I love watching ’90s and 2000s Filipino movies centered around a younger cast, whether it’s a teen movie, a rom-com, or horror. Of course the ideal scenario is that I would find them actually kind of good, but the quality doesn’t usually end up mattering—I have a surprising amount of patience and willpower to sit through the entire thing, provided that the locations catch my eye. It’s endlessly fascinating to me to watch intently for places I recognize, places that no longer look the way they used to when I was growing up, places I miss, places I wish I’d known about. The newly opened Market! Market! in Say That You Love Me (2005), a whimsigoth cafe in Kutob (2005), the indoor amusement park Dreamscape in Now That I Have You (2004).
For me it’s a form of virtual time travel, a chance to revisit a version of Metro Manila that doesn’t really exist anymore. Captured on film, standing the test of time. They obviously can’t be changed, becoming unintentional period pieces (and unintentional odes to the era’s obsession with banana yellow and boho-chic). It’s different with books; the words can be edited to reflect what’s current and trace the shifts in how we live and how we are, disregarding the cultural climate the book was a product of in the process.
But why would we want to?
Published in 2002, Lilledeshan Bose’s Una & Miguel is the rare breed of early Filipino YA in a time when young adult readers weren’t even really acknowledged as a major publishing demographic yet. The title characters have a meet-cute when Miguel almost runs Una over with his Vespa, and there’s an immediate attraction, but it gets a little complicated because he’s with the popular crowd and she’s one of the outcasts.
Not the most original premise, but its charm is that it’s set not (technically) in the halls of high school, but in a village during the summer. I read it the summer after sophomore year, when I had an almost-thing of my own with someone who also belonged in different social circles, who was never supposed to be someone I could grow close with, let alone share a pair of earbuds with, our heads tilted close together as we listened to some pop-punk ballad, both too afraid to move to ruin the moment.
Anyway. It didn’t end up helping me navigate this thing, but it did leave me with an insufferable tendency to refer to people who “conformed” as “sheep.”
My cousin and I discovered our copies of Una & Miguel as a forgotten should’ve-been-classic, tucked away on the Filipiniana shelves of National Book Store’s Shangri-La branch (RIP) and marked down to a whopping P50. And when I say tucked away, I mean literally tucked away: the spine is a nondescript all-black, so you wouldn’t even know what it was until you pulled it off to look at the cover. The hidden gem of all hidden gems.
But it wasn’t as forgotten as we’d thought, because in 2012, Una & Miguel received a second edition, this time no longer pocket-sized, and with an actual spine. The paper was no longer a very thin muddy pulpy gray consistent with recycling (was this a meta-reference to how they would end up working together at a paper recycling shop?! probably not, but that’s my headcanon now), and the text is a cute magenta! Despite being reprinted ten years after its first edition, though, this wasn’t labeled as an anniversary edition, more like it was just repackaged to be new. Young adults were finally considered a major demographic as readers, after all.
The problem was, it just didn’t feel the same.
And none of it was because of the redesign at all. The text, the characters, the plot, they all remained largely unchanged, as well. But Una & Miguel was defined by its pop culture references as it was by these elements. Its references are embedded in the identity of its characters: their tastes become their social currency, and that’s exactly what the plot is all about, isn’t it? Miguel and his “cohorts” might be popular, but it’s not hard to tell that Una and her friends are infinitely cooler and more secure in themselves. I don’t know what I would do with myself if I opened up a copy of Meg Cabot’s All American Girl and found that Sam’s penchant for drawing her best friend horseback riding with Heath Ledger had been backspaced to the ether.
I’ve been thinking about this for years, and now I’m finally doing it: I’ve scanned (as in re-read, but also as in used a scanner on) both my copies of this book, and I’ll be making observations on the changes they’ve made. I never meant for this to be a literal close reading/analysis of the characters and the text, but it turns out my inner English major never really left. (But also, a lot of this is just me being like “this is cool” and “this is not cool.”)
When we first meet Una, she pretty much immediately drops a proto-stan list, which couldn’t have been a more fitting introduction. She’s a harmonica player, an aspiring filmmaker. I think the switch from Ani DiFranco to Up Dharma Down works, and I love that the Some Kind of Wonderful mention stuck around. Going from Josh Hartnett to Chris Hemsworth is a Choice, and so is not replacing Brandon Boyd.
I miss when Beauty Bar ruled our (dream) vanities. Now that I can actually afford stuff from there and Essences, all of the fun brands I’d always wanted to try are gone. The Body Shop’s also kind of on its way out now, so today Una would probably say she’s never ordered anything from Issy and Company.
There is mention of what year it was, and they did move it up to the “present.” A decade is a long time, reflecting changing cultures especially since our relationship with the internet shifted rapidly between 2002 and 2012. The social dynamics were different, particularly when it came to ideas of nonconformity and self-expression—but we’ll get to that. All that said, casually changing the setting like this has a bigger effect on the book than one would think.
(I also found the choice not to change “anklet shopping” funny, since they’re a decidedly early-2000s fashion statement.)
Miley Cyrus starred in a Nicholas Sparks movie and has been recognizable as both a blonde and a brunette, so she and Mandy Moore might have more in common than I thought.
I resisted K-pop as much as I could as a teenager, only ever learning certain things through pop culture osmosis as I kept up with friends’ interests, so I probably would’ve glossed over the mention of it here. Now, though, I see it as very apt, and if the first edition had just been published a year later, the boy bands definitely would’ve been F4 and “Asian/Koreanovelas” instead.
It’s charming that they kept Marcel Marceau—this nod to a 20th-century mime artist would be just the kind of character quirk that wouldn’t be out of place on someone with a Livejournal or a Tumblr account. It also reminds me of the main character’s obsession with an old-Hollywood actress in Why We Broke Up (disclaimer: not a book I think too highly of), which I read in 2012.
I love this part for how accurate it is in describing very specific Filipino youth social hierarchies and nuances. It brings me back to the nonsense conversations I would have with friends over lunch in college, many of which revolved around these same observations since UP at the time fostered this exact ecosystem. I don’t really know how all this would hold up today, but writing this now, it does make me wonder.
During the edit these paragraphs were mostly unchanged, and what stood out to me was the fact that they kept even “sosy.” The newer edition added an extra S and italicized the word, but that doesn’t really change the fact that nobody was still saying it in 2012.
I was 8 in 2002, and we lived comfortably but not with a whole lot, so I didn’t always get what the characters were talking about right away. One thing I had to look up was what the hell an “MD player” was, and it turned out to be a MiniDisc player. It was one of those cool in-between tech innovations of the decade—more convenient than CDs, but largely forgotten because MP3 players came not long after. So it makes sense that Miguel’s MD player was switched out for an iPod.
My mom was in her late 30s in the 2000s, and she was young enough that she still cared deeply about music and splurged on original CDs. She was an early believer of John Mayer and Jason Mraz, and the mention of Sugar Ray here has me smiling because she loved “When It’s Over.” Anyway, I think the selection of artists in both editions represent the two periods well. (And the 2012 ones are also kind of funny, because it’s like, okay, indie girl.)
Nothing much to say here other than “neo-feminist” being added in 2012 alongside “anti-imperialist,” which speaks to me again as someone who educated myself a lot on the movement and intersectionality at the time. Say what you will, but Rookie did so much in terms of empowering young women to embrace, learn more about, and embark on their personal journeys with feminism, and this includes giving them the voice and agency to launch their own webzines.
VCDs are kind of on the same boat as MD players, not as popular or nostalgic as VHS tapes and DVDs, but they were pretty common in my house because they were cheaper to get authentic. Not to go on another parent-related tangent, but I got my last VCD in 2008—a copy of 10 Things I Hate About You that I asked for after watching an hour-long broadcast about the life and career of Heath Ledger, who had recently passed. My dad got it for me at the Video City in SM North. (What a time.)
Another VCD memory: watching horror movies late at night and my cousins and I pointing fingers and arguing because we were all too scared to get out of bed to replace Disc 1 with Disc 2.
Another one of my favorite parts, where Miguel compares and contrasts our main girl with sosy, sweet, and safe Tonette, the Pathy to Una’s Carson. It tells us a lot about how he perceives the world around him and what he considers important, even if it’s just about the girl he has a crush on. (Obviously not Tonette, and it’s not even close.)
I think the Osbournes reference definitely should’ve been switched out since the show had stopped airing seven years ago in 2012, and it doesn’t really have cult-classic status. It could’ve been “like Cassie Ainsworth minus the hang-ups” or “like Violet from American Horror Story, but better,” but both are a little too edgy. Maybe Awkward or Suburgatory or Kat Dennings circa Nick & Norah or 2 Broke Girls? The Miley of this period doesn’t quite match Tonette’s characterization either since she would’ve been in her wild-child phase, but “Blake Lively, not on Gossip Girl, but in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” would’ve fit right in.
“Is a dean’s lister but doesn’t have much of an opinion” is way more powerful storytelling to me than the change to Camus, and it’s one of the edits I really didn’t like.
The text-speak in the original edition cracks me up, and it was great attention to detail to edit it out in the newer edition since it might be the most glaringly reflective of how much has changed in a decade. More than anything, it makes me think about how in sixth grade, my best friend at the time had an “Anti-TXTSPK” Friendster page. And how my mom’s texts never let this typing style go all the way through to 2021, and how dear that was to me.
Some more interesting changes and references I took note of that I chose not to scan: burning CDs, Mango always being replaced with Zara, Tropical Hut (which wasn’t edited out, I just love Tropical Hut and it was cool to read), the slang “exag.”
Revisiting the two versions of this work had me wondering if Bose herself had done the edits necessary to prepare it for republication. Based on my work and what I know about publishing, the answer should be a simple yes. She’d been editorial assistant at Seventeen and evidently knew what was cool in 2002, and I would’ve assumed that the same would be true ten years later because it’s all a matter of taste.
Her taste was still evident in certain parts, especially when it came to music, but it no longer felt like her finger was on the pulse of the zeitgeist. The characters were suddenly not as 100% in tune with the genuine 2012 teen experience, even if it was small things like teen heartthrobs. Chris Hemsworth wasn’t quite Candy Cutie material, but Josh Hutcherson or Robert Pattinson were.
Another thing I’m thinking about is: Would another refresh of Una & Miguel work today? Are there any more cool rock bands? Would Miguel be into Wallows and Geese (I hated typing these I have no fucking clue what local straight men listen to) and have thousands of Instagram followers just because he has a Vespa and that face? Would Una be listening to Soccer Mommy, Mitski, and Japanese Breakfast, and would she be a secretly popular NCT stan account? Am I just projecting and treating this as a fun creative thought exercise? Yeah, probably.
But this leads me to my answer: a mid-2020s (how the fuck are we mid-decade already) version of Una & Miguel would never work, just like the 2012 version was already barely working. They would live too differently, their DNA would have to be rewritten completely. These are not people who should know what the Omegaverse is.
An example I keep coming back to is Jerry Spinelli’s 2000 novel Stargirl, a celebration of nonconformity and staying true to yourself and what makes you happy. Its title character wore long dresses, played the ukulele, and chose her own name. When it was adapted into a movie twenty years after it was published, I knew even before watching that it was made too late. The message, while it remained earnest and important, didn’t quite land so hard during a time when it had gotten easier to find like-minded people online and niche subcultures, well, weren’t as niche anymore. Everyone wanted to set themselves apart now, everybody wanted to be different. Stargirl Caraway became just another girl who was not like other girls.
On the other hand, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower was published in 1999 and set even earlier, in the early ’90s. It stayed true to this setting for its 2012 film adaptation, which worked so well not only because of the understated and realistic approach and the fact that the author himself was directing, but also because the visual style was both timeless and spoke to what teens on Tumblr were interested in: something gritty, something flawed but beautiful.
 |
| Lady Bird itself is set in 2002, after Greta Gerwig’s own coming of age. |
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my project archiving magazines on @glossyarchive, it’s that Filipinos have so little reference and documentation available online of what life was like before and outside of social media. Most early blogs and web pages that would’ve been a goldmine to learn from and live vicariously through are gone. It would be a disservice to erase them even further by trying to modernize them for an audience that might be curious, even if they have to look up who Ani DiFranco is. Because literature perseveres and has the most impact when it captures humanity exactly as they are. If you never make anything that’s a product of its time, then why document anything at all?
(I also have to note how progressive, and, again, forever and ever and ever, how deeply cool it was for 2002. Una had a gay best friend named Choke! There was a drag show!)
It’s a testament to how real the characters feel in Una & Miguel, to how much they mean to me and how I regard them more like old friends than some ink on thin pages, that I’m so adamant that they don’t belong in 2012 or any other time because this is who they are, this is how they’ve grown up and this is how they exist.
I was 14 when I first read it and it changed my life. Over fifteen years later and I still resonate with Una’s independence and uncertainty. Her need to discover her own personhood, but also to belong in a community she’s cultivated and feels herself and at home in. Fifteen years later and the feelings of discovering a new crush and their unforgettable first kiss still linger. She’s a modern girl because she reflects not necessarily modern tastes, but modern and enduring emotions and experiences.
The book should be understood and appreciated for what has remained relevant and relatable about it. Like Stargirl, it’s a tribute to self-actualization and identity, so why strip it of what made it so fresh and authentic and ahead of its time? In the end, that’s what stays with you.