the red plastic platter sitting in the middle of my grandmother’s dining table in laguna always had one occupant left at the end of sunday after mass lunch.
it was usually a single piece of lumpiang shanghai. the spring roll was glistening with translucent vegetable oil, its pork filling exposed at one jagged edge where the frying wrapper had split open. next to it sat a tiny melamine saucer filled with spicy sweet-and-sour sauce, skin forming on its surface like a thin film of plastic.
every person at that table was still hungry. my cousin mark had just finished his second bowl of rice, scraping his spoon against the bottom of the aluminum pot until it made a metallic sound. my uncle was fanning himself with an old manila times insert, eyeing the platter while chewing on a toothpick.
yet nobody touched that final piece.
huwag na, nakakahiya.
that was the unspoken rule. to take the last item on a shared plate was to declare your own appetite more important than the dignity of the group. it was an unspoken admission of greed. we called it the hiya piece. my lola would sit at the head of the table, her thin wrists resting on the worn floral tablecloth, watching us with quiet satisfaction. she had spent five hours in the kitchen since four in the morning, chopping carrots and scraping pork fat, but she would never push us to clear the dish entirely. the presence of that solitary lumpia proved two things at once: we had been fed enough to leave something behind, and we were raised well enough to pretend we did not want it.
looking back at those lunches now, i feel a strange ache in my chest. my grandmother passed away three years ago during the heat of october. but that cold lumpia stays with me. it haunts me because i spent half my life believing that quiet restraint was our greatest national virtue. i thought pagpapakumbaba and pakikisama were the invisible threads holding our families together across bad weather and lean months.
lately, looking at the news streaming through my phone late at night, i realize how thoroughly that virtue has been weaponized against us. we are a nation of people trained to starve ourselves of the last bite out of politeness, living in a country run by people who bring plastic bags to the buffet and empty the entire tray into their trunks.
walk down any side street near the mrt stations in kamuning during lunch hour. the small carinderias tucked between metal repair shops and pawnshops tell a story that official economic statistics try hard to soften.
a decade ago, twenty pesos could get you a generous mound of pinakbet or a bowl of tinola with two thick chunks of green papaya and a real chicken thigh. today, the wooden counters are lined with square stainless-steel trays, but the portions look like they were measured with an eyedropper.
the shrinkflation of our daily food is not just a matter of smaller plates. it changes how we look at each other across the table. when food is abundant, hiya is a small cultural tax you pay to look gracious. you leave the last piece of fried banana or the last spoonful of adobo sauce because you know there is more rice in the cooker and another meal coming at six in the evening.
what happens when the food runs out before the hunger does?
i watched a worker in a faded blue uniform sit down at a wooden bench near v. mapa last month. he bought a single order of tokwa’t baboy and two cups of rice. the tray contained mostly fried tofu cubes soaked in dark vinegar, with two papery thin slices of pig ear floating on to. a younger boy, probably an apprentice from the nearby vulc-seal shop, sat down beside him with just a plain block of rice wrapped in wilted banana leaf.
the older man looked at his small bowl. he paused for three full seconds, his spoon hovering over the largest piece of tofu. you could see the internal calculus running behind his eyes: do I offer this, or do i survive the rest of my twelve-hour shift?
he did not offer. he ate quickly, staring straight at the corrugated iron wall ahead of him, his chin dipping low over his plastic bowl.
that brief hesitation was the sound of our social fabric snapping under financial weight. when basic survival becomes a daily gamble, hiya ceases to be a noble practice of community care. it turns into a luxury that only the comfortable can afford to keep. we are slowly becoming a society where remaining polite means giving up your spot in line, your seat on the bus, or your fair share of a meal you worked eight hours to earn. the struggle to stay afloat is chewing through our daily manners, leaving behind a desperate instinct to grab what we can before someone else remembers to be polite.
there is no hiya at the turnstiles of the lrt 2 station in recto at five-thirty in the afternoon.
if you stand on the concrete concourse above the traffic noise of avenida, you will see thousands of office workers, call center agents, and students compressed into a tight, damp mass of human bodies.
the moment the steel doors of the train hiss open, the polite filipino who leaves the last lumpia on the platter vanishes entirely.
people push. shoulders lock into ribs. canvas bags are rammed into the small spaces between kidneys. an elderly woman holding a plastic bag of groceries gets swept sideways like driftwood in a flood. nobody apologizes. nobody says tabi po or paki-daan. the only objective is to get two feet inside that aluminum train before the warning lights start flashing.
in front of a dinner table, we step back out of shame. in front of a train door, we step forward out of terror.
this is not a moral failure of the commuters because this is the natural result of living in a system designed around artificial scarcity.
our public transport infrastructure operates on the basic assumption that your time has zero value. when there are only three functional buses for every five hundred people standing under the pouring rain on quezon avenue, the cultural ethic of pakikisama becomes a death sentence for your evening. if you wait for everyone else to go first because you were taught to be humble, you will still be standing on the sidewalk at midnight, watching empty taxis barrel past you with their red lights turned off.
we reserve our gentleness for spaces where we believe there is enough to go around. the moment we enter the public square we instantly recognize that the system is rigged to feed only those who push their way to the front. the hiya piece disappears because we know, deep in our bones, that no one is coming to refill the tray once it goes empty.
this panic over who gets to claim the final slice extends far beyond transit lines and street corners. it cuts right through the center of the filipino home.
when carlos yulo won his two gold medals at the paris olympics, the entire country celebrated for about twenty-four hours before the narrative curdled into a bitter public feud over family, money, and ownership. suddenly, the talk shows and comment sections were not discussing his floor routine or his vault landing. they were dissecting his mother’s financial disclosures, his prize money, and who had the right to claim a piece of his success.
it was a public trial about the limits of utang na loob.
in the traditional filipino family structure, an individual’s triumph is rarely treated as private property. your success is viewed as a communal dish placed in the center of the table. the parents who paid for your schooling, the aunts who lent you money for tuition, the neighborhood that watched you grow up—they all sit around that plate with their forks ready.
if you attempt to pull your prize toward your own side of the table, you are immediately branded as walang hiya.
nakalimot na sa pinanggalingan. that is the ultimate insult in our culture. it is the accusation that you ate the whole meal without waiting for the elders to take their portion first.
parents raise children on a diet of deep emotional indebtedness. they tell them that every sacrifice made by the family is an invisible ledger that must be balanced the moment they enter the workforce. when a child breaks out of that cycle and tries to set boundaries around their own life, their own income, or their own sanity, the family structure responds with overwhelming shame.
sino ka para kumain nang mag-isa?
we fail to ask why the burden of family survival rests so heavily on the shoulders of one child in the first place. why must an athlete’s victory double as a retirement fund for an entire household? why must a young nurse sending money home from dubai live in a tiny bedspace with six strangers just so her relatives back in cavite can buy groceries?
we demand that individuals display absolute hiya toward their families, while the state abdicates its responsibility to provide basic healthcare, elderly pensions, and decent wages. we turn familial love into a guilt-driven distribution system where everyone is terrified of being seen as selfish, even when they are starving.
while ordinary citizens monitor their own behavior at every meal, counting their portions and agonizing over whether they took too much, an entirely different set of rules operates at the top of our society.
look at the political landscape over the past year.
we watched legislative hearings reveal billions of pesos shifted through government offices like pocket change. we listened to public officials answer questions about missing funds with blank stares and smug smiles. we saw former mayors linked to illegal gambling hubs and human trafficking rings, comfortably walking into courtrooms wearing designer jackets while their lawyers argued over technicalities.
there is no hiya in those air-conditioned rooms. none at all.
an ordinary clerk working at the department of social welfare and development will feel an ache of anxiety if they accidentally overcharge a client by fifty pesos. a public school teacher in leyte will spend her own salary to buy chalk and visual aids because she feels nahihiya when her classroom lacks basic supplies.
yet the people sitting in high political office can look straight into a television camera and justify secret budgets that could fund three thousand rural health clinics for a decade.
the tragedy of the filipino condition is that our poorest citizens suffer from an excess of shame, while our most powerful leaders suffer from a total lack of it.
the poor citizen steps back from the plate even when their stomach is rumbling, worried about what the neighbors might say. the politician pulls the entire table toward themselves, clears the dishes into their lap, and demands that the waiters bring out another round of dessert at public expense.
this contrast is the core operating system of our politics.
our cultural obsession with hiya acts as an effective mechanism of social control. it teaches the working class to be patient, to wait for hand-outs, to accept small favors with tears in their eyes, and to avoid making noise when they are given less than they deserve. we treat protest and anger as bad manners. we call people who demand accountability mga walang modo, npa or rebelde, while we describe corrupt politicians as maaasahan simply because they threw a few gold coins into the crowd during an election parade.
we have normalized a political culture built on total entitlement. the public treasury is treated like an endless buffet at a high-end hotel, where those in power pile their plates high with pork barrel funds, confidential allocations, and land deals, completely indifferent to the long line of hungry people waiting outside the door.
walk through any trendy cafe in bonifacio global city on a saturday afternoon and you will see the modern antidote to traditional hiya.
young people sit under warm, track-lit ceilings, shooting videos for social media. they stage their coffee cups next to expensive leather bags, holding their phones at precise angles to capture the perfect light. some of them step into crowded walkways, forcing pedestrians to stop while they dance for a fifteen-second clip.
we have imported the hyper-individualism of western digital culture and slapped it over our old social anxieties. the message on every screen is clear: be the main character.
do not wait for your turn. do not worry about disturbing others. flaunt your wealth, project your success, and take up as much space as possible. in the digital economy, the person who hesitates loses. the person who feels hiya gets scrolled past. the winner is the one who claims the whole plate, takes a photo of it, and posts it online with a caption about hard work and manifest destiny.
it is easy to look at this modern entitlement and simply blame social media, but the root goes much deeper.
this performative selfishness is a protective response to a society that has consistently broken its promises. when you grow up in an environment where working hard does not guarantee a decent life, where your taxes vanish into the pockets of mayors, senators, and the country’s vice-president, and where your public services are broken beyond repair, you stop believing in the collective contract.
you stop caring about pakikisama because pakikisama never fixed the flooding on your street or lowered the price of onions.
so you turn inward. you decide that your only duty is to secure your own plate, your own brand, your own circle of safety. you retreat into a private life where you can control the outcome, abandoning the public square to the bullies and the thieves.
in doing so, we risk losing the one concept that makes our culture worth saving: kapwa.
kapwa is not the shallow politeness that makes you leave a cold piece of fried meat on a platter to avoid looking bad. it is not the performance of obedience to authority or the uncritical acceptance of unfair family demands.
kapwa is the deep recognition that the person sitting across from you is not a competitor for limited resources, but an extension of your own humanity. it is the understanding that your stomach cannot be truly full while the person beside you is chewing on air.
when we reduce hiya to mere self-effacement, we turn it into a weakness. we make it an excuse for accepting tiny crumbs from the tables of the powerful. real hiya should not mean staying quiet when you are being robbed. it should mean feeling a profound, burning shame at the sight of unfairness.
my grandmother’s table in laguna is long gone now. the house was sold two years ago to a developer who tore down the old mango tree in the backyard and built three grey townhouses with tall steel gates.
sometimes i still catch myself looking at the last piece of food on a shared plate at a restaurant with friends. my hand will instinctively pull back, checked by twenty years of cultural conditioning. huwag. nakakahiya.
i am trying to unlearn that hesitation, not so i can become selfish, but so i can see the difference between true respect and forced submission.
we need to stop teaching our children or our kapwa as general that staying polite means staying hungry. we need to destroy the belief that asking for your fair share of food, wages, or governance is a sign of bad manners.
if there is only one piece of lumpia left on the plate, we should stop staring at it in awkward silence while our stomachs rumble. we should look around the table, ask who needs it most, break it in half, and offer it clearly.
and when we see the people at the top of our society grabbing the entire platter and walking away with it, we need to stop lowering our eyes out of respect. we need to stand up, block the doorway, and remind them—loudly and without a single drop of shame—that the food on that plate never belonged to them in the first place.
ang sarap ng lumpia. libre mo ako lumpia, ano tara?
excuse me for the language pero - putangina?? ang galing! it's written in grief and anger and empathy, sure. pero you captured filipinos in a way that's accurate and painful and true. keep it up!!
literally got chills after reading this. thank you for creating this wonderful piece! sana marami pa sa mga kapwa nating Pilipino ang mamulat na at tumayo para sa isa’t-isa.