowing only a few words of Tagalog.

At that moment, I considered the thoughtfulness of this performance. When I came here, I thought, why did they come here in the first place? They could have totally stayed in Thailand and did their thing there; a lot of their Filipino fans would have gladly made their way there instead. An actor or actress’ free time is very limited and precious, yet they went here and performed for us, even though the pay would probably not be worth the trouble. Their performance wasn’t perfunctory, either: there was genuine effort in what they did today. 

For a moment, I thought fans were the pap smears of an artist’s work: numerous, endless, and exhausting work almost not worth the cost. But for most people who perform, for most artists… indeed, for most professionals, they understand that art has to be seen and experienced, and fans are the conduit through which the art transforms from a lone action into something deeply shared between art and observer. Much like there are patients waiting for their results, fans exist to be able to view the work, and the work has to be done.

I do not know if my books reached Nadech or Yaya, or if they’re stored in a box somewhere far from their minimalist homes, or if the staff neglected to give them the books in the first place and just chucked them in a bin. As a writer, it is my utmost desire for my works (as any writer would) to be read and not just sit idly in a shelf, gathering dust. There’s an argument to be made about art should be created for art’s sake, and there is truth to that, but without readers I would be stuck in my own world, and without fans and supporters, an artist performs alone, in the dark.

After the program ended, I lined up with the rest of the people who opted for a photo-op, where we would go in groups of ten. My seatmate from earlier took out her homemade bags and prepared to have them signed, but a security guy stopped her, saying that it wasn’t allowed. He was about to take away her pentel pens, but she offered to put them back in her bag. She looked disappointed at the fact and sheepishly walked forward in the line.

It was finally my turn and we went up to the stage to “hi-touch” the two – hi-touch being a fancy K-pop term for a high five. I had planned to say something to the both of them but was tongue tied when I faced Yaya, even though I was, echoing the words of that person from The Dark Knight Rises, a pretty big guy. I only managed to blurt out a thank you before she curtly moved on to the next person.

I then approached Nadech and said the same thank you, but this time, I mustered the courage to say a few more things.

“I brought you guys something. A book,” I said.

Nadech seemed interested at what I said. He began to tell me to give the gifts to his agent, pointing to the side of the stage. I was about to explain that I actually gave them to the staff, but the security people noticed and started interrupting me, saying that giving anything right now wasn’t allowed (even though the item wasn’t with me). I figured that the security people weren’t looking for an explanation and it wasn’t a good look to be dragged out there, so I relented. I said my goodbyes and after taking the photo, our group was ushered into a side corridor into what we all thought was an anteroom, perhaps for an additional meeting. As the first of our group, I opened the two doors at the end of the corridor. It turns out that it was the exit – and we all found ourselves unceremoniously dumped on the street where we all went our separate ways.

Throughout the performance, I had to remind myself over and over that, even though these two are good artists, and even though it looks like the two of them are the nicest of people, they are not our friends. They do have a relationship with us, but the distance between fan and idol will likely never go away. To shake away the illusion of intimacy in a relationship that is ultimately a parasocial one is difficult, but every fan owes it to their idol to remember this fact. Whether in art, or in religion, or in politics – the people we admire are just that: people, as flawed and as lovely and as glorious as you and me.

The first thing I did when I went home was to hang Nadech and Yaya’s signed poster on my cabinet, next to a poster of Roderick Lindayag’s Dito Lang Ako (2018). Sometimes, when I pass by the poster, I half-jokingly touch it like a devotee touching the Santo Nino while passing by the statue. Sometimes I ask myself, if Nadech and Yaya ever came back for another show, would I be there? 

I honestly think I would.