ALMOST AS soon as we got home from New York, Beng and I flew out to Bangkok where I was speaking at a conference. We stayed in a boutique hotel in Sukhumvit, a lively district that becomes even livelier after dark. I ran into this outdoor “bar” complete with disco lights outside our hotel—a new life for an old VW Kombi. Cheers!
Penman for Monday, November 5, 2012
I FIRST visited New York 32 years ago, as a young man on his first trip abroad, and I can still remember the convulsive thrill that I felt as I peered out the window of my plane from Detroit and saw Manhattan’s spires rising toward me, to the accompaniment of a Gershwin tune.
At the same time, I looked at New York with not a little dread, both because of its sheer immensity and also its fearsome reputation for harboring mobsters and hucksters. While I marveled at the Christmas lights of Rockefeller Center, I also saw Times Square and Bryant Park at their worst, long before Rudy Guiliani came in with a broom, and 9/11 lent the city the kind of composure that comes with tragedy.
I’ve been back many times since—with my mother, daughter, and sister, and Beng’s sister living in the US, we try to visit every year—and over the years, I’ve slowly learned to trust if not to love this mother and mentor of modern cities, holding my wariness in check just long enough to let New York’s many and unexpected charms seep through and permeate my senses.
It’s a tired cliché by now, but while I go to my sister’s place outside of Washington, DC for rest and recuperation, I go to New York for the energy and the excitement, for the buskers in the subways playing everything from Vivaldi to That’s Amore, for Paul’s Burgers in St. Mark’s Place, for the two lions guarding the library (Patience downtown, Fortitude on the uptown side), for the $6/lb. Chinese takeouts, for the Art Deco flourishes nearly everywhere you look, for the Housing Works resale shops, for the discounted Broadway tickets, for the Sabrett’s hotdogs on the sidewalks, for the muscular subway, for the parks that sprout up amidst brownstone and cinderblock, for the warren of words that’s the Strand, and, of course, for the translucent glass stairway leading down to the reverse-heaven of the Apple Store.
New York can have the newest of the new—think of the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini—but oddly enough, what Beng and I enjoy most on our New York visits is seeking out old treasures (or what might be junk to most other people) in the thrift shops of 23rd Street and the flea markets of the Upper West Side and Hell’s Kitchen. Sometimes these treasures even come free, shamelessly dragged in off the street on my sister-in-law’s block in Forest Hills, like that miniature wooden Christmas sleigh that I salvaged last week off the top of a pile of detritus (the polite Roman word, I think, for garbage).
Inevitably, despite our absent intentions, every visit brings something new. Two years ago it was the magic of dusk in Coney Island, at the very end of the F subway line and, it seemed, of New York itself, so serene was that velvet hour with the amusement park’s fun machines in off-season repose. This year it was a day trip we took by train to a small village called Cold Spring, up the Hudson River, after learning that it hosted a cluster of antique shops and was a good place to catch the fall colors, besides.
It did not disappoint on either count; autumn declared itself resplendently for most of the 90-minute ride along the ribbon of the Hudson, and exploded in brilliant yellows and reds on our arrival in Cold Spring. As Beng and Mimi scoured the shops for old buttons, bottles, and trinkets, I strayed into a shop with a small door that turned out to be a huge warehouse of vintage knickknacks—among them, a lovely black hard-rubber-and gold Conklin ladies’ pen from around 1920 and a marbled Parker Vacumatic desk pen from 1935. Having earlier picked up a Waterman silver-overlay pen and a contemporaneous brass inkwell from 1915 at the Greenflea Market on the Upper West Side, I pronounced this trip sufficiently penworthy, and contented myself for the rest of the day with photographing the Hudson’s color-washed banks.
Another novelty on this trip was my first walk into and across the heart of Central Park, which I had somehow never done in three decades of visiting New York. All that time I had contented myself with reconnoitering the fringes of the park, forewarned by a score of movies and CSI New York episodes about the demons and dangers lurking within. On the Saturday that we crossed the park on our way to Greenflea, we met nothing more dangerous than sprightly squirrels and latter-day hippies channeling John Lennon in Strawberry Fields, the corner of the park across the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and was shot dead (a few days after I left New York on my first visit there in 1980). And how can you walk across Central Park without (again) George Gershwin, Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, and Liza Minnelli performing in concert in your dreaming head?
We had earlier visited the 9/11 Memorial downtown, where the Twin Towers used to stand; last year it had been under construction—and still was, to some degree, as the museum within has yet to open. But the two large reflecting pools were already in operation, acting like four-sided waterfalls whose constant flow—broken only, when we looked, by an almost unbearably theatrical rainbow—seemed to represent a perpetual dousing of the fires that burned the towers down, a cleansing of the evil and the ill will that came before and after the event. I had also been there in 2001, a few months before 9/11, and had seen the towers—had even gone up to the top of one of them on an earlier visit—but had no personal connection to the place. Still, I paused when I caught a name—one of almost 3,000 names etched deeply into the bronze railings around the pools—that was unmistakably Filipino: “Ronald Gamboa,” who turned out to be a 33-year-old Fil-Am, a manager at The Gap who died as a passenger on UA 175, one of the hijacked planes.
In yet another unintended irony, I’m writing this paean to New York from Lansing, Michigan, where I’m attending a conference and from where I’m supposed to fly back to JFK tomorrow and then back home to Manila on Thursday—but can’t, because New York and much of the American East Coast has been shut down by super storm Sandy, and I’m effectively stranded. If I can’t get back to JFK by Wednesday, I’ll have to rebook my Manila-bound flight, and stay in New York a little longer. That’ll be mildly annoying—but I can’t wait to spend a bonus weekend in Manhattan, poring over heaps of junk at the flea market, in quest of that golden glint that could be the clip of a 1936 Parker Vacumatic Oversize, one that George Gershwin himself might have scripted a tune or two with.
A BRAINWAVE hit me a few minutes ago as I was going all the Mac junk in my man-cave and I saw an iPad dock for the original iPad—remember these expensive and practically useless thingies that couldn’t hold up an iPad in its case? I’ve had this dock since i bought my iPad 1 and never even opened the box—I swear, it was that useless!
Well… I came home last night from the US with an iPhone 5 and a Lightning-to-30-pin adapter…. So what would happen if I plugged the adapter on to the iPad dock? Voila—a standing charger for the iPhone 5! There’s just enough stability and clearance to lift up the IP5 (it’ll work even with a thin case or skin—I tried it). So, suddenly, my useless iPad dock becomes a neat bedside accessory! (I should’ve kept more of these to sell right now, ha ha.)
It charges—and, yes, it syncs.
WE TOOK a train out of Manhattan to spend a quiet fall day in Cold Spring, about 90 minutes north along the Hudson, and I took the opportunity to test the “Panorama” feature of IOS6 on my iPhone 5.
Penman for Monday, October 29, 2012
BECAUSE OF the timing of this current trip to the US, I failed to attend the awarding ceremonies two weeks ago for Quezon City’s Gawad Parangal, which I was honored to receive this year among other sons and daughters of the city. So by way of publicly thanking the people who gave me that distinction, let me offer up my own memorial to that city which I now call home.
“Now,” I just realized, goes back almost 45 years, except for a couple of stretches we spent in Pasig and San Mateo. The Dalisays—my parents and their five kids—might as well have been gypsies in our childhood, moving around Manila at least a dozen times while we were growing up, everywhere from Pasay and Singalong to Boni Avenue and Pasig (not just one but three barrios in Pasig—Malinao, Bambang, and San Nicolas). Childhood and adolescence were to me a series of moving trucks carting increasingly smaller loads of furniture, appliances, and sundry effects from one apartment or rented space to another.
But it’s Quezon City that’s accounted for most of my life, since the early ‘60s when we found ourselves on Liberty Avenue—peppered by grainy-sweet aratiles—before our Pasig interlude. When I qualified for the Philippine Science High School in 1966, we moved back to Quezon City, to another apartment on Mahiyain Street in Teachers Village, where we ran a small and luckless poultry business in the backyard; I learned to smoke here, and I remember looking up at the tracered sky one New Year’s Eve and sighing, “It’s 1970!”
We were paying P160 a month for that apartment, but even that proved too much, and we had to move again, to what amounted to a lean-to that my father built on the side of a house on Tandang Sora; here we kept a pig in the bathroom and performed our ablutions under his watchful eye. I walked from this happy hovel to my classes in UP; the happiness ended, at least for me, when I was arrested in this same place under martial law in January 1973.
Within a year I was out of prison and married; my young bride Beng and I moved briefly to an apartment on Bignay Street in Kamuning, and then to Project 6, before settling in with Beng’s folks in Barangay Marilag in Project 4. In 1978, my parents decided to amortize a small house and lot in Modesta Village in San Mateo, so, being the good son, I took the house next to theirs, and paid that off over 15 years, even when we lived elsewhere. In those carless days, commuting to work meant leaving very early and coming home past dinnertime, so we eventually moved back to Project 4, and then to Sorsogon Street in West Triangle, Masikap Street in Barangay Central, and finally (for now) to Juan Luna in Barangay UP Campus.
It’s been a hectic but exciting journey, in the course of which I grew up, and more; I first met my wife-to-be in Quezon City; I lost my innocence (and more) in Quezon City; I received my college degree in Quezon City; my daughter went to school, had her debut, and got her first job in Quezon City; my father died in Quezon City; I’ve written most of my books in Quezon City.
I’ve often asked myself why—given how wide Metro Manila has grown and how many choices of places to live we middle-class working stiffs have—I’ve kept coming back to QC the couple of times I’ve strayed from it. It’s hardly the prettiest place on earth—although it has green fringes, like Diliman, especially where it overlooks Marikina Valley, that make you forget or want to forget its drearier swaths.
But the wonder of Quezon City is precisely its variety and mutability. A pious president lived on sedate Times Street, not too far from Timog Avenue in its raucous heyday. (And the younger me remembers, with an unrepentant grin, that Manila, Makati, and Pasay had nothing on QC in the nightlife department, back in the day.) Some neighborhoods might verge on the hoity-toity, but few approach the opulence and pretentiousness of the new upper class in Manila’s newer suburbs.
Indeed, if anything, Quezon City is staunchly middle class, my comfort zone, one that stretches from Farmer’s and Ali Mall in Cubao to SM North and Trinoma and the restaurants of Matalino Street and its pedestrian-friendly environs. A perfect Sunday for Beng and me might begin with a morning walk around the UP Academic Oval, a light lunch at Via Mare, then a P250 foot massage at Ton-Ton on V. Luna in mid-afternoon, a half-hour’s browsing through the “new” arrivals at the ukay-ukay next door, an early dinner of chicken mami and siopao in our favorite noodle place in Trinoma, capped by a movie around 7 pm.
The older we get, the less inclined Beng and I are to roam too far from our nest on the UP campus (unless it’s to some exotic destination reachable by budget fare), knowing that, in our corner of QC, everything we need is a 15-to 30-minute drive away: groceries at Rustan’s or Shoppersville, medical check-ups at your choice (or maybe not) of the Lung, Heart, or Kidney Center, certificates of all sorts at the NSO and licenses of all manner at City Hall. And, of course, there’s my workplace-cum-backyard, the University of the Philippines, where I’ll likely stay until they kick me out when I reach mandatory retirement not too long from now.
How I got there is another serendipitous QC story in itself. I’d been working, albeit as a college dropout, at the Manila and then the Makati offices of the National Economic and Development Authority in the late ‘70s when our boss, Gerry Sicat, decided to move our unit to the NEDA office on EDSA, near GMA-7. Being that close to UP, I thought I’d re-enroll and take some units when I could, and I did—and left NEDA to teach in UP.
It was probably just fitting that the person who informed me of my Gawad Parangal was another friend from NEDA days, former Budget Minister Manny Alba, who’s worked for Quezon City for many years now as City Administrator and Senior Adviser to the Mayor. After telling me the happy news, Dr. Alba shared his own reminiscences of UP:
“I note you live on Juan Luna St., UP Campus. So, did I, from 1961 (when the area was still cogonal), until 1983. I was Minister of the Budget for two years then but I left (though I did not want to), because I was feeling guilty paying just about P300 a month and displacing other deserving faculty members.
“I was on leave. In fact, I was on leave for most of the time I was working with the government and it was easy for me to go back to UP after martial law. I was on a status called ‘faculty on government service’ or FOGS (I was one of several original ‘foggies,’ which included Gerry Sicat, Cesar Virata, Jimmy Laya, Tony Aguenza, and OD Corpuz. OD himself concocted the idea of the FOGS, when he was UP President.”
And in my own odd way, that’s what and where I am now—an aging fogey killing time on the fruit farm most people call the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.
Penman for Monday, October 22, 2012
LIKE I mentioned last week, I’m in the US to visit family and to participate at the International Conference on the Philippines (Icophil), which is taking place Oct. 28-30 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
Dealing with all aspects of Philippine Studies, Icophil happens every four years, and it’s been held around the world—mainly in the US and the Philippines, but also in Australia and the Netherlands; the upcoming conference in Michigan will be the ninth. Icophil’s international reach reflects not only the global Filipino diaspora, but also the growing interest and engagement of non-Filipino scholars in Philippine affairs. While most participants still come from the Philippines, a significant number of speakers and panelists come from foreign universities.
Icophil also provides scholars an opportunity to assess the state of Philippine Studies around the world, in a roundtable organized by Prof. Belinda Aquino of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who is Icophil’s founding chair. Convenors for this year’s conference are the eminent scholars Dr. Roger Bresnahan of MSU and Dr. Bernardita Churchill of UP.
Aside from us Filipinos, this meeting will bring together Filipinists from the US, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, France, Russia, Spain, and the Netherlands. By institutional affiliation, the confirmed Filipino participants will include Jose Buenconsejo, Marilyn Canta, and myself (UP Diliman)); Filomeno Aguilar, Jr., Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu, and Lisandro Claudio (Ateneo de Manila); Paul Dumol and Clement Camposano (University of Asia and the Pacific); Raymundo Rovillos (UP Baguio); Teresita Ang See (KAISA); Nick Deocampo (Center for New Cinema); Genevieve L. Asenjo (DLSU); Hope Sabanpan-Yu (University of San Carlos), Kristian Cordero (Ateneo de Naga); and Prisciliano Bauzon (University of Southern Mindanao).
Icophil 2012’s keynote speaker will be an international expert on climate change, Dr. Rodel Lasco, Senior Scientist and Philippine Program Coordinator of the World Agro-Forestry Centre (ICRAF) and Affiliate Professor, UPLB School of Environmental Science and Management. A recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientist Award in 1997, Dr. Lasco has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines.
Trailers for two new and interesting documentaries will be shown: one by MSU Prof. Geri Alumit-Zeldes on the two Filipino nurses who were wrongly convicted for murdering their patients in Ann Arbor, Mich. in the mid-1970s, and another, by filmmaker Sonny Izon, about the “Manilaners”—Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust who found refuge in Manila through the intercession of President Manuel Quezon. Filmmaker Nick Deocampo will also be showing a documentary on American influences on Philippine cinema.
The panel discussions cover a predictably broad range of topics, from indigenous peoples, the Pinoy diaspora, and peace-building to economic relations, modernization, and popular culture (one of my early favorites on the program: “Automats, Supper Clubs, Drive-ins, and Quarantined Carinderias: The Contradictions of Restaurant Culture in Post-War Manila” by Peter Keppy of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation).
I expect to be ruffling a few academic feathers with my chosen topic, which just happens to be one of my recent areas of expertise: “The Commissioned Biography: Confessions of a Hired Gun.” I’ll be speaking less as an academic than a professional writer, and I’ll try to keep it light, but I’ll be dealing with some serious ethical and academic questions raised by the practice of biographical writing from a sympathetic point of view, as opposed to the independent and critical stance expected of the unpaid scholar. Aside from payment for the writer and PR for the subject, can there be anything to be gained from the commissioned biographies that have appeared in recent years on Philippine shelves? Can they be of any service to the academic historian, political scientist, and litterateur? My provisional answer is yes, but I’m going to have to prove my case.
I tacked on the official part of this trip to my annual vacation so it’s not costing UP anything, but I have another personal reason for going to Icophil. I’m a proud graduate of Michigan State’s archrival, the University of Michigan (MFA ’88), but it was MSU (the “other” Michigan) and East Lansing that hosted me for more than two months on my first visit to the US (and my first trip abroad) in 1980. I’d never been away from my home and family for so long, and it was here that my 30-year-plus relationship with America took off. I would even write about that first autumn—about a foray into the yellow forest in my backyard called Sanford Woods—in my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992):
“Sandbar, Sandfar, Sanford. Sanford Woods. In the shock of autumn, the first of my life, I took a walk in Sanford Woods with Estoy. Estoy himself had arrived in the United States just the previous year to take a Ph.D. in Development Economics on a fellowship, and I took the train up to Michigan the first chance I got to leave the conference in New York. I had never stepped into a forest of red and gold before, and for the first few minutes I trod carefully on the layered ground, as though disturbing it would hurtle me back in a swirl of pretty leaves to prison camp. We let ourselves be taken in and covered by that new season: we watched the squirrels shimmy up the trunks, and, coming into a patch of pure, delirious yellow, I persuaded Estoy to pose for a snapshot he could send home to his wife Marie. He stood stiffly against the color, hands in his jacket pockets, and he muttered an oath about the cold, but his grin was true. On the way back we observed how fat the squirrels were. In Manila, Estoy said, they’d be roasting on a spit, if they ever got that big. I said that there probably was a law preventing people from doing that in this country.”
That fellow “Estoy” was based on a real character, a friend who passed away a few years ago, whose life was marked by both blinding brilliance and consuming darkness. I barely told his story in the novel, and it will be a moving experience for me to retrace our steps into those woods, in another October more than three decades after.
More comic is the memory of my first kitchen disasters in that new country: of how I walked miles to the nearest Asian food store, craving food from home, and then eagerly frying a panful of dilis in my dorm room, only to have people hammering on my door, asking where that awful smell was coming from; and of stashing bottles of Coke in the freezer and forgetting about them, to be greeted by a ragged waterfall of black ice upon opening the fridge.
I’ll have a thing or two to say in East Lansing, but I’m really looking forward to more private conversations with the squirrels and sugar maples of Sanford Woods.
A couple of iPhone shots from New York today:
And one from the backyard in Virginia:
ALMOST AS soon as we landed in New York, Beng and I ran off to one of our old haunts, the Sunday flea market on the Upper West Side. These were my two neat finds: a Waterman 412 1/2 PSF fountain pen in silver filigree from 1915 (still a bargain at $150), and a brass inkwell, in dire need of restoration but a pretty piece (at a pretty price–$10!).
Penman for Monday, October 15, 2012
AS YOU read this, Beng and I should be in the US, on a sem-break visit to family (my mother, daughter, and sister, and Beng’s sister). I’ll also be attending and speaking at the International Conference on the Philippines in East Lansing, Mich., about which you’ll hear more from me next week.
This trip’s an annual pilgrimage we all look forward to, despite the sacks of loose change it entails. The two or three weeks Beng and I spend every October in the States virtually guarantees penury at year’s end, but we’ve learned not to mind. For me, the whole point of working my butt off is to save enough so we can buy time together, which is never a waste of money. I’d rather have a trove of happy memories than a hefty savings account, and Beng absolutely agrees, so we’ve been blithely footloose and spendthrift. Curtailed by the fact that we’ve never had enough to be truly extravagant, we’ve had great fun scouring the antique malls of San Diego, feasting on hotdogs in Coney Island, and hunting for bargains in the thrift shops of Virginia.
The eating part of this trip has always been a highlight for me—and you could have seen it in my stocky frame—but this time around, my Stateside folks are in for a surprise. A new Butch is coming to town, less 35 pounds of excess baggage mainly around the waist, and with worn-out walking shoes in his luggage. He won’t be sneaking out to Walgreen’s for a six-pack of Coke or Coors and a gallon of ice cream; ridiculously—if you knew him at all—he’ll be sipping tea and munching carrot sticks, doing his gritty darnedest to resist the lure of the steaks smoking in the backyard.
This visit’s going to be a test of my new resolve—which I manifested a few weeks ago, after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes—to lose weight by eating right and exercising as the doctor ordered.
Like I said then, I knew I had it coming. Writers lead notoriously, pigheadedly unhealthy lifestyles. Not only are we bound to our desks most of the time; we’re tethered, physically and psychologically, to bottles of beer and packs of cigarettes.
T. S. Eliot was a chronic smoker and eventually died of emphysema; so was Dylan Thomas, who also loved booze and drank himself to death (famously telling a friend after a binge: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record”—and it probably was). The death wish appeals to the romantic in us, to our inner Poe (who, doctors now say, may have actually died of rabies and not alcoholism). Here at home, I’ve had writer-friends who openly flaunted that death wish; they lived on the edge, and died there.
Me, my days as a devilish Dylan are over. I used to smoke four packs of Marlboros a day—count them, 80 loaded pistols, with an open pack in my shirt pocket and another one in my pants, the easier to grab a stick when you needed one—until Beng and I decided to quit, cold turkey, about 17 years ago. I haven’t had one puff since, although I still get the occasional craving, and wake up feverishly from a dream (a most pleasurable one, I must admit) of having smoke curl through my parched lungs. I still think it’s one of the smartest decisions I ever made, next to marrying Beng, but quitting smoking came with a downside—I regained my appetite, which morphed into another monster, and somewhere along the way I ballooned from about 160 to nearly 220 pounds.
Also, until recently, I could and did drink up to ten bottles of beer in one sitting, proudly if foolishly remaining amiable and ambulant after the fact. In between beers, I tanked up on Coke—about three cans of the sweet syrup a day, to go with snacks and meals. It’s funny how I could write of other people having death wishes, when I was effectively living through one myself.
Well, I haven’t had a Coke in three months, and only about four or five bottles of beer in that same time. Stranger still, my food cravings are gone. I take a brisk 3-to-6-kilometer walk around the UP Academic Oval once or twice a day, and when my stamina flags, I just try to think of every pound lost as another day saved to spend with Beng and Demi. (The incorrigible techie, I use a free Nike app on my iPhone to track distance traveled by GPS, and to count calories burned.)
I still go on my poker all-nighters, but now I use the time between hands to surf on my phone and keep up with the news and discussions on the diabetes and dieting sites. (My newest discoveries: eating 2,000 calories or less a day will enable weight loss; exercising before breakfast is good, because it burns fat rather than carbs, which your sleeping body nibbled on all night; don’t skip breakfast after working out; you also need carbs for serotonin, which keeps you smiling.) I’ve learned to chew my food, manage my portions, count calories, and read the labels.
I had the deepest, sweetest satisfaction the other day when I sent over six pairs of my khaki pants with 40-inch waists to the neighborhood tailor for alteration, down to a smarter 36. The repairs cost me P450, but I’d gladly pay thousands more if I had to send them back after a few months to be trimmed by another couple of inches.
I know I’m far from being out of the woods, and of how easy it is to backslide. Anyone can lose weight fast—and naturally that became my early obsession—but keeping it off and feeling good about it is going to be the bigger struggle. (You know you’re not alone when you type in a search term in Google and it auto-completes the form three words away from finishing what you had in mind. Some time ago, I punched in “lose beer belly…” and something like “lose beer belly fastest way” came up, as though the machine had read my mind.)
But if America has burgers and Slurpees, it also has miles and miles of wooded walks, and that’s what I’ll be going for this time. Although he meant going to the woods in another sense, Robert Frost might as well have written these lines for me: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep…”
ON ANOTHER note, I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of two friends in the arts. The first was a shocker—Nonoy Buncio, a passionate art collector and a Botong Francisco connoisseur, was shot by unidentified gunmen while on duty as a Quezon City official tasked with clearing up the chronic congestion on Commonwealth Avenue. If they only knew how deeply Nonoy, a committed socialist, loved his country and his people.
The other friend who passed away was celebrated film director Marilou Diaz-Abaya, for whom I had the privilege of writing a script (for the 1994 movie that came to be retitled “Ikalabing-Isang Utos: Mahalin Mo, Asawa Mo,” which I’d somewhat more sedately but perhaps uncommercially called “Sylvia, Susan, Soledad”). Among the many directors I’d worked with, Marilou was the most methodical, approaching every sequence not just with technical but philosophical questions. Years ago, we also worked together on two abortive projects—a docu-drama on the EDSA 1 revolt and a film biography of Joseph Estrada, before he ran for president.
I wish we had enough time to finish everything, but there never is, and that’s why I’m in America, visiting those dearest to me.
Penman for Monday, Oct. 8, 2012
THIS WEDNESDAY, the fraternity I’ve belonged to for over 40 years will be celebrating its first half-century.
I joined Alpha Sigma almost as soon as I stepped into the University of the Philippines in Diliman as a wet-eared freshman in 1970. It was one of the three things I wanted to be a part of in UP, an ambition I’d nurtured over my high school days at Philippine Science—the Philippine Collegian student newspaper, Alpha Sigma, and an activist organization (which turned out to be the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, via the Nationalist Corps).
They were indeed all of one package: I looked up to Alpha Sigma because the Collegian was then being lorded over by fraternity members like Vic Manarang and Tony Tagamolila, both editors in chief, and Gary Olivar, who wrote a column. It seemed to be the frat where all the cool and brainy guys were, but more than that, it also attracted a strong core of dedicated activists—people like the then-imprisoned Nilo Tayag (one of the original founders) and a quiet but intense young fellow named Benny Tiamzon, now reputed to be the supremo of the New People’s Army.
I can imagine how strange this must sound to many readers who think of writers and academics as deskbound people who should have better things to do than gather around a campfire like cavemen, chug beer, and thump their chests, literally and figuratively. Indeed, in this age of Facebook, NGOs, and Rotary Clubs, fraternities can be seen by people as something of an anachronism, a throwback to feudal privilege and the days of Big Men on Campus. Frankly, I can’t blame them. Just about the only thing most of us hear about frats today is when they haze poor, hopeful neophytes to a bloody pulp. And as far as I’m concerned, frats that do that deserve to be treated like the criminals they are—punished in court and summarily outlawed.
I’d be the last to deny that there’s a lot of childish and sometimes fatal stupidity you can associate with this kind of alpha-male bonding. But to be just as honest, at least back in the day when I was a 17-year-old looking up at the Oblation, there were worse choices I could have made than to join up with this happy bunch of nerds and nationalists.
Alpha Sigma’s founders established it in UP in 1962 precisely to go against the grain of traditional fraternities, which seemed to be interested only in beating each other up, in finding cushy jobs for their alumni, and parading their cars around campus. The initials “AS” may have been suggested by the frat’s base in the College of Arts and Sciences, but they soon stood for “Advocates of Scholarship” and “Alay sa Sambayanan.”
Since then, the fraternity has produced a long line of brothers who have distinguished themselves in nearly all fields of endeavor—not just in the usual categories of business and politics, but also in the arts, in engineering, in public health, and, of course, in public service.
To name just a few, they include the likes of Smart Communications founder Doy Vea, sociologist and journalist Randy David, legal scholar and professor Raul Pangalangan, and the late playwright Boy Noriega. Dodo Banzon runs PhilHealth; over in Seattle, Oying Rimon manages the public health portfolio of the Gates Foundation. I could go on and on with this list, but you get the idea.
We have many brods in mainstream politics—Sen. Gringo Honasan, Cong. Miro Quimbo, and former GMA men Mike Defensor and Gary Olivar among the most prominent of them. But the Left can also count Alpha Sigmans among its most revered figures; aside from the aforementioned Nilo Tayag, Tony Tagamolila, and Benny Tiamzon, they include Billy Begg and Joey Calderon who, like Tony, heroically gave up their lives in the fight against the dictatorship.
Like blood brothers, we have differences, disagreements, and debates within the fraternity, which is a healthy thing. If I thought a brod was doing wrong, I’d consider it my duty and indeed the best thing I could do for him to tell him so. I’ve never believed in a culture of silence and secrets, nor in blind obedience. I do appreciate the opportunity that the fraternity has provided for people from opposite sides of the political fence to meet and to argue civilly without fear of being bashed or punished—something I wish we could do more of in our society at large. I can’t forget that on the run during martial law, many of us found shelter and succor with the brods.
And for the young men who come to UP like I did many years ago and who find their way into our brotherhood, I have a standard set of messages waiting for them. Build up both your mental and physical strength, I say, but eschew violence—it has no place in the university. Value scholarship and service; develop your talents, so you can serve the people better. Be an example for others to emulate.
When a resident brod enrolls in my class and introduces himself to me, I tell him that I will expect more from him than from his classmates, and that he had better be ready to recite on demand, because I don’t ever want it said that I gave a brod a free cut or went easy on him. That’s how we can maintain high standards of behavior and performance within the fraternity, and guarantee that it won’t decline into irrelevance.
If you’re an Alpha Sigman and would like to reconnect with 50 years of a glorious tradition of excellence and service, join us in our grand reunion this Wednesday evening, at the Shangri-La Makati. Please email me for more details.
Pinoy Penman 3.0 