Lust and No Caution: Erap’s pardoned, but what about justice and repentance?

For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance. — Adlai E. Stevenson

 Was it boundless lust for power and survival, throwing caution to the winds? The recent much-publicized pardon of ex-President Joseph Estrada by his arch-nemesis President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was foremost in my mind as I recently watched a special preview of Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s 2007 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion Best Picture award-winner, the riveting and well-crafted erotic spy thriller Lust, Caution, at the Columbia Pictures Preview Room at Shangri-La Mall, Mandaluyong.

This intriguing Mandarin-language film set in World War II Japanese-occupied Shanghai is full of shifting intrigues, betrayals, lies, sly political machinations and conflicting layers of emotions not so different from the box office telenovela of our ongoing Philippine political zarzuela starring the perceived power usurper now granting executive clemency — allegedly “for national reconciliation” — to a controversial but popularly-elected ex-president. Both alleged usurper and toppled leader should win Best Actress and Best Actor awards for this unending high drama. Abangan ang susunod na kabanata (Wait for the next episodes)!

Ang Lee’s film is based on a novella by the late Chinese writer Eileen Chang. Hong Kong star Tony Leung masterfully plays a cold, calculating collaborator with the Japanese military regime as chief of the Shanghai secret police. He gets enmeshed in an illicit love affair with a young former theater actress and anti-Japanese spy played powerfully by new actress Tang Wei. The underground resistance movement, of which the spy is a member, plots to assassinate the hated collaborator to destabilize the Japanese regime. It is an artistic film of unforgettably searing emotions and unnerving sub-plots.

Mentioned throughout the film Lust, Caution but not depicted as a character was Wang Jing-Wei — in real life, a former charismatic young revolutionary and loyal disciple of the famous patriot Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. After Wang eventually lost a power struggle with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, he allowed himself to be used by the Japanese conquerors as president of their puppet regime. When Wang died, the Japanese overlords gave this collaborator an elaborate state funeral and had him buried in a grand mausoleum. After the war, Chinese nationalists branded him a “traitor to the Han Chinese,” blasted his mausoleum with tons of dynamite and burned his body.

I kept recalling this tragic saga of the once-respected and idealistic Wang Jingwei as I watched the twists and turns of Lust, Caution. I remembered when I was a student, interviewing then newly-appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee in his new office. He told me how his late father, Dr. Jose Tee Han Kee — co-founder of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1904, pre-war Manila’s biggest drugstore entrepreneur (whose young employee, Mariano Que, would someday found his own Mercury Drugstore) and pre-war Chinese General Hospital chief — was assassinated in broad daylight by local Chinese guerrillas in downtown Manila.

The elder Dr. Tee was a good man, a doctor to many of my late dad’s family members, and he was legendary as the chief Philippine supporter of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s 1911 republican revolution against the corrupt Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty. Dr. Tee was also founder of Manila’s revolutionary newspaper Kong Li Po, with its young editor Go Bien Un (immigrant great-grandfather of Philippine STAR CEO Miguel, editor-in-chief Isaac and philstar.com chief Kevin Go Belmonte). Both Dr. Sun and the idealistic Dr. Tee Han Kee went to the same medical school in Hong Kong. However, there was no forgiveness from the anti-Japanese local Chinese guerrillas when Dr. Tee sincerely tried to assuage the sufferings of the local Chinese community in the Philippines during the brutal Japanese military occupation, or when Dr. Tee agreed to serve as vice president of a Japanese-sponsored puppet Chinese association.

When Senator Richard Gordon was still Tourism Secretary, he once asked me to join his delegation touring China to promote tourism. He was shocked to hear me recount how, while our society and General Douglas MacArthur had allowed pro-Japanese collaborators of the Philippine power elite to be forgiven, local Chinese guerrillas had assassinated in cold blood more than 50 local Chinese community leaders who became collaborators with the Japanese conquerors of the Philippines. Like the honorable and courageous true hero Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos who sacrificed his life rather than allow himself to be used by the Japanese to legitimize their puppet regime, many local Chinese community leaders also opted for martyrdom or the sufferings of imprisonment in Fort Santiago rather than collaborate with the despicable conquerors.

For many years, it has been a nagging question for me — as a student of history — how we in the Philippines can honor the memory of the heroes Jose Abad Santos, former UP student leader and anti-Japanese guerrilla Wenceslao Vinzons and many other martyrs of the resistance, while so easily forgiving and even electing back to office in the postwar era many prominent collaborators with the Japanese in that dark era when more than a million Filipinos lost their lives.

I understand GMA’s unabashedly political and pragmatic decision to pardon Erap, which is obviously to shore up her sagging political fortunes in these uncertain times when even more lurid scandals beset her government. However, I am very disturbed by what I perceive to be an almost total disregard for the law of the land, as well as the higher moral law of the universe, which supposedly governs civilized societies. 

From the many land-holding or highly-educated ilustrado collaborators with the Spanish and American colonizers, through the “who’s who” of power holders and perfumed society members who conveniently collaborated with the Japanese conquerors, to sinners of the martial law-era Marcos regime and its alleged large-scale corruption — why do we keep reading about and hearing that over-abused word “forgiveness,” yet we have heard precious less about remembrance of history, justice, truth or the need for genuine repentance?

* * *

Thanks for all your messages. Comments/suggestions welcome at willsoonflourish@gmail.com or wilson_lee_flores@yahoo.com.