Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No: 40: Teaching History

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 8, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 37: Time for Winter-Melon Soup

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 17, 2023

AS I SHOULD have expected, last week’s Qwertyman piece on a recent visit I made to Taiwan as an ordinary tourist provoked a small firestorm from readers who berated me for my “ignorance” of the “one-China policy,” because I had described Taiwan as a “country” in my column.

I replied politely to these objections, explaining that (1) while I was aware that our government, among most others in the world, subscribed to the one-China policy, I wasn’t the government, and (2) that “country” to this writer was more of a state of mind, if not of fact (and if we have to be persnickety about fact, then consider that Wales and Scotland are accepted as countries within the United Kingdom). 

One of my reactors was gracious enough to yield the point and leave me be, but another insisted that I had China all wrong—that it had no unfriendly intentions toward the Philippines, and that its occupation of what we hold to be our islands in the South China Sea was a mere enforcement of its historic rights to those territories. “Absolutely no intentions of invading the Philippines?” Hasn’t that already begun?

My column also prompted some reflections from an old friend and comrade in the fight against the martial-law dictatorship. Commenting on China’s threats to bring Taiwan under its heel, by force if necessary, my friend remarked: “It’s hard to comprehend how the leaders of big, powerful China could feel justified in unleashing death and destruction against the people of small but proud Taiwan, a country that poses no threat, and against fellow Chinese of near identical racial and cultural origin. After all, isn’t this the China that I, and many of us, not too long ago, emulated as the model for ‘liberating’ our own country, and whose proletarian ideology we embraced as the formula for ushering a new and better age for humanity? How is this a manifestation of Mao’s ringing slogan to ‘Serve the People?’

“But then we’re seeing the same perversion of once lofty ideals in the current behavior of Russia, the progenitor of ‘egalitarian socialism,’ now immersed in a barbaric project to decimate the people of Ukraine, members of their own Slavic family. Yes, Putin doesn’t call himself socialist but it was this system that trained and tutored him, and whose humiliation he’s trying to undo…. However, in light of the current behaviors of Russia and China, the two foremost homes of the Marxist experiment, and in light of the incontrovertible failure of Joma Sison’s project in our country, we who dabbled in this belief system need to step back and take a good hard look.”

I thanked my friend for his ruminations, which I completely identify with. Indeed, as fervent if naïve activists in the 1970s, we looked up to Mao’s China as a beacon of socialist virtue. Today’s Red-taggers would have fulfilled their month’s quota with the likes of me. I kept Mao’s “Little Red Book” in my shirt pocket, and could spout quotations like “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” 

On my first visit to China in 1987, our guide was surprised that I could sing “Sailing the Seas Depends Upon the Helmsman” and that I wanted to visit Mao’s tomb. “What do you want to visit him for?” our guide asked in consternation. “He killed my father during the Cultural Revolution!” 

In various capacities as a tourist, a journalist, a writer, and academic, I have visited China many times since that first encounter, and have seen how its people—honest, hardworking, hopeful people like us—have managed to survive and prosper under a challenging succession of regimes and global conditions. I observed how the government was intent on modernizing its economic and physical landscape, razing down whole rows of hutongs or old communities in cities to make way for swanky new high-rises. On one visit to Shanghai, I couldn’t resist noting the irony of how the historic site of first National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party—a sacred shrine of that ideology—was located in the heart of what has become one of the city’s glitziest and most upscale districts, Xintiandi, in close proximity to a posh French restaurant.

I don’t think anyone can fault China for its transformation into an economic powerhouse, or even deny that its strong central planning was a key factor in making that happen, especially under Deng Xiaoping. What I’m sad about (and this statement will probably cost me my next Chinese visa, but no matter) is how this China has remained a tyrant to its own people and a bully to its neighbors—something that it doesn’t need to be, except to flex the almighty power of the CCP. 

If it wants to, it could yet become an example of a confident and benign socialism—something the CCP will never dare to embrace, for fear of seeming soft, especially in the face of American, Japanese, Korean, and yes, Taiwanese resistance. I can’t help thinking that while there may be “one China” in whatever configuration the politicians propose, there are indeed two Chinas in our hearts—the one we have been historically and culturally enmeshed with and want to love, and the other that won’t rest until we kowtow to its might.

And before the pro-Beijing troll machine springs into action, let me say this again: I separate governments and regimes from the people they theoretically represent and should be serving. (We also have to be reminded that there are significant political factions in both Beijing and Taipei, and that Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang were no angels when they “liberated” Formosa from the Japanese, only to take it over.)

I have written favorably (and critically when I had to) about both China and Taiwan without any sponsorship from either entity’s government. There are powerful lobbies for both sides right here in this country—one even offered to send me on an “observation tour,” which I gently declined, aware of the political subtext; I would go, I said, on my own dime, and I did. (Which is not to say I will refuse “observation tours” of the south of France, Tahiti, the Nordic fjords, the Patagonian forests, and other bucket-list destinations not likely to invade the Philippines.)

To Beijing’s and Taipei’s cheerleaders, chill out and enjoy the scenery; some calming winter-melon soup might help to keep the vitriol down.

Qwertyman No. 36: A Tourist in Taiwan

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 10, 2023

MY WIFE Beng and I visited Taiwan with friends on a five-day holiday just before Holy Week, and returned home dog-tired but deeply impressed by what we had seen: a country not just surviving but staunchly moving forward, progressive and optimistic, despite living under the constant threat of invasion by its hulking neighbor and self-declared owner, China.

It was my fourth visit to Taiwan and my wife’s second, so we had witnessed the island’s wonders before. But we went back—this time with friends who had never been there—precisely because it had much to offer as a vacation spot. For me, Taiwan has largely been about food (especially the beef-brisket noodles and fruits like the giant atis and cherimoya), technology (like the exhilarating 3D I-Ride it has exported to Hollywood), and culture (exemplified by the legendary jadeite cabbage at the National Palace Museum). Economists and political scientists will surely have much more to look for and investigate in Taiwan, but my unsophisticated cravings were fully satisfied. 

The tourist in me observed that Taiwan had achieved First-World status, with elevated expressways, high-rise housing, clean waterways, and extensive transport networks. Taipei’s shops were open past 10 pm, catering to a busy nightlife. We took a day trip out to visit the Chimei Museum in Tainan, and boarded the High Speed Rail that zoomed down the island’s west coast at 236 km/h. Despite Taiwan’s high level of industrialization, the countryside remained lush with forests and greenery, and Taipei’s streets were litter-free. True, there were homeless people gathered around Taipei’s Main Station, living out of shopping carts and camping tents, but we had seen far worse in New York and San Diego. Some old-school courtesies persisted: on the subways and buses, younger riders still stood up to yield their seats to seniors.

That said, it was hard for me to shake off the feeling that we were experiencing an ephemeral pleasure. As we took a bridge over a river in Taipei, and reveled in the vista of a thoroughly modern city rising from its ancient roots as a Spanish trading outpost, I remarked to Beng, half-facetiously, that a few Chinese bombs could pulverize all that. China, I said, could “Ukrainize” Taipei, and blow the 101-storey Taipei 101 building, the National Palace Museum, the Shilin Night Market, and all the other attractions we associate with this city into smithereens. Beng said that I shouldn’t be making such horrible jokes, but I had to wonder how much of what I said was indeed a joke and how much of it was dire possibility.

The threat is certainly there—and has been there since 1949, when Chiang Kai-Shek’s losing Nationalist forces retreated to the island, took it over, and turned it into a thorn in Communist China’s side. China has repeatedly used shows of force around Taiwan to demonstrate its readiness and capability to employ “resolute and forceful measures to defend (its) national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and while no explosively significant confrontations have taken place, China’s saber-rattling has only grown louder, provoked by presumptive American guarantees to help defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, and possibly emboldened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (The US, of course, has been rattling its own sabers, particularly with the acquisition of more basing rights in the Philippines.)

You’d think that the specter of invasion would switch Taiwan into full military mode, with air-raid drills and sirens and tanks and soldiers in the streets, but no. When we were there, it was business as usual, with no sense of urgency, even as Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California, raising the cross-straits temperature further.

Taiwan-watchers such as David Sacks, whose post was republished by the influential Council on Foreign Relations last November, have warned against complacency, especially in the wake of Russia’s Ukrainian misadventure. According to Sacks, “Despite these growing worries and initial steps, actions remain far below where they need to be to deter China and respond to potential Chinese aggression. The increases to Taiwan’s defense budget over the past six years are commendable, but at 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), it is still well below where it needs to be…. While there is a recognition that the civilian population will need to play a large role in defending the island, the conversation about how to reform Taiwan’s reserve force is still in its infancy, with little consensus on what its role should be. Taiwan’s military lacks the munitions it would need to withstand an initial Chinese assault and its military services continue to pursue legacy platforms such as fighter jets and large naval vessels that will have little utility during a conflict. It is far from certain that there is buy-in across the military for adopting an asymmetric defense strategy.

“Beyond the military realm, Taiwan needs to do much more to increase the resilience of its society and decrease its reliance on trade with China…. Over 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports go to China or Hong Kong. While there is wide agreement that this is a major vulnerability, there is a certain amount of defeatism, with few ideas of how to reduce this dependence without massive government intervention.

“While the government is taking steps (albeit insufficient) to address the growing threat China poses, there is a worrying gap between officials and the public. Opinion polls reveal that Taiwanese people are not concerned about an invasion and believe war is unlikely in the next decade…. Understandably, most want to focus on improving their lives. There is a fine line, however, between stoicism and complacency.”

Is this a fatalism that we Filipinos seem to share? If China attacks Taiwan, can the Philippines be next, and what will we or can we do about it? (In my admittedly  pedestrian view, China has no need for a military invasion of the Philippines—which will be costly and troublesome, given our geography—so long as it achieves full control of the South China Sea. It will be cheaper and easier to subvert and suborn the government, if it wants pro-China policies to prevail.)

I was glad to be just a tourist in Taiwan, enjoying my cherimoya, instead of being a defense analyst pondering the medium term—or, for that matter, being a local fruit seller who might one day find a gaping hole where the orchard used to be.

(Photo from thetimes.co.uk)

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Qwertyman No. 35: The Ultimate Casualty

Qwertyman for Monday, April 3, 2023

I’M SURE I wasn’t the only one who looked up from his breakfast coffee last week to see, on the morning news, that another mass shooting had ripped through the heart of America—in Nashville, a city that usually brings to mind the twangy plaints of country music, in mournful songs about prison life and cheating hearts. This time the pain was much more brutal and direct, devoid of all poetry: six people were killed, including three nine-year-olds, their bodies savaged by bullets from AR-15-style assault rifles.

According to the Gun Violence Archive—whose very existence should be disturbing—it was the 130th mass shooting in the US in the first three months of 2023 alone. Last year, 647 such events were recorded; overall, more than 44,000 Americans died from gun violence in 2022. At this rate, 2023 will almost certainly be a much bloodier year for America. There will be hundreds more Nashvilles, thousands more families ambushed by unspeakable tragedy, choruses of angry wails to heaven asking God to explain why.

Like any other parent who witnessed that carnage, my wife Beng raised the question on every sensible person’s mind: “How could they let this happen?” 

“This” here would mean not only the mass killing itself, but the means to do it. Two AR-15-style assault rifles were used by the 28-year-old shooter. The AR-15 has been the mass shooter’s weapon of choice. It can rip people to shreds. According to the Washington Post, “The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.”


The mere thought of children being mowed down like carnival toys is horrific, but apparently not enough for America’s powerful and richly funded gun lobby, which has insisted on looking the other way, sanctifying the Americans’ Second-Amendment right to bear arms above all other human considerations. 

In Tennessee, where the shootings took place, it is legal for anyone over 21 to carry handguns without a permit; that holds true for 24 other states, making fully half of America gun-friendly. And despite the mounting deaths from mass shootings, politicians in many predominantly Republican states—including Tennessee—are sponsoring even more permissive gun laws, to do away with background checks and facilitate the sale and transport of lethal weapons.

President Biden has rightly said that he has done all he could to help stop the violence by calling for a ban on assault rifles, but the opposition to such gun-control measures has been stubbornly successful. The National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been bankrolled by the gun industry for generations, has lost some of its luster and bluster following the public outcry over the mass shootings, but it still wields enormous political power by supporting gun-supportive candidates in elections.


The gun lobby argues speciously that guns don’t kill—people do; and further, that the problem isn’t that there are too many guns on the streets (there can never be too many), but that mass shooters are certified lunatics who in no way represent the millions more of responsible gun owners who keep their guns for target practice, for the joy of collecting, and for the End of Days, when hordes of zombie-like strangers will come over the hill to invade their homes, steal their food, and rape their wives. Mass shootings, they insist, are a mental-health problem, not something to be blamed on the proliferation and easy availability of weaponry.

Why does this concern us in faraway Philippines? First, because millions of us have relatives in America—who, as minority citizens, are prone to racial violence, as the recent spate of maulings of Filipino-Americans has shown. Many mass shootings have been racially motivated, and it will be only a matter of time before some teenage White Aryan barges into a Pinoy wedding or fiesta to prove his superiority through the barrel of an assault rifle. I fear for our daughter in California, who could be enjoying a night out with friends or shopping for groceries when the shooting begins. (Much to Beng’s and my surprise, our daughter Demi joined the UP Rifle and Pistol Team and became a sharpshooter, but has never felt the need to own and carry.)

Of course, in truth, we knew about America’s bloody history a long time ago, if only from The Untouchables, The Godfather, and America’s Most Wanted. What was a cowboy, a frontiersman, or soldier without a gun? And let’s not forget that it was the Krag-Jorgensen rifle with which US Army troopers “pacified” Filipino “insurgents” from 1898 onwards.

The second connection is our own gun culture—which, though not as pronounced and as strident as America’s, nevertheless exists, with the gun seen less as a means of self-defense than as a symbol and enforcer of power. With no need for a Second Amendment, our politicians and other bigwigs assemble arsenals for their private armies, such as the cache of arms and ammunition recently uncovered on the property of the Teveses in Negros Oriental. 

Oldtimers will remember when people boarded jeeps and buses with .45s tucked into their waists; congressmen used to enter the Session Hall bringing guns. Ironically, it took martial law to mop up most of those vagrant firearms—when someone decided that only he and his henchmen could carry them—but yet even more ironically, it was the military bullet that assassinated Ninoy Aquino that took the regime down.

I’m not so naive as to believe that we’ll see a gunless world in our lifetime and sing “Kumbaya” until we fall asleep. As societies undergo even more wrenching tests of the values that keep them together, our animal instincts—fear, belligerence, and survivalism—will become even more assertive, and the most brutish and inarticulate among us will let their firepower do the speaking. Unless reason prevails, the insanity will continue.

Abetting the murder of children—whether in Nashville or Bakhmut—means condoning the death of our humanity. That will be the ultimate casualty.

(Image from cnn.com)

Qwertyman No. 34: America the Paradox

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 27, 2023

“AMERICA THE Paradox” was the title of an undergraduate paper I wrote on Carlos Bulosan for my class in Philippine literature, in which I observed—as many had done before me—that Bulosan felt deeply conflicted by the two faces that he kept seeing in America. On the one hand, it was the mother with open arms, calling out to the world’s orphans, and accepting of all brave and enterprising spirits. On the other hand, it was the hard fist of racism, viciously averse to all complexions other than white. 

Bulosan arrived in Seattle in 1930, a time of great economic turmoil, and he soon found himself fighting for the exploited poor, becoming a labor organizer and writing radical poetry. He would remain poor for the rest of his short life, despite achieving some degree of literary celebrity following the success of his semi-autobiographical 1946 novel America Is in the Heart. He died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1956, never having been able to come home. I was so moved by Bulosan’s travails that I gifted our daughter with a signed first edition of his novel as her wedding present, and paid my respects at his grave when I visited Seattle some years ago.

Last Thursday, March 23rd, I joined several hundred other guests for dinner at the Sofitel to celebrate a joyful event: the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright program in the Philippines. Over that period, the Fulbright program, which selects and sends scholars from all over the world to study in the US, has sponsored over 3,000 Filipino scholars and 1,000 American scholars coming to the Philippines. The Philippines—through the Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF)—has the longest-running Fulbright program in the world, dating back to March 23, 1948, hence last week’s big commemoration.

It isn’t hard to see why Sen. J. William Fulbright believed that such a scholarship program was a good idea then, with the Cold War brewing and America projecting itself as the champion of the Free World. For the Philippines, it was a continuation of the prewar practice of sending pensionados to the US, thereby ensuring a cohort of Filipino intellectuals and administrators sympathetic to the American cause.

I myself went out on a Fulbright twice—in 1986, for my MFA at Michigan and then my PhD at Wisconsin, and then in 2014 as a senior scholar at George Washington University. It would be an understatement to say that the Fulbright—especially that first five-year stint—was life-changing for me. The learning was exhilarating, but the living—away from home and family—was fraught with pain.

Still, we Fulbrighters had it much better than Bulosan. Most of our expenses were borne by the American taxpayer (although, because of a budget crunch, I had to teach and also to work part-time as a cook, cashier, and busboy at a Chinese takeout). Our return home was guaranteed (indeed, legally mandated). Most of us enjoyed the hospitality and support of new Fil-Am and American friends. 

Although here and there we had the inevitable brush with racism, we saw America in the best possible light, as a source of knowledge and of the democratic spirit. Arriving in Michigan just after EDSA 1986, I too was seen as living proof of the long and beneficial reach of America’s cultural influence: I could speak English like they did, and (mild boast coming) could write at least as well if not better than they did. 

I recall how, in one Shakespeare class, I was the only one who could explain the difference between “parataxis” and “hypotaxis,” and how, in another class, our professor wrote up a long sentence from one of my stories on the board to demonstrate “Jose’s perfect command of punctuation.” But all that was presumably because of my Americanized education—not even in America, but in the Philippines, where we had seemingly prepared all our lives to come to America, only to find ourselves more indoctrinated than many Americans. (I had memorized all the state capitals in grade school in La Salle, confounding my American friends at Trivial Pursuit.)

Ironically, I also belonged to the First Quarter Storm generation that railed against “American imperialism,” that learned about our colonial exploitation and about the primacy of American self-interest in its transactions with the world. We rallied at the US Embassy against the war in Vietnam and against the US bases in the Philippines. We denounced Ferdinand Marcos as an American puppet, and saw Washington’s hand in every instance of political mayhem around the globe. Where did all that militancy go? Was a scholarship to Hollywood enough to negate these accusations?

Seated at that Fulbright dinner and listening to the speakers extolling our special relationship with America, I thought about Bulosan, the FQS, my Fulbright experience, our daughter in California, my teaching of American literature, and such recent issues as EDCA and the Chinese presence in our territorial waters to sort out my emotions. 

The America that had been such a paradox for Bulosan remains, in many ways, a chimera for us today—speaking with moral authority against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and yet still enamored in many places of Trumpian demagoguery; espousing peace and human rights while allowing assault rifles on its streets; and promoting education and global literacy while hosting the world’s biggest engines of disinformation. We want to believe in the America that believed in us, although the cynical can argue that “believed” should be taken as “invested,” of whose efficacy this column offers ample proof. 

In the end, I reminded myself of what I tell my students: (1) The American government and the American people are not necessarily the same; (2) The American people are many peoples; there is no single, monolithic America; (3) We study America and its literature not to become Americans, but to be better Filipinos; and (4) We often take the terms “America” and “American” in an ideal or idealized sense, a compound of expectations and aspirations shaped by Abraham Lincoln, Hollywood, cable TV, and Spotify.

We went to America not just to study there, but to study America, and that study continues. 

(Image from pacforum.org)

Qwertyman No. 31: A Homecoming for Anwar

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 6, 2023

TODAY WE pause our fictional forays to focus on some happily factual news—the visit last Thursday of Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to the University of the Philippines, which conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

I’ve been missing many university events especially since I retired four years ago, but I made it a point to attend this one because I’ve long been intrigued by Anwar’s colorful if mercurial political career—one that witnessed his meteoric rise from a student leader (who majored, at one point, in Malaysian literature) to minister of culture, youth, and sports, then of agriculture, and then of education, before being named Finance Minister and Deputy Minister in the 1990s.

As Finance Minister during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Anwar imposed very strict measures to keep the Malaysian economy afloat—denying government bailouts, cutting spending, curbing corruption and calling for greater accountability in governance. His zeal and effectiveness gained him international recognition—Newsweek named him Asian of the Year in 1998—and put him on track to succeed his mentor Mahathir Mohamad as Prime Minister. 

However, his growing popularity came at a steep personal price. In what he and his supporters denounced as political persecution, he was imprisoned twice following a fallout with Mahathir. In the meanwhile, Malaysia sank into a morass of corruption under the since-disgraced Najib Razak, making possible the brief return to power of Mahathir, who enabled the release of his sometime protégé Anwar. Anwar’s eventual accession to the prime ministership in December 2022 was for many a just culmination of decades of near-misses (in our lingo, naunsyami).

His visit to Diliman last week was actually a homecoming. Anwar had visited UP more than once as a young student being mentored by the late Dr. Cesar Adib Majul, our leading specialist in Islamic studies. Like other Malaysian scholars, Anwar has also had a deep and lifelong appreciation for the life and work of Jose Rizal, with whom he shared the notion of a pan-Asian community of interests.

Most instructive was the new UP President Angelo Jimenez’s summation of Anwar’s political philosophy, in his remarks welcoming and introducing the PM:

“Beneath Anwar Ibrahim’s sharp sense of financial management lies a deep well of moral rectitude, a belief in right and wrong that seems to have deserted many of today’s political pragmatists. Much of that derives from his strong religious faith—which, unlike the West, he does not see as being incompatible with the needs and priorities of modern society. To him, this is a native strength that can be harnessed toward an Asian Renaissance.

“Like Jose Rizal, who self-identified as ‘Malayo-Tagalog’ and who was a keen student of the cultural and linguistic connections between Malays and his own countrymen, Anwar appreciates the West as a source of knowledge but cautions against neglecting or yielding our cultural specificity.

“At the same time, he has championed a more inclusive and pluralistic Malaysia, arguing—and here I quote from his book on The Asian Renaissance—’not for mere tolerance, but rather for the active nurturing of alternative views. This would necessarily include lending a receptive ear to the voices of the politically oppressed, the socially marginalized, and the economically disadvantaged. Ultimately, the legitimacy of a leadership rests as much on moral uprightness as it does on popular support.’”

In his talk accepting the honorary degree, Anwar argued strongly and eloquently for the restoration of justice, compassion, and moral righteousness to ASEAN’s hierarchy of concerns, beyond the usual economic and political considerations. He was particularly critical of ASEAN’s blind adherence to its longstanding policy of non-interference in its members’ internal affairs, noting that “ASEAN should not remain silent in the face of blatant human rights violations” and that “non-interference cannot be a license to disregard the rule of law.” 

Extensively quoting Rizal, whom he had studied and lectured often about, Anwar urged his audience to free themselves from the self-doubt engendered by being colonized, while at the same time remaining vigilant against subjugation by their “homegrown masters.” I found myself applauding his speech at many turns, less out of politeness than a realization that I was in the presence of a real thinker and doer whose heart was in the right place. (And Anwar was not without wry humor, remarking that as a student leader visiting UP, “I was under surveillance by both Malaysian and Philippine intelligence. Now I have the Minister of Intelligence with me.”)

Speaking of honorary doctorates, I recall that UP has had a longstanding tradition of inviting newly elected presidents of the Republic, whoever they may be, to receive one, as a form of institutional courtesy. As soon as I say that, I realize that many readers will instantly recoil at the idea for reasons I need not elaborate upon. But let me add quickly that not all Malacañang tenants have accepted the honor. Some have had the good sense to find a reason to decline, knowing the kind of reception they will likely get from Diliman’s insubordinate natives, beyond the barricades that will have to be set up for their security. For everyone’s peace of mind, I humbly suggest that it may be time to retire this tradition, which agitates all but satisfies no one. 

For the record, UP has given honorary doctorates to less than stellar recipients, including the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and the martial-law First Lady Imelda R. Marcos. Even some recent choices have stirred controversy and dismay. 

As a former university official, a part of me understands why and when a state university dependent on government funding employs one of the few tools at its disposal for making friends and influencing people. But as a retired professor who has devoted most of his life to UP and its code of honor and excellence, I find the practice unfortunate if not deplorable. 

I don’t make the rules, but if I did, I would automatically exclude incumbent Filipino politicians, Cabinet members, and serving military officers from consideration. This is not to say that they cannot be deserving, as some surely are, but that they can be properly recognized for their accomplishments upon leaving office. This will also leave much more room for the university to hail truer and worthier achievers of the mind and spirit—scientists, artists, scholars, civil society leaders, entrepreneurs, other outstanding alumni, and fighters for truth, freedom, and justice in our society.

Qwertyman No. 26: UP’s New President

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Qwertyman for January 30, 2023

TWO FRIDAYS from now, a change of leadership will take place at the University of the Philippines, when outgoing President Danilo L. Concepcion turns his office over to Atty. Angelo “Jijil” A. Jimenez. Elected by the Board of Regents last November after what was known to be a tightly contested three rounds of voting, Jimenez will serve for the next six years as UP’s 22nd president. (By tradition, the BOR’s formal announcement of the vote declares it to have been “unanimous” although, to the best of my knowledge, it never has been, at least in modern times.)

Jimenez is no stranger to UP’s political and academic culture. A sociology and law graduate from UP with a master’s in management from the National University of Singapore, Jimenez served twice on the Board of Regents as Student Regent in 1992 and as Regent from 2016 to 2021. 

How he will win over the faculty is something else. It’s no secret that many professors emeriti and other faculty members—myself included—openly declared themselves in support of the candidacy of UP Diliman Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo, whom his supporters saw to have the best academic and administrative experience among all the six candidates for the position. That did not mean that no one else was qualified, and the BOR apparently saw something more in Jimenez that we did not, and so we will have to live with that decision.

The faculty’s chief concern may have been that Jimenez has never taught full-time in UP, raising fears that he might not appreciate or respect UP’s academic culture as strongly as a UP president should.

Academic culture is hard to explain to outsiders, but it is a way of life founded on intellectual meritocracy, on the idea that authority and respect are earned through hard-won knowledge, the currency of learning. And “intellectual” here doesn’t simply mean knowing something and being smart (and in some cases, insufferably arrogant), but actually doing something about it—through teaching, research, or some form of social action. Universities value people who contribute to our understanding of ourselves and to the improvement of human life. This is more than gaseous talk that nobody else can understand. It’s doing the deep thinking that nobody else will do, because they either have no interest or see no profit in it, or because they’re not trained to. A national university like UP, funded by our taxes, applies that thinking and learning to real-world problems and places its resources at the service of society. UP demonstrated this social commitment during the pandemic through the heroic sacrifices of its staff at the Philippine General Hospital and the research conducted by the Philippine Genome Center, among others.

Nonetheless, I can sense that despite their initial misgivings, many members of UP’s academic community are willing to give Jimenez a chance to prove himself as a protector and promoter of UP’s interests rather than someone imposed by the powers-that-be to bring the unruly natives to heel. 

“Jijil knows UP’s academic culture, and he listens. He studies things carefully before making a decision,” a highly respected colleague who knows (and once taught) Jimenez assured me. I have to say that in the few times that I met and observed him when I served as Concepcion’s VP for Public Affairs, I was impressed by Jimenez’s grasp of the issues and his willingness to learn. And this will not be the first time that someone perceived to be an outsider was chosen to sit in Quezon Hall; the most notable and perhaps the most effective of such predecessors was Edgardo J. Angara in the 1980s, who had no qualms about using his powers to modernize and streamline UP’s aging bureaucracy, against stiff resistance from within.

Jimenez has led a colorful life that included being posted as labor attaché in war-torn Iraq and him and his wife adopting a baby girl who was left at their doorstep. As a labor lawyer, he will understand the plight of the disempowered, and know how to speak to power and, just as importantly, to negotiate with it as well. 

Ultimately, it will be his character that will be on trial—how he will perform and decide under pressure from both left and right, what values lie at his moral core, and how he will steer the university and ensure its well-being under an indifferent if not hostile political regime. 

PAAJ, as he will be known in UP (Concepcion was PDLC), will have to contend with the rabid red-taggers at UP’s gates (and some of them well within its campuses), who will expect him to deliver UP, and specifically Diliman, on a platter to Malacañang. Curiously, just before the voting, Jimenez—a Duterte appointee to the Board of Regents—was denounced by another newspaper’s resident canine as a communist, alongside Fidel Nemenzo. UP has never had a shortage of detractors rooting for nothing less than its closure, but expect the troll armies to work overtime the minute PAAJ asserts its academic freedom.

Internally, Jimenez will have to deal with the conditions and demands of a constituency just emerging from the temporary and unnatural constraints imposed by the pandemic and eager to spring back into normal academic life but with even more incentives to work and to teach. Some colleagues will berate me for this, but “serve the people” no longer seems to be reason enough to study and to teach in UP. The sense of entitlement afflicting society at large has also crept into UP’s culture, with students complaining about their grades, freshly hired instructors complaining why they haven’t been promoted, and professors complaining why their work wasn’t given more points in their evaluation. Economic issues are easy to understand in a time of rampant food prices (and gross profligacy on the part of public officials), but this goes beyond a bigger paycheck. 

Given his two stints on the Board of Regents, Jimenez will be familiar with these issues down to their minutiae, as perhaps a lawyer can best comprehend. Appointing a capable executive staff will be key to his success, but again, they can only act on judgments emanating from the president’s fundamental sense of good and bad and right and wrong.

Arguably, the visible function of university presidents has changed in recent times, from being exemplars of scholarship and ideological firebrands to resource generators and managers. (Concepcion was particularly adept at the latter role.) How Angelo A. Jimenez will distinguish himself over the next six years will be a story entirely his to craft. I will be eager to read it, and wish him well.

Qwertyman No. 25: Courtesy Ca. 2023

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 23, 2023

THIS TOPIC wouldn’t have occurred to me to write about if I hadn’t come across—in my meanderings online as a collector of antiquarian books and papers—a copy of a slim pamphlet published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1936, titled “Courtesy Appeals by the President’s Committee on Courtesy.” But as soon as I saw that title, I knew I had to get that pamphlet and reflect on the observance (most likely in the breach) of its prescriptions today.

To be honest, I never even heard of a “committee on courtesy” in UP. Neither, as a former student and professor, did I ever instinctively attach the word “courtesy” to UP, although I will not agree to any collective condemnation of “Iskos” and “Iskas” as boorish and uncultured. Granted, UP lore is rich with tales of what we’ll call youthful insolence toward their elders, in ways that would make even millennials cringe. (Who was that young poet who, in a writers’ workshop, supposedly stole a famous lady poet’s underwear—don’t ask me how—and strung it up a flagpole or hung it on a line, prompting her friend—another professor known for her fiery temper—to curse the laughing fellows: “I wish your mothers had aborted you!”) 

Meekness may not be one of a UP student’s strongest suits, because we teach them to assert themselves. But we also teach them to criticize or comment with style and intelligence, as when a young wit responded to a customary recitation of then President Carlos P. Romulo’s kilometric list of honorary degrees by saying, “Why, Mr. President, you have more degrees than a thermometer!” (In fairness to CPR, that fellow went on to an illustrious career accompanied by much—and some say self-generated—pomp and circumstance.)

Courtesy, of course, is not about sticking out but about staying in—behaving oneself for social acceptability and harmony, living up to someone else’s expectations by observing a strict code of do’s and don’ts. At least that’s how it was appreciated in the 1930s, when President Jorge Bocobo created the committee that came out with the prescriptions in the pamphlet. Although he served as one of UP’s most hardworking and effective presidents—someone who pushed UP students to go out and serve the masses—Bocobo was also known to be a rather prudish disciplinarian. He had been on the committee that censured Jose Garcia Villa for publishing his “obscene” and “ultramodernistic” poem “Song of Ripeness,” leading to Villa’s suspension and hastening his departure for more liberal America. He also cut down on the popular student dances that Rafael Palma allowed, and enforced the rule for student uniforms. When Guillermo Tolentino presented his design for the Oblation statue, Bocobo had one important comment: protect its modesty with a fig leaf, which was done. Not surprisingly, although again a bit too simply, he was called “the gloomy dean” by the editorialists of the time.

In 1936, when the pamphlet came out, Jorge Bocobo was almost midway through his presidency (1934-39). I learned that 8,000 copies were printed to be handed out to all students, and teachers were required to discuss its contents—all 20 pages of them—in class.

Some of its prescriptions are entirely understandable for the period:

“A young lady of social position does not go to a ball without a chaperon.”

“When a gentleman is introduced to a lady, he does not extend his hand first. It is the lady’s place to show whether she wants to shake hands or not.”

“When a lady leaves a gentleman to whom she has been introduced, she never says she is ‘glad to have met him’ or that she ‘hopes to see him again.’’

Some would be perfectly applicable today:

“Annoying the ladies by staring at them or making remarks about them as they pass cannot be countenanced.”

“Avoid being a bore by talking too much. Be a sympathetic listener.”

Some would be difficult to enforce:

“It would be nicer if gentlemen should remove their hats on entering a building.”

“Do not wear a tuxedo at daytime.”

“(Do not) thrust the individual knife into a butter dish or the individual fork into a pickle dish.”

“Bananas are peeled into a plate and taken with the fork.”

I was amused, as many of you would be, but these social commandments (yes, they were far more than “appeals,” and students and faculty were disciplined for disobeying them) invited me to wonder how we look at courtesy today or even think about it, let alone practice it. Thanks to the anonymity provided by the Internet and to a toxic political environment, rudeness if not obnoxiousness seem to have become the norm. It’s almost customary to assume that the other fellow is uninformed, hostile, stupid, or just plain wrong, and I have to confess to thinking this of many people I encounter for the first time, especially online. 

I’ve been on the receiving end of these assumptions as well. An expat American—a Trumper—once tried to convince me that I knew nothing about America, as did an expat Brit who lectured me about the monarchy like I’d never read a book (I could’ve lectured him back on Elizabethan revenge tragedy, but he could have been just a regular fellow who didn’t know anything about me, and why should he, so I desisted and let it slide).

Courtesy today clearly involves more than etiquette or protocol, more than observing antiquated codes of behavior requiring you to use this fork or that spoon. It’s more a matter of attitude toward other people, of assuming them worthy of respect and an intelligent and civil response (until they prove otherwise, as many inevitably do, especially in politics). 

Unfortunately we also too easily conflate courtesy with external manners, with opening doors for ladies (which I still do, although my wife Beng sometimes has to remind me there’s a door in front of us). On a higher order of behavior, aren’t profligacy and ostentation extreme forms of discourtesy to a people struggling to make ends meet? Do arrogance and impunity invite respect, or resentment and disdain?

What could a “Courtesy Appeals” for 2023 read like? “Do not waste the people’s hard-earned money” seems like a good place to start.

(Some factoids mentioned here come from an unpublished, unofficial history of UP. You can check them out against an official history published recently by the UP Press.)

Penman No. 446: Our Oldies

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Penman for Sunday, January 1, 2023

IT’s BAD enough to be out of touch with the present, so it must be worse to be out of touch with the past—or at least, someone else’s past. 

Nothing reminded me more starkly of the great divides that exist between generations than last month’s Eraserheads reunion concert, hailed by its attendees as nothing less than the Second Coming. “A spectacle unto itself. It was like mix-mashing the Super Bowl’s half-time show and a rock concert. Except it went one better as it was also like one four-hour-long karaoke set,” wrote reviewer Rick Olivares in the Inquirer. “The four-hour, three-part show was filled with nothing but singing our hearts out, jumping for joy, and all the while taking in the fact that yes—this is the Eraserheads, and we are ever so lucky to hear them live again,” gushed Nikka Olivares on GMA-7. 

What struck me was how so many of my younger friends—writers, artists, and teachers now in their 40s and 50s—posted pictures of themselves waving their concert tickets like some generational badge of honor. And indeed it was, if the reported crowd of 75,000 that drove out to the reunion was to be believed. It was a paean to the 1990s and to Generation X, to 486-DX PCs and clunky cellphones, to mixtapes and dressing down, to self-reliance and partying on. (Hold it—why is this so familiar? Now I know why I should know—our daughter Demi, born 1974, is a card-carrying Gen-X’er. “I caught up with the Eraserheads in UP,” she told me from California, “and I used to watch them at the UP Fair at the Sunken Garden!”)

I’ll take my former students’ word for it and believe that the Eraserheads were the best Pinoy band of their time, and that their songs captured the heartbeat of their generation. I’m sure that there’s a thesis or dissertation to be written there somewhere, if it hasn’t been done already—a project that will go far beyond melody and rhythm to dissect the E-heads’ contributions to political and social commentary (not much fun, but academia is the land of the morose). 

For Demi’s mom Beng and me, however, much of that remains a mystery, because it all begins with the music, which somehow went past us. “Do we know any of their songs?” Beng asked me. “Well, yes, one of them,” I answered, “the one that goes ‘Magkahawak ang ating kamay at walang kamalay-malay….’” And I went on to hum the tune for her, and she remembered. “I think its title is ‘Ang Huling El Bimbo,’” I added helpfully. Totally geriatric dialogue, but there we were, trying to figure out a context for that snippet of a song. Of course we knew the original El Bimbo dance, where your conjoined arms opened like a fan, but that was about it. We were lost in this strange territory.

That reminded me of that time, maybe thirty years ago or more, when drove Demi to school in our VW, and turned the radio on. Demi asked if she could change the station, because she wanted to hear some “oldies.” Oh, great, I thought, finally, my daughter’s wising up to the classics—maybe to some Sinatra? And then she played Earth, Wind, and Fire. “Do you remember, the 21st night of September…” (I remembered another September 21!)

So, all right, my oldies aren’t your oldies, and we respond to music on different wavelengths. There’s nothing that unites us more than music—think Christmas carols, church hymns, fight songs, and national anthems—and also nothing that divides us more than music.

I suppose we Boomers can be typecast as Beatles fans, and that won’t be unfair, as it was de rigueur for teenagers of the ‘60s to know the Beatles songs by heart if not to play them on a Lumanog guitar, with the aid of a chord book. But to be even fairer, I don’t think our taste in music could be pegged to any one band or genre. The fact is, we were incredibly eclectic, and liked everything from crooners like Tony Bennett, folk singers like Joni Mitchell, and bossa-nova masters like Antonio Carlos Jobim to rock bands like Queen, divas like Barbra Streisand, and disco kings like VST & Co. And let’s not forget the birth of OPM at the first Metro Pop festivals, with the Circus Band and the New Minstrels.

Life was a big jukebox, and you had a song and a singer for certain moods and certain days. (That probably explains the Beatles’ popularity—they could go from soulful ballads like “Michelle” and “She’s Leaving Home” to barnburners like “Rock ‘N Roll Music” and “She Loves You.”) Feeling, more than idea, was key to a song’s full enjoyment, and much of that feeling was generated by the melody and arrangement. 

Bottom line, a song had to be singable. (The master of singability for me was Burt Bacharach.) For a while back there, we might have put on snooty airs and publicly disdained cheesy acts like ABBA—only to embrace them and warble along at their revival. Danceability was another important factor. The shift from the ‘70s to the ‘80s was the golden age of disco, spurred on by “Saturday Night Fever.” (Miserably, my dancing skills never went beyond the jerk and the boogaloo, so doing the hustle with Beng remains on the bucket list.)

I guess this all means we have a lot of “reunion concerts” to look forward to—the only problem being, most of the singers we’d like to hear have croaked their last. The last one Beng and I attended, a few years ago at the Araneta Coliseum, was that of the Zombies (yes, they were big, cool, and British). Instead of 75,000 screaming fans, ours was a crowd of several hundred white-haired, well-behaved seniors, happily humming along to “The Way I Feel Inside” and “She’s Not There.” Maybe we forgot the lyrics here and there, but hey, we were feeling groovy, as we might have said back in 1969. So, kids, here’s to the next Eraserheads reunion, sometime in 2042. 

Qwertyman No. 19: The Real Maria Ressa

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 12, 2022

I WAS very honored to speak last Saturday at the launch of Maria Ressa’s new book, How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (Harper, 2022). I’d read an advance copy of it a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase, if you’re thinking of buying a book to read for the holidays or to gift to friends, look no further. This book, for me, is among the year’s best in nonfiction.

I have to emphasize that word—nonfiction. As we all know we live in times when fiction has taken over as the most influential form of human discourse, particularly in the political arena. As a practicing fictionist, I should be happy about that, but I’m not and I can’t be, because so much of it is bad fiction, crudely written—and surprisingly, infuriatingly effective, at least with a certain kind of reader. 

Maria’s book cuts through all that. It’s undisguised, old-fashioned, in-your-face truth-telling, told in the same voice and tone we’ve become familiar with over the years of listening to her reportage over CNN. I’m sure that, like me, many of you wondered the first time you heard her: “Who was this little brown-complexioned woman speaking with an American accent?” She looked Filipino, but how come we’d never seen her before?

This was all before she rose to prominence—some would say notoriety—as the moving spirit behind Rappler, and subsequently to global fame as a Nobel Prize winner for Peace. We identified with her travails, shared her anger and sadness at the abuse she has received, and rejoiced in her victories, whether in the courts or in the larger sphere of public opinion. 

But how well do we really know Maria Ressa, and whatever drives her to be who and what she is? This book takes us to the person behind the phenomenon, and answers many questions we may have had about her and her stubborn advocacies.

The book’s title sounds like that of an instruction manual—which it is, and also is not, being part autobiography, part journalism, and part testimonial. As a manual for freedom fighters, it emphasizes the need for collaborative and collective action against seemingly insurmountable forces. Those forces now include the Internet, which, as Maria documents with both precision and profound dismay, has morphed from a medium that once held all kinds of liberative promises into a medium for mass deception and targeted assault. She draws her counsel not from some esoteric guru or academic paradigm, but from some very basic values that have informed her own life—the Honor Code she followed in school, and the Golden Rule.

“That’s what I lay out in this book,” she says, “an exploration into the values and principles not just of journalism and technology but of the collective action we need to take to win this battle for facts. This journey of discovery is intensely personal. That’s why every chapter has a micro and a macro: a personal lesson and the larger picture. You will see the simple ideas I hold on to in order to make what have—over time—become instinctive but thoughtful decisions.”

It’s this constant back-and-forth between the personal and the political—and at some point they become inextricably fused—that forms the fiber of Maria’s narrative and gives it strength. Her convictions are grounded in personal experience; they have not been paid for—as the hacks in the journalistic trade will allege, seeking to bring her down to their own level—except in the coin of personal suffering under the constant threat of imprisonment and violence.

But we learn from this book that trauma is nothing new to Maria. (We also learn that Maria Ressa wasn’t the name she was born into, but to find out her birth name, you’ll have to buy the book.) From her abrupt relocation from Manila to America at the age of ten, to her journalistic immersion in the horrors of conflict and disaster in Indonesia and Ormoc, the book chronicles Maria’s quest for truth, meaning, and purpose in her life, and that of others. She stresses the importance of remembering the past to make sense of the present, quoting TS Eliot’s phrase, “the present moment of the past.”

And so can we, she seems to suggest, even in these times of high anxiety, when we can see the vultures hovering over such once-sacrosanct treasures as our pension funds, while billions more go to feed the dogs of an increasingly untenable counter-insurgent war. The big words we have become used to tossing around—truth, freedom, reason, justice, democracy—they all come down to a personal choice to do the right thing, and the courage to do it. 

Nowhere is this matter of choice more evident than in the fact that Maria is here in the Philippines, having willfully subjected herself to our brand of justice, however imperfect it may be, instead of escaping to the safety of America or another haven, which her dual citizenship if not her celebrity can certainly afford her. She will see her own story through to the end, in the locale where it matters, among the people to whom it matters most.

I’ve often remarked, as a creative writer and professor of literature, that in this country, the writers most in danger of political persecution and retribution are really not fictionists or poets like me. Not since Rizal has a Filipino novelist been shot dead for what he wrote. For sure, we have lost many brilliant writers to the struggle for freedom and democracy—Emman Lacaba, and most recently Lorena Tariman and her husband Ericson Acosta. But they were killed by the State not for what they wrote—the State is illiterate when it comes to metaphor—but for what they allegedly did.

Rather, the most imperiled writers in the Philippines as in many other places are the journalists who speak the language of the people and of their plaints in terms too clear to ignore. They could be radio announcers like Percy Lapid, or the victims of wholesale murder in Maguindanao, or high-profile and exemplary targets such as Maria Ressa. It would have been easy for her to lash back at her critics and tormentors with the same viciousness. But, she says, “I will not become a criminal to fight a criminal. I will not become a monster to fight a monster.”

That, too, is a difficult choice, and one I am sure we are often tempted to cast aside. But Maria’s equanimity in the face of savagery shames us back into our better selves. It will be that kind of quiet resolve that we will need to survive and prevail. After all, we survived martial law. We can survive this regime—with agility, patience, and courage. But don’t take my word for it. Read Maria’s book to know that we can, and why we must.