this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on October 1, 1998.
I hate colegialas, those convent-bred denizens of high society who tend to overwhelm the brown-skinned majority with their Castillian features and porcelain-like skin. The same girls you see in the party-hopping photo spreads of all the upbeat/upmarket fashion rags. The same girls who announce that they have come of age in the society pages of the most reputable broadsheets. The same girls who get to skim off the cream of the Top 10 Most Eligible Bachelors’ List. The same girls who get invited to become Ms So-and-So 199X.
I don’t like them because there’s always something that rings so false about them, as if most of them are trying to hide behind smokescreens of elegance to hide the awkward and insipid girls beneath all the powder and perfume. With their affected manners and fractured English, it’s enough to make a real member of the gentry lose his lunch in the gutter because of the cloying sweetness with which these gestures and words are delivered.
In my case, my general contempt for these faux aristocrats began when my parents moved me from the academic sanity of JASMS along Indiana in Manila to the social-climbing hell that was a monk-run institution in Alabang. At the tender age of 9 and in the third grade, some of my classmates were already beginning to act like princess-bitches on a smaller scale.
I noticed almost immediately that I was definitely not going to fit in with the crowd: I did a lot of reading while everyone else compared notes about new Barbie doll fashions and the latest additions to their Sanrio collections. I could tolerate the Sanrio stuff (my ancestry’s part Japanese, so cute anthropomorphics are in my blood), but the Barbie dolls just didn’t cut it with me. Besides, I was a new kid from a school they had never heard of (Jeez, how provincial can you get?). Therefore, they said I had to prove myself worthy of their respect.
I told them to forget it because I was not going to let myself get turned into anyone’s patsy. The end result was that they made me cry a lot more often than was normal, I had to go into psychological counseling (much to my parents’ annoyance, naturally), and I was an absolute mess until I was about 16. (I still am now, but that’s another story.)
Under ordinary circumstances in high school, maybe I would’ve become one of the Vicious Ones, as I was fond of calling them at the time. However, the fact that I wore very thick eyeglasses and I was in the library, a lot branded me as square and not worth letting into the sacrosanct (to them!) society of the high, the beautiful, and the mighty.
The girls I had to study with in grade school blossomed into the typical pert and powder-pretty cheerleader types you used to see in such shows as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Saved by the Bell.” And, like their fictional television counterparts (or can I say role models?), they had money to burn, boys to flirt with, clothes to choose from and parties galore to attend. They also began to learn how to polish their mean streaks in order to chastise us lesser beings into absolute submission. Their tongues grew sharp, their eyebrows were always uneven (one, after all, being raised higher than the other in obvious condescension of the people around them), and their lips forever curled in tacky sneers that they thought cute but the rest of us though annoying.
As if things weren’t bad enough, they began to speak fractured English in high-pitched voices and to giggle in a pitch that you could almost say sounded like a flock of shrieking imps from the lowest regions of hell itself. If you think that we had some respite from all this during our annual retreats, forget it! The dorm often rang with unholy laughter even in the wee hours of the dawn when we were supposed to be meditating on whatever transgressions we had done. (Come to think of it, I don’t think the stereotypical colegiala psyche even has a notion of the existence of a conscience.)
To make a long story short, the princess-bitches ruled the roost on campus, forcing us uncool types to play Dungeons & Dragons off campus without fear of rebuke (“Yuck! You’re so baduy, ha? Di ba for the boys lang the game na yan?”), to go into our shells, to hang out at the library where we knew none of them would hang because it would damage their reputations (“So grabe ka naman! You’re gonna make tambay na at the libe? Corny mo, ha?”), and for those who couldn’t take the pressure anymore–to suicide.
The colegiala crowd eventually went wild when we all moved to college. After all, college meant more freedom and, to them, it meant more freedom to go to parties till the break of dawn, shop till they dropped, and flirt around with gorgeous college boys. Of course, we lesser ones had our revenge when the time finally came. We became the top dogs, not them. We won all the slots in the Student Council, ran all the organizations, organized all the fun activities, represented the school at debates, athletics and just about everything else.
From my safe perch at a fine women’s institution along Taft Avenue where I took up Communication Arts instead of the ultimate try-too-hard-colegiala dream course Medicine. I saw the princess-bitches of my batch fall from their pedestals one by one. Some married as soon as they turned legal. Some got pregnant without benefit of matrimony. Some slept around and lived in with whoever rich preppy-boy (or dirty ol’ miser) they could wrap their legs around. Some got addicted to alcohol or soporifics. Some did the most scandalous things (smoking was one of them) women aren’t supposed to do in public and got the ire of the manangs of society in the process. Some dropped out of school because their inanity couldn’t take the pressure. And some went mad or just put themselves out of their misery.
The few who did manage to survive the rigors of collegiate life eventually stopped being so bitchy and grew so level-headed that you could hardly believe that they were once hot-blooded ninnies painting the town red on a Saturday night. A friend of mine explained that colegialas were like the just-as-jaded flapper girls of the Roaring ’20s: live fast, burn out before your prime. I couldn’t help but feel vindicated by that; it only served them right for all the pain they caused us because they wanted everyone to be just like them when we all knew that we couldn’t. They thought that they were special: the real world proved them wrong.
