Pinoy Penman

Manileño for December 2008


A YEAR ago, I had the great fortune of having my then-unpublished novel, Soledad’s Sister, make the short list of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, given out in Hong Kong by same global group that sponsors what’s now known as the Man Booker Prize. That short list of five—which included novels from Hong Kong, Myanmar, India, and China—was culled from a long list of 23 semi-finalists that emerged from 243 entries from all over Asia.

This year, four Filipino writers made it to the long list: Ian Casocot, Lakambini Sitoy, Miguel Syjuco, and Alfred Yuson. Two of them—Syjuco and Yuson—then qualified for the short list. The winner was to be announced in Hong Kong on November 13, but win or lose, we can be proud of the fact that—however belatedly—Filipino writing is beginning to be noticed among Asia’s literatures in English.

Of course, Filipinos have been writing in English for over a century, and a number of them—from Carlos Bulosan, NVM Gonzalez, and Jose Garcia Villa to Jessica Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, and even younger writers such as R. Zamora Linmark and Brian Ascalon Roley—have deservedly made a mark in the United States. But we haven’t really been seen as coming from the Philippines except through the US, so that new venues such as the Man Asian help emphasize our Asian-ness and the fact that not everything we do or say has to have to do with America.

Except for “Krip” Yuson and, to some extent, “Bing” Sitoy (already an accomplished short story writer), these Filipino writers are new, young, and first-time novelists. I’ve often observed how we Pinoys—acknowledged masters of short fiction—should write more novels to gain notice on the global stage, but that’s another column. At least we now have four new brilliant novels to look forward to, and we can only hope they make it across the ocean to contribute to literary discussions not only in the US but in Europe and other continents as well. (Ironically, as I’ve discovered, these international distinctions also help in getting our own countrymen back home—who’s sooner pick up another opus by Dan Brown or Danielle Steele—to take notice and to read us.)

Soledad’s Sister has opened doors for me and for other Filipino writers. It’s gotten me a literary agent (something new for Manila-based Filipinos), who’s secured Italian publishing rights (another novelty). The novel’s taken me to the Sydney Writers Festival, and I’ll be in New York next April to take part in the World Voices Festival. Whatever happens in the Man Asian, these new novels and the excitement they’re generating in the Asian literary scene will help make sure that more Filipino voices will be heard abroad.

Here’s a sampler of excerpts from Alfred Yuson’s The Music Child (a novel-length elaboration of an earlier short story) and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (which, I gather, is set in New York):

Yuson: "My boy hears a tune once and repeats it flawlessly," Don Jose said proudly. "Hearing a passage, he can bring it to its proper conclusion. When I taught him to read words on paper, he was only four, and he lost no time in showing me that he could read notes as well. He would rummage through all the music sheets I kept inside the piano seat, and burst out in Italian, getting the accent right, too. He'd turn a score by Wagner upside down and make a sport of it, as a boy would the most terrible of toys. It was frightful. It still is."

"Bats flapped noisily past the roof and swooshed around the bamboo grove. The night wind lofted across the valley, while the cornfields hissed before us.

“Not only is he a great mimic, repeating exactly what he hears. He takes it further where he will, adding his own touches of whimsy, curing it here and there to suit his taste for the game, his own special game. Then too he makes up his own music, chanting epic tales of courage and gallantry, or of how two mountains coupled and gave birth to a new forest. Indeed he was born to sing. Yet never has he sung originally of love. I remember that day his mother died. The midwife almost dropped him in fright. It was as if he was born to sing of death.”

Syjuco: “There was this time, when I was a young boy, when my father was consumed by jealousy.” I poured Crispin a glass of sherry; he looked up at me, nodded, but continued speaking. “My father, see, he coveted the zoo my uncle had on his farm. He decided to get an animal of his own, but for Manila, since that was where he spent all his time.” Crispin paused, stared at the typewriter in front of him. I had on my jacket and backpack. I cradled the bundle of outgoing mail in my other arm. But Crispin seemed eager to speak about things of which he rarely spoke. “I suspect Papa wanted to impress my mother, as well as coax her into spending more time with him there than in Bacolod. Of course, my father didn’t know anything about animals. He just liked having them. He must have thought he could hire people. As you do. He wanted a tiger. Somehow he got one. I don’t know how, I was too young. I remember he kept it in a cage by the swimming pool, near the lanai where we had our meals when we ate outdoors. Actually, I think the tiger was there in Forbes because it was being transported to our farm. I’m not sure anymore.”

Manileño for November 2008


BY THE time this piece gets published, Americans will have chosen their new President, and I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to whom that’s going to be. At this point, it looks like a very close call, and like many Filipinos I’ll be looking forward to the Election Night tallies with great excitement.

It may seem like we Pinoys have no proper business being involved in American politics, but we do. When America sneezes, we catch a cold; whatever happens in Washington, Wall Street, or Wasilla bears an impact on Manila, Makati, and Mangatarem.

But more than most Filipinos, there are political and cultural junkies like me who’ve made it out profession to study America and the American way of doing things, and there’s nothing like a presidential election to showcase the best (and worst) of America before the rest of the world.

I would’ve wanted to witness this particular election—I have a US visit scheduled for October—but, as I’ve told some American friends in my version of a bad joke, the two times I was around in the US for an election, two Republicans emerged winners (Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder), so I plan on staying away this time.

That tells you where my preferences incline, and I’ve made no bones about them. But this year, I’m looking at the American polls with a more personal interest. My daughter Demi married into a staunchly Republican family in San Diego, with deep ties to the US Navy and military service. They’re solid, upstanding American citizens who maintain their connections to Bicol, who read up on Filipino history and culture, and who participate actively in the political and social life of both countries.

Demi’s husband Jerry works in the defense industry, and her brother-in-law Ray is a reserve naval officer, a Republican ideologue and party activist with whom I’ve had the most interesting, the most engaged, and yet also the most civil discussions about what ails our societies.

I’m very proud of Demi’s in-laws and what they’ve achieved in American society, and I hope they know it. At the same time—even as I realize and respect the fact that my only child has married into a new family, society, and nation—the incorrigible liberal in me hopes that Demi will remember and retain her orientation as an alumna of the University of the Philippines, mindful of the need for social engagement and for an abiding sympathy for the poor and oppressed. I don’t tell her anything—at this point, I probably shouldn’t—so I’ll just rely shamelessly on her being her daddy’s girl to see her way through to pulling the right lever when the time comes. (Actually, she’s a very bright and also stubborn girl, so she’ll do what she thinks is right, no matter what anyone says.)

So never mind what I want. One of the things that American elections—as flawed as they may be in some ways—remind us Filipinos of is that parties exist, and that parties matter. I can hear a howl of protest against that assertion from any number of Americans who’ll say that you can’t tell Democrats and Republicans apart any longer, and that it’s time for third choices to emerge, but I think most Americans will still agree that these two parties represent fundamental differences in ideology if not in political practice, just as the Conservatives and Labourites do in the UK.

And that reminds us Pinoys of how far we have to go to mature, politically, as a national electorate in need of clearly defined options. Yes, we do have political parties. Remember the Nacionalistas and Liberals? They’re still there—but it’s hard to tell what they stand for, whose side they’re on, and on whose side they’ll be. (The Liberal Party, for example, is split between the so-called oppositionist Drilon and the pro-GMA Atienza factions.) There’s Danding Cojuangco’s Nationalist People’s Coalition, the old Ramos-De Venecia Lakas, the nascent Arroyo Kampi, Erap Estrada’s PMP, Marcos’s vestigial KBL, and a smattering of other political flavors, mostly varieties of vanilla.

I’m sure they’ll all vehemently disagree, but for most Pinoys on the street, none of these parties stands for anything more than the presidential ambitions of their standard-bearers and those just praying for the frontrunners to trip and fall. With over a dozen politicians openly declaring themselves available for the presidency in 2010 (not to mention the incumbent), there might not be enough parties to go around, although Pinoy politicos have been known to create their own parties and bring their own seats (“nagbubuhat ng sariling bangko,” you might say) to this game of musical chairs.

And why not? Our parties are flags of convenience, easily grabbed, discarded, traded. The only advantage seen in one party over the other is its war chest and its machinery, translatable not only into how many warm bodies a party can deliver to the voting booth on Election Day, but also how many of those votes actually get counted in a candidate’s favor, whether they were cast or not.

All of which is a sorry commentary on how little ideas count in a society still basically run by a few families with money and power. It isn’t all bad—yes, civil society has become more assertive, and yes, party-list groups have arisen to redefine a little corner of Congress—but any American who wants to complain about how screwed up their political system is should come to the Philippines for a sobering lesson in feudal civics.

Manileño for October 2008


If there was any doubt that the Philippines is one of the world’s texting capitals, a recent report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer just put that to rest. The astounding figure of 1.2 billion texts a day—not too far from giant China’s 1.39 billion—came up for the Philippines, the combination of around 600 million text messages on Smart, 500 million on Globe, and 100 million on Sun.

That breaks down to an average of 13.3 texts a day for our 90 million people, which is nowhere near the actual figure, since not all Filipinos have cellphones and one-tenth of our population lives abroad. I’d think that 20 texts a day per cellphone-toting Pinoy would be pretty safe—or scary, depending on how you look at the phenomenon.

Texters or not, we Filipinos have come to understand the power of SMS. We like to remember when a torrent of text messages helped bring Joseph Estrada down in 2001, and also threatened to topple his successor four years later. Marketers have ridden on this revolution, selling us anything from cash loans to high-rise apartments and, just a tad more subtly, a chance to chat with the stars (or more likely their alter egos).

But I suspect that we text not so much in the hope of bringing governments down or effecting global change.

Most of those 1.2 billion messages, to be sure, say little more than “K” or “Wru.” It’s the stuff of daily life, the seemingly inconsequential chatter that surely makes up the bulk of people’s conversations and yields our telcos their tidiest profits. And I think that that’s the way we like it. It’s the sweet if often meaningless nothings that keep us bonded to one another, like pressing palms across the digital void.

The fact is, we don’t want anything too dramatic, especially bad news, to come over SMS. We’d rather be called and told about a loved one’s passing or a friend’s accident. I’ve often observed that we Filipinos are an aural, oral people—we like to talk, and nothing is finally true unless and until it’s spoken and heard. (Note, for example, how our movie villains never simply shoot or stab somebody; they need to preface the dastardly deed with a lengthy speech explaining their motives—“Niyurakan mo ang dangal ng aming angkan, etc.”—followed by the victim’s own spirited defense of his act, and a plea for mercy.)

Whatever we say on SMS, with over a billion messages winging through the air on any given day, texting has become a major economic and political factor in Filipino life, beyond its social utility. And I don’t have the figures on hand to back me up, but I can bet that most of those billion messages are sent not by the rich calling out to their drivers and hairdressers, but by the poor buying the cheap comfort and amusement of a reassurance across the void: “Musta na u?” “K lang!”

This was why President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo drew the most applause in her recent State of the Nation Address when she announced a 50-centavo (effectively a 50 percent) cut in the cost of sending a text message—only to earn jeers afterwards when it came to light that the cut was a three-month promo the telcos had agreed on rolling out.

Politicians who have proposed tapping into the texting kitty—such as Sen. Richard Gordon, who wants texting taxed in lieu of a value-added tax (VAT) on power, liquefied petroleum gas and processed food—have been rewarded with contempt. Like the price of rice, the price of an SMS message has become something of a line in the political sand, a sacred trust not to be trifled with.

The one place where texting has raised abnormal temperatures is education—not just because of the pervasiveness of cellphones in the Filipino classroom (and to that let’s add restaurants, concert halls, and movie theaters), but because of the inroads of text language into the kids’ schoolwork. Parents loudly and roundly complain that their children can’t spell—no great surprise, since their children can’t and don’t read beyond the text messages they send and get (and conveniently, everyone forgets about the role of parents in encouraging their kids to read with interesting books, papers, and magazines around the house).

Texting and text language aren’t going away anytime soon; if anything, the numbers can only rise, so we might as well get used to the emergence of a texting culture, with both its pluses and minuses. It’s changing our habits (foreigners and visitors invariably take it as rudeness when we text in the middle of a conversation), but it’s also changing our mindsets, towards greater expressiveness and, in moments of crisis, perhaps even towards communities of thought.

It’s tempting to suggest that the only ones who profit from texting are the telcos, which may very well be true. But to millions of Pinoys, a peso a text (or, over the promo period, half that) can’t be too high a price to pay for the relief of knowing that, well, they are not alone, and that some of them are loved—at least, till text do they part.

Manileño for September 2008


I SAW a yellowing old magazine around the house the other day and started flipping through its pages. Among the articles that caught my eye was an editorial titled “Food Shortage, a National Disgrace.” Here’s what it said, in part:

“Food shortage in tropical Philippines is a national disgrace. Every Filipino should feel a deep sense of shame that the country should need to import rice from abroad. This is a rice producing country and it ought to produce all the rice needed by its population. The Bureau of Plant Industry and other entities concerned should not claim success until this fertile land of ours produces all the rice needed here and a considerable excess. The Philippines should be a rice-exporting country and not a rice-importing country.”

Now that’s something that could have appeared in a Manila newspaper anytime last June or July, at the peak of the rice crisis gripping not just the Philippines but much of the world—except that the magazine I was reading was The Philippine Forum, issue of September 1936, edited by Camilo Osias (whom many oldtimers will remember for the Philippine Readers series). I have no idea how that copy got into my library, although I’m an inveterate pack rat and will pick up anything older than I am, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

What did surprise me was the fact that not much seemed to have changed in these Philippine Islands, after seven decades, with a World War, martial law, and at least two EDSAs in between.

Remember the brouhaha that attended the aborted sale of the Manila Hotel to a Malaysian group a decade ago, with no less than the Supreme Court stepping in on the grounds that it was part of the national patrimony? The historic hotel ended up with Chinese-Filipino publishing magnate Emilio Yap, under whose management the hotel has gone, uhm, a bit threadbare. Maybe they should’ve sold it to professional hoteliers when they could, back in 1936 when, the Forum reported, “The Manila Hotel, owned by the Manila Railroad Company, a quasi-government firm, is for sale if a satisfactory price is offered for it, President Quezon announced recently. He considers P5,000,000 as a fair price for the hotel in its present condition. The hotel will cost more after the additional wing now being constructed is finished. The disposal of the hotel is said to be in line with the government policy to get its share in the lucrative tourist business of the world.”

And what about our people’s pleadings for a decent minimum wage (now pegged at around P360 a day for non-agricultural workers in Metro Manila—still way too low, according to labor activists)? Quezon dealt with the same issue: “In line with his announced policy to improve the lot of the masses, President Quezon recently issued an executive order declaring a minimum wage of P30.00 a month for all government employees…. The labor leaders are urging the President that further measures be adopted fixing a minumum wage in private firms and companies.

I’m writing this piece on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the results of which we all eagerly await, but will probably not be too surprised by. When the Forum was published in 1936, the Berlin Olympics had just finished, from which the Philippines emerged with a solitary medal—a bronze, won by Miguel White in the men’s 400-m hurdles. But the basketball team—which included such stars as Jacinto “Jumping Jack” Ciria Cruz and future Senator Ambrosio Padilla—posted a remarkable 4-1 record and finished fifth overall in what would be our best Olympic showing ever in that sport, losing only to the Americans, the eventual champions. (Oddly enough, Canada won second place with a 3-1 record, Poland fourth with 1-2, and Mexico—which both the US and the Philippines defeated—took third.)

Still, the Forum thundered: “That we have not shown up better and captured more points with old Olympic men, like Toribio and Ildefonso, point winners in the 1928 and 1932 Games, is a great lesson to us as a people. It should show us our place in the world of athletics and how much more progress we have to make. It is a dangerous frame of mind to be provincial and to think that we are so good, that we do not need much further exertion. This should be shattered by consideration of conditions in other parts of the world and what is true in athletics is true in other fields of human activity. It cannot be too often reiterated that the Philippines as a nation is now more than ever duty bound to judge Philippine things in comparison with standards in other parts of the world. We must continually progress and must have the national discipline and national perseverance to keep on progressing, if we are to approximate world standards.”

And how’s this for dark comedy? “In Manila and in the provinces, thievery is becoming more common. Mrs. Torres, wife of the Chief of Police of Manila, was victimized in a church of all places. She was attending Mass at San Marcelino celebrating her birthday when P7.00 in cash, an P800.00 check, two gold mine certificates and other personal belongings disappeared from her bag.”

Just move the decimal points, folks, and you’ll agree how all this feels like the Philippines, ca. 2008.

Manileño for August 2008


THIS MONTH, I’m going to step back into my personal commemoration of the Centennial of the University of the Philippines, which I briefly interrupted with a report on my recent encounter with Sydney’s Pinoys. By the time this piece appears, UP will have held its big birthday party for alumni at the Araneta Coliseum (last June 21st), but the Centennial celebrations will continue until December, given the number of milestones being marked by UP’s many constituent universities and units. A new generation of students has had that old fight song, “Push On, UP,” coming out of its ears.

The Centennial has provided a great occasion for everyone to be nicer to the university—including the administration (with which UP has always historically been at loggerheads, whoever sits in Malacañang), which committed P100 million as a birthday bonus, and agreed to provide P100 million more each year for the next five years to develop a National Science Complex. Yet another P100 million has been advanced by Ayala Land, Inc. for its lease on UP’s 37.5-hectare Commonwealth Avenue property, which Ayala is developing into the National Science and Technology Park. (Anyone who passes that area, in the vicinity of the Arboretum and the landmark “eggshell” nuclear reactor, won’t fail to be impressed by the neighborhood’s rapid transformation from a magnet for squatters to a 21st-century technopark.)

And UP’s alumni, of course—including many from the United States and other countries—have risen to the challenge, pledging millions of pesos in donations to the university.

This is all well and good, and very badly needed. It’s almost sheer luck that 2008 happened to be UP’s centenary; otherwise, precious little would have happened, and few would have felt any sense of urgency about pushing UP on to truly world-class status.

In that mission, we have a long way to go. Amid all the hoopla came some sobering news: the most recent global survey of Top 500 Universities undertaken by The Times Higher Education Supplement and the consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds (THES-QS) had UP dropping from 398th spot in 2007 from 299th in 2006. Ateneo managed to climb up to 451st from 484th place, but on the other hand, La Salle and UST fell out of the Top 500, with rankings of 519th and 535th places, respectively.

We can’t even plead that we’re just another Southeast Asian country trying to muddle through one crisis after another, because our similarly-afflicted neighbors—such as Thailand and Indonesia—are way up there on the same list (Chulalongkorn came out 299th, and three Indonesian universities were all higher than UP).

Rankings like these look into factors such as the number of PhDs (and even Nobel Prize winners) on a university’s roster, its research capabilities, the salaries it can afford its staff, and the employability of its graduates. Given these, it’s not too hard to see why even UP would have a hard time catching up with even much smaller but better-funded American universities.

We can argue—as Ateneo officials have—that universities in countries like ours are designed to do more than make money, or make its graduates rich; we like to think that we produce alumni who “serve the people” or who act as “men for others.” That still doesn’t make up for the fact that we’re way behind in the kind of infrastructure and the progressive thinking that world-class institutions depend on. UP, for example, has been weaned too long on a “Subsidize me!” diet, which continues to drive some professors and students to insist that UP do nothing to generate its own income and meet its own needs.

Thankfully, there’s hope. After more than a decade of spirited albeit often frustrating lobbying, UP finally got its new Charter passed by both chambers of Congress, and signed by President Arroyo last April 29. The Charter revisions were long overdue, and address concerns that have to do with UP’s financial and political autonomy. (I remember how—when I served some years ago as UP’s Vice President for Public Affairs—our efforts to get these reforms passed were constantly thwarted by petty politicking, malice, and plain indifference on the part of a few lawmakers. UP flexed its political muscle, helping to give the worst of these politicos the boot.)

According to Vice President for Legal Affairs Marvic Leonen (now UP’s law dean), the new Charter’s most significant provisions include: - the recognition of UP as the country’s National University;

- the redefinition of UP as a University System, thus acknowledging the role of the chancellors as administrative leaders, and of the university council as the highest policy governing body in each constituent university;

- the granting of greater flexibility to enable UP to offer a more competitive compensation package;

- the granting of an additional 100 million pesos each year for the next five years, over and above UP’s regular budget and the budgets for other existing programs and projects, etc.;

- the exemption of academic awards from taxes;

-the exemption of equipment to be used for academic purposes from customs duties and other charges;

- the reduction in the number of the members of the Board of Regents from 12 to 11 and the inclusion of a staff regent;

- the granting of greater flexibility in the development of UP’s assets;

- the inclusion of provisions that allow UP the benefit of advice from private advisory groups in the management of our funds; and

- the affirmation of democratic access and governance.

The rest is up to us, and if these reforms don’t help us get up from 398th spot, I don’t know what will.

Manileño for July 2008


I PROMISED last month that I’d devote a couple of columns to nostalgia pieces that would aptly celebrate the ongoing Centennial of the University of the Philippines, but let me just squeeze this in before I forget what happened a couple of weeks ago. (That’s the nature of aging memory—we remember events from a century back, but forget about last year.)

I was down in Sydney, Australia, to attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival—one of the world’s largest literary festivals, highlighted by such big names as the British novelist Jeanette Winterson and Pulitzer prizewinner Junot Diaz (Santo Domingo-born but now based on the East Coast). I was there to help raise the profile of Philippine literature, a formidable effort to which Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis and ANU-trained Jose Wendell Capili also contributed. We all had new books to show around: Wendell was launching a new Filipino-Australian anthology he co-edited titled Salu-Salo; Merlinda’s second novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, was also out, published by Australia’s Murdoch Press; and I had packed 20 copies of the fresh-off-the-press first edition of my own Soledad’s Sister.

It was good for all of us to be there, because I’ve always felt that we Filipino writers don’t promote ourselves aggressively enough, at least where we are, and certainly not to the world at large. There are some understandable reasons for that—Philippine publishers, for example, don’t have promotions budgets—but we’re not entirely helpless, either. Joining and figuring in international events—workshops, festivals, competitions, residencies, conferences—is one way of getting ourselves and our literature known, for as long as we can find sponsors for the travel, board, and lodging.

I was especially happy to be back in Australia—the first and last time I was there was more than a decade ago, for another literary festival—not only because of Sydney’s spectacular beauty, but also because visits to other places such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK give me other insights into how our people fare in environments other than America. (Of course, we’ve gone much farther than these Anglophone countries, but I’m paying special attention to them because the language was supposed to ease our entry into these cultures.)

Indeed, one of the things I most enjoyed about Sydney was the company of the many Filipinos who came out to hear and meet me. Quite a few came to attend my sessions (with the Indian-Canadian novelist David Davidar and the Singaporean poet Felix Cheung, and also with the star of the show, Junot Diaz himself, as warm and as funny as a Latino can be), but I also went out to meet them in two public libraries in the suburbs. I read a few light pieces about Filipino culture, so we could all laugh easily at ourselves, and then we had a spirited Q&A.

In situations like these, you can almost predict what people will say and ask. “What’s it like back home?” “What can you say about the state of English in the Philippines?” “Why can’t we unite?” (I had the strangest moment during that first trip to Australia, when, after I’d given a fairly formal lecture at a university on Philippine culture and politics, a very old Filipino immigrant stood up to ask a question that had been bothering him for ages: “What’s the Filipina like today?” It was a page right out of Bienvenido Santos’ “Scent of Apples,” and I felt the hair on my arms prickle.)

The “unity” question always comes up whether in America or in Australia, and I suspect it isn’t just because Pinoys back home seem like a fractious lot if all you do is read the papers, but also because Pinoys abroad have their own scores to settle among themselves. Sometimes—especially when I sense that a ball is being bounced off me as a guest speaker, so that it can hit somebody else in the audience—I’m tempted to respond by saying “Why should the 80 million of us back home unite behind the President (or whoever), when the 300 of you here in (provide the name of the city or township) can’t even agree on your Independence Day program?” But my better sense takes over, and I remind myself to remind my compatriots that surely there are more things that unite than divide us, and that those commonalities are far worthier of our attention.

Thankfully the members of my Fil-Australian audiences weren’t at each other’s throats, and we had a jolly time talking about even disturbing topics (at least for me), such as why Filipino authors don’t sell as many books as their foreign counterparts. (Short answer: because Filipinos don’t buy as many books as their foreign counterparts.) There is, of course, a long and complicated answer to that, having to do with the Pinoy’s general lack of disposable income, his or her propensity to buy a book by Tom Clancy or Danielle Steele, and the poor packaging and marketing of our literary products. (And here’s every Filipino author’s fevered fantasy: “There are almost 3 million Filipinos in the United States, many of them doing quite well…. Now, if only 5,000 of them bought my book….”)

I was happy enough to sell all 20 copies of my new novel in Sydney, many of them to non-Filipinos, but at the end of it all I wasn’t sure if I was happier that my countrymen turned out to welcome me so warmly, or that a Filipino voice had been heard by others in that glorious babel of literary tongues. I don’t suppose it really mattered. If what an international literary festival does is to bring a writer closer to his own people, then it’s a great success in my book.

Manileño for June 2008


FOR THE next couple of issues, in honor of the Centennial of the University of the Philippines, I’m going to focus on little-known but interesting vignettes from a century of that university’s campus life, hoping to provoke some happy memories in the minds of thousands of UP alumni and their families among Filipinas readers in America and elsewhere.


OVER IN a tree-lined corner of Quezon City that’s sometimes been called the “Diliman Republic,” the University of the Philippines—UP, the country’s premier state university—is celebrating its 100th year as loudly as possible, with fireworks, street parades, concerts, and other special events spread out all through 2008.

And why not? Few universities, at least in this part of the world, can claim a hundred years of a proud heritage. Pride is something UP has always had in spades since its creation by the American colonial government in 1908. Patterned after the best of American universities then, UP has produced many of the Philippines’ most outstanding leaders in public service, business, the arts and sciences, and the professions. A staunchly secular institution, it has also acquired a formidable reputation for independence and militancy, as a constant thorn in the side of government and anything representing tradition and authority.

But it wasn’t always so, and it wasn’t all books and barricades. Over the past century, there’s been a whole lot of lovin’ goin’ on, to mix up two ‘60s songs, at State U—not just in Diliman, but in the university’s many other campuses (now numbering seven) all around the country. A yet-unpublished history of the university—put together by a team of some of UP’s best writers and researchers—gives glimpses into another meaning of “society” in UP, before the word acquired an altogether serious mien (as in Philippine Society and Revolution, the blueprint for revolution alleged to have been authored by a former English instructor at UP in the early ‘70s).

Before the War, when UP had its home in Padre Faura in the heart of old Manila, the campus’s closeness to the seafront and to the city’s biggest park should have proved conducive to smooching among the scholars. But as smart as these kids were, they quickly realized that the same results could be achieved without having to go too far; the “botanical garden on the third floor of Rizal Hall, the Little Theater, the porches and dark corridors of the library, the University Hall and Rizal Hall” were all identified in a Free Press article by a sophomore reporter for the Collegian, the student paper, as the venues of choice for couples seeking, uhm, freedom of amatory expression. An administrative order had been issued not to light these nooks as a way of cutting costs—a bane to some, and a blessing to others.

“Could the walls but speak,” the whistleblower whispered, “they would tell tales of many romantic escapades of young men and women.” (Himself only 17 at that point—perhaps a bit too young to fully appreciate his subject—this reporter, Leopoldo Yabes, would move on to become one of UP’s foremost literary scholars.) The report—following a presumably even saucier, anonymously written Collegian piece titled “Confessions of a UP Coed”—shook the university, raising renewed questions about the wisdom of the coeducational system, which UP President Rafael Palma staunchly and staidly defended for its “mutual respect born of the equality in intellectual capacity of one or the other.”

At the agricultural campus in Los Baños, the dean imposed a rule banning boys and girls from walking together at night. Back in Manila, the women’s dormitories resorted to logbooks, 9 pm curfews, a five-minute limit on phone calls, and chaperones; the girls could go out only to school functions—and, of course, to church.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were two well-known guardians of UP morality: the Dean of Women Ursula Uichanco-Clemente, and her successor, Salud Rafols. Uichanco-Clemente would become famous for her “one-foot rule”, so-named because it described the minimum distance that the dean expected men and women to maintain between their bodies at their tea dances. Miss Rafols would actually wield a foot-long ruler to make sure this decorous distance was maintained on the dance floor, driving harried couples to find “some remote corner” where they could hold “each other tightly with a vengeance.”

By the time we entered the university in 1970, something had definitely changed in the sexual and social atmosphere. The academe had felt the shudders of the Sexual Revolution (on top of other revolutions of the ‘60s—green, red, and psychedelic); performers had bared all onstage in a landmark production of “Hair”, and even ex-colegialas were mouthing “free love” like they meant it, and some of them did.

Just a few years earlier, in high school, some of us had amused ourselves by throwing pebbles at the coosome twosomes who inhabited the UP Lagoon past sunset, to break up the fun—little knowing that, before too long, we ourselves would become the subject of less than scholarly scrutiny in the lagoon, behind the Library, and in the half-dozen other prime spots on campus that Professor Yabes and Dean Clemente would have been shocked to find being employed for distinctly non-academic research.

But—as a refreshingly secular haven in a country of convent schools—UP wasn’t going to be left behind in the pursuit of happiness, its Yabeses and Clementes notwithstanding.

Manileño for May 2008


MY WIFE and I took a break a couple of weeks ago; we’d been planning to go to Batanes, which neither of us had visited, only to discover that flights were rare, accommodations chancy, and tour packages more expensive than if we’d gone to Hong Kong. So we went to Hong Kong instead, after making arrangements online with a tour operator.

Granted, Hong Kong and Batanes aren’t nearly the same thing, and won’t provide the same experience; I have a suspicion that the inner photographer and poet in me would have found Batanes much more restful. But if you can’t get to Eden, or can’t afford it, then Hong Kong can’t do too badly for second choice. It’s cheap, accessible, a shopper’s paradise across the entire range of budgets from princely to pauperish—and, as Beng and I began to appreciate—it’s getting to be quite pretty in certain spots, and certainly a whole lot cleaner than Metropolitan Manila, despite Metro administrator Bayani Fernando’s best efforts.

We’d both been to Hong Kong many times before, from back in the days when landing at Kai Tak meant you survived to finish the rest of your tour, so we knew what to expect and what to look for. My most recent visits to Hong Kong had been on business, which meant hotels and convention centers. But having nothing on our schedule this time (and not having much moolah to blow) than walking, eating, and sleeping, we saw a Hong Kong we’d previously neglected: the one with a park and bird sanctuary in the middle of Kowloon, the one with a view of lush green islands and rocky cliffs, the one with good cheap food on nearly every streetcorner, as well as the one clearly on its way to epitomizing, like Singapore, the 21st-century Asian metropolis.

And, as happens every time I take a trip to the First World and its fringes, I wondered again why we couldn’t be like this. This time, it was actually Beng who posed the question, marveling at the elegant suspension bridge that snaked from Lantau Island to Kowloon and at the tall, brand-new housing estates decking the hillsides. “Why can’t we have these back home?’ (My own measure of the difference between First and Third Worlds is decidedly more pedestrian: I call it the fit-and-finish test, which I apply to the infrastructure. Just look at how straight the concrete lines are, how flat and even the asphalt, in places like Germany and even Malaysia. Many of our buildings and bridges still look and feel like they’d been slapped up by masons battling hangovers, with the concrete bulging here and dimpling there. Our overpriced roads look great on Day One; give them a few months, and they begin to buckle. And here’s another thing: all around Manila, the skyline looks like a spider’s web, from all the wires—many of them illegal connections—we still can’t put underground.)

My first impulse—thinking as well of Singapore—was to tell Beng that it may have had something to do with the Confucian Chinese respect for authority; what the boss says, people follow. But much of this development didn’t even happen under Beijing; if anything, the rest of China from Shanghai to Kunming is going the way of Hong Kong. Was it British colonial rule? Perhaps, to some extent—but there are Commonwealth countries that look (and are run) like dumps compared even to us.

There could be an easy and simple answer out there, but I don’t know it. Still, here’s another suspicion: Hong Kong and Singapore have both worked overtime to stamp out corruption, to ensure a level playing field and assure investors of a worry-free climate. Back in 1996, for example, Singapore blacklisted five international companies for employing “consultants” to bribe public officials. Singapore didn’t buy the companies’ excuse that they didn’t know what their consultants were doing—nor the oft-raised justification that some level of corruption is tolerable if you want to bring in jobs.

In Hong Kong, an Independent Commission Against Corruption, established in 1974 under the British, began by cleaning up the police force, and has since gone on to investigate cases of election-related corruption, unexplained wealth, conflicts of interest, misuse of public funds, favoritism, and cronyism, among other things. The ICAC has taken on cases involving substandard schoolbuildings and illegal stock trading, bagging such big fish as a deputy director in what’s now known as the Department of Justice. When the new airport began to rise in Lantau, the ICAC was there to make sure no monkey business took place on the side.

Now, why are many of these words and phrases strangely familiar? “Unexplained wealth… election-related corruption… cronyism… new airport!” We have them all right at home in the Philippines—heck, we even have a slew of commissions and task forces against graft and corruption—but something big is definitely missing. You tell me what.

In 2005, Hong Kong’s former chief graftbuster, Tony Kwok, came over to Manila on the invitation of President Arroyo to see what he could do to clean out the stables. He was hopeful when he came. “If you really want to fight corruption, you can do it,” he was quoted as saying. “It can be done but only if you really want to do it. It's a matter of political will. We did it in Hong Kong and it can be done elsewhere.”

And then a series of scandals, including the $329-million NBN-ZTE scam, blew up, for which not one person has been held to account. And where’s Tony Kwok now? Maybe back in Hong Kong—flying out of the old NAIA rather than the mothballed, graft-infested Terminal 3—enjoying the lemon chicken in Aberdeen. I wish I could join him.

Manileño for April 2008


AS EVERY Filipino in America knows by now, the Philippines has been caught in the grip of a scandal implicating President Arroyo and her husband Mike, the former chairman of the Commission on Elections Ben Abalos, and several other government officials and business leaders. The Senate hearings on the aborted $329-million National Broadband Network (NBN)-ZTE Corp. deal have absorbed the nation by offering more drama and more soundbites than a telenovela, and—as of this writing in mid-March—there’s no end in sight to the flow of nasty revelations from the Senate floor, with new witnesses coming out of the woodwork (or, from Malacañang’s view, from the opposition’s demolition machine).

I won’t belabor Filipinas readers with the particulars of the scandal, which should have been well covered by the Filipino-American media. The saucier details are all over the Internet and on SMS—not all of which, one suspects, can possibly be true. Indeed, getting at the elusive truth has been the most obsessive, the most important, and also the most difficult aspect of this whole affair.

The Palace has circled the wagons, and has imposed a gag order on government officials to prevent them from testifying (the formal restrictions were recently lifted, but “executive privilege” can still be cited as a reason to say nothing). On the other hand, the search for truth isn’t being helped any by opposition politicians all too obviously riding on the wave of anti-administration sentiment to promote their own political fortunes. Both ways, the public feels used and abused, mistrustful of both the poobahs in power and—after two EDSAs that didn’t seem to change much—of those presuming to replace them.

So what’s a Pinoy like me—a veteran of both EDSAs, and even a speechwriter for Mrs. Arroyo and Mrs. Aquino in the case of the second EDSA—to think and do in this situation? The Palace line has been to dismiss the NBN-ZTE inquiry as a political sideshow, a distraction from the administration’s prime mandate of turning the economy around and creating jobs for Filipinos. At any rate, says Malacañang, the contract (which even GMA acknowledged to be flawed on public radio—only to take her admission back the next day) has already been canceled—so what’s there to investigate?

Plenty, says the opposition—and the Church, and many other Filipinos who couldn’t care less for the likes of Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson. Much as the Palace might wish for this problem to simply go away, it won’t—the amounts are too big, as are the people involved or implicated.

What I and many Pinoys find most galling in this whole affair isn’t even the money, which is sordidly large enough—bribes and kickbacks of $130 million were being bruited about—but the administration players’ efforts to cover up what happened and to have us believe that nothing really wrong happened. It’s bad enough to be stolen from (or almost, since the contract was canceled, after all the furor); it’s worse to be taken as a gullible fool by people who think that they can get away with anything, after escaping with their necks post-“Hello, Garci.”

You had the elections chief—the very same one who presided over the country’s most controversial presidential contest ever—admitting to wining and dining the officials of a foreign company who had a fat contract to win from the Philippine government. He just wanted, he said, to be hospitable, given his presidency of a local golf club—one that just happened to be favored by the President’s husband. His three or four visits to China, he added, were just reciprocal golfing sorties, paid for by ZTE. No brokering of any kind happened. Ho-kay…..

Much later in the inquiry, you had Palace official Manuel Gaite—a man of modest means, if government salaries are to be believed—handing over P500,000 in cash to star witness Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada to help keep him away from the Senate hearings. The money, he said, came out of his own pocket (actually, his uncle’s chicken farm) and he gave it to Lozada—whom he’d met only twice—out of Christian compassion. Yeah, right.

What do these jokers think we are? I may be wary of Ping Lacson’s police-boss background; I didn’t vote for Erap, nor for FPJ; I think that former Speaker Jose de Venecia, our newest St. Paul of Tarsus, helped bring us to this mess; I think that what Antonio Trillanes did was brave but silly; and I’m certainly not going to let someone from Utrecht tell me how to think. In other words, I’m no opposition stooge. But I’ll be darned if any of this makes me feel any more sympathetic to an administration so mired in scandal and so caught up in its own falsehoods that it expects the public to believe its pathetic cover-ups.

The Palace wants us to focus on how well the economy’s been doing, instead of all the corruption issues it’s been embroiled in—as if to suggest that everything’s OK for as long as our GDP goes up. But a recent Asian Development Bank report put the lie to that argument, showing that perceptions of massive and unattended corruption were keeping more investments in check. Thank our overseas workers for all the cash that’s coming in; blame the crooks in government and business for all the money going out.

So should we do another EDSA? After the second one, maybe not. There has to be a better way out of this, beginning with gathering up the evidence that will convict these thieves and throw them in jail. I know that after the Marcoses and Erap Estrada, we have little to give us confidence that (1) we can land the big fish in prison, and (2) even when we do, that they’ll stay there long enough to be sorry. But maybe we are stupid, after all, if we believe those who say that nothing will come out of these investigations, anyway, so we should just let things be and go about our daily business—stupid enough to be paralyzed into shutting up and doing nothing by our fear and cynicism. This regime is banking on it.

Manileño for March 2008


I HAD an interesting if a bit overheated discussion online with some members of my Macintosh users group—not about computers but about the English language, which I realized could be a a more incendiary subject than the pros and cons of the new ultraslim MacBook Air.

I’m a pretty quiet and laidback guy who thinks he did all his shouting during the First Quarter Storm and the two EDSAs. It takes some effort to get me all worked up about anything. I don’t get white-hot angry when my students manifest laziness or ignorance, or even stupidity—they’re being what 18-year-olds (and even 54-year-olds) will occasionally be; I show displeasure and disapproval, and enforce discipline (albeit gently), but I don’t scream. I reserve that for instances of cheating or willful deception—and, in this present case, for when we let others put the Filipino down, wittingly or otherwise, with nary a whimper from ourselves.

What got me started was an innocuous-looking (and, I was sure, well-intended) blog entry by a member, apparently a foreigner who’d been in the Philippines for some time and who’d learned some Filipino—who observed that “the Filipinos’ most common grammatical error” was the expression “For a while,” which your mother and your brother and mine routinely use to answer phone calls with. This “dependent clause”, he said, was incomprehensible to foreigners, and deserved banishment from our vocabulary.

I had no problem with that observation, per se—of course “for a while” means nothing to the Americans, the British, and the Australians, in the same way that “at sixes and sevens” means nothing to us Pinoys, even those of us with PhDs in English.

The real problem was that, well, there was no real problem. “For a while”—which, to begin with, isn’t a clause (dependent or otherwise) but a phrase (a prepositional phrase, to be exact)—is perfectly understandable and useful to most English-speaking Filipinos. It’s our equivalent for “hold on” or “hold the line” or “just a minute” or some such expression in Standard American or British English. It meets the most basic purpose of language: communication. (I remember when a critic took me to task for using “Kill the light” as a direct translation for “Patayin mo ang ilaw,” until I showed him all the times Americans themselves used it in their own writing, idiomatically—go ahead, do a Google search.)

In other words, it’s not an error—grammatical or otherwise. Grammatically, it would be had someone said “a while for” or “while for a”, which goes against the way words fall into their proper slots in phrases in English grammar. What was being read as an “error” was the fact that it’s Filipino English, a local adaptation of a language we never asked to learn but had to, anyway. We’re dealing here with a matter of usage, which varies widely in time and place, and not grammar, which tends to remain fairly fixed.

Let’s get something out of the way. English today has many varieties, none of which is necessarily better than the other; they’re all useful in their own way, in their own cultures; Singlish works for Singaporeans, Chinglish for the Chinese. (Taglish isn’t Filipino English, but a kind of hybrid, which has its own usefulness, and its own limitations.) The word “limitations” is important, because this is what the language police tend to pounce on, especially with a phrase like “for a while.”

“Speak and write in Standard English,” we’re told, because otherwise, “You won’t be understood by others.” That’s right, and I absolutely agree: we should know the difference between the language we use for and among ourselves, and the language we need to know to communicate with the outside world (which we often associate with business, government, and education—the big, “official” things).

But the question is, where are we, anyway? With whom are we speaking? If it’s a foreigner calling—and most Filipinos will be able to sense that by ear—then “for a while” won’t be quite the thing to say. The thing is, even if we did, just how grievous an error (of choice of words) would that be? Why is it that we Filipinos will trip all over ourselves to understand American and British expressions in both written and spoken forms, and feel or be made to feel that we’ve committed a crime when we use our own?

And I’ll tell you what really made my blood pressure shoot up during that largely civil exchange on the message board. It wasn’t the fact that this probably well-meaning white man (going by his avatar) had chided us over a small matter of English. It was the number of fellow Filipinos who responded, “Oh, thank you for correcting us, kind sir!”, even after I’d pointed out the problems with the fellow’s reasoning, and with his own faulty grammar and spelling.

It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t take criticism. Of course we should—and we do, all the time, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not. “Why can’t you be like Singapore?” “Why can’t you Filipinos come to meetings on time?” “Why do you eat with your hands?” But we should know when to serve others, and when to be ourselves, even and especially in this globalized universe.

Sometimes we come down too hard on ourselves and apologize too much, thinking that there’s some white man out there watching us with beady eyes, ready to cane us for the slightest misdeed. Sometimes we think that to be “world-class” and “competitive,” we have to speak, dress, and act like the white guy.

In my earlier days as a teacher and writer of English, I used to be one of these finger waggers. I understand the need to draw the line somewhere, and that’s part of my job. I’m not saying that anything goes, certainly not. But—if we’re truly smart people—we should know what to say when, to whom, and how.

Manileño for February 2008


I WAS pawing through some back issues of TIME Magazine in the throne room, and was amused to find an article published last April that featured—no, not another scandal or coup attempt in the Philippines—the creeping invasion of the United States by non-American fastfood chains, among them none other than Jollibee.

“Jollibee, with more than 1,400 stores in the Philippines and 11 branches in California, makes McDonald's look like a funeral parlor,” wrote Joel Stein. “Its mascot is a jolly bee, and the restaurants are blindingly happy, all giant, shiny yellow blocks, as if they were designed by an architect from Legoland. Even if you gave Walt Disney all the ecstasy in the world, he would not have come up with this. America, according to Jollibee, is clearly a place of childlike optimism. Jollibee's two most popular items are called the Yumburger and the Chickenjoy. The Yumburger has a weird, plasticky dollop of French dressing in the middle. The crisped-up French fries are dry inside and taste as if they weren't just double fried but dunked in oil four or five times. The fried chicken is halfway decent, but the inflated, happy fakeness of Jollibee makes you feel that the only American its Filipino owners have ever seen is Pamela Anderson.”

As it happened, I’d just taken my mom and our housekeeper that afternoon to—where else?—Jollibee, and I was pretty sure that the smiles on their faces afterward were by no means fake. In fact, when I told them that I was treating them to a late lunch at Jollibee, they brightened up instantly, their minds already knowing what their tongues would be savoring in another 15 minutes or so. So what was Joel Stein complaining about?

Of course, you and I—and several million other Pinoys and Filipino Americans—know what to tell Mr. Stein and his doubting kind. So sorry, but Jollibee wasn’t made for you; it was made for us, and the only reason it’s in places like Daly City and Cerritos is, well, us, or those of us who happen to live there, hankering amid the blueberry muffins and the stuffed turkey for sweet spaghetti and cereal-fortified burgers (and, yes, greasy fries).

Having lived abroad in different places for some time, I’ve never failed to marvel at how Filipinos are defined by food, which is often just about the only thing that unites us, no matter how fractious Pinoy politics (not just in Caloocan or Cebu, but in Chicago as well) can get. I’m close to believing that we eat not so much for sustenance as for comfort—for the reassurance that the world is still something we know, and even chew on. In the dead of winter, tinolang manok, pinakbet, and binagoongang baboy can be your best friend—plus, of course, that Asian food store proprietor in that suburban mall.

Unfortunately, there’s still no such thing as a global food giant that serves all of the above on demand, over the counter, so we settle for the next best thing, Pinoy fast food, which can only mean Jollibee.

The story of Jollibee’s rise from a hole in the wall in 1978 to the global giant it has become deserves a book of its own (and it did, a few years ago, in a 25th anniversary coffeetable tribute edited by my friend Krip Yuson). Founder Tony Tan Caktiong (who in 2004 was named Ernst & Young’s World Entrepreneur of the Year) has led a company that has consistently been named the country’s best managed. All the good management in the world can’t help a bad product, so we can only conclude that if Jollibee’s burgers and fries taste just so, it’s because that’s the way we like it.

Now comes a sad confession: I can eat all the Chickenjoys and Yumburgers you can throw at me, but I draw the line at sweet mushy spaghetti. I’m no gourmet or culinary snob—the prospect of “fine dining” sends a chill down my spine, conjuring up images of some overpriced, unpronounceable dish employing seemingly exotic ingredients like aubergines and capsicums (without rice!)—but one thing I’ve learned to like is noodles al dente with real ground beef and lumpy-thick tomato sauce.

I can take a slight hint of sweetness—but nothing like the runny ketchup with hotdog slices that my Dad (bless his soul) used to make for us and which, I swear, Jollibee copied for its formula. (Or did my Dad just copy the neighbors’ spaghetti sauce?)

But even this I understand: we Pinoys like sweetness because sweetness is comforting (ask any six-year-old), and comfort leads to happiness of the inflated sort that Joel Stein swears is fake, but which we know isn’t. Happiness is an emotion, and eating at places like Jollibee is, for us Pinoys, a genuine emotional experience, a taste of home—nothing ersatz to me about that.

As for my acquired taste for firm, non-sweet pasta (and, okay, for meatier burgers), let’s put that down to the other side of this globalization thing, which is that as we go out to the world, so the world comes to us—in this case, in a flood of American fast-food chains, a marketer’s delight albeit a dietician’s horror. A man’s got to have variety in his life, so now and then I check out the latest offerings over at MacDonald’s, at KFC, at Shakey’s, etc.

And now and then—reminded by my wife or my mother—I might even remember to eat some tinolang manok. You can’t get that at the local strip mall just yet, but Jollibee (which now has pancit molo on its menu) just might do something about it, in good time.

Manileño for January 2008


CALL IT a tempest in a teapot, but one of the more interesting tiffs that shook up Manila these past few weeks (abortive coups excluded) was the word war that erupted between the officers of the National Press Club (NPC) and a group of Angono artists over a mural commissioned by the NPC.

Angono, as some of you may remember, is that scenic lakeside town in Rizal that has produced an inordinate number of excellent painters in the tradition of muralist and National Artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco, Jose Blanco, Perdigon Vocalan, and Nemiranda. Steeped in this tradition, the Neo-Angono Artists Collective looked like a natural choice for the commission, involving the production of a mural dedicated to the idea of press freedom—a subject which, on the surface of it, the NPC seemed the best body to be promoting, likewise.

Or maybe not. As it turned out, the NPC and their contracted artists had very different ideas about how “press freedom” should be depicted—and maybe about the purpose of the mural, if not of the press club itself.

Of all people, the NPC had invited President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—whose husband had sued the pants off 43 journalists for alleged libel, and whose regime was being roundly accused for the unpunished killings and harassment of many others—to inaugurate their new mural. The artists, on the other hand, took “press freedom” and its subjects to heart and painted a tableau that covered every current political issue from the disappearance of activist Jonas Burgos to the $329-million ZTE broadband contract scandal.

When the NPC officers saw this, they freaked out, and hurriedly contracted somebody else to remove or paint over the offending portions overnight. According to the painters, the retouches included “the change of the tattoo on Andres Bonifacio’s left arm from the alibata K to a sappy red heart pierced by an arrow.” The artists cried “Censorship!” The NPC cried “Breach of contract!”, alleging that the artists had agreed to come up with an “apolitical” mural.

Surprisingly, above the predictable groundswell of protest that met the NPC’s actions, a few contrary voices have arisen—among them, National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose’s—to chastise the Angono artists and their supporters for making much ado about nothing. “Paint as you are paid,” wrote Frankie Jose, just falling short of calling the artists hacks; they should have just done what the NPC was paying them to do. But then again, how anyone can create an “apolitical” mural about press freedom in the Philippines in these troublous times is a gaping mystery (and why a “national press club” should be so eager to please the President is another—but then we can think of a million answers to that).

These contretemps quickly conjured references to a far more famous commission—the one extended to Mexican muralist and Marxist Diego de Rivera, who in 1932 was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to produce a mural to grace the lobby of the new Rockefeller Center in New York. De Rivera inserted a picture of Lenin into his work, in a May Day tableau; the Rockefeller managers were shocked, and had the mural smashed by ax-wielding workmen in the night. (History notes that de Rivera got the last laugh—he recreated the mural in Mexico City, adding a vignette of Rockefeller in a nightclub.)

While the NPC didn’t take a real hatchet to the Angono mural, it effectively achieved that with the alterations it imposed. The net result is that nobody wants the mangled mural now, for perfectly understandable reasons.

(Parenthetically, what’s annoying about this incident—aside from the laughably impossible demand of the NPC for an “apolitical” piece and its abject spinelessness at the feet of the powers-that-be—is, on the other hand, our being captive to the literal truth.

While I’ve written elsewhere to fervently support the painters in their right to interpret their given subject as they see it, the finished mural just reiterates something I’ve often observed in our statuary and public art: we can’t seem to express things except literally, in the most obvious ways. Rather can capture the spirit of things, we more often choose to present what we think is its substance—a near-photographic or cartoonish rendition of an event.

Just take a look at all the monuments to EDSA and People Power around Manila; they seem imposing, but are ultimately soulless, because they don’t have mystery enough to provoke and inflame the insurgent imagination. Why can’t we have a Vietnam War memorial—poignant and moving in its obsidian starkness? Why can’t we have a Louvre Pyramid—something so deliberately contrapuntal that it induces deep contemplation?)

Angono art is, of course, in a school of its own, and the NPC knew what it was getting when it chose these people to do the job. Or maybe it didn’t, and thereby hangs another problem: for what it wanted, it could have rounded up some Mabini painters to put together a quick, cheap, and rosy picture of a subservient press—which, ironically, is the lasting image we’re left with in this affair.

And this isn’t the end of the art wars: over in Maragondon, Cavite, the mayor is up in arms over a statue it commissioned of Andres Bonifacio, claiming that the sculptor—the young Abdulmari “Toym” Imao, son of his namesake, the National Artist for Sculpture—didn’t catch the Great Plebeian’s likeness well enough.

Perhaps, instead of buying more murals and monuments, we should just be putting our loose change into more puericulture centers and public libraries, the utility of which no one can argue about.

Manileño for December 2007


I’VE BEEN so sorely tempted to write another piece on the poor Motherland’s continuing political travails, but this being the New Year, I thought I’d spare us all some heartache and talk about literature, a subject I happen to teach and, in some ways, to contribute to. Where, for example, is the Philippines on the global map of literature?

It’s been more than six decades since Carlos Bulosan published America Is in the Heart—probably the most successful book written by a Filipino of all time, excluding Jose Rizal’s novels, in terms of being translated in many languages and gaining an international readership. I don’t have the exact figures right now, but I was told at one point that America Is in the Heart was translated into over a dozen languages and sold over 100,000 copies. (Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong).

That’s phenomenal, even by today’s standards, especially for a Filipino work. I don’t think even Jessica Hagedorn’s The Dogeaters, which came out in the late 1980s and was very well received in the American market, achieved that kind of exposure. In the Philippines, even our leading authors can’t expect to see more than 1,000 copies of their books for their first and possibly last print run; very few creative works go into second editions.

The good news is that a growing number of Filipino authors (or those of Filipino origins) are getting published in the United States and elsewhere—a few by major presses, many by small ones willing to invest in our kind of material (about which more, later). In America, especially—and after Hagedorn and Ninotchka Rosca—a new generation of younger writers have led the charge, among them R. Zamora Linmark, Brian Ascalon Roley, Peter Bacho, Eileen Tobias, Gina Apostol, and Eric Gamalinda. (There’s loads more and I’m sure I’m forgetting someone really important, but it’s been a long day.) In Australia, Arlene Chai and Merlinda Bobis are making a mark. As more Filipinos and their descendants take root elsewhere in the world—and God knows there’s hardly a country left without a Pinoy community in it—we can only expect our voice to assert itself in new fiction and poetry that acknowledges and makes use of our global presence.

At least, that’s the idea. The reality, however, is that we have miles to go before we achieve the kind of visibility and regard that, say, another diasporic people like the Indians have gained in world literature. For all our much-vaunted mastery of English, we have yet to produce a Rushdie or a Naipaul—and I mean that not only in terms of literary merit or volume of work but also of name recognition outside of the home country. F. Sionil Jose perhaps comes closest—but it’s still a long way even for him from popularity in the Asian academe to regularity on the pages of, say, the Times Literary Supplement.

(Ironic, but well worth noting, is the observation of an Indian-Singaporean critic-friend of mine who remarked that while the likes of Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh may be bywords in New York and London, their names and works mean little to most native Indians, who swear by their own homegrown novelists in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and so on.)

I wish I could say that it doesn’t matter to me if we don’t get known abroad if we’re read and appreciated at home, but that’s not true, either. As I mentioned earlier, Filipino authors are finding themselves having to compete for shelf space and for the Pinoy’s precious disposable peso—not so much with each other as with Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling, and Danielle Steele.

So what seems to be the problem with, say, Philippine fiction in English, and why can’t it make the kind of breakthrough that the Latin Americans, the Indians, and even the Chinese have? Isn’t English supposed to be our ticket to international fame, our guarantee of being fast-tracked to acceptance by the Anglophone world (and have we ever striven to reach anyone else)?

I’ve always held the pet theory—admittedly with no hard data to back it up with, whatsoever—that our use of English has been a hindrance rather than a help in this department. Sure, it gets us understood faster and better; but at the same time, it’s an English that—even in the most artful of hands such as those of Nick Joaquin and Gregorio Brillantes—no one else can relate to but us Filipinos, and by “language” I don’t mean just the words but also the experience it carries. Certainly not the British, who have enough of their Commonwealth ex-subjects to busy themselves with and feel guilty about; and certainly not the Americans, most of whom don’t even know they colonized us through language, among other things, and even if they did don’t quite know what to do with us.

Meanwhile, those who write in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or some Slavic language and then get translated into English are presumed by Western critics and readers to be speaking with voices more “authentic” than ours. I remember my American colleagues finding Joaquin too lush, but taking warmly to Sionil Jose’s plain prose, as if to say “This is how you Filipinos should be writing in English. Please, keep it simple.”

But even before we assume the challenge of global literary conquest, I think we Filipino writers should work a bit harder to be read by more Pinoys. That means writing about things that truly engage them, in ways that also truly engage them. Where’s the crime, the humor, and the sex in Philippine fiction? Where’s the Filipino novel (in whatever language) that’ll sell 100,000 copies? Somehow, that seems a taller order than selling a book to Random House.

Manileño for November 2007

THIS TIME last year, I was teaching a class of American teenagers at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin about Philippine culture and society. For the past four months, I’ve been doing the reverse back home in Diliman, Quezon City, where I’ve been using a class in Contemporary American Literature to teach young Filipinos about the United States and its people.

This follows my basic approach to teaching literature—that we study it not just for the pleasure of the language (which is, in itself, important) but also to learn something about the culture and the conditions that bred the story or the poem. This was why, last year, I introduced my American students to some sensitive aspects of Philippine-American relations by taking up stories like Juan Gatbonton’s “Clay” (which deals with a Filipino boy’s idolization of an American GI after the war, and his later disillusionment) and poems like Rene Estella Amper’s “Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, Also Called Pete” (which, with comic sadness, tracks the changes in some Pinoys when they migrate to America, as well as the changes back home).

Literature isn’t the only way of learning about a country and its people, of course—there’s history and what we used to call “social studies” to take care of the facts—but it’s often more effective than hitting the encyclopedia in that it presents large issues in intimate human terms. Abstractions like “exile” and “alienation” become starkly painful and personal realities in stories like Bienvenido Santos’s “The Day the Dancers Came.”

The course I teach at the University of the Philippines—English 42, Contemporary American Literature—aims to provide Filipino teenagers with a sampling of the best American poems, stories, and novels over the past 60 years or so. And by “the best” we also necessarily mean “the most disturbing”, which is to say that these works aren’t meant to promote tourism by presenting postcard pictures of America and American life, but rather present the humanity (and, sometimes, the inhumanity) of America and Americans. I don’t mean for my students to love or hate America—that’s beside the point—but instead to understand it, or at least understand it better than they did at the start of the semester.

We Pinoys grow up thinking about America, and there’s no escaping its presence and influence—on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in the news—and we can’t be blamed for thinking that we know it. Given our shared history, we probably do, better than most other people around the world. As I’ve mentioned here before—no thanks to a neocolonial education—I learned to draw the map of the US and to memorize all the states and their capitals by heart in grade school, in the Philippines; I learned to recite Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech; I knew what a mackinaw was even if I’d never seen one. My American students seemed stunned that I knew a lot more about their history than they did.

But there’s the America beyond the history books and the almanacs that both Americans and Filipinos hardly ever get to see—the America that you can access only through the imagination of its writers and artists.

There’s the small-town America that Shirley Jackson so lovingly captured then just as resoundingly crushed for its blind adherence to tradition in “The Lottery”, a story that drew a ton of hate mail when it was published by the New Yorker in 1948. There’s Flannery O’Connor’s exploration of the grotesque underside of the Bible Belt in “Good Country People”; John Updike’s paean to youthful rebellion in “A&P”; James Baldwin’s gruesome description of the lynching of a black man in “Going to Meet the Man”; Tim O’Brien’s portrayal of a Vietnam-War soldier’s fatal tenderness in “The Things They Carried.”

These stories—and the many more poems and other pieces that we take up—may seem preponderantly unsettling rather than comforting, but that’s how literature largely works: by shaking us out of the easy assumptions we make about life. Many Pinoys still think, for example, that life in America is a bed of roses; any Filipino-American who works two jobs could tell them that it isn’t, but we won’t believe it until we see it enacted in a story or a movie.

The image of America that my students come away with is that of a rich and complex tapestry of peoples, beliefs, practices, and traditions—many of which factors have given rise to problems but also to new ways of thinking and the search for new solutions. We talk about large “American” concepts such as the frontier, individualism, egalitarianism, and innovation, as much as we talk about racial inequality and discrimination, imperialism, insularity, and conservatism. If America emerges as a paradox, maybe that’s because it is, even to this long-time observer, who finds its contradictions—and the fact that American can live with them and despite them—fascinating.

I begin my English 42 semester with an overview of American history, a look at the American map, and a summary of the kind of statistics that many Americans themselves don’t know or bother to learn (e.g., population, 300 million; per capita income, about $43,700 in 2005). My Filipino teenagers may know the latest goings-on in High School Musical, but this is news to most of them.

In fact, it was news to many of my American students as well—a troubling realization for the people of the world’s only remaining superpower.