Written in front: The slums can be said to be the areas where all the metropolises of the world actually exist. Some people say that slums are hells, carrying the anger of the poor, injustice to reality, and a cage of darkness; Others say that slums are poor but have never lost hope. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, few people in the Chinese media have visited this once-rumored slum where half the population feeds on PAPAGag, a type of food waste, and many people seem to have an impression of the place 10 years ago. "Don't forget that there are many people in the world" In the first year after the end of the epidemic control in the Philippines in 2022, I decided to go to Tondo to have a look.
Hello everyone, I'm Aufheben who has walked all over the Brangay 114 Tangdu district. In fact, for Tondo, you will see a lot of films carefully edited by bloggers for Bo Eyeballs on YouTube and Douyin Search, which will focus on squatter, the "occupying house" on the banks of the dirty river, and then tell you how poor, dirty and broken this place is from a "real" perspective. Most of the people who have lived in Manila for a long time are very familiar with the Tangdu district but have never been there. In fact, I am also curious about how the poorest and most densely populated slum in Manila has been living in the past two years. So today, follow Aufheben into Tangdu, a place full of prejudice and misunderstanding in the outside world. In fact, many Chinese self-media lack a certain degree of humanistic care, which is also my original intention of doing the Philippine full perspective, if you like my article, do not forget to subscribe to the Philippine full perspective, like + watch, wonderful naturally come.
Catholic Church of the Holy Child in Tongdu – an incredible funeral
The death of Socrates is the most prestigious allusion in ancient Greek philosophy; The death of Jesus Christ also changed the course of the spiritual life of the Jews and the entire human society; In traditional Chinese culture, Confucius's gaze on death expresses the feeling of "unknown life, death of Yan". Death has always been the subject of eternal reflection in human thought and philosophy. We are all fighting for the living life, when you really witness people's attitudes towards death, you will really feel a little strange, in fact, human sorrow and joy can be connected, and the living standards, status and your attitude when facing death makes you really feel a little shocked.
Tangdu Holy Child Church, in the very center of Tangdu District, entered the church on Sunday, I thought it was a "Sunday Mass", but I did not expect that everyone was dressed in white, and when the singing was finished, I stepped forward and found that it was a mass funeral mass that gathered 6-7 deceased people from the local community.
Relatives and friends slowly circled the coffin in the solemn poetry of the church, but few people shed tears, and they were more in remembrance of their deceased relatives. Quite simply, it's a Catholic country, and everyone will believe that they and their loved ones will eventually meet at some point in history or at the end of the world, at the end of time. The end of the world of the deceased simply means that they have drifted to the other side of the world, where the most ordinary and ordinary Filipinos believe that they will throw away all the poverty and suffering in this world and put on the gorgeous clothes that belong to their faith in "God". As the Scripture says, "The night is deep, and the day is near; Let us shed our dark deeds and bring the weapons of light."
The People of Tongdu may spend their entire lives in poverty and confusion, but from their feelings and eyes I seem to have tasted a touch of the most different emotion from the ordinary people in the slums of Dhaka in India and Bangladesh. They do not face the pity of death, and there is still hope in their eyes.
The most interesting thing is that the coffin is slowly closed and sent into the funeral vehicle, and the result is no mourning, but the "African coffin dance" at the entrance of the church is close to the festive atmosphere. This is too visual to have the visual sense of "drumming and singing" when Zhuangzi's wife died. When Zhuangzi's wife passed away, he was happy, because he understood that life and death must be "between the heavens and the earth of life, if the gap between the white colt is sudden." The most ordinary poor people in Tangdu have similar emotions to Zhuangzi in their poor and lowly lives, how can they not be moved?
A slum outside of urban legends – the real Yudu
Many Chinese familiar with Manila, even chinese descendants, will say when they mention Tangdu District that this place is extremely chaotic, terrible, and criminal, as if it were a barren place. If you search for The Tangdu District in a search engine, most articles will cite decades-old stories about the poor people in Tangdu eating food waste, PAGPAG. Manila's most densely populated area is as scary as an urban legend.
What does the real soup look like? In fact, it is almost the same as the community Ofngay in other areas of Manila, which has a very lively atmosphere and is very rich in fireworks. Follow the church deep into the banks of the canal and the port
In slums, you can still see many traces of "squatters". Tin houses, dilapidated cables. But the children in the slums are always smiling, and because they rarely see foreigners, they always talk to you warmly and invite you to eat their new food, such as coconut cake.
The alleys are full of vendors of all kinds of street food. Since the outbreak, the local government has built many community basketball courts for slums. On Sundays in Yudo, the community's activity center becomes a place where Tangdu residents gather to dance and sing karaoke. The enthusiasm of Filipinos for singing will not be extinguished by any external economic conditions. Even in the poorest parts of Manila, there are still songs and swallows everywhere, and it is uncomfortable.
Basketball is a favorite sport among Filipinos, and young children play in community basketball hoops on the street. And some adults sit around on the road and play chess; Others play a simple version of billiards; The Internet and computers are also beginning to spread in Tangdu, and young people are sitting around in front of n-hand computers from an unknown country to play "Counter-Strike" - an old game from 20 years ago. I was very curious about the internet fee, the owner told me that 1 peso for 6 minutes, 10 pesos for an hour (equivalent to 0.17 US dollars). I asked the boss why he could still play for 6 minutes, and the boss just smiled and said that 6 minutes can just play a game. The children are happy in the soup, at least you can witness the hopes of this country and the sadness of the past from their eyes and vitality. Nowadays, few people eat such things as kitchen waste, and you can see street vendors selling street food everywhere on the street.
I often discuss with my friends how Tang Du survived the epidemic. Because the impression is that it is so poor, the most difficult lockdown years, the days without work may be difficult to survive no matter what. But a field trip in 2022 proved me wrong. During the epidemic in the community, the local government built a large number of public facilities, many new buildings replaced the old tin houses in the community, and more and more families were electrified. It seems that life and everything are getting better, perhaps in itself like the story of the Philippines as a country.
The closer you get to the depths of the canal, the closer you can see the old tin houses that are close to the films you see when you search for soups. There are many people on the street who raise fighting cocks, and many poor Filipinos also have the illusion of getting rich overnight. Can't afford lottery tickets, but their cockfighting is often neat and clean, and they are cool and heroic. Every cockfighter is eager for their chickens to make a fortune in their next duel.
On the banks of the canal – the most famous soup capital
In fact, the most famous of all Tangdu's films is the occupied house area by the canal. Thousands of immigrants come to Manila with honor and dreams, where they want to make a career. However, contrary to their wishes, with the Philippine economy turning over in the 1980s and 1990s, this group of uprooted people left the tranquility of their hometowns to enter the big cities, but could not find a job. They have no housing and no ability to earn a living, and many of them do not even speak Filipino or English (Filipino is in fact only one of the main languages of Luzon). Desperate people built the famous Zhan House on the banks of the Tangdu Canal with container tin from a nearby port. As the name suggests, occupied houses are houses without land titles, these illegal buildings are not recognized by the government, and people on the banks of the seaside canal are still "illegally living" here today. But the Philippine government can't do anything about them, can't they always expel the "low-end population"? As a result, the residents of Hu zhanya were stationed here for a long time.
This is the "Outer Land" outside of the Brangay 114zone 6-8 area. But unlike the canal you see in the film, there is no stench or a large area of garbage floating on the canal. The construction of the occupied house is still continuing. Walk along the canal, where local residents greet you and smile. Tang Du is so terrible, and the terrible thing is always people's "natural prejudice" against poverty and backwardness.
In fact, the local people told me that the government is also vigorously rectifying the pollution of the canal, and the local government also understands that this group of people cannot be driven away, and it is impossible to forcibly demolish them, so it is better to improve their living environment. Perhaps this is a different kind of "residential justice" that belongs to the slums of Manila.
In fact, Tang Du is no longer the Tang Du in the film and article. In Manila, how can you go to the soup once? In Tangdu, there is also the most broken "SM" mall in the Philippines - SM DECA. There are no more than 10 shops in the mall, and most of the vacant shops cannot be rented. There are cheap household appliances for sale in the lobby. Surrounded by large residential areas formed by slum transformation and relocation, it is very similar to the world-famous dense residential area of Guiyang, Guizhou, China, the Flower and Fruit Garden, which is very cyberpunk. In fact, there is no shortage of urban villages in large cities around the world, and slums and urban villages are not the shame of the city, on the contrary, you can taste whether the future of the whole country exists from their lives and changes. The eyes of the poor teenager are full of the vision of this country.
In fact, the horrific description of the poor and poverty stems largely from our fear of poverty itself. In fact, you can already see the changes in the rapid popularization of electric vehicles, cars, newly built buildings, community basketball courts, unknown N-hand Internet cafes, yingge and swallow dance weekends, and all the new things that have landed in Tangdu. The water in the canal has long since ceased to flow through the sewage, and the living environment of the occupied houses is rapidly improving.
Slums are not scars of cities, and how we look at slums also means how we see the future of cities. The temperature of the slums also symbolizes whether the whole country can get out of the "bear market" and run to the "bull market", and it is also the humanistic care and temperature of the country itself. Everything is changing subtly and shockingly in 2022.