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About penmanila

A Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Qwertyman No. 99: A Call to Engage

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 24, 2024

I WASN’T going to start this column on this note since I had another topic in mind, but it occurred to me that these two concerns may after all be related and have a bearing on one another.

You may have missed it since it was just local news, but a few weeks ago, elections were held for the University of the Philippines Student Council (UPSC) in Diliman—historically, the breeding ground of young hopefuls destined for national politics. It’s always been a tight and sometimes even bitter contest of personalities and platforms, strategies and tactics, rhetoric and resources. Given its superior organization, ideological discipline, and progressive platform, the student Left has held an advantage in these elections over the past few decades, but vigorous and sometimes successful challenges have arisen from centrist parties appealing to more student-oriented causes. 

The outcome is often eagerly awaited. But last month, something incredible happened. The “abstain” vote won, leaving the posts of chairperson, vice chairperson, and many councilors unfilled—and they will so remain. 

It would be easy to read this as a sign of apathy, especially given that only 36.7 percent of the student body voted this year, but those “abstain” votes sent a clear and deliberate message: we don’t want any of you, we want something or someone better—could we please have some real change around here?

I could understand that; as a teacher (I still teach optionally, even if I’m retired), I’ve opened the classroom door to scores of student candidates asking for five minutes to make their campaign pitch, and almost invariably, it’s the same familiar litany of complaints over this and that (the same ones we ourselves mouthed half a century ago)—valid complaints, to be sure, but thoroughly tired and uninspiring. And when you ask, even in your mind, “So what are you going to do about it?”, you can hear the answer coming: “Elect us, and we’ll show you!” I let my students raise the difficult questions (that’s what I train them to do) and share their discomfort and embarrassment when they don’t get the specific and well thought-out answers they deserve.

Now, put that scene on “pause,” and let me report on another UP matter (even if you’re not from UP, this likely concerns you because UP accounts for about 20 percent of our national budget for higher education).

Last week, on the occasion of UP’s 116th founding anniversary, President Angelo A. Jimenez formally presented a set of ten “flagship programs” to the media and the public which his relatively new administration will seek to undertake—not necessarily complete, but at least initiate—over the remaining five years of his tenure. These programs were the result of year-long consultations with the university’s academic and administrative leaders. They cover academic excellence; inclusive admissions; research and innovation; Open Distance e-Learning (ODeL); Archipelagic and Oceanic Virtual University (AOVU); active and collaborative partnerships; arts and culture; expansion of public service offices; Quality Management System (QMS) and Quality Assurance (QA); and digital transformation. 

Jimenez (or “PAJ” as the university community calls him) was quick to explain that rather than being new or distinctly separate programs, these are really thematic priorities that pull together many existing threads from UP’s wide range of teaching and research expertise. For example, the AOVU concept whereby UP will undertake a more comprehensive but also more coordinated study of our marine resources—our “blue economy”—draws on UP’s longstanding experience in marine science, fisheries, and maritime law, with the added emphasis on our archipelagic geography as a strength rather than a weakness. This will be supported by such innovations as UP Los Baños’ new PhD offering in Environmental Diplomacy and Negotiations aimed at developing leaders from around Southeast Asia who can bring good science into environmental conflict management and sustainable development.

There are many aspects and details of the ten flagship programs that deserve deeper discussion—and some will certainly be challenging if not controversial—but some key themes resonated with me most strongly as a former administrator, a teacher, and a UP fanatic since my childhood days when my mom (UP Educ. 1956) indoctrinated me by playing a record of “UP Beloved” and “Push On, UP” over and over again on our turntable.

Likely of greatest impact to most Filipinos was PAJ’s pledge to democratize UP even further by adopting policies that will bring in more students from underrepresented and marginalized sectors of the country, to correct the lopsidedness of UP’s student profile now favoring private and largely metropolitan high school graduates without necessarily compromising UP’s high admission standards. One way would be by engaging more UP student and faculty “Pahinungod” volunteers to help in teaching disadvantaged students pre-UPCAT, and also by providing sustained support to such students who pass the UPCAT but decide to stay out because of the high expenses of studying in a UP campus (a budget has been set aside to support 350 of these students under the Lingap Iskolar program).

But the key word of the day was “service,” which has been added by PAJ to UP’s traditional motto of “Honor and Excellence.” (I know there’s been some grumbling, in typical UP fashion, over the process by which that decision was arrived at, leading me to sigh and ask, “Is that even a fight worth picking? Isn’t ‘service’ the one thing we can all implicitly agree on?”) Jimenez wants UP to be more engaged with the people, with communities, with other universities, citing programs such as UP Tacloban’s response to the seasonal red tides that render mussels unsafe to eat but still useful as extracted material for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

Above all, service should be a mindset that impels UP students and faculty members to find meaningful roles on their own in their community, whether local, national, or global. It struck me that perhaps this was what our student politicians needed to find and articulate, beyond sloganeering about often abstract issues—how can I serve you and our people, as I am, where I am? What can I do for you?

That “abstain” vote should be minded by the administration as well, and not just in UP. Our youth are seeking to be engaged and inspired—but their cynicism will abate only if they see, in their elders, the exemplars of the integrity and accountability, aside from ability, that any prospective servant of the people should bring to the job.

(Image from upd.edu.ph)

Qwertyman No. 98: Panahon Not

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 17, 2024

WHOEVER URGED President Marcos Jr. to issue that memo mandating all government agencies and schools to sing the new “Bagong Pilipinas” hymn and recite the accompanying pledge at flag ceremonies should be banished to the farthest reaches of Malacañang, in the archives chronicling his predecessors’ most stupid mistakes.

PBBM was already riding a cresting wave of nationalism (bordering, let’s admit it, on Sinophobia for many) because of Chinese aggression in the West Philippine Sea and scandals related to offshore gambling operations run by Chinese in the country. He also earned grudging points from even his staunchest critics and detractors for seemingly being open to investigating the human rights excesses of his iron-fisted predecessor and sanctioning the arrest of one of that man’s most notorious cronies (an unsuccessful operation that Vice President Sara Duterte found the delicacy to deplore for its “excessive use of force,” which you never heard her say about her papa’s murderous tokhang campaign). 

Bongbong Marcos, in other words, was beginning to look and sound like what Rodrigo Duterte never could: a president with a grasp of the issues and a sensitivity to public opinion. Even former Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, a prominent figure in the opposition in 2022, praised BBM for the latter’s recent foreign policy speech in Singapore, where he cited the Treaty of Washington whereby Spain ceded Philippine territory beyond what was stipulated in the Treaty of Paris. “This finally corrects the greatest misconception in Philippine history,” said Carpio, a militant advocate of Philippine territorial rights, “a watershed moment in our fight to defend our island territories and maritime zones in the West Philippine Sea.” 

No, it didn’t mean that the old pre-EDSA issues were forgiven and forgotten, nor that new ones like the dubious Maharlika fund haven’t emerged over the first two years of his tenure, on top of his wanderlust. But BBM has had the good luck—if you can call it that—of inheriting Chinese expansionism and the Duterte legacy, and the good sense to get on the right side of these thorny concerns. 

Granted, there’s no real way to know if his deviation from Digong’s Sinophilia and trigger-happiness is sincere and not just a ploy to torpedo Inday Sara’s claim to succeeding him and install his own man. At this point, it doesn’t seem to matter much; so brazen has Chinese aggression been that even Duterte’s boys in the Senate have felt compelled to wear “West Philippine Sea” T-shirts, even as their lesser allies pose as “peaceniks” who somehow saw nothing wrong with the former president waging war on his own people.

So did BBM’s team—or BBM himself—think that this was the right time to reap some of that PR dividend, consolidate his gains, and foist the “Bagong Pilipinas” brand on the country through a new song and pledge?

The implicit rationale, we can understand. It’s a page right out of his dad’s New Society playbook: use music—indeed, use culture and education—to generate team spirit, or at least some semblance of it. That’s what anthems, hymns, and fight songs are for, from the American Civil War’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the quintessentially English “Jerusalem” and the Nazi “Horst Wessel Lied.” Here in the Philippines, no martial-law morning was complete without the “Bagong Lipunan” (its real title was “Bagong Pagsilang”) song playing on the radio. 

To be fair (if it’s even possible to say that, given that the regime put me in prison for seven months in 1973), it was a catchy, well-written song, with a martial (what else) rhythm; that we still remember at least the tune five decades later attests to the success of its imprinting. It resurfaced on the airwaves shortly after BBM took office in 2022, reviving apprehensions of a New Society 2.0, but it seems to have been pulled shortly after, leading me to suspect that BBM, after all, wanted to be taken on his own and move away from his father’s shadow, which would have been the smart (if nearly impossible) thing to do.

But the imposition of this “Bagong Pilipinas” hymn and pledge again invites uncomfortable parallels and comparisons with what FM Sr. did—and I don’t mean just having the martial-law anthem composed and played, but everything else that came with the New Society: the corruption, the arrests and killings, the submission of our institutions to autocratic rule. 

If you don’t want to go there, let’s talk about just the “Bagong Pilipinas” song itself—have you even heard it? I’m not a music critic, but even I can tell that it’s barely singable, with an uneven tempo, with immemorable lyrics, the constant refrain of which is “Panahon na ng pagbabago” (“It’s time for change”), probably the tritest political message there ever was. You need a trained choir and a band capable of trumpet flourishes to render the piece effectively; I can be convinced that this will work only if I see and hear the President himself and his Cabinet singing the song from memory at the Malacañang flag ceremony (and let’s add the new Senate President, who has embraced the directive).

I don’t know how many millions went to the lyricist and composer of the song, who have mysteriously remained anonymous; clearly, they weren’t the late National Artists Levi Celerio and Felipe de Leon, who worked together on the “Bagong Lipunan” hymn. Perhaps BBM’s critics should be happy that they weren’t that good because, presidential mandate or not, this hymn and its equally problematic pledge seem fated to be ignored and forgotten for their sheer unusability, superfluity, and irrelevance.

PBBM should have been advised that at a time when the nation needs to pull together against a visible external threat, we need constancy, not change, not confusion over who and what we are. We need our one and only National Anthem more than ever, and the same Pledge of Allegiance we have been reciting since our childhood years. Panahon na? Panahon not.

Qwertyman No. 97: The City That Works

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 10, 2024

I WAS back last week in the city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan with a group of writers from the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing, at the invitation of Dr. Eing Ming Wu of the Edu-Connect Southeast Asia Association, an education NGO seeking to establish stronger ties between Taiwanese universities and their counterparts south of Taiwan. We were there to meet with our literary and academic counterparts, but also to acquaint ourselves with contemporary Taiwanese society and culture. What we found along the way was a city and a government that works—a model we have much to learn from.

It was my second time in Kaohsiung and my sixth in Taiwan since my first visit in 2010, but those earlier sorties were either for tourism or for attending meetings and conferences, so we never really got to immerse ourselves in the place and its people. This time, Dr. Wu made sure that we went beyond casual handshakes and pleasantries with city and university officials to engage our hosts in in-depth conversations.

The first thing that usually strikes visitors about Taiwan is how modern it looks, especially when flying in through Taipei—the High Speed Rail (HSR), the wide roads, the skyscrapers (think Taipei 101, once the world’s tallest), the late-model cars. For quick comparisons, consider this: Taiwan’s population, at 24 million, is about a fifth of ours; in terms of land area, we are almost ten times larger; its nominal per capita GDP, however, is almost ten times larger than ours at US$35,000. Not surprisingly, Taiwan now ranks around 20th in the world in terms of its economic power.

That power came out of decades of dramatic transformation from an agricultural to a highly industrialized economy, starting with massive land reform and the adoption of policies that spurred export-driven growth. Industrialization itself went through key phases from the production of small, labor-intensive goods to heavy industry, electronics, software, and now AR/VR and AI tools and applications.

At a briefing at the Linhai Industrial Park by Dr. Paul Chung, a US-trained engineer who was one of the architects of this economic miracle, we learned how Taiwan built up the right environment for economic growth through such strategies as the creation of industrial parks (there are now 67 of them covering more than 32,000 hectares, with 13,000 companies employing 730,000 people and generating annual revenues of more than US$260 billion—almost eight times what all our OFWs contribute to the economy). The Taiwanese government has also implemented a one-stop-shop approach to investments, bringing together the approvals of many ministries and local governments under one roof.

Consistently, in modern times, the private sector has led the way forward, with the government acting as facilitator. This was much in evidence in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s southern industrial hub that was, until relatively recently, a virtual cesspool, the prime exemplar of industrialization gone amuck. A strategic seaport, Kaohsiung grew out of the need to export Taiwanese sugar during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945); the sugar industry gave rise to railways that went far up north to Keelung and became the backbone of the country’s transport system. After the war, the Kuomintang who displaced the Japanese did little to improve things until a visionary mayor undertook reforms that cleaned up the place. Industry also achieved important synergies by adopting policies toward carbon neutrality and reducing waste—for example, one company’s blast furnace slag is being used to pave roads, and harmful carbon monoxide emissions have been rerouted as inputs to chemical companies.

Kaohsiung today is a city of 2.8 million people, a showcase of how runaway industrialization and urban blight can be reversed through good governance and political will. “People need responsible, responsive, and accountable government,” says Dr. Wu, a public-administration expert who worked for 15 years with five Kaohsiung mayors and who now serves as a visiting professor at UP’s National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG). 

A longtime visitor to the Philippines, Dr. Wu has made it his personal mission to promote Philippine-Taiwanese people-to-people relations—a concept he calls “taiwanihan”—in the conviction that the two countries have much to learn from each other and form a natural geographical, economic, and cultural partnership. “We are each other’s closest neighbor,” Wu says. “Taipei is 96 minutes away by train from Kaohsiung, but Kaohsiung is only 90 minutes away by air from the Philippines.” 

Wu and his colleagues at NCPAG have been exploring the possibilities of developing a corridor of cooperation between Southern Taiwan and Northern Philippines, given their proximity. “We have the technology, you have the resources like biomass,” he adds, pointing out as well that taiwanihan doesn’t just mean a one-way relationship, but that the Philippines can also assist Taiwan with its growing needs, such as engineering talent and manpower. Some 8,000 Filipinos now work in Taiwanese factories, but Taiwan’s demand for highly skilled workers will only get higher as it moves into the next phase of its development, which will be heavily dependent on AI.

Artificial intelligence already takes care of many of Kaohsiung’s more mundane needs such as remote traffic monitoring and even the paid parking of vehicles, which has been outsourced by the government to a private entity. “We buy services, not things,” explains Dr. Wu. “The government provides the land for the parking, the private sector supplies the technology and the hardware. This is our version of public-private partnership: the government listens to the private sector, which can use the city as its lab.” 

E-governance and decentralization led us to an unusual sight: we visited City Hall on a weekday and saw very few people in the lobby, unlike its Philippine counterparts. That doesn’t mean that government is distant from the citizens, as a “1999” complaints center receives and fields calls online or in person, employing the disabled to man its booths. 

And even as AI has taken the forefront, it was abundantly clear that human intelligence and human priorities remained important. Good community governance, for one thing, was key to clean and peaceful neighborhoods (their village officials are appointed rather than elected, eliminating vote-buying). Their libraries alone show how and why the Taiwanese are succeeding: they not only have hundreds of thousands of books available to their citizens, but they have innovations such as the “Adopt-a-Book” program by which you borrow a book just based on a previous reader’s recommendation, and books in both Braille and regular text, so that sighted readers can read along with the blind and enjoy a story together. A city that goes that far to meet its people’s needs can’t fail.

Penman No. 463: Masters of the Old and New

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Penman for Sunday, June 10, 2024

THE WORK of two outstanding Filipino artists drew my attention last month, in events that could be considered retrospectives of remarkable if somewhat divergent careers. 

The first was the exhibition “Looking Back” mounted by Fernando Modesto at the Galerie Hans Brumann in Makati, running until June 30, which gathers some of the painter’s best work over the past five decades, many of them from the private collection of the longtime Manila resident Brumann himself. That Brumann—now 83, and also a renowned artist and jeweler—was letting go of these pieces struck me much less as a disposal of worthy objects than a bequeathal, an opportunity to share the best of Modesto with other collectors. Laid low by a stroke some years ago, “Mode” as his friends know him remains mentally as sprightly and mischievous as ever; and he has striven and managed to produce new work despite his condition, taking off from the Mode we knew.

That Mode was irrepressibly bright, witty, and playful. In contrast to the somber and even dismal realism of many of his contemporaries from the 1970s onwards, Mode made light of things, opening up a world of freedom and delight in an oppressive universe. 

The playfulness, at one point, was literal. In 2018, writing in Frieze magazine, Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva reported on the Ateneo Art Gallery’s recreation of an early Modesto installation from 1974 titled Dyolens(Marbles) that involved laying out thousands of marbles on the floor for visitors to kick around. That was about the time I first met him during my days as a printmaker in Ermita; Mode had already gained fame—or notoriety if you will—for his depictions of pendant penises, which even then were clearly meant not to offend but to make one smile.

The Brumann exhibit documents Mode’s progression from tongue-in-cheek wit to transcendent wisdom, opening a door into a world we can only hope to inhabit, where angels reach for a shimmering sun (or are they playing volleyball?) in an iridescent haze, or float face-up in a cosmic pool. His most recent work such as King of the Islands II (2021) retains that rare equanimity in the cool blue gaze of its subject.

If Fernando Modesto is a master of the modern, the second painter who caught my eye reminded me of how much richness remains to be discovered in our artistic past. May 24 saw the launching of Matayog na Puno: The Life and Art of Hugo C. Yonzon, Jr. (published by Onyx Owl, 248 pages), on the centennial birthdate of Yonzon. Authored by Hugo’s son Boboy and the late Neal Cruz, the book chronicles the life and work of a man for whom art was both a passion and a living. Hugo’s career harkened back to a time when the line between fine and commercial art was blurry and perhaps not all that important, for as long as the artist gave the work his all. 

Yonzon had to leave school early to take a job—just the first of one or many—and he would go on to become much more of a journeyman, one viscerally engaged in the trade, than an aesthete or academic. “Yonzon was always invited to the various sessions held by the Saturday Group and other weekday groups that tried to establish their name and weight in the art scene,” says the book. “But he never stayed long nor drew enough on-the-spot sketches; although he had an eye for women, nude sketching did not interest him. He would rather banter and drink a cup of coffee, then return promptly to his favorite themes in his perpetually makeshift studio.”

He was friends with some of the best artists and illustrators of his time, including Mauro “Malang” Santos and Larry Alcala. Having worked as an illustrator and as an art director for an advertising agency, Hugo wielded an extremely versatile brush, adjusting his style and treatment to the client’s needs. It got to the point that visitors to his one-man show became confused, seeing so many different styles on display, but that range was a great part of the reason for Hugo’s popularity. 

But he kept returning to his favorite themes—the pastoral, the folk, the heroic, the visual representation of what he imagined Filipinos at their best and most essential to be. This appealed to the sensibilities of patrons such as First Lady Imelda Marcos, who generously supported Yonzon. Hugo was tireless in his painting and gave his friends huge discounts to the point that his wife Betty felt compelled to manage his financial affairs.

His lifestyle was appropriately flamboyant. “Dad was a loud but chic dresser,” recalls his eldest daughter Minnie. “When psychedelic colors and prints were in vogue, his long-sleeved shirts were in paisleys and reds and greens. Why, he even painted the air scoop of our brand-new Beetle in paisley!”

The life depicted in the book is fascinating, full of struggle and drama, but ultimately it is the art that imprints itself in our consciousness—one full of vigor, color, inventiveness, and variety, celebratory in every way of the near-mythic Filipino. The writer and art critic Lisa Nakpil would say that Yonzon, who died in 1994, was the “underrated master of heroic Filipino iconography,” and this book clearly shows us why.

Qwertyman No. 96: Not Filipino Enough

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 3, 2024

IN THE current feeding frenzy over Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo’s allegedly questionable citizenship (to which I admittedly contributed with my tongue-in-cheek take two weeks ago), a consensus appears to have formed that Mayor Guo isn’t Filipino, or isn’t Filipino enough. All kinds of “tests” of “Filipino-ness” have come up online, things that every homegrown Pinoy is supposed to know: dinuguan, chismis, Dolphy, chaka, peks man, etc.

The ancient Hebrews had a word for this practice, by which they distinguished friend from foe: “shibboleth,” which supposedly couldn’t be pronounced correctly by the enemy, much like the myth that “Mickey Mouse” was the password American GIs used on D-Day, because it was something only Yanks understood.

We can understand how and why these exclusionary measures serve a purpose: to protect the community from external threat. At the same time, these cultural code words help define that community by establishing a common denominator (as common as can be—not George Washington or Alexander Hamilton, but Micky Mouse). Interestingly, they say as much about the excluders as the excluded.

The larger question that needs to be asked by truly inquiring minds is this: what does it really take or mean to be Filipino? Not just “a Filipino,” a matter of citizenship or legal personality provable with birth certificates and passports, but “Filipino” in a more personal, cultural, and even psychological sense.

When we challenge Mayor Guo’s identity—is she who she claims to be?—we imply that we know ours, and feel secure in that knowledge. We think that eating balut and pinakbet, dancing the tinikling and budots, listening to the Eraserheads and April Boy Regino, putting out an open palm ahead of us and bending when we cross a busy room, and counting on our hand from one to five starting with the pinky finger make us Pinoy—and of course they do; but are they enough?

Academics (and, let’s not forget, politicians) have long wrestled with this question, given how our extensive colonial history has effectively extinguished whatever the aboriginal pre-Filipino may have been in most of us. For better or for worse, the “Filipino” we speak of and identify as today is a fairly modern construct and, to my mind, still very much a work-in-progress, as is the Filipino nation itself.

One such academic view was provided by UP Assistant Professor Jay Yacat in the Philippine Journal of Psychology in 2005, where he wrote that “The label ‘Filipino’ functions as a social category. And as such, it is important to identify its boundaries. The meaningful boundaries define the loob/labas of the concept of Filipino. Identity as Filipino was found to have three relevant components: pinagmulan (socio-political component); kinalakhan (cultural component); and kamalayan (psychological component). This supports the position that national identity is more than a political identity. It is possible to think of national identity as three kinds of relationships: relationship with the state; relationship with culture; and relationship with self and others.…

“However, the more interesting finding is that individuals and groups place differing emphases on the three dimensions…. Another important implication is… the constructed-ness of our national identity. Our notion of being Filipino is negotiated and not fixed. This means that our definitions of being Filipino have the potential to be changed depending on a variety of factors: gender, ethnicity, age, political convictions, background, upbringing among others. True, this flexibility may bring about more confusion about our national identity but on a more positive note, this could also provide maneuverable spaces for marginalized groups to participate in a national context: Chinese-Filipinos, Amerasians and other biracials in the Philippines; naturalized citizens; indigenous peoples; and non-Christian groups….

“The analysis identified two kinds of Filipino-ness. This is based on the level of identity integration into one’s loob. A more integrated sense of Filipino identity is called ‘Pilipino sa puso.’ The individual who has not fully integrated this sense of being Filipino into the self is known as ‘Pilipino sa pangalan.’ Kamalayan (psychological sense) seems to be the primary determining factor of Filipino-ness.”

That’s a lot to digest, but my clearest takeaway—which we don’t really need a professor to tell us—is that Filipino-ness can be superficial or deeply felt and understood. The degree of that understanding—of who we are, where we came from, where we want to go, how to get there, and whom we need or want to make that journey with—may yet be the ultimate gauge of how Filipino we are. 

Another suggestion I’d like to make is that to be Filipino is to be inclusive, and therefore tolerant of other ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs. We’d never have survived this far if we weren’t so, despite the regionalism that seems ineradicable in our national politics. 

The Senate is right to continue probing Mayor Guo for her suspected ties to illegal gambling and human trafficking, and for the questions hovering over her citizenship. But Filipino-Chinese cultural advocate Teresita Ang See is also right to deplore the disturbing turn of the public mood into one of a witchhunt against the Chinese among us. 

Continuing Chinese provocations in the West Philippine Sea present a clear and present danger. The Guo allegations and suggestions of “sleepers” in the country are riding on those concerns to build up a hysteria that might ultimately divide rather than unify us. They deserve to be investigated, but without losing focus on the real enemy. I’ve seen some of the vicious feedback that Ang See has received for her sober warning; none of that vitriol makes her any less a Filipino than her attackers.

Indeed, the worst damage to our security and sense of nationhood isn’t being done by Chinese spies, but by Filipinos parroting the Chinese line or selling us the story that opposition to Chinese aggression is futile and that seeking international help against it will only bring on a war we can’t win. These are the real sleepers in our midst.

Qwertyman No. 95: Till Divorce Do Us Part

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 27, 2024

IS THERE anything about divorce—a bill legalizing which will soon be taken up in the Senate—that hasn’t already been said, or that most people don’t know? This was on my mind last week as I walked to school, wondering what my class of 20-year-old seniors thought about the issue. As young people likely to get married within the next five to ten years, they’re the ones who stand to be most affected by the outcome of the current drive to get the bill passed.

So I brought it up—we’re taking up argumentative or opinion writing, and how to handle contentious topics, and divorce was right up that alley. I didn’t tell them which side I stood on, although, knowing me to be a flaming liberal, they could have guessed that. I let them speak. Given that this was the University of the Philippines, and even factoring in the possibility that students tend to dovetail along with what they think their teachers believe, it was no big surprise that everyone who spoke up in that room did so in favor of legalizing divorce; if there was anyone in opposition, which I rather doubt, he or she chose to remain silent. 

Clearly, a majority favored the move, for the very reasons cited by the bill’s supporters. One student had a very personal take on the matter: “As the child of parents whose marriage was annulled,” she said, “I can remember all the things they had to do to get that annulment. The poor can’t afford it.” And economics aside, what did divorce offer that annulment didn’t? “The freedom to remarry!” everyone chimed in. (Correction: annulment allows for remarriage, but legal separation doesn’t.)

But—I said, just to probe a bit further—what about the argument that divorce will contribute to the break-up of marriages? “Those marriages are already broken,” said a student. 

But the Vatican opposes divorce, doesn’t it? (It’s the only other country in the world, aside from the Philippines, which doesn’t recognize divorce.) “Priests don’t get married. What do they know about marriage?”

At this point, I found it useful to introduce a fact that was news to everyone in the room. “Did you know that we used to have divorce in the Philippines?” No! Really? “Yes, a divorce law was enacted under the Americans in 1917. It was even expanded under the Japanese Occupation, and continued after the war until the Civil Code of 1950 abolished absolute divorce and replaced it with legal separation. Go on, look it up. I don’t know how many Filipinos actually availed themselves of divorce when it was legal—it would be interesting to see the statistics—but it’s not like we never had the option. It was there, but Church-supported politicians took it back.” Did the Filipino family collapse back then because of the availability of divorce? Show me the proof.

If this exchange sends chills up the spine of ultraconservatives who still think of UP as a haven of rebels, atheists, and devil worshippers, I’m happy to tell them that religion is alive and well in UP—the services in both Catholic and Protestant chapels are usually full. But so are reason and critical thinking, which to me remain the best antidotes to doctrinaire dogmatism, whether from the left or from the right. 

The Catholic Church’s steadfast resistance to legalizing divorce and my students’ apparent willingness to push back against that bulwark reminded me of a critical period back in the 1950s when UP was torn by a struggle between religious forces allied with the popular Jesuit Fr. John Delaney such as the UP Student Catholic Action and those who, like Philosophy Prof. Ricardo Pascual, believed in maintaining UP’s non-sectarian character. In the end, secularism prevailed, but at the price of Pascual and other liberal-minded professors being denounced as “communists” before the House Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities.

I’d like to think that a lot has changed since then, although sometimes things seem pretty much the same, given how the Red-tagging continues despite the sharply diminished power and influence of the CPP-NPA. One thing that has changed, at least in the public’s perception, is the presumption of moral superiority once claimed by a Church now embroiled in sexual and financial scandal. Its invocations of “divine law” or “natural law” in matters relating to homosexuality, contraception, and divorce sound almost medieval in a world that has largely moved in the opposite direction—something the conservative faithful will see as all the more reason to hold on inflexibly to their core convictions.

We can’t argue with those convictions, to which everyone has a right, but conversely, our people as secular citizens shouldn’t be subject to any religion’s doctrines when it comes to personal decisions that are no prelate’s or imam’s business. (And just for the record, I have no plans of divorcing my adorable wife, with whom I just celebrated 50 years of a typically mercurial but happily enduring marriage.)

I’ve written previously about my disaffection with organized religion, so that may provide some context; I do believe in God and in the value of faith and prayer in our lives, and in the right of others to practice their religion—for as long as they don’t insist that theirs is the only right way forward, and impose their way of life on me. If you want to stay married in mutual and lifelong misery because you believe it’s the right thing to do, fine; but don’t expect others to do the same, because their lives aren’t yours to mess up. Happiness is hard enough to find in this dystopic world we live in; let’s not make it harder for others looking for another chance at love and peace. 

I doubt that they’ll change the wedding vows—“For better or for worse, till death do us part” is always worth two people’s best shot, until worse comes to worst. But divorce should be an option better left to the individual’s God-given intelligence, conscience, and emotional honesty to sort out than to institutions more concerned with abstractions than reality. It’s ultimately a reminder of how human we are—people make mistakes, which can’t be corrected by prolonging them; we learn, we do better, and we live on. I think that’s what a just and kind Almighty would wish for his creations.

(Image from montanoflamiano.com)

Qwertyman No. 94: Artificial Intelligence

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 20, 2024

DR. CHICHOY Carabuena had a problem. He wanted the school he owned and ran—the Generoso Carabuena Academy of Pedagogy in Santa Vicenta—to place higher in both national and international rankings, partly so he could raise tuition fees, and also so he could claim bragging rights among his university-president friends and drinking buddies. He had inherited the school from his grandfather; Generoso Carabuena was a banker who had collaborated with the Japanese and stolen the money they left behind to open a school for teachers, which was his wife’s dream, becoming a war hero in the process for outsmarting the enemy. 

The school had done well enough to the point that Chichoy’s dad Ramoncito could buy a Mercury Capri that he regularly drove to Manila to carouse in its nightclubs. Chichoy was the product of one of Ramoncito’s dalliances with the agreeable ladies, and it fell on him to rescue both the business and the family name from ruin and disrepute. He had been managing a carinderia for Pinoy workers in Dubai when the call came, and always wanting to become someone of substance, he returned to Sta. Vicenta to turn the daughters and sons of hog butchers and vegetable growers into teachers, like he imagined himself to be. Surely higher education wasn’t all that different from running a restaurant and coming up with the right menu at the right price for your customers. He had secretly dreamed of becoming a mayor, a congressman, or even governor, but first, he had to make a name for himself and make money.

Somewhere along the way he picked up a “Dr.” from a diploma mill and dressed the part, coming to his office even in the warmest of days in coat and tie. “More than anything else,” he would lecture his new recruits, “first impressions count, so before you even become a teacher, you have to look like a teacher, walk like a teacher, and sound like a teacher!” He had a faux marble statue made of his grandfather to greet visitors at the school entrance, and another one of Jose Rizal standing behind Generoso, as if looking on in approval. 

But lest people think he was beholden to the past, Chichoy Carabuena peppered his speeches with 21st-century mantras like “disruption,” “innovation,” “sustainability,” “customer-centric,” and, yes, “21st-century.” “The great challenge to higher education today,” he would often declaim, “is to produce graduates attuned to a global climate of disruption and innovation, mindful of evolving needs and opportunities in the marketplace of ideas while seeking sustainable and synergistic 21st-century solutions to problems rooted in our feudal and neocolonial history.”

Those speeches were written for him by his former executive assistant named Mildred, a UP graduate whom he had to fire when his wife discovered them smooching in his office—an act he vehemently insisted to be no more than a paternal gesture, much like  former President’s public bequeathal of a kiss on a married woman, a defense that gained no ground. His wife personally chose his next EA, a former SAF commando named Dogbert; making the best of the situation, Chichoy paraded Dogbert around as his bodyguard, spreading the rumor that his life was under threat from unspecified enemies determined to keep the quality of Philippine education down. “We can give them no quarter,” he declared at the last CHED event he attended. “We must resist, with all impunity, those who aim to keep our poor people shackled to the twin pillars of ignorance and idiocy!” He missed Mildred in those moments, but he felt quite pleased with his growing self-sufficiency in speechwriting, thanks to his new discovery, ChatGPT. Of course it never quite came up to his standards, so he tweaked the prose here and there, like that reference to Samson that he hoped would bring the house down.

But now, reading the reports of top Philippine universities slipping in their rankings in the usual Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli-Symonds surveys, Dr. Carabuena saw an opportunity for his modest HEI to rise. “As their mystique diminishes, so our aura will grow,” he informed an indifferent Dogbert. “We just need to come up with sustainable innovations that will disrupt the status quo.” Dogbert handed him a slim folder. “Sir, someone wants to see you, to apply for the position of Academic Vice President.” It was a position that Chichoy himself had held concurrently to save on salaries, but now he felt obliged to pass it on to a real expert. He flipped the folder open and saw the picture of a cute Chinese-looking woman going by the name of “Dr. Alice Kuan.” Chichoy was mesmerized. “Send her in—and get out!”

When Dr. Alice Kuan stepped into Chichoy’s office, he felt himself enveloped in a miasma of jasmine, peonies, and five spices—everything good he remembered from his only visit to China many years ago. Her lips were lotus-pink, her skin ivory-white, and here and there dumplings suggested themselves to his imagination. “Good morning, Dr. Kuan! Please, have a seat! You’re here to apply for the AVP job?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” she said with a quarter-moon smile, “and I come with many ideas for both improving your curriculum and raising revenues through academic innovations.”

“Innovations! I like that! Like what?”

“Why artificial intelligence, of course! We could use AI to teach many of our courses, reducing costs. Also, we could bring in more foreign students from—uhm—friendly neighboring countries, while creating part-time employment opportunities for them in—uhm—online entertainment, for which we could even lease out some of your campus property. It would create a huge economic boost for Sta. Vicenta!” 

Temple bells rang in Chichoy’s mind. Not only was she fetching; she was smart! Suddenly he could see his political future brightening. He wanted to know more about this adorable avatar, and only then did he notice how patchy her resume was. 

“Your birth certificate was filed when you were…. 17?”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“Which elementary school did you go to?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe homeschooling?” She threw him an exasperated sigh. “Look, Dr. Carabuena, does it matter? I can have AI do a perfect resume if that’s what you want. If not, I can take my ideas to the Fontebello Institute of Technology in San Bonito just an hour away, and maybe they’ll be more receptive to disruptive innovations—”

“No, no, no! Disruptive, I like disruptive! Please, Dr. Kuan, stay in your seat! I’ll have somebody prepare your contract. Dogbert!”

(Image generated by AI.)

Qwertyman No. 93: A Century of Philippine Accountancy

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 13, 2024

IN MY long life as a professional writer—aside from being a fictionist, journalist, and academic—I’ve occasionally been asked to write books for both private and public institutions and individuals, usually to commemorate an important milestone. My clients have included banks, power and energy companies, accounting firms, NGOs, business tycoons, politicians, and thinkers. 

While it’s a job, it’s also been a great learning experience for me, particularly when I’ve had to deal with topics like oil exploration, steel manufacturing, and geothermal energy. I begin to understand how things really work in our economy and society, seeing the cogs and wheels that turn industry, create jobs, and produce things people need. I meet people I never would have run into otherwise, people with interesting stories to tell about themselves and their work.

Probably the most famous of those people was Washington SyCip, the legendary founder of SGV & Co., once one of Asia’s largest and most highly respected accounting firms, whose biography Wash: Only a Bookkeeper I wrote back in 2008. When people tell me how boring the lives of accountants must be, I tell them the story of Wash, who wasn’t just an academic prodigy who graduated summa cum laude from college at 17, but who also served as a US Army codebreaker in India in the Second World War. Granted, not many accountants lead lives as colorful as Wash’s, but to suggest that there’s no drama in accountancy is certainly mistaken. 

I discovered this in my latest (and very likely my last) commissioned book, A Century of Philippine Accountancy, which will be launched this week by the Philippine Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA) Foundation. The book is a compendium of both big and small stories, an institutional history that also delves into the personal struggles and triumphs of key people in the industry.

The centennial book comes a bit late, because the Philippine accounting profession formally traces its beginning to March 17, 1923, when the Sixth Philippine Legislature passed Act No 3105, “An act regulating the practice of public accounting; creating a Board of Accountancy; providing for examination, for the granting of certificates and the registration of Certified Public Accountants; for the suspension or revocation of certificates and for other purposes.” Six years later, the PICPA was established within the private sector to represent professional interests.

Of course, some form of bookkeeping was being practiced in the Philippines long before that. Given the Philippines’ vigorous trade with other countries such as China even before Spain’s arrival in 1521, there must have been some early form of record-keeping maintained by both natives of the islands and their foreign trading partners. Accounting in early China was said to have reached a peak during the Western Zhou dynasty (1100-771 BC); the Chinese developed sophisticated methods of accounting to keep track of such basics as revenues, expenditures, salaries, and grain. In Spain, regulations began to be applied regarding the accountability of companies starting with Queen Juana and her son Emperor Charles V in the 1500s. Manila’s galleon trade with Mexico, which lasted from 1565 to 1815, required meticulous bookkeeping, and archival records still exist of the cargo manifests of the galleons; these records show, for example, that audits of the ships’ cargo revealed discrepancies in capacity that suggested smuggling (whereby space meant for such necessities as water was reduced to make way for profitable goods).

Since 1923, the profession has grown in the Philippines by leaps and bounds to nearly 200,000 registered CPAs, employed in over 8,000 firms and partnerships. Based on the number of Publicly Listed Companies (PLCs) they audit, six firms dominate the industry: SGV & Co. (Ernst & Young); Isla Lipana & Co. (PricewaterhouseCoopers Philippines); R.G. Manabat & Co. (KPMG Philippines); Reyes Tacandong & Co. (RSM Philippines); Punongbayan & Araullo (Grant Thornton Philippines); and Navarro Amper & Co. (Deloitte Philippines). In keeping with the times, many local firms have affiliated themselves with large global partners to avail themselves of the latest technology and expertise. (For a bit of trivia, the first Filipino CPA was Vicente F. Fabella, the founder of what is now Jose Rizal University.)

The profession is governed by the Board of Accountancy (BOA), which administers the CPA Licensure Exam at least once a year. The BOA in turn is supervised by the Professional Regulatory Commission, along with other professional boards. The BOA and PRC work closely with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is responsible for ensuring the integrity of the country’s financial system and its institutions.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis highlighted the importance of quality assurance and adopting international financial reporting standards in accounting. With the help of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, the major players in the profession—PICPA, BOA, PRC, and SEC, among others—undertook studies to reform the industry, resulting in the Philippine Accountancy Act of 2004. The SEC also initiated an Oversight Assurance Review to extend and strengthen reforms further. What the book chronicles most significantly, according to former SEC Commissioner Antonieta Fortuna-Ibe, is the Filipino CPA’s rise to global respectability and prominence, because of the industry’s relentless efforts to raise its standards and to keep pace with the latest developments in financial technology. Ibe stood at the vanguard of many basic reforms in Philippine accountancy, and was behind the push for a book to mark their centenary.

The profession will need to adapt to the ever-changing financial landscape. As SGV’s Wilson Tan puts it, “While we have yet to see how new technologies such as the Metaverse and the integration of AI into work applications will impact the accounting profession, CPAs of the future will need to likewise evolve their skills and capabilities. Foundational changes will need to be made in the curriculum to integrate learning that encompasses non-financial reporting matters, use of technology, data, and analytics, and cybersecurity, among others.”

Personal integrity, as ever, lies at the bedrock of accountancy. The BIR’s Marissa Cabreros reminds everyone that “Every CPA being asked to sign a financial statement must give weight to the purpose of their signature. If it has your signature as a CPA, we expect that you reviewed and recorded that properly. But unfortunately, sometimes lapses happen and CPAs forget what they signed for. An accountant must always have the importance and value of her signature in her heart.” Wash SyCip could not have put it any better.

Accountants and other members of the public interested in getting a copy of the book can email Lolita Tang at lolitatang@yahoo.com for more information.

Qwertyman No. 92: The Return of the Old Normal

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 6, 2024

FEW WILL remember it, but yesterday, May 5, marked the first anniversary of the official end of the Covid-19 pandemic as a global health emergency, as announced by the World Health Organization. Of course it didn’t mean that Covid was over and gone—it would continue to mutate into thankfully less lethal variants—but the worst was over. It had infected more than 765 million people around the world, and killed almost 7 million of them; in the Philippines, as of last month’s latest figures, over 4 million of us caught Covid, and we lost more than 66,000 friends, family members, and neighbors to the disease.

It’s amazing what a difference a year makes. The pandemic rules had been relaxed long before May 5 last year, and much of 2023 and 0f the present year had been spent by us trying to get back to life as we knew it pre-Covid at a frenetic pace—engaging in that new term, “revenge travel,” buying new cars, building new homes, and as of last week, complaining about the infernal heat wave like it was the worst thing to have plagued us in decades (maybe it was—since Covid). For the most part, we seem to have willed Covid out of our minds, eager to replace its bitter memories with fresh and happy ones—an entirely human thing to do, to cocoon ourselves against the pain of loss. Are we in the “new normal,” or have we returned to the old?

I remember most vividly the paranoia that gripped the country during the pandemic’s early days—the first reports of people we knew dying horrible deaths in isolation, the terror following a sudden and suspicious onset of coughing and fever, the constant fear of carrying the virus home to the innocent and the infirm in one’s shoes, one’s clothes, one’s merest touch, the rapid disappearance of disinfectants and bread from the shelves, the inevitable closure of cinemas and restaurants, the anxious eyes peering above face masks and through face shields, the physical boundaries beyond which only a select few could cross—and, of course, the near-endless wailing of sirens announcing the imminence of death and dying. Unfamiliar words and phrases entered our vocabulary: co-morbidities, social distancing, quarantine, lockdown, ECQ, EECQ, RT-PCR, community pantry, antigen, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Sinovac (and anti-vaxx), etc.

Like many others, I lost friends to Covid, from very early on when no one knew what was really going on and what could be done to save patients who were turning up feverish and could hardly breathe. One of them was my own cardiologist, who reportedly assisted a patient whom he didn’t know carried the virus. Others were academics and senior officials returning from conferences overseas. Fortunately, no one in our families died of the disease, although many of us, myself included, later caught it at some point despite all precautions. When I did catch it, I have to admit that it was with a strange sense of relief, not only because I could now count myself a participant in a grand if horrible experience, and also because I imagined, perhaps foolishly, that I would be rewarded with some kind of immunity from further and worse infection.

Those of us who survived Covid hopefully did so with a more profound appreciation of the gift and value of life, and of the need to do good in the time we have left. But the 2022 elections only seemed to prove the power of political patronage, which became even more keenly felt during the pandemic, when local officials down to the barangays held sway over their constituents like never before. Covid sharpened the already stark contrast between rich and poor, from access to what were seen as the most effective vaccines to self-declared exemptions from certain restrictions like liquor-lubricated parties and literal hobnobbing. In the end, the virus didn’t discriminate, scything rich and poor alike, although the poor, living in cramped communities, were always more likely to fall ill and die.

What the public often failed to witness—and therefore can’t remember—were the stories of the frontliners who met Covid head-on and served as heroes behind the scenes. I’m now working with Dr. Olympia Malanyaon—a pediatric cardiologist who also served as Director of the Information, Publication, and Public Affairs Office of UP Manila—on a book she’s writing to document the efforts of UPM and of the Philippine General Hospital (which is part of UPM) to respond to the Covid crisis. The PGH, the country’s largest public hospital, was designated a Covid-referral hospital almost as soon as the pandemic broke, and its people found themselves in the vortex of an unprecedented medical and social crisis, and we want to tell their stories in this forthcoming book.

The word “hero” gets bandied around a bit too easily these days, but if there was a time for heroes to emerge, it was during the pandemic, when what used to be the most routine decisions (“Should I report for work today?”) could mean a matter of life and death. When the death toll mounted, many PGH staff resigned for fear of infecting their families, but many more stayed on, with nurses pulling 16-hour shifts and some doctors remaining on duty for as long as 30 hours.

Even utility workers recalled how pitiful the plight of the afflicted was. One said that “They had no one with them, not even when they died. They would be put into body bags, which could not be opened. Then they would be cremated the next day, without being seen by their families.” And then, the staff felt shunned by society when they went home as ordinary neighbors. “When we ordered at the fastfood, the guard shooed us away when he learned that we worked in the Covid unit,” recalled another. “I was very upset. It felt very degrading to work so hard, to line up for food when you got hungry, only to be turned away.”

Thankfully, the crisis also brought out the best in some other Filipinos, such as those who poured their time and money into community pantries that served the hardest hit. For a while back there, we saw and felt the glimmer of our inner heroes. It was a spirit that I hoped would be sustained into a broader and more enduring wave of change in 2022, but as the pandemic receded, we realized how much of the old normal yet remained.

Covid made us aware of the precariousness of our health as individuals. Looking forward to 2025, I wonder what it will take for our people to value their well-being as a society and as a nation.

(Image from Reuters/Lisa Marie David)

Penman No. 462: Exit This Gatekeeper

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Penman for May 5, 2024



INDULGE ME this bit of self-reflection, which I suppose will also speak for many writers of my generation. After much thought, I have decided that I will no longer be judging literary competitions, having just completed my last one.

My first reason is that I’m 70, a good age at which to pause and plan out the rest of my life, however long or short that may be. (The life expectancy of a Filipino male today is 72, although actuarial science seems to think that if you’ve come this far, you’ll likely hang around for another ten years.)

There are just a few things I want to devote that time to—primarily, to write my own books (not books for others, so I’m also announcing that upon completion of my current commitments, I will desist from seeking or accepting book commissions—unless I fall into grave and sudden need.) I want to travel more with Beng and Demi while we can, look after Buboy’s growth, play poker all night twice a week, and enjoy my strange hobbies. I’ll teach for as long as I can—I’m enjoying my undergraduate class right now—but will limit my participation in workshops, conferences, festivals, seminars, etc. to the few I am committed to, like the UP Writers Workshop. 

Judging competitions doesn’t seem that much work (unless you’re a judge looking at over 100 stories) and of course it’s a signal honor to be asked to help pick the best of new writing. It remains a tremendous responsibility and privilege to be thankful for. You get to go up a stage, say some nice things about literature and writers, receive a modest fee, and feel somewhat useful and relevant. That’s all well and good.

When I transitioned from being an active literary combatant (that’s how many of us felt back then, with the likes of Rene Villanueva and Ed Maranan breathing down your neck) to a judge after getting my Palanca Hall of Fame plaque in 2000—I never joined a contest after that—I felt that I had turned a corner and found a kind of inner peace. It wasn’t that I had nothing more to prove; one illusion that local literary competitions encourage in the young is that winning them is the be-all and end-all of writing, when all they are is a formal pat on the back to get you started. The true challenge for the young or beginning writer is not to win prizes but to write and publish books that will be read and appreciated by others, that hopefully will matter, that will outlive you, that for better or worse you will be remembered for and remembered by; publication is the ultimate prize, readership the ultimate validation. So I went on to write books, teach, have fun, and discover wonderful things outside of writing and literature (yes, there are such bright and shiny marvels). 

Judging competitions seemed to be a good way of keeping a foot in  the door, so I’ve been doing a lot of that, also as a kind of payback for all the people before me who took their time to recognize and reward my efforts with a prize. At some point, I realized that the foremost reason I kept joining and judging the Palancas was because I wanted to be there on Awards Night, to enjoy the company of writers I admired (the piano-playing Greg Brillantes being one of them), and to feel good about being a writer on the one night of the year that they took center stage. The great luck of Hall of Famers is that they can now attend all the Awards Nights they want without having to work for it—so I won’t.

The most important reason is that I’ve already read enough, perhaps too much, for far too long, and it’s no longer healthy for me or for those I may be judging. Our literary community certainly doesn’t lack for younger people who can do this job as well as if not better than I can.  I’m still and always delighted to see brilliant new work emerge from the pile, but it’s getting harder—more laborious, more fatiguing, and ultimately more disheartening to be asking, “ls this the best they can do? Don’t people know what a good story is anymore?” Or have I become the problem?

The word “gatekeeping” has been going around much lately, evoking the image of a surly senior (a Boomer, for sure), out of touch and out of step, insisting that his students and young writers should write like him or like Hemingway, playing favorites, and slamming the door shut on entire genres he doesn’t like or understand. That sounds a lot like me, except that I’ve never expected or driven my students to write like me; they come to my classes with their own experiences, their own material, their own talents and insights, and  the best of them have written stories that are nothing like mine, except perhaps that they’re realist, because that’s the kind of fiction I best know and teach. I’ve always been open to other forms and genres, even if I hardly write in them (I think I’ve tried everything at least once), because the world would be a terribly boring place if we all wrote about everything the same way. Think of much of the political rhetoric going around these days, no matter which flag is being waved: labels and slogans—the shorthand of groupthink—have replaced and diminished personal narrative and reasoning. (As if people will care when you die if you were “correct” all the time; they will ask if you were good and kind.) This is also why I have long resigned from anything resembling organized ideology or religion, whose avatars often seem so, so sure of themselves and of what they’re saying to the point of arrogance. 

I value the doubt and ambiguity, the constant self-questioning (what can we be capable of, despite ourselves?) that are fiction’s domain. Fiction humbles us by exposing our infirmities, but it also exalts us by offering the possibility of redemption.

In the end, what I have always looked for in a prizewinning story, aside from being exceptionally well-written (smooth and stylish when it needs to be, tough and visceral when it needs to be) is that it be moving and memorable. It should burn a hole and leave a scar in my heart, my guts, and my memory. I can enjoy clever and inventive stories as much as anyone else, but if it’s a passing amusement, like a joke, it won’t leave much behind. Some of the most memorable stories I’ve  come across weren’t even what you’d call grand in a sonorous or elaborate way. They took place in small places within relatively short periods of time, and involved ordinary people in situations that brought out their extraordinariness (by which I don’t mean some blinding heroism, but a part of them, dark or light, they didn’t even know was there).

Too many of the thousands of stories I’ve had to read over the years have been poorly written, dull, and forgettable. That’s not even a complaint, just par for the course for any kind of open literary competition here or anywhere else. People can’t be blamed for hoping and trying with their graceless prose, and I’m sure that many have nursed precious ambitions of being published and read. Not to be snarky, but the problem here really isn’t so much a lack of writing talent than of self-awareness, the kind of honesty and humility that will tell you, in your heart of hearts, that you will never be a nuclear scientist or an F-1 driver. Unfortunately, literary self-awareness can happen only when one has a sense of what truly good writing is. 

But could it possible that I myself have fallen so far behind that I can no longer recognize the new “good,” or apply the “new standards,” whatever they may be? Could my notions of “good fiction,” however liberally applied, be standing in way of some young genius’ debut?

I’ll be holding on to those notions, but now only for myself. I’m not urging my fellow seniors to do the same; we all operate on different clocks and their patience could be longer than mine. Some might say “Good riddance” and the feeling could be mutual, but I depart this task with a light and happy heart, looking forward to producing new work that will be judged by others.

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.