Category Archives: Family & Me

Qwertyman No. 70: Life (and Death) on Installment

Posted on by
1

Qwertyman for Monday, December 4, 2023

THE SUDDEN collapse of Loyola Plans—yet to be explained to longtime customers like me—reminded me of the fragility of our expectations. Like probably hundreds of thousands of other pre-need plan holders, I was just going about my daily business, secure in the thought that whatever happened, I could look forward (well, not exactly, but…) to a coffin, an air-conditioned room full of flowers, and a patch of grass or a marble urn at the end of the road.

That road apparently ended sooner for Loyola than for me and my wife, and we are now in the odd situation of having outlived our funeral plans and the company that was supposed to fulfill them. I understand that Loyola sold educational plans as well, which in a way is even sorrier for the supposed beneficiaries, whose lives are just beginning as opposed to ours. 

We bought those plans more than 30 years ago, when we were in the middle of our lives and careers and just beginning to think of a far future, of the sunset over the horizon and such other clichés meant to assure us that life follows a predictable if not comfortable trajectory. Beng and I were both student activists who, much to our surprise, had survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law, when our friends and comrades were being murdered right and left. We got married and became parents in the middle of all that, and became tentatively hopeful that we would live a little if not much longer.

In true middle-class fashion, we paid for that future on the installment plan. We bought a subdivision house and lot in the boonies of San Mateo on installment, faithfully amortized for P784.54 a month over fifteen years (you don’t forget a figure like that when you write a check that often). We bought a used Volkswagen Beetle on installment, spread out over 36 months. We bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the crowning glory of the middle-class library—on installment. We budgeted by the month, our wages largely committed to patient creditors whom I imagined sitting at their desks slitting hundreds of envelopes stuffed with checks and cash (back then, we still trusted the postal system enough to actually send money in the mail). 

Come to think of it, our parents also lived from month to month. Their big thing was appliances—TVs and refrigerators, especially—that they checked out on the display floor, ooh’ed and aah’ed over, and then deposited a down payment for, withdrawn from the bank that afternoon with a sigh at once hopeful and despondent. These appliances became virtual members of the family, occupying positions of prominence in our living rooms and kitchens—until, sometimes and shockingly, they were carted away by strangers to Mama’s tears and Papa’s embarrassed silence. We younger ones learned that installment plans bore obligations that also carried emotional costs.

A little Googling tells us that installment buying has been around since at least 1807, when a New York furniture store offered the option. In 1850, Singer began selling its sewing machines on installment. The practice took off in the 1920s, and became even more hugely popular in the 1950s with the growing use of credit cards.

At least, those kinds of plans began with you getting some product up front. Until the repo man knocked on your door or until the blacks of your eyes turned white from viewing, you used and enjoyed your 14” TV. That’s not the case with educational and funeral plans, which are a kind of a safe bet that tomorrow’s prices will be higher than today’s, so you might as well buy now what you’ll pay for tomorrow anyway. At the end of your long period of indenture, you even get a document in fancy script—like we did—as final proof of your faithfulness and as a guarantee, graven in legal stone, that you will get what you paid for.

Except that now, that’s not going to happen. As the thousands of Filipinos who bought into the College Assurance Plan (CAP) two decades ago discovered, sometimes the bottom falls through the piggybank, and suddenly your dreams go “Poof!” (The CAP case, I’m told, is a complicated one, compounded by the unexpected rise in tuition fees and a new government requirement to produce billions of pesos up front. Last year, after an 18-year battle through the system, a Supreme Court ruling finally allowed for CAP’s rehabilitation, theoretically enabling the payment of 50 centavos for every peso owed a plan holder.)

Not being an avid follower of the business news, I heard about Loyola’s troubles only after their liquidation and the procedure for claims (until April 18, 2024, for the equally ignorant) were announced. As these claims processes go, we could be strumming lyres in heaven (or dodging forks elsewhere) before we see the color of money—and even so, if they just give us back what we paid in, instead of the now-expensive service we paid for, then it’ll be laughably (make that cryingly) small. 

My 95-year-old mother’s response probably said it for most plan holders her age: “I can’t die now.” No, you can’t, Nanay, and not just because we need to find you—and us—a new plan, which hopefully will be worth more than the paper it’s printed on. 

Penman No. 456: A Pocket of Peace and Quiet

Posted on by
Reply

Penman for Sunday, November 5, 2023

ROXAS CITY, the capital of Capiz, is proud to declare itself the “Seafood Capital of the Philippines” as well, but I didn’t even know that when I booked a flight for me and my wife Beng last month to spend a few days in Roxas. I still had a few “super passes” I’d bought a bunch of from an airline promo last year and they were expiring soon, so as Beng and I are wont to do, we decided to pick a place on that airline’s list of destinations, one where we’d never been before. It would help that Beng was Ilongga, and having been married to her for almost 50 years, I could understand Hiligaynon, so getting around would be no problem. The “seafood capital” tag popped up when I googled “Roxas City” for ideas about where to go and what to do—that was the clincher for me, the scourge of crabs, shrimp, scallops, and all aquatic arthropods. 

An hour-long plane ride from Manila deposited us in Roxas City’s airport, which has the advantage of being a short tricycle ride away from downtown. 

For our “hotel,” I picked out, online, a place called the Olive Hostel, which proved to be an adventure on its own. At just over 1K a night with free breakfast and within walking distance of Western civilization, it seemed just right for Beng and me, who don’t insist on five-star luxury. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in a container, well, we found out. It literally was built out of steel containers piled on top of each other, with doors and windows cut out. But don’t get me wrong: it was all very capably and tastefully done, and as tiny as our quarters were, it was actually quite cozy; the bathrooms were immaculately clean and the wi-fi was strong. There was no TV, but we made up for that by watching Netflix on my laptop, perched on my tummy. (Beng and I are used to tiny hotels in HK, Japan, and Korea; I’m usually claustrophobic, but I don’t feel that with Beng beside me.) 

The Olive Hostel’s grounds were, by contrast, spacious and very well maintained, lovely especially in the evening. For those seeking more traditional lodgings, the President’s Inn downtown comes highly recommended. Among the city’s newest and most modern hotels, three—the Veronica, the Urban Manor, and the Islands—can be found in Pueblo de Panay township.

Roxas City has one of the prettiest and cleanest plazas I’ve seen around the country, small but the very picture of what a plaza has always been in our provincial imaginations, with City Hall, the church, and a park with a bandstand beside a river.

To one corner stands the Panublion Museum, a cleverly repurposed water tank that showcases highlights of Capiznon history and culture. Managed by its very capable director, Cheryl Anne del Rosario, Panublion features the personal memorabilia of the city’s favorite son, President Manuel A. Roxas, including the flag flown at the July 4, 1946 inaugural of Philippine postwar independence. (President Roxas’ ancestral home is not too far away and is open for public viewing, but was closed on the day we toured the city.)

The museum also showcases the tools and finery of the province’s and island’s indigenous peoples. Most captivating were the exhibits  featuring Capiz’s two female National Artists—Jovita Fuentes for Music and Daisy Avellana for Theater. Fuentes’ golden gown contrasted sharply with the suit of armor worn by Avellana as Joan of Arc. Entrance to the museum is free, but donations are welcome. 

On our first night we walked out to a neighborhood restaurant where the chicken inasal was P108 with unlimited rice and a surprisingly good fruit drink, plus lomi at P68. We had the obligatory seafood lunch in one of the many restaurants along Baybay (literally, the beach), but much more charming and restful was a similar lunch on a bamboo raft on the river at the Palina Greenbelt Ecopark, normally part of a lazy cruise (the tide was too low when we arrived for any cruising, but the scenery was enough to soothe the senses).

Roxas has no shortage of malls for the urban dweller. The usual suspects—SM, Gaisano, CityMall—line the main highway downtown. Its equivalent of Metro Manila’s BGC is the 670-hectare Pueblo de Panay township, a residential and commercial development project master-planned by a Singaporean company and offering the most modern facilities and amenities to Capiz’s and Panay’s rising middle class. 

A mutual friend—the peripatetic Susan Claire Agbayani—introduced us to Hariette Ong Banzon and her husband Peter, the couple behind the Pueblo, who invited us to dinner at Cafe Terraza, their hilltop restaurant offering a panoramic view of the city far below. But before dinner, Hariette made sure to bring us to see the project dearest to her heart and now one of the city’s—indeed the island’s—most remarkable landmarks: the 132-foot statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which Harriette commissioned following the miraculous cure of a relative. Hariette and Peter—incidentally both fellow PSHS alumni, so we had other memories to share—are people of faith and conscience, reflecting their values in their optimism about Roxas City’s prospects and the way they run their business.

For all the things we seek in this troubled world—a pocket of peace and quiet, good food, rejuvenation of body and soul, and friendly people—Roxas City has much to offer, and we can only give it our ultimate accolade: “We’ll be back!”

Qwertyman No. 67: Business with Culture in Iloilo

Posted on by
2

Qwertyman for Monday, November 13, 2023

OVER THE past year, still eagerly emerging from our post-pandemic stupor, my wife Beng and I have been traveling up a storm, limiting ourselves to local destinations such as Bacolod, Virac, Davao, Roxas City, and Iloilo City. We chose these places because we’d never been there before—such as Virac and Roxas—or hadn’t visited for many years.

We were most impressed by the progress shown by Iloilo, whose transformation into a rapidly urbanizing metropolis I had begun to observe well before the pandemic. City and provincial officials, under the initial leadership and with the strong support of former Sen. Franklin Drilon, had managed to unite behind the key objectives of a continuing comprehensive development plan that has straddled several local and national administrations. 

All over the country, you hear about politicians achieving national prominence and power, even to the point of aspiring for the presidency—except that back in their home provinces, they did little or nothing for their constituents, and may even have lost the local vote to an outsider as a result. Drilon never ran for President—a job I think he would have performed excellently, if our voters were thinking rationally—but if he did then he could have counted on a near-solid Iloilo vote for never forgetting where he came from and ensuring Iloilo’s emergence as a model of city planning.

Any visitor to Iloilo cannot fail to be impressed by its dynamic growth, from the minute he or she steps off the plane in the city’s airport in Cabatuan, about 20 kilometers from downtown Iloilo. The long drive to the city down the wide, smooth highway is a virtual introduction to the city’s progress, with new malls, office buildings, car dealerships, hotels, construction depots, hospitals, and housing lining both sides of the road; new bridges and overpasses were rising here and there. A Grab car service just opened this year, our driver said, happy to be lifted by that rising economic tide.

The crown jewel of Iloilo’s renaissance is clearly the Iloilo River Esplanade, now stretching nine kilometers along both banks of the river in its expanded form. Designed by the celebrated architect Paulo Alcazaren, the Esplanade is what we Manileños want our Pasig riverbank to look like, in our dreams, but here in Iloilo, it’s been a reality for over a decade now. From early morning until after sunset, the Esplanade is filled with joggers, couples, families, and tourists who can also duck for a drink or a meal into one of the restaurants and cafes lining the walk. The river itself, once described as a septic tank into which the effluents of the city’s factories, slaughterhouse, and beer gardens drained, is clean and clear, fringed by a healthy belt of mangrove where we spotted egrets taking refuge. 

There’s a point of view that sees malls as the bane of urbanization and the death of small, artisanal businesses, and that’s been true in many places. It’s abundantly obvious that malls and mall culture have invaded Iloilo, with some negative consequences down the road. But so strong is local culture and tradition that it’s almost inconceivable that Iloilo will lose Tatoy’s, Breakthrough, Ted’s La Paz Batchoy, Panaderia de Molo, pancit molo, KBL, diwal, and all the other little things that make the city what it is. Indeed, instead of being pushed out, many of these institutions are now in the malls. At the plaza in front of Molo Cathedral, after a 3-km walk from our hotel via the Esplanade, we had breakfast of mini-bibingkas baked right before us the way they’d been done for decades.

It was a happy coincidence that, during our visit, UNESCO named Iloilo as the country’s first Creative City of Gastronomy, in recognition of its outstanding culinary culture and heritage. This was achieved by the city government under Mayor Jerry Treñas with the assistance of a team from UP Visayas’ College of Management that facilitated a workshop for the city’s food-industry leaders last May. Education remains one of the city’s strengths; its West Visayas State University College of Medicine is now one of the country’s top-ranked medical schools, aside from UPV’s commanding role in the region.

It was UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano who, after dinner in one of the many seafood restaurants that have cropped up in Leganes on the city’s outskirts, drove us around so we could appreciate the city by night. On our way to Molo, we passed through the new Megaworld/Festive Walk business district and were blown away by how smartly designed everything was; it was almost as if we were in Singapore or some such country. It was hard to believe that not too long ago, this was the old Iloilo airport in Mandurriao, and that the road we were traveling on had once been a runway. This is also where the Iloilo Convention Center is located, where the APEC 2015 summit was held (Drilon had negotiated the donation of the site from Andrew Tan, in exchange for the ICC’s being built there).

We returned to this place in the daytime to visit one of Iloilo’s most recent and also most impressive attractions: the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art or Ilomoca, a three-story showcase of both local and national talent. Ilomoca’s establishment in the middle of one of Iloilo’s CBDs demonstrates what seems to be the local formula for sustainability, the merging of the modern with the traditional, of business with culture. You can best see this in the majestic Consing mansion in front of the Molo Cathedral, which was bought by SM but tastefully renovated and transformed into its Kultura shop. There’s no doubt that modernization is coming to Iloilo in a big way, but its leaders are smart enough to know that the city’s appeal lies in what it has built over the past two centuries, which no money can buy.

You’d think that Iloilo has gotten this far just because of political patronage from Manila, but Iloilo was one of the 15 provinces that went for Leni Robredo in 2022. The city’s former mayor, Jed Mabilog, was hounded out of office by threats of tokhang under the previous administration, but the city seems to have weathered the political storms under Treñas, returning to his old job under the National Unity Party. What this tells me is that good local governance matters, whatever may be happening elsewhere. 

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

Qwertyman No. 58: A Long Grace Note

Posted on by
2

Qwertyman for Monday, September 11, 2023

AT ABOUT this time fifty years ago, I was newly released from martial-law prison after seven months of what everyone euphemistically called “detention,” and wondering what to do with the rest of my life. I was just nineteen, so I suppose you could say that I had a lot of living ahead of me, but I felt very differently then. More than a dozen of my friends—all of them in their twenties or even younger—had died horrible deaths fighting the regime. We exalted them as the martyrs that they were, but grimly realized and acknowledged that given how things were going, we ourselves would be fortunate to see the ripe old age of thirty.

I had been arrested at home on a cold January morning in 1973, just past midnight. Like many student activists, I had dropped out of college during the First Quarter Storm of the early 1970s. But instead of joining “the movement” full-time, I improbably found a job with a newspaper as a general-assignments reporter. It was heady stuff at age eighteen, covering three-alarm fires, floodwater rescues, and the very same demonstrations I had joined on the other side of the police barricades. And then martial law was declared—I was actually covering a rally in UP, and thought I had a scoop when a radio station nearby came under fire from the Metrocom, only to be told by my night editor when I tried to phone the story in that we no longer had a newspaper to publish, because soldiers had taken over the office. 

Over the next few months I shuttled between part-time jobs and clandestine meetings with the anti-martial law underground, moving around the city. I wasn’t doing much, given how green I was, but I thought it was important to take part in the resistance in whatever way. And then when Christmas came, like a good boy, I went home to my parents and foolishly had a chat with a neighbor who turned out to be a military asset. Not long after, a posse of soldiers appeared at our door, and when my father nudged me awake, I had a gun pointed at my face. I was being arrested under a catch-all “Arrest, Search, and Seizure Order” or ASSO issued by the Defense Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, for whom I would ironically be writing some speeches during his post-EDSA reincarnation (he won’t remember that, as I was a tiny mouse in the office).

My release in August 1973 came right out of a Kafka story. I was taking a shower one morning in our prison—which, by the way, is roughly where St. Luke’s BGC is today—when I heard my name being called over the PA system. “Dalisay, report to the guardhouse immediately!” The last time I had done that, after one Sunday dinner, I had been beaten up by some drunken guards just for the heck of it, so I groaned when I heard the announcement. Not again, and so early? As it happened, I was received by an Army officer with a stack of papers. He pulled mine out, squinted at it, and said, “Dalisay, you’re still here? Pack your things. We have nothing on you.” The first place I visited after I went home was the AS Steps in UP, where we had gathered for many a raucous rally; it was vacant and deathly silent, and I knew that I wasn’t going back to school just then. Only after a long detour—working as a printmaker, a writer, an economist, and meeting Beng and fathering Demi—did I return to UP and graduate with my degree at age thirty.

I’ve written about my activism and incarceration in my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (Anvil Publishing, 1992), and it isn’t what this column is really about. Rather, it’s about the aftermath, about having a life after martial law, and an unexpectedly long one at that. 

For any activist from my generation who’s still alive, every breath we’ve taken after our 30th birthday is a grace note—what the dictionary describes as “an extra note added as an embellishment and not essential to the harmony or melody”—in other words, a bonus. Considering that we could have been gunned down like dogs or buried alive like some of our comrades were, you can understand why we feel that way. It’s almost absurd to contemplate, but education, marriage, career, success, fame, fortune—and all the downsides and flipsides that come with them—all these were a long string of surprises, any one of which might never have happened, but for a twist of fate or a stroke of luck (clichés, like life’s very milestones, but ones we appreciate).

When my fellow FQSers and I—all college editors who were part of the SERVE book that I wrote about last week and that we launched last Saturday—gathered around a table before the launch to pre-sign some copies, we noted with much chuckling how surprisingly old we had become. We were beset by diabetes and hypertension, which were lethal enough but easier to bear than the four bullets one of us took to his face and body; he was with us that day, laughing, his spirits buoyed by his fervent Christian faith. 

We had become university presidents and professors, Cabinet secretaries, CEOs, magazine editors, pastors, and opinion-makers. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who believed any longer in the necessity nor the efficacy of violence, but neither did anyone imagine that our youthful goals had been met, that the country had become a kinder place, and that our work for justice and freedom was done. We had come to terms with our past, were busily in the present, and were hoping to enjoy what little we had left of our extended lives. But like those shaken passengers who stagger away from a crashed plane, leaving the uncounted dead behind, I’m sure that we felt driven by survivor’s guilt to make the most meaning of our gifted years, to do well and to do good, and to serve our people in any way we could. 

We learned that everything may be political, but also that politics is not everything, and that the road to happiness and deliverance may be wider than we had thought. I myself have resolved that even as I fight on for truth and beauty, I will not allow my happiness to be determined by our political vicissitudes, if I can help it. That will be my sweet revenge on my jailers. I will survive you, live a fuller life, and meet my Maker with a clear conscience and a smile.

Penman No. 454: Revenge Travel, Local Edition

Posted on by
Reply

Penman for Sunday, September 3, 2023

WE PINOYS don’t really know what “summer” is any longer, with heavy rains falling out of the sky as much in March as they do in September, but especially with the new school calendar in place, most of us now do what used to be our summer traveling between May and August, if Facebook posts are any indication.

Many Filipinos—those who can afford it—still seem to be in “revenge travel” mode, flying off to Prague, Helsinki, Myanmar, and other parts off the usual travel charts. My wife Beng and I had a couple of dream spots halfway around the world in mind—recalling our pre-pandemic spree in 2019 when we blew a chunk of my retirement kitty on an escapade to Penang, Tokyo, England, Scotland, Singapore, the US, Turkey, and Macau—but our shrunken pesos and aching knees urged something kinder and more affordable: go local, and suffer no jetlag.

As it happened, we visited at least four places these past few months that I’d like to share with our readers looking for alternatives to the usual weekend destinations, ie, Tagaytay, Subic, Baguio, and Boracay. Some of these trips were partly for work, although I have to admit that pleasure pretty much overpowered anything else on our minds once we got there.

The first was a treat for the whole household—Beng, myself, my 95-year-old mom Emy, her caregiver Jaja, our housekeepers Jenny and Ara, Jenny’s husband and Beng’s assistant Sonny, and Jenny’s and Sonny’s kids Jilliane and Buboy. This is our extended family, whom we genuinely enjoy being with, so every year I promise to take them out on an overnight trip to water resort, as everyone (well, at least below 65) loves to swim. That means a wave pool, a place to cook, good and clean rooms for sleeping and showering, and not too long a ride (for my mom who gets carsick). 

Last year it was the Villa Excellance Beach and Wave Pool Resort in Tanza, Cavite that did the trick for us—and it’s still worth a weekend for your family—but a little Googling yielded me something much closer to our home on UP Campus: the Ciudad Christhia Nine Waves Resort in San Mateo, Rizal, just a 30-minute hop away via the Commonwealth/Tumana route. The place had everything we were looking for—it’s an ideal venue as well for teambuilding seminars, if you don’t want to go too far, with very helpful staff and prices that won’t break the bank; you can do your broiling right beside the huge pool, and the cabanas were clean and cozy. While I flailed around in the knee-high water, six-year-old Buboy had a blast in the wave pool, which was all that mattered.

If you don’t mind driving through the mountains on a zigzag road for about three hours, then a trip to Infanta, Quezon will make the effort worth it. Facing the Pacific, but with Pagbilao Island buffering the waves in between, Infanta offers a bevy of beach resorts, of which Beng and I went to the Marpets Beach Resort, which was run by an American expat and his Filipino wife. Aside from its stretch of beach, the resort had three swimming pools, very livable quarters, and deliciously cooked food. The great thing about a roadtrip to Quezon—which is reachable via the zigzag Marilaque Highway from Marikina and also via the equally scenic though more moderate route passing Antipolo, Famy, and Real—is that the journey itself is an adventure, with much local produce to buy along the way, and breathtaking views to snap. 

Our third destination was almost a random but providential choice. Looking for an inexpensive getaway far enough from Manila to require a plane, and with some airline credits to expend, Beng and I looked up Cebu Pacific’s destination map and settled on one spot we’d never been to—Virac, Catanduanes. We Manileños often hear of Virac only in the context of incoming typhoons, for which it’s probably unfairly used as a reference point, but if you catch it on a sunny day like we did, then you’d rather be here than busy Boracay. I found a new boutique hotel on booking.com called Happy Island Inn in San Vicente, a short tricycle ride from downtown fronting the water, and it turned out to be a winner, priced very reasonably with the friendliest front desk fellow I’ve ever met in all my travels.

Soon we learned that nearly everything in Virac is reachable by tricycle, which we hired for a day tour that included a beachside lunch at the ritzy Twin Rocks resort, a visit to the historic Bato church, hewn out of stone and coral, and a bracing dip into the cool and clear waters of Maribina Falls (entry fee, P25 per person). We made new friends of a lovely couple, Bobby and Myette Tablizo, with whom we shared stories under a full moon. There’s a lot more to be discovered of Catanduanes up north—the island can be circled on a first-class circumferential road—but we’ll save that for next time.

My last sortie was by my lonesome and work-related, but work gets doubly hard in a place meant to transport you to blissful oblivion. This was in Panglao, Bohol, which, the last time I looked many years ago, was little more than a cluster of huts. Imagine my surprise when we stepped off the plane into a world-class airport and then, just minutes later, were wheeled into the kind of resort you find on some glossy magazine cover or on the travel channel but never thought was right in your backyard. (Well, of course there’s a whole class of Pinoys who do know about such places, and I’ve been fortunate to have been invited to a few, but my poor-boy’s jaw still can’t help dropping in the face of luxury.)

The Bellevue Resort in Panglao is one such place that will make you wish you’d studied something like plastic surgery so you could spend a few weekends here every year. The rooms are as plush and comfortable as you should expect at its price point, but it’s the waterfront that will captivate the first-time visitor, with its white-sand beach, tour boats, infinity pool, and multilevel restaurant. Breakfast or dinner beachside is an option, and a tour of the rest of Bohol can be arranged.

Of course, there’s always Bali or the south of France, but with the new travel paperwork requirements, who needs the hassle at immigration? Save yourself the travel tax and go local. It’s still more fun in the Philippines, if you know where to look.

Qwertyman No. 50: Doro’s Times and Ours

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, July 17, 2023

THE NEWS of Amando “Doro” Doronila’s recent passing in Canberra at age 95 marked the end of an era, as Doro was the last of his generation of journalists who made newspapers and their Op-Ed pages compelling reading. Whichever side of the political fence they were on, these journalists and columnists gave it all they had; many reveled in their prominence and some shamelessly parlayed their influence into all manner of profitable enterprise, back when it seemed the sensible thing to do, before the darker complicities of martial law set in.

Doro seemed to me to be above all this. His personality was, shall we say, poorly suited for TV or even radio, which was just as well, because it drew a clear line between journalists who did nothing better than think and write deeply, and those who confused their calling with show business.

I didn’t really know Doro personally. My one memorable encounter with him was when I was 18, a freshman dropout from UP who was dying to get into the newspapers, by hook or by crook. (Like some precocious teenagers, I was convinced I had the writing talent to skip journalism school. I would later pay for that hubris in tearful rewrites in the newsroom.) 

One of the doors I knocked on was that of the Manila Chronicle, which Doro was the editor of in 1972. I remember striding into its office and walking up to Doro’s desk, sucking in my stomach. He seemed puzzled to see my pimply face, which probably belonged to a messenger boy’s, except that I came empty-handed. “Yes?” What did I want? “Sir, I want to apply for a job—as a reporter,” I must have croaked, mumbling something about my writing for the Collegian and my high school paper. “How old are you?” I said that I was “going to be nineteen soon”—“soon” being about nine months away. 

I can’t recall if he looked back at me with pity or sympathy, or if he was laughing inside. I do remember him saying something like “Why don’t we talk again in a few years?” I was disappointed but not dejected; at least he didn’t throw me out of the place, or ridicule me before a roomful of the kind of people I wanted to be—hunched over typewriters, smoking up a storm, shaping tomorrow’s news, their bylines embedded crisply and imperishably on fresh paper.

Eventually, sometime that summer, and through sheer persistence, I did land a newspaper job, as a features writer and then a general-assignments reporter with the Philippines Herald, very likely the youngest fellow working full-time for the papers then. With the Herald and later Taliba  just before martial law, I met all kinds of journalists on the job, and saw how human we all were, the creatures of our noblest ambitions and pettiest grievances. One reporter I was on the police beat with loved playing cop, interrogating suspects each one of whom he was convinced was nursing a confession. Many had an enormous capacity for alcohol and the unapologetically macho bluster that came with it. Despite their gruffness, some had marshmallow hearts; two or three even took me under their wing to spare me from the usual gauntlet that rookies had to undergo. We were the peons of the profession, entry-level Hemingways and Woodwards chasing stories down the city’s tenebrous alleyways, and we loved every minute of it.

That was our world, but when I reported to the newsroom in the afternoon to file my story, I was ever aware that even above the copyeditors’ desk was another tier of men (as they mostly were) who perorated boisterously in a corner office on the day’s politics over scotch and cigars, the people whose opinions mattered and who made opinion matter. Never having worked with or for Doronila, I could only imagine him in that company, sitting sagely with his fingers crossed while allowing the thunder to roll above his head.

Today, half a century later, and finding myself just as old or even older than those titans of Philippine journalism then, I can savor the irony of having the privilege to write an Op-Ed column in times that mirror, in many ways, the early 1970s—with a Marcos in Malacañang, an opposition at bay, a scandal a week, and yet a people hard at work, striving for economic and moral deliverance. 

The great difference is that newspapers no longer have a monopoly of opinion-forming; that ground has been taken over by the Internet and social media (and elsewhere, by early-morning and late-afternoon AM radio, perhaps the hardiest of public platforms). Certainly, some Op-Ed stars remain—again on either side of the political divide—with faithful followers in need of sharper articulation and affirmation of their own sentiments. But even those readers tend to be aged or aging, people with the time and patience to read prose in paragraphs instead of bullets and memes, and who might even look for and appreciate that elusive quality called “style.” (Doronila’s no-frills prose, to be honest, was straight and guileless to the point of being starchy.) These 1,000-word pieces we produce now belong to what they call “long-form” writing, as if to write and read them were a test of endurance. 

But against the cheeky punchiness of Twitter and the ugly street brawls on Facebook, and above all stylistic considerations, I have to applaud this new generation of journalists (not all of them for sure) for their adherence to the truth and to fact-based reporting, and for holding themselves up to a higher standard of ethical behavior than their predecessors. Battling the bots and trolls of disinformation, they put their lives and well-being on the line, story by story, column by column; most are young, many are women, some even gay—the old gray men of the newsroom no longer dictate the headlines or the editorial slant. I think Doro himself would have been happy to see this, having mentored many of his successors.

And so as we grieve Amando Doronila’s demise at an age few of us can hope to approach, we can celebrate the continuity of upholding courage, virtue, and incorruptibility in Philippine journalism, with deepest thanks for the example the man set for us to follow.

(Photo by Pablo Tariman on FB)

Qwertyman No. 47: An Open Door

Posted on by
2

Qwertyman for June 26, 2023

A FEW weekends ago, the traffic was tied up in knots around the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, where we live, and we knew why. Many thousands of high school seniors hoping to enter UP were taking the university’s UPCAT or entrance exam, which had gone back to its old physical, face-to-face format after two years of being suspended in favor of a statistical formula because of the pandemic. This year, over 100,000 applicants took the UPCAT, out of whom about a tenth will be taken in, the actual number of admissions being determined by the capacity of UP’s eight “constituent universities” like UP Los Bañ0s and UP Mindanao, aside from Diliman, to absorb new freshmen.

As a campus resident and now a retired professor who still teaches a course every semester (an option I avail myself of, just to keep my foot in the classroom and know what the young people are thinking), I witness this ritual every year, and smile every time I see those bright and eager faces, squinting at the sun and looking a little lost; the first challenge every UP freshman faces is finding out where things are and the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B. 

That’s literally thinking on your feet, which is a survival skill we inculcate in our students. If there’s a smarter way to solve a problem than brute force, we’ll find it. (I recall how, in the middle of an exam for a Shakespeare class which I usually aced, I was stumped for the right answer, and in despair just responded with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion!” My professor let me off with a 1.25.)

Frankly or perhaps unkindly, UP people are called pilosopo, magulang, or maangas by those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the forthrightness and cleverness that our academic culture encourages. At worst, we’re called “godless communists” by those who don’t see how packed our chapels and parking lots are (although of course, today, the most successful communists are called oligarchs). On this point, I can guarantee you that no one can be more annoyed if not enraged by a UP person than another UP person; our faculty feuds are legendary. Indeed that has become a liability with some employers who prefer to hire graduates who will simply do as they’re told without asking “Why?”

“Why?” may indeed be the wrong entry-level thing to say, but it’s also what has moved science and society forward, quickly followed by “How?” If no one asked it, we’d still be chasing animals over clifftops for food and sacrificing our first-borns for bigger harvests. This urge to apply reason to the most basic of human and natural functions again can be occasionally irritating, especially when it is accompanied by the unflinching (or perhaps juvenile) certitude that one is absolutely right. 

As a teenage activist in Diliman, I was sure that the only way out of the mess we were (and continue to be) in was an armed revolution; Marxist logic said so. Approaching 70, I’m just glad that I lived long enough to reason my way out of it, but looking back at that pimply 17-year-old who carried Harry Shaw’s College English in one hand and Mao’s Little Red Book in the other, I can understand why I thought the way I did. And no, it wasn’t like my professors force-fed me with rebellious notions. I was a reasonably bright kid who read the news—murders and massacres here, extreme poverty and hunger there, corruption and scandal all around, with few of our leaders seeming to care—and I was looking for a comprehensive and compelling framework to explain all this and map out a route forward. The Left offered that.

It’s important to note that then, as now, most UP students and certainly most Filipino students didn’t feel the same way and do as I and my comrades did, which was to put activism over academics. Our protests may have hogged the headlines and typecast UP for good as a school for rebels (although it had been a hotbed of student protest since Quezon’s time), but the majority of UP students then continued attending their classes, turning in their assignments, and picking up their diplomas, as was their right. Like I often emphasize, as vocal dissidents, we were (and are) in a distinct minority. That comes with the territory of resistance—not just in a university but in society as a whole.

Given what’s happened since, were we wrong to protest and did we waste our youth (and, as some politicians and red-tag-happy trolls might say, our people’s money as well)? Some of us persisted and stayed on that path; many paid with their lives, or devoted the entirety of their lives to their cause. Some turned 180 degrees and now rabidly renounce their past, casting their lot with their former enemies. Some, like me, now see moderate liberalism as the only viable way forward—to endure and survive, gaining ground from one generation and one community to the next, instead of in one fell swoop. Somehow I understand all of these outcomes, which are all human, all fallible, and none of them assured of success. I can only be hopeful, and not certain, that my option is the best one.

As I looked at the UPCAT examinees posing for selfies in front of the Carillon and the Oblation in Diliman, I remembered that eight UP students are now facing charges for their recent attempt to storm past a closed door at Quezon Hall to protest an unpopular decision by the Board of Regents. Among the complainants’ grievances, ostensibly, was that the wooden door was part of UP’s heritage, and had to be protected at all costs.

That saddened me, because the last image that one could imagine to stand for a university like UP is that of a closed and impregnable door. UP’s true heritage doesn’t lie in its furniture but in its tradition of free speech, and even of protest, the occasional overflow of passion included. I can only pray that UP’s new and compassionate president, Jijil Jimenez, can draw on his own activist past to see that point, and to keep an open door for his constituents to his mind and heart.

Qwertyman No. 44: Again, America

Posted on by
5

Qwertyman for Monday, June 5, 2023

I HAVE a good friend whom we’ll call Ted, a Fil-Am who retired a few years ago as a ranking officer in the US Navy. He was in town recently on some family business, and like we always do when circumstances permit, we had dinner and a good chat just before he and his wife flew back home.

Most of us have friends if not relatives in America, and all of this would be pretty routine except for one fact: I’m a flaming liberal, and Ted is a Trump Republican. Over the fifteen years or so that we’ve known each other—well before Donald Trump entered the picture—we’ve been aware of those political differences, but rather than politely skirt them in our conversation like many sane people would, we feel comfortable enough with each other to talk at length about them, and even exchange some friendly barbs.

Much of that level of comfort comes from my belief that, in his own way, Ted sincerely and deeply loves his country—and his ancestral home, the Philippines. He’s smart, curious, eager to learn and understand. In his former naval job and as a private citizen, Ted—who was born in the US but spent some of his formative years in his family’s hometown in Bicol, and speaks some of the local language aside from Filipino—has visited the Philippines as often as he can, trying his best to improve relations between the two countries on a personal level. (On this last visit, for example, he also took part in a ceremony to celebrate the commissioning of the USS Telesforo Trinidad, named after an Aklan-born Filipino petty officer who was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravely rescuing his shipmates from an explosion aboard their ship in 1915.)

Given his naval background—his dad joined the Navy in the 1970s—I’m not surprised that Ted is a Republican, like many military Fil-Ams are. (One notable exception is a mutual friend of ours, the former West Pointer, Army Ranger, and diplomat Sonny Busa, as staunch a Democrat as they come, and a key figure behind Filipino veterans’ causes in Washington.) His support for Trump despite the man’s many failings continues to mystify me, but I’m guessing that in his calculations, Ted chose to cast his lot with the man best positioned to thwart the liberal agenda. That includes items that Ted and other Republicans feel extremely uncomfortable with, such as what he calls the “celebration, beyond just acceptance” of transgender rights, and their judicial enforcement.

Perhaps with any other person, my liberal hair-trigger would have fired away at such comments with a fusillade of counter-arguments, but with Ted I find more value in listening and trying to understand a certain mindset, as different as some of its premises may be from mine. In our last conversation, what Ted had to say was profoundly disturbing. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially it was this: “America is a mess. People can’t talk civilly to each other anymore. When I say I’m a Republican, people instantly assume I’m a racist.” To which I said that people at the top like Trump (and our own version of him here) greenlighted that kind of boorish discourse, with additional pressure brought on by right-wing militias armed with AR-15s. We talked about January 6 (which he opined was not an insurrection) and the Second Amendment (which I said seemed sacrosanct in American politics). “You have cancel culture,” he sighed, “to which the other guy responds by going bam bam bam!” He was deploring, not endorsing it, trying to get a fix on his own society’s ailments. “It’s in our DNA,” he said glumly about guns.

Thankfully Ted and I always have other things to talk about—like the Philippines, in which Ted said he feels much more relaxed than his own country. He knows how worked up I can get about politics and our own leadership (or the lack thereof), but as far as he could see on this trip, I and my fellow Filipinos (including those he met in Bicol) were just chugging along. “We’re survivors,” I said, “and we’ll do what it takes to get by from day to day.”

That brings me to another friend, “Tony,” who messaged me out of the blue the other day, obviously distraught by the Senate vote on the Maharlika Fund bill and asking if it was time for him and his family to leave the country, given how we seem to be back on the road to political plunder and economic ruin. It wasn’t just a rhetorical question; he was really thinking about it. Here’s what I said:

“Hi, Tony—If it’s a realistic option, I don’t think anyone can or should blame you for leaving or wanting to leave. We have only one life and we have to make the most of it in all ways. Politics is important, but it’s only one of many other factors that define who we are—love, art, family, and faith, among others. That said, it can have a way of complicating our lives and life choices. 

“Moving to the US has also been an option for me for some time now. Our only daughter lives in California and has been wanting to petition us. But my wife and I have been strongly reluctant to move there, although we visit almost every year and are familiar and comfortable with living in the US, where I spent five years as a grad student. We are artists, and our work is culture-bound. We feel appreciated here, within our small circle of friends. However good we may be, in America we would be marginalized; we don’t want to become an American minority and deal with all the issues that will come with it. And America has become much less inviting now, with all the intolerance and racial violence provoked by Trumpism. 

“So unless it were a matter of life and death, we’ll stay here, despite the present dispensation and many more aggravations like the Maharlika Fund to come in the years ahead, because I feel that my continued survival and success will be my best way of fighting back. Having survived martial law, we can survive this as well. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and again you should feel free to find your place where you can best live with your family and secure their future. Nothing is ever final anyway, and you can always come back. Follow your heart and conscience, and you should be all right, wherever you may go. All best!”

(Image from bu.edu)

Qwertyman No. 43: Perhaps It Takes a Fire

Posted on by
10

Qwertyman for May 29, 2023

THE WORST fire I ever witnessed was that of the Family Clinic hospital near Quiapo in Manila in 1972. I was a police reporter for the Philippines Herald, on the graveyard shift at the MPD HQ, when the three-alarm alert came in and we sped out in our jeep to the fire. Flames were billowing out of the upper floors and people were on the roof when we got there, and soon, sickest of all, I began to hear the thuds of bodies falling onto the pavement, of those who could no longer bear the heat and chose the only other terminal option. When I called the night editor to tell him what I was looking at, he had an additional assignment for me: “Count up the bodies, we need a figure.” I spent the early morning making the rounds of the nearby hospitals and their morgues, seeing up close what fire can do to a human body, the weeping of burnt flesh. I was eighteen, a college dropout eager to work; that night was worth a year in journalism school for me.

Many decades later, early in the morning of April 1, 2016, I was playing poker with some friends when I got a text message from another night owl that the UP Faculty Center was burning. Ever the skeptic, my first thought was that it was the first of what would be many April Fool’s Day jokes, but then other messages confirmed the terrible news. I dropped my cards and drove back to the campus—where I also live, by the way—behind the blare of firetrucks speeding to the scene of the fire, their loudness and haste almost superfluous in the stillness of the night. 

I arrived in time to catch the sight of my office burning—the whole first floor, our whole department, was burning. Strangely at that moment I felt no pain, no sense of loss; I didn’t flail around or throw up my hands in anguish. I suppose that was a form of shock, the way our brain throws a cold, wet blanket around us to insulate us from the heat, to keep us immobilized and therefore safe in the face of catastrophe. Unavoidably my mind began taking inventory of what was in my room—books, paintings, the best student papers of thirty-some years, twenty first-edition copies of my book Penmanship I had saved for its special paper, a computer, flotsam and jetsam from an academic life. There were many precious and irreplaceable pieces in that office, for sure, but again strangely, as soon as I remembered them, I said goodbye; I realized that I was muttering what amounted to a prayer.

Two days later, when the smoke had cleared, I stepped into the gutted building and took a video with my phone. The embers were still steaming beneath my feet. I confirmed with my own eyes the finality of things. Everything but the shards of a ceramic cup was gone—and my book of stories, prettily charred around the pages as though for some theatrical presentation. My writer’s mind was compensating, salvaging scraps of beauty from the crushing loss. That comes to us like second nature; we want to give our grief exquisite form, hoping for meaning and consolation.

There is something about a fire, a compelling majesty, that Filipinos instinctively respond to—not necessarily to help, which is beyond most of us, but to watch and be spellbound by. Where is the child who didn’t jump out of bed and dash into the street at the shouts of “Sunog!”, followed by the festive clangor of alarms and firetrucks? Nighttime fires are especially dramatic, as the sky glows orange and the smoke curls into your nostrils. You are aware that something terrible is happening to someone, and the next morning the news will carry the grim details: a family trapped, a mother curled over her baby, a son who had just graduated the week before. We feel sorry for these victims, while being secretly relieved that we ourselves were spared. Perhaps what attracts us to fire is its anticipation of The End, with science assuring us that the sun will scorch the earth in its last embrace and religion threatening yet more heat for miscreant souls.

When I heard about the fire at the Manila Central Post Office building last week and began seeing the pictures coming online, I reacted with the same stunned silence, trying to absorb the enormity of it all, while morbidly, guiltily, indulging my fascination with fire. It was epic theater—the inferno raging behind and through the neoclassical columns that had withstood a war. I should have been mourning the loss of hand- and typewritten letters—rarities themselves in these days of email—and of other valuables in that building (oh, the stamp collection of the Bureau of Posts!), but my mind drew me back to my childhood, when my father was working at what was then the Department of Public Works, Transportation, and Communications, which was housed in that building.

I must have been just five or six when my dad brought me there to his mezzanine office; I recall rocking on his wooden swivel chair, and playing with the double-tipped red-blue pencils on his desk. At lunch, we crossed an inner courtyard to the cafeteria. My father was just a clerk then, but to me, he seemed like the boss of the place, and I wanted to be like him, seated behind a big table with a pen in hand (in my sixties, I would buy a similar swivel chair). 

Editorials will and should be written about the MCPO building’s loss and for its reconstruction. Explosive words like “arson,” “heritage,” “accountability,” and “negligence” will fly up in the air. For a while, like the fire itself, they will consume us, hold us in thrall, until they flicker out and we return to our daily business, our outrage expended.

Once again we find ourselves loving what is gone too late. But perhaps it takes a fire to awaken love and memory, and to teach us important albeit bitter lessons about impermanence, and thus the need to care and to give value while we can. Whether started by accident or by diabolical intent, fires remind us that we are not what we accumulate but what we regret losing, and struggle to rebuild and recover.

(MCPO photo from philstar.com)

Qwertyman No. 39: My Mother Emy

Posted on by
6

Qwertyman for Monday, May 1, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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