Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

Posted on July 27, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 27, 2026

LATER TODAY, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be delivering his fifth—and second-to-the-last—State of the Nation Address (SONA). In anticipation of that event, I got invitations from several media networks last week to talk about how SONAs get made, and what I expected BBM to say today.

The invitations were likely prompted by someone’s discovery that I used to be a presidential speechwriter—a title that sounds grander than the job itself, which of course is a privilege in some respects (and presuming your principal isn’t a crook, perhaps more honored in the breach) but also in others a crushing chore.

As I must’ve noted in this corner at some point, in a past life, I wrote or drafted speeches for five presidents since my early twenties—for Marcos Sr., Cory Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—but it was FVR whom I served the longest, and frankly with the greatest satisfaction.

I wrote more than 600 speeches for him as part of a small crew of speechwriters that worked quietly off-site—the so-called West Avenue outfit headed by the late Johnny Gatbonton, my model and mentor in the craft. We operated all those years far from Malacañang—a deliberate choice, to isolate and insulate ourselves from Palace intrigue.

We produced tons of material on demand—there were days when I would write four speeches for occasions as diverse as a bridge inauguration, the Famas awards, a peace agreement signing, and a vin d’honneur, with little to go on—not even Google in those pre-Internet days—but my own wits. And yes, my training as a writer of fiction surely helped, along with a diploma in Development Economics that I picked up along the way. We learned quickly, and we delivered. (I never met FVR as a client when I was writing for him, although ironically, as I’ve related before, he was the guest speaker at the TOYM and Palanca awards when I was an awardee—and yes, bizarrely, I got assigned to write his speeches for those events. I never introduced myself to him as his speechwriter until we met again for a book interview shortly before he died. We had a good laugh then.)

The year’s biggest job, of course, was the SONA. Like I told my interviewers, at least in my experience, no single writer writes the SONA. It takes a bureaucratic barangay to produce one, which probably explains the chop-suey character of certain SONAs you’ve heard. Normally, presidential speeches are produced by the Presidential Management Staff, and the executive departments submit their list of accomplishments to the PMS for consolidation and construction into a SONA. (Under FVR, these inputs ended up with us, although of course the President literally always had the last word.) The President—or his or her chief advisers—might come up with a central theme or slogan, around which the rest of the address could be organized. In 1993, for example, it was “a level playing field” for FVR; ten years later, GMA trumpeted her “strong republic.”

My own sense of a good or ideal SONA is one that’s focused, clear, easy to understand, sincere, and above all hopeful and inspiring. It’s a tall order amidst uncertainty and despair, but it’s precisely when times are bad that people need to hear a message of hope—one they can believe in or at least hold the President to, despite their doubts and misgivings. But that’s just me, as a writer looking for stylistic coherence and a Churchillian sort of impact and memorability, rather than a laundry list of X number of bridges built and Y number of tourists brought in. Leave that to a technical appendix.

The fact is that SONAs are constitutionally mandated documents, a report of an administration’s accomplishments provided as a matter of public accountability. It began in America with George Washington and now continues as the State of the Union (SOTU). For over a century from Jefferson onward, the SOTU became just a written report submitted to Congress; Woodrow Wilson revived it as a speech, thinking that a president had to be seen and heard by the people. We Filipinos took up the practice—and also constitutionalized it—in 1935, with President Quezon focusing presciently on national defense. (Interestingly, he spoke before a unicameral assembly—no senators to complicate life then for a brief interlude.)

It used to be that no one seemed really that interested in SONAs. Even on January 26, 1970, when as a sixteener I marched with thousands of other students outside the Legislative Building to protest Ferdinand Marcos’ SONA and thereby unwittingly helped trigger the tumultuous First Quarter Storm, we neither knew nor cared what FM was saying inside. Today people watch SONAs for the fashion show and for the inevitable mayhem outside the Batasan.

But last year, BBM dropped a bomb at the SONA that I suspect even he didn’t realize was going to be that big. His “Mahiya naman kayo!” broadside against corruption set off a further and indeed continuing series of explosions, all the way to the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte, as well as a Kanagawa-sized wave of expectations that now hovers over the last two years of his administration.

So what will or should BBM talk about this afternoon? My short list:

1. An acknowledgment of the economic crisis our people are suffering, and an announcement of meaningful measures to bring some relief. Talk about horrendous power bills, jeepney drivers pulling 16-hour days, seniors collapsing at ayuda lines: this is reality for most Filipinos today.

2. An update on his professed campaign against corruption; what next after the ill-conceived and underpowered Independent Commission on Infrastructure? Corruption bridges economics and politics, with public money being used by and for political power. I doubt that BBM will directly address Sara’s impeachment—best for him to stay above it and let the prosecution do its job—but it remains a corruption and accountability issue, and should be taken in that context.

3. A resolve to pursue these priorities over his last two years. He won’t and can’t use the word “redemption”—a mountain of skepticism still stands in his way there—but I’m sure he’s aware that people are watching what he’ll do next. In the end, it won’t be speeches but deeds that will make the difference—but as he learned last year, a few words can make big things happen. If I were the President—which every presidential speechwriter has to fearlessly assume for a few hours—the best way to think of the next two years is to think of forever.

Qwertyman No. 207: Invicted

Posted on July 20, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 20, 2026

WHEN I teach speechwriting—like I’ll be doing again this semester as part of my course in Professional Writing—I tell my students to avoid using quotations from obscure philosophers, great writers like Shakespeare, and even the Bible if it’s highly unlikely that the speaker they’re writing for would have read them in his or her real life and understood what they were saying.

Few people are truly that learned—not that they have to be to render good public service—and the last thing you want to see and hear is your client squinting at and struggling with a sonorous phrase he or she never saw before. Especially if they’re politicians, I’d much rather that they poach “hugot” lines from pop culture that their listeners can relate to, with disarming and self-deprecating humor rather than malice aforethought.

A lot’s been said about VP Sara Duterte’s obvious reference to William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem “Invictus” at the abbreviated “press conference” she held on the second day of her impeachment trial at the Senate. “In this bloodbath and bludgeoning,” she intoned, “I will be bloodied but unbowed.” Lit-savvy netizens quickly jumped on “bloodied” being a misquote, the actual word in the verse being “bloody,” but in the context of her premise about being bludgeoned in a bloodbath (never mind how cheesy that alliteration sounds), “bloodied” makes better dramatic sense, positioning her as the unfortunate receiver of an injurious action, perhaps even more victim than victor.

I wouldn’t put it past VP Sara to have known the Henley poem, which many Filipinos of a certain age would have encountered at some point, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Indeed, it’s the very popularity of the poem—plus again that awful alliteration that’s the hallmark of a speechwriter reaching for cheap effect (also note: “bloodied” sounds ridiculously inevitable after “bloodbath,” yes?)—that accounts for its hokeyness.

Did a PR consultant put her up to it? (“Go in there, say these lines, then exit forthwith.”) We can’t say. But something tells me that’s the way VP Sara herself wanted it. The speech and the action were entirely in character with someone who sees and represents politics as theater, where broad gestures visible from across the room and the archipelago—the bullying of sheriffs, for example—matter. With the Dutertes, everything has to be punchy, dramatic, theatrical, staged. DENR giving you problems? Dump truckloads of trash right in front of their office. That’s the kind of gesture the DDS faithful lap up as creative, courageous, and even inspired.

So when Sara sneaks into the Senate (the lions’ den!) to give her little speech but quickly departs before she can even be called to the witness stand, let alone bludgeoned, we’re supposed to take that for both bravery and cunning—or at least her supporters are.

On February 18, 2026, when she declared her intention to run for the presidency, she used a series of statements ostensibly begging forgiveness for once having allied herself with her tormentor.

Mga kababayan, humihingi ako ng paumanhin sa inyong lahat. Patawad kung tinulungan kong mahalal si BBM bilang Pangulo ng ating bansa.

Patawad kung hanggang ngayon ay marami pa ring Pilipino ang nalulunod sa baha nang dahil sa malawakang korapsyon.

Patawad kung lantaran ang pang-aabuso sa ating mga institusyon para sa pansariling interes ng mga pulitiko.

Rhetorically, this usually works. She (or her speechwriter) is employing a device called anaphora, which repeats key words or phrases with incremental changes. It’s effective because it establishes a certain cadence, a regularity of structure that implies you’re in command of your material and know and mean what you’re talking about. The best-known example from modern history comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who declared in 1963 that “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up… I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin…”

Now, Sara Duterte is no MLK, but she was saying things her own people needed to hear. It wasn’t a speech to persuade BBM’s followers much less Kakampinks to seriously consider her as the better alternative. It was a speech to malign the enemy, a litany of grievances to justify her turnaround and to pass some moral ammunition for her troops to shoot with. Never mind that “malawakang korapsyon” and “pang-aabuso ng institusyon” are precisely the issues that have now landed her in impeachment court. As with Donald Trump, she’s learned that the best way to deal with political mud is to throw it right back at the accuser.

She has no problem working up her minions with these verbal broadsides. But beyond the home crowd, the problem with VP Sara is that she can’t seem to sustain an extended, rational, and unemotional argument. If I were her handler, I would worry that, on her own, she might prove incapable of discussing specifics, of fleshing out policy, of speaking beyond platitudes and generalities. You can imagine how she would respond to the cool but relentless questioning of an Atty. Ligutan or an Atty. Diokno. She would sputter and explode, and walk off the stand.

I’ve gone through her speeches on her OVP website, and they betray little of whatever originality she may be capable of. The major pieces—an education keynote in South Korea, for example—are competent, but pedestrian and undistinguished, patently outsourced. Her talks to grade-schoolers focus on the “4 Be’s”—“be kind, be humble, be happy, and be careful”—which is all well and good if you can inspire them by personal example.

It’s not that she’s unintelligent; her feral brain knows what it needs to do to survive.

In her mind she has already dismissed the Senate trial as a fruitless exercise. She’s confident she has the votes to be acquitted, and they can rail at her as much as they want and work themselves blind trying to prove her a crook, but in the end the votes will break her way, her misdeeds will be deemed expunged, and best of all, she will emerge triumphant—bloodied but unbowed—and even more powerful, which is all that will matter leading up to 2028.

That’s why she can afford to ignore whatever summons they send her way, and deprive her prosecutors and the public of the spectacle of her appearance at the witness stand. Her absence, heavy with mystery, is within her control. Her testimony, fraught with danger, will not be. That is cold calculation, intelligence of the hardest kind.

And that’s why she can’t give a damn what Lit profs like me say about her spouting “Invictus” in lieu of testifying—she’s boxed herself into that character, which makes her sound like she’s fighting when she’s not.

Penman No. 487: A Prize for AI?

Posted on July 12, 2026 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, July 12, 2026

LAST MAY, the literary world was rocked by the news that the winner of the Commonwealth Literary Prize—a short story titled “The Serpent in the Grove” by a little-known writer from Trinidad named Jamir Nazir—had been written using AI. Words like “fraud” and “hoax” flew out quickly into cyberspace. Probably suspecting something was off, someone had used an AI-detector app called Pangram to scan the piece, which returned an unequivocally damning judgment: “100% AI-generated.”

Along with other Commonwealth winners, the story had been published in the respected literary magazine Granta. Given the uproar, the Commonwealth Prize judges reviewed Nazir’s drafts, and pronounced the work authentic; Granta severed its ties with the foundation giving the prize, but has retained the story on its website anyway for all to see and evaluate.

And that’s exactly what I did—go the website and read the work for myself before coming to any conclusion of my own.

Now, it’s not as if literary hoaxes are anything new; it’s happened before, and it’s even happened here. Long before AI, plagiarism and outright invention (a crime in the case of nonfiction) were practiced not only by the lazy and untalented but also by the cunning. Among the most notorious cases in the US were those of James Frey, who fabricated large sections of his bestselling memoirs, and Janet Cooke, whose Pulitzer-prizewinning story for the Washington Post turned out to be based on an entirely fictional character. Here in the Philippines, a postal clerk named Jose Marco duped generations of Filipinos into believing that the Code of Kalantiaw and a novel by Fr. Jose Burgos titled La Loba Negra were the real thing.

The fraud in these cases was uncovered not by programs like Pangram or GPTZero but by dogged scholarship—in the case of Kalantiaw, through the work of the historian William Henry Scott, who showed that Marco’s “code” had words that weren’t in use until centuries later.

Even with software, proving literary deception today is a lot more difficult, because creative writing almost by definition is, well, deception of the highest order, extremely liberal in its methods and means, and devious (without being necessarily evil) in its motivations. Fiction especially is intrinsically ambiguous, unlike journalism which rests on fact. So how can anyone be sure that this prizewinner was faked?

“The Serpent in the Grove” is not a very long short story at less than 3,400 words, and the controversy aside, is certainly an interesting if not significant one in many ways: freshness of language, simplicity of plot but complexity of character, power of imagination. It talks of a man named Vishnu who, enamored of a vamp he meets at the bar, contrives to drown his wife Sita in a well; she falls into it but then manages to crawl out with a neighbor’s help. Sita and even their young son seem to understand exactly what has happened, but no one brings it up and they somehow manage to survive into old age keeping that terrible truth unspoken.

Some people have savaged the story after the scandal broke, in the way people change their minds instantly about someone after being told that person served time for rape or murder. Personally—and this could well be an unpopular opinion—I found it rich and engrossing, at least partly because of very same startling metaphors that got flagged as AI giveaways. It’s not an easy read, with its localized English, and I could see how Western readers attuned to the kind of language you hear at Walmart would find it painfully artificial (my friends in the Midwest found Nick Joaquin “too lush” when I had them read him). I don’t write that way myself, which is probably why it intrigues me even more. Here are some random excerpts:

“Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed. Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance.”

“Marsha lived two bends down. If the village had a mouth, it was hers. Big in the way of women who never apologize to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness. People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.”

“Sita lifted two planks and slid them aside. Wood complained in a voice too near speech. She lowered the pail until rope slackened. Smell rose—old wet, crushed jasmine, frog skin. On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep. The plank gave one long groan and swallowed its word. Stone, shoulder, hip; shock of cold tearing breath. One foot banged and screamed. The wall was slick as lizard. She clawed moss and slid. Water took her and would not return her.”

So what did the software flag? Unlikely metaphors, it said, like the vamp “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Or that a character “smiled like sunrise over a sink.” It noted that there were nearly a hundred metaphors in such a short piece. It claimed that in the sentence “Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all,” the phrase “rain in teeth” made no sense, was a hallucination.

But at this point, my own gut was telling me to trust Pangram less than the author. Call me dumb, but I find “rain in teeth” rather fetching. Any first-time workshopper would get that.

So would I have given the story a prize? That would depend on its competitors, which I haven’t seen, but it’s surely a story I would teach, both for its own merits and for its alleged employment of AI. I might even do that this incoming semester, when, for the first time in many years and possibly the last, I’ll be teaching an undergraduate class in Professional Writing. It’s a course I designed and had been teaching for two decades, but the big difference this time is that we’ll be dealing with AI—which is something that I don’t intend to ban outright (like Canute commanding the waves) but to grapple with head-on, negotiating the line between one’s imagination and what AI might do. I can foresee how controversial this will be, and I recognize the adamant opposition to AI from many writers and artists on both aesthetic and ethical grounds, but at 72, this could be my last look over the horizon. (I’ve already declared that I will no longer judge literary contests nor take part in literary workshops except in my own classes, so this will be my arena for engaging with AI.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future (and if it hasn’t happened already), some smartass with an ax to grind enters a wholly AI-generated story or poem into the Palancas, only so that when trusting judges make it win, he or she can declare them and the entire literary Establishment (yes, that cabal of superannuated gatekeepers who keep ignoring one’s literary genius) a bunch of fools.

Right now, what I’m thinking is, if you can come up with the kind of prompt that produces “The Serpent in the Grove,” then you deserve a prize—maybe not the Commonwealth one, which is still an open question, but at least one for inventiveness and audacity which seem to remain in short supply in what I’ve been reading, with or without AI.

Penman No. 486: The Ghosts of Our Fathers

Posted on June 21, 2026 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, June 21, 2026

TALKING ABOUT how memory softens loss in Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

As I’ve discovered from my friends and from people I know, father-son relationships are often fraught with conflict and tension, especially from those childhood and growing-up years when emotions are raw and expectations run high. There’s a host of theories to explain the problem—Oedipal competition, the emotional detachment of fathers, bars set too high, among others—but whatever causes the pain, it tends to linger, until we learn to relinquish our grievances to time and age.

I’ve been more fortunate in my experience, but I’ve asked three writer-friends to share theirs, and to embrace the ghosts of our fathers that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Butch Dalisay

I’ve often written about my dad, Jose Sr., whom I grew up idolizing not just because he was intelligent, but also because he was very resourceful or maabilidad, as they say. He was well known in Romblon to have been the province’s smartest young man at that time. And he would have gone on to a law degree and a distinguished career by everyone’s reckoning, except that his family was poor. And while my mother was someone who came from a family of means in Romblon, shortly after they married and had me, the first of their five children, the family fell on hard times when he lost his job.

He worked for the Motor Vehicles Office. He worked for the Department of Public Works and Transportation as a clerk, but there were very difficult periods when my father took on jobs far beneath his competence. He did not think it beneath him to work, for example, as a barker for jeepneys just to put me and my siblings through school with the help of my mom, who was a postal employee.

I hero-worship him despite the fact that he was deeply flawed. He was a gambler, which probably explains why I’m an avid poker player to this day. I could remember the smell of the pancit that would announce a night of winnings, but more often than not, he would come home quiet early in the morning, and I kind of understood what had happened. Once he brought home a brand-new Singer typewriter to encourage the young writer in me, only to have it vanish when he couldn’t keep up with the installments.

It was my father who introduced me to reading and writing. He was an excellent writer himself, and the governor of Romblon relied on him to write his speeches and to become a kind of secretary and recorder for this and that. It was a role that he would play all throughout his life, even in his old age, as a barangay official, someone who would help people in our village in San Mateo with their paperwork. He introduced me to reading because there were many things to read in the house, Time magazine and Reader’s Digest, and soon books.

He was a gentle, loving man who adored my mom Emy and took good care of us in ways more than money could. My wife Beng and our daughter Demi cherished him. When he died of an aneurysm at age 73 in 1996, I was crushed, and I treasure the times when we meet in my dreams, walking on the shore of our hometown in Romblon.

I owe him the gift of words, which I am now passing on to others.

Krip Yuson

Armando Sison Yuson came from Lingayen, Pangasinan. He tried to be an Air Force pilot before World War 2, but cut out at some point. His father wrote poems in Spanish and Pangasinense, as I’ve been told by writer-friends from the region.

I can’t really share much or anything else about my dad, except that we had a falling out when I was 16, after he became too religious and wanted everyone in the family to pray the rosary every day to start the evening. I couldn’t do it after the first few days, and said so. Nothing he said could change my mind. It broke his heart, and he blamed everyone, including himself, for allowing his firstborn to enter UP after graduation from San Beda, proving his fears right that I had joined an atheist university. My doubts about faith actually began a year earlier, and were resolved when I read Robert Green Ingersoll at the UP library: “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

My dad (called him that because he was an Amboy) and I never became close again. As an early barkadista, I spent more time away from home. He passed away when I was 32. I tried writing a poem on him for almost a year, but gave it up. The following year, 1978, I was on my first week at the International Writing Program in Iowa City when I felt his presence in my Mayflower Apartments room as I was turning in. I recall saying out loud, “Dad, must you follow me here?”

I couldn’t sleep. A poem started in my head, a triplet of a stanza, immediately followed by another, and another. Before my memory could give out on more lines, I got up and started pounding away on my typewriter. The lines followed until I completed the poem. My first experience of automatic writing. When I checked the page in the morning, I decided there was nothing I had to revise. It became one of my most favorite and most anthologized poems. Here it is, written in 1978.

Father (from Sea Serpent, 1980)

Must everything begin and end

with tension, as with father and son,

the memory of games and sins between?

In the hospital I watched your heart

tighten its flutter across a screen, a moth

blipping from breath to breath

and finally arriving at a pinpoint

of dark, the last light a feint

that threw me off your sorry hint.

Entering your deathroom I came

upon a sad peace, bent toward time

And kissed you; you were him.

Pressed your hand and in a wild

appeal to chance thumped a child’s

blow upon your chest, a field

I wanted to revive and roam

upon some more, though the dusk of the dream

hurried me along toward half a home.

Sarge Lacuesta

My father, Amado Lacuesta, Jr. quit his high-profile job at one of the country’s pioneering investment banks to become a full-time screenwriter. I don’t know if it mattered that there were four of us kids and that I was just entering high school. But because of his life decision he showed me a life that was so rare and so special that I
felt privileged to be a part of it. I would tag along to his tapings, his shoots, and his brainstorming sessions as his semi-official sidekick. Never mind that it was a school night or that the discussion—or worse, the proceedings—were not really appropriate for
someone my age.

It’s been almost 30 years since he died of a heart attack at the age of 49. I was 26—so long ago that I don’t really remember many details of him anymore. That’s more years without him than with him, so that is fair. I am also older now than he ever would have been, and there’s a lot of disconnect between who I am now and the son that I was.

But what has rubbed off on me during our years of father-and-sonhood has stayed, for better or for worse. I am overly critical of others and blind to my own faults like he was. I remember him critiquing a writing exercise I performed for him when I was ten or eleven years old, mainly by laughing at my cliches and tired turns of phrase. I am as idealistic and often as detached from reality as he was. At EDSA, he used his own car—the only car we had—to physically block the path of the tanks that were rumored to roll into White Plains Avenue.

Now I am my own father, in every sense of the phrase: I’ve lost a large part of him, but a large part of him I can’t help but carry around.

Charlson Ong

My father Conrado was a rather laidback fellow whom I think would have been more successful in another time and place. As a second-generation Chinoy born and raised in Binondo, he ended up as a business person—and, in my recollection, a rather reluctant one. He was always too trusting of friends and spent on not a few turkeys, like real estate that disappeared after landslides and high tides. I always thought his passion lay elsewhere.

In hindsight he passed on some opportunities that might have led to bigger prospects but I guess he was never the sort who ‘bore into the money hole’ as the Chinese would have it. He perhaps never had the drive or risk taking personality, content to raise a comfortable middle class family—we were three kids, I was the youngest—with vital help from our mother. There never much issue between us, as I was youngest and when I was born in 1960, my parents were more or less settled. I know he worried for me because of my interests but never interfered with my life choices, I feel he regretted not being able to leave behind enough for me to engage my whims without having to worry about livelihood.

He loved cars and, I’d like to think, singing. He was a very good baritone who took lessons in his younger years with an operatic singer. But he had difficulty with the Italian and French lyrics and eventually gave it up. But some Sundays he would sing Chinese ditties while our mom, a piano major, accompanied. In long drives—before the time of car stereos , cartridges, cassettes, Spotify—during the 1970s and ‘80s, he would sing to himself just to stay wake driving while I pretended to sleep. But the songs embedded themselves into my psyche—romantic ditties of the 1950s and art songs of the 1930s while China waged its war of resistance against Japan and warlords. Whenever requested to sing Chinese songs, I draw on this repertoire of oldies.

He had an innate heart condition we now refer to as “athletes’ heart.” He had a health crisis as a younger man in his 30s but once it passed gave he gave in to his epicurean instincts and a two-pack-a-day smoking habit. By the 1980s he had his first heart attack but there was nothing much the technology of the time could realistically do.

In October 1987 he had his second attack. I was scheduled then for my first trip to China for the premiere of Eddie Romero’s Hari sa Hari—a co-production between the Philippines and China about the Sultan of Sulu and his embassy to the Ming emperor.

I thought my chance to go to China had passed, but my father recovered briefly and sent me on my way—I always felt he wanted me to experience the old country. But shortly after I left he suffered his third attack. This was before the the Internet, so for the week that I was in China I was blissfully unaware that he was fighting for his life.

When I returned, I had to rush to the hospital and upon arriving, I found out he had just passed away. He was 57. I did not witness his final days, but the lore remains that while he was in and out of lucidity, he had some clear moments, and when our plane landed in Manila he was supposed to have uttered—his tongue had receded by then—that ‘They have alit, my youngest is home.’ Until this day I can never recount that tale without tearing up and I was able to mourn him only through some of my later fiction. Still whenever I am bamboozled to sing, willingly or otherwise, I know that his voice is there.

Penman No. 485: Forever Young—in Yearbooks

Posted on May 3, 2026 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, May 3, 2026

THERE’S SOMETHING terribly sad and yet also strangely soothing about thumbing through the pages of college and high school yearbooks from decades past. As a diehard UP alum and collector of UP memorabilia, I’ve accumulated a stack of yearbooks from the University of the Philippines called the Philippinensian (a name likely inspired by that from one of UP’s formative models, the University of Michigan’s Michiganensian).

Going through them inevitably fills me with what I know to be a naïve longing for seemingly simpler times; the past gets rosier the farther we move away from it. But these images, imbued with innocence, still offer relief from today’s sordid realities. When I look at the youthful visages of such figures as Juan Ponce Enrile and Jose Ma. Sison, I am reminded that we had choices, and that, while indicative, college could be too soon to plot the full trajectory of our lives. Yearbooks are also, of course, an intellectual and social history of the university itself, balancing the frilly fun of a Cadena de Amor with the sonorous seriousness of editorial commentary.

The first issue of the Philippinensian came out in 1915, seven years after UP opened in 1908—occasioned, argued its editors, by the realization that “There has heretofore been little consolidation of interests on the part of students of the University and the so-called University spirit, which should be stronger here because of the maturer quality of the students enrolled, was subordinated to the college spirit.” (I was fortunate to find a copy of this maiden volume, once owned and signed by Guillermo Tolentino.)

In 1928, the Philippinensian apparently assumed the name of UP Alpha. If you studied then at the College of Liberal Arts your professors would have been people like Maximo Kalaw, Conrado Benitez, H. Otley Beyer, Vidal Tan, Carlos P. Romulo, Maria Agoncillo, Paz Marquez Benitez, Manuel Bernabe, Jose P. Laurel, Marcial Lichauco, Mauro and Mendez, and Pura Santillan. The college’s editorialist expressed the tenuous hope that education would resolve the class struggle: “Far out in the villages away from cities reign ignorance, selfishness, suspicion, all things that a life of isolation and narrow-mindedness afford. We recognize the need for light in those nooks, that light which will add strength of vision to the eyes of the unlearned, which will make them see the invisible ties that unite hearts the world over. We are aware of the selfish exploitation of the poor by those who have greater cunning, and higher intelligence; but we believe that the broadening of the sympathies of the latter and the opening of their closed, hard hearts will banish away all suspicion and hatred that rend souls asunder.”

A decade later, the 1938 Philippinensian opened with a dedication to that year’s commencement speaker, Field Marshal Douglas A. MacArthur, followed by postcard-worthy shots of UP’s Manila campus, carefully curated to show off its best facets. The staging creates ironic if not tragic overtones, especially when taken with the photographs at book’s end of UP’s cadets in smart formation, many of whom would march into the maw of war in a few years. Padre Faura itself would be bombed to ruins, albeit with the Oblation statue still standing defiantly.

After the war, with school having been closed for a while and the whereabouts of hundreds of students and graduates unknown, the Philippinensian resumed in 1946 under the temporary banner of the UP Phoenix 1942-1946, to cover the lost years. The yearbook staff could only note that “Some letters [of invitation to the yearbook] were received postmarked ‘return to sender’ for various reasons: “addressee unknown,” “no such address,” “moved.” In many cases, the addresses were among those burned or shelled during the war. In a few cases, the graduates were already dead. But so long as there was a clue, no matter how unreliable, the staff did not fail to track it down, sending letters, again and again, to the same person, at different addresses.”

Among those who fortunately responded were Narita Manuel of San Andres, Manila, BSE 1942 (soon to marry a writer named NVM Gonzalez); Damiana Ligon Eugenio of Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, BSE 1942, cum laude(long before assuming the deanship of Philippine folkloric studies); and Renato Constantino of Manila, PhB 1946, cum laude, then already working for the Malacañang PR Office. (There were no privacy issues then, and one’s full address could be published at will.)

The closer we get to the present, the more familiar the names become, although their juvenile faces always come as a surprise. My mother Emy—who turns 98 next Sunday—was among those who first made the move from Padre Faura to Diliman. She appears as Emilia A. Yap, BSE, from Guinbirayan, Sta. Fe, Romblon, in the 1953 Philippinensian, a volume in which also appear such luminaries as Rafael M. Salas, Rony V. Diaz, Amelia Lapeña, Andrez Cristobal Cruz, Jose T. Joya, and Napoleon V. Abueva. For many alums, the ‘50s were UP’s golden age, and the yearbook reflects that; with the war over, it could claim that “The UP spirit is of beauty…. The tradition of looking for beauty everywhere, even where none is supposed to exist, is born… to temper an otherwise skeptical, cynical mind.”

But by the end of that decade, on the cusp of the ‘60s, and in the midst of the great debates between secular liberals and sectarian conservatives on campus, UP had to be ever reminded of its unique position as social critic. Introducing the 1958 Philippinensian marking UP’s golden jubilee, E. San Juan intoned that “Ours is an age of rebellion…. Man of the twentieth century… strives for a blessedness yet unbestowed, the blessedness incarnated in him as rebel-artist.” Petronilo Bn. Daroy would warn the following year that “It is at this point that we begin to see the estrangement of the university from the mainsprings of life, from the fact of the national reality. With politics controlling the focus and acting as guidepost from which the university must stand to gain its angle of vision, the reality that is revealed for inspection is necessarily fragmented and false.”

UP’s vibrant social and cultural life continued, with the fraternities and sororities leading the way. The yearbooks lauded the smartest and the prettiest. But the dark clouds were gathering, and the mood was shifting. Writing in the 1966 Philippinensian, Temario C. Rivera began his essay with a stinging line: “Frivolity has always been the most vicious stigma of youth.” But, he concludes, invoking protests around the world, “The youth have finally come of age.”

In a few more years, the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune would erupt, and the last Philippinensian would come out in 1971; the last Cadena de Amor had taken place in 1968. Many of those street warriors, myself included, would live on to their seventies and eighties, brandishing canes and hostage to metformin.

But in these yearbook pages, full of faces brimming with hope and idealism, we remain forever young and forever free.

Qwertyman No. 190: Beyond Survival

Posted on March 23, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, March 23, 2026

PARDON ME for this rambling piece this week, which I’m writing in a stupor, blindsided by the sudden, heartbreaking loss of a friend. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this state of disorientation, of looking for a center or an anchor to stabilize at least our view of the horizon. Every day we come across so many deaths on Facebook, amid hundreds of faceless thousands more around the world—much too many to mourn, even counting just your friends.

It’s been a tough time for many, with a war halfway across the planet casting a dark red shadow on us and our pedestrian lives, far out of sight and out of mind of Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran, but ever vulnerable to the subterranean tremors of politics and economics snaking around the globe.

A viral post tried to make the best of that by reminding us that at least we’re not dodging missiles. That’s true, but it doesn’t remove the cloud of fear and uncertainty we’re living under—not to mention the pain of brutal price increases, which is what Donald Trump’s war comes down to for 98 percent of the world.

I’ve heard many friends and even strangers saying that despite all the aggravations we face today as Filipinos—the corruption, the inefficiency, the pollution, the noise both physical and political—they’re relieved to be where they are, instead of being somewhere out there under constant threat of death falling out of the sky. I’ll admit to feeling the same way, and that I even feel safer to be here today than in America, which I have no intention of revisiting until after the Trumpian nightmare is over.

No, this isn’t another piece about “resiliency,” although there’s certainly that, at least as a way of putting a good face on a bad experience. Rather I’m thinking about how we survive at all, beyond meeting economic needs, about prevailing meaningfully as humans with purpose and dignity and even hope in this horribly oppressive and degrading environment.

The fact is, people learn to adjust soon enough to adversity and privation, excepting such extremes as Stalingrad and Gaza, where sheer survival may have been heroic enough.

Nick Joaquin recalls in Manila, My Manila how quickly the city’s inhabitants fell back on their old routines after the first bombs exploded and the Japanese marched in. The shows reopened, the restaurants thrived, pedestrians bowed to the sentries, and life continued. Certainly there was terror and suffering aplenty, but until famine hit them, followed yet later by the horrors of the Japanese withdrawal, many Manileños apparently coped with the war.

Even closer to the present, we seniors well know what it was like in the early years of martial law, when, as if domestic turmoil weren’t enough, we were hit by a global oil crisis triggered by another Mideast war. The buzzwords then were “austerity,” “alcogas” and “Asiong Aksaya.” We mixed corn with our rice. We complained, we resisted, we struggled, we suffered—but we survived.

I have to remember these when I think of how confused and depressing the present can be, and how pointless it may seem to persevere, especially when we turn on the news or go online. We seem surrounded by hostility and indifference, by death and sorrow—and yet, just as insistently, goodness, creativity, and courage abide, our handmaidens and henchmen, the torchbearers of our humanity.

Last week, on one particularly busy day, my wife Beng and I attended two consecutive book launches.

The first, in Makati, was by our friend Erlinda Panlilio, who had been my student in a graduate writing class more than twenty years ago. Linda was among several women enrolled in Creative Nonfiction—all of them already accomplished in their respective fields—who thought that the time had come to gather and preserve the wealth of their memories in a book. I was less their teacher than their enabler, and many if not most of them subsequently published outstanding memoirs that looked back on lives well lived—not just in privilege as you might expect but in struggle, whether in business, love, conflict, or self-fulfillment.

Aside from many other compilations she’s edited, this was Linda’s third book (and she claims her last as she is now in her eighties, although no one believes her). The book, Saying Goodbye to the House, comes across as a valedictory, a summing-up of a long and fruitful life. At the launch, I said that it was important for senior voices like Linda’s to be heard in today’s frenetic, youth-oriented culture, which barely leaves time to pause, reflect, and rejoice as Linda does.

And then we moved back to Quezon City, where the young Cedric Tan was launching his second novel for young adults, a fantasy titled The Hotel Titania, in which a girl steps into a hotel that turns out to be full of magical beings. You could not imagine a sharper contrast with Linda Panlilio’s domestically grounded universe (which, being Filipino, has its touches of wonder as well). Cedric not only wrote a fantasy; by giving up his job to go full-time into writing, he’s living it, exploring territory at once exciting and fraught with danger.

Stepping into the car homebound after a day full of books and stories, Beng and I felt exhilarated, our confidence in the tenacity and the infinite variety of the human imagination restored. Against dismal reality, our memory and our curiosity would save us.

And then, as I was scrolling on my phone, came the stunning and crushing news that our friend, the veteran journalist and essayist Joel Pablo Salud, had succumbed to a heart attack. A recently professed Christian, Joel had fought hard for truth and justice, and he died a man of faith who knew where he was bound. Even among hard-bitten writers used to seeing the worst of things, the passing of someone so passionate about his craft, his convictions, and his family produced profound grief and consternation. Again we had to ask: why does God take the dearest of his creatures? Why does he bring so much suffering to the world?

And I think Joel knew the answer: so we could assert our humanity while we could, and among the best ways to do that is to employ our talents against surrender and despair. Every book we write does that. We seek survival not just to eat and breathe—but to love, to sing, to endure, to yet become.

Qwertyman No. 187: No Better Time for Philippine Publishing

Posted on March 2, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, March 2, 2026

I WAS asked by the National Book Development Board to give brief remarks last week at the media launch of this year’s Philippine Book Fair, which will take place from March 12 to 15 at the SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall. I spoke alongside publishing stalwart Atty. Dominador Buhain of Rex Book Store, who laid out a legislative road map for the book industry in the Philippines.

For my part, I addressed myself to the young Filipino writer, speaking as a senior often accused of being a capo in our so-called “literary Mafia”—my tongue-in-cheek acceptance of which has been taken in dead seriousness by some parties intent on proving that a conspiracy exists out there to rob of them of their literary fame and fortune.

It was a happy coincidence that we were launching the PBF on the 40^th anniversary of EDSA 1, because it provided a natural frame within which to appreciate the growth and progress of Philippine writing and publishing, from martial law to where we are today.

Forty years ago, in 1986, I had exactly one book, my first collection of stories. Today I can count more than 45, both fiction and nonfiction, so I guess I’ve been pretty busy (in fact I have another book deadline to meet over the weekend, after I turn in this column). But what many people don’t know is that it took me about a decade to come up with that first book, which was launched in December 1984, and I might have waited longer had it not been for a bet I had made with a dear friend, the late playwright Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega, that we would both come out with our first books by our 30^th year (we did).

Having dropped out of college as a student activist after my freshman year, I had very little literary training beyond my own reading. I knew no one and no one knew me; no literary network, no doting mentor or sponsor. I sent out stories to the very few publications open under martial law, like Focus and the Manila Review. I joined all the literary competitions in sight, and lost as many times as I won. I never attended the UP Writers Workshop as a fellow, although I did get invited to the Silliman Writers Workshop in 1981 after the Tiempos came across a published story of mine, after which I felt fired up enough to resume my studies in UP and graduate with my AB in 1984 at age 30.

My biggest stroke of luck was having a friend from martial-law prison, Raffy Benitez (who would found the Erehwon Arts Center), who ran a small printing press in Quezon City, and who offered to publish my first book from the scrap paper left over at his press. And so Oldtimer and Other Stories (Asphodel Books, 1984) was born. We had no marketing, no bookstore access. Somehow, the books got sold.

I told this story—which wasn’t mine alone, but my generation’s—to emphasize that there has never been a better time for Philippine writing and publishing than the present. The PBF, now on its fourth year, is the best proof that hundreds of publishers exist out there for all manner of material, from ghost stories, romances, and comic books to big novels, biographies, and collections of essays. Add to that the support network that writers get from writers’ workshops, writing programs, book festivals like the PBF and Frankfurt, literary contests, and of course social media, print-on-demand, and online marketing.

What every writer needs to do to get published is what all writers have done from the very beginning: persevere, get those words on the page, and find a publisher (who will also hopefully provide good editing and marketing).

There are, of course, writers who believe that “gatekeepers” like me (professors, editors, publishers, reviewers, etc.) merely stand in the way and spoil what should be a great literary experience accessible to everyone. To them I say that if you want complete control over your work and not have to engage in mainstream publishing, you can always publish yourself online, for free, without having to worry about contracts, royalties, launches, and such.

Otherwise, if you want your book published and put out there, do your homework, find a publisher or agent, and prepare to compromise and negotiate. At its core, publishing remains a business, which has both its good and bad aspects, so learn to navigate the territory, because for the professional writer, it doesn’t end with that final period on the screen—you’re just halfway to your reader. If you think this is too sordid for you, too much of a sellout, then stay away and again, publish yourself (or look for an academic publisher, if your book is worthy enough) and be happy with your reading circle Contrariness can be a virtue; just don’t preach like you’re the only virtuous soul left on the planet.

I may sound like another hard-hearted Boomer, but I won’t echo what one senator said about Gen Z’ers being “weak”; they just deal differently with their realities. Still, there are realities that cut across generations. No one in the world owes you a reading, a publishing contract, a positive review, a spot on the syllabus, and a fistful of money. The demands that matter most are those you make on yourself. Sure, as in any business, contacts and networks count in publishing—but only to a point; again as in any business, no publisher will invest in something too poorly conceived or executed to connect with an audience.

Just write, and don’t let yourself get too distracted by the politics of writing or even of everyday life. If you believe strongly enough, the politics will find its way into your poem or story in the best ways possible—organically, without the shrillness or snarkiness of those who can’t make themselves heard otherwise. If it resonates with others, it will find its way to publication. The usual critics will pile on me for this, but I think there’s too much noise, too much drama, too much flag-waving out there; indulge in it if you will, but I’m too old to care, and I’d rather hole up in my home office with a cup of coffee and peck away at my next novel than prove that I’m more, uhm, Polynesian than thou.

Write your heart out, but with craft and composure; write something moving and memorable, and get that book out with your name on the spine. Me, I’ll be at the PBF to sign books all day on March 15.

Penman No. 482: Love in Ink: The Lost Art of the Love Letter

Posted on February 8, 2026 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, February 8, 2026

HAVING NO idea how Gen Z people write love letters (and if they even do), I asked AI, and this is what it told me:

“Gen Z love letters are characterized by digital-native, emotionally fluent, and, often, casual expressions that prioritize vulnerability, mental health, and boundary-setting. They frequently use lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats, and ‘ily’ (informal) or ‘love ya’ to avoid excessive intensity. Common themes include a rejection of traditional, performative romance in favor of ‘soft launching’ relationships (gradually revealing a partner online) and a focus on authenticity over aesthetics.”

I have to confess that the answer left me feeling much relieved to be 72 years old and increasingly irrelevant. If I were young and seventeen today but with the mind and heart that I had back in 1971, I seriously doubt that I could make a significant connection to the Gen Z girl of my dreams, from whom I would have drawn derisive laughter for a long, convoluted, meandering letter asking for a first date (I will neither confirm nor deny that this actually happened). I may have lacked in “emotional fluency,” but certainly not for words, which were all I had when, in 1973, I met a pretty girl named Beng and pounded her with prose, in my crabbed, ungainly penmanship using a technical pen; within months we were married (and still are, 52 years later).

Time was when love needed to be declared in big, bold, wet letters—and I don’t mean letters as in ABC, but letters as in pages of paper filled with scribbled and impassioned professions of affection, sometimes of hurt, sometimes of longing, but always of desire for the addressee. Setting everything else aside, overtaken and overwhelmed by this most urgent need, a man or a woman sat at a desk—or kitchen table, or any hard surface on a beach or a moving vehicle—and put pen to paper to release a flood of pent-up emotion.

It all came down to the same three-word idea: “I love you” (sometimes, or more often, with a fourth word, “but”). As with love poems, some letters were better, more unique, more persuasive than others; most, in hindsight, were likely mawkish or mediocre. But rarely—except perhaps to writers keen on grammar and style—did literary merit matter, neither to sender nor receiver; the profession of love alone was monumental enough. Because it was handwritten and signed, it was personal and deliberate, a statement of commitment impossible to deny.

Indeed what was thought to be intimate and ephemeral sometimes became history. Little did lovers realize or perhaps care they would become famous, and that their private correspondence would become known—thankfully not to their peers but to posterity and the critical judgment of strangers.

In one of the books I treasure most in my library titled The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Correa de Lago Collection (Taschen, 2018), two envelopes offer proof of love affairs—illicit in this case, as all the parties concerned were married to someone else—between Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton, and between the revolutionary Leon Trotsky and artist Frida Kahlo (who had given the outcast Trotskys refuge in her home).

This was the same free-spirited Frida who would write her husband Diego Rivera that “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.” (To be fair to Frida, Diego was far more liberal with his vagrant attentions.)

In one of literary history’s worst-kept secrets, Vita Sackville-West would write to Virginia Woolf that “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia… I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality…. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”

Jose Rizal’s letters to Leonor Rivera were reportedly all burned, but as Ambeth Ocampo notes, two of her letters to Rizal survive, in which she uses the pseudonym “Taimis” and tells him that “I was very much surprised that you had a letter for Papa and none for me; but at first when they told me about it I did not believe it, because he did not expect that a person like you would do such a thing. But later I was convinced that you are like a newly opened rose, very flushed and fragrant at the beginning, but afterwards it begins to wither…. Truly I tell you that I’m very resentful for what you have done and for another thing that I’ll tell you later when you come.” We know how that story ended, with the both of them going their separate ways and marrying another, although Leonor was said to have pined for Pepe to the end.

Again thanks to Ambeth, I can quote Manuel L. Quezon’s 1937 letter to his wife Doña Aurora, where he engages in what today might be called “gaslighting”:

“Darling, I am still wondering if you really think that I love you less. Please don’t doubt me, my love has never changed from the first day I have realized that I was in love with you. I have my weakness as you know, but, dear, it’s all superficial and you know also, that, except for the case of that bailarina, my weaknesses in this respect have not been serious. When you married me, you were frankly informed by me of my shortcomings. I did not want to deceive you by promising something that I could not fulfill. After we have been married you have placed [me], sometimes, in a position when I thought that it was better that I should not confess to you what I had done that might hurt your feelings, but I want you to know that whenever such a thing took place I have felt very bad about it, because nothing I dislike more than not to tell the truth and I always resented the fact that you should prefer to put me in such a situation, thus making me almost hate myself.”

That would still have been more preferable than receiving this ardent letter from a king, and falling for him: “But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only…. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart. No more, for fear of tiring you.” The recipient, Anne Boleyn, lost her head in more ways than one, and the sender, Henry VIII, went on to court her successor, Jane Seymour, who wisely returned his love letter unopened—sparking his interest in her even more intensely.

The letter I found too coarse and too embarrassing (brimming with scatological detail) to even quote was written by James Joyce to his wife Nora, but the technologically adept will surely find it online.

My own letters to Beng, and hers to me, are stored in a moldering box that occasionally gets lost and then resurfaces in a year or two, and when we go over them we laugh and cringe at their melodramatic prolixity, as though life itself would run out soon (as it did for many of our generation, under the cloud of martial law, and thus the urgency).

So how do the love letters that we—perhaps the last of the art’s practitioners—have written stack up against history’s and literature’s most memorable? But first, who are “we?”

The immediate “we” are members of our Fountain Pen Network-Philippines who still value and use pens for handwritten communication, beyond signing checks and office forms. Old fogeys like me naturally fall into that category, but surprisingly, given the fountain pen’s and handwriting’s resurgence as a form of protest, if you will, against digital homogenization, many younger people, even some Gen Z’ers, have taken up the cause. Ballpoints are all right—but there’s still nothing better than a vintage fountain pen nib, which flexes with pressure and gives the inked line more character, to convey emotion.

From what I’ve gathered, the best love letters people write go far beyond the often vapid promises and profuse assertions of courtship. They’re unbidden reminders and reassurances of affection, a note quietly written in the morning, a message of congratulations. This, too, is love with a deeper, more hushed voice that comes with maturity and assurance.

I should take my own advice and write Beng more love letters with my hundreds of pens, every single act of which would validate that pen’s existence and probably exorbitant purchase price. I should employ all the colors of ink stored in the dozen bottles that crowd my desk to express love in all its shades and moods, in the same spirit that Robert Graves wrote: “As green commands the variables of green, so love my loves of you.”

But sadly this old man’s fingers have become cramped from being curled too long over keyboards, and can barely finish a page of handwriting before tiring. So instead—though not quite a Gen Z’er accustomed to “lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats”—I write articles like this and stories on Facebook that suggest, ever so obliquely, how central she remains to my life, albeit in Georgia 12 points and .DOCX rather than flowing script. My idle pens, dear Beng, are like the books I’ve yet to write for you, the words still forming in the opaque ink, like the colorful and wide umbrellas I keep buying to shield you with, waiting for rain. So there, and Happy Valentine’s.

Qwertyman No. 173: A Page from 1937

Posted on November 24, 2025 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, November 24, 2025

I”M NOT a historian, although there are times I wish I were, and at an early crossroads in my youth, I actually had to choose between Literature and History for my major, settling for the former only because I thought I could finish it faster. But I’ve retained a lifelong interest in history, for the treasure trove of stories to be found in the past and for what those stories might foretell of the future.

I’m particularly fascinated by the prewar period—what Filipinos of the midcentury looked back on as “peacetime” and what Carmen Guerrero Nakpil called our “fifty years in Hollywood,” which were enough to occlude much of the influence of our “three hundred fifty years in a convent” under the Spanish. It was an age of many transitions, from the jota to jazz, from the caruaje to the Chevrolet, from tradition to that liberative and all-embracing buzzword, the “modern.” Much of that went up in smoke during the Second World War, but you can still catch the ghost of this lost world on the Escolta, among other vestiges of our love-hate affair with America. (You might want to visit the Art Deco exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts, ongoing until May 2026; I have some items on display there.)

So entranced have I been by this time that I decided, during the pandemic, to set my third novel in it, at the birth of the Commonwealth and upon Quezon’s assumption of ultimate power, an upstairs-downstairs narrative about the comprador upper class and the world of the Manila Carnival set against the embers of the Sakdal uprising, the fuming and scheming Aguinaldistas, and the netherworld of printing-press Marxists and tranvia pickpockets. Progress has been slow because novels always take the back seat to life’s more pressing needs, but I still hope to get this done if it’s the last thing I do.

The research for the book, however, has brought its own rewards. Among my main sources for the background has been a slim volume—long out of print and now very hard to find—titled The Radical Left on the Eve of War: A Political Memoir by James S. Allen (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985). Allen (actually a pseudonym for Sol Auerbach) was an American scholar and journalist, an avowed Marxist who traveled to the Philippines in 1936 and 1938 with his wife Isabelle, also a member of the American Communist Party, to meet with local communists and socialists (then headed by Crisanto Evangelista and Pedro Abad Santos, respectively) and to get a sense of the Philippine situation under American rule.

Even that early, the threat of a Japanese invasion was already looming on the horizon and causing great anxiety in the Philippines; Japan had earlier occupied Manchuria and as much as a quarter of the entirety of China by 1937. It seemed like a confrontation between Japan and the United States was inevitable, although some Filipino nationalists—fiercely anti-American—preferred to ally themselves with their fellow Asians than with prolonged white rule. At the same time, others like Pedro Abad Santos feared that the independence Quezon sought would be granted prematurely to give the US an excuse to abandon the islands and avoid confronting the Japanese.

This is where I tell you why I’m bringing up James Allen’s memoirs this Monday—because of our present situation vis-à-vis China and (in one of history’s ironic reversals from victim to victimizer) its growing domination of the South China Sea. In Quezon, Filipinos had a leader who was deeply mistrusted and opposed by many; the United States’ willingness to defend the Philippines was in doubt; and the threat of a foreign invasion was clear and imminent.

Allen actually sat down with Quezon for a long interview at the latter’s invitation, and was impressed by the man’s grasp of politics and his singular ambition. But the article that came out of that encounter displeased MLQ; Allen, after all, was still a communist at heart, which makes the following quotation—from a letter Allen would compose and send to his American colleagues in October 1937—even more interesting. I’ll leave it to you to observe the parallels, and to cast them against the Marcos-Duterte issues of our time.

“Filipino Marxists and radicals need to relate independence from the United States to the world crisis created by fascism. The immediate concern in the struggle for an independent and democratic Philippines is to safeguard the country against the threat of Japanese aggression. The objectives of complete independence from the United States and the internal democratic transformation must be obtained without endangering such gains as have been made or subjecting the country to new masters. The people must be awakened to the prime and pressing danger to their national existence. The United States is moving toward alignment with the democratic powers against the fascist bloc, albeit slowly and indecisively.

“Roosevelt is shifting somewhat toward the Left of Center to keep pace with his mass support from the surging labor movement and anti-fascist and anti-war popular sentiment. The national interests of the Philippines call for vigilance and precautions against Japanese aggression. This coincides with the interests of the United States in the Pacific area, and it would be folly not to take full advantage of this concurrence. In the broader perspective, the outcome of the struggle in China will be crucial for all the peoples of the Far East, and if the United States were to withdraw from the Philippines this would be a serious blow against China and encouragement to Japan’s designs upon Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The cause of Philippine independence at this time can best be served by cooperation with the United States.

“The situation also requires a change in the attitude toward Quezon, from frontal attack to critical support. Unprincipled opposition for the sake of opposition-as with some leading participants in the Popular Alliance is dangerous, for it plays into the hand of pro-Japanese elements and sentiments. Quezon certainly is not an anti-fascist, but he is not intriguing behind the scenes with Japan. The greatest opposition to his early independence plan comes from the landed proprietors, particularly the sugar barons, while it enjoys support among the people. The Popular Alliance should also support the plan, including provisions for mutually satisfactory economic, military and diplomatic collaboration after independence. Though Quezon is far from being a Cardenas or Roosevelt in his domestic policies, every effort should be made to move him away from his pro-fascist and land baron support by providing him with mass backing for such pro-labor and progressive measures as are included in his social justice program. In sum, the Popular Alliance should encourage a national democratic front devoted to the preservation of peace in the Pacific, the safeguarding of Philippine independence, and defense and extension of democracy in the country.”

Penman No. 480: A Call to Serve (Untold Stories of Rosa Rosal)

Posted on November 24, 2025 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, November 23, 2025

IT WAS with great sadness and regret that I received the news of Rosa Rosal’s passing last week—sadness, because of what everyone who knew her and her work would have seen as the end of an extraordinary life of artistry and service; and regret, because I had completed her biography fifteen years ago, and it came this close to publication before being shelved, for reasons I can no longer remember. I think Rosa said she needed to look into it a bit more, but never came around to doing so, until the months became years, and we eventually lost touch.

The book had been commissioned by the Philippine Red Cross, the organization to which Rosa had devoted much of her life’s work away from the cameras. Having established herself as one of the country’s biggest movie stars—and not just a star, either, but a truly talented and accomplished actress—Rosa decided to put her celebrity to good use by aligning herself with the Red Cross, its blood donation drives, and other humanitarian efforts she pursued on her public-service programs.

It’s a pity the book (Rosa herself chose the title: A Call to Serve) never came out because Rosa’s life story was a stirring and remarkable one, centered on a woman vastly different from her onscreen persona and yet filled with such drama that it would be hard to believe as a movie. Her life seemed a constant pairing of triumph and tragedy, of maintaining courage and composure in the depths of pain and despair. Toward the end—she was already in her eighties then, and prepared to face her Maker—she left everything to God, being the person of faith that she was all her life.

I recovered the manuscript from my files, hoping that with Rosa’s passing, the Red Cross and Rosa’s family might decide to revisit the project and bring it to being—we owe it to Rosa and all she did. Herewith, some excerpts from the book that might yet be:

In retrospect, the opening sequence of Anak Dalita (LVN Pictures, 1956) captured what its star, Rosa Rosal, would be doing for the rest of her life: bringing comfort to the afflicted, as unlikely as her appearance and position may have been for an angel of mercy.

In that prizewinning film, set in the war-torn ruins of Manila’s Walled City, Rosa’s bargirl-character Cita steps into the frame in a black, spaghetti-strapped dress, almost ethereally beautiful and glamorous amid such squalid surroundings. It is daytime and she seems to have worked all night, but her first concern is to seek out a dying woman whose soldier-son has been stationed abroad.

The beauty and the glamour were genuine, and vintage, vampish Rosa Rosal. But just as real, offscreen, was the compassion that animated her in a long and still continuing life of virtue and public service. Rosa Rosal was as lustrous a star as stars came, but her feet remained on bare and solid earth; over the decades, it was the star within her that shone even more brightly than her on-camera celebrity.

The woman who would be known as the Florence Nightingale of her country was, fittingly enough, born with that name. Rosal Rosal was born Florence Danon on October 16, 1931 to Julio Danon and Gloria Lansang del Barrio.

Very little is known of Julio, a French-Egyptian-Jewish businessman. “My father died when I was very young, so I never got to know him,” Rosa says. It was her mother whom Rosa grew up with and looked up to. “She was a simple woman from Sta. Rita, Pampanga, a typical Kapampangan—a great cook, and very industrious. The wisdom she gave me is what made me who I am now. It’s a great thing that I chose to listen to her words instead of resenting her constant presence.”

When Rosa was six, Gloria remarried a Filipino named Ruperto del Barrio; they would have four more children—boy-and-girl twins, and then two more girls. “We weren’t rich, but we lived a decent life thanks to my mother and stepfather’s efforts. They bartered with people from the province. My mother was such a hard worker. She used to sand down all our furniture with is-is, a rough-textured leaf.”

The family lived in a two-story house in Sta. Cruz, Manila. Theirs was a simple, unassuming life, where time spent with one another was highly valued. “My mother made sure that the whole family ate together, so everyone could talk to each other and share stories. We spoke Tagalog in our house.”

Rosa went to the Antonio Regidor Elementary School. Early on, a lifelong trait of hers would surface here. Rosa saw herself as a “strong person,” but instead of using that strength to get ahead of others, Rosa used it to protect the weak. “When I was 10 years old, there was this girl who kept on bullying one of our other classmates. At first I tried talking to her,” Rosa recalls. “I begged her not to cause any more trouble for anyone. But she ignored my request. So one time, when the two of us were in the girls’ restroom, I dunked her face into the toilet bowl. She begged me to stop, but I made her promise not to bully anyone anymore before I did.”

On screen, Rosa continued to do what would have made most Filipino mothers faint. She seemed to think nothing of doing kissing scenes, wearing figure-hugging bathing suits, and playing the other woman. She was the character people loved to hate, but were also secretly entranced by, because she did freely what they could not.

In private, however, Rosa was anything but that kind of woman. She was deeply religious and devoted to her family, and her main objective was to give herself and her siblings a proper education. “Unlike my colleagues, I wasn’t too fond of going out and socializing. I didn’t frequent clubs or places like that. It was only later on that I formed friendships with my fellow actors, like Delia Razon. Actually most of the people that I hung out with were men, and everyone else thought of me as one of the boys. When we went out on the field I had my own accommodations, but I still preferred to sleep and hang out where the crew stayed.”

Oscar Miranda bore witness to the other Rosa: “In our neighborhood, Rosa was admired. Even when she was already a star seemingly beyond our reach, she had a nice smile and a kind word for everyone. In spite of her growing contravida image, everyone knew she was a nice girl, a good girl who was respectful and devoted to her parents, a very pious girl who heard mass every Sunday. Everyone sensed that her new image was just for show and Rosa was their star. Because the neighborhood saw her grow up, she was really one of them.”

“One time there was this girl at the PGH ER who had fallen from the top of a five-story building, and was in a coma. I returned to the hospital two days later and the girl was still there. I couldn’t help but ask around about her. I was told that the child needed a neurologist, so I talked to Dr. Vic Reyes, a good friend, and had him look at the child. The doctor said that it was a hemorrhage and that the girl needed blood. So I went to the Red Cross, got some blood for the girl and brought it back to the hospital. Even with the blood, the doctors were not sure if the child would make it. The mother was there, crying the whole time.

“When the blood was about to run out, the girl’s hands suddenly moved. Her eyes opened, and she cried out, ‘Mama!’ and the mother cried again, this time in relief. So with that experience I saw first-hand what blood can do. I realized that blood is something very precious. It can really prolong someone’s life. That’s when I decided to dedicate myself to the Red Cross,” Rosa recalls.

Even before this, Rosa had already attended blood donations through the Red Cross. “At the time, before you were accepted as a Red Cross member, you had to undergo training. I would come home from shooting at 5 am and then go straight to the training at 7. I didn’t have a car then so I had to take a cab to the Red Cross.”

The Red Cross and its blood bank would become so important to Rosa that they would eventually become the focus of her life, well beyond the movies. “You know I don’t celebrate my real birthday. I celebrate July 4,1950, the date of the first blood donation drive that I organized. It was held in Muntinlupa. I used to personally deliver blood to hospitals in Subic. On one such delivery run, a group of Huks—Communist guerrillas—stopped me in Pampanga. They told me that the next time I passed by, I should attach a Red Cross banner to my car so they would know that it was me.”

There was a tragic background to that encounter with the Huks. She had become friends with Baby Quezon, President Manuel Quezon’s daughter. “The two of us would meet at the Army-Navy Club. One day, I had just made a personal appearance, and they were asking me to hang out with them. Normally I couldn’t say no to Baby, but my mother was waiting for me at home. On the way home, I was with Alfonso Carvajal, and we heard on the radio that Baby and her friends had been ambushed by the Huks, and they were all killed. When I got home I told my mother what happened. I realized that my love for my mother saved my life.”

Working for the Red Cross also began to change how Rosa might have wanted others to see her. “When I became a regular volunteer for the Red Cross, I requested Manny de Leon if I could veer away from contravidaroles. I was tired of playing one, anyway. So he gave me Sonny Boy, opposite Jaime de la Rosa, and I won a FAMAS award for that.”

* * * * *

Not everyone appreciated Rosa’s efforts. Some suspected her of hypocrisy, of using her social work to promote herself. One incident is embedded in Rosa’s memory. “One time a group of teachers wanted to raise money to build a school in Tondo. I was able to raise P10,000 and I gave it to them. I was about to go home from Tondo when I noticed that one of my car’s tires was flat—the tire had been slashed. A man stepped up to me and said that he was the one who did that to my car. He said that I was doing all of my volunteer work not because I wanted to help people but because I wanted to sustain my popularity as an actress. The teachers helped me fix my car and told me to ignore the man, but I was still affected, and I cried on the way home. My mother saw me and I told her what happened. She didn’t tell me to stop doing charity work. She just sat with me and comforted me.”

Years later she would meet this man again—a girl was badly in need of a blood transfusion, and Rosa provided the help she needed. A man who identified himself as her father approached Rosa in tears, begging her forgiveness. “I was the one who slashed your tires,” he confessed. “I’m so sorry I doubted you!” Rosa wept with him, astounded by the irony of the situation.

* * * * *

That part of the country—Batangas, Cavite, Laguna—lived up to its reputation as a hotbed of rebellion and outright banditry. Steeped in poverty, people resorted to desperate acts; the comforts and glamour of Manila were another world away, and the only contact that the provincial folk had with it was through the movies—or, better yet, on those rare occasions when the movie stars themselves deigned to make a personal appearance in the boonies, usually in conjunction with a town fiesta, of which their ethereal visitation became the highlight.

And so did Rosa find herself again, another time, on another bus in Batangas, coming home from an appearance with an entourage of about 20 actors, singers, and dancers. Suddenly the bus was stopped in the middle of the road by a gang of robbers. “There were about ten of them,” Rosa remembers. “They boarded our bus and asked for our belongings. I told everyone to just comply. The thieves heard my voice and thought that I sounded familiar. To be sure, they asked me who I was, and I said I was Rosa Rosal. ‘Aren’t you the one with the Red Cross?’, one of them said. I said yes, and to everyone’s great surprise their leader ordered his gang to return what they stole. “Return everything. Don’t touch her, because she helps people like us.’ And then they left. We all cried afterwards. It was quite an experience. But I didn’t tell my mother about it.”

I wish I could share more—we’ve barely scratched the drama of her real life—but the rest will have to wait for the book. Let me end with something Rosa wrote in her preface (with a reference to her beloved grandson James, who died in an accident in 2010):

“I am ready to go anytime that He calls for me. I know that when that time comes, Jesus, my mother, and James will be there to welcome me. I can imagine the smile on their faces when God shows me the permanent home He has prepared for me. I thank Him for all the awards He has given me. I praise Him for the death of my grandson, James, as well as the 30 years of suffering of my mother. We praise God not just for the good times but also for the painful times. I have gladness and joy in my heart as I have obeyed His commandments and I answered His call to serve.”

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Category Archives: Writing

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Penman No. 480: A Call to Serve (Untold Stories of Rosa Rosal)