Category Archives: Travel

Penman No. 19: Autumn in New York

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Penman for Monday, November 5, 2012

I FIRST visited New York 32 years ago, as a young man on his first trip abroad, and I can still remember the convulsive thrill that I felt as I peered out the window of my plane from Detroit and saw Manhattan’s spires rising toward me, to the accompaniment of a Gershwin tune.

At the same time, I looked at New York with not a little dread, both because of its sheer immensity and also its fearsome reputation for harboring mobsters and hucksters. While I marveled at the Christmas lights of Rockefeller Center, I also saw Times Square and Bryant Park at their worst, long before Rudy Guiliani came in with a broom, and 9/11 lent the city the kind of composure that comes with tragedy.

I’ve been back many times since—with my mother, daughter, and sister, and Beng’s sister living in the US, we try to visit every year—and over the years, I’ve slowly learned to trust if not to love this mother and mentor of modern cities, holding my wariness in check just long enough to let New York’s many and unexpected charms seep through and permeate my senses.

It’s a tired cliché by now, but while I go to my sister’s place outside of Washington, DC for rest and recuperation, I go to New York for the energy and the excitement, for the buskers in the subways playing everything from Vivaldi to That’s Amore, for Paul’s Burgers in St. Mark’s Place, for the two lions guarding the library (Patience downtown, Fortitude on the uptown side), for the $6/lb. Chinese takeouts, for the Art Deco flourishes nearly everywhere you look, for the Housing Works resale shops, for the discounted Broadway tickets, for the Sabrett’s hotdogs on the sidewalks, for the muscular subway, for the parks that sprout up amidst brownstone and cinderblock, for the warren of words that’s the Strand, and, of course, for the translucent glass stairway leading down to the reverse-heaven of the Apple Store.

New York can have the newest of the new—think of the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini—but oddly enough, what Beng and I enjoy most on our New York visits is seeking out old treasures (or what might be junk to most other people) in the thrift shops of 23rd Street and the flea markets of the Upper West Side and Hell’s Kitchen. Sometimes these treasures even come free, shamelessly dragged in off the street on my sister-in-law’s block in Forest Hills, like that miniature wooden Christmas sleigh that I salvaged last week off the top of a pile of detritus (the polite Roman word, I think, for garbage).

Inevitably, despite our absent intentions, every visit brings something new. Two years ago it was the magic of dusk in Coney Island, at the very end of the F subway line and, it seemed, of New York itself, so serene was that velvet hour with the amusement park’s fun machines in off-season repose. This year it was a day trip we took by train to a small village called Cold Spring, up the Hudson River, after learning that it hosted a cluster of antique shops and was a good place to catch the fall colors, besides.

It did not disappoint on either count; autumn declared itself resplendently for most of the 90-minute ride along the ribbon of the Hudson, and exploded in brilliant yellows and reds on our arrival in Cold Spring. As Beng and Mimi scoured the shops for old buttons, bottles, and trinkets, I strayed into a shop with a small door that turned out to be a huge warehouse of vintage knickknacks—among them, a lovely black hard-rubber-and gold Conklin ladies’ pen from around 1920 and a marbled Parker Vacumatic desk pen from 1935. Having earlier picked up a Waterman silver-overlay pen and a contemporaneous brass inkwell from 1915 at the Greenflea Market on the Upper West Side, I pronounced this trip sufficiently penworthy, and contented myself for the rest of the day with photographing the Hudson’s color-washed banks.

Another novelty on this trip was my first walk into and across the heart of Central Park, which I had somehow never done in three decades of visiting New York. All that time I had contented myself with reconnoitering the fringes of the park, forewarned by a score of movies and CSI New York episodes about the demons and dangers lurking within. On the Saturday that we crossed the park on our way to Greenflea, we met nothing more dangerous than sprightly squirrels and latter-day hippies channeling John Lennon in Strawberry Fields, the corner of the park across the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and was shot dead (a few days after I left New York on my first visit there in 1980). And how can you walk across Central Park without (again) George Gershwin, Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, and Liza Minnelli performing in concert in your dreaming head?

We had earlier visited the 9/11 Memorial downtown, where the Twin Towers used to stand; last year it had been under construction—and still was, to some degree, as the museum within has yet to open. But the two large reflecting pools were already in operation, acting like four-sided waterfalls whose constant flow—broken only, when we looked, by an almost unbearably theatrical rainbow—seemed to represent a perpetual dousing of the fires that burned the towers down, a cleansing of the evil and the ill will that came before and after the event. I had also been there in 2001, a few months before 9/11, and had seen the towers—had even gone up to the top of one of them on an earlier visit—but had no personal connection to the place. Still, I paused when I caught a name—one of almost 3,000 names etched deeply into the bronze railings around the pools—that was unmistakably Filipino: “Ronald Gamboa,” who turned out to be a 33-year-old Fil-Am, a manager at The Gap who died as a passenger on UA 175, one of the hijacked planes.

In yet another unintended irony, I’m writing this paean to New York from Lansing, Michigan, where I’m attending a conference and from where I’m supposed to fly back to JFK tomorrow and then back home to Manila on Thursday—but can’t, because New York and much of the American East Coast has been shut down by super storm Sandy, and I’m effectively stranded. If I can’t get back to JFK by Wednesday, I’ll have to rebook my Manila-bound flight, and stay in New York a little longer. That’ll be mildly annoying—but I can’t wait to spend a bonus weekend in Manhattan, poring over heaps of junk at the flea market, in quest of that golden glint that could be the clip of a 1936 Parker Vacumatic Oversize, one that George Gershwin himself might have scripted a tune or two with.

Penman No. 17: Another October, Another Michigan

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Penman for Monday, October 22, 2012

LIKE I mentioned last week, I’m in the US to visit family and to participate at the International Conference on the Philippines (Icophil), which is taking place Oct. 28-30 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

Dealing with all aspects of Philippine Studies, Icophil happens every four years, and it’s been held around the world—mainly in the US and the Philippines, but also in Australia and the Netherlands; the upcoming conference in Michigan will be the ninth. Icophil’s international reach reflects not only the global Filipino diaspora, but also the growing interest and engagement of non-Filipino scholars in Philippine affairs. While most participants still come from the Philippines, a significant number of speakers and panelists come from foreign universities.

Icophil also provides scholars an opportunity to assess the state of Philippine Studies around the world, in a roundtable organized by Prof. Belinda Aquino of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who is Icophil’s founding chair. Convenors for this year’s conference are the eminent scholars Dr. Roger Bresnahan of MSU and Dr. Bernardita Churchill of UP.

Aside from us Filipinos, this meeting will bring together Filipinists from the US, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, France, Russia, Spain, and the Netherlands. By institutional affiliation, the confirmed Filipino participants will include Jose Buenconsejo, Marilyn Canta, and myself (UP Diliman)); Filomeno Aguilar, Jr., Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu, and Lisandro Claudio (Ateneo de Manila); Paul Dumol and Clement Camposano (University of Asia and the Pacific); Raymundo Rovillos (UP Baguio); Teresita Ang See (KAISA); Nick Deocampo (Center for New Cinema);  Genevieve L. Asenjo (DLSU); Hope Sabanpan-Yu (University of San Carlos), Kristian Cordero (Ateneo de Naga); and Prisciliano Bauzon (University of Southern Mindanao).

Icophil 2012’s keynote speaker will be an international expert on climate change, Dr. Rodel Lasco, Senior Scientist and Philippine Program Coordinator of the World Agro-Forestry Centre (ICRAF) and Affiliate Professor, UPLB School of Environmental Science and Management. A recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientist Award in 1997, Dr. Lasco has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines.

Trailers for two new and interesting documentaries will be shown: one by MSU Prof. Geri Alumit-Zeldes on the two Filipino nurses who were wrongly convicted for murdering their patients in Ann Arbor, Mich. in the mid-1970s, and another, by filmmaker Sonny Izon, about the “Manilaners”—Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust who found refuge in Manila through the intercession of President Manuel Quezon. Filmmaker Nick Deocampo will also be showing a documentary on American influences on Philippine cinema.

The panel discussions cover a predictably broad range of topics, from indigenous peoples, the Pinoy diaspora, and peace-building to economic relations, modernization, and popular culture (one of my early favorites on the program: “Automats, Supper Clubs, Drive-ins, and Quarantined Carinderias: The Contradictions of Restaurant Culture in Post-War Manila” by Peter Keppy of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation).

I expect to be ruffling a few academic feathers with my chosen topic, which just happens to be one of my recent areas of expertise: “The Commissioned Biography: Confessions of a Hired Gun.” I’ll be speaking less as an academic than a professional writer, and I’ll try to keep it light, but I’ll be dealing with some serious ethical and academic questions raised by the practice of biographical writing from a sympathetic point of view, as opposed to the independent and critical stance expected of the unpaid scholar. Aside from payment for the writer and PR for the subject, can there be anything to be gained from the commissioned biographies that have appeared in recent years on Philippine shelves? Can they be of any service to the academic historian, political scientist, and litterateur? My provisional answer is yes, but I’m going to have to prove my case.

I tacked on the official part of this trip to my annual vacation so it’s not costing UP anything, but I have another personal reason for going to Icophil. I’m a proud graduate of Michigan State’s archrival, the University of Michigan (MFA ’88), but it was MSU (the “other” Michigan) and East Lansing that hosted me for more than two months on my first visit to the US (and my first trip abroad) in 1980. I’d never been away from my home and family for so long, and it was here that my 30-year-plus relationship with America took off. I would even write about that first autumn—about a foray into the yellow forest in my backyard called Sanford Woods—in my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992):

“Sandbar, Sandfar, Sanford. Sanford Woods. In the shock of autumn, the first of my life, I took a walk in Sanford Woods with Estoy. Estoy himself had arrived in the United States just the previous year to take a Ph.D. in Development Economics on a fellowship, and I took the train up to Michigan the first chance I got to leave the conference in New York. I had never stepped into a forest of red and gold before, and for the first few minutes I trod carefully on the layered ground, as though disturbing it would hurtle me back in a swirl of pretty leaves to prison camp. We let ourselves be taken in and covered by that new season: we watched the squirrels shimmy up the trunks, and, coming into a patch of pure, delirious yellow, I persuaded Estoy to pose for a snapshot he could send home to his wife Marie. He stood stiffly against the color, hands in his jacket pockets, and he muttered an oath about the cold, but his grin was true. On the way back we observed how fat the squirrels were. In Manila, Estoy said, they’d be roasting on a spit, if they ever got that big. I said that there probably was a law preventing people from doing that in this country.”

That fellow “Estoy” was based on a real character, a friend who passed away a few years ago, whose life was marked by both blinding brilliance and consuming darkness. I barely told his story in the novel, and it will be a moving experience for me to retrace our steps into those woods, in another October more than three decades after.

More comic is the memory of my first kitchen disasters in that new country: of how I walked miles to the nearest Asian food store, craving food from home, and then eagerly frying a panful of dilis in my dorm room, only to have people hammering on my door, asking where that awful smell was coming from; and of stashing bottles of Coke in the freezer and forgetting about them, to be greeted by a ragged waterfall of black ice upon opening the fridge.

I’ll have a thing or two to say in East Lansing, but I’m really looking forward to more private conversations with the squirrels and sugar maples of Sanford Woods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flotsam & Jetsam No. 11: Pen & Inkwell

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ALMOST AS soon as we landed in New York, Beng and I ran off to one of our old haunts, the Sunday flea market on the Upper West Side. These were my two neat finds: a Waterman 412 1/2 PSF fountain pen in silver filigree from 1915 (still a bargain at $150), and a brass inkwell, in dire need of restoration but a pretty piece (at a pretty price–$10!).

Penman No. 16: Promises to Keep

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Penman for Monday, October 15, 2012

AS YOU read this, Beng and I should be in the US, on a sem-break visit to family (my mother, daughter, and sister, and Beng’s sister). I’ll also be attending and speaking at the International Conference on the Philippines in East Lansing, Mich., about which you’ll hear more from me next week.

This trip’s an annual pilgrimage we all look forward to, despite the sacks of loose change it entails. The two or three weeks Beng and I spend every October in the States virtually guarantees penury at year’s end, but we’ve learned not to mind. For me, the whole point of working my butt off is to save enough so we can buy time together, which is never a waste of money. I’d rather have a trove of happy memories than a hefty savings account, and Beng absolutely agrees, so we’ve been blithely footloose and spendthrift. Curtailed by the fact that we’ve never had enough to be truly extravagant, we’ve had great fun scouring the antique malls of San Diego, feasting on hotdogs in Coney Island, and hunting for bargains in the thrift shops of Virginia.

The eating part of this trip has always been a highlight for me—and you could have seen it in my stocky frame—but this time around, my Stateside folks are in for a surprise. A new Butch is coming to town, less 35 pounds of excess baggage mainly around the waist, and with worn-out walking shoes in his luggage. He won’t be sneaking out to Walgreen’s for a six-pack of Coke or Coors and a gallon of ice cream; ridiculously—if you knew him at all—he’ll be sipping tea and munching carrot sticks, doing his gritty darnedest to resist the lure of the steaks smoking in the backyard.

This visit’s going to be a test of my new resolve—which I manifested a few weeks ago, after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes—to lose weight by eating right and exercising as the doctor ordered.

Like I said then, I knew I had it coming. Writers lead notoriously, pigheadedly unhealthy lifestyles. Not only are we bound to our desks most of the time; we’re tethered, physically and psychologically, to bottles of beer and packs of cigarettes.

T. S. Eliot was a chronic smoker and eventually died of emphysema; so was Dylan Thomas, who also loved booze and drank himself to death (famously telling a friend after a binge: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record”—and it probably was). The death wish appeals to the romantic in us, to our inner Poe (who, doctors now say, may have actually died of rabies and not alcoholism). Here at home, I’ve had writer-friends who openly flaunted that death wish; they lived on the edge, and died there.

Me, my days as a devilish Dylan are over. I used to smoke four packs of Marlboros a day—count them, 80 loaded pistols, with an open pack in my shirt pocket and another one in my pants, the easier to grab a stick when you needed one—until Beng and I decided to quit, cold turkey, about 17 years ago. I haven’t had one puff since, although I still get the occasional craving, and wake up feverishly from a dream (a most pleasurable one, I must admit) of having smoke curl through my parched lungs. I still think it’s one of the smartest decisions I ever made, next to marrying Beng, but quitting smoking came with a downside—I regained my appetite, which morphed into another monster, and somewhere along the way I ballooned from about 160 to nearly 220 pounds.

Also, until recently, I could and did drink up to ten bottles of beer in one sitting, proudly if foolishly remaining amiable and ambulant after the fact. In between beers, I tanked up on Coke—about three cans of the sweet syrup a day, to go with snacks and meals. It’s funny how I could write of other people having death wishes, when I was effectively living through one myself.

Well, I haven’t had a Coke in three months, and only about four or five bottles of beer in that same time. Stranger still, my food cravings are gone. I take a brisk 3-to-6-kilometer walk around the UP Academic Oval once or twice a day, and when my stamina flags, I just try to think of every pound lost as another day saved to spend with Beng and Demi. (The incorrigible techie, I use a free Nike app on my iPhone to track distance traveled by GPS, and to count calories burned.)

I still go on my poker all-nighters, but now I use the time between hands to surf on my phone and keep up with the news and discussions on the diabetes and dieting sites. (My newest discoveries: eating 2,000 calories or less a day will enable weight loss; exercising before breakfast is good, because it burns fat rather than carbs, which your sleeping body nibbled on all night; don’t skip breakfast after working out; you also need carbs for serotonin, which keeps you smiling.) I’ve learned to chew my food, manage my portions, count calories, and read the labels.

I had the deepest, sweetest satisfaction the other day when I sent over six pairs of my khaki pants with 40-inch waists to the neighborhood tailor for alteration, down to a smarter 36. The repairs cost me P450, but I’d gladly pay thousands more if I had to send them back after a few months to be trimmed by another couple of inches.

I know I’m far from being out of the woods, and of how easy it is to backslide. Anyone can lose weight fast—and naturally that became my early obsession—but keeping it off and feeling good about it is going to be the bigger struggle. (You know you’re not alone when you type in a search term in Google and it auto-completes the form three words away from finishing what you had in mind. Some time ago, I punched in “lose beer belly…” and something like “lose beer belly fastest way” came up, as though the machine had read my mind.)

But if America has burgers and Slurpees, it also has miles and miles of wooded walks, and that’s what I’ll be going for this time. Although he meant going to the woods in another sense, Robert Frost might as well have written these lines for me: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep…”

ON ANOTHER note, I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of two friends in the arts. The first was a shocker—Nonoy Buncio, a passionate art collector and a Botong Francisco connoisseur, was shot by unidentified gunmen while on duty as a Quezon City official tasked with clearing up the chronic congestion on Commonwealth Avenue. If they only knew how deeply Nonoy, a committed socialist, loved his country and his people.

The other friend who passed away was celebrated film director Marilou Diaz-Abaya, for whom I had the privilege of writing a script (for the 1994 movie that came to be retitled “Ikalabing-Isang Utos: Mahalin Mo, Asawa Mo,” which I’d somewhat more sedately but perhaps uncommercially called “Sylvia, Susan, Soledad”). Among the many directors I’d worked with, Marilou was the most methodical, approaching every sequence not just with technical but philosophical questions. Years ago, we also worked together on two abortive projects—a docu-drama on the EDSA 1 revolt and a film biography of Joseph Estrada, before he ran for president.

I wish we had enough time to finish everything, but there never is, and that’s why I’m in America, visiting those dearest to me.

Penman No. 12: Singapore’s Cultural Renaissance (2)

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Penman for Monday, Sept. 10, 2012

ANYONE WHO doubts that Singapore is going through a cultural renaissance just has to drop by places like the Goodman Arts Center, the Arts House, the National Library Board building, and any one of the many museums that have sprung up around the city-state city-state celebrating everything from historical heritage to biodiversity and toys.

On a recent media visit to Singapore, I was shown by my hosts from the National Arts Council around many of these cultural hotspots, and they offered a wealth of insights into contemporary Singaporean society and its concerns.

Housed in what used to be a school run by the La Salle Brothers, the  seven-hectare Goodman Arts Center in the Mounbatten district opened last year and has quickly become Singapore’s largest arts enclave, serving as a studio, meeting place, and performance venue for both local and international artists. Studios in the GAC are generously subsidized by the government, and “There’s a long waiting line of artists wanting to use the center,” said Evan Hwong of The Old Parliament House Ltd., which manages the GAC.

Being a complex of converted school buildings, there is nothing particularly impressive about the GAC on the outside; but open one of the many doors and instantly a world of artistic creation meets the eye and swarms the senses. During our visit, we encountered Jerry Hinds, an expat Briton who’s helping young Singaporean cartoonists sharpen their skills not just in terms of drawing but also in sharpening their narratives; Iskander, a longtime transplant from the Netherlands, who’s working to help people see comics not just as entertainment but also as an art form; Sonny Liew, Malaysian-born but Singapore-based, who’s already drawn for Marvel Comics; Japanese artist Eriko Hirashima, who’s turning books into art objects in themselves; and Singaporean copywriter Amanda Lee and artist Winnie Goh, whose Studio Kaleido explores crossovers between visual and literary art.

Not only professional artists are welcome at the GAC. Ongoing at the GAC this month and open to the public are a batik painting workshop, a professional singing course in Mandarin, and classes in contemporary dance, hot glass bead-making, bookmaking, and pottery, among others.

Theater has always been particularly strong and popular in Singapore, and performance venues abound, such as the landmark durian-shaped Esplanade, the elegant Arts House at the Old Parliament Building along the river, and the Drama Theater of the School of the Arts.

We had a special encounter with an icon of Singaporean theater, the playwright and novelist Stella Kon, at the Peranakan Museum which had dedicated an exhibit to her play Emily of Emerald Hill, much performed and beloved of generations of Singaporeans since it debuted in 1982. Although born in Edinburgh (she later reacquired Singaporean citizenship), Stella is of Peranakan origins, referring mainly to the Chinese who settled centuries ago in certain places around the Straits of Malacca, particularly in Penang, Melaka, and Singapore. The Peranakans have contributed richly to the economy, culture, and cuisine of their host countries; most outsiders will recognize, for example, the sarong kabaya immortalized by the TV ad’s “Singapore girl,” a stylized version of traditional Peranakan dress.

Emily of Emerald Hill is a long dramatic monologue in English (most recently and brilliantly performed by the cross-dressing Ivan Heng) that takes the audience through the colorful life of Emily Gan, who rises from poor Peranakan girl to powerful matriarch. It’s a sad story but one that has resonated powerfully with its viewers (it’s being taught here in the Philippines by Dr. Lily Rose Tope, our new departmental chair in UP, in her Southeast Asian literature class), and it’s too bad that we didn’t get to see the play, but meeting the author herself as we walked through the Peranakan Museum was a special treat. “It used to be that being Peranakan was something of a disadvantage,” said Stella, “but today’s it’s become chic.”

The stories of the Peranakan—and much more—are lodged in the National Library of Singapore on Victoria Street, a breathtakingly modern building whose collections comprise not only the traditional hardbacks but a growing library of digitized e-books as well. (Just how far ahead Singapore is in the digital game struck me when I overheard someone mention a “Donate your old iPad” campaign being undertaken there for the use of schoolchildren.) “We don’t actually keep all that many books here,” a reference librarian told me, “because they’re sent out to the public libraries.” In other words, Singaporeans are busy reading. The National Library Board also runs a vigorous publishing program, and its products—such as an annotated bibliography of contemporary Singaporean literature in English—are available for free to anyone interested. The library’s collections are searchable online. At the time we visited, a large and groundbreaking exhibit featuring the letters of Singapore’s colonial founding father, Sir Stamford Raffles, was just about to open; there was also an exhibit upstairs of the personal memorabilia and writing tools (the pens were of particular interest to me) of some of Singapore’s most prominent writers. And here’s a travel tip: the best view of Singapore’s skyline can be had at the National Library’s Pod venue, open by special arrangement.

We ended our visit with dinner and music at Timbre at the Arts House, a bar and restaurant along the breezy riverfront operated by a group led by Danny Loong. Danny was himself a musician but has moved on to become one of Singapore’s leading arts managers and music entrepreneurs. (Danny told me that he was due to fly to Manila soon to judge at a blues-band competition; he’s also brought some Pinoy bands over to Singapore.) The music scene in Singapore was varied and dynamic, Danny told us—and we could hear that for ourselves, as a local trio essayed Bon Jovi on acoustic guitars. Some years ago, a Singaporean rap tune called “Why You So Like Dat?”—in Singlish, of course—was a big hit on the airwaves, and you can still catch it on YouTube. A message on the TV monitors at Timbre reminded the audience that they could send in their dedications to one another via SMS. It was a Monday, just the start of the work week, but the young Singaporeans around us were clearly enjoying themselves—and the great food and wide range of beers—at prices that weren’t going to bust anyone’s wallet.

It’s this kind of popular enthusiasm that Singapore’s cultural planners want to tap into, toward the creation of even more original material that would engage Singaporeans of all ages and levels. There’s a master plan behind all this, and it’s contained in the recently released Final Report of the Arts and Culture Strategic Review, which noted among others that “Since 1988, our cultural vibrancy has increased exponentially, with activities rising almost twenty-fold. Local audiences now have a year-round selection of festivals, fairs, events and activities to choose from. Demand for arts and culture has kept pace with vibrancy, with ticketed attendances and museum visitorship rising three-fold and eight-fold respectively.”

The review is a very detailed plan that our own cultural poobahs can learn a thing or two from—such a streamlining funding requirements for the arts (the NCCA, bound by COA procedures, makes our artists go through hoops of fire for the simplest things). And it should be noted that Singapore’s National Arts Council is backstopped by its Ministry of Culture, Community, and Youth—leaving us, again and parochially, one of the few large Asian countries without a Department of Culture to spearhead these initiatives at the highest levels of government.

On a more personal note, I was happy to be able to indulge myself this last visit in some of my favorite Singapore pastimes—feasting on the chicken rice at the Kopitiam, looking for bargains at the Sunday flea market on Sungei Road, and ducking into the Aesthetic Bay pen shop at ION Orchard for a bottle of ink. On my last morning walk, I stumbled serendipitously into a sidestreet that led me to Emerald Hill, the setting of that fabled play.

And even in Singapore’s smallest corners I found a Pinoy connection. Chatting with Kenny Leck, the owner of Books Actually (who publishes handsome little poetry chapbooks under the Math Paper Press imprint), I discovered that a Filipino poet—my old student and beer buddy Joel Toledo—lived just across the street in Tiong Bahru. Joel’s in Singapore to do his PhD, and has begun to make his mark there, with his Ruins and Reconstructions sitting on the same shelf alongside the works of Alvin Pang, Edwin Thumboo, and Kirpal Singh. I flipped through a copy of the Asia Literary Review in the bookshop, and found contributions by the Ateneo poet Anne Carly Abad and the Leyte-based poet Michael Carlo Villas. One way or another—and let’s not forget the forthcoming Singapore Literary Festival in November—Filipinos will figure in Singapore’s cultural reawakening.

Penman No. 11: Singapore’s Cultural Renaissance (1)

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Penman for Monday, Sept. 3, 2012

I’VE BEEN to Singapore many times since my first visit in 1983—almost yearly, in fact, since 2008—but I don’t think I understood and appreciated the place as much as I did when I flew in again last weekend to cover the launch of this year’s Singapore Writers Festival. What I found was not only a vibrant writing and publishing scene, barely mindful of the censorship we instinctively associate with that city-state, but also an explosion of artistic talent in fields as diverse as cartooning, music, and theater. This week I’m going to report on the SWF and writing in Singapore, and next week I’ll talk about the other arts.

For Filipinos more accustomed to thinking about Singapore as a place for upscale shopping and high finance, the notion of “Singaporean culture and arts”may seem a strange one. Singapore, we’ve assumed, just buys and borrows someone else’s art. Indeed, thirty years ago, Singaporean writers were humble enough to acknowledge the fact that they had a lot of catching up to do. In his introduction to 1983’s Stories from Singapore, George Fernandez observed that “Multiracial Singapore is in the throes of evolving a national literature. In this field of national literature in English we are certainly only a fledgling, and we have much to learn from the older and more experienced countries like the Philippines and India.”

That was then. Today, the reality is that—thanks to substantial government support and to a newfound confidence among Singaporean writers and artists—Singapore has become a major cultural hub in Southeast Asia, attracting international talent while nurturing its own.

The Singapore Writers Festival—whose 15th edition will run from November 2 to 11—is a case in point. Formerly held every two years, its organizers have seen fit to turn the SWF into an annual event, bringing it up to the level of other regional events such as the Sydney Writers Festival and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

I was a participant in last year’s SWF, engaged in a very lively conversation with the British playwright and novelist Caryl Phillips, but it was different to be going backstage this time and to watch the event being set up. The festival was being launched more than two months in advance to start generating publicity and ticket sales, but our small press group (which included Susan Wyndham of the Sydney Morning Herald and Parisa Pichitmarn of the Bangkok Post) was treated to a preview of the kind of talent to expect at the festival itself, and to an introduction to the Singapore book scene.

Before we even met the authors, we met the books—and a familiar authorial accessory, beer. “Books & Beer” is a regular event that takes place around Singapore at different venues, and this time it was at Lil Papas Wieners Bistro at Tanjong Pagar Plaza, right next to the central business district. Aside from selling a mindboggling variety of craft beers from all over the world, Lil Papa’s features a revolving library operating on a simple principle: bring a book, and take one home. The crowd is decidedly young, but the books on the shelves go beyond perennial favorites Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, and Alex Garland to include Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, and John Le Carre.

At Select Books on Armenian Street, we sat down with a group of Singaporean or Singapore-based writers—Hadijah Rahmat, who writes poetry and fiction in Malay; KTM Iqbal, a Tamil poet; Chow Teck Seng, a poet and fictionist in Chinese; Shamini Flint, an ex-lawyer from Malaysia whose crime mysteries and children’s books in English have sold over 500,000 copies since she began writing six years ago; and Neil Humphreys, a British humorist who has made Singapore his home and whose most recent book, Return to a Sexy Island, recently made Singapore’s bestseller list.

The multiracial composition of the group couldn’t have been more Singaporean, representing the four official languages (English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil) and the experiences—both pluses and minuses—as well of each of these writers and the language they wrote in. Not surprisingly, Neil and Shamini found it easiest to break through to a larger market—Neil had just returned from a book launch in Malaysia—but even so, barriers remain. “I found that my publishers were much more interested in book with no Asian content,” said the eminently adaptable Shamini, whose books have gone as far as South Africa. Chow Teck Seng saw a way out of the madding crowd by publishing his poems with photographs and other catchy graphics that seem to have clicked with younger readers.

I was both relieved and distressed to find that Singaporean and Filipino authors had much in common. Books are expensive in Singapore, averaging about S$17 (almost P600) for paperbacks and $30 for hardbacks. With a population of 6 million, the market is inherently small. Translation grants—vital in a multiracial, multilingual society—are new and few. “We don’t read each other” was a lament I heard more than once, particularly across the linguistic divide. With the exception of Neil and Shamini, most local writers still need to keep day jobs, usually as teachers.

As for taboos and political no-no’s, they’re still in place—writing too pointedly about race and religion could land you in the hot seat, and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is still officially banned—but Singaporean writers have learned to test and push the limits. Humphrey’s solution is humor—lots of it. “I’m known as the foreigner who whacks Singapore and survives,” he said. “Regulation encourages creativity,” another writer told me. An anti-homosexuality statute is still in the books, but that hasn’t stopped Jee Leong Koh from writing and publishing overtly gay poetry. And sometimes the poetry comes from people you least expect to write poems, especially traditional sonnets, such as Joshua Ip—the pseudonym of a major in the Singaporean army—whose Sonnets from Singlish has been gaining some traction in the bookshops.

Speaking of book stores, there are around 40 of them in Singapore, including a few prized “indie” bookshops such as Select and Books Actually. The recent global closure of Border’s was a big letdown for book buyers, but old reliables like Kinokuniya are still operating, and even sell some local literature.

There’s a palpable sense of a cultural and literary renaissance in the place, and the forthcoming SWF will be sure to project Singapore’s cultural vitality even more strongly, with Pulitzer prizewinner Michael Cunningham (The Hours), travel essayist Pico Iyer, and Man Asian prizewinner Shin Kyung-Sook leading an impressive list of literary luminaries in attendance (including our own novelist Charlson Ong). All in all, the SWF will feature 138 local and 46 international writers in 200 events spanning ten days.

“And for the first time, we’re having a festival fringe focused on the origins of desire and sexuality in literature,” said the young and energetic festival director Paul Tan, from the National Arts Council. The staid riverside Arts House, which used to be the parliament building, will be hosting dicsussions on (surprise, surprise) 50 Shades of Grey and burning questions like “Do women write better sex?” and “Can you be a feminist and still enjoy women’s magazines?”

If only for that, it should be worth booking a visit to Singapore between November 2 and 11.

Penman No. 8: A Hotel with a View

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Penman for Monday, August 13, 2012

A MONTH ago, I was invited out to lunch by Bobby Laurel and his sister Sallie Laurel-Lopez, who both help manage the Lyceum of the Philippines University which was established by their grandfather, the late President Jose P. Laurel, Sr., in Intramuros 60 years ago. I’m writing a biography of Bobby’s and Sallie’s father, the late Sen. Sotero “Teroy” Laurel, and we’d set up the lunch to interview some old Laurel family friends.

The interviews went well, as I’d expected. What came as a pleasant surprise was the venue for our lunch—the Bayleaf Hotel, specifically its 9 Spoons restaurant on the 9th floor. Bayleaf is just a few steps away from the main LPU campus. Externally, the nine-story building blends in with the Spanish colonial architecture of the district; it was an old building acquired from the Licaros family, and subsequently and brilliantly renovated by TI Vasquez Architects & Planners. Its interiors and amenities couldn’t be more modern, with five function rooms that can accommodate up to 500 people, and large LCD TVs and wi-fi access all over the place.

I saw these rooms and the Bayleaf’s suites myself, having asked for a guided tour of the place after a sumptuous lunch at the 9 Spoons (so named after the nine children of Teroy and Lorna Laurel; and before I forget, the crowd favorite at the 9 Spoons lunch buffet—the crunchy bagnet—is to die for). The 57 rooms—which start at around P4,000 a night, including breakfast—are very smartly appointed.

On top—literally—of all these is the Bayleaf’s killer feature, which isn’t even in the building itself: the view. The Bayleaf’s roof deck offers a 360-degree view of Manila Bay, Intramuros, and has quickly become the hotel’s choicest spot. The weather permitting, you could do worse than sit here at sunset with friends, sharing a cold beer.

The Bayleaf’s facilities tie in neatly with the Lyceum’s offerings in Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management, among its strongest programs today (historically, the school had been known for its Law, Foreign Service, and Journalism programs). LPU President Bobby Laurel, however, clarified that “We’re running Bayleaf as a business first, and as a training ground second. I’d describe it as a 3-4-5 star hotel: 3-star price, 4-star amenities, 5-star service. We got the best people we could find to run it. This is going to be an investment, a learning experience that we can duplicate in the other campuses if we do it right.” An avid and talented amateur photographer, Bobby also did some of the pictures in the hotel and the Cioccolata coffee shop on the ground floor.

The next time you’re in Intramuros and feel like having a hearty lunch or a cool drink at day’s end, give Bayleaf a try. Better yet, stay overnight and enjoy the view. I never thought I could say this about a city whose infernal traffic and grime I’ve resigned myself to embracing, but from the Bayleaf’s roof deck, Manila never looked so good.

* * * * *

SPEAKING OF Manila, I don’t get my fellow Manileños who’ve been griping about how badly Manila was portrayed in The Bourne Legacy, with its visual emphasis on the city’s poorer districts. I wonder what they were expecting when the Bourne people came over and said they were going to shoot here. Greenery? Bonifacio High Street? They can get that more cheaply—miles and miles of it—in Southern California.

Of course Manila isn’t all poverty (don’t we know that, every time we ride or drive into one of its gated communities, leaving our pedestrian IDs at the guardhouse), and of course it isn’t fair to portray just one side of things. But movies aren’t about fairness, especially action thrillers with the singleminded purpose of pumping more adrenaline into your bloodstream. They’re about achieving a certain effect, a mood or a backdrop against which the plot can move forward without too many distractions.

If there’s anything to complain about in the movie, it’s how the plot—so rich and complex at the beginning—seems to peter out in the end, after the long and well-executed chase scene. I don’t mean this to be a spoiler, but this movie is begging for a sequel (as if it wasn’t already a sequel to a sequel). Since Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz—who turned in very creditable performances—have already sailed off into the sunset (and more literally than you think), I don’t imagine we’re going to see more of Manila in this franchise’s future. Time to hit the slums of Mumbai?

* * * * *

THE RECENT flood—all the more infuriating to many because it didn’t even have a name—reminded me of my own baptism as a reporter for the Philippines Herald back in 1972. I was 18, a freshman dropout who’d wangled his way into a reportorial job at a broadsheet, realizing the dream of my albeit brief lifetime.

I’d been with the Herald for just a few months writing mainly news features when what would be called the July-August floods of 1972 broke over our heads and turned Manila and much of Central Luzon into a giant bowl of mud soup, like Ondoy a month long. That truly was a downpour of biblical proportions.

I did some research at Public Works and realized that the flood plans for Central Luzon hadn’t been reviewed or revised since 1935. I wrote that story up, and got it into the front page—the first time anything I wrote was ever worth the front page, so I’ve kept the clipping to this day.

But more interesting things were in store for me. I reported for work one morning, only to be told to return that evening and to pack a change of clothes. I was going to be sent out on a Navy ship to cover relief operations in Pangasinan, which was still heavily flooded. The ship turned out to be an LST, a Landing Ship Tank, which seemed to me to be a large metal box floating on the ocean—that’s certainly what it felt like when we sailed in rough waters along the coast that night.

The next morning my photographer and I disembarked in Lingayen Gulf, wading into the water like an invading army, and plunged into the wettest excursion of my life. The US bases were still around, and the folks at Clark had sent a big rubber raft along, and I clambered aboard, half-reporter and half-flood victim, to get stories from the flood. We spent a cold night at the governor’s house amidst bags of relief goods, after I’d phoned in my story to a deskman who took it all down on a typewriter with the phone clenched between his cheek and shoulder (ever wonder how newsrooms worked before cellphones and email?).

The following day an American helicopter arrived, a Jolly Green Giant they might have been using in Vietnam, and we hopped aboard—not knowing that its next stop was Clark Air Force Base. Stepping out of the chopper—smoother than any plane I’d ever flown, although I hadn’t flown too many then—I saw and gawked at all those warbirds on the Clark tarmac and imagined for a minute what it would be like to be transported out of this infernal wetness into some place like California; but I settled for the chocolate cake at the commissary (another word added to my vocabulary).

Sunny California would come into my life eight years later. Back in the office the next day, the desk then sent me out to interview Mrs. Imelda Marcos in Malacañang about the Palace’s relief work. She met me in front of a mountain of Nutribuns. I don’t remember much of what she said—charmed witless, I suppose. What can I say? I was eighteen, with hardly a notion that, just a few weeks down the road, an even darker and longer storm was about to fall all over the islands.