Category Archives: America

Qwertyman No. 191: A Letter to Julie

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, March 30, 2026

I HAVE a dear friend in America named Julie Hill whom I have written about before, an old friend of our country and people. She turned ninety this past week, amid a host of personal challenges that come with age and with living alone. A prolific and published author whose books I edited, Julie was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to the US for graduate school. She traveled and lived around the world, including Manila, with her late husband Arthur, and served as a multinational executive before retiring to Southern California. She has returned to the Philippines many times to visit with her old friends and quietly supports some private charities. 

When I last came to see her last year, despite her own mounting needs, she graciously donated a substantial amount to the University of the Philippines in aid of UP’s poorest students. Despite the entreaties of concerned friends, she refuses to be confined to a nursing home, preferring the company of her memories to the chatter of strangers. She can sometimes be lonely and fearful, but she is proud and brave, and the horizon she gazes at stretches far longer than we can imagine. I thought of writing her this birthday letter to cheer her on.

Dear Julie,

With your ninetieth birthday coming up in a few days, a lot must be going through your mind. I don’t know if your roses are blooming and your oranges fruiting outside your window, but I hope they are, because they always bring you joy and delight, of which our world is desperately short these days.

You have been around that world and have seen both the best and the worst of it. Over the five travel books and memoirs I have edited for you, you found kindness and humanity in the earth’s farthest reaches, and you singled out the Philippines for your warmest affections. Even before we met, you established lifelong friendships with many Filipinos, and continued to visit them and to maintain a special relationship with this place.

And thus you would have seen that the Philippines you knew half a century ago is far different today in many ways, yet unchanged in others. You came here with your husband Arthur, when the Ford Foundation sought to help Philippine education and rural development—priorities which remain unmet. Our population and our cities have grown far beyond their capacity to sustain a decent living. Manila now teems with tall buildings and sleek condominiums, at the literal feet of which the hovels of the poor abound, a cliche we’ve become inured to, and accept as God’s design. We breed children we can barely feed, who can’t read, who seemed doomed to servitude.

Your generous donation to the University of the Philippines, meant to help the poorest of UP students complete their studies, will provide some much-needed hope and relief. While intervention at the college level is often too late for these children, your support, and that of others, gives them a fighting chance. Beyond external assistance, we need massive educational reform, which will require a singular and strategic will on the part of our government to invest in our natural intelligence, before we even speak of AI and other shortcuts. Sometimes I think we need to love ourselves enough.

And so is America changed as well—no longer the welcoming sanctuary you found when you fled Nasser’s Egypt to study in Minnesota, but a paranoid society, hostile to foreign faces, accents, and ideas. You know this yourself, living in an affluent community whose manicured lawns are dotted with MAGA flags. I’ve met some of your neighbors over lunches in your home, and they’re very nice people, except for their politics, now explainable only in terms of mass hypnosis or idolatry. 

For how else could otherwise well-educated and upright citizens condone and even applaud a mad megalomaniac who starts a war without knowing why, delivering death and suffering the world over? What does it say of people happy to be led by a man utterly without morals, without conscience, and without compassion? Not long ago, with appalling but typical coarseness of spirit, this draft dodger publicly celebrated the passing of a combat veteran he saw as his enemy—an act of crass cowardice to which his followers turned a blind eye.

I’m reminded of those science-fiction movies from the 1950s, where your smiling, all-American neighbors turn out to be aliens beneath the skin, except that, ironically, today we are the aliens, to be excluded and exterminated by ICE, the American Gestapo.

I told you that I’ve sworn not to revisit the US until after Trump and his kind are banished from office, which makes me feel sorry that Beng and I might not see you again for some time, if ever again. The fare situation seems to have made that moot. The way things are going, we can’t even afford a flight down south, let alone across the Pacific. To all those MAGAs and Fil-Ams who tell us to butt out of US politics because it’s none of our business, well, here’s the g—d—n proof: never mind my bellyaching about plane tickets and all the nice beaches I’m missing out on; our jeepney drivers are plying the streets for 12 hours a day with tears in their eyes because they can’t even make enough to cover the gas they’re consuming, let alone pay their operator their “boundary” or daily minimum. When our oil supplies drain out in a few weeks, the agony will worsen. Beng and I will get past this—we’ve been through worse—but the suffering for many poor Filipinos will be incalculable.

I know that you, too, are suffering the aches and pains of old age, and that my periodic bouts with sciatica are nothing compared to yours. Twenty years ago when we first met we were still flush with energy and optimism, full of ideas about books to write and places to go. We wrote most of those books and followed our respective itineraries. When you come to think of it, we’ve led far fuller lives than most people can even dream of.

We can be thankful for the past and for the life partners we have been blessed to share this journey with. We could not have been more fortunate than for you to have had Arthur for half your life and  for me to have Beng for most of mine. But we are not quite done yet. 

We cannot let the bastards win. Our mission is to survive—and to survive them. If only for that, you have to live to 95, or even beyond that, and I have to do the same, so that we might, before finally exiting, regain our cheer, enjoy humor without irony, feel unmitigated joy. Be strong, be safe, and bask in the afternoon sun.

Affectionately,

B.

Qwertyman No. 190: Beyond Survival

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, March 23, 2026


PARDON ME for this rambling piece this week, which I’m writing in a stupor, blindsided by the sudden, heartbreaking loss of a friend. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this state of disorientation, of looking for a center or an anchor to stabilize at least our view of the horizon. Every day we come across so many deaths on Facebook, amid hundreds of faceless thousands more around the world—much too many to mourn, even counting just your friends.

It’s been a tough time for many, with a war halfway across the planet casting a dark red shadow on us and our pedestrian lives, far out of sight and out of mind of Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran, but ever vulnerable to the subterranean tremors of politics and economics snaking around the globe.

A viral post tried to make the best of that by reminding us that at least we’re not dodging missiles. That’s true, but it doesn’t remove the cloud of fear and uncertainty we’re living under—not to mention the pain of brutal price increases, which is what Donald Trump’s war comes down to for 98 percent of the world.

I’ve heard many friends and even strangers saying that despite all the aggravations we face today as Filipinos—the corruption, the inefficiency, the pollution, the noise both physical and political—they’re relieved to be where they are, instead of being somewhere out there under constant threat of death falling out of the sky. I’ll admit to feeling the same way, and that I even feel safer to be here today than in America, which I have no intention of revisiting until after the Trumpian nightmare is over.

No, this isn’t another piece about “resiliency,” although there’s certainly that, at least as a way of putting a good face on a bad experience. Rather I’m thinking about how we survive at all, beyond meeting economic needs, about prevailing meaningfully as humans with purpose and dignity and even hope in this horribly oppressive and degrading environment.

The fact is, people learn to adjust soon enough to adversity and privation, excepting such extremes as Stalingrad and Gaza, where sheer survival may have been heroic enough.

Nick Joaquin recalls in Manila, My Manila how quickly the city’s inhabitants fell back on their old routines after the first bombs exploded and the Japanese marched in. The shows reopened, the restaurants thrived, pedestrians bowed to the sentries, and life continued. Certainly there was terror and suffering aplenty, but until famine hit them, followed yet later by the horrors of the Japanese withdrawal, many Manileños apparently coped with the war.

Even closer to the present, we seniors well know what it was like in the early years of martial law, when, as if domestic turmoil weren’t enough, we were hit by a global oil crisis triggered by another Mideast war. The buzzwords then were “austerity,” “alcogas” and “Asiong Aksaya.” We mixed corn with our rice. We complained, we resisted, we struggled, we suffered—but we survived.

I have to remember these when I think of how confused and depressing the present can be, and how pointless it may seem to persevere, especially when we turn on the news or go online. We seem surrounded by hostility and indifference, by death and sorrow—and yet, just as insistently, goodness, creativity, and courage abide, our handmaidens and henchmen, the torchbearers of our humanity.

Last week, on one particularly busy day, my wife Beng and I attended two consecutive book launches.

The first, in Makati, was by our friend Erlinda Panlilio, who had been my student in a graduate writing class more than twenty years ago. Linda was among several women enrolled in Creative Nonfiction—all of them already accomplished in their respective fields—who thought that the time had come to gather and preserve the wealth of their memories in a book. I was less their teacher than their enabler, and many if not most of them subsequently published outstanding memoirs that looked back on lives well lived—not just in privilege as you might expect but in struggle, whether in business, love, conflict, or self-fulfillment.

Aside from many other compilations she’s edited, this was Linda’s third book (and she claims her last as she is now in her eighties, although no one believes her). The book, Saying Goodbye to the House, comes across as a valedictory, a summing-up of a long and fruitful life. At the launch, I said that it was important for senior voices like Linda’s to be heard in today’s frenetic, youth-oriented culture, which barely leaves time to pause, reflect, and rejoice as Linda does.

And then we moved back to Quezon City, where the young Cedric Tan was launching his second novel for young adults, a fantasy titled The Hotel Titania, in which a girl steps into a hotel that turns out to be full of magical beings. You could not imagine a sharper contrast with Linda Panlilio’s domestically grounded universe (which, being Filipino, has its touches of wonder as well). Cedric not only wrote a fantasy; by giving up his job to go full-time into writing, he’s living it, exploring territory at once exciting and fraught with danger.

Stepping into the car homebound after a day full of books and stories, Beng and I felt exhilarated, our confidence in the tenacity and the infinite variety of the human imagination restored. Against dismal reality, our memory and our curiosity would save us.

And then, as I was scrolling on my phone, came the stunning and crushing news that our friend, the veteran journalist and essayist Joel Pablo Salud, had succumbed to a heart attack. A recently professed Christian, Joel had fought hard for truth and justice, and he died a man of faith who knew where he was bound. Even among hard-bitten writers used to seeing the worst of things, the passing of someone so passionate about his craft, his convictions, and his family produced profound grief and consternation. Again we had to ask: why does God take the dearest of his creatures? Why does he bring so much suffering to the world?

And I think Joel knew the answer: so we could assert our humanity while we could, and among the best ways to do that is to employ our talents against surrender and despair. Every book we write does that. We seek survival not just to eat and breathe—but to love, to sing, to endure, to yet become.

Qwertyman No. 189: All of One Piece

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, March 16, 2026

A FEW weeks ago, soon after the New Year, I wrote to express my worry that the massive tide of protest against corruption that had built up over the second half of the year would drop and weaken over the holidays. That seems to have happened, despite a natural but passing pickup over the EDSA anniversary. 

The Independent Commission for Infrastructure is, for all intents and purposes, finished—or at least it says its job is, although we have no clear idea what its investigations have yielded or will lead to. Zaldy Co remains a fugitive, probably basking in the sun beside Atong Ang in some Club Med in another hemisphere. We don’t know how the cases against the Bulacan engineers, the Discayas, and their cohorts are proceeding. 

Hopefully something is going on, some incremental progress in the prosecution of the accused, but it’s no longer headline material, as if we’ve resigned ourselves to the inevitability of a marathon wait. (At this point I can’t help thinking of our starry-eyed countrymen who insist that Philippine justice would have sufficed to handle Republic of the Philippines v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte within the lifetimes of the accused and his presumptive victims.)

We’ve been distracted aplenty. From out of the blue, Donald Trump’s megalomaniacal warmongering in the Middle East and the crushing gas pump prices in its wake now dominate the news and our head space. 

Domestically, and for good reason, we’ve all been roiled by the emergence of the perverts in our midst. That the characters look utterly shameless and even bizarrely comical—one of them sporting a portrait of Adolf Hitler behind his desk—invites even more attention. 

Meanwhile, the impeachment ship that stalled a few months ago is finally inching its way out of port, but already some rats are deserting what they must be assuming is an ill-fated voyage.

The National Unity Party—which can’t even live up to its name, given the discord among its members—has declared that it won’t support the move to impeach VP Sara Duterte unless it’s presented with “ironclad” proof of her guilt. Instead of approaching it as the political exercise that it is, the NUP or at least its leadership now wants to treat it daintily as if it were a murder case, and as if the original articles the Congress passed a year ago—which the Supreme Court effectively set aside on a technicality—weren’t good enough. The seguristasseem convinced that the impeachment measure won’t pass in the divided Senate, and that VP Sara will then run for president and win, and look kindly on those who took her side (or at least straddled the fence) in her time of need.

All these threads may seem disparate and even at cross-purposes, but look more closely and you’ll see that they’re all of one piece.

The unifier is impunity—the idea that those in power can do anything they please, the consequences be damned. It’s what makes Trumps and Epsteins—and yes, Dutertes—not just possible but powerful and difficult to dislodge, because they intimidate or habituate us into believing that they are part of the natural order, of the givens of life we can do little about. The inflated hubris that drives these maniacs to bomb nations and their peoples off the face of the earth is the same brutish instinct that makes them feel entitled to sexual gratification on demand.

This is why, in the midst of all this turmoil, it’s even more important to focus on and pursue what’s right and doable within our means—as the impeachment is, because it’s about corruption and the abuse of power at its core. Recent issues may seem far removed from the particulars of the impeachment complaint against the VP, but they implicate the same principles.

If we recoil at the economic pain caused by a distant war, so must we recall the billions we lost to corruption that would now have given us relief. If we mourn the death of innocents in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, so must we seek justice for our own victims whose deaths did not even come screaming randomly out of the sky, but from lists and quotas set by a president’s henchmen to please their boss.

That’s the same egotism driving Trump and his billionaire friends—the Epsteins included—to see the planet as their playground, respectful only of their fellow gangsters. We can’t fight Trump & Co. from here, but we can make sure that we hold our own abusers of power to account in our corner of the world. It’s not just to punish the guilty, but to remind ourselves that we still know right from wrong, and can—as the DDS insist—deliver justice within our territory.

Only clean government and good governance can help ensure that however difficult the global situation might become, we can survive together, take care of our poorest and weakest, and weather any economic storm.

Should the impeachment fail, not for lack of merit but because of rank opportunism, and should VP Sara push through with her campaign for the presidency as expected, then we should be even more focused and united. Stop insisting on ideological purity—remember how Bam Aquino was skewered for his seeming equivocation, with that one word “ideal”?—and learn how to build a united front, a coalition of the willing. 

As the American civil rights anthem went, we need to keep our “Eyes on the Prize”—which isn’t even the presidency itself but the just, capable, efficient, and honest government we’ve long wanted and deserved.

(Image from Rappler.com)

Qwertyman No. 185: A Joke for World Peace

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, February 16, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump places a note in the Western Wall in Jerusalem May 22. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters) See TRUMP-JERUSALEM-HOLY-SEPULCHER May 22, 2017.

I JUST love it when a piece of mine about the goings-on in the US gets a rise out of some MAGA expat—and you’ll be surprised how many of them have chosen to reside here, forsaking what I would have thought would have been the sweet comforts of life in Fortress America. 

A message from a guy we’ll call “Bob” reacted to my recent column on “What I Told the Fil-Ams” by suggesting that I had imbibed too much “Cali water,” referring to that state’s trenchant liberalism. I responded by sending him a joke about an American President in the Holy Land, which I hope he appreciated. (I’ve resolved that this is how I’ll deal with my critics from now on, as long as they remain friendly enough—which to his credit Bob was—kill them with kindness, or at least with corny jokes, of which I have a barrelful. I’ll save a special section for MAGA Pinoys, who keep telling me to butt out of their business but who can’t help doling out prescriptions for their ex-countrymen to find their way to the light.)

I’ve often wondered if our world can get much worse than it already is, knowing all the while that the answer can only be yes, yes, emphatically yes. Still, it comes as a rude shock every time fresh confirmation arrives of a new Marianas Trench in human greed, crassness, and stupidity. 

All by himself, Donald J. Trump accounts for more than half of every week’s lows, and I’d like to think that I’ve become immune to further aggravation by this man, only to be roundly disabused. Last week, Trump outdid himself in crudity by putting out a meme on his social network depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. 

When called out by even his own, usually docile partymates for the patently racist post, Trump passed it off to some unnamed “assistant” who supposedly made the mistake, which Trump claimed to have been too occupied to pay close attention to. Why the President of the United States would leave his personal account open to some junior flunky is ludicrous enough; that he would expect anyone to believe his lame excuse is beyond laughable. His spokesperson derided the ensuing protest as “fake outrage” and called for renewed attention to “the things that truly matter to the American people,” as though racism, decency, and honesty no longer mattered.

But Trump isn’t even the issue here any longer; the man is irredeemably vain, vile, and vicious. (Let’s not even mention—but heck, let’s—his offensiveness to beauty and good taste, with his insistence on gilding the White House, plastering his name all over the place, and picking Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.) Like our own Rodrigo Duterte, he has long cast his lot with Darth Vader & Co., not even pretending to be good, or to be aiming for such banalities as truth, freedom, and justice. In the words of one of his chief lieutenants, Stephen Miller, the age of “international niceties” is over; the only things that count today are “strength, force, and power,” which Trump & Co. have liberally deployed—not against global bullies like Vladimir Putin, but chiefly against the American people themselves. 

But again, let’s put the Orange Man aside for a minute. The real danger is that there are tens of millions of people who think the way he does, and who probably thought that way even before he gave Trumpism a face, a voice, and a name. These are people for whom daily doses of falsehood have become the norm, and I really couldn’t care less if they believe that Satanic Democrats drink the blood of kidnapped children, except that their weirdness creeps up to the White House and into the kind of domestic and foreign policy that makes life difficult for us 8,000 miles away, and emboldens other despots.

I’m not saying here that we don’t have our own version of Trumpers to deal with (and I’m adding this paragraph for the MAGAs who’ll remind me to stick to the local, a description I expect them to extend, in MAGA logic, to Greenland). Our DDS, in many ways, offer a parallel constituency; like many MAGA members, their grievances are rooted in historical neglect and a sense of displacement in rapidly changing times. They pinned their hopes on a man who was supposed to improve their lives—but who didn’t, distracted by a megalomaniacal drive to reshape society to his grim vision. 

This is why I haven’t given up on Digong’s faithful; there’s a valid cultural dimension to their disaffection in terms of Mindanao and Manila-centrism, but their issues can be addressed by attentive and equitable governance. The corruption issues that have gutted the country have devastated them as well. Except for the shrillest and most invested in a Sara succession, I feel that many can yet be persuaded to choose responsible leadership. 

In this respect—and this may not be shared by many, given the lows to which our own politicos have fallen, with some in need of growing a spine and others a brain or at least a heart—I feel more hopeful for the Philippines in the medium term than I do for America, and I think that’s saying a lot.

Now let’s wait for the MAGA backlash; I have lots of Trump jokes lined up to brighten their day, restore their sense of humor, and maybe help bring about world peace. 

Qwertyman No. 184: What I Told the Fil-Ams

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, February 9, 2026

LAST WEEK, at the Executive House of the University of the Philippines where he officially resides, UP President Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez graciously hosted a delegation of about twenty Filipino-American business and community leaders from San Diego, California, led by our honorary consul there, Atty. Audie de Castro. 

I was happy and proud to have helped facilitate this visit, having some close personal and professional ties myself to San Diego. Our unica hija Demi married a San Diegan, and has happily lived there with her husband Jerry for almost 20 years now. My wife Beng and I visit her nearly every year if we can afford it. 

San Diego also happens to be where a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Julie Hill, lives in a lovely home in Rancho Sta. Fe. Julie stayed in the Philippines for some years many decades ago when her husband was the Ford Foundation representative here and fell in love with the country and its people, and despite having traveled and served all over the world, the Philippines retains a special place in Julie’s heart. The last time I dropped in on her a year ago, Julie (who’s approaching 90) announced that she was donating what came out to more than P20 million to help the poorest of UP students. Atty. De Castro helped to formalize that donation as our consul in San Diego, cementing our relationship.

Professionally, but through Julie’s recommendation, I also served as Pacific Leadership Fellow in 2014 at the University of California San Diego, where I had previously lectured on Philippine-American affairs. Beng, meanwhile, observed operations and state-of-the-art techniques at the Balboa Art Conservation Center.

In other words, we’ve established rather close ties to this sunny and vibrant city in Southern California, where many generations of Fil-Ams have taken root, mainly because of the US naval base there, where thousands of Filipino sailors recruited from the Philippines have served. That’s how Demi’s in-laws came to San Diego from Bicol, their children born as Americans but deeply mindful of their Filipino heritage.

Many of our visitors never saw the Philippines until they were grown up, and I think most were setting foot on the UP campus for the first time. So we gave them the warmest reception and the best orientation we could, and engaged them over lunch in a lively discussion.

One of them asked: “What is the Filipino dream?” My UP colleagues responded to that in various ways, coming from different technical and academic disciplines. I tried to give a pedestrian answer: “The Filipino dream is actually a fairly simple one: a roof over one’s head, food on the table, a good education for the children, peace and justice in our communities. We dream for our families. But like all seemingly simple things, achieving that dream is difficult and complicated.”

The visitors had earlier asked President Jimenez about UP’s role in national leadership, and beyond citing how many presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices we’ve produced—which, to be honest, has also contributed to the ruination of our nation—Jijil emphasized the value his administration places on service to the Filipino people, which can manifest even from beyond our shores. He spoke of UP sharing its knowledge and resources with other SUCs, of UP assuming its responsibilities as the country’s national university—a concept perhaps alien to the American situation but entirely relevant to ours. (I was aware, of course, that UP has many internal issues and priorities of its own to sort out—it always has, regardless of administration.)

A more challenging discussion was one that I had on the side with two ladies who admitted that they represented two ends of the American p0litical spectrum, but had managed to remain friends despite their differences. Their question for me was, what did I personally think of what was happening in America?

No longer in UP spokesman mode, I could have answered as bluntly as possible, but I wanted to give them the more nuanced answer their friendship deserved. 

I began by saying that I considered myself an exemplar of American colonial education, having gone to a private elementary school in the 1960s where I learned about “heifers” and “mackinaws” long before I ever got to see real ones, and even memorized American states and their capitals, to the dismay of my future American friends when we played Trivial Pursuit. I shed off much of the mystification as a student activist in the 1970s and took a far more critical view of the American influence over our history, economy, and politics. 

But the indoctrination was so effective that I retained a fundamental affection and even admiration for many aspects of American culture and technology, and maintained a lifelong and ultimately professional interest in the US. I studied and worked for five years in the Midwestern heartland, in Michigan and Wisconsin, I taught American literature—not just in UP but in America itself, to college students who seemed surprised that I seemed to know more about their country than they did. Not just because our daughter lives there, I continue to follow American affairs keenly, starting my day with the digital editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post (the latter now sadly degraded).

What I told them was that this America was no longer the America I once thought I knew and looked up to, despite its excesses. I said I thought I understood, at least in part, where MAGA was coming from, in the neglect of the American working class and their anxieties in a rapidly changed world. At the same time, Donald Trump had ridden on those grievances to empower and aggrandize himself and the billionaire elite, trampling on the very liberties that had once defined American democracy, imposing his racist and imperialist vision of America, and endangering global peace and security. The shootings in Minnesota were profoundly shocking and depressing. I said that as much as it saddened me, with loved ones in the US, I did not plan on visiting America again until this madness had passed. If even American citizens could be dragged by masked men into vans and summarily deported to El Salvador, then I did not want to risk an encounter with the American Gestapo.

I could have added that both Americans and Filipinos, as polarized as we have become, need to find some common ground, as we share problems that cut across our differences. Bu the time was short, and we sent our guests off with a smile.

Qwertyman No. 173: A Page from 1937

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, November 24, 2025

I”M NOT a historian, although there are times I wish I were, and at an early crossroads in my youth, I actually had to choose between Literature and History for my major, settling for the former only because I thought I could finish it faster. But I’ve retained a lifelong interest in history, for the treasure trove of stories to be found in the past and for what those stories might foretell of the future. 

I’m particularly fascinated by the prewar period—what Filipinos of the midcentury looked back on as “peacetime” and what Carmen Guerrero Nakpil called our “fifty years in Hollywood,” which were enough to occlude much of the influence of our “three hundred fifty years in a convent” under the Spanish. It was an age of many transitions, from the jota to jazz, from the caruaje to the Chevrolet, from tradition to that liberative and all-embracing buzzword, the “modern.” Much of that went up in smoke during the Second World War, but you can still catch the ghost of this lost world on the Escolta, among other vestiges of our love-hate affair with America. (You might want to visit the Art Deco exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts, ongoing until May 2026; I have some items on display there.)

So entranced have I been by this time that I decided, during the pandemic, to set my third novel in it, at the birth of the Commonwealth and upon Quezon’s assumption of ultimate power, an upstairs-downstairs narrative about the comprador upper class and the world of the Manila Carnival set against the embers of the Sakdal uprising, the fuming and scheming Aguinaldistas, and the netherworld of printing-press Marxists and tranvia pickpockets. Progress has been slow because novels always take the back seat to life’s more pressing needs, but I still hope to get this done if it’s the last thing I do.

The research for the book, however, has brought its own rewards. Among my main sources for the background has been a slim volume—long out of print and now very  hard to find—titled The Radical Left on the Eve of War: A Political Memoir by James S. Allen (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985). Allen (actually a pseudonym for Sol Auerbach) was an American scholar and journalist, an avowed Marxist who traveled to the Philippines in 1936 and 1938 with his wife Isabelle, also a member of the American Communist Party, to meet with local communists and socialists (then headed by Crisanto Evangelista and Pedro Abad Santos, respectively) and to get a sense of the Philippine situation under American rule. 

Even that early, the threat of a Japanese invasion was already looming on the horizon and causing great anxiety in the Philippines; Japan had earlier occupied Manchuria and as much as a quarter of the entirety of China by 1937. It seemed like a confrontation between Japan and the United States was inevitable, although some Filipino nationalists—fiercely anti-American—preferred to ally themselves with their fellow Asians than with prolonged white rule. At the same time, others like Pedro Abad Santos feared that the independence Quezon sought would be granted prematurely to give the US an excuse to abandon the islands and avoid confronting the Japanese. 

This is where I tell you why I’m bringing up James Allen’s memoirs this Monday—because of our present situation vis-à-vis China and (in one of history’s ironic reversals from victim to victimizer) its growing domination of the South China Sea. In Quezon, Filipinos had a leader who was deeply mistrusted and opposed by many; the United States’ willingness to defend the Philippines was in doubt; and the threat of a foreign invasion was clear and imminent. 

Allen actually sat down with Quezon for a long interview at the latter’s invitation, and was impressed by the man’s grasp of politics and his singular ambition. But the article that came out of that encounter displeased MLQ; Allen, after all, was still a communist at heart, which makes the following quotation—from a letter Allen would compose and send to his American colleagues in October 1937—even more interesting. I’ll leave it to you to observe the parallels, and to cast them against the Marcos-Duterte issues of our time.

“Filipino Marxists and radicals need to relate independence from the United States to the world crisis created by fascism. The immediate concern in the struggle for an independent and democratic Philippines is to safeguard the country against the threat of Japanese aggression. The objectives of complete independence from the United States and the internal democratic transformation must be obtained without endangering such gains as have been made or subjecting the country to new masters. The people must be awakened to the prime and pressing danger to their national existence. The United States is moving toward alignment with the democratic powers against the fascist bloc, albeit slowly and indecisively.


“Roosevelt is shifting somewhat toward the Left of Center to keep pace with his mass support from the surging labor movement and anti-fascist and anti-war popular sentiment. The national interests of the Philippines call for vigilance and precautions against Japanese aggression. This coincides with the interests of the United States in the Pacific area, and it would be folly not to take full advantage of this concurrence. In the broader perspective, the outcome of the struggle in China will be crucial for all the peoples of the Far East, and if the United States were to withdraw from the Philippines this would be a serious blow against China and encouragement to Japan’s designs upon Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The cause of Philippine independence at this time can best be served by cooperation with the United States.


“The situation also requires a change in the attitude toward Quezon, from frontal attack to critical support. Unprincipled opposition for the sake of opposition-as with some leading participants in the Popular Alliance is dangerous, for it plays into the hand of pro-Japanese elements and sentiments. Quezon certainly is not an anti-fascist, but he is not intriguing behind the scenes with Japan. The greatest opposition to his early independence plan comes from the landed proprietors, particularly the sugar barons, while it enjoys support among the people. The Popular Alliance should also support the plan, including provisions for mutually satisfactory economic, military and diplomatic collaboration after independence. Though Quezon is far from being a Cardenas or Roosevelt in his domestic policies, every effort should be made to move him away from his pro-fascist and land baron support by providing him with mass backing for such pro-labor and progressive measures as are included in his social justice program. In sum, the Popular Alliance should encourage a national democratic front devoted to the preservation of peace in the Pacific, the safeguarding of Philippine independence, and defense and extension of democracy in the country.”

Qwertyman No. 151: For Don, a Meditation

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, June 23, 2025

(Photo of Los Cabos by Kurt Nichols)

I WAS looking for a topic for this column last week when it occurred to me that I had been staring it in the face, in the news and in the Facebook feed that, like for many, my days begin and end with. It was the omnipresence of death, in its many forms and guises, swift and slow, painless and agonizing, arriving on whispery feet and crashing through one’s roof or window. 

“A screaming comes across the sky,” the line with which Thomas Pynchon famously begins his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, was how death and destruction came last week to hundreds in Kiev, Tehran, and Tel Aviv, in missiles and drones designed and manufactured for but one purpose: to deliver death by inexact algorithm to place-names plotted on digital maps. 

In India we marveled at the horror and the mystery of one survivor escaping a catastrophic plane crash barely a minute after take-off: a moment when most of us would have just begun to fidget with the entertainment controls, wondering whether to take in a comedy or a thriller for the next two hours and what the meal choices will be. 

In Minnesota, a MAGA gunman stalked Democratic lawmakers and their families, shooting four and killing two on a long list of intended targets—murders that a Republican senator reflexively attributed to “Marxists not getting what they want.”

Most appalling was the report of Israeli tanks firing into a crowd of Palestinians lining up for food in Gaza, an incident that led to about 60 deaths and more than 200 wounded, for which the Israelis apologized with this statement: “The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”

As if the news isn’t enough, every time we scroll through our social media accounts, more deaths emerge, in the now-familiar solitary-candle meme and in the garlanded portraits of the recently departed. Facebook has become our new obituary page, our book of condolences, our virtual wake. The friend or the kinsman in us takes the loss with the requisite pain and grief; the enemy with muttered thankfulness, or more rarely forgiveness; the human with relief, that we are reading and not being read about.

Death in the news is meant to outrage us, and it still does, at least for a while, especially senseless and preventable death, willful murder, and patent genocide. But sadly we can only take so much, even with the keenest of consciences; there is something in our brains, a control or shut-off valve, that says “Enough” and leads us back into the immediate and comprehensible present, back to chocolate cupcakes, Torx screwdrivers, tomorrow’s court hearing, and Lola’s birthday. This, we remind ourselves, is life, the only one we have, our chief responsibility above all others to live and to give meaning to. 

We try to make sense of death as much as we do of life, and for those of us of a certain age, that means the acceptance of its inevitability. I suspect that those of my generation who came of age under martial law and fought it, who saw dozens of our comrades die, can do that with more equanimity than most, never having expected to live beyond twenty-five; every year and decade since has been a grace note, a blessing we have been careful not to waste. We are lucky to have come this far, and can leave without regret.

The Buddhists have what they call maranasati, the practice (says Google, meat-eating me being decidedly non-tantric) of contemplating one’s own mortality to cultivate mindfulness, reduce fear of death, and appreciate the present moment. The practical Swedes have döstädning, celebrated in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson, a Nordic Marie Kondo who advises us to downsize and clean up our mess before we croak to save some grumpy nephew the trouble of sorting out which things go to the trash and which go to the resale shop. 

Speaking of which, my devotion to Japan-surplus stores and their wonderful bargains is tempered by the knowledge that most of these items were likely made available by the peculiarly Japanese practices of hikikomori, or withdrawing from society and living alone, and the even sadder kodokushi or “lonely death,” where the bodies and belongings of the forgotten might be found days after their passing. But then, as a collector of vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books, I am well aware that these precious objects have passed through many lives and survived their owners, and will certainly survive me, which is strangely reassuring. They offer proof of an afterlife—maybe not paradise, but the life of the people and things you leave behind.

In a way, death’s predictability (or the illusion thereof) is comforting, because we think we can therefore prepare for it, as for the coming of a friend who will lead us away by the hand, down to the smallest detail. Despite her surprisingly good health, my 97-year-old mother has written out her DNR instructions, and a year ago we made a light-hearted trip to the mall to pick out her funeral dress, in a deep, pacific blue. Well before my father died of an aneurysm almost thirty years ago—he was a chain-smoker and a candidate for early passage—I had written out a scene in my first novel where the protagonist comes home to his father’s wake, which was my way, the privilege of imaginative writers, of cushioning the real pain when it struck; when it did, I still wept like my father’s child.

I’m writing this because I’m actually not very good at dealing with death and processing grief, as detached or as flippant as I may sound about it. I avoid or don’t stay long at the wakes of friends because I tend to say the lamest things. 

Last week I lost good friend—a high-school classmate named Don Rodis, brother to lawyer Rodel and producer Girlie, whom more people know—our Philippine Science High School batch’s livewire and indefatigably perfect host, to those visiting him in San Francisco. On vacation with his family in Los Cabos in Mexico, Don was strolling on the beach when a rogue wave known by the locals as the mar de fondo caught and swept him out to sea. Despite a massive search, his body has yet to be found. We are all stunned and awash with grief, but what struck me was how pretty that beach was from all the pictures, how blue and inviting its waters. And now I’ll say a stupid thing, for Don: rather than dying from a rocket to your head, or rotting from within, or freezing alone in Yamagata, sometimes we die in beauty’s arms. 

(Don Rodis, 1954-2025, with his wife Jocelyn)

Qwertyman No. 149: American Idiocracy

Posted on by
1

Qwertyman for Monday, June 9, 2025

IN HIS controversial but surprisingly popular 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom lamented what he saw to be the decline of intellectual inquiry in America, indicting its universities for failing their students by promoting “relativism” over the time-honored values embodied by the “Great Books” of Western thought. “The consequences of the abandonment of the quest for the best are far-reaching and destructive,” Bloom intoned. 

Bloom was no flaming liberal; in fact, he was anything but—a true conservative who disdained rock music for its overtly sexual messages and its narcotic effects on the young (imagine what he would have said about TikTok). But his book and its arguments struck a responsive chord in many Americans—half a million of them bought hardcover copies—who were worried that the counterculture that had crept across American society since the tumultuous 196os had weakened it from within and had dulled the blade of American exceptionalism—the rock-solid article of faith that America was, or had to be, No. 1 in everything, because of its unique history and attributes.

That sounds a lot like “Make America Great Again,” although MAGA wasn’t driven by a longing to study Plato, but by deep-seated, grassroots-level grievances and prejudices. One wonders how Allan Bloom, who died in 1992, would respond to the political situation today, which on the surface mirrors some of his concerns, but only just so: a conservative President has declared war on America’s liberal universities, for all the wrong reasons, leading up to the “far-reaching and destructive consequences” that Bloom bewailed. 

Of course, Donald Trump is no Bloomian or even Reaganite conservative; all he seems to be about is unbridled power and money, and testing the limits to where they can go. “Trumpism” has been described as a mash of nationalism, populism, and industrialism, with a generous dollop of pettiness and egotism. 

Sometime last April, messaging on Truth Social (with a shift key typically gone berserk), Trump attacked Harvard University, claiming that “Harvard is an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart. The place is a Liberal mess, allowing a certain group of crazed lunatics to enter and exit the classroom and spew fake ANGER AND HATE.” 

Shortly after, he ordered the federal government to withdraw more than $2 billion in funding for research grants to Harvard, and sought to cancel its ability to enroll international students. Trump wasn’t alone in declaring war on American academia. Years earlier, his VP-to-be JD Vance had told the National Conservatism Convention that “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth…. We have to honestly and aggressively attack (them).”

Not surprisingly, Harvard and a cohort of other leading universities have fought back, taking the administration’s tack as a frontal assault on academic freedom—and, more strategically, on America’s albeit waning intellectual leadership.

MAGAworld’s anti-intellectualism is interesting, because it draws on a long and dark tradition of tyrants from Franco’s Spain to Pol Pot’s Cambodia waging war on scholars—to cite only the most visibly horrifying examples under which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were massacred. Mass murder makes the withdrawal of grants and visas seem benign, but they come from the same deep mistrust of critical thinking, contrary opinion, and the alien element. Dictatorships thrive on herd mentality and unquestioning obedience, both anathema to academia.

It’s not as if Trump and Vance never went to good schools. Trump went to Wharton and Vance to Yale Law; whether they learned something worth their tuition is another matter. Political instinct, not intellect, drives these men. 

Right now, that instinct is telling them that culture (or its reversal) is more important than anything else—specifically “woke” culture, the greatest threat to the hegemony of straight white men: civil rights, women’s empowerment, abortion rights, gay and gender rights, minority representation, affirmative action, Black heritage, environmental protection, and internationalism, among other values espoused by the liberal Establishment and its bastions like Harvard. 

The collateral damage of this insane and reckless urge to reshape America in Trump’s own image has included truthfulness, justice, accountability, sound science, and, ironically, America’s own long-term economic and academic well-being. MAGA’s success will be America’s diminution from the intellectual powerhouse that has accounted for more than 70 percent of all Nobel Prize winners (about 30 percent of them immigrants to the US) to the fools’ paradise contemplated in the 2006 movie Idiocracy—a comedy that won’t be so funny when it materializes.

Trump’s insistence on characterizing foreign students as potential terrorists and troublemakers will be particularly counterproductive, as it will banish many of the world’s best young minds to more receptive climates, and erode America’s influence on global thinking. 

That may not necessarily be a bad thing, as it reminds everyone that the US has no monopoly on excellence, and never really did. But as a two-time Fulbrighter who, like thousands of other pensionados to America, look back with gratitude and not a little pride on that opportunity to imbibe not just new knowledge but America at its welcoming best, I cannot imagine anything stupider than this willful squandering of American goodwill and soft power for the price of a few missiles. 

It will not even be Donald Trump & Co. who will pay that price, but generations of Americans down the road who will recall this period of infectious lunacy with bewilderment and regret. They will have no one to blame but their red-capped grandparents, who thought that trusting a despotic dunce with all that power was a bright idea. (And I know how much that statement smacks of the elitism that Trumpers hate, but tell me it isn’t true.)

Penman No. 473: Taking Care of Emy

Posted on by
2

Penman for Friday, May 9, 2025

MY MOM Emy turns 97 today, May 9. Some years, her birthday coincides with Mothers’ Day, saving us a celebration. But that’s a bit deceptive, because when you have a parent this old living with you, every day is a blessing worth celebrating. 

It’s hard to believe that Mommy Emy is a lot healthier than she was a quarter-century ago, when we all feared that we were about to lose her, just a few years after our dad Joe Sr. passed away in 1996 from a ruptured aneurysm. After all, the stories usually went that way—one spouse dies, the other follows soon after, out of grief or a sense of life suddenly losing its purpose and meaning. Whatever caused it, Mom fell ill with tuberculosis, with the disease progressing so devastatingly that she was coughing blood and feeling terribly weak. Luckily, her doctor put her on a menu of cutting-edge pills that, over two years, miraculously banished the TB, well enough for her to secure a US visa to join my sister Elaine in California.

Over the next decade, she regained her strength, and even as she sorely missed our dad, indulged in a newfound zest for life—traveling with my sisters in the US, Canada, and Europe, visiting glaciers, going up the Tower of Pisa, and settling into in the quiet suburbs of Virginia just outside of DC with Elaine and her husband Eddie. She stayed there long enough to gain a green card, and we would visit her every now and then, sensing that, despite Elaine’s and Eddie’s loving care, she was pining for home. Eventually she did return to Manila, giving up her green card. “I want to die here,” she stated with finality, and that was that. 

One thing I love about my mom is her eminently practical sense. Since at least five years ago, she has written out clear instructions about what to do in case she was dying—no intubation, no extraordinary efforts to prolong her life, just as quiet and as painless a departure as could be managed. Last year we went out with her to the department store to pick out her funeral dress—a macabre chore to some, but for us, and especially for her, a cheerful excursion, with much discussion about this cut or that shade of blue (yes, she’s going in blue). 

She was born in Romblon a landlord’s youngest daughter, the apple of his eye, the only one to go to UP in Manila, from where she graduated with an Education degree. Growing up, she rode a horse on the farm and accompanied my Lolo Cosme on his trips to Manila. She remembers how easy and provident life was back then: “We would go to the beach and Papa would throw a net into the water, not far from shore, and it would come up teeming with fish, and the fish were everywhere, jumping in the air.” 

My father was a sharecropper’s grandson, too poor to finish college but with a sharp mind and a gift for words that must have swept Emy off her feet. Like many couples of their time and place, they decided to seek their fortune in Manila a few years after I was born. Their love was deep but often tested, given that there were five of us to raise. There was even a time when Dad was a barker for jeepneys, and Mom worked as postal clerk for minimum wage. Life sometimes felt like a soap opera, but we all pulled through, and often it was Emy’s internal toughness that made sure we were fed and ready for school.

Since her return from Virginia, my mom has been staying with us in UP Diliman, occasionally spending time with my three other siblings (Elaine is now in Canada). Still figure-conscious despite her age, she watches what she eats, but we indulge her every whim. It doesn’t take much to make her happy—almost daily Facetime calls from Elaine in Canada and our daughter Demi in the US, a weekly manicure, visits from her brood, and Tuesday Circle get-togethers with her group of neighborhood friends, among whom she is now most senior. 

What surprises people who meet her for the first time is how strong and alert she is. She uses a cane and a walker (but only because we insist), but she takes long walks daily around the yard and just outside the house. Her steps are getting slower and harder, but she marched for Leni in 2022, in gratitude for which the VP sent her a video greeting on her 95th birthday. She reads without glasses, and plays word games on her iPad with a passion; she follows Netflix, and watches the news with tart commentary. She’s as prayerful and religious as they come, but is staunchly liberal in her politics. “All my friends are dead” is her frequent complaint, quickly balanced by “But I’m so thankful for my children!” She and Beng share long meals and laughter-filled conversations. We have no doubt that as long as she takes her maintenance meds and doesn’t suffer a bad fall, she’ll live to be a happy hundred. 

Emilia Yap Dalisay’s name will never make it to the society pages, but she’s the biggest star in our small stretch of sky, and taking care of her has been our grandest privilege. Happy birthday, Mommy Emy, and may you have as many more years to come as God’s kindness will allow.

Qwertyman No. 132: A False Horizon

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, February 10, 2025

I DON’T know why, but like the proverbial bad penny that keeps turning up (English teachers: note the British idiom), every few years, some Filipino school announces its adoption of an “English-only” language policy on its campus, ostensibly in the service of a sublime objective such as “global competitiveness” or “global competence.”

This time around, it’s the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao that’s enforcing the rule. PNC president Librado Dimaunahan has issued a memo declaring that “In line with our vision of developing globally competitive and world class students, the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao (University of Cabuyao) is now an English-speaking campus starting Feb. 03, 2025…. All transactions and engagements with officers, students, employees, and workers should be communicated in English, whether written or otherwise. For strict compliance.” What he wanted to create was no less than “a strong English-speaking environment.” 

A few years ago, it was Cavite State University which required its students, teachers and staff to speak exclusively in English or face punishments like getting your ID confiscated and having to sing the CvSU hymn (in English, of course). Filipino could be used only by maintenance workers—and by others, but only in the restrooms and cafeteria.

I’m not going to add to the brickbats that these ideas have already received, not unreasonably. But I will add my two cents’ worth (my, where do these “brickbats” and “two cents” come from?) to the conversation, as a lifelong user and teacher of the language.

I have a PhD in English—something I don’t often bring up because it sounds so pompous and presumptuous—earned in America where, to my smug satisfaction and my classmates’ consternation, my professor would single out my prose for, among others, its perfect punctuation. I was the only one in our graduate literature class who could explain the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis (no, nothing to do with Yellow Cabs and Uber). Was that global competitiveness? I guess so. Was I proud of my English language skills? Of course. Did it make me or the Philippines any richer? Not a dollar more. Is this what a national language policy should be about? Heck, no.

I’ve done well in English not because I was forced to, but because I love the language, and languages in general. I should have loved Spanish—discovering its beauty too late, when I had to read and translate Federico Garcia Lorca for a grad-school exam—but I didn’t, because we had been forced by our curriculum to take so many units of it (24, in my mother’s time). I started on German and French in high school and college and am picking German up again on Duolingo, in preparation for the forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair. (I write plays and screenplays in Filipino, despite being born in Romblon.)

What I’ve realized from studying these languages and from a lifetime of writing, speaking, and using English is that in our country of over a hundred languages, English can’t be taught and learned well by exclusively using English. I’m learning German on Duolingo using English.

I don’t mind saying that when I teach creative writing or literature in English, I pause when my students can’t seem to understand what the text is saying—and then we pursue the same line of inquiry in Filipino, and everybody goes “Ah!” It makes simple teaching sense. You can’t get more out of a student—in English—if he or she can’t understand or even recognize the problem, in English. 

And just to be clear, these are questions of comprehension and interpretation that even native speakers of English would have a hard time with. (How do I know? I taught the American short story to American undergraduates in Wisconsin.) These are questions like “So what’s John Updike saying about the position of the rebel or nonconformist in society at the end of his story ‘A&P’?” That’s best answerable if you also discuss as we do what America was like in the 1960s, with Vietnam, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, and the moon landing in the background. (I always tell my students that we’re not studying American literature and history to become Americans, but to become better and wiser Filipinos.) 

Boomers like me like to recall that in many private schools of our time, students were fined five centavos for every instance they were caught using Filipino. Some may find that quaint or even charming, but if you think anyone learned and loved English because of these stupid rules, think again. Students learn good English from good teachers who don’t teach English as a grammar rulebook but as a road map or even a cheat sheet to an adventure.

English is best learned along the way of learning something else—like how the world works, in science and literature—as a key to unlocking knowledge and meaning. English proficiency all by itself is a non-goal, a false horizon that can delude people into believing that they’ve arrived. Arrived where? What for?

All the English in the world isn’t going to turn the Philippines into an economic powerhouse—which Japan, China, Russia, and Germany managed to become without a mandatory word of English in their curricula from decades back. Better English could make us become more employable as waiters, domestic helpers, and seamen—and I’m not downplaying this, because the language does give us an advantage in those markets—but these jobs, noble as they are, aren’t what universities were made for.

All the English in the world isn’t going to drive a moral spine up the backs of our leaders. Intolerable as it was, one president’s foul mouth and boorish manners may not be far worse than a General Appropriations Act legitimizing the wholesale thievery of people’s money in perfectly edited English. 

We can speak all we want with an American accent—only to realize that, in Trump’s America, where one of his appointees has declared pointblank that “It takes a competent white man to get things done right,” the color of your skin still matters more than whether you can pronounce “Adirondack” or “tortoise” correctly. Trump’s maniacal edicts and pronouncements—cutting foreign aid, expelling Palestinians so he can turn Gaza into an American beach resort, and turning the FBI and the DOJ into his personal security force and loyalty police—have all been made in his lazy, slurring English, each word delivering chaos and disaster with as much consequence as Hitler’s Nuremberg rants.

More shameful than lack of proficiency in English is lack of proficiency in one’s own language, which I see in the children of parents anxious to “globalize” their kids without mooring them first in their own culture. Those children will be maimed for life, insulated from and unable to communicate with or relate to their common countrymen. We need our own languages to understand ourselves.

Teach good values and good citizenship. Even if that student’s English turns out less than stellar, our country can’t be worse off.