Category Archives: Education

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. 91: 1968 Redux

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 29, 2024

A WAVE of pro-Palestinian protests has been sweeping American college campuses, prompting academic administrators and political leaders to push back and invoke their powers—including calling in the police—to curtail the demonstrations. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson—a Trump ally and staunch supporter of Israel—probably spoke for his ilk when he told protesting students at Columbia to “Go back to class! Stop wasting your parents’ money!” He also called on Columbia University president Minouche Shafik—an Oxford Economics PhD and English baroness who also happens to have been born in Alexandria, Egypt to Muslim parents—to resign for not moving strongly enough against antisemitism on the Columbia campus, despite Shafik’s controversial suspension of pro-Palestine student groups earlier and her resort to police action, resulting in mass arrests.

The protests and the violent response to them threw me back to 1968, when the world’s streets from Chicago to Paris shook from the boots of students and workers marching against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and for women’s liberation. In the Philippines, student organizations such as the SCAUP and the newly formed SDK took up the same causes, on top of a resurgent nationalism. I was too young to have been part of these great movements then, although we marched in high school for “student power,” whatever that meant. I would get deeply involved as the decade turned, infected by the inescapable ferment in the air; in 1973 I would realize that protest had a price when I spent seven months in martial-law prison.

I’ve tried hard to think what it would be like to be 18 and a student today, what cause would drive me to the streets and to pitch a tent on the campus grass. While we Pinoys have our sympathies, Gaza seems too distant for us to mobilize for, and certainly we don’t lack for domestic issues to be bothered by, although our level of tolerance appears to have risen over time. In 1971, a 10-centavo increase in oil prices was enough for us to trigger the Diliman Commune; today we routinely wait for Tuesday’s inevitable announcement of gas price hikes and sigh.

Perhaps time and age do bring about shifts in perspective; some leftist firebrands of my youth have now become darlings of the right, and I myself have moved much closer to the center, ironically morphing from student activist to university official at the time of my retirement.

As that administrator—at a university where protesting is practically part of the curriculum—I can appreciate the bind Dr. Shafik now finds herself in, hemmed in from both left and right, with the complexity of her thinking and the brilliance of her own achievements reduced to a single issue: how to deal with students who won’t “go back to class and stop wasting their parents’ money,” as Speaker Johnson would have it, and will instead insist on their right to self-expression, whatever the cost. Aggressiveness, audacity, and even insolence will come with the territory. Persons in authority become natural targets of one’s rejection of things as they are; the preceding two generations are to be held immediately responsible for things gone wrong. 

I recalled a time when UP students barged into Quezon Hall to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Regents to plead their cause. Some furniture was scuffed, but the president sat down with the students and discussed their demands. No one left happy, of course, but what had to be said on both sides was said. At another meeting later, someone asked if the students involved should have been sanctioned for what they did. I had to butt in to pour cold water on that notion, knowing that any punitive action would just worsen the problem. Open doors, I said, don’t shut them; this is UP—that kind of protest is what makes us UP, and our kind of engaged response is also what makes us UP.

Some will say that these outbursts are but cyclical, and that young people never learn, in repeating what their now-jaded seniors did way back when. But then the State never learns either, by responding to student protests today the way they did back in 1968, with shields and truncheons, effectively affirming everything the young suspect about elderly authority.

The Israel-Hamas war—now magnified, through many lenses, into an Israeli war on Palestinians—is a particularly thorny issue for American academia and for a public habituated to looking at the Jewish people as biblical heroes and historical victims. Gaza has turned that perception around for many, with the aggrieved now seen as the aggressors. In my column two weeks ago, I agreed with that re-evaluation, although I was careful to take the middle road and to condemn the excesses—committed for whatever reason—on both sides. 

Not surprisingly, I quickly got blowback from both my pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian friends. War is always ugly, one said, and Israel has to do what it must to save itself; the Hamas attack on October 7 was overblown by propaganda, said another, and it was something that Israel had coming. 

I still accept neither extreme; call me naïve and even Pollyannish, but I stand not with Israel nor with Palestine, but for peace and justice, which are not exclusive to one side, and can only be achieved by both working and living together. You can argue all the politics and the history you want, but there is absolutely no humane rationalization for the rape of women, the murder of children, and yes, even the killing of innocent men—not even the prospect of potentially saving more lives, the very argument behind the incineration of 200,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an act of war we all benefited from, but cannot call guiltless.

In a conflict as brutal and as polarizing as this one, “middle” never quite cuts it, and the excess of one will always be justified by the excess of the other. (To complicate my ambivalence, some issues do seem to have no middle, like Ukraine.) There have been no mass protests or demonstrations to advance my kind of moderation, and I don’t expect students, whether in Columbia or UP, to take to the streets flashing “peace” signs. 

And in mentioning that, I think I’ve put a finger on one difference between 1968 and 2024: “peaceniks” were neither pro-Saigon nor pro-Hanoi, although her critics were quick to paint Jane Fonda red; they just wanted America out of a war that was none of its business. There was an innocence to that that seems to have been lost in our hyper-informed and over-analyzed century. We feel compelled to choose with passion and precision, and are defined by our choices, from politics to sneakers.

Penman No. 461: A Parisian Interlude

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Penman for Sunday, April 7, 2024

WHY IS it that just when you think you’ve begun to figure out a foreign city’s transport system, it’s time to come home? That happened again barely two weeks ago when my wife Beng and I flew to France for some speaking engagements in Paris and Le Havre. We were there for work, not tourism, and more work waited for us as well back home, so we couldn’t stay for as long as we would have wanted to. We’d been to Paris three times before and had done the obligatory Louvre and Eiffel Tower visits, but it almost seems criminal not to linger and loiter around such a beautiful city.

We were there at the invitation of SciencesPo, France’s leading social sciences university, for a series of talks on Philippine literature and art. Along with France-based writer Criselda Yabes, I gave a reading as well at the Philippine embassy in Paris at the behest of our most gracious ambassador, Mme. Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, an avid amateur painter and supporter of Philippine culture. Our host at SciencesPo, Dr. Pauline Couteau, also arranged some events for us at their campus in Le Havre and sponsored a special screening of Lino Brocka’s classic “Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” at the Entrepot Theater in Paris.

It was a hectic week that left these footloose septuagenarians exhausted but exhilarated at the same time, warmed up in France’s unseasonably chilly weather (often falling below 10C) by the enthusiasm of our new friends, both French and fellow Filipinos. 

Again, however, we had a sweet problem to deal with even before we flew to Paris: with such little time left on our schedule for more casual diversions, what places or experiences would we put on top of our list for our relaxation and amusement, given Paris’ almost inexhaustible offerings of wonder and delight?

Anthony Bourdain, bless his soul, famously advised short-term visitors to Paris not to make a mad dash to try and see everything all at once, but to just relax, have coffee, imbibe the neighborhood culture, stay in bed (and for those able and inclined, make love). Beng and I recalled, with both fondness and regret, how we had first seen Paris a quarter-century earlier from the back of a bus on a 99-pound budget tour from our base then in Norwich, England. The bus went by the city’s landmarks so fast that Beng missed Rodin because she was in the on-board restroom then. Subsequent visits afforded us a bit more time to see the Mona Lisa (of course) and to go up the Eiffel Tower (of course) but our happiest memories came, as Bourdain suggested, from just walking in the city gardens and along the Seine.

This time, we decided to do just two things with our limited free time: visit one museum, and hit the flea markets. This follows a pattern that Beng and I have observed over decades of traveling together, from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and London to New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The museums capture and preserve the glory of the past, and if you’re lucky, rather than pay for made-in-China miniatures at the museum gift shop, you can find some genuine article from that past in the flea market. 

Our choice of museum was easy: Paris has dozens of fantastic museums—and you’ll never, ever finish the entire Louvre in one visit—but the great one we’d never been to was the Musée d’Orsay, the former train station that’s become France’s cathedral of Impressionism. Finally, this time, in the few hours we had just before boarding the train to Le Havre, we managed to step into the Musée d’Orsay, and what a divine experience e that was, to find room after room filled by the masterworks of Renoir, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Redon, Courbet, and so on, like walking into a book of pictures. 

Understandably, hundreds of other people had the same idea, so the best time to visit may have been after 6 pm—the museum closes at 9:45—when admission rates are also cheaper. Not a few friends have remarked that they found the Musée d’Orsay much better than the Louvre, perhaps because of its relative compactness and its delivery of proven crowd-pleasers in its collection.

Our flea-market sorties proved just as wondrous, with the additional thrill of unpredictability, as each table will be different from the one before it and you need a quick, trained eye to spot the jewel in the junkyard. As flea-market addicts from decades back when we used to scour the yard sales and antique barns of the American Midwest for things we could drag home, Beng and I have developed a routine of scan-and-scrutinize, looking for our respective grails (old fountain pens for me, old bottles and costume jewelry for her).

We were lucky to be billeted near our first flea market, the one at Porte de Vanves, which has about a hundred dealers strung along a large city block selling all manner of goodies from 18th-century books and Christofle silverware to walking sticks and paintings. I searched in vain for that lost Juan Luna and that stray copy of the Fili (which Rizal finished in Paris), but the flea-market gods blessed me instead with an early 1900s “safety” fountain pen sheathed in gold, perfect in every way, lying all by its lonesome on a table of bric-a-brac. “Combien, madame?” I asked in my schoolboy French, my throat dry with anticipation. “Cinquante euros,” she said; it was easily worth five times that, but I gathered up all my courage and countered, “Quarante?” “Okay,” she said, “A quick “Merci!” and 40 euros later, I was a happy boy with a new toy—what could be a better memento of this short trip than a gorgeous century-old pen with the word “Paris” on its 18-carat nib?

Of course, this luck was not to be repeated on our visit to the big flea market of St. Ouen in Clignancourt—reputedly the largest of its kind in the world—a few hours before boarding the plane back for home, but we rewarded our labors with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant. After a week of French cuisine, immersed in the grandeur of French art and culture, huge platefuls of Cantonese fried rice sounded just about right. It was as if we were being told, “You’ve had your Parisian interlude and your souvenirs, it’s time to go home.” Au revoir!

Qwertyman No. 87: A French Sojourn

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 1, 2024

MY WIFE Beng and I were in France last week to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, better known as SciencesPo. They don’t formally observe Holy Week in France (nor, for that matter, do many Filipinos to whom it’s simply come to mean “long weekend”). So we thought that it was the best time to come over and share some of our insights into Philippine literature, art, and politics with young French students as well as our countrymen in Paris, for whom I and fellow writer Cris Yabes, who’s based in France, gave a special reading at the Philippine embassy.

For those who’ve never heard of it—which won’t be too surprising given our Pinoy fixation on top American and British universities—SciencesPo (pronounced SEE-ansPO) is France’s leading university in the social sciences. It now has 14,000 students spread out over seven campuses across the country. Only 4,000 of those students are undergraduates; the rest are graduate students, including 350 taking their PhD. Unlike our universities, SciencesPo’s undergrads can finish in only three years, with their last year spent abroad. I was told that there are about 20 Filipino students currently enrolled at SciencesPo, and about half of its students come from overseas. As a public research university, SciencesPo is supported by the government through a private foundation, an arrangement that gives it a high degree of autonomy.

Founded in 1872, the university has served as the training ground for France’s political elite, producing five out of France’s eight presidents: Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac, Hollande, and the incumbent Macron. Marcel Proust studied here for a year, and Christian Dior was a graduate.

With that kind of elite status comes criticism and controversy, and SciencesPo has had its share over the years. Nevertheless, it remains high on the list of desirable universities, especially for students with plans of joining the French civil service, after further studies at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (At Inalco, another Fremch university, we were surprised to find eight Filipino-French students studying Filipino for their degree under Prof. Elisabeth Luquin, who studied in UP and speaks Filipino like a local.)

Beng and I gave presentations on the Philippines at SciencePo’s main campus in Paris—a sprawling complex comprising ten buildings in some of Paris’ most precious real estate—and I had an additional three sessions in Le Havre, where SciencePo’s campus focuses on Asian studies. Wherever we went, we could see signs of intellectual and political ferment; like their predecessors at the Sorbonne whom we admired for their militancy 60 years ago, SciencesPo students have protested and rallied over many causes from domestic violence to Gaza.

To be fair, these concerns have occupied much of the rest of France as well. In a country where street protests are a time-honored tradition that have a real bearing on political outcomes, differences of opinion can run deep and long, and controversy stalks nearly every issue, from the wearing of religious headgear to the extension of the retirement age. To “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” we must now add “identité,” the subject of identity so central to political discourse in many countries today, especially those with large and strong immigrant populations like America and France.

“Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars—a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity,” noted sociologist Daniel Zamora in an article for Catalyst in 2021. “Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. Building on what we have in common, Macron argued, meant finding an answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be French?’”

Identity, at least, was not in question when Cris Yabes and I gave our reading at the Philippine embassy, thanks to the invitation of Ambassador Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, one of the most amiable, gracious, and artistically inclined ambassadors I’ve ever met. (She was very game as well, happy to hoist an IPA beer with my wife Beng after our talks.) To a fairly sizeable group from the Filipino community in Paris, Cris and I read pieces that had to do with our foreign relations, particularly in my case with our diaspora, which my second novel Soledad’s Sister (which has been published in French by Mercure de France) dealt with. 

In the conversations that followed, I learned that there are around 26,000 documented Filipinos in France, with perhaps just as many existing belowground, most of them domestic helpers. One of them, Zita Cabais, was a victim of human trafficking more than two decades ago, having been enticed to come to Europe with the promise of a visa and a good job. Instead she was brought to Hungary, from where she was led on foot through Europe to finally reach France, whereupon her employer confiscated her passport, effectively holding her hostage. But unlike many other DH’s, Zita fought back, sued her employer, and succeeded. Since legalized, she now works for organizations devoted to fighting human trafficking. (The path to legalization is reportedly shorter in France, but knowing the French language is a prerequisite.)

One unexpected highlight of our visit was running into a group of Filipino seamen in our hotel in Le Havre, prior to my lecture. Beng and I had just come down for breakfast when we heard the familiar chatter of Filipinos at a nearby table. We came up to them and introduced ourselves, and we had a lively conversation during which they explained that they were still waiting for their ship to dock because of the bad weather. I’d met and chatted with seamen like them before in Hamburg and in Christchurch, among other places; as a writer and as a Filipino, I take it as a pleasant obligation.

Competition, they said, was driving them to accept shorter four-month stints at sea. “We barely break even, and it’s a tough life at sea, but we have no choice, since our families depend on us.” Part of my lecture that day was going to be about our Filipino notion of the hero as martyr, of Christ-like sacrifice for the common good. I suddenly realized that it was Good Friday. We had our smiling selfies taken, and they seemed proud to stand with UP professors, but it was Beng and I who felt honored to be there with them.

Qwertyman No. 86: The Real Pasaways

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 25, 2024

THE LOCAL Internet came down hard last week on an anonymous teacher who was caught on livestream giving her students a scorching tongue-lashing for what she claimed was their lack of respect and discipline. Almost hysterical, Teacher X called them good-for-nothings without a future. Predictably, netizens deplored her derogatory language, which they equated with child abuse, and called on the Department of Education to investigate the incident and impose some disciplinary measure on the teacher concerned.

I agree that Ma’am seems to have gone overboard in expressing her displeasure over her students’ misbehavior, and that she could have been more circumspect in her choice of words. I’m certain that DepEd—which happens to be headed by someone who doesn’t mince words herself when it comes to court sheriffs—will use her case to remind teachers of the need for exemplary behavior, if not some sweetness and light, in classroom management. 

At the same time, having been a teacher myself for forty years, I can imagine and understand the exasperation that must have gone into a titanic diatribe like that. I’ve never taught in elementary or high school, where these aggravations come in spades on both sides of the teacher’s table, but I’ve heard and read enough to know what a cauldron of high emotions a Filipino classroom can be in the worst of circumstances. 

Let’s pack a room meant for twenty students with twice that number or even more, with the heat from a tin roof bearing down on everyone (or, in another season, rain leaking down onto desks and textbooks). The teacher recites her lesson in a funereal monotone, expecting her students (who keep themselves awake by sneaking glances at TikTok on their phones) to regurgitate what she has just said: “Class, how do you pronounce a-DO-le-scent?” 

Not that she truly cares what they say, because her mind’s on the box of chocolates she has to buy for the supervisor whose signature she needs for her salary loan. She’ll spend half that loan on a fence around her garden to keep the roaming pigs and pissing drunks away, and the other half on a new cellphone because her arch-rival Mrs. Buenafe has one that can take selfies without the blemishes. Maybe, if she took better pictures of herself, she could win back her husband Temyong from that tramp in Trece Martires.

Just then a fight breaks out at the back of the room because Etoy has dropped a ballpen to sneak a look at Corito’s underwear, in full view of Corito’s alleged boyfriend Mikmik. “Stop that, quiet, gademet, you imbecile a-DO-lescents, I order you to behave or I’ll squeeze your little balls until they pop! You have no future, you worthless pasaways! You’re going to rot in this living hell they call a classroom!”

Now, when Teacher X says “You have no future,” I take it to mean that Ma’am has read the Edcom II report on the sad state of Philippine education, which puts our young learners practically at the cellar of global achievement. Unless some systemic reforms are put in place by the same DepEd that will now trumpet the virtues of better decorum in the classroom, we might as well have cursed those kids that caused Teacher X to blow her top—and by “curse” I don’t mean the use of foul language, but rather a hex such as a witch might put on some unfortunate soul. 

Philippine education is full of pasaways, many of them more than ten or even fifteen years old. Some have been in the system for so long that they have mastered its ways and means (e.g., how to make good money off bad textbooks) to a level of proficiency worthy of a doctorate. Secretaries of Education come and go—some more lamented than others—but these pasaways remain, as they do in certain bureaus dealing with government revenues, because they ensure continuity, which everyone but the occasional and hopelessly naive reformer appreciates. They may even be well-mannered, with the nicest smiles and mildest dispositions you ever saw, because of their contentment with the world as it is and their philosophical acceptance of human frailty.

This brings to mind another kind of pasaway, a certain man of God—no, make that Son of God—who has steadfastly refused to honor a summons by a Senate committee looking into sex trafficking, of which this pastor has been accused, among other crimes and misdemeanors. Let me judged by the proper court, he has argued through his lawyers, although—if he is who he claims to be—then no one but God the Father will qualify for that privilege.

God must have been a prolific babymaker, because this prosperous preacher is but one of many around the world proclaiming themselves to be Sons of God. Nearly all have landed in some kind of trouble with the law, usually in matters of sex and money, paltry and mundane emoluments that Sons of God seem to feel especially entitled to, in partial recompense for the heavy burdens of divinity.

Someone should have assured our good pastor that the Senate is a decorous institution, exceedingly kind to its guests, as a recent hearing involving police officials being questioned by a former police official showed. A senator who walked out of that hearing out of disgust over the “babying” shown the witnesses by their inquisitor now himself stands accused of discourtesy. Notwithstanding the presence of a chairperson known for her intolerance of untruths, our Son of God can surely count on the professed and unshakeable friendship of some of her honorable colleagues to shelter him from the slings and arrows of earthly justice. We are a much kinder people than that apoplectic teacher might suggest.

Qwertyman No. 85: Epilogue to a Novel

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 18, 2024

IT WAS in 1986, shortly after EDSA and my arrival in the US for my graduate studies, that I began thinking about what would eventually become my master’s thesis and my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. It was published by Anvil in 1992 when I came home to resume teaching after completing my PhD. 

For those who’ve never heard of it, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of coming of age during the Marcos years, from the point of view of a Filipino who makes the traditional journey from island to metropolis to the world at large, becoming, in the process, a kind of political chameleon. 

I had sent the first draft directly to several US publishers—my first try at getting a book published abroad—and one of them, Alfred Knopf, responded. They were interested, they said, but they needed some revisions. I knew very little about the book publishing industry then; I had no agent, wasn’t sure what lay ahead, and was in a hurry to see my book out, so I passed on Knopf—which turned out to be a titan in literary publishing—and went with Anvil, which had barely just opened.

I haven’t regretted that decision, although the Knopf deal, had it pushed through, would have been a tremendous break, not just for myself but for Philippine literature as a whole. I could understand that after EDSA, US publishing was hungry for books from and about the Philippines, so that opportunity was there, but I was also impatient to be read as a novelist by my fellow Filipinos, after having written short stories and plays. 

Anvil published the book in many printings and editions over the next two decades, as it got on the syllabi of college teachers who were looking for a novel in English on martial law, alongside Lualhati Bautista’s iconic Dekada 70. This has been my greatest reward and satisfaction from this book—knowing that somehow, it helped some of my countrymen understand what they went through.

It took a while for the novel to gain some traction overseas. In 2010, it was published in the US by Schaffner Press in a dual edition with my second novel, Soledad’s Sister. In 2012, it was translated into Spanish by Maria Alcaraz and published in Barcelona by Libros del Asteroide under the title Pasando el rato en un pais calido.

A few months ago, I received the happy news from my publisher Anvil that Killing Time was being picked up by the German publisher of Soledad’s Sister, which had apparently been doing well in the German market. So now the book is being translated into German, hopefully for a launch by Transit Verlag in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair this October, leading up to our big Frankfurt Guest of Honor year in 2025.

But I didn’t write this column just to tell you about the story of a book—rather, I wanted to say something about the story of its story.

In a message to Anvil a few days ago, my German publisher requested that I write a short epilogue to the novel, given that it’s been more than 30 years since it first came out, and that many things have happened since to the world and the Philippines—the Internet, Trump, and fake news, among others. 

So I sat down and wrote the short piece below, which I’m sharing with you since it’s highly unlikely that you’ll come across, or understand, the German translation of this epilogue if and when the new edition comes out. Here goes:

I began writing this novel in 1986, shortly after the downfall of the Marcos regime. That happened because of a massive uprising in Manila’s streets that made headlines and became a kind of model for peaceful anti-authoritarian movements worldwide. I proudly took part in that revolt, and felt the euphoria of liberation after more than a decade of martial law. It was a moment I would often return to and savor as the Iron Curtain fell and as various and largely non-violent revolutions took place elsewhere, including the Arab Spring.

I thought then that the best thing I could do was to write a novel that would try and explain how and why people fell under the spell of a dictatorship, as they did under Nazi Germany—not sparing myself, having been complicit in its later actions as an employee of the regime. I wrote it—in English—in America, mainly to fulfill my graduate school requirements, but also to celebrate our hard-won victory and share the good news with the world.

Almost four decades later, the seemingly unthinkable has happened: the right is back in power, not only in the Philippines but in many places we had thought to be reformed democracies. The optimism sweeping the planet toward the end of the 20th century has given way to a darkening horizon, a hardening of hearts, a closing of minds. Our most basic freedoms and values are under stiff and unrelenting assault, from forces we now realize had never really been vanquished but had merely been lying in wait, biding their time, seeking an opportunity for revival amidst the excesses of late capitalism.

And once again I am hearing the siren song of despotism, and see the eyes of people glazing over in the desperate desire for quick relief from their troubles, for quick salvation. I hear the march of boots, to which many young citizens—their ears plugged by loud music—seem indifferent. Even among many of their elders is a renascent yearning for the simple discipline of strongman rule.

I see all these and I wonder if I should write a sequel, an update for the new century, but what would be the point of repetition? My novel was supposed to be about the past. Why is it so suddenly pertinent again?

Qwertyman No. 84: An Advocate for IBD

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 11, 2024

YOU’LL FORGIVE me this “proud papa” moment if I preface this week’s column with the news that our unica hija Demi Dalisay Ricario, who’s unbelievably turning 50 later this year, represented Asian-Americans—and indeed the Philippines—on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC recently to lobby for changes in US health laws on behalf of patients. That’s an ocean and a continent away and doesn’t really affect us, but what’s salient here is that Demi went there on behalf of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) as an advocate for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) concerns—and that touches on our lives as Filipinos.

IBD is one of those little-known and often misunderstood diseases that can turn life into a living hell for its sufferers. It comes in two variants—ulcerative colitis (UC) and the more severe Crohn’s disease (CD), both of them involving inflammation of parts or all of the intestines. Often accompanied by bloody diarrhea, UC and CD and can be extremely painful and be lifelong burdens—or even turn fatal. 

Their causes remain unknown, but genetics, environmental factors, and immune responses seem to be active factors. Remedies include strict dietary changes and employing colostomy bags. Patients can find their social lives diminished or even be stigmatized. It’s not that common—according to the IBD Club of the Philippines, UC hits 1.22 out of 100,000 Filipinos and CD just 0.35, but it’s that same obscurity that makes it difficult to recognize, diagnose, and treat properly. In our culture where people tend to ignore or diminish their ailments—especially embarrassing ones—and consult doctors only as a last resort, the problem gets magnified.

It was on one of our visits with Demi in San Diego ten years ago that she fell terribly ill with blood in her stool, and despite all the tools available to modern American medicine, no one could tell why. Only months later was she positively diagnosed with UC, bringing both relief and radical lifestyle changes, especially to her diet (she can’t eat anything with wheat like ordinary sliced bread, among others). She held a high-pressure job as a frontliner in one of San Diego’s premium hotels, and stress is a high inflammatory factor.

“People often struggle to understand that IBD is an invisible illness, which means that sufferers might look healthy outwardly yet still experience significant health challenges,” Demi says. “This misconception is particularly challenging for individuals like me, who worked in high-end environments like the US Grant hotel, where maintaining an elegant appearance and managing demanding clients was part of the job. The contrast between looking ‘well’ and feeling unwell led to misunderstandings, as people would say, ‘But you don’t look sick!’

“The unpredictability of IBD symptoms significantly impacts mental health and daily life (it makes me anxious sometimes). Fluctuating symptoms such as frequent restroom visits and pain can hinder social interactions and activities. The inconsistency of the disease makes it difficult to commit to plans, as fatigue is a common issue. Additionally, managing a career can be problematic; frequent medical appointments and unexpected flare-ups often disrupt regular work schedules. This was my experience at The Grant, where I had to forego managerial opportunities to avoid exacerbating my condition. Additionally, managing relationships and friendships can be complex with IBD.”

IBD patients have a hard time at parties and social events, especially in the Philippines, where pakikisama is part of a strong food culture. People with colitis can’t eat ordinary bread or drink milk (think halo-halo). Demi has had to be adept at declining offers of food—a no-no for Pinoys—and explaining her unusual condition.  

“Before heading to any event or restaurant, I take a look at the menu online to figure out what I can eat. I’ve even gotten into the habit of giving the host a heads-up about my diet to make sure there’s something on the table I can actually enjoy. When it’s time for those long flights to places like Manila, I pack a stash of gut-friendly snacks in my carry-on (usually gluten-free bread, granola bars, nuts, and fruit). Whenever available, I pre-order gluten-free meals for my flights. After dealing with IBD for almost a decade, I’ve learned the hard way what foods are my friends and which ones are foes, such as gluten and lactose.”

To help her fellow Pinoys deal with IBD, Demi created a “Dear Colitis” Facebook page, also to encourage them to come out in the open and realize that they have a virtual global support group. Her advocacy continues online and with various entities like Pfizer, the Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning, and the Crohn’s Colitis Philippines FB group. Last year she was invited by the American Gastroenterological Association to join six other advocates as part of their pilot Patient Influencer Program to help promote IBD awareness, giving her the opportunity to participate in this year’s Digestive Disease National Coalition Public Policy Forum in DC. 

She explains that “Filipinos dealing with IBD should be well-informed about their condition and discerning about the reliability of information sources they encounter. It’s crucial for patients to be their own advocates, boldly voicing their needs and concerns whether at home, in the workplace, or in social gatherings. This self-advocacy is key to maintaining a good quality of life. Cultural concepts such as hiya (shame or embarrassment), pakikisama (camaraderie or fitting in), and the fear of being a pabigat (burden) can pose significant challenges. These factors might discourage individuals from speaking out about their condition, but overcoming these barriers is essential for their well-being and mental health. By confidently communicating their needs and educating those around them, Filipino IBD patients can navigate their condition more effectively while fostering understanding and support in their respective circles.”

Spoken like, well, a spokesperson, but I think a good one for the job.

(Illustration from Johns Hopkins Medicine)

Qwertyman No. 83: It Isn’t Just Money

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 4, 2023

MY RECENT column titled “An F for Philippine Education” apparently struck a chord among many readers who messaged me to say how appalled they were by the findings of the Second Congressional Commission on Education or Edcom II. Released just last January, the commission’s report graphically displayed just how poorly young Filipinos are faring in their schooling, especially when compared to the Asian neighbors they’ll be competing with for jobs down the road. 

To recapitulate just one particularly distressing finding, our best high-school learners are performing at a level comparable to the worst of Singapore. I read as much as I could of the report not just to be able to write about it, but—as an educator myself—to find out how this disaster happened.

There’s clearly a lot of blame to be thrown around for this situation, but to be fair, the report makes it clear at the outset that Philippine education’s systemic failures and shortcomings go back many decades, to problems being recognized by previous studies (notably Edcom I in the early 1990s) but left unattended rather than decisively acted upon. 

“This report was not crafted to point fingers,” say the report’s framers. “Our intention, instead, was to find things out and to instill a sense of urgency, along with a sense of doability—a clear horizon, and perhaps a sketch of the map toward that horizon.”

Its noble intentions notwithstanding, the report is a 400-page indictment of what successive Philippine administrations have failed to do, and it isn’t like they didn’t know or weren’t told. There’s been a plethora of studies of Philippine education between the two Edcoms in the 30 years separating them, and they’ve identified many of the same chronic problems plaguing the system today. The report identifies 28 “priority areas” such as governance and financing, in each of which specific problems and their implied solutions are discussed. 

One aspect that drew my attention was that of funding, which many of us, including myself, have thought to be the big problem of Philippine education: throw more money at it, and maybe it will go away. It turns out to not be the case, or in the very least, not the only major issue. Our “more” still isn’t enough, and even with more, the money needs to be spent, and spent wisely.

At the time of Edcom I, the report notes that the Philippine government spent only 2.7% of GDP on education, rising to 3.6% from 2014 to 2022, and to a high of 3.9% in 2017 (do take note that these are percentages of Gross Domestic Product, not the national budget). That comes very close to the global minimum of 4.0% set by the Incheon Declaration, but still falls short of Malaysia’s 4.2% and Singapore’s incredible 25.8% in 2018. Even so, our expenditures on education are rising to an average of 16 to 17% of the national budget for 2023 and 2024, compared to 10.7% in 1987.

Nevertheless, we still spend significantly less on education than our Asian neighbors, and the PISA results show a direct correlation between levels of spending on education and national scores in math, reading, and science. It’s also possible that we’re spending our education money in the wrong places. The report notes that “Between 2015 and 2020, increased government allocations to education were actually mostly at the tertiary level, with per student expenditure rising from only P13,206 to P29,507. In contrast, during the same period, investments at the primary level modestly improved and even fluctuated.”

And it seems like in some cases, we’re not even spending it at all. As I noted in my earlier column, from 2018 to 2022 alone, the Department of Education had a total budget of P12.6 billion allocated to textbooks and other instructional materials, but only P4.5 billion or about a third of this was obligated and only P952 million or less than 8% of it was disbursed for only 27 textbooks for Grades 1 to 10, since 2012. The budget of the Commission on Higher Education grew by 633% from 2013 to 2023, but it wasn’t spent on the additional people that its expanding responsibilities required, with its staffing complement increasing by only 22.7%, from 543 to 666 within the same period. 

There’s a lot of room for reform in education, but Edcom II zeroed in on a problem even more basic than funding in trying to change things—one of institutional culture. “Scholars have criticized the sector’s inability to implement reforms due to frequent changes in leadership, resistance to change within the government, and the agency’s ‘culture of obeisance’ (Bautista et al., 2008)—a bureaucracy accustomed to jaded compliance.”

This reminded me of a point raised by a reader named Peter Traenkner, an expat who recently visited Norway where their youngest son and his family live.

“Almost everybody admires the Nordic educational system,” Peter wrote me. “Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland) was generations of phenomenal educational policy. The 19th-century Nordic elites realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful ‘folk schools’ for the best educated among them. 

“They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society. Education meant for them the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. For them education is intended to change the way students see the world, to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things—between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.

“The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation: ‘That which a person did not burn for in his young years, he will not easily burn for as a man.’ That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. All Nordic countries have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between freedom and communal responsibility.

“High social trust doesn’t just happen. It results when people are spontaneously responsible for one another in the daily interaction of life, when institutions of society function well. When you look at the Nordic educational system, you realize that the problem is not only training people with the right job skills. It’s having the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society.”

In other words, we have to remember that education is about much more than teaching people the right skills so they can become good workers and earn good money. It has to teach them good citizenship, and their stake in the success of the nation.

Qwertyman No. 82: How Young Filipinos See Their Future

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 26, 2024

THIS SEMESTER, I’m teaching an undergraduate class in UP called “Professional Writing,” a course I designed more than twenty years ago to help English and Creative Writing majors (and other seniors in search of interesting electives) get a handle on what the “real world” out there expects of them, in the kind of everyday jobs they’re likely to land. Not Shakespeare, not Jose Garcia Villa, not lyric poetry and neither the full-length play, but rather the more mundane assignments you get paid a salary for: business letters, press releases, feature articles, AVP scripts, brochures, and speeches. 

I find myself telling my students that, in a way, what I’ll be teaching them—which is basically how to conform to organizational or institutional standards and norms—is counter-intuitive to what’s been thought of as the UP way of asserting oneself and even questioning authority. This mythified UP “yabang” or “angas” could be one reason why UP graduates don’t rank at the top of employable prospects for corporations. 

So I feel like I have to teach my students the virtues of humility and sufferance, of sticking with a job and doing it well even if it’s not the coziest or smartest thing in the world to do, and of the importance of execution and delivery with no excuses, no (audible) complaints, on time, and against all odds. Before they break the rules, they should know the rules, so they’ll know exactly what they’re breaking and why (I bring up how Picasso was a realist before he turned to Cubism).

Of course, I also tell them that the door swings both ways—they can also walk out of a job they can no longer take (like I’ve done a few times in my own career), but not before thinking through the consequences and figuring out one’s options. Innovation and initiative are great to show on the job—but they can also backfire if not handled well, given people’s (and many managers’) ingrained resistance to change. In other words, prepare for and learn how to deal with adversity, which can be a better teacher than I’ll ever be.

It’s going to be an interesting semester, seeing how the students are responding to my provocations. One of those provocations was our first in-class writing exercise, which was a “visioning” of sorts, where I asked them to look 20 years ahead (preparatory to their next task, which is to write a job application letter). I’m sharing some of their responses below (excerpted here with their authors’ permission) to give readers an idea of how young Filipinos see themselves in their own future. There’s a palpable strain of pessimism in these responses—and that’s understandable, but it worries me. We shouldn’t saddle our successors with the notion that things can only get worse. So I’m making a note to myself: teach reality, teach adversity, but above all, teach hope. Having survived this long, despite everything we had to go through, should yield a useful lesson or two.

Student A: I remember telling myself upon entering college, “If I end up becoming one of those people I despise—a heartless doctor, a vain lawyer, all in the name of shameless success—I’d rather not enter UP.” Twenty years from now, the Philippines—and by extension, me included—will probably still be trying to heal from all the abuse that accumulated through time. In my dejection, I see the country still having a hard time distinguishing the morally right from wrong. Yet I hope that it would be otherwise. My hope sees differently from my rational musings, my hope sees the tide calming, a time I no longer have to convince my father of a reality so transparent it bites us in the face like a serpent.

Student B: I struggle to think of what the future holds for me. Truth be told, I struggle to think of a future with me in it at all. I find that thinking of the future brings with it a wave of dread, because even if the state of the country miraculously improves, there will always be a bigger power that inevitably ruins things for everyone else. However, if I somehow manage to be present still, (through either sheer luck or spite), I will likely be working at an office or a school somewhere. I’ll have a cat or two if the landlord allows it. Who knows if I’ll ever get married. The only thing I’m sure of is that I won’t have children—I can’t, in good conscience, bring someone else into this mess of a world.

This all sounds pessimistic, but in reality, I would actually call myself an optimist in day-to-day life. I want to think the best of people, and I believe that people are inherently kind. There is still a chance for things to improve, for everything to work out, but I can’t ignore the sinking feeling that it’ll only get worse from here. It might seem like we’ve already hit rock bottom, but somewhere, some world leader has brought a shovel and they’re ready to dig.

Student C: In many ways the country is a better place. People are more free to be who they are and love who they love, without fear. We have made leaps and bounds of progress in research and development. Science creates new technology, and we artists learn new ways to create, adapt, and keep toe-to-toe. Because I’ll be damned before I let the machines win. Yes, life is better. For those who can afford it. I want to afford it. But those braver than me fight for a future where everyone need not to. Because that’s the thing about human nature. Fighting is instinctual. Through war, poverty, and inequality, there will always be people fighting for something better. Many because they have no choice but to fight or die—fight to survive. Others because they owe it to someone, maybe themselves, to be the source of hope they want to see or have seen before. 

The country is far from perfect in 2044. Those selfish, like myself, have found a good life amidst a rotten core. We have survived. I have survived. Now it’s time to finally be brave. In 20 years, I know I’ve learned so much. Let me teach what I can.