Manny Pacquiao article in SALON

[emankcin]

Finally, an Asian who packs a punch
Generations horrified by "The Hangover" and Long Duk Dong have an
unlikely hero in boxer Manny Pacquiao
Saturday, Nov 12, 2011 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Thea Lim

On a Saturday night in May 2009, I was alone in my apartment and
surprised when my Twitter feed exploded with updates of the same,
seemingly anachronistic event: a boxing match between Manny Pacquiao
and Ricky Hatton.

A publicist I knew in Toronto wrote: What would Manny P do? A hipster
friend in Texas tweeted: I wouldn’t trade places with Ricky Hatton’s
jaw for all the Maker’s in Williamsburg. Mariah Carey observed: Pon de
seats in the arena then This is really violent and then Woah. And then
perhaps most strangely, several feminist critics wrote: Tagalog
phrase: NANALO SI MANNY. English translation: MANNY WON.

Boxing is a disgusting sport, my mother always says. It’s all rich
people watching poor people punch each other to death. Boxers aren’t
poor, I say. Some get millions of dollars a match. But my mother is
insistent. Look at tennis, look at golf, she says. Those are rich
men’s sports; they don’t have to beat each other in the face. Yet for
some reason, everyone I knew, from a vast variety of ideological
backgrounds, had simultaneously fallen in love with a Filipino boxer
who turns a coarse sport new again. On Saturday night, Pacquiao fights
for the first time since May, in a hotly anticipated pay-per-view bout
against Juan Manuel Marquez, a fighter he has battled twice before —
the first bout ended in a draw; Pacquiao took the rematch, but barely.

Pacquiao makes boxing lovable by being lovable: He overcame immense
poverty to become an international phenomenon worth millions. He is
monstrously fast in the ring. He named his newborn Queen Elizabeth
just because he likes Queen Elizabeth. He is humble and sweet-faced
and appears amazed by his own success.

But dig deeper and you see something else about Pacquiao that is an
unexpected gift. For Asians and Filipinos who were born and live in
the West, Pacquiao offers a space where a diasporic people can feel
closer to somewhere hardly ever seen. For a few hours they are united
with all the other Asians in the world hunkered down in Pacquiao caps,
socks and hoodies, trying not to gnaw off the rim of their beer
glasses. Pacquiao closes a distance of thousands of miles so that they
are at home.

«

That night in Toronto, it was just spring, the city still gasping from
the end of winter. At an uptown bar called Sports Centre Cafe, all 50-
plus flat-screen TVs pulsed with the golden words Pacquiao versus
Hatton, over the side-profiles of the men in a stare-down, their
triceps, pectorals and latissimus dorsi rippling. Fans huddled in huge
clots, vibrating with anticipation. Max, the tweeting publicist, was
there with a group of about 30, some of whom he’d known since he was
small. He’d even brought his dad.

Max and his friends almost always get together on weekend nights to
drink beer, argue about Israel and Palestine, debate whether or not
Kim Kardashian is white, and watch sports. Max is excitable, a short
stocky bundle of vociferation and enthusiasm, but this night his
nerves kept him quiet. Hannah, a community health worker specializing
in women’s health — not your typical fight-night spectator — was at
the bar with Max. She first heard of Pacquiao at her grandmother’s
funeral in 2004, when half the mourners retreated to the kitchen to
watch TV. All of a sudden, they began screaming and hooting. They were
watching Pacquiao fight. I ask if anyone was disapproving of sports
fandom at a funeral. Hannah is emphatic, “Not at all. It was the death
of a grandma … and the birth of Pacquiao. It was totally acceptable,”
she says, “because he was Filipino, and because he won.”

It is not just that Pacquiao is Filipino — and classically,
undoubtedly so, all the way down to his shameless adoration for
karaoke and tendency to belt out George Benson hits on late-night
American talk shows — it is that he is Filipino and he is Great.
Pacquiao goes past Filipinoness or Asianness, rousing transracial
unity for anyone who has a reason to back the ethnic underdog. Kai is
black, and out of Max’s social group of publishing types and lawyers,
stands out as the one with the most glamorous job — he is an actual
rocket scientist. He says, “Pacquiao’s being nonwhite definitely was
appealing for me. Not just that, but being from a third-world country
and the fact that he came from struggle. So I kind of supported him in
solidarity.”

Pacquiao has broken records and the laws of science, jumping through
six weight classes to win seven world titles. This is the language of
boxing, but all you need to know is this: Pacquiao is X-Man fast,
flattening opponents experts say should destroy him. When Pacquiao was
scheduled to fight Oscar De La Hoya – sports superstar and Pacquiao’s
idol – in late 2008, commentators said the fight was a mistake. The
idea of the matchup, an English sports writer said, made him queasy.
De La Hoya is going to kill Pacquiao. What happened instead stunned
the boxing world. By the eighth round, De La Hoya’s beautiful face was
a mess of swollen purples. The crowd was a solid wall of unison: MAN-
NEE MAN-NEE. As Oscar sat on his stool before the ninth round, his
trainer Nacho Beristain, beseeched him, “There is no reason to
continue with this. He is just too fast for you.” The fight was
stopped before De La Hoya got truly pulped. The fans in the stadium
were beside themselves.

If you are not a boxing fan, this description may not do it for you.
Yuck, my mother would say, how is it a talent to destroy another man’s
face? But this is where Pacquiao’s true appeal comes in. As Beristain
announced his decision, Pacquiao ran to the middle of the ring and
threw his arms around De La Hoya’s neck. This was the end of De La
Hoya’s boxing career. The men swayed like slow dancers as their teams
begin to swarm, like brothers-in-arms embracing for the last time.
Then Pacquiao pushed passed the melee, falling to his knees in his
corner to pray, his gloves cupped around his face like he was telling
the post a secret. His team members reached through the ropes, trying
to touch him, caress his head, hold his arms. The names tattooed to
his arm, of his wife Jinkee, and his children, Jimuel, Michael and
Princess, glistened under the sheen of sweat and the flashbulbs of the
hysterical arena. And then Pacquiao squeezed his way back to De La
Hoya to hug him again, ignoring attempts by legendary boxing analyst
Larry Merchant to begin the post-fight interview. “You’re still my
idol,” Manny said to Oscar, “No matter what happens, you’re still my
idol.” “No,” Oscar said, “Now you’re my idol.”

In a sport defined by violence and the joyful arrogance of boxers like
Muhammad Ali, Pacquiao is a weirdo. He is a sweetheart. His most
famous body part, after his left fist, is his smile. In narrating his
weigh-ins, boxing analysts appear to be speaking of an infant rather
than a prize fighter, “And oh, there it is. There’s that smile. Look
at that smile.” Equally compelling is Pacquiao’s origin story. The
poverty of the Global South that Pacquiao came from is unimaginable to
some American boxing fans, where Manny’s single mother was among the
poorest of the poor in the world. Now GQ tells thick-growing fables of
Pacquiao’s generosity: A man in his camp stole a huge amount of money
from him, but Pacquiao simply forgave him, which led several members
of his team to believe in God. On his 31st birthday he held a karaoke
party for 3,000.

A Schwarzenegger-esque twist in “Pacman’s” story: In May 2010,
Pacquiao won a seat in the Philippine Congress, by a landslide.
Pacquiao’s logic for entering politics is typically charming — “I
cannot turn my back on the poor … I don’t want to be just your boxing
idol. I also want be your idol in public service.” My friend Janine, a
poet and a Ph.D. candidate who was born in the Philippines, is not as
starry-eyed about this win as Max and his friends. She asks, with some
contempt, how getting hit in the head qualifies someone for
government. But when I took Janine to her first Pacquiao fight last
May, her logic dissolved. On a bar stool at Buffalo Wild Wings, a fan
awoke. Janine covered her eyes when Shane Mosley upset Pacquiao’s
balance and then yelled “That’s my guy!” when Pacquiao rallied. “I
can’t explain it,” she said somewhere around the eighth round, “I’m
just inexplicably drawn to him.” She gazed happily at the television
screen.

For Asian fans, there is something exceptionally thrilling about
Pacquiao: the joy of seeing ourselves whenever he is on TV. During an
interview on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” in 2010, Pacquiao sang “Nothing’s
Gonna Change My Love For You,” for no reason really, other than that
he wanted to. I was transfixed by his warbling; he employed the exact
same karaoke style as my Singaporean uncles. I had never seen such a
comforting, familiar and unabashed presentation of Asianness on
American TV.

«

It was as if the promoters of the Pacquiao-Hatton fight were goading
on this ethnic rivalry. Throughout the lackluster undercard matches,
the slogan of the main event kept flashing in different iterations:
war of the worlds. battle of East and West. Or as Ryan put it,
colonizer and colonized (though to be fair, the Philippines was
colonized by Spain, not England). This was a bout underscored by
nationality and ethnicity, even though boxing rivals fight simply for
their name, not country. Pacquiao’s logo uses the rays and sun of the
Philippines’ flag. Ricky Hatton’s trunks were cosseted by a sequined,
tasselled Union Jack.

Boxing has always been about race. Sports in general are deeply
racially coded, which is why Tiger Woods and Yao Ming are such
fascinating figures. Colin, one of Max’s crew, tells me that boxing is
history, a mirror of race relations across the decades. He recounts
the story of Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight champion from the
earliest days of boxing. White champions refused to fight Johnson,
depriving him of a chance at the big titles. Then, when Johnson
finally fought — and beat — the undefeated white heavyweight champion
on July 4, 1910, race riots erupted across the U.S. Police interrupted
multiple attempted lynchings. By the end of the night, the body count
was at 25 — 23 of them black. As the title of a 2005 documentary about
Johnson states, Johnson was “unforgivably black.” Colin is black and
white, not Filipino, but he has enough Asian and Filipino friends to
provide an analysis of what Pacquiao means. “Asian men aren’t usually
shown as very masculine or athletic in mainstream media. So his rise
is their rise. Pacquiao potentially knocking out Hatton, a white guy,
is all the more significant.”

If Pacquiao could beat Hatton, it would undo — for at least a moment —
the prevalent stereotype that Asian masculinity is limp and feeble; a
stereotype that has dogged Asians in American pop culture for decades,
and continues still today.

Asian men in movies and television are portrayed as Korean grocery
store owners silenced by English, bumbling call center operatives or
stereotypical comic book nerds. There’s the ubiquitous image of the
Asian man as effeminate and emasculated like “The Big Bang Theory’s”
Raj, or sexually stupid like Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles.”
American pop culture in general seems uncomfortable with Asian men’s
sexuality. When Hong Kong megastars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Chow
Yuen-Fatt tried to break into Hollywood in the late ’90s, they were
repeatedly cast in awkwardly platonic relationships with American
sexpots like Mira Sorvino and Aaliyah. Even a decade later, after
Asian-American heartthrobs like Daniel Dae Kim, Asian men are still
the butt of the joke in movies deeply concerned with manliness. In
2009’s “The Hangover,” Ken Jeong plays an Asian gangster named Mr.
Chow who enters the scene by jumping naked out of a car trunk, and
then spends the rest of the movie striking homophobic panic in
audiences worldwide.

These stereotypes seem to loom in the minds of these friends. Instead
of a picture of his face, Max’s brother Christian has a photo of his
wife’s chest as his Facebook picture, with the words “Everyone Loves
an Asian Boy” dancing across her bosom. Colin claims Anthony is
morbidly obsessed with the number of Asian women he sees with white
men on the street. Ryan admits that seething over that “white guy
Asian girl thing” comes from a bad place and that as a younger man he
struggled to get over this anger. But this anger comes from real pain;
from hearing, day-in-day-out, that Asian men cannot be strong, sexy or
desirable.

I wonder if Pacquiao, as a Filipino from the Philippines, knows what
he means to Asian-American men; if he is well-versed in the American
racial landscape, or the excruciating immigration histories that shape
it. For almost 100 years, the U.S. and Canada both created laws to
make Chinese people – the largest group of Asian migrants – illegal,
starting with mandatory head taxes and a “pigtail ordinance,” up to a
total ban on immigration from China, which lasted until 1943 in the
U.S. and 1947 in Canada. Even before the ban, Asian men who immigrated
to North America could not bring their wives or families, to prevent
the growth of an Asian American population. These men often only had
access to jobs that culture associated with women, like running
laundromats and restaurants. And the only way Asian women could come
to the West was as chattel: as sex workers or mail-order brides. This
history has echoes that affect even Asian folks like me, whose
families came to North America long after 1947. Things are different
today, but it has been only a few decades since the laws shifted, and
attitudes are slower to move. Hence Asian men are sex comedy, Asian
women are sex property; on one side of the coin you have Mr. Chow, on
the other you have yellow fever.

Max says one of the things he loves about the Age of Pacquiao is
seeing black guys in Pacquiao shirts and gear. When I ask why, he
says, “Man, I been copping black athletes’ gear for what, 20 years?”
“Cross-cultural solidarity,” Ryan says. “Straight up,” Max says.

It is Colin’s happiness at seeing a bona fide, nonfictional Asian hero
for his friends that draws him to Manny. When I ask the group if they
think it’s OK to experience enjoyment at the sight of an Asian man
beating a white man, Aruna, Christian and Anthony search for a tactful
response. But Colin says, “Doesn’t it sort of feel gratifying though?
I’m just thinking of all the times we’ve seen Asian men emasculated,
and I just think Pacquiao can be symbolic of Asian pride. It’s kind of
cool and satisfying to see one of us — ” Colin stops to correct
himself here, pointing out that he can’t say “us” because he’s not
Asian. But it’s clear that Pacquiao means something to him directly,
not just via his friends. He continues, “For me, when Obama won the
presidency, it was one of the greatest moments of my life: to see a
black guy, a biracial guy reach the highest levels. You can dispute
Obama’s policies or whatever, but seeing that win, I cherish that. I
don’t think it’s wrong to necessarily feel a little pride, a little
racial pride maybe, in seeing Pacquiao knock out a white guy out.” He
pauses dramatically. “He put that guy to sleep.” Everyone laughs.

«

Boxing is honest about the thirst for blood that other sports obscure
with penalty boxes. Its attraction is its simplicity — two players as
opposed to the 20-odd of many team sports — the ease with which we can
turn it into a clear narrative with heroes and villains. The appeal is
instant, if you can get over the brutality and the mutilated septums.
Maybe boxing gets its continuous staying power from the universal draw
of a good story, when the two-dimensional masculinity and tightly held
virility that once gave boxing its shine are outmoded. (Sort of.)

In Manny’s story, the villain is Floyd.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the antithesis of Manny Pacquiao. Mayweather
seems to sunbathe in his own fast-talking cockiness. He has never been
defeated, a fact that he is quick to relay to any microphone that
finds itself in his face. During a September 2011 fight, Floyd’s
opponent, Victor Ortiz, made the ill-considered decision to butt Floyd
in the head. As Ortiz continued to say sorry after the bell rang to
restart the round, Floyd sucker punched Ortiz in the middle of his
apology, knocking him out and winning the fight. When Larry Merchant
suggested during the post-fight interview that Floyd had taken
advantage of Ortiz, Floyd shouted, “You never give me a fair shake!
HBO needs to fire you! You don’t know shit about boxing! You ain’t
shit!” Merchant lost his journalistic cool. “I wish I was 50 years
younger,” Merchant screamed, “and I’d kick your ass!”

Personality aside, Mayweather is the other Best Boxer in the World,
and fans are desperate for a Pacquiao vs. Mayweather showdown that
will establish, once and for all, the true champion. Pacquiao began
negotiations to fight Mayweather in late 2009. Then Mayweather
requested Olympic-style drug testing for the match: random blood
testing leading up into the week of the fight, on top of the official
testing required by the boxing commission. Pacquiao refused. He said
that having his blood drawn so close to the fight date would weaken
him. Boxing went bananas. Negotiations stopped, started and stopped:
years have passed and the fight still hasn’t happened. Fanbases remain
balkanized, and the Internet screams that Mayweather is just a coward
and a bully who can’t bear to be defeated. Or Pacquiao is a dope user
and his superstition about blood drawing shows just how backwards this
foreigner is.

Just before Christmas 2009, while the rest of the guys discussed
whether or not sneakers were against the dress code at the club where
they had New Year’s plans, Christian, Max and Kai got into one of the
first of countless heated arguments over Mayweather and Pacquiao. At
one point Kai looked to Colin, the only other black guy at the table
to back him up. “Sorry guy, I’m neutral,” Colin said.

While Kai says there is still a lot to like about Pacquiao, he
contends that Manny is shady and lied about why he didn’t want to do
the drug test. And Christian and Max, according to Kai, are too
blinded by their Pacquiao love to see Kai’s logic. Christian and Max
say Kai is just fronting, and he actually likes Pacquiao. They say Kai
only pretends to defend Mayweather because he’s “a contrarian” and
because he “feels the need to defend every black public figure.”

When Kai says that Pacquiao and his team capitalize on things that
Mayweather “would never have gotten away with,” I ask if he means that
Mayweather as a black man cannot get away with what Pacquiao as an
Asian man can get away with.

Despite the fact that Asians are an enormous community, the perception
that they are soft-spoken and submissive, and therefore a “model
minority” preferred by the white ruling classes, can create rifts
among communities of color. It is ridiculous to state that over 2
billion people share a deferential nature; yet in the case of Manny,
the irony is that the description fits. All the Pacquiao fans at my
disposal describe him as incorrigibly gentle. Ryan says, “He is a
tough guy within the ring, and that confronts stereotypes about
Asians, but outside of that he seems sort of nonthreatening, and maybe
that fulfills a stereotype. But that’s because he just does him.” Yet
contrast this with the way African Americans are stereotyped and how
Mayweather appears — loud, arrogant, violent — and when two boxers who
both match a racial bill come up against each other, it’s war. In an
echo of the Jack Johnson treatment, perhaps Pacquiao is forgivably
Asian. But neither being forgiven nor unforgiven for your ethnicity
seems so hot.

It is difficult to tell how much of the feud between Kai and Max is
for real. The boys-of-color solidarity that buttresses their
friendship is complicated by the truth that their ethnic experiences
are parallel, but definitely not the same. Max and Christian call
Floyd “Fraud” and “Gayweather.” Kai calls Pacquiao “Saint Pacbot” and
“Princess Pacroid.” Max says Kai has no radar for sarcasm. Kai says
the pot is calling the kettle Asian.

«

In a simpler time, everyone is watching as finally, Pacquiao and
Hatton arrive in the arena. Some white Hatton fans near Aruna, Anthony
and Hannah are making comments about “pilipinos” and “pinoys.” The
friends ignore them and Aruna refuses to acknowledge the British
national anthem. The bell for the first round rings. Ryan’s friend
Joseph, an eccentric who owns an iguana named Shelley, keeps screaming
“Here we go boys!” In the arena the onscreen crowd is chanting “MAN-
NEE MAN-NEE.” The noise crescendoes and garbles and turns into the
Ricky Hatton song which goes, “OooooOOOOoooo Ricky Hatton,
OooOOOOooOOoo Ricky Hatton.”

Pacman and Hatton spin around the ring in a whirligig of limbs. The
referee separates them, and then he separates them again. At one
minute to the end of the round, Pacquiao knocks Hatton down. Hatton’s
mouth opens in shock as his feet leave the mat. Joseph begins yelling,
“It’s done son! It’s done son!” even though Hatton is clearly getting
to his feet. Hatton resumes bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking
unfazed. But Pacquiao is too fast. “He’s eating it!” Ryan yells as
Pacquiao’s glove connects with Hatton’s face. The British boxing
analysts cry, “This looks so bad for poor Ricky Hatton!” At five
seconds till the end of the round, Pacquiao knocks Hatton down again,
who gets to his feet once more as the bell rings.

“I felt conflicted seeing Hatton down,” Aruna said later — “he was a
good guy.” Hatton starts backing away from Pacquiao, on the tips of
his toes, as if he is always about to fall over backwards. Now
everybody in the bar is on their feet, one large organism reacting
with a single OH! every time Pacquiao’s glove crunches Hatton’s face.
It is as if Hatton’s gloves are full of sand. And then at eight
seconds until the end of the second round, Pacquiao catches Hatton in
the jaw. Hatton goes down like a push-button umbrella. He lies flat on
the canvas, landing with his arms above his head. And then his arms
retract neatly to his sides, as if he is settling in for a peaceful
nap. The referee doesn’t even bother with the count. Six minutes into
the event, the fight is over.

The Sports Centre Cafe detonates. A drumming sound like the onset of
monsoon rain swells as people slap their hands against the low
ceiling, literally hitting the roof. Max runs around the room, giving
all the Filipinos he can find high fives. Joseph buys a round of
drinks for a table of random Filipinos. Anthony notes that even the
Hatton fans, bummed out as they are, are applauding out of respect.
The screen begins to run replays, and the crowd cheers all over again.
Mariah Carey tweets Woah.

“We knew he would win,” they all say, “but we just didn’t think it
would be so fast.”

GQ quotes a boxing reporter for the Philippine Star who talks about
how Pacquiao’s riches mean that he can live wherever he wants in the
world. Necessity drives 3,000 Filipinos a day away from the
Philippines to work overseas; the global economy has turned the
Philippines into a country that is used to being left. Yet Manny has
elected to stay. “Not just in the Philippines,” the reporter says. “In
his hometown. The place he started. You cannot understand how this has
stunned us Filipinos. That Manny Pacquiao chose us.”

Because in the end, this is the reason for the pure, tears-in-the-
throat elation that he inspires. He is Manny Pacquiao — ultra-human
boxer, colonized defeater of the colonizer, archetypal Asian man
karaoke singer — and he belongs to us.



Thea Lim is a nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast and former deputy editor
of Racialicious. Follow her on twitter: @theapants. More Thea Lim