Monthly Archives: May 2023

Qwertyman No. 42: Life Lessons for the College Student

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Qwertyman for May 22, 2023

TWO YEARS ago, well before I began writing this column, I was asked to share some thoughts with fellow teachers of General Education—that special recipe of college courses in various disciplines meant to give incoming students a basic but challenging introduction to the issues of life and society. Instead of giving a lecture, I decided to come up with a list of 12 “life lessons” that I thought every undergrad should learn, one way or another, over their four years in college. I’d like to share them here as well, with further notes from me in parentheses, to reach a larger audience—and yes, even well beyond college. Here goes:

1. You don’t have to understand everything right away. In any case, you can’t. Some things in life will forever remain mysteries—some of them wonderful, some of them perplexing. Staying curious is what matters to the lifelong learner. (Aside from being usually obnoxious and insufferably arrogant, know-it-alls never learn that they can’t possibly know everything.)

2. Engagement helps—and by engagement, I mean investing yourself, putting in your time, effort, and maybe even money behind some belief or idea or activity that means something to you. Sometimes engagement is the best way of knowing, learning, and finally understanding. (Talk is cheap; get off your butt and actually do something. Remember the “community pantry”? That was because somebody took charge of an idea and put it into action.)

3. Not everything has to have practical value—at least not yet, or maybe ever. Value can mean more than utility or money. Delight and discovery are their own rewards. (All art involves finding beauty in the abstract; even sport is the quest of abstract perfection. Of course both art and sport have ironically become big business, and their best practitioners deserve every reward, but just as ironically, their greatest feats are driven by love and passion, not money.)

4. You are not the center of the universe. Not everything has to do with you. However, every connection you can make to the world around you leaves a mark that you were here—and that, in your own way, you mattered. (Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

5. Learn to see time in years and centuries, not seconds or hours. If you want to foretell the future, look back to the past. We may seem to be headed for the future, but in fact we will all inevitably be part of the past. How will you want to be remembered? (Repeat: Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

6. Intelligence, cleverness, knowledge, and wisdom are very different things. Knowledge without values is worthless and even dangerous. The middling student who has a sense of good and bad and right and wrong is worthier than the summa cum laude who doesn’t. (The people who have methodically impoverished and destroyed this country are no idiots; they are experts at what they do, or can hire whatever expertise they need.)

7. The first thought that comes to your mind may not be the best one. Pause and think before you speak or write, especially in these days of Facebook and Twitter. Speech but also silence can require courage and good judgment. (Live and write as if there were no “delete” or “unsend” buttons at your fingertips.)

8. Learn to love something larger than yourself, your family, and your prized possessions. “Nation,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “equality” are very attractive ideas, but you have to learn to bring these big words down to earth, in concrete forms, actions, and decisions. Can you accept that you are your housekeeper’s equal as a human being? (Good citizenship is always personal. Bad leadership is no excuse; be the example to your family, friends, and community.)

9. Be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes—and even to fail. You can learn more from failure than from over-performance. Everybody—even the very best of us—will fail sometime, and it will be good to believe that we are all entitled to at least one big mistake in our lives. (Being humbled by failure is always a good starting point; as we like to say in Diliman, you have nowhere to go but up!)

10. Be prepared to change your mind. As you grow and learn, some things will become more simple, and others more complex. You are not a fixed entity; you are changing all the time, and you can change faster than the world around you. (In my twenties, I thought I had the world all figured out in black and white, and would have been prepared to die for my causes. I’m glad I didn’t—I needed more time to learn that the world is mostly shades of gray, and that “compromise” is not necessarily a bad word.)

11. Technology can be deceptive. It can lead us to believe that the world is changing very fast and for the better. That may be true for some of us and for the way we live. But for many others left behind, the world is no better than it was a hundred years ago. (Technology, even artificial intelligence, is amoral. It’s only as good as the person who uses it, and his or her intentions.)

12. Competition is good, but cooperation is often better—and necessary. Poems are written by solitary genius, but bridges, cathedrals, and nations are built by many minds and hands. The best way to deal with loneliness is to find meaning in the many—to learn from and to contribute to the experience of others. (And I’m not talking here just about networking online; indeed nothing has made us lonelier in this century than the Internet. Share a cup of coffee, and learn to listen—their causes could be more urgent than yours, and you might even have the answer.)

Qwertyman No. 41: Living up to “Honorable”

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 15, 2023

I’VE BEEN following the saga of the Hon. George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York, who’s been caught in a tangle of lies he made about his education and employment on his résumé, and who’s now been charged in federal court on 13 counts from wire fraud and money laundering to theft of public funds and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. So brazen have been this young politico’s prevarications that even his fellow Republicans—many of whom had forced themselves to swallow Donald Trump’s gargantuan lies about the 2020 election—have called on Santos to resign, if only to spare their party from the prolonged embarrassment of nursing a self-confessed falsifier in their ranks.

Now this is what gets me: Santos had earlier admitted to having fabricated about four-fifths of his CV, an act he called “résumé embellishment” which involved a “poor choice of words.” He said he was sorry—but then just as quickly insisted that he was no criminal and intended to serve the rest of his term, and even run for re-election. He boldly reappeared in Congress—still dressed like the preppy he never was—and acted like nothing happened. Despite the ostracism, he stood his ground, knowing that under its rules, the US Congress couldn’t kick out one of its own—even someone convicted of a crime, unless that crime was treason.

The story fascinates me because it illustrates the utter shamelessness and disregard for the truth that now seems par for the course in politics, and not just in America. The fact that many of his colleagues found Santos’ behavior reprehensible offers hope that some people still know right from wrong. The other fact, that Santos refuses to take responsibility for his actions and resign—and that some people continue to support him nonetheless—reminds us of how degraded the idea of “honor” has become in contemporary society. 

Social scientists tell us that “honor” has evolved over the centuries from the chivalric, even aristocratic notion of responsibility to a community—think of a hero undertaking a noble sacrifice, even at the cost of one’s life, for the common good—to something much more individualized and internalized, to one’s own sense of respect, dignity, and integrity. 

I’d argue even further that for most people today, “honor” has become a much more elastic term, one that allows for a range of justifiable behaviors. I’ll give you an example: would you rat on an officemate, perhaps even your best friend, who’s also your chief competitor for that AVP position? You could, and you would—if you convince yourself that becoming that AVP is a more important honor, something your family and circle of friends would appreciate. This is the difference, as one scholar noted, between “internal” and “external” honor, between integrity and reputation. If we equate, as many might, “reputation” with popularity, with a positive public perception of your image, then it’s easy to see how and why many people find integrity expedient and expendable.

These thoughts ran through my mind when I learned of the recent passing of former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario, and read the many eulogies and encomiums following his death. All of them spoke of him as a man of honor, someone who fought for his country, stood by his word, and conducted himself with dignity. I had only occasional brushes with him, but can agree from those encounters with what was said. Some people communicate their integrity instantly, even wordlessly, just by their very manner. 

On the other hand, there are people who, by their swagger and arrogance (often a cover for some deeply felt inferiority), immediately invite mistrust if not repugnance. I’m reminded of a man who, from his lofty perch, drenched the good secretary with vitriol, accusing him of being “not a Filipino, you don’t look like a Filipino,” and threatening to “pour coffee on your face.” To which the diplomat merely reiterated the need to defend the country’s interests and to beware of the duplicity of our aggressive neighbor. 

The sad thing is how many Pinoys laughed along with that sneering man and thought that he was doing and saying the right thing. For years, he had fed them a diet of vulgarity, as if to reinforce the idea that that was the Filipino’s natural state and that he was one of them and spoke their language. In fact, he was cultivating and normalizing their basest instincts, an easier thing to do than the nobler alternative: appealing to their better selves, to what they could yet be. I see this innate goodness and decency, this desire for self-betterment, in Filipinos every day, even among the poorest of us. Overwhelmingly, this is still who and what we are. Those who believe otherwise debase only themselves.

But we are short on exemplary leadership—on leaders who value honor and integrity, on leaders who can feel shame, on leaders who can curb their profligacy out of respect for the poverty of the many, on leaders who will be genuinely missed and mourned by the masses when they depart. Our role models have become so few—and our expectations of our officials have become so low—that many of us have forgotten what honor truly means, assuming simply and tragically that it comes with wealth and power. The word “Honorable” is too easily affixed to certain high offices. Are they truly so?

I may be aghast at Rep. George Santos’ behavior in New York, but who knows how many lies are buried in our politicians’ CV’s, how many “résumé embellishments” and “poor choices of words” we have had to swallow?

And then again there’s a part of me that says, forget the résumé; it’s never been a trustworthy predictor of moral intelligence. Ability is the most basic we should expect of our “honorables.” Living up to their titles lies at the other extreme. But still I have to wonder: if a George Santos happened here, would he resign? 

Qwertyman No: 40: Teaching History

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 8, 2023

I HAVE a subscription to the New York Times, which I enjoy for its features and commentary as much as its news coverage, and the other day my attention was piqued by a small headline: “It’s Not Just Math and Reading: US History Scores for 8th Graders Plunge.”

According to the article, recent test scores reveal that young Americans (about 13-14 years old for eighth-graders) have become much less knowledgeable about their history and civics over the past decade—with 40 percent scoring “below basic” and only 13 percent ranked as “proficient.” 

I immediately wondered how our students would score given similar tests. Would they be able to answer even simple questions about why Ferdinand Magellan sailed to the Philippines, what prompted Filipinos to revolt against Spain, why the Americans occupied us, what led to our involvement in the Second World War, and what martial law and EDSA were all about? I’ll probably be safe in my prediction that they would score dismally, from what I’ve seen in my own classes in UP (yes, in UP), where I’ve been dismayed to find a yawning ignorance of history and literature among my students, supposedly among the best in the country. 

Don’t get me wrong: these are bright, idealistic kids, desirous of all things good for their people and their families. They perform well in class and will likely succeed in whatever career lies ahead of them. But when I ask a roomful of English majors if they know or have read NVM Gonzalez and only a couple of hands go up, I get worried. When I ask when or what year the Americans arrived to conquer us and I get strange answers like “1945,” I get worried. 

However shocked we may profess to be, we can’t blame the students. In 2014, following the passage of the Enhanced Education Act of 2013 or the K-12 Law, the Department of Education issued Order No. 20, Series of 2014, effectively removing Philippine History as a high school subject and subsuming it as an “integrated subtopic” under “Asian Studies,” supposedly to provide students with a wider global perspective. The idea sounds nifty, but as many educators have since pointed out, its practical effect has been to dilute the teaching of Philippine history to the point of oblivion. The result is that we have young Filipinos with no knowledge of the most basic facts and issues of their past, and no appreciation of how that past brought us to where we are today.

That vacuum has been an open invitation to misinformation and historical distortion, the stock-in-trade of political propagandists, trolls, and spinmeisters. It’s become much easier to sell myths like a golden age under martial law to impressionable youngsters who were never told or taught the truth. Not surprisingly, Order No. 20 has been attacked by its critics as a means to lobotomize the youth and to render them more susceptible to alternative narratives (aka fake news) concerning our history. 

And yes, I have to acknowledge that all this began under the late President Noynoy Aquino, a champion of K-12, whom I prefer to believe had no such nefarious motives in mind, as he and his family would have had little to gain by erasing history. But the policy was upheld and sustained by the following administration, with DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones arguing strenuously that History (including our martial-law experience) was being taught in Grade 6 under Araling Panlipunan, and again in high school as a component of Asian and World History.

Given the current DepEd’s expressed desire to review K-12, it might be a good time to test how effective that policy has been: just how much Philippine History are our high school students learning and retaining? How much should they know by the time they get to college, where thornier issues such as nationalism, agrarian reform, and foreign policy will be threshed out in all their nuances?

Long before these questions arose, it was a common complaint among students and even teachers that our problem with History was how badly it was taught, often as a collection of names and dates rather than a coherent narrative (which I must say I sometimes wonder about, fact often being stranger and messier than fiction). We generally agree that History should involve more reasoning than rote memorization. But as the New York Times reports, “That emphasis can contribute to a troubling lack of background knowledge,” with experts observing a “rapid and very significant decline in what students know about history and geography—like the fact that Africa is a continent, not a country.” So the basics of names, dates, and places remain important—getting the facts straight before getting into more complicated arguments.

It’s even more troubling to note that on top of this decline in historical knowledge and awareness among young Americans, there’s now a ham-fisted effort from conservative politicians to purge school curricula of what they see as “woke” content—subjects that have challenged the longstanding impression of America as a nation forged by whites. Governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis—eager to present themselves as the flag-bearers of political and moral rectitude—have supported moves to eliminate African-American and LGBTQ studies from the curriculum. Others have called for banning books that threaten their view of traditional America, including books titled “The Infinite Moment of Us” (a young adult novel about love and sex) and “How to Be an Antiracist” (a nonfiction book about racism and ethnicity). This reminded me of how some Philippine state universities, not too long ago, went on their own book-banning spree, on some silly suspicion that books by such authors as National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera were “subversive.”

The New York Times piece came with an irresistible teaser: a brief five-question, multiple-choice history quiz for readers to test themselves on how well they know American history. I scored four out of five (failing a question about post-Civil War reconstruction)—not too bad, I thought, for a guy living seven thousand miles away. But then I come from a generation schooled on American textbooks, who know American history and geography better than many Americans. That’s a topic for another column.

In the meanwhile, let’s ask ourselves: how well do we know our history, and how important is that knowledge to understanding our present and shaping our future? Is “Maria Clara and Ibarra” pointing the way forward?

Penman No. 450: A Hillside Haven

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Penman for Sunday, May 7, 2023

“SHAMBALA’ IN Tibetan Buddhism is a mythical kingdom where, according to lore, resides a community devoted to good deeds. But there’s a real version of it, aligned with the same beneficent principle, and it’s just two hours from Manila on a good day.

Thanks to the herculean efforts of the wife-and-husband team of Riza and Albert Muyot, a place called Shambala Silang now exists to welcome city folk fleeing stress, pollution, and stop-and-go traffic for a day or two of blissful living.


The two-hectare hillside resort seems larger than it is, magnified by the panorama that opens behind it—the green sprawl of a provincial landscape under a bright blue bowl of sky. But “resort” seems a misnomer, because Shambala doesn’t have a swimming pool, a karaoke bar, a disco, or a zipline. Except for short walks around the property, you don’t come to Shambala to work up a sweat, but rather to relax, meditate, and celebrate life, whether by yourself or better yet, in the company of loved ones and friends.

That’s what we did on a recent day trip organized by fellow writer and academic and dear friend Edna Manlapaz, at the gracious invitation of the Muyots. (Albert—a lawyer and former Undersecretary of Education—is another old friend, a fellow fountain-pen enthusiast and Michigan alumnus.) The main invitee and guest of honor was actually National Artist for Literature Jimmy Abad who came with his wife Mercy, and we roped in novelist Charlson Ong to complete the party.

From Quezon City, Shambala is best reached by the Skyway, then CALAX, then a series of backroads winding through Silang. We have friends who have chosen to relocate here, and passing through groves of mango and other fruit trees, we can understand why. If you want to disengage from city life, Silang is an easy option, where you can vanish into the woods while still being a short drive away from modern necessities. A narrow dirt trail leads uphill to Shambala, and I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much from what I could (or couldn’t) see on the road, but then it appears at the very end, and the magic begins.

Shambala is a cluster of several buildings containing art galleries, collections of Philippine tribal art and culture, halls for meetings and celebrations, restaurants, gardens, and the Muyots’ private residence. It has six tribal houses open for overnight (or longer) stays, operating as a B-and-B. The houses are authentic structures brought down from the north when their owners no longer needed them, and rebuilt piece by piece. “They were originally constructed without nails, but we had to reinforce them and to introduce some modern touches and conveniences to make them more comfortable for our guests,” said Riza. “For example, we expanded the space beneath the houses , which was traditionally used for farm animals like chickens, so we could put a platform around which people could sit and meet. We also added friendlier stairs.” The one-room houses are spacious and airy, and a modern bathroom stands outside each of them.

Below the houses, down the hillside, is a circle of stones with a fireplace at its center—a dap-ay traditionally used for meetings of tribal elders and for religious functions, but now serving as a virtual theater or arena for post-prandial get-togethers under the moonlight.

And everywhere you look, there are trees—about a thousand of them, according to the Muyots, a hundred of which are Benguet and Norfolk pine, specially brought in. “There was nothing here when we bought the place around 2000 but pineapples and coffee,” said Albert. The Muyots were then looking for a sylvan hideaway to run to from their workplaces in Manila. They found the property and fell in love with it, although today’s Shambala wasn’t necessarily what they had in mind. “This is all Riza’s doing,” Albert explained. “She’s the one with the vision, the one who saw the possibilities and brought them to reality.” Now the CEO of Save the Children Philippines, Albert is happy enough to work on his laptop from his home office on the property (yes, there’s wi-fi all around).

A CPA who once worked with SGV, Riza comes from a corporate background. She’s also a gifted poet whose works subtly appear among the art on the walls. “Culture, heritage, art, and nature—that’s what we devote ourselves to here in Shambala,” Riza said. “We have an ongoing exhibit of soil painting featuring artists from the Talaandig tribe in Bukidnon. Do you know that there are 21 colors of soil in Bukidnon? They add water to those soils and use them in their painting. “ Shambala brought over Mindanao artists such as Kublai Millan and Datu Waway Saway to share their experiences and insights in the TIBOK Community Art Fair last month.

“People discovered us during the pandemic,” said Albert. “They went to Tagaytay, only to be turned away because of local restrictions on visitors from out-of-town, like seniors who couldn’t be let in. They came here and liked it, and spread the word.” It’s no surprise that on busy weekends, as many as 200 people pass through Shambala’s gates. Shambala has consistently ranked No. 1 in TripAdvisor surveys of such resorts in the area.

So if you want to try something exquisitely different—like their signature welcome drink made from malunggay, luya, and calamansi—drive off the beaten track to Tagaytay and try Shambala one of these days. The food’s as heavenly as the place itself, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t come here sooner. You can find out more about Shambala and their rates on their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/ShambalainSilang/.

Qwertyman No. 39: My Mother Emy

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 1, 2023

Pardon me if my column this week is a bit personal, because its subject is my mother Emilia, who will turn 95 next week, against all odds and through the grace of the One she prays to every night and every morning, and in the loving embrace of her five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In this age of murderous Covid, rampant cancers, devastating disasters, and political turmoil, to reach 95 is extraordinary. To be 95 and be reasonably healthy, free of dementia (but for a few memory lapses that even I at 69 am prone to), able to walk a few hundred meters for her daily exercise, read without glasses, and comment tartly on the day’s political and entertainment news is almost superhuman. 

Like today’s children, my mom Emy can’t be removed from her iPhone and her iPad; she loves to play word games, beats my wife Beng at Scrabble, devours Netflix by the series, and has her telenovela programming graven in stone. She has daily Facetime audiences with our daughter Demi in California and my sister Elaine in Toronto. She even gave up her US green card to spend, she says, the rest of her time at home. In her “Tuesday Circle” of elderly friends, she is now the most senior, but hardly the most infirm. Best of all, she looks forward to reading my books and columns, and although I suspect that they sometimes bewilder her as much as they do my other readers, she invariably likes them because they were written by her first-born, who cannot possibly write anything badly. (This week’s surprise column, I think, will be a hit with her.)

A quarter-century ago, shortly after my father Jose Sr. died, we thought we were going to lose her as well. That’s what they say often happens—one dies, and then the other follows, in the utmost expression of devotion and sympathy. Emy was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so serious and advanced that we felt we were gathering at her deathbed, her sheets spotted with the blood she was coughing up. I had never seen her so frail and so helpless. She was missing my father terribly, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded leaving us to join him at that moment. 

Theirs had been a storybook, whirlwind romance. She was the youngest daughter of a landowner in Romblon, the only one in their brood of twelve whom her father had trusted to study and go to college in UP in Manila. She was her father Cosme’s pet, a girl who rode horses on his farm and who accompanied him when he took a boat to the big city to off-load his copra harvest and to buy necessities and a few baubles for his large family. It must have pained him when she decided to finish her high school in Manila (“I was walking on Padre Faura and saw UP High, and so I went in to see how I could study there,” she says) and to stay there so she could study to become a teacher.

My father Joe was the brightest boy in his school and, so the local legend goes, in the whole province. He was an eloquent writer and speaker and cut a dashing figure. The only problem was, his family was poor—his grandfather had been a sharecropper, his father a farmer. His parents had separated shortly after he was conceived—another story that deserves a telling of its own—and lived about a kilometer apart for the rest of their lives. Raised by my grandmother Crispina, Joe seemed destined for great things far beyond Romblon. He already had a girlfriend, among the town’s prettiest bachelorettes (I met her once when I was a boy, unaware of why she was looking at me a certain way.)

One day Emy and Joe met at the pier in Manila waiting for other people and other things. Some sparks must have flown, because not long after, they were together and engaged to be married. I was the first outcome of that improbable union, born in a nipa house in Alcantara, Romblon, pulled out of my mother by a midwife (whom I would meet about twenty years later, walking barefoot on the asphalt road, and whom I would rather awkwardly gift with a pack of Marlboros in token thanks for my delivery).

The decades following would be a mixture of toil and triumph, of struggle and hope. Both my parents had enrolled in law school, but the need to sustain us foiled that dream. Joe had even gone to the police academy, in the class of James Barbers. He clerked for Public Works, became a Motor Vehicles Office agent with a shiny badge, and took on all kinds of jobs to support us. My mother Emy, despite her pride as a UP Education graduate, soldiered on beside him and sold stamps as a postal clerk. We went through some very rough times, constantly moving around the city with all our worldly possessions on the back of a truck in search of more affordable lodgings. Sometimes my father would be gone for long periods, working as far away as Mindanao to be able to send us some money. 

But one thing they always held up for us was the value of education. My parents slaved and my siblings sacrificed so I could go to a private school, thinking like most Filipinos of their generation that a facility in English would be my ticket to success. It was a huge relief for all (and a good excuse to buy our first TV) when I got a full scholarship to the PSHS. So it must have felt like a stab in my mother’s heart when I announced, shortly after entering UP on the swell of activism, that not only was I not going to be a scientist (my Math grades were miserable) but that I was also dropping out of college to find work (which I did at 18, to write for the Philippines Herald). Despite everything, I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps and gamble on my talent.

But I did come to my senses and many years later returned to school, where I remain to this day, with a lofty title my wife Beng prefers to downplay to “Chauffeur Emeritus.” Instead of following Joe to his grave, my mom Emy fought back, miraculously recovered, traveled the world, and cradled her great-grandchildren. So good things do happen to those who persevere and survive, for as long as we’re willing to give life another chance.

I honestly don’t think I’ll reach 95 myself, but I have the privilege—and the challenge—of living with someone to inspire me every day. Happy 95th, with all our love, Nanay!