Immersion

Over at Plurk there’s been an interesting discussion among my friends on this recently published piece by a Xavier High School student. In the essay, he talks about his experience immersing himself in the life of an SM grocery bagger. I thought I’d put in my two cents on the issue here.

First, let me get this out of the way: the immersion was a positive thing and a useful experience for those who took part in it. And, if you still don’t agree with that, at least accept that it was well intentioned.

The essay is littered with all sorts of descriptions of the life of a temporary SM bagger. The author talks about being scolded by customers, “slicing the chicken for hours and hours,” and learning about the lives of the baggers he and his friends worked with. It’s a very colorful account, and you can almost hear the wonder in his voice and see the shimmer in his eyes when you read his description of the four days he spent in SM Marikina. I guess that tone of seeming naiveté is what’s drawing most of the Internet mockery and disdain.

But for all its descriptions of the “what”s of the story—what he saw, what he felt, what the stories of his ate and kuya baggers were—very seldom did he ever ask why. The question is beginning to be asked in certain passages, such as this:

It wasn’t by choice that these employees were here at SM working as baggers, cashiers and merchandisers. It was out of necessity that they had to apply for these jobs.

But most of the article talked about “what it’s like to be on the other side of the fence” and about how the immersion taught the author to “appreciate [his] blessings,” rather than probe into the deeper narratives that run beneath all these observations.

There is nothing wrong about these musings, of course. These guys are certainly entitled, more so than anyone, to their own observations about their own experiences—observations that they make from their own standpoint and framework. The reflections we read in the essay aren’t naive at all. They are the perfectly valid and rational inferences reached by a young man from his experience. But immersions are supposed to be just that—opportunities for people to immerse themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. They aren’t supposed to be reduced to spectacle, to mere souvenir photographs, truisms, and reflection essays.  

This brings me to what I hope these Xavier High School students, who aren’t much younger than I, will realize when they look back on their experience years from now.

First, I hope they’ll understand more deeply the divide between them and the SM baggers. Even if they stood side by side at the SM checkout counter for one school week, their experiences are still starkly different. They chose to immerse themselves in the lives of grocery staff; the SM staff, as the author already pointed out in his essay, are there out of necessity. They cannot choose not to be there.

From that, I hope a second realization will follow: the divide between the Xavier seniors and the SM staff is not a divide at all. The things that will explain why they were born into wealth are also the same things that will explain why the SM baggers they chatted up had to move to Manila to take her chances. There is no fence whose “other side” they explored for four days. The Xavier kids and the SM baggers are all connected by the thread of history: the history that we share, that shapes us, and that we are poised to shape.

Thankfully for these Xavier seniors, they have full, privileged lives ahead during which there will be many opportunities to have all these realizations and more.