An Etymology of Sayang

Sayang, the Filipino word for regretfulness expressed over waste

Sayang, in Filipino

Use Case #1: You want to try out that new café you saw on Instagram, against your friend’s advice!

Sayang in Filipino expresses a regretfulness over waste, or otherwise a potential waste. Now let’s see the word in action. When your friend says the iced latte at the new café you saw on Instagram isn’t worth 260 pesos, she advises you: sayang lang pera mo diyan. When you order it anyway and discover for yourself that it tastes like wet soil, you agree with: sayang nga pera ko dito. But they had a fancy La Marzocco and everything! Sayang naman investment nila. When you can’t go on drinking it after two sips and toss it in the trash: sayang yung kape. When you and your friend agree that given its convenient location it could’ve been your new haunt: sayang.

Use Case #2: All you do in class is sleep, and the times that you are awake, you are cutting paper!

In high school I was told I was sayang, and by my home economics teacher no less. My home ec teacher—let’s call her Rosa—was tiny, like below 5-feet, with cropped, graying hair and a maternal aura about her. But her well-meaning nature didn’t make me any less irritated when she said—and she pulled me out of class to tell me this—sayang ka, matalino ka pa naman. What a waste, given how intelligent you are.

Sayang is a double-edged blade like that. It acknowledges the existence of more—in this case, intelligence—while criticizing your inability to make the most out of it. So, Rosa was pretty disappointed in me. I hadn’t turned in an embroidery project. This project was well within my skill level, where was my sense of responsibility, don’t I want to keep playing soccer, etcetera etcetera. But hand-embroidery, let me tell you, is a brutal endeavor I would not wish even on the classmate who contributed jack shit to the group work but still listed their name first on the submission.

Me, by my friend Kayla, 2010. She used to bring her lomo camera to school and take photos of us during breaks. This must’ve been shot on her Diana mini.

The school I attended had at most 165 students in each grade, and so, you can imagine, everyone knew everyone, the high school teachers knew the grade school teachers, and Rosa knew my ex-homeroom-advisor. Rosa proceeded with her soft-spoken tirade: rinig ko naman matataas grades mo noon. I heard your grades were pretty good then. But now all you do in class is sleep. And when you aren’t sleeping, you’re cutting paper! (I didn’t bother notifying her my scissors had been confiscated during Christian Living earlier that day, and I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.)

Why was I unable to stay awake in class despite my best efforts? Why did I compulsively cut paper, or fold paper, or rip them into the tiniest possible halves? Why did one of my best friends tell me I wasn’t laughing as much as I used to? I’m sure you might be able to piece something together. Now take whatever you’ve pieced together, and hold it up against sayang: Do you suppose it might be the cause of sayang, or the byproduct of it? Interesting. I thought both, too—they nourished each other well.

Use Case #3: You would be so worthy of love, if only you changed who you are!

Sayang, once bestowed, is branded onto your skin, in a place only you can see. And then, over time, you forget what your skin once looked like. Hasn’t this always been my skin? Hasn’t this always been a part of me?

Sayang would follow me out of high school, throughout college, and into my professional life—maybe especially in my professional life, because becoming a theatre actor is one way to have your sayangs efficiently listed out as if on a resume. From directors: sayang, I could sing, but I didn’t have the slightness of an ingenue, or effusive countenance of an 18 year-old. From relatives: sayang if I just continued to grind away like this. I was young, I had energy. It wasn’t too late for law school.

Sayang was no longer a teacher’s misguided criticism that I could roll my eyes at—it was a character trait, a negative one, which I would take on as a deficiency in my personhood. I could not help but conflate my quality of sayang with [whatever it is you have decided it is in your mind]. I was sayang, I was destined to fall short of my aspirations—it was genetics, it was fate, and it was so easy to confuse the two.

Sayang was seared onto my skin as a girl, and remained long after—a bumpy, raised keloid, tender to the touch.

Sayang, in Indonesian

In Indonesia, our neighbor and fellow archipelago, sayang is said in affection. I didn’t learn this until recently—that in another language, this word could evoke love. Sometimes sayang is used as a term of endearment: instead of darling, or beloved—sayang.

It felt bittersweet, discovering that this word which in my Filipino implied there could have been more in another language said there is more. There is more to you that you do not see, but I see it. Because you are my beloved, and you are always more.

Neighbors!

Sayang, in Singapore

I’ve since read that the Indonesian sayang can also be used like the regretful Filipino sayang—not surprising, given these neighboring languages most likely evolved from the same ancient Malay. In one tongue then, sayang is able to simultaneously evoke both regret and love.

In the cultural melting pot that is Singapore, where Filipino, Indonesian, and Malay among other languages find themselves intermingling, this intercultural reality wills sayang to embrace both meanings: yes, it is regret, and yes, it is love. Like the Filipino sayang, it evokes the more that could’ve been. Like the Indonesian sayang, it evokes the beloved. But sayang, having been displaced from its homeland and finding itself in a new environment, evolves into a slightly different thing: the Singaporean sayang can express a sense of regret over a love that is lost, or regret over a beloved that could have been but can no longer be.

My first theatre production, 2001. It was the showcase of a summer workshop that took place at a mall.

I am no longer in high school, or college, or working in theatre. I am in a new environment, and have been for some time now. The self, having been uprooted, displaced, and having found shelter in a new home—could now evolve into something not so drastic as a shiny, better object, but perhaps just a slightly different thing. What is it they say in Thailand? Same same but different? A gentle reframing, then: Where there was once regret over who I could’ve been, there is now affection for who I could yet become.

Sayang, no longer as a deficiency in character, but a deficiency in circumstance? Sayang not as a lack of ability or drive, but the acknowledgement of how rare it is for the right things to occur at the right time. Sometimes in sports, when a game between two evenly matched teams is decided by an unforeseen injury, or a buzzer-beating shot, fans of the losing team will exclaim: sayang!—not in a way that’s entirely mournful, but almost as if galvanized and raring to go. Sayang as in that was unlucky—but we’ll get ‘em next time! And I like this kind of sayang. A good sport sayang. A sayang which concedes to the mischief of fate.

This is not a tidy resolution, but a precursor to forgiveness. Where my old sayang bore down on me like fate, this new sayang tells me: there are more futures for you, there always will be. But more importantly: it was not your fault.