EFFORTPOST Alice Guo Part II: Her autobiography

Our story takes place in Bamban, an ordinary city of about 50,000 people in the middle of the Philippines.

I'm going to pick up where we left off in the first part. I'm going to limit myself just to stuff that came out in May. This is when she starts answering questions, weaving a fairy tale about where she comes from. I'll try to tell her story of how she came to be the mayor Bamban and center of all this drama. It won't be easy as her memories have change quite a bit from day to day. But to be fair, she's getting asked some pretty hard-hitting questions like "Do you have any siblings?"

In happier times.

We now get a dramatic origin story, fit to be a fairy tale. Her father was Chinese hog farmer Jian Zhong Guo, who adopted the Filipino name Angelito. At first she claims she doesn't know who her mother was, but later reveals it was Filipina Amelia Leal. Born July 12, 1986 as the love child of Angelito's forbidden affair with a maid, she was kept secluded on the hog farm, not even learning her own true identity until she was about 12-14. Recalling the shame of this part of her life is too much and tears well up in her eyes. Sadly there doesn't seem to be any record proving that Jian Zhong Guo or Amelia Leal exist.

Come on, you can cry more than that!

Alice grows up on the hog farm, which sounds like a downright magical place. She never attends school, being homeschooled by a teacher named Rubilyn, yet another very obscure resident of Bamban who didn't leave much of a paper trail behind. Later her education is continued by her fellow hog farmers who take her under their wing. She had a half-brother who now lives in China, but he must not have been important to her since she forgot he existed at first. Since she had been born at home, she never got a birth certificate. She gets one at age 17. That's not unheard of, but unfortunately she made a lot of mistakes so the basic facts about her parents on the birth certificate do not match any of her hazy recollections.

Maybe a stork delivered her.

Young Alice quickly proves to have a flair for business, perhaps coached by those loyal hog farmers. The first corporation is created in her name when she's only 24, and soon she has built her own little empire of 11 companies in a variety of fields from embroidery to smelting to (of course) slaughtering livestock. Looking for new worlds to conquer, she suddenly entered politics, successfully running for mayor of Bamban. Who taught her how to run a campaign so quickly? She gives the credit to the hog farmers, of course. Is there anything they can't do?

Actual footage of the hog farmers who take such good care of our princess.

Despite the demands of her many businesses and political career, Guo still enjoyed her hobbies. She loved cars, owning 16 vehicles. Well, I guess 17 if you count her helicopter. But one of these cars stood out from all the others, a beauty that nobody else in Tarlac or even the whole country could beat. She had her very own McLaren 620R supercar, one of only 350 ever built. We know because she took it out to display in auto shows and take pictures in front of it. Exactly where it came from is a bit of a mystery, as none were ever legally exported to the Philippines. One was seized from a smuggler by Customs and appraised at $672,080. Maybe Guo bought this one at auction, as no others are known to exist in the Philippines.

Maybe don't emphasize so much that you're the mayor of a town of 50,000 when you're showing off this car.

Remember that POGO that this whole story is about? One of Alice's business ventures was the Baofu Land Development Corporation. They did a bunch of real estate transactions. The important thing is, these involved Guo, the land the POGO was built on, the company that owned that land, and a Chinese guy named Zhang Ruijin. After being elected, Guo approved the construction of the POGO. In May, Zhang was coincidentally being prosecuted in Singapore over a massive $2 billion money laundering scheme that's a huge scandal in itself.

One of the 36 buildings in the compound.

At the end of May, there was no end to the hearings in sight. Obviously she came from China at some point, but when? For what purpose? Who does she really work for? Was she here to make money off internet scams or to spy?

Google is so bad that I searched for Alice Guo memes and this is all I got.

Next time we'll finally find out the true identity of Alice Guo! And hopefully I'll catch up to the present day because the drama just don't stop with this one. Today they put out a warrant for her arrest.