I always forget whether it’s na or ng. I have this propensity for tacking on unnecessary -ng enclitics and eliding necessary ones. My cousins in the Philippines always find my mangled Tagalog highly entertaining.

But meditating on that phrase, I tried to see if I could parse it out. From the Tagalog that I managed to pick up from my parents, I always understood loob to have the literal meaning of “inside, interior.” I have a copy of the popular Tagalog-English Dictionary by Leo English and looked it up. Interestingly, the first definition is defined as “will; volition; state of mind; disposition; heart.” I’ve always thought that this definition was metaphoric. Obviously these are all internal states, emotions. Characteristics of what I would call, for want of a better name, the soul.

So this is my personal deconstruction of utang na loob: a debt of the soul. In this paradigm, one can think of Original Sin and its forgiveness by the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as utang na loob to God. But I digress.

My dad has always looked at the concept of utang na loob as a pernicious one. As I grew older and recognized the debts I have incurred to not only my parents, but my uncle and my aunt, my dad would laugh at me. “They own you now,” he would intone ominously.

You could almost say that my dad lives his life judiciously avoiding incurring this weighty debt.

I subsequently learned to think of this debt as a burden. The metaphors that frequently come to mind originate from Greek mythology. I think of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders for punishment of his war against Zeus. I think of Sisyphus condemned by Hades to roll his huge boulder to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll down again, damned to repeat this futile cycle over and over again throughout eternity—a very vivid description of the existential hell that Camus envisioned.

I recall how in my mother’s family, the eldest member of each of the two generations before me have always sacrificed themself for the benefit of the younger members. My grand-uncle Blas died in the Bataan Death March, which provided my mom’s family with an indemnity from the U.S. government, allowing them all to go to school. My uncle Telesforo was the first to come to the U.S., joining the Armed Forces, and sending whatever he could back to the Philippines, and subsequently petitioning his younger siblings over to the States. Even today, he continues to send considerable sums of money back, perhaps even to the detriment of creating incentive to strive.

While I am not the eldest member of my generation, either here or in the Philippines, I am the eldest child in my nuclear family, and I felt compelled to follow this almost self-destructive example, which is consanguine with the myth of Sisyphus and the polyvalent concept of utang na loob. If I wanted to be portentious and grandiose about it, I could say that this particular debt extends back to World War II, spanning two generations, and still this debt will never be repaid.

This no longer distresses me as much as it used to. After being educated by Jesuits, I’ve sort’ve internalized the idea of being “A Man for Others.” The Jesuits emphasized a life of active service to the community, and my choice of profession is very predicated on this idea. The oath I’ve sworn binds me to the service of humanity, and in this way I live out my utang na loob.

Is it a curse? A badge of honor? I don’t know. It’s all these things and more, a window into the soul of the Filipino. I wonder if other Southeast Asian cultures have a similar concept, or whether utang na loob is an import of Catholic Spain, wrapped up in the trappings of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the price for humanity’s sins.

The closest thing I can think of in English that has the same sort of generational timescale is the weregild—the bloodprice, except that this seems to involve more vigilante-ism rather than self-sacrifice, although in stories, being a vigilante frequently ends up being self-sacrifice.

An example of where the two sort of intersect lies within one of my favorite movies of all time, “The Princess Bride”. I’m sure you all know Iñigo Montoya. (You killed my father. Prepare to die.) His monomanic vengefulness against Count Rugen seems to incorporate both utang na loob and the weregild. It is his utang na loob to his slain father that drives him to exact a weregild from Rugen.

It may seem that the two concepts aren’t very related, but the way I link them up is that they can be thought of assigning a price to a person’s soul, the weregild in a (mathematically) positive sense, utang na loob in a negative sense.