Monster’s work

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Finally, I got to watch the docu “Kano: An American and His Harem”, and it has left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the film affirms the power of documentary cinema to tell the truth about the human condition. On the other, one weeps for our country and our people because after all is said and done, the documentary boils down to one story: our institutions and values have broken down in the face of abject poverty.

You can only ask “why?” and you keep asking it in the face of this incredulous story that you cannot deny has happened, and perhaps continues to happen to us and our womenfolk. Why, indeed, can women accept their roles in this true story? Why does it seem so easy for these women to accept these? More painfully: Why couldn’t we give them other options?

Handled with prudence and plenty of maturity, “Kano…” directed by Monster Jimenez, is the story of Victor Pearson and his women down south in Negros Occidental, an American and his harem amid bamboo and coconut trees and rice fields.

Instead of passing judgment on the characters of this story, which was initially broken in the local media as a staggering 100-count rape case, Jimenez  tries to cast them in a sympathetic light, trying, no doubt, to help explain how something like this could happen in a country so rich with natural resources.

But nothing and no one can fully explain, much less justify, how sisters  and cousins can become mistresses of one man, how one man can have five to six women everyday, and how what, 20? 30? 50? women can come in and out of this American’s life, knowing they are all mistresses.

“That’s how it is here,” one of them said in the docu, “you work here as a mistress like everybody else.”

“Mga asawa kami di tanan ni Kano. Sport lang…We’re all wives of Kano here…but it’s all right,” one of the women said as she explained the sex life in the place. “Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s her. Yes, we also tried doing it together.”

Pearson is a Vietnam war veteran, as much a victim of his government’s foreign policy as the Congs. Vietnam changed him, his sister says in the film, “he could not quite come back.” It’s just too bad he strayed into the Philippines and eventually, Negros.

Instead of going back to America, he went to Subic where, on very first day, he narrated, he went straight ahead and looked for a wife. “By 4 or 5 p.m. of that day,” he relates, “2 or 3 people said yes to me.” Two years later, he married a Negrense, leading him to settle in the south of the province where he bought a piece of land and built his harem. There, he held a party every week and women came freely in and out of his lair. Why he commanded such position in his community, the film has a quiet explanation, told in graphics, without sound: Most people in this place earn $250 a month; Pearson earns $3,500.

Perhaps, because she was conscious this was a sensational story by itself, Jimenez grips it tightly and allows the characters to tell their stories straight, sans any embellishment. The result is a raw, gripping movie so full of humanity that hits the heart and the mind at once. One feels anger at the helplessness of the human beings in this drama, but it is an anger that is useless because there is really no single character here who is to blame, not even Pearson, but the whole system that let them into situations they had no control of. Indeed, if there is anything to blame, it is the system and if any righteous anger be raised, it must be against it. Then perhaps, we can all start resolving to change that system.*

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