Then 23, she was living in a wooden shack beside the tracks with four children under 5. It was 6pm on May 25, 1992, and So was among the 70 per cent of Filipinos watching the Channel 2 evening news. “I didn’t have a job back then,” she says, starting in on her Pepsi story. For more than 28 years she’s nurtured bitter resentment against the company.
If someone asks for a Pepsi, her expression sours. With a kind smile, she serves them warm bottles of water and Royal Tru, one of a few sodas she displays alongside tiny shampoo sachets and single cigarettes. In the steamy heat of a summer afternoon, shirtless children appear at her window clutching coins. Marily So, a woman in her early fifties with greying hair, runs a sari-sari store out of her one-room home in a concrete building beside a railway track in Manila.