JOWA na kita.”
I was jarred when I heard that said by a twenty-something to someone of a different generation. “Jowa,” I am told, isn’t as new a term as I originally thought as it has been used for some time now (said a 30-something friend). But to my ears that grew up and adjusted to the words “shota” in reference to a boyfriend or girlfriend, or to a couple (mag-shota), the word “jowa” was indeed jarring.
Generation gap, I guess. Something that is as sure as death and taxes.
I remember my mother relating how her mother and her mother’s generation found Elvis and his hip-twisting gyrations onstage “obscene.” In turn, there were those of my mom’s generation who were unhappy when we as teenagers had dance parties that featured “sweet” music played to low (or no) house lights so you could clutch your date as tightly as you wanted to. And how my mom hates the falsetto voices of The Bee Gees, telling me they sounded like men singing while their gonads were being crushed.
‘It is a given, I suppose, that an older generation looks at a succeeding one and shakes its head. My elders did it to mine and now I catch myself doing it to the young people I meet.’
If you knew me as a teenager you wouldn’t be surprised to know that such a comment only made me want to blare the music even louder.
The Bee Gees were the singers of our “theme song,” my high school “shota” and me.
Last Wednesday, I hosted lunch for Rep. Peter John Calderon and a handful of UP Law classmates who survived professors such as Haydee Yorac, Chief Justice Enrique Fernando, Bienvenido Ambion and even Carmelo Sison during our first year. We happily reminisced how somehow our teachers would find a way to make us feel stupid, and not be constrained by any considerations to tell us so, to our faces. Could you do that to the current generation of students, I asked a classmate who has chosen to spend part of his later years as a lawyer teaching succeeding generations of would-be lawyers; No, he said.
Somehow, I am told, today’s generation doesn’t take kindly to being told how much they don’t know. We, on the other hand, had to brace for and brace the verbal assault in class. Of course, we knew that the only way to avoid being turned into minced meat was to study, and to be prepared for any eventuality during recitation.
Then my father’s own life experience came to mind, leaving me wondering how much of a “softy” my generation was compared to his. Theirs was the generation who had to find a way to survive World War 2 and the aftermath. My dad and his three surviving sisters even had to pick their way through the rubble of devastated Intramuros to cross from lines of the enemy to those of US and Filipino troops, flimsily protected by a white handkerchief held aloft. That’s the type of challenges they survived; in comparison, those my generation faced, and those that the current generation faces, seem like, well, a walk in the park. And yet many, especially today, crumble, unable to cope.
It is a given, I suppose, that an older generation looks at a succeeding one and shakes its head. My elders did it to mine and now I catch myself doing it to the young people I meet.
It’s the “Jowa” generation and maybe I as a member of the “shota” generation should not even try to fully “get it.” In many ways I never will.
It’s not just terminologies, mind you; it’s even the rules and roles that have changed.
Jowa or no Jowa.
