On any night, if you happen to be in Angeles City, try to visit the Friendship Road located at the Anonas district, and suddenly you’ll feel you are in the Gangnam area of Seoul in South Korea. Almost a kilometer of restaurants, hotels, videoke and grocery stores are lined up on both sides of the road.
On any night with those colorful blinking lights and neon signs which are in Korean characters, take shots on your cellphone camera, post them on Facebook and caption them “relaxing in Gangnam”. You can pull everyone’s leg.
Sangyupsal, kimchi and few Korean slang words we commonly hear now have been added to our local dictionary. The Koreans have “invaded” Angeles City, and slowly but surely they have built their own community in and around this district and filled those vacant residential houses in nearby subdivisions. They may number up to more or less 15,000.
Why are they here, you may want to ask? Obviously, for various reasons. But first the background.
The Korean Peninsula was divided into two – the north and the south. The Korean war raged for three years, 1950 to 1953. The war divided the country into a communist northern half and an American-occupied southern half, the division marked by the 38th parallel as the demarcation line.
And until today, there is no reunification between the two Koreas. There were several efforts, but all failed. And it seems the peninsula will never be reunited.
A few years ago I traveled to Panmunjong, the last Korean city before North Korea with my friends Ferdinand Beltran, Martin Vitug and Pampanga Board Member Ananias Canlas Jr. and saw for ourselves the no man’s land that separates the two Koreas. Our travel guide was so impressed when I told him about the participation of our Filipino soldiers during that war. That our soldiers were the last combatants repelling the onrushing North Korean contingents aided by communist Chinese troops. They were the soldiers belonging to the Philippine Expeditionary Forces to Korea (PEFTOK) where former President Fidel Ramos saw action.
The postwar planners had intended that the division between the north and south would be a temporary administrative solution, but to this day, the reunification effort on both sides had been stonewalled. And every now then, due to change in leadership from Kim Il Sung, considered as the great leader of the North Korean nation, to his son Kim Jong il and now the very young and inexperienced grandson Kim Jong Un would intermittently send shivers to the south every time the latter would order tests of their nuclear arsenals. That’s one good reason why many Koreans are placing investments in other nations, particularly in our country.
The experience of the South Vietnamese people during the fall of Saigon in the late 60s after it was overrun by the North Vietnamese soldiers may have influenced the actions now of the Koreans coming from the south.
The other reason why mostly they are settled here in Angeles City and some to Baguio City, Metro Manila and in Cebu City in the south is because of proximity. The activation of the Clark International Airport must have contributed largely to the coming of the Koreans. One of their legacy carriers, Asiana Airlines and some budget airlines like Jin Air make regular flights to Clark.
Besides the proximity, the business climate in Angeles City is another attraction. And talking about attraction, many pretty young Filipina girls are now frequently escorted by Korean gentlemen. It will be no longer a surprise to us that in the coming years we can have in the mainstream Philippine society Filkor kids, products of procreation by the two races. Gone are the days of Fil-Am kids after the closure of Clark Air Force Base in 1991.