by David Celdran

	F4 mania has swept Manila.

THE PRESIDENT had just delivered her ultimatum to the rebel soldiers: surrender or die. After the shocking takeover of the Oakwood Premiere building complex earlier that Sunday morning, the mutiny in Makati had just taken on another exciting twist. It was the time for both sides to either negotiate or dig in. It was also the time to, well, cut to regular entertainment.

Shortly before noon on July 27, news anchors on both ABS-CBN and GMA-7, the country's two largest networks, said their brief goodbyes to give way to regular programming. For ABS-CBN, that meant turning over to "Meteor Garden Rewind," a rerun of the wildly popular Taiwanese teen series "Meteor Garden." Now on its second season, "Meteor Garden" has since ruled over the ratings and remains the most-watched drama series ever in Philippine television history. With millions of faithful viewers glued to the tale of Shan Chai, a poor girl who mixes it up with four rich brats led by Dao Ming Shi, yanking out the Sunday rerun would be more than just a disappointment; it would be tantamount to betrayal. And for a diehard core of fans, cause for mutiny.

There were a few irate letters to the editor afterwards, from people who thought the mutiny merited nothing less than minute-by-minute coverage from the biggest local networks. But at ABS, the network executives apparently knew something that the coup plotters would never have imagined: nothing gets in between the millions of loyal fans and their favorite chinovela, not even a coup attempt.

The ratings that Sunday prove the network right. Despite a small drop in viewership compared to the previous weekend (a four-point ratings dip according to the survey group AGB Philippines), the audience share of the "Meteor Garden" rerun was bigger than any other channel on air. That included another ABS channel, Studio 23, which continued coverage of Oakwood. As expected, more than a million households in Metro Manila, the epicenter of the military mutiny, tuned out of the coup coverage to follow the story of Shan Chai and Dao Ming Shi instead.

Since the series began airing in May, the lives of the poor and feisty Shan Chai and the rich and attractive gang of four college boys known collectively as F4, have been part of the daily conversation of Filipinos in schools, offices, parlors, street corners — any place where people converge. Their story is unlike many other teen dramas. Common themes of adolescence dominate like puppy love and moral, gender, and generational conflict. Nothing unusual really, except for the program's meteoric rise to popularity and its current cult status in local pop culture that has spawned a satellite industry in "Meteor Garden" and F4 memorabilia.

But the omnipresence of chinovela kitsch in our daily life has less to do with what could be just another passing trend. Underneath all the frenzy and fanaticism, changes are taking place at a deeper cultural level. After all, Filipinos aren't new to TV hits with an attractive teenage cast, a coming-of-age plot line, and hit soundtrack. "Dawson's Creek" and "Beverly Hills 90210" share similar ingredients with "Meteor Garden." Both U.S. shows, however, lack these: an Asian cast in an Asian setting. And these are exactly why the baby-boomer programmers at the TV networks could never have imagined a Chinese-language drama taking the country by storm.

FOR THOSE who grew up before cable TV, Chinese entertainment meant Sunday morning dramas with bearded men in flowing silk robes or fragile women in cheongsam dancing to annoying (at least to young ears) traditional music. For this generation, Hollywood ruled and all else was either cheap imitation or tacky art.

Not so for today's kids, who now make up roughly 40 percent of the country's population, according to a U.N. tally of Filipinos under 18 years. The Filipino teenagers of the 21st century have more in common with kids across the South China Sea than with their elders across the street. Because of the globalization of media — in cable, magazines and the Internet — the young can now bypass the once mighty monopoly of U.S. media and explore neighboring mediascapes in Asia.

Ironically, because of television, an American invention, Asians are now becoming more "Asian." They idolize the same stars, sing the same songs, and follow the same fashion trends. "Meteor Garden," a Japanese manga (comic book) transformed for a Taiwanese teen audience, has since made its way across Asia, captivating fans in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand before finally invading the Philippines. Asian urban youth culture is spreading like wild fire across the region — disseminated mainly through the medium of entertainment. And because today's teens share increasingly common cultural experiences with other young Asians, it makes identifying with anything from the romantic sensibilities to the fashion sense of Taipei teenagers like Shan Chai and Dao Ming Shi so much easier.

Indeed, today's youth are more Asian than previously imagined. As pre-adolescents, they grew up with toys like Hello Kitty and Pokemon, played video games like "Tekken" and "Street fighter" and watched Japanese animé like "Sailor Moon" and "Dragonball Z" The influence of Western pop culture was further marginalized when local television programming trends in the 1990s narrowed the shelf space for U.S. sitcoms and dramas. With local hits in the vernacular entrenched in primetime television, Hollywood was banished to the niche channels of cable television.

The one area of television where Western culture remains strong is in the realm of pop music. But even this is slowly eroding. The Hong Kong-based Music Channel V and Singapore's MTV Asia are showing that when American music is programmed by Asians for Asians, a little bit of USA is lost in the process. Eminem may be the preeminent American rapper today, but when taken out of the context of American inner cities and inserted into the sanitized surroundings of MTV in Singapore, the gritty American pathos is gone and replaced by the chirpy mood of dance floors from Kuala Lumpur to Manila.

Regional channels like MTV Asia and Channel V are more than just adopting Western pop culture for Asian tastes. They are also introducing a new aesthetic that is uniquely Asian — at least the kind that young urbanites recognize and adapt as their own. The rise of English as a second language among the young is also speeding up the process of assimilation.

In the looks department, pan-Asian media employ actors and models with what are considered to be universal Asian features. The point is not really to look Malay, Hindu or Chinese, but simply Asian: global features for the global youth. It's almost impossible to tell what countries veejays like Donita Rose or Utt belong to (Philippines and Thailand respectively), and that's precisely the point. Part of the success of F4 in Asia is that they can all claim to look Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, or even Filipino. Ironically, Vanness, the only one who fits what most people think as "typically Chinese" in the group, happens to be an American.

It isn't hard then to see why young Filipinos are falling in love with Asian pop icons. For sure, Asian teenagers across the continent have their own unique characteristics and preferences. But compared to the West, they have much more in common with one another. Asians boys have long realized they look more like Koji Kabuto than Clark Kent and Asian girls have always known that their smaller Asian frames make Asian style more fashionable.

Finally, one could feel Asian and hip at the same time. Kids everywhere are creating a uniquely Asian style that now borders on the bizarre. Skin whitening is in and so is hair rebonding. That the new "in look" resembles the characters of "Meteor Garden" is no coincidence. Asians everywhere, including Filipinos, are slowly discarding Western standards of beauty for their own. The country's hottest stars and commercial endorsers like Heart Evangelista and Diether Ocampo epitomize the chinito look that has replaced decades of mestizo domination in the industry.