Category Archives: UP

Penman No. 473: Taking Care of Emy

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Penman for Friday, May 9, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 144: A Better Fighting Chance

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 5, 2025

TWO WEEKS ago, almost 18,000 young Filipinos and their parents awoke to the good news that they had qualified for admission to the University of the Philippines through the UP College Admission Test (UPCAT). Over 135,000 high school students had applied, so this year’s admission rate stood at just over 13%, almost 7% higher than last year’s outcome.

Whatever UP’s critics may think it’s become, entry into one of its eight constituent universities remains the highest of aspirations for many Filipino families, especially the poor for whom the tuition and cost of living at top private universities is impossible without a scholarship. 

UP oldtimers like to recall the days, decades ago, when the quality of public education was still high enough for public and private high school graduates to compete on fairly even terms for admission into UP. It wasn’t unusual for some provinciano wearing chinelas to step into a UP classroom or laboratory and beat the daylights out of some elite-school fellow in academic performance. Many of those provincianos—the likes of Ed Angara, Miriam Defensor, Billy Abueva, and Dodong Nemenzo—went on to stellar careers in government, education, the arts, and industry. UP was clearly doing what it was supposed to do, as its past President Rafael Palma put it: to be “the embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of the people for their cultural and intellectual progress.”

Ironically, by the time the UP Charter was revisited and revised a century after its founding in 2008, giving it the unique status of being the “national university,” UP’s student profile had changed. Jokes about UP Diliman’s parking problems began to underline the popular perception that UP was no longer a school for Filipinos across the archipelago and across income strata but one for the privileged, mainly from the big cities. The introduction of free tuition in state universities and colleges in 2017, while well intentioned, even resulted in subsidizing the children of the rich in UP, who could well have afforded going to Ateneo or La Salle.

But some good news is emerging, as this year’s UPCAT results bear out. Starting with last year’s UPCAT, there’s already been a reversal of the trend favoring graduates from private high schools, with 55% of qualifiers now coming from public and 45% from private high schools. UP President Angelo Jimenez—himself a boy from the boonies, coming out of tribal roots in Bukidnon—has pledged to do even more to give poor students outside of the big cities a better fighting chance of getting into UP.

“We started this banking on two things,” he says, “that UP will respond to the challenge of transforming the so-called common clay—the less-advantaged—into fine porcelain, and that the less-advantaged will respond to the challenge of opportunity. The task of leadership now is to set the enabling environment, structures, and systems to ensure the success of this two-pronged strategy. It’s a big bet, and it gets bigger. We still have the non-UPCAT track. This includes our Associate in Arts program, UPOU’s ODeL, talent-based modes, and finally, the UP Manila School of Health Sciences in Tarlac, Aurora, Palo, and Cotabato. We cannot solve all problems, we are not lowering standards. In fact, we must demand excellence regardless of social and economic status, and enforce it. But we are dropping rope ladders so people long staring up from the base of the fortress walls can have a better chance of scaling its sheer drop with something better than their bare hands.”

Those rope ladders include adding more UPCAT testing centers in faraway places, ultimately to have at least one in each province—a goal that will be met later this year. The testing centers are also being moved from private to public high schools. “We’ve seen that more students tend to participate when the tests are given in their national high schools,” says UP Office of Admissions director Francisco de los Reyes. Aside from more testing centers, UP is helping disadvantaged students prepare better for UPCAT through its Pahinungod volunteers, who distribute reviewers using real items from past UPCATs (these reviewers are also downloadable for UPCAT applicants) and use them for UPCAT simulations, guiding students even with such details as shading the exam oblongs. (De los Reyes reports that wrong shading has caused 20% of their machine counting errors.)

These steps are clearly paying off. Davao de Oro (formerly Compostela Valley), which previously accounted for less than 10 UPCAT qualifiers, has just produced 31, after a testing center was put up in Nabunturan. 

UP’s support for poor students doesn’t end with UPCAT. Every year, thousands of qualifiers from so-called Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDAs), even after passing UPCAT against all odds, fail to show up for enrollment after realizing that they cannot afford the costs of living on a UP campus. UP has rolled out a P50-million Lingap Iskolar program that provides such disadvantaged qualifiers who meet certain standards P165,000 a year to cover housing, meals, transportation, books, cellphone load, and other expenses. Almost 200 Lingap Iskolar grants were given out last year. In UP Manila, private donors fund daily meals for over 30 students.

I’m particularly happy to report that a dear friend of mine, Julie Hill, recently donated almost P21 million that will be used for a new Agapay Fund that will go toward the upkeep of poor students in UP’s School of Health Sciences, which has a unique ladderized program that enables rural midwives to become nurses, and nurses to become doctors. The program has already produced about 200 doctors who have served their communities back. 

Among them was Dr. Hannah Grace Pugong, who recently landed in the top 10 of the medical board exams, after placing No. 1 in the midwifery and No. 3 in the nursing exams. Dr. Pugong will soon be deployed under the Department of Health’s Doctors to the Barrios (DTTB) program, fulfilling her return service commitment. It is an obligation she willingly embraces, saying that “I have often reminded myself that how I treat my patients should reflect how I want my family members to be treated by other health workers.” 

If that’s not what being a national university should be about, I don’t know what is.

Penman No. 473: New Light on (and from) the Philippine Short Story

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Penman for Sunday, April 6, 2025

FEW MAY have noticed, but this year, 2025, marks the centenary of what has been widely acknowledged to be our first classic short story in English, Paz Marquez Benitez’s deathless “Dead Stars.”

As I’ve often observed as both a writer and teacher of Philippine literature, there’s probably no literary form more popular among Filipinos than the short story and its predecessors—myths, legends, folktales, and such stories that draw on the power of narrative to tell and teach us something about human life. 

A lot of this has to do with the fact that people and cultures everywhere have made use of stories to make sense of things—to establish causality in human actions—often as a way of prescribing and also proscribing certain behaviors. Stories were there to learn from, like the biblical parables, Aesop’s fables, and the creation myths. The more exciting and entertaining the stories were, the easier the learning happened. Even the mere recognition of oneself in a story that could have taken place a thousand years ago in a place across the planet makes our lives seem more meaningful.

In the Philippines—as it did in the West, where the modern short story took form—the short story was a staple of prewar weekly magazines like the Sunday Tribune, where a story written by an American author would be matched by a local story during what our early literary scholars like Leopoldo Yabes would call our period of apprenticeship. This was in English, but the short story in Filipino (then Tagalog) and other Philippine languages had developed even earlier, and continued (as it continues) to explore new forms and material.

Why the short story and not the novel? That’s another long discussion to be had, and I’ve addressed it in a lecture titled “Novelists in Progress,” but the short of it is that, well, we Pinoys like things in small doses (think Nick Joaquin’s “heritage of smallness”), and the short story satisfies our craving for a touch of fiction and fantasy in our ordinary lives. We’re not marathoners, but great sprinters; we’re not summiteers or navel-gazers, but masters of the street and alley. 

And so, over the past century, important anthologies of the Philippine short story have been published, tracking the development of the genre and its practitioners, from Yabes’ landmark Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940 (a project continued by Gemino Abad for 1956-2008) to Isagani Cruz’s Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (2000). Outside of English, Mga Agos sa Disyerto edited by Efren Abueg came out in 1964, proclaiming new directions for Tagalog short fiction, and the much-needed Ulirat: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines was published in 2021, edited by Kristine Ong Muslim.

But the 21st century is now a quarter of the way through, and just in these past two decades or so, a fresh bumper crop of brilliant new stories has built up, awaiting harvest.

Five years ago, an American friend named Gerald “Jerry” Burns—a fellow academic and a scholar of Philippine literature in English, now Emeritus Professor at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire—decided to do just that: review the best of the newest Philippine short stories and produce a selection with which to introduce them to the world. He needed a collaborator, and having worked with Jerry earlier when he was a Fulbright professor at our English department in UP, I agreed to co-edit the volume with him. Because of our backgrounds, our stories would be mainly those written in English (and the excellent Ulirat had already covered much more ground in the other Philippine languages than we ever could) but Jerry wisely insisted that we should have at least some representation of non-English stories in translation in the book, if only to lead the reader to explore more in Ulirat.

The selection process was predictably long and bruising, with all the political, aesthetic, and practical considerations that go into anthologizing, but in the end we came up with 18 stories written by both familiar and fresh names, from within and beyond the Philippines, including the diaspora: Dennis Andrew Aguinaldo, Dean Francis Alfar, Mia Alvar, John Bengan, Ian Rosales Casocot, Richard Giye, Vicente Groyon, Ino Habana, Carljoe Javier, Monica Macansantos, Perry Mangilaya, Doms Pagliawan, Ma. Elena Paulma, John Pucay, Anna Sanchez, Larissa Mae R. Suarez, Lysley A. Tenorio, and Socorro Villanueva. We also found an agreeable and supportive publisher, Milflores Publishing, fortuitously run by Andrea Pasion-Flores, herself a fine fictionist who understood the need for a new anthology like this, especially on the threshold of the Philippines’ participation as Guest of Honor in this year’s Frankfurt Buchmesse.

The book’s title, What Light It Can Hold: The Philippine Short Story in the Twenty-First Century, was suggested to Jerry by an encounter with the piña weavers of Kalibo, Aklan, and a caption he saw that said: “How fragile a single thread of piña is, how delicate, but look how much light it can hold.” He explains that “What Light… is intended to recognize the limited capacity of the Philippine short story in this period to offer any widespread or definitive illumination of the nation’s life and culture. At the same time, a more expansive understanding of that title is possible. For the short story, as will be suggested in the next pages, is a signature Philippine product, too. And these slender narratives, fashioned by their makers with a skill, patience, and devotion comparable to the piña weavers’, bring what light they can hold to vital areas of contemporary Philippine and larger human experience.”

No anthology project will be without its perceived failures and omissions, and Dr. Burns and I remain fully open to criticism in that respect. But we believe the sympathetic reader still stands to profit from both the selections and the introduction, penned largely by Jerry, that makes salient observations on the changes that have taken place in this most favored literary form of ours over the past century. Happy reading! (What Light It Can Hold is available on Lazada and Shopee.)

Qwertyman No. 136: Bringing In the No-Shows

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 10, 2025

EVERY YEAR, about 100,000 Filipino high school seniors take the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (UPCAT), hoping to get into one of UP’s ten campuses nationwide. It’s an annual ritual that’s been taking place since 1968, except for a brief period during the pandemic when the test was replaced by an alternative system. (I didn’t even realize until I looked these figures up that I was among the third batch of UPCAT takers in 1970; thankfully I got in.)

Of those 100,000 hopefuls, only about 13,000-15,000 make it. That passing percentage may seem cruelly if not needlessly small, but there’s good reason for it. While we’d like more students to come to UP, admissions are limited by how many incoming freshmen UP’s campuses (or “constituent universities” such as UP Manila and UP Mindanao) can optimally absorb. Classrooms, housing, teachers, and facilities all come into play. Large campuses like Diliman and Los Baños can obviously take in more, but even so there’s a limit to admissions that needs to be observed if UP is to maintain the quality of higher education that it promises.

The more troubling statistics have to do with the distribution of those “passers” (technically, no one “fails” the UPCAT, which is just one of several factors that determine admission, including high school grades; each campus also has a different qualifying standard to rationalize admissions, so you can “fail” Diliman but qualify for UP Cebu). 

Last year, according to UP’s own statistics, 44 percent of UPCAT qualifiers came from private high schools. Another 27 percent came from the country’s science high schools. (which are publicly funded, but offer a much higher standard of education). Other public high schools accounted for only 29 percent of the total. Consider these figures against the larger picture, in which around 80 percent of our students go to public high schools, and less than 20 percent to their private counterparts. 

Compounding this gross inequality, about 70 percent of UPCAT qualifiers come from the big cities, mainly in Luzon. This, of course, is no big surprise. A recent study by UP professors showed what we didn’t need a study to know (but being academics, of course they had to prove it): that “income advantage” weighed heavily on one’s chances of passing the UPCAT and getting into UP. If you went to a good private high school, you were more likely to get in than a poor student from the boonies. To top it off, with tuition now free in public universities, we actually end up subsidizing many students from affluent families who could well afford to pay their way in private colleges.

This lopsided situation has long been the cause of much concern within and beyond UP, which, as the country’s “national university,” bears the dual responsibility of aiming to be the best university in the country bar none, and yet also serve the interests of the entire Filipino nation, and not just those of the urban elite that has apparently become over-represented in its student body. Various UP administrations have sought to address this seemingly paradoxical “excellence vs. equity” argument through different methods aimed at more democratic access—without, as current UP President Angelo Jimenez emphasizes, lowering UP’s standards. This remains a work in progress, but the aim is clear: make it possible for poorer Filipinos to get into UP so it can truly be the “university for the Filipino” it was envisioned to be.

Against all odds—and this brings me to my present point—many surprisingly do. I don’t have the actual figure on hand, but they number in the low thousands, of the 13,000-15,000 in an incoming batch. Encouraging, yes? But here’s the rub: about 1,500 of them never show up—what we call “no-shows”—not for lack of ambition, but for lack of means to cover the cost of living at a UP campus. Imagine that: it’s hard enough to get a good public high school education in what are called Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDAs), and harder still to pass the UPCAT from where you are. You’re elated to learn you made it, only to realize that you’re not leaving home after all, because you can’t afford the transportation, food, housing, books, and computers that come with college.

Thankfully, UP has initiated a new Lingap-Iskolar program to help out with these expenses and bring more GIDA passers in, starting with 300-500 students. Over the next four years, P250 million has been allotted by UP for this purpose. It’s a great initiative, but it still falls far short of minimizing the no-shows so the yawning disparity between UP’s rich and poor can be more effectively reduced.

With the education budget being squeezed even more under the current GAA, this is a great opportunity for the private sector to come in and make a clear and strategic impact on the future of the Filipino mind. If you’re a corporation or philanthropist in search of a good cause to support, look no farther—make it possible for a young Filipino from our poorest and remotest regions to study in UP. Sure, democratizing UP will require much broader and deeper moves, going back to basic education; but this step is solid, immediate, and tangible. 

I’m happy to report that I made this pitch to a dear friend in the US who had spent some time here in the Philippines more than 50 years ago with her late husband, who worked to help improve Philippine education. Responding to my call, that friend, Julie Hill, sold two HR Ocampo and Ang Kiukok paintings from her collection at a recent Leon Gallery auction, the proceeds of which she will be donating to the UP Foundation for a fund to be set up along the lines of Lingap-Iskolar. Despite being away for so long, Julie remains deeply attached to the Philippines; she’s not Elon-Musk rich and lives very modestly, but has sacrificed her best pieces so some bright young Pinoys she will never meet can have a better future and serve the nation.

If a foreigner can do that, I don’t see why our homegrown billionaires can’t. Support a GIDA scholar, and make a difference right now.

Penman No. 471: A Promise to Keep

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Penman for Sunday, February 9, 2025

Now and then we come across stories of foreigners who fall under the spell of the Philippines so completely that wherever else they go, the Philippines and its panoply of wonders—its mangoes, its waters, its sunsets, and above all its smiling people—stay with them, urging them to return, in spirit if not in person.

One such visitor was my good friend Julie Hill, who with her late husband Arthur first came to Manila in 1968 on a mission to help improve Philippine education, among other concerns. Almost six decades later, after having traveled the world and settled in America, Julie’s thoughts and affections remain bonded to this country and to its future. In the twilight of her life, she has decided to gift poor but bright young Filipinos with a life-changing opportunity to study at the University of the Philippines, from the forthcoming sale at auction of two paintings by National Artists HR Ocampo and Ang Kiukok.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt to Greek parents, Julie Hill went on to a fulfilling life in the United States and around the world with Arthur, who represented the Ford Foundation in the Philippines. Forced to leave Egypt when Nasser took over, Julie found a scholarship for her master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Minnesota. There she met Arthur, an Australian taking his PhD in Education and Mathematical Statistics. 

The two fell in love, married, and embarked on a lifelong adventure around the world—to Western Samoa, Thailand, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, where Arthur’s expertise in education and agricultural development was much sought after. Arthur passed away in 2002, but Julie went on to her own career as an international marketing executive for Lucent and later AT&T. Since retiring at their home in Rancho Sta. Fe, California, she has written and published five books of travel and memoirs—all of which I edited after being introduced to her by our mutual friend Jimmy Laya, turning our business connection into a long and dear friendship.

From the first of those books, A Promise to Keep (2003), come many vivid impressions of a country and society transitioning to modernity, troubled but brimming with energy and promise. Arthur got busy working with UP and the International Rice Research Institute, among others, and the Hills became good friends with the rising technocrats of the time—Cesar Virata, Gerry Sicat, and Jimmy Laya. It was Laya—who remains close to Julie—who introduced her to the local art community.

“The art scene was vibrant,” Julie would write. “Manila, a centuries-old entrepot, was rich in art and culture, and we were privileged to visit many private art collections….

“Art galleries flourished. A self-exiled painter stormed into town and set new price ceilings. The audience increased. So did the column inches devoted to art in the newspapers and magazines….

“The Luz Gallery in Makati was run by Arturo Luz, a leading painter, known for his high standards of professionalism. His gallery gained the trust of the public and the artists. The Solidaridad gallery and bookshop was located in Ermita, run by novelist Frankie Sionil Jose. Solidaridad was the middle ground between the established artists exhibiting at Luz and smaller galleries where new talent was championed. You could find superb examples of prints, drawings, miniatures, relief metal sculptures, collage, photographs, and paintings all over Manila.

“We were interested in meeting the artists and visiting their studios, but were reluctant to pay the gallery prices. If we liked the work of a particular artist, why not buy directly from him or her? This was how we searched for and found the home of Hernando Ocampo.”

“Hernando Ocampo was a pure abstract expressionist with a daring originality in his paintings. His work was unmistakably Filipino, ascribing this national character to his unique, tropical colors. A typical Ocampo painting is not unlike a honeycomb, a complex weave of color and tone with each individual cell suggesting a large, more real life form. His work is tropical and warm and suggestive of symmetry. The colors and shapes seem to dance before the eyes. His home in Maypajo was a mecca for friends, admirers, and collectors. He had an open house on Sundays. Good food and hard and soft drinks were ready for guests. Visiting Ocampo, we felt welcomed not only by the artist but also by his family. We commissioned a painting. Sketches were drawn; we followed the progress of our painting with our weekly Sunday visits, and sampled the wonderful pancit, that ubiquitous Filipino noodle dish, that was offered. We photographed the progress of his work. He completed the ‘Song of Summer’, a mastery of color in 17 different shades of red. It would hang proudly in our home in California, and continue to provide intense, pleasurable excitement, another reminder of our times in the Philippines.” (Note: Ocampo’s sketch and color guide for the painting will go with the artwork at auction.)

The Hills left Manila for Indonesia shortly after martial law, but on a return visit in the early 1980s, their old friends at the Ford Foundation presented them with another painting by another Filipino master, Ang Kiukok.Julie recalls seeing several works by accomplished Filipino painters in the foundation office, purchased back when they were far more affordable, and this may have been one of them. Like the Ocampo, it traveled with the Hills around the world all the way to Rancho Sta. Fe, where I have been visiting Julie over the years (our daughter Demi conveniently lives nearby in San Diego).

It was during our most recent visit there that Julie brought up the idea of donating her two paintings for the benefit of poor UP students. A lifelong but quiet supporter of students as far away as Mindanao and a staunch believer in the transformative power of education, Julie also honored me by anonymously (but no more) endowing the Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. Professorial Chair in Creative Writing at UP, over my embarrassed pleas to put it in her name.

This time, she wants the money to go to UP’s poorest—specifically, those exceptionally bright and mainly provincial students who, against all odds, pass the UPCAT but fail to enroll, lacking the means to afford the cost of living on a UP campus. We’ll need to work out the mechanics, but this will go much farther than professorial chairs in changing Filipino lives.

“I had a privileged education in Alexandria and was fortunate to receive a scholarship for my graduate education in America,” Julie says. “During our years in Manila, Arthur and I developed a deep affection for the people of the Philippines, and I am hoping that this donation will contribute to creating a generation of talented and hopeful Filipinos who will serve their country well.”

The Ocampo and Ang Kiukok paintings will be sold at auction by Leon Gallery on February 22. I pray that generous buyers will help Julie keep her promise to the Filipino people.

Qwertyman No. 131: A Relentless Questioner

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 3, 2025

I DON’T know if there’s a Marxist heaven, but if there is, then Dr. Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, who passed away recently, must be smiling up there because of the forthcoming launch of his book Notes from the Philippine Underground (UP Press, 2025).

It’s too bad that Dodong won’t be around to see the book and sign copies for his legions of friends and comrades—many of them like my wife Beng, who remember him as a dashing and persuasively articulate professor of Western Thought, despite the Cebuano-accented English he was sometimes laughed at for by the ignorant. He never became my teacher in college, and oddly enough—because I was out of UP Diliman for most of the time he was teaching there—I never really got to know him closely as an activist and ideologue.

I did know him as a boss—he took me in as his Vice President for Public Affairs when he was UP President—and in that capacity I learned to respect and admire him as a man who held firm to his principles while finding practical and effective solutions to UP’s problems. This was especially true of our campaign to revise the outdated UP Charter, which eventually succeeded under President Emerlinda Roman, but which he tenaciously pursued despite the insults of spiteful politicians. 

Throughout his adult life and to the last, Nemenzo remained a professed and unapologetic Marxist—a word that would seem Jurassic in these post-Soviet and Trumpian times, but which he saw and lived in a different light. 

As the preface to his book by Prof. Patricio “Jojo Abinales” explains, “Dodong’s engagement with Marxist theory wasn’t an academic exercise. For him, Marxism was a living, breathing framework—a summons to connect theory to the existing conditions of everyday life. He wasn’t content to theorize from a distance; with a scientific mind, he dug into the realities of Philippine society, always interrogating its dominant ideas, structures, and contradictions. His writings speak to this dual commitment: the rigor of his analysis is matched by an acute sensitivity to the concrete lives of real people whose struggles he sought to illuminate. He distrusted all dogma, and sought to validate all received knowledge.

“Francisco ‘Dodong’ Nemenzo’s life and work resist easy categorization. He was a Marxist thinker, a revolutionary activist, an inspiring academic leader, and a mentor to generations of scholars and radicals. But more than any of these roles, he was a relentless questioner of the world as he found it—and a passionate believer in its potential to be different, if not better.”

Indeed the book shows how sharp, even scathing, Dodong could be in his opinions of how his idea of Marxism remains relevant and useful despite how it has been misused by many of its adherents and misunderstood by its opponents. 

He writes: “We must struggle against their misconception of Marxist theory and practice (e.g., equating Marxism with Stalinism and totalitarianism) and point out that humanism is inherent in the Marxist worldview. Going through the basic documents of Filipino social democratic groups, it is obvious that, even as they try to distance themselves from Marxism, their analysis of present conditions and their historical roots is almost entirely based on a Marxist framework.” 

He acknowledges the flaws and failures of Marxist parties caught up in internal conflicts (Dodong himself was once ordered to be executed by the party he belonged to, ostensibly for treason): “Can people be blamed for suspecting that communists are motivated by cynical calculations of what would bring them tactical advantages? Their loud and monotonous protestations ring hollow in the absence of inner-party democracy. The authoritarian and repressive character of the regimes their comrades established wherever they gained the upper hand reinforced this impression. This stigma they must shake off; otherwise they would remain at the periphery in the continuing struggle for democracy.”

He is not without wry humor. Reflecting on the ultimate folly of a revolution being led by a highly secretive, centralized, and “conspiratorial” party, he notes: “This is difficult to implement in the Philippine cultural milieu. A code of silence—what the Russians call konspiratsiya and the Mafiosi call omerta—is impossible among people who take rumor-mongering as a favorite sport. Our irrepressible transparency is a weakness from one point of view but a virtue from another. Our legendary incapacity to keep secrets is probably the best guarantee that no conspiratorial group can stay in power long enough to consolidate a dictatorship.”

Even for those disinclined or even hostile toward the Left, Notes from the Philippine Underground offers many valuable insights from one of that movement’s “OGs,” in today’s youth-speak. Nemenzo may be highly critical but he remains ultimately hopeful that positive and deep social change will happen, if the Left learns from its mistakes and finds new ways to engage society. Listen:

“There have been many pseudo-united fronts put up by the vanguard party. They consist of party-led mass organizations that simply echo the party line. None ever grew into a genuine united front, although they did attract a few prominent individuals who had no organizational base whatsoever. Other organized groups are often suspicious of the party and wary of being reduced into instruments for policies they do not accept.

“But I know of only three attempts at seriously establishing a real united front in this country: in the immediate postwar period, in the late 1960s, and very recently. They all collapsed because of sectarian methods of work. Sectarianism is the blight of all united front efforts everywhere….

“The Philippine movement has never been able to solve this dilemma. At the very moment when united front structures are set up, rivalries emerged. And intoxicated by short-term successes in expanding their mass organizations, the sectarians eventually prevailed.”

Pluralism, he suggests, is key: “Pluralism is a bourgeois liberal doctrine that ought to be preserved and enriched in the socialist revolution. It is not incompatible with socialism. The tension that arises through political competition would serve as a constant reminder that the party must earn the allegiance of the masses. Of course, no state would tolerate an opposition party that resorts to violent methods and solicits support from foreign powers. But this should never be an excuse for suppressing any opposition.”

Surely there will be blowback from those holding different views; expect the usual howl from UP bashers and red-taggers. But when that happens, even from the grave—or Marxist heaven—Dodong Nemenzo will have sparked the kind of discussion we direly need to find our way forward as a nation.

Qwertyman No. 126: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (2)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 30, 2024

THIS WEEK I continue with excerpts from my interview with the late Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, on his recollections of his genesis as a young intellectual and activist at the University of the Philippines in the 1950s.

“It was all a popularity contest. Everything just seemed to be socials. Homobono ‘Bon’ Adaza, who was then the editor of the Philippine Collegian, tried to organize a socialist club with me. Bon even put out an announcement for a meeting. Bon and I were contemporaries, but he was a year older than me. I think I was a senior by then. I was living with my father on campus, since he was a professor here. We had a cottage in Area 2, then we later moved to Area 14. Our whole family was here. 

“It was because of my readings. I had already read the history of the socialist movement, and I was fascinated by that so we formed a socialist club. I think just three of us turned up for the meeting—the third was Princess. After that we were always together. We weren’t going steady yet then. We continued being friends because she was the only one who listened to my sermons on socialism. You ask her, but I don’t think she had any association with socialism before. We had just that one meeting. 

“Bon was eventually expelled from UP, but I had a hand in his election as chairman of the Student Council and editor of the Collegian twice because we were friends. The editor was elected from among the topnotchers of the exam. 

“The UPSCAns didn’t have a candidate who passed the exam, who were all frat boys. Bon landed in the top three, but he had no supporters. I bargained with the UPSCAns because they held the majority. So I used my vote in the council to push for Bon. Eventually he became editor of the Collegian. 

“Together with the chairman of the council and also the leader of the UPSCA, we decided to hold the first student strike. This was because for one and a half years, UP had no president, with Enrique Virata serving as acting president. It came down to a stalemate between Vicente Sinco and Gonzalo Gonzalez. Squabbling behind them were Jose P. Laurel, who represented the Senate on the Board of Regents, and Carlos P. Garcia who was supporting Gonzalez. No one could get the majority. I was on that strike. I proposed a solution arguing for the Board to take decisive action but also endorsing Salvador Lopez, whose essays I loved, for president. The UPSCANs didn’t care who won, as long as we had a president. 

“Our strike paralyzed the campus for a couple of days. It didn’t last as long as the Diliman Commune, but it was the first—and it was my first mass action. I was the one who was planning the tactics. 

“I was really looking for allies when I met this labor leader who used to be the secretary-general of the Federation of Free Farmers. [We’ll call him Hernando for this account, pending verification of the name—JD.]He claimed to be a socialist and he seemed to have read books on socialism. He was a layman. He was the one who introduced me to labor leaders such as Ignacio Lacsina and Blas Ople. They had a group of young people who revolved around Lacsina, and they met at his office in Escolta. 

“But I continued my reading. Sometimes I felt alienated because they weren’t Marxists. They were just for nationalization, and I felt more advanced than they were. There were other students there, but they were not as involved as I was. When the Suez Crisis exploded in 1957, the Americans intervened in Lebanon. We decided to picket the US embassy. We were  already using the word ‘imperialism’ then. Prominent labor leaders were there, including Hernando. When we got there, the labor attaché invited us inside to have breakfast with the US ambassador. I didn’t want to go in, but Ople and Lacsina thought they could change US policy by convincing the ambassador, so we did. I was utterly disgusted by that experience. 

“I was due then to go to US for my PhD, on a Rockefeller fellowship at Columbia University. Our demonstration took place just a few months before I was to leave. I was an instructor in UP and my college wanted me take up Public Ad, but I wanted to get out of that so I chose Political Sociology. I had become an admirer of C. Wright Mills who worked there and I wanted to work with him, only to find out that he didn’t want to handle graduate courses. 

“I already had a room at the International House in Columbia. Everything was prepared. I already had my visa. But on the day I was supposed to leave, the embassy told me that I could not leave. The consul general showed me the immigration law, which banned the entry of communists, anarchists, drug addicts, and prostitutes. 

“I think they had some earlier information about me because Lacsina later told me that Hernando was a CIA agent. He said that once, he and Blas Ople wanted to invite Hernando for a drink so they could get him drunk and then ply him with questions to extract the truth. What happened instead was that Blas got drunk first so nothing happened. Then he lashed out at Hernando and told him to his face that he was a CIA agent, and cursed him for blocking me from taking up my scholarship in the US. Looking back, I think Lacsina was right!”

Dodong Nemenzo eventually went to the University of Manchester in the UK for his PhD in Political History. He returned to serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, chancellor of UP Visayas, faculty regent, and 18th president of the University of the Philippines. He married Ana Maria “Princess” Ronquillo and they had three children—one of whom, the mathematician Fidel, became chancellor of UP Diliman.

Qwertyman No. 125: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (1)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 23, 2024

IT WAS with deep sadness that we received the news last week of the passing of Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, the staunch Marxist, nationalist, and former president of the University of the Philippines. My wife Beng and I are spending Christmas with our daughter in the US and being an all-UP family, we all knew Dodong and were much affected by his loss. Beng had been a student of Dodong’s at UP, and I was privileged to serve under him as his Vice President for Public Affairs twenty years ago. But long before this, I had met him as a student at the Philippine Science High School where his wife Princess taught us History; he came to pick her up in the afternoon in his Volkswagen Beetle whose door was emblazoned with the Bertrand Russell “peace” sign.

We will be missing the many memorial events that will surely be held in his honor these coming days, so I thought of recalling Dodong in a different way from what most of his colleagues and comrades will be speaking about him. More than ten years ago, I interviewed Dodong for a book I sadly have yet to finish, and he spoke with me about his life before he became the fighting ideologue everyone now remembers him to be. Let’s hear him in this abbreviated excerpt:

“We went back to Cebu after the war. Everything was still in turmoil. I enrolled at the Miraculous Medal School, a Catholic school, and completed my third and fourth grade there. By the time I reached fifth grade, Cebu Normal School was opened so I graduated from there. After sixth grade, I spent a year in the seminary in Cebu. That was my parents’ plan ever since I could remember. I was the only boy among three children, and the eldest. My parents were devout Catholics, and they considered it an honor when a member of the family became a priest or a nun. Since I was an only boy they wanted me to become a priest. I stayed there for only a year, and then I quit. That was probably the beginning of my radicalization. The seminary back then was run by Spanish or Vincentian priests who were supporters of Franco. They looked down on Filipinos and despised Rizal. 

“I went to the University of San Carlos. It was a Catholic school but my father was unhappy with the Science instruction. Our science textbook used the question-and-answer method and my father didn’t like that. He examined my notebooks every day and corrected what my teacher said. He got mad when we were taught creationism, and he lectured me on Darwin and evolution. I answered my teacher back and the principal reported me to my father for my heretical tendencies. My father decided to free me from this nonsense and transferred me to the Malayan Academy, a private non-sectarian school that had very good teachers. I finished near the bottom of my class, failing in Conduct and Tagalog. 

“I entered UP Diliman in 1953. The rule then was that you were exempted from the entrance exam if you had an average of 82, but my average was around 77 so I had to enroll in a summer institute that was like a backdoor into UP if you passed 6 units there. I didn’t know what course to take. My father didn’t want me to take up Law and wanted me to become a scientist like him, but I reckoned that if I did that, I would always be compared to him and come up short. So I chose a course called AB General. 

“The advising line was a mile long. Jose ‘Pepe’ Abueva, a friend of my father’s, passed by and saw me in the queue. He asked after me and I told him that I couldn’t think of a course I really wanted. He tried to sell me on Public Administration, but I didn’t like to serve in a bureaucracy. He said there’d be a lot of opportunities abroad, scholarships, and if I did well I could join the faculty. He had a lot of arguments, but the one that persuaded me was ‘If you join Public Ad right now, I’ll sign your Form 5 right away, and you won’t have to join this crowd.’ 

“That’s how I ended up in Public Ad. When the dean of Business Administration tried to recruit me and my (Pan Xenia fraternity) brod Gerry Sicat who was then in Foreign Service to go into Economics for our master’s, Pepe Abueva again swooped in and told me to take up an MPA instead, and to join the PA faculty immediately. So I became a faculty member in my senior year, just before my graduation, as an assistant instructor. I probably had the longest title in UP: ‘research assistant with the rank of assistant instructor, with authority to teach but no additional compensation.’ I really wanted to teach, but had no actual assignment. I only took over the classes of professors who went on leave. 

“I never joined the UP Student Catholic Action or UPSCA. Well, maybe for one year, but I was never active and then I got out of it. I joined only until I met an UPSCAn named Princess. We always met in Delaney Hall. We were together in the student council. She was representing Liberal Arts, I was representing Public Ad. I joined in 1955, my third year, along with Gerry Sicat, Manny Alba, and Jimmy Laya. I became a liberal and distanced myself from UPSCA. 

“I idolized (Philosophy professor) Ricardo Pascual. I was looking for a cause, but these liberals were just fighting for academic freedom with no purpose. It seemed empty. I was under the influence of Pascual for some time, but we had no advocacy. I joined a short course in Social Order at Ateneo on the papal encyclicals on labor. My liberalism and my growing social consciousness merged and I started reading Marx and Huberman on my own, to find out what we were fighting for. There were a couple of professors like Elmer Ordoñez and SV Epistola who according to Bill Pomeroy had already reached that level of consciousness, but when he left they became liberals, they weren’t really organized.” (To be continued)

(Photograph by Rick Rocamora, used with permission)

Qwertyman No. 115: Why I Teach

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 14, 2024

LAST OCTOBER 5, we marked World Teachers Day—not one of our most popular or noisiest holidays (it isn’t even an official one), but one that gives us pause to remember some of the most important people in our young lives. I taught for 35 years before I retired in 2019, and I still teach one writing subject every semester as professor emeritus, so I suppose I wanted to be that “VIP” in someone’s life. 

When we teach writing—and not even creative writing, but composition—to freshmen, we take young people by the hand and help them make sense out of their lives and their ideas, such as they are. The term “composition” applies as much to the writer as to the text: one composes oneself, drawing out the essentials and leaving out the dross. Creative writing pushes that process one step farther, by turning to the imagination instead of one’s limited experience for material and insight. 

The creative writing teacher’s task is not only to encourage but also to guide and to train that imagination, sparing the student from having to reinvent the wheel but affording him or her the thrill of self-discovery. 

It’s an inarguably fine and noble mission. On the other hand, and in economic terms, the teaching of creative writing is brutally inefficient. In a typical workshop class of 20 people, an instructor would be fortunate to find two or three with real talent—an aptitude for language, a maturity of insight, a stylistic flair. Among those, far fewer will have the discipline and perseverance to write and write well for life.

So why should we even persist, or expend public funds to produce boatloads of people who will probably never write the kind of line you will mumble in your half-sleep, or will cry out to the heavens in your most painful or most euphoric moment?

For one, because producing good creative writers is like mining for precious stones, where a ton of ore might have to be torn out of the earth and sifted through to produce one small jewel-grade rock, which has yet to be cut and shaped by expert hands. 

We must also persist in teaching creative writing because the production of new literature reinvigorates and replenishes our imagination as a people, our imagination of ourselves. It is that imagination, however dark, that gives us hope and makes reality endurable. The truth of numbers—of GDP and ROI and per capita income and population growth rates—is important (I’ve often remarked what a terribly innumerate society we are); but it is a limited and even sometimes deceptive truth that barely begins to tell our story. History does this, but without much latitude for pure conjecture. As in painting and the other arts, creative writers have often simply done, and done first, what critics and theorists would later describe and systematize. Creative writing is a breath of intuition caught on paper.

But I also teach creative writing in the conviction that every student—no matter the person’s background—has at least one good story to tell, and that it is our task as teachers to release that story. Most of my students may come to my classes merely to pass the time, or fulfill a requirement, or satisfy a craving for some critical attention; many may never write another story in their lives. But I want them to come out appreciating and respecting the liberative and ameliorative power of art—which is a fancy way of saying that, for those of us who will never be mistaken on the street for Brad Pitt or Superman, here we can be and do anything, for as long as we make artistic sense.

As K. Patricia Cross, professor emerita of higher education at Berkeley, reminds us, “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

Anyone can write anything, but not everyone can be a writer. By the same token, not every writer can be a teacher. People who have no problems stringing seamless paragraphs of compound-complex sentences can’t give a lecture or an exercise worth an ATM receipt. It takes a different sensibility—and, yes, another set of talents (or what I call a whole bunch of P’s—preparation, perseverance, patience, and passion)—to teach well and to endure in the classroom.

I feel passionate about teaching in UP and in this country, and in giving back to them, through my students, what they have given me. But teaching is not a word I often say in the same breath as love. I cannot honestly say that I love teaching, in the sense of wanting to do it for most of my waking hours, or missing it terribly when I’m doing something else. Teaching is one of the most exhausting jobs you can get. The job doesn’t begin or end in the classroom; it just happens there.

Every time I step into a classroom, I pause at the doorway to expel a deep sigh and collect my thoughts, wondering if I have enough to sustain a 90-minute performance. As the American novelist Gail Godwin famously said, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.” Indeed I spend the last ten minutes before class writing a script in my head: I will say this; I will do this; I will bring these props and use them at some point; I will ignite an argument; I will leave them with a question that will buzz in their ears for a week. Even bad stories can be turned to great lessons; where’s the teaching point? How can I say it without crushing or diminishing the person? 

It doesn’t always work—sometimes I simply collapse into my chair and count away the minutes—but we all attempt some variation of this drill. Basically, we are saying: I will do my best to make this day worth their time and mine. It’s what they expect; it’s what I promised.

It is not love but duty that drives me to teach—although duty, perhaps, can also be a form of love; a love not of the thing itself but of some larger principle. That principle to me is service—service to country, people, university, and service to the great and truly free republic of the imagination.

“How do you know that what you’re doing matters?” I was asked once. “How can you tell if you’re making a difference?” My answer was, I don’t know, I can’t tell. But for a teacher, the only distinguished achievement that counts is the quality of one’s students. You are distinguished by their achievement, and in this sense, I have been distinguished aplenty.

Qwertyman No. 113: My Lessons from Martial Law

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 30, 2024

I WAS recently invited by a student organization at the University of the Philippines to speak to them about my martial-law experience, given that I had been a student activist in UP during what we called the First Quarter Storm, had been imprisoned, and had, against all odds, survived into a reasonably comfortable old age. It occurred to me, as I entered the SOLAIR building in Diliman where the event was going to be held, that I had last stepped into that place as a 17-year-old activist back in 1971 (that’s me in the picture, second from right, in that building). What had I learned since then? Here are some points I raised with my young audience:

1. We were always in the minority. Even at the height of student activism in UP and in other universities, those of us whom you might call truly militant or at least progressive were far smaller in numbers than the majority who dutifully went on with their studies and their lives and saw us as little more than a rowdy, noisy bunch of troublemakers. And the fact is, we were still in the minority in 2022, which is why Leni lost (yes, even in Barangay UP Campus). This bears emphasizing and thinking about, because sometimes we fall into the trap of believing that since we think we’re so right, surely others must think the same way. Which brings us to my next point.

2. We have to learn to communicate with other people with different views. The phrase “echo chamber” often came up in the last election, and with 2025 looming, it’s even more vital that we master modern propaganda as well as the other side does. This means sharper and more effective messaging. Enough of those two-page, single-spaced manifestoes written in the Marxist jargon of the 1970s and 1980s and ending with a string of slogans. Learn how to fight the meme war, how to navigate and employ Tiktok, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and all the arenas now open in digital space.

3. When talking about martial law, don’t just dwell on it as the horror movie that it was for some of us. True, many thousands of people were killed, tortured, raped, imprisoned, and harassed. True, the trauma of that experience has lasted a lifetime for those involved. But most Filipinos never went through that experience, adjusting quickly to the new authoritarianism; many even look back to that period with nostalgic longing. That’s proof of martial law’s more widespread and insidious damage—the capture of the passive mind, and its acceptance or denial of the massive scale of theft and State terror taking place behind the scenes. Martial law imprisoned our minds.

3. People change; you could, too. One pointed question I was asked at the forum was, “Why is it that some very prominent student activists turned their backs on the movement and went over to the dark side?” It’s true—many of the shrillest Red-taggers we’ve seen these past few years were reportedly once high-ranking Reds themselves. So why the 180-degree turn? Well, it’s perfectly human, I said, trying to be as kind as I could, despite being at the receiving end of some of that calumny. People can hardly be expected to stay the same after twenty or forty years. Even if many if not most of my generation of activists have remained steadfast in our quest of the truth, freedom, and justice, one’s definition of exactly what is true, free, and just can change. Some people change their stripes out of conviction; some others do it for the oldest of reasons—money and power, or sheer survival. I’m saddened but no longer surprised by brazen betrayal. I learned from martial-law prison that people have breaking points, and some thresholds are much lower than others. 

4. We have to admit we were wrong about some things. This will vary from person to person, and there’s a line that could even constitute the “betrayal” I mentioned above. Some fellow activists will probably disagree with me on one of these key points: armed struggle didn’t work, and it won’t, not in the Philippines nor anytime soon. However we feel about the subject, the fact is, one armed Filipino revolutionary force or other has been at it for more than 80 years now—“the world’s longest running insurgency” as it’s often been referred to—with little gain to show for it. I don’t mean to denigrate the noble and heroic sacrifice of the thousands who gave up their lives fighting what they believed was a brutal dictatorship—many were personal friends—but how many more lives will it take to prove the efficacy of revolutionary violence, one way or another?

5. That leads me to the last point I made to my young listeners: live, don’t die, for your country. We can and will die for it if we absolutely have to (especially us seniors who have little more to lose), but today’s youth have options we never did. In the 1970s, if you were young, idealistic, politically aware, and daring if not brave, you could not but conclude that something was terribly wrong with Philippine society, and that change was badly and urgently needed. You chose between reform and revolution—and it was only a matter of time before you became convinced that the latter was the only way forward. 

Agreed, the basic problems of Philippine society may not have changed much—but one’s ways and means of addressing them have. The growth of civil society—the proliferation of NGOs covering a broad range of causes and concerns—offers practical, focused, peaceful, and professional alternatives to young people seeking social and economic change. One need not embrace the burdens of the entire nation, only to feel inadequate or ineffectual; one can do much if not enough by improving the lives of families and communities. Beyond feeling sorry or guilty for those who fought and died as martyrs, do what you can as a living, intelligent, and capable citizen to create a better Filipino future to the best of your ability.

If this sounds like the voice of a tired old man, it is. I’m tired of death and despair; I choose to fight for life and hope.