“One wonders if all this going ga-ga over Guo would indeed aid in crafting legislation”
This continuously unfolding saga over a small-town mayor in Tarlac, a lady named Alice Guo who was elected in 2022, has become a telenovela with new twists at every hearing, senators undoing each other with new “strip-tease” findings.
One wonders if all this going ga-ga over Guo would indeed aid in crafting legislation.
The laws on citizenship are clear. If violations are found out, our senators could just direct the Philippine Statistics Authority, the Bureau of Immigration, and even the National Bureau of Investigation, to conduct the needed investigation, and ferret out the truth.
Why the need to extend the telenovela over Guo, much like Ang Probinsyano which mercifully ended after four or five years of running with every new episode intended to prolong the raking in of advertising sponsorships, is beyond me.
If the issue is about the proliferation of POGOs, which started in Cagayan, via a special law authored by the current presidential legal counsel giving ample authority over a special economic zone called CEZA at the tip of Luzon to operate online gaming beyond its territorial metes and bounds, then by all means, ban them all.
Even the government of China, whose citizens are the main market of the POGOs has asked us to stop these operations which they claim to be illegal under their laws, and upon which a lot of clandestine monies have been funneled, er, laundered.
Let PAGCOR and the Anti-Money Laundering Council and the Bangko Sentral do the work then, instead of going ga-ga over Guo, and unleashing a Sinophobia with all its aberrant effects, along with Ludlumesque espionage insinuations.
We have been co-existing with Chinese through centuries, even before Ferdinand Magellan came to our shores, and many of us have co-mingled Malay, Chinese, even Caucasian blood running through our veins.
All of a sudden, because of conflicts in the interpretation of international law, the usual interference of the powerful US of A taking advantage of our military weakness side-by-side with our colonial mentality, the bullying by Chinese militia vessels and their Coast Guard after we agreed to additional EDCA sites aimed at Taiwan, we have started looking at China and the Chinese as enemies.
And now this enmity is highlighted by the curious but irrelevant Senate investigation into one Chinay called Guo, with both traditional and social media all het up over her.
Curious too that a Chinoy, whose parents are probably infused with 100 percent Chinese blood while sporting a Pinoy surname, is at the ramparts of the stripping of Guo’s bona-fides.
Our political leadership through the years has been enriched by Chinese ancestral roots.
From Laguna’s Jose Rizal, to Cavite’s Emilio Aguinaldo, Cebu’s Sergio Osmena Sr., Ilocanos Elpidio Quirino and Ferdinand Marcos Sr., to Corazon Aquino and her son Noynoy, even Rodrigo Duterte, all trace lineage to ancestors from the land Marco Polo called Cathay.
Even now, several dynasties mimicking perhaps the history of their forebears, lord it over from North to South, West to East of our archipelago. An enumeration of these Chinoy political families will take an entire column space.
Suffice it to mention here family names like Lacson (Belated Happy Birthday, Senator Ping!), Locsin, Cojuangco, Yap, Dy, Tan, Uy, and many others who have become political leaders in country and countryside.
And who are the shapers of our economy, whose manufactures and malls, even food every Filipino patronizes these days?
Many of these taipans built their empires from their first generation who started as lowly merchants selling everything from siopao to siok-tong, beer to fried chicken, junk food chips to instant noodles, to almost everything under the sun.
Now they are into banking, real estate, high-rise housing, and the biggest fast food purveyors in the country.
Our wholesale markets, whether Divisoria in Manila or Carbon in Cebu or Uyanguren in Davao have been “suki” of generations of retailers for everything from housewares to food.
I know nothing about Alice Guo, and couldn’t care less about Bamban in Tarlac which we no longer pass on our way to the capital of the province or places farther north.
If their POGO operators have committed violations of law and even crimes, then shut them down for all this non-gambler cares.
I just do not know how this Alice Guo can be deported to China, if her bona-fides are a Filipino passport and none other, and a birth certificate issued by our official census registry, and none other.
Meanwhile, stop the Senate telenovela. Nakaka-umay na po.
We are becoming the laughing stock of the world, and for the ordinary Filipino wondering about the ways and means to buy uber-expensive rice and ulam, “malayo sa bituka ‘yan.”
