The Germ of an Idea
By Jose A. Carillo
How do you bring a practically dead river back to life? Do you tell the teeming occupants of its banks to please, please kindly dismantle their shanties and stop draining their wastes into its currents? Do you ask for loose change to save the river by deploying fancy carton deposit boxes in bank teller’s cages, drugstore counters, and supermarket checkouts? Do you write sense-of-loss letters to newspaper editors and hold rock concerts and sing paeans of how it was when, during the great Jose Rizal’s time, people could actually drink water from the river without risk of getting sick or dying from mercury poisoning or excess of E. coli?
A few years back, I heard a story that said there was a better answer, and that one man had actually already discovered it. I was incredulous at first because the story was simply too good to be true, and because I heard it not from a fellow Filipino who could sympathize with this country’s dire and screaming need for self-regeneration. Instead I heard it from a South Korean heavy equipment distributor and motor shop executive, that morning while I waited for his mechanics to resuscitate my ailing 1992 Toyota Corolla. Having neither political motive nor hidden agenda (other than perhaps to brighten up the day for an increasingly impatient customer), the foreigner, whom we will fictitiously call Mr. Chung for this narrative, told the story with an unmistakable ring of truth.
In the halting but clear English that some Korean businessmen finally manage after staying in the Philippines for a few years, Mr. Chung recalled a most intriguing day when he paid a visit to a town mayor that he was trying to interest in his heavy equipment. The mayor’s staff had told him over the phone that the mayor was greatly disposed towards approving his bid, which they said was much cheaper and better than all the bids they had received. The mayor wanted to finalize the deal with him right away, so could he please come over at once to see him?
“Mr. Chung,” the Korean executive quoted the mayor as saying right after the usual introductions, “I will go directly to the point. When you prepared this bid for our garbage dump trucks, how much in overprice money did you put in it for us?”
The Korean said he was so dumbfounded by the question that he could not speak for several minutes. He became dizzy from the thought that the overprice he had put in was too low, and that now he was reaping the bitter fruit of his stupid stinginess. But when the mayor repeated the question, a little more sternly this time, he realized he had to give an answer. With a catch in his throat he finally muttered: “It’s exactly 30 percent, Mr. Mayor.”
To his surprise the mayor said without missing a beat, looking him straight in the eye: “I see. I see. All right, Mr. Chung, I want you to know that I do not allow and accept such add-ons in our contracts for this town. Here’s what I want you to do if you want us to do business with you: knock off that 30 percent from your quotation and send me the reduced one right away. I will have it approved and you can make the deliveries as soon as you can. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor, if that’s what you want,” the Korean recalled having blurted in his daze, following it up hastily with the formalities of leaving. But as he was heading for the door he remembered having recovered enough sense to make this final pleasantry to the mayor: “Thank you so much again, Mr. Mayor. Is there anything my company can do for you in appreciation for giving us your business?”
“Nothing really, thanks,” the Korean said the mayor replied. “But wait, tell me...I heard a great deal about your Olympic Park in Seoul. I remember somebody telling me that your government built it for the 1988 Olympic Games and that it’s simply beautiful. I am particularly interested in your Han River regatta course and your Mong-Chong moat. How your country restored that ancient artificial lake for the Olympics intrigues me! I also heard that you have the largest music fountain in Asia. Somebody told me the water goes 88 meters high, changes 1,400 times with the laser lights, and plays 140 different songs. And a world-class Olympic sculpture park, too! What great things your country had done in Korea in the name of sports and national pride, Mr. Chung!"
“Yes, Mr. Mayor, our Olympic Park is as beautiful as you have heard,” the Korean recalled having said with a happy jolt in his heart, in the most fluent English that he could muster. “If you find time to visit Seoul I would be delighted to accompany you to those places myself. Autumn will be a particularly enchanting time for you and your environmental staff to come. Just give the date and I will be there to show you around.”
“I will seriously think of going, Mr. Chung,” the mayor said. “Have a nice day!”
Several months later, the Korean executive said, huge dredging equipment began cleaning up the putrid stretch of the river that runs through the mayor’s small town. The squatters that choked its banks completely disappeared. Within the year that stretch of river became clear and freely flowing again. As a finishing touch, a singing water fountain with laser lights started performing in midriver one night, and in the days that followed a sculpture park of farmers and water buffaloes and herons in concrete started to gaily assemble along its scrupulously clean and neat banks. (circa 2003)
This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2003 and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 to date. I’ll be posting one of them in Jose Carillo’s English Forum every Wednesday from October 26, 2016 onwards.
