Monkey see, monkey didn’t

Close to 20 years ago, while I was in graduate school, I spent Thanksgiving weekend with the family of one of my closest friends. They had also invited a Chinese student who hailed from the mainland.

“He’s excited to meet you,” my friend said. “He said you’d know how to speak his language.”

“What? No!” I nearly choked on my coffee.

“But he says that’s what they teach everyone in China,” my friend replied, surprised, “that all Filipinos speak Chinese.”

When we finally met, the guy apologized. He said he had been taught from childhood that the Philippines was just like China, down to Mandarin fluency. Later, he struggled with conversation: he was knowledgeable, but he just didn’t seem curious about other people’s lives—only whether people’s stories confirmed what he had been taught.

I remembered the incident last week, when the internet exploded with an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated video uploaded by Chinese propagandists.

The video shows a monkey dressed in barong Tagalog and salakot. The creature, confused and shaking, is cast by the hefty fists of world powers onto a karaoke stage in the middle of the ocean. The world powers command the monkey to sing. It does, echoing Chinese propaganda.

The world powers slap a piece of paper onto the monkey and make it sing again, this time with the arbitral ruling as its songbook. The monkey still doesn’t comply, which exasperates the world leaders.

They throw the monkey out. It gets water-cannoned into the sea, still clutching the arbitral ruling. A whale sees it, and asks the monkey to do its part in not adding to the ocean’s garbage.

The Department of Foreign Affairs, and many internet users, called the video dehumanizing and racist.

In every twist of the video, the Philippines is depicted as being out of its depth. It wants to sing China’s tune while being forced to do otherwise by world powers. It is tossed out by world powers only to be abused by a Chinese water cannon.

Dehumanizing indeed; infantilizing, to be even more specific, as though we are a mere mouthpiece, have no mind of our own, have always been pro-China but forced into reciting empty words.

The video is reductive as well. The piece of paper is not trash: it is an actual legal ruling and not even a mere sheet! It is something we fought for ourselves because we recognized injustice in how China overtook our territories, treated our fisherfolk, and damaged our coral reefs.

We spoke out as a country because artificial islands were popping up where the sea should be, Chinese coast guard personnel and militia were prowling where Filipino fisherfolk were trying to earn their livelihood, and rubble and debris had taken the place of a once-blooming ecosystem.

If ever we were monkeys, then we were the sort that consciously defended our herd because we recognized danger. We were the species that mourned lost lives and livelihoods, then fashioned legal tools to speak on their behalf.

We were the breed of monkey that made a cry so loud and precise, we were heard by an international tribunal and judged rightly.

We are not the comic book monkey that imitates. We are not mere monkey figurines with empty eyes littering random bookshelves. We are not some mythical monkey king that has to be imprisoned and chastised for its mischief.

Those kinds of monkeys are mere caricatures—then again, what can we expect from propaganda, which is only good for reducing humans to stereotypes at the service of evil and lies?

What can we expect from a system that teaches people to see us as mere extensions of their country, mere reflections of their culture, mere echoes mouthing their language?

What can we expect from a system that teaches people to judge and compartmentalize before asking questions?

To the outcry, I add that the video is a distraction. We are being forced to focus so hard on the racism of the monkey image, rather than on the cheap ploys used in an absurd storyline.

We lose sight of the fact that we have been rendered as caricatures with neither agency nor thought, and our legal victory portrayed as mere paper destined for disposal.

The insult wasn’t in the stereotype alone. It’s in how a country, which boasts so much and so often about the power of its economy and the richness of its culture, decided to pick on another country using nothing but a few buttons and an overused stereotype that’s more tiring than enraging.

It’s in how that same country deploys silly tools in a legal arena where we exerted actual effort to demonstrate our sovereignty.

It’s in how childishness is allowed to be in the same room as adults holding truth and justice in their hands.

And it’s in being discredited using a deplorable piece of wannabe art with the pathetic label of “made in China.”

After speaking with our own voice, shouldn’t we have been entitled to some originality?

Try harder, China. Bullying the world to fit your narrative is so 20 years ago.

And to paraphrase your talking whale: let’s all do our part to keep our world free of your AI garbage.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu

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