Qwertyman No. 127: From St. Louis to San Diego

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 6, 2025

I’M WRITING this on New Year’s Day in San Diego, California, where we’ve been visiting our married daughter Demi, who’s been living and working here for the past seventeen years. It was our first Christmas in America in ten years, and our second visit since the pandemic ended. 

Last night, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I watched a long and fascinating documentary on cable TV on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which ran from April to December that year. We Filipinos recall that event for its importation of over 1,000 of our countrymen to demonstrate what “savagery” meant—specifically, through the public butchering and eating of dogs. 

That bloody sideshow raised an outcry even then among both Filipinos and Americans, a pain we still feel more than 120 years after. Lost to many of us as a result of that diversion was the magnificence of the fair in many other respects, especially in terms of advances in science and technology. Many necessities and amenities we associate with the 20th century—electrical lighting, wireless telegraphy, the X-ray machine, baby incubators, and tabletop stoves, among others—were first shown to the public at the fair. 

But the fair, above all, was meant to showcase American ascendancy in politics and culture and in military and industrial might. America had just defeated Spain and had become a global maritime power, and was eager to flex its muscle, so this triumphalism underscored the great urge at St. Louis to introduce the world to America, and America to the world.

Just a few days earlier, we came out to San Diego’s famous waterfront to watch a parade to celebrate the Holiday Bowl, a football game scheduled for the Christmas break, with floats, balloons, marching bands, and military vehicles. It was a moment of pure Americana, brimming with Christmas cheer. I did my best to keep politics out of my mind for that golden hour, but of course it was never far away—especially in San Diego, a border city that could soon find itself caught in the mass-deportation drama promised by the incoming Trump administration, which takes office in less than three weeks.

This morning we woke up to the news of at least ten people being killed and dozens more injured on the street in New Orleans by an ISIS sympathizer plowing into a crowd of New Year revelers. That could very easily have been us at the parade, and again I had to wonder if—despite all the bad press the Philippines gets, with some reason—the US was truly a safer place, given its new realities of normalized and often racist violence. 

It doesn’t even take a bearded terrorist to wreak havoc in American life; as of December 17 last year, 488 mass shootings had been recorded in the US, so often that they’ve become a news staple eliciting just about as much outrage and action as another mugging at Central Park. Anti-Asian violence—to include both physical assaults and verbal or online abuse—has been on the rise, with Southeast Asians reporting the highest number of threats, despite polls showing most Americans believing that anti-Asian-American attitudes are on the wane, post-pandemic. 

That’s not going to deter the hundreds of thousands of Pinoys who, like us, still need or want to visit America each year—mostly as tourists who just want to see Disneyland, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building, aside from picking apples in Michigan, tasting wine in Napa Valley, and skiing in Colorado. The magic of an America we fantasized about—growing up watching Hollywood movies, listening to American songs, reading American books, and following American idols—remains powerfully attractive, enhanced by an image we retain of America as an innocent, benign, and giving place. This might be especially true of us Boomers who learned about snow and white Christmases long before we came across the real thing.

I doubt, of course, that our forebears who stood half-naked in their tribal garb for the delectation of the crowd in St. Louis saw anything so warm and fuzzy about America. Instead they saw curiosity, pity, and revulsion. American “innocence” was always a romantic illusion; America the Beautiful can turn on a dime to become America the Ugly.

When I put all these things together in my mind, I wonder if we 21st-century Filipinos identify more ourselves today with those “savages” on exhibit or with their onlookers, particularly those Pinoys who have crossed over to become Americans—in some cases, even “more American than the Americans,” as I’ve heard it said, proud of their assimilation into a mainstream moving farther than ever to the political right. 

As a teacher of American literature and society—who also studied, taught, and worked in the Midwestern heartland for many years—one thing I always remind my Filipino students is that there’s no such thing as a single, monolithic America, and that, whatever its current majorities might say, American society is diverse and ever more diversifying. To the American right, that’s the “great replacement theory” at work, the horrifying possibility that non-whites—the carnival freaks—are taking over the country, prompting the Trumpist turnaround from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI policies. To me, diversity offers both challenge and hope.

Out of respect for my hosts and friends here in San Diego—some of whom, for their own reasons, voted for Donald Trump—I’ve held my tongue for the time being, telling myself that it’s their country and their choice, although that choice will inevitably affect our lives halfway around the world. 

Among my liberal American friends, I sense an urge to disconnect at least temporarily from political reality and to go into passive resistance while they regroup. It’s a position that I can identify and sympathize with, as we sort out our options in the Philippines of 2025. We survived martial law; you’ll survive Donald Trump, I tell them. To survive may well be our best New Year’s resolution: against the aggravations and vexations of the world we’ve come into, survival is the best revenge.

Penman No. 470: A Collector’s Christmas

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Penman for Sunday, January 5, 2025

MY WIFE Beng and I in San Diego, California for our first Christmas in the US in ten years, visiting our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry. San Diego’s one of those perennially pleasant places where the weather seems to be perfect almost all year round. You don’t come here for a white Christmas—although there’s snow up in the mountains not too far from town. It’s still sunny and warm enough in late December for people to be going around in T-shirts and shorts in the daytime, but for us Pinoys who love to freeze, sweaters and jackets are de rigueur.

We’ve been coming here for twenty years now, and while San Diego is chockfull of attractions—this is, after all, where Comic-Con happens every July (been there, done that twice) and where the waterfront boasts a flotilla of historic ships from a life-size Spanish galleon to the USS Midway—I have to admit that the collector in me loves San Diego for its antique malls, flea markets, and thrift shops, of which scores can be found in the city and its suburbs. I’ve found many a prize piece in these places—such as a working gold-plated 1930s Hamilton “Curvex” watch in a basket marked “Any item $5”—which, for me, beats walking into a boutique and plunking down your credit card to pay full price.

I guess I’m a cheapskate at heart, which is why everywhere Beng and I have gone around the world, flea markets and thrift shops—aside from museums—are at the top of our to-do list. The thrill is even less in the purchase itself than in finding something old, beautiful, potentially valuable—and at a bargain. 

Collectors everywhere know the feeling—that tingle in your bones and at your fingertips when you step into a shop and scan the territory, and notice something in the hazy distance that seems to look like your obscure object of desire. As a collector of vintage fountain pens, I naturally gravitate toward small tubular shapes in black, silver, or gold—which was how, last March, I spotted and bagged a gold “safety” French-made pen from the early 1900s, sitting all by its lonesome at a table at the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris, a 40-euro find for something easily worth five times as much. 

Everyone has his or her strategy, but mine has always been to do a quick march down and around the street or aisle, just to see what’s out there and to catch obvious standouts, before taking a more leisurely and more probing walk back, peering into corners and at the details of particular pieces. It pays to come early—flea markets open as early as 5 am—and we’ve been lucky to bag early-bird bargains at cock’s crow in a barn in Ohio and the flea market at Covent Garden in London.

Unfortunately, flea markets of this sort have yet to become a regular feature of Filipino life, unless we count the Bangkal used-goods market in Makati and the plethora of Japan-surplus stores that have sprung up around the country. 

Fortunately, there’s a global flea market that’s accessible to nearly everyone and which doesn’t even require you to fly overseas and deal with visas, airfares, and airports. That market is eBay, which I like to call the great equalizer, since anyone with an Internet connection and a bank account can tap into the millions of items that eBay has online at any given second.

To my great wonderment and not a little horror, I realized as I was writing this that I’ve been on eBay for 27 years now, having signed up with the website just three months after it changed its name to eBay from Auction Web in September 1997. My first buy was a 1950s Pelikan 140 fountain pen from Germany, and since then I’ve made almost 2,000 purchases covering all my collecting passions, from pens, typewriters, and Apple computers to antiquarian books, paintings, and clothes. (Clothes? Yes! If you’re a rather large man like me who has difficulty finding his size in local stores, you’ll have lots more choices on eBay for less as long as you’re sure of your shirt, blazer, pants, shoe, and hat sizes.) 

Shipping each item to Manila directly from the US or the UK (another eBay paradise) will be too costly, so what I and other experienced collectors do is to open an account with a forwarder like ShippingCart or Johnny Air Cargo, which gives you a local address, wait until the items pile up, and then ship them in a box to Manila. (Check with each shipper’s website for their specific insurance and customs policies.) I generally get my goods within two weeks of shipping them out.

I began by mentioning that we were in San Diego because this ties in with another twist to the Pinoy collector’s and shopper’s strategy: if you know you’re going to be in the US and will be staying with a relative or friend, you can have your eBay or Amazon items shipped to that address over, say, the preceding month, and bring everything home with you in the second suitcase you’re entitled to, saving a ton on air freight costs. 

This time around, to give you an idea of what my Christmas loot has been, I’ll be filling up a suitcase (or more likely my carry-on) with some small things of little commercial value but of great interest to hopeless hoarders like me. They’ll include:

– A copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from April 1825, in which an article predicts that “It appears that Spain is likely to lose her possessions in the Eastern, as well as the Western world” because of rebellions and crimes in the Philippines as well as at home, including “ravages committed (in Catalonia) by wolves within the last twelve or fifteen months…. The last was a young girl who, on the 18th instant, was almost entirely devoured by the wolves” (which, according to the monks, were “animated by the souls of defunct Constitutionalists”);

– A first American edition of Paul Proust de la Gironiere’s Twenty Years in the Philippine Islands, published in New York in 1854;

– A lovely Art Nouveau rocker ink blotter from around 1915, once used to mop up excess ink from fountain pens; and

– A Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in pearl and black from around 1929, once owned by a “Francis J. Keefe” whose identity will be another mystery to explore.

If Christmas was this bountiful, I can only imagine what the New Year will be like.

Penman No. 469: Seniors and Their Stories

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Penman for Sunday, December 8, 2024

I HAD the privilege of attending the private launch of a book in Makati recently, a book titled Bridges of Memory produced by a group of seniors who had each contributed their poems, stories, and essays to the collection. None of them was a professional writer; I gathered that they came from distinguished backgrounds in banking, law, public service, and other pursuits. 

Prior to publishing the book, they had been mentored by an accomplished and experienced writer, the San Francisco-based poet Oscar Peñaranda, who just happened to be an old friend of mine. Oscar was in the US when the launch took place, so he sent a congratulatory video. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this was already the “Sunshine” group’s (so named because they meet at the Sunshine Place for seniors in Makati) second such book.

As you might expect, the book contains the authors’ musings on life, love, and loss, the funny with the sad, the joyful with the tragic. The styles and the quality of the writing predictably varied, but the enthusiasm was palpably even, with all the contributors present eager to share their work.

At that very same moment, way across town, another mass book launch was being held at a major university, where one of the featured books was a long and distinguished biography that had partly been edited by me. I had also been invited to that event, but chose to attend the Makati one despite the Christmas traffic, because I had the feeling that it would somehow be a more enjoyable occasion, at least for me, as it would put me in touch with writers of a gentler disposition.

Having been caught in a whirlwind of literary activities over the past two months—from the Frankfurt Book Fair to the Palanca Awards to the PEN Congress—you’d think that I’d shy away from a small book launch, but aside from the fact that some of the authords were friends, I wanted to show my support for this kind of more personal writing and publishing that we too often take for granted as self-indulgence.

I’d seen books like this before, the output of writing groups, barkadas, high-school chums, and fellow alumni. They’re often triggered by an impending milestone, like a 50th anniversary or a grand reunion and homecoming.

The professional crowd might think of such volumes as vanity projects published by people who could never put out their own books. But then that’s the whole point: one person’s vanity is another person’s self-empowerment, and such private publishing reclaims the right to self-expression from the academic and commercial gatekeepers. The works they contain may not win any literary prizes, but they are as honest and heartfelt as writing can get, and satisfy the most basic urge that impels all good writers: to use words to give shape to one’s thought and feeling, and to share those words with others so they might think and feel the same way. They’re written neither for fame nor fortune, but to leave some precious memories behind for a very specific audience—although some pieces may be of such merit as to be more widely appreciated.

I’ve always said, even in my own creative writing classes at the university, that I believe that every person has at least one good story in him or her—and that it’s my job as a teacher to bring that story out. And people know this, too—many of them are dying to tell their story, but don’t know where and how, and who will listen. That’s particularly true for digitally-challenged seniors, who don’t have access to blogging, and who use Facebook for little more than “Happy Birthday!”

I’m particularly taken by the fact that these books are produced by seniors, who are increasingly being left out of a social world ruled by schemes and products for young people. Even within families—let’s admit it—very few grandchildren now have the time nor the patience to listen to their elders’ stories, much less to ply them with questions; they’d rather scroll through their social media than ask what a typical summer vacation was like half a century ago, or what people did before there were cellphones, computers, and satellite TV.

Years ago, fearing we would lose her soon because of her illness, I’d asked my mother to write down her memoirs in notebooks which I still keep. As it happened, she recovered magnificently, miraculously, and is approaching 97, still strong and alert, albeit a little slow. She walks every day, plays games on her iPad, and navigates Netflix on her own. When she’s staying with us (we siblings share her company), Beng and I pepper her with questions about her childhood in their village in Romblon, where she rode a horse and scooped fish out of the plentiful sea. The youngest of a dozen children, she was the apple of her father’s eye, and the only girl he sent to Manila for high school and college at UP. They had a rice mill, and snakes roosted in the large straw bins that kept the unhusked rice. But the snakes were to be feared much less than the beautiful encantos that came down from Kalatong on fiestas and lured their victims to join them with offerings of black rice. How could you not like and want to retell stories like that?

Our seniors are a treasury of stories to be told. They just need to be asked, encouraged to write, and published.

(For your copy of Bridges of Memory, email marketing@sunshineplaceph.com.)

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. 124: In Sin and Error Pining

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 16, 2024

IT WAS at an early Christmas lunch when a friend asked if I thought that Vice President Sara Duterte would be impeached, with all the motions now on the table to that effect. I wasn’t expecting politics to be taken up over the merrymaking, but this is the Philippines where we breathe politics, so I obliged. 

I said that while I certainly believed that the VP was fit to be impeached for all the obvious financial irregularities happening under her watch, I very much doubted that it was going to happen. And why not? Because it was going to come down to the votes in the House and in the Senate, and while President BBM and his allies doubtlessly had the muscle to push the motion through, I just didn’t see why they would. And again why not? You don’t think they can come up with the evidence to find her culpable for the misuse of hundreds of millions of public money in confidential funds? They could, if they want to, I said—but again, why would they? 

Think about it this way, I said. Impeachment is political, so the facts don’t really matter much, except for propaganda purposes—especially with elections coming up in a few months. Don’t get me wrong—there are people who take the process and its reasons seriously, as we all really should, because millions going to non-people like “Mary Grace Piattos,” “Chippy McDonald,” and “Fernando Tempura” in the guise of “intelligence operations” insults our non-artificial intelligence. 

VP Sara’s refusal to explain these strange endowments paints her further into a corner—which, it seems, is exactly where she wants to be. When she says, “I’ll be at peace when I’m impeached,” and when her drumbeaters exclaim that the hearings are turning the Dutertes into “folk heroes,” then you know that she’s not going to get what she wants. 

Why would PBBM let her go? What would be in it for him? He doesn’t need a functioning Vice President—he never had one; this VP can’t point to a single memorable deed beyond publishing an expensive book. Cutting off his “Uniteam” partner and depriving her of her last official job would simply give her free rein to wreak more mayhem with no accountability to the government or the people. 

Keeping her on the official payroll—but fundamentally powerless—would be the smarter thing. It was never in Sara’s nature to do a VP Leni, and turn political Siberia into a veritable factory of good deeds. She’ll stew in the OVP, sans her confidential kitty, until she can’t take it any longer and resigns, which could easily be spun into a form of surrender or an abandonment of her sworn duties.

The other reason, of course, is that while VP Sara is drawing fire, PBBM can enjoy some peace of mind, and make benign speeches at this and that forum with a heartfelt smile. He knows that he has benefited immensely from the odious alternative the Dutertes represent in the eyes of many Filipinos, even those who staunchly opposed his candidacy in 2022. 

The Dutertes have done Marcos Jr. the priceless favor of making him and whatever he does look good by comparison—a difference he has substantively emphasized by rejecting his predecessor’s slavishly pro-China policy and (despite reports of continued EJKs under his regime) withdrawing Digong’s murderous tokhangcampaign. He has had his missteps, like that bizarrely ill-conceived Maharlika Fund, but I have been hearing murmurs of approval from otherwise progressive friends—albeit grudging and cautious—for many of his positions, an unthinkable proposition just a year ago, when the wounds of 2022 were still fresh. 

But with more than half his term yet ahead of him, there’s opportunity aplenty for unraveling and for even graver misdeeds. Even now, while we profess shock and dismay over the P500 million spent by the OVP in confidential and intelligence funds for 2023, the House has given BBM a free pass on the even more staggering P4.57 billion his office disbursed for the same purposes that year. 

And that’s why I think it’s wiser to keep the focus on the Dutertes and to keep the VP where you can see and hear her, flailing around and squealing like a stuck pig. The impeachment drama will play itself out in the New Year with more twists and turns than a telenovela, and then, for some reason, the votes will fall short, and the VP will be censured and chastised before being sent back to the pen. For what it’s worth, I don’t think impeachment is the proper penalty here; criminal prosecution, conviction, and punishment should be, but that’s a whole other game.

* * * * *

Christmas will soon be upon us—my 70th, in my case, a milestone I never expected to reach given the many young deaths that marked my generation, but one I thankfully accept as the ultimate gift and blessing, no matter the turmoil in our world today. I personally have much to cheer about and be grateful for—so why can’t I be merrier?

We associate Christmas with joy and new life, with the Christ child’s coming, but there is nothing to be jolly about where wanton greed and senseless death are concerned. 

Everything today points to a headlong dive into a global cataclysm, a World War III that may not have a clear and time-stamped beginning like the invasion of Poland or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but a prolonged and widespread series of provocative and catastrophic events occurring all over the planet—Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, Chinese occupation of Southeast Asian waters, Israel’s pyrrhic extermination of its enemies, North Korea’s incessant saber-rattling and nuclear brinkmanship, America’s surrender of the asylum to the lunatics, and the inexorable degradation of the environment—all of which will come to a head. It will be horrific, but a side of me wonders if we need this cataclysm to remind us of our most basic values and virtues as humans, beyond ideology, religion, power, and wealth.

The other week I had a reader, a pro-Israel partisan, writing me to contend that there was no one else to blame for all the dead children in Gaza but their parents who refused to stand up to Hamas. It saddened more than infuriated me to see that this is where all our presumably educated reasoning has come to—a justification for the slaughter of innocents. I wanted to shake the man by the shoulders, across the Internet, to awaken the terrified and hungry child in him.

Our world will become yet darker and more difficult before it comes to its senses, rediscovers the value of truth, beauty, and courage, and pulls back from the brink of self-annihilation. Yes, I remain optimistic about the future of humanity, about a time when reason and justice will prevail, but I am quite sure I will not live to see this “new and glorious morn.”

Qwertyman No. 123: A Forgotten Hero

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 9, 2024

A HANDSOME book—as handsome as its subject—was launched last week by the Ateneo University Press, a biography of another unsung Filipino hero who would have faded into oblivion had it not been for the efforts of an American expat in the Philippines with a deep sense of history. 

The hero was Col. Narciso L. Manzano, the highest-ranking Filipino in the US Army during the Second World War, and the man who rescued his memory is Craig Scharlin, a former English teacher, gallery owner, and biographer who served for some time as Manzano’s personal secretary fifty years ago. I had met and known Craig earlier as the author, with his wife Lilia Villanueva, of the biography of Filipino-American labor leader Philip Vera Cruz; when he asked me to help him put together what eventually became The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano, I agreed, especially after hearing his story of the life of this remarkable man. 

Craig had learned that the MacArthur Library in Virginia had a 260-page handwritten autobiographical manuscript that had been written by Col. Manzano in 1948, to which were later added another memoir written in 1983 for his grandchildren; his son Jaime had also written a family history. Craig acquired copies of all these and the necessary permissions to publish them; I helped stitch the manuscripts together into a more coherent whole and edit the text.

Though born in Manila in 1899, Manzano grew up in Atimonan, Quezon before leaving at age ten for Spain where his family hailed from. He was a mestizo through and through: Filipino by birth and allegiance, Spanish by blood, and American by military service and later citizenship. After returning to Manila and studying Engineering at UST, he signed up to join the US Army, hoping to fight in the First World War, which ended too soon for him. He went to the US for further military training, and served back home as a Philippine Scout, and then as a colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

It had been one of Manzano’s pre-war missions to map out the Bataan peninsula carefully in preparation for War Plan Orange 3, which MacArthur eventually discarded. It was in this zone that Manzano would first earn praise for his bravery. As Craig’s introduction tells it, “It was Manzano, along with his American co-commander, Lt. Col. Skerry, who led their engineers in setting the explosives to blow the bridge at Calumpit, the last and most vital bridge in Central Luzon…. When Gen. Wainwright decided the bridge had to be destroyed to halt the rapidly advancing Japanese invading forces, the Army engineers assigned this task led by Manzano were on the wrong side of the bridge, the Japanese side. Manzano requested that Skerry wait to blow it until he and his men could get across… but Wainwright had no choice: the bridge had to be blown as the Japanese were advancing too fast in order to save the entire American and Filipino forces and allow them time to retreat to Bataan…. Somehow Manzano, along with another of his American officers was able to evade the Japanese on their own and made their way with all their men to Bataan.”

Working in intelligence in Bataan, he was later captured and imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell; upon release, he was quickly assigned to develop an intelligence network in Luzon, at which he proved exceptionally capable. His wife Charo was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese. But he pressed on, and when his network was exposed, he moved to Mindanao from where he hoped to be taken by submarine to Australia so he could properly advise MacArthur, who was getting poor intelligence. MacArthur’s lackeys scotched that plan, forcing Manzano to improvise as a guerrilla until MacArthur returned. He later moved to the US with his family, where he died in 1986, proud of his life’s work despite being embittered by the betrayals he had to suffer, and disappointed at being passed over for the generalship he had expected.

That’s not even half of the story; brimming with the candor of a man with nothing to lose, Manzano’s memoirs are full of vignettes and reflections about people at war, and Manzano can be painfully scathing in his estimations of those he felt had betrayed his country. He whittles down MacArthur and his aides for what he saw to be their foolish and costly unwillingness to listen to lifesaving intelligence (an opinion shared by historians such as Hampton Sides, who wrote that “MacArthur’s judgement, clouded by his gargantuan ego, was sometimes deeply, dangerously flawed. The men who fought under him, and the civilians who happened to get in his way, often paid a terrible price.”) Manzano was highly critical of MacArthur’s abandonment of War Plan Orange 3, and even said that he would have testified in support of Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma had he been asked.

He not only believed President Jose P. Laurel to be a collaborator, but plotted the failed operation to assassinate him on the golf course at Wack Wack. For this alone, the book should be well worth reading; I among others have a contrary view of Laurel, but Manzano was there and we were not. Manzano has spicy opinions of other wartime and postwar personalities whom we have named streets after—again, quite an eye-opener. He reserved some of his choicest words for Ferdinand Marcos, whom he called “a poser, a phony, a fake, a war profiteer.”

In his introduction to the book, Craig Scharlin recalls his first meeting with Col. Manzano in San Francisco in 1975: The movie “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino had not yet come out. However, the character Pacino played in that movie, Frank, was a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. As portrayed by Pacino, the character had Old-World charm, dressed impeccably, and even in his older age had ramrod-straight posture, showed strength of character and conviction, and the demeanor of an officer who had commanded other men and led them into battle. But he also carried scars of resentment and a certain sadness, a lament of unfulfilled destinies, of real battles won and others lost. And of course it was all Al Pacino—short, dark, brooding, yet still incredibly charismatic.

“That was the man I met in 1975 in a well-appointed penthouse apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco. The only difference was that this wasn’t Al Pacino nor a fictional movie character, but the real deal—a retired US Army colonel named Narciso L. Manzano.”

Meet the rest of the man in the book, which you can order here: https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/manzano-memoirs-life-and-military-career-colonel-narcisco-l-manzano.

Qwertyman No. 122: On Writing as a Profession

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 2, 2024

FOLLOWING THROUGH on last week’s piece about the challenges faced by creative writers trying to make a living in this country, let me share some further thoughts on that topic that I wove into my Rizal Lecture last week at the annual congress of Philippine PEN. My talk was titled “The Living Is in the Writing: Notes on the Profession of  Writing in the Philippines.”

Our writers of old made a profession of writing, often by working as journalists, speechwriters, and PR people at the same time that they wrote poems, stories, novels, and essays on the side. Some also taught, and of course some writing comes with that territory, but with teaching you get paid for your classroom hours than for your word count. (To which I should also add, so much of the writing that our literature professors do today is understandable only to themselves.)

Our best and most prolific writers lived by the word and died by it. The two who probably best exemplified this kind of commitment to writing—and nothing but writing—were Nick Joaquin and his good friend Frankie Sionil Jose. Both were journalists and fictionists (in Joaquin’s case, a poet and playwright as well). We can say the same for Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Kerima Polotan, as well as for Gregorio Brillantes, Jose Lacaba, Ricky Lee, Alfred Yuson, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, and Charlson Ong, among others. 

These were all writers whom you never heard to claim, as has been recent practice, that “I am a poet!” or “I am a fictionist!” They were all just writers, for whom the practice of words was one natural and seamless continuum, and a profession they mastered just as well as we expect doctors, engineers, mechanics, and lawyers to do. This was also when journalists could be poets who could also be politicians and even reformers, revolutionaries, and heroes.

This was paralleled in other arts such as painting, where artists such as Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Botong Francisco routinely accepted commissions to support themselves and any other personal undertakings. (Of course, this was well within the old Western tradition of writers and artists having wealthy patrons to help keep them alive and productive.)

But then came a time when, for some reason, creative and professional writing began to diverge, as creative writing withdrew from the popular sphere and became lodged in academia, where it largely remains today. Professional writing, or writing for, money, came to be seen as the work of hacks, devoid of art and honor. Even George Orwell urged writers to take on non-literary jobs such as banking and insurance—which incidentally T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens did, respectively—rather than what he called “semi-creative jobs” like teaching and journalism, which he felt was beneath them. (Orwell himself worked as a dishwasher in Paris, where he wryly observed that “nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this.”)

An attitude of condescension soon emerged among poets and fictionists who looked down on journalists as a lesser breed—something I have always warned my students against, having been a journalist who had to turn in a story, any story, by 2 pm every day on pain of losing my job. Never knock journalists. Let’s not forget that when it comes to facing real dangers brought on by one’s written word, poets and fictionists have it easy. The last Filipino novelist who was shot for what he wrote was Jose Rizal; the only writers dying today are our journalists and broadcasters in the hinterlands offending the local poobahs. Governors and generals read newspapers, not novels; they are impervious to metaphor.

Professional writers, on the other hand, saw creative writers as artsy dilettantes enchanted by fancy words and phrases that no one else understood and very few people paid for. Creative writers took it as a given that they were wedded to a life of monastic penury, unless they had another skill or job like teaching, doctoring or lawyering, or marrying into wealth. It even became a badge of honor of sorts to languish in financial distress while reaping all manner of writing honors, in the misguided notion that starving artists produced the finest and most honest work. 

The fact is, both are two sides of the same coin, which is the currency of public persuasion through words and language. One is an artist, the master of design; the other is the artisan or craftsman, the master of execution. Both can reside in the same person, unless you’re foolish enough to disdain one or the other. You can produce great art, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the hubris for it; but you can also live off your artistic skills, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the humility for it. 

(That said, I have to report that in my forty years of teaching creative writing, some of the students who find it hardest to switch to fiction are journalists, who just can’t let go of the gritty and often linear reality they’ve been accustomed to; poets come next, those who feel preciousness in every word and turn of phrase, so much that they can’t move from one page to the next without agonizing, or, going the other way, without drowning us in verbiage.)

This was why, more than twenty years ago, I designed and began teaching an undergraduate course at the University of the Philippines called “CW198—Professional Writing.” Mainly intended for Creative Writing and English majors who had very little idea of their career options after college aside from teaching, the course syllabus includes everything from business letters, news, interviews, and features to brochures, scripts, speeches, editing, publishing, and professional ethics. The first thing I tell them on Day One is this: “There is writing that you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others. Don’t ever get the two mixed up.”

Penman No. 468: A Game of Prompts

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Penman for Sunday, November 17, 2024

I WAS in Dumaguete recently for a seminar organized by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines to encourage local authors and publishers to break out into the international market, following through on our participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was asked to talk about “The Future of Literature,” but I chose to turn that around and talk instead about the literature of the future.

Taking off from the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, I put forth a series of “provocations” that writers and publishers could think about. Let me share part of what I said:

My first provocation: the literature of the future, or some part of it, will be a game of prompts: not just or not mainly to copy existing writers, but to produce results that will be a hybrid of the author’s creativity in prompt-making and AI’s selectivity, drawing from its enormous stock of possible responses. This will be writing as a form of play, of co-authorship between man and machine.

Following through from this is Provocation No. 2: Expect the growth of the literature of hybridity—of more crossovers from one genre or form to another, from one language to another, from one sensibility to another. This is by no means new and has been happening for some time now, but there will be an even greater and more deliberate blurring of traditional boundaries, more experimentation.

To some extent, that will be because—and here’s Provocation No. 3, and to use this generation’s favorite trigger-word—there will be less gatekeeping. Or, if not less, then more resistance to or disregard of it. There will be more independent publishing and self-publishing to counter the influence of traditional publishing houses. But this free-for-all will also likely lead to a general decline of standards, as writers forgo the services of editors and the critical evaluations of quality- and market-minded publishers.

Provocation No. 4: The big novel will survive, simply because of the power of inertia, and because there will always be a need for something as capacious to contain and possibly comprehend the ever-growing complexity of human life. Our exposure to the international market at the Frankfurt Book Fair will also provide more impetus to the production of novels, something at which we Filipinos have not been particularly good at, historically speaking. 

On the other hand—Provocation No. 5—there will be a general shortening and simplification of form, as writing seeks to approximate the meme, or Tiktok. I don’t know exactly how this will happen, or what form it will take, but when I look at the frankly scary popularity of Lang Leav, I worry that people will see that kind of poetry as the new standard. Of course Emily Dickinson was just as short if not even shorter 150 years ago; she would have made a fine poet for our time.

Given what the world is going through, and the even bleaker future humanity faces, I propose—Provocation No. 6—that the literature of the future will be one of survival, of coping, of enduring. I have recently been advocating the need to produce a literature of hope, but that will be a difficult ask for young writers just trying to keep their heads above the water, and more understandably concerned with this life than with anything that may follow. Science fiction and fantasy will always go over the visible horizon, anticipating a distant future albeit in often dystopian terms, but for most, it will be the literature of next week.

And in that increasingly diminishing and threatening universe—Provocation No. 7—when our precious selves are all we have left to cling to, the literature of “I am,” the first-person narrative, and the politics of identity will prevail. When we no longer trust the government, business, education, our parents, the Church, and even God, and on the verge of losing control of our own petty lives, we will desperately fight to be recognized, acknowledged, and maybe even loved. We will leave nations and societies to the editorialists and social scientists; in fiction and poetry, we will seek solace and sense.

Let me just say a few words about the Frankfurt Book Fair, the 2024 edition of which I and some of us here attended last month. As you know, the Philippines will be Guest of Honor next year, which will do much to project the visibility of Philippine literature overseas. Even this year, many gains were already achieved by our writers and publishers, with dozens of deals signed for the translation and publication of our books in foreign markets.

Post-Frankfurt, Filipino writers will think of writing for the world—not necessarily in English although that’s always an option, but through translation, which will be the great equalizer. The huge surge in translation coming out of Frankfurt—not just from Filipino to English but from our other Philippine languages, including English, to other global languages—will forever change our literary culture, which has traditionally and quite unfairly favored our writers in English when it comes to recognition beyond our shores.

Also, and this may be a controversial point, I’ve long had this suspicion—and maybe Frankfurt proves it—that the rest of the world doesn’t really care about (because it doesn’t know about nor understand) the differences between Tagalog, Iluko, Bikol, and Cebuano etc. literature. When we reach foreign readers in translation, we’re all Filipino—and only Filipino—just as African or Indian literature  appear to us as cultural blocs rather than deeply variegated constructs. This has its positives and negatives, but I tend to lean on the positives, which are a reminder that our literature helps define a cohesive national experience and identity above the regional and ethnic markers otherwise so precious to us.

In one of my sessions in Frankfurt, I was asked a question, to which I replied: “I will always be more optimistic about literature than politics.” Given what has just happened in America, and what that will mean for the rest of the world, I have to believe this even more than ever.

Qwertyman No. 121: Fame, Fortune, and the Filipino Writer

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 25, 2024

CREATIVE WRITERS don’t earn much in this country, unless they lend their talents to someone else, for far less literary reasons than writing a novel or a collection of poems. A senator might need to deliver an important speech to an international audience; a taipan might be marking a milestone like a 75th birthday, and fancy having his biography written; a conglomerate might want to have its history written and published, to trumpet its accomplishments and contributions to society. 

For all these, many novelists, poets, and essayists will drop their pens and exchange their metaphors for the plainer but more remunerative prose of public relations. I know I have; I’m one of these people for whom writing isn’t just an art but a profession, a means of livelihood, a trade I’m grateful to be able to ply instead of hauling gravel or fixing carburetors. 

I’ve been writing for a living since I dropped out of college and became a newspaper reporter at eighteen, and I’ve been at it ever since, even throughout my whole other life as an academic (yes, I went back to school and got all the right degrees just so I could teach). At seventy, I’m still working on three or four simultaneous book projects for clients, with my own third novel in the back burner. (I’ve already drawn the line at seventy; after these, no more, so I can focus on my own work, and live modestly off my professor’s pension.)

I daresay, however, that most Filipino writers don’t operate like this, either because they can’t (you have to park your ego at the door and be extremely adaptable) or they won’t (for some, writing for money is selling your soul, although you can always say no to jobs and clients you don’t like, as I have). So creative writers have to keep day jobs like teaching or lawyering or newswriting and editing, and tap away at their magnum opuses on the side.

Why do they even bother? It’s not as if they’re hoping to write novels that will become bestsellers, make them millions, and get sold to Hollywood or Netflix. Ours is also a culture and society not known for buying and reading books, unlike, say, the Japanese whose faces you’ll find buried between pages on the Tokyo subway. In a country of around 115 million people, a new book will still typically be published in a first (and likely only) print run of 1,000 copies, which will probably take a year to sell out, if ever (Filipino relatives and friends also expect to be given free signed copies, which they won’t even read).

So again, what are we writing for? Perhaps thanks to Jose Rizal (who, let’s not forget, was shot for what he wrote), to be a writer still carries with it an aura of honor and fame, the suggestion of some extraordinary talent, a special way with words. We may not pay or read our writers, but w e admire them, maybe because they seem to know something most people don’t, like saying “I love you” in enchanting ways, or drafting convincing letters and papers, or even just fancy words like “somnolent” and “adumbrate.” There’s some glory to be won in writing—maybe even a little cash, if you know how to market yourself.

Last Friday, at the PICC, many of the country’s best writers got together to bask in that shared glory. In one of the highlights of the literary year, 54 authors were feted at the 72nd edition of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Begun in 1950 and faithfully and generously endowed by the Palanca family, the Palancas are the country’s longest-running and most prestigious literary competition, and for the past seven decades (almost uninterrupted except for the pandemic) have heralded the emergence of our finest writers—in English, Filipino, and more recently our other major Philippine languages.

According to the foundation that oversees the awards, this year’s competition drew in 1,823 entries in 22 categories, with 60 winning works produced by 54 writers. New winners outnumbered previous ones by 31 to 23, a good sign of new talent emerging—and not just new but young. Five winners were 20 and below, the youngest being only 14 years old (and the oldest 78). That’s quite a range, which tells us that the future of Philippine literature is safe and strong.

I myself won my first Palanca when I was 21, and of course I thought I was God’s gift to literature—until I lost for the next four years straight. I probably learned more from those losses than from my lucky win, and as I grew older the writing became more important than the winning, but the incentives—a little of both fame and fortune—that the Palancas provided never diminished in their attractiveness, especially during the martial law years when there was very little publishing going on.

You certainly don’t have to join the Palancas or win one to gain a literary reputation, and the value of such awards can easily get overblown, such as when egos get the better of writers starved for attention. Ultimately prizes don’t count nearly as much as publication, and all those honors will be meaningless until and unless one’s books are read, understood, argued about, and maybe even cherished. (With the Philippines poised to become Guest of Honor at next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, we can expect the global readership for Filipino works to increase, and international publication will be a new goal for our writers to aspire for.)

Not everyone who writes for a living can win a Palanca, but not everyone who wins a Palanca can make a living out of writing, either. I’m blessed and thankful to have been able to do both, but at this point in my life I’ve come to realize that even more than seeking fame or fortune, a writer’s greatest mission is to tell and spread the truth, in that moving and memorable form only art can deliver.