opass

A Filipina friend here lent me a couple of books by a local writer named Jessica Zafra who has a weekly column in the Philippine Star. She’s quite an amusing writer and seemed to be fascinated about the spree killer Andrew Cunanan, so much so that she wrote about him in several articles. When he became infamous and was on the run, nobody in the US seemed to realize the name was Filipino. I recall how at the time American newscasters all mangled his name. But Filipinos here instantly recognized it as one of their’s. Almost every word or name here is pronounced with the accent on the penultimate syllable so everybody here knows it’s pronounced Cu-NA-nan.

He’s probably more well-known than local heroes. I’ve tested this with some Filipinos I know and mentioned “a spree killer in the US, the guy who murdered Versace” and before I can even finish speaking they jumped in with “Oh yes, Cunanan!” Instant recognition.

Zafra jokingly suggested that Cunanan was running amok, a Filipino word used to describe someone who loses control and begins killing at random, a phenomenon that apparently occurred often at one time in Malay regions. If they found a word for it, well then it must have been happening with some degree of frequency I think.

If Zafra’s conjecture is correct, it would suggest that there’s a genetic, rather than cultural, link to “running amok”. Cunanan was not a Filipino, but an American born to a Filipino father who’d immigrated to the US and an American mother. He had no real link to the Philippines and was clearly not, culturally, a Filipino.

Hey, here’s something curious I learned! The word amok did not enter the English language by way of the American occupation of the Philippines as is commonly assumed. It’s actually a word used in many of the languages in the region. In fact, Captain James Cooke wrote about it in his journals in the 1700s.