Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, December 25, 2006


My sister Elaine and her husband Eddie treated us to a movie at the local Cineplex last weekend, and most of us voted to see “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson’s latest foray into that special genre we’ll call “bloody, gruesome movies with strange languages requiring subtitles.” Eddie didn’t care much for subtitles and my mom’s eyesight was too poor to keep up with them, so they went off to catch “Blood Diamond” instead. But we all decided to make the 15-minute walk to the movie theaters, a matter of crossing two or three residential blocks of this pleasantly wooded and grassy suburb of Centreville just outside Washington, DC.

Now, I know I also used the word “pleasant” just last week to describe De Pere, Wisconsin, a small town of about 22,000 people (about 20,000 of whom must have been indoors watching football when we were there, because we never saw them). I don’t mean to turn that description into a cliché, but it happens to fit these two places I’ve been in recently.

De Pere’s pleasantness comes from old-fashioned manners and good-neighborliness; there wasn’t a person I met on the street who didn’t say hello or at least flash me a smile. Centreville, on the other hand, is almost singlemindedly safe and uneventful, a cluster of neat, new subdivisions serving as bedroom, kitchen, and playground to Washington’s working stiffs.

While De Pere can look back to centuries of trading between the Indians and the French voyageurs on the banks of the Fox River, Centreville had always been something of an aspirant or claimant to grander destinies. Its name derives from a wishful notion—expressed sometime in the 1700s—that it was going to sit smack in the path of a major road about to be built; as it happened, the road escaped the village.

While its neighbors such as Manassas and Chantilly proudly wear their scars as Civil War battlegrounds, Centreville served as little more than a supply depot for the Confederacy. This might explain the decidedly low profile it keeps today; it hosts a population of CIA spooks, blue-jeaned software engineers like my bayaw Eddie, Foggy Bottom drones, and enough Korean expats to warrant the erection of the most interesting place in town, an Asian grocery the size of a basketball gym. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that Centreville is pleasant because it has to be, thereby making a virtue out of its irrepressible modesty.

Where was I? Oh, yes, we were going to see a movie. I’d wanted to see “Apocalypto” because I’d seen the trailer, which promised gory action (truly, nothing relaxes me as much as grievous injury inflicted on someone else; some people call that sick, the Greeks called it “catharsis”). And while I’d also seen all the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapon” movies—and let’s not forget “Braveheart”—I didn’t think all that much of or about Mel Gibson until I saw “The Passion of the Christ,” which inexplicably made me shed a tear, in that scene between the son and the mother. I’m not a churchgoing person (much to the dismay, I suppose, of my Catholic hosts in De Pere) so that was probably cinema, and not religion, at work.

I’d like to say that Mel Gibson might do better staying clear of hard liquor and anti-Jewish diatribes; on the other hand, that subliminal mess could be where his intensity as a director comes from. Gibson’s view of life is anything but pleasant, and his reconstruction of a Mayan civilization in the throes of decay has a few forced moments that challenge credulity (his protagonist’s energy would put the Eveready bunny to shame). But overall, I thought, it was a great action movie—a chase movie, to be more precise, where the hare outfoxes the hounds (did I just get my animal metaphors all mixed up?).

Take it as anything more than that and you run into the kind of flak “Apocalypto” has received from critics who obviously didn’t get treated to the movies and popcorn by their sisters and brothers-in-law. Here’s a few of those swipes, lovingly chronicled by rottentomatoes.com:

“It is Mel Gibson's latest proof that as a director, his ambition is boundless and his energy nearly so, but his judgment is sorely lacking.”—Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle

“The premise of Cornel Wilde's ‘The Naked Prey,’ the jungle savagery of a 1980s Italian cannibal film and the sadomasochistic martyr-complex obsessions that apparently churn like a ball of snakes inside Mel Gibson's head are all here.”—John Beifuss, Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

“Apocalypto wants us to believe there is an overpowering darkness in the land, while I can't quite get past a suspicion of overpowering darkness in the filmmaker.”—Michael Booth, Denver Post

“In this family-values action film, you could never accuse Gibson of being unconvincing where blood and sadism are concerned.”—Jules Brenner, Cinema Signals

Well, you get the idea. I don’t know if and when “Apocalypto” will be showing in Manila—it wouldn’t be my first choice for a Christmas movie to take the kids to, in lieu of “Enteng Kabisote”—but if and when it does, ask yourself first what you’re having for dinner later, because those plans could change.

Whatever brought me then to think and talk about “Apocalypto” on Christmas Day? There’s a third point or vertex to this strange confluence of ideas besetting me this season, and it’s a take-off in a way on the quotation from the historian Will Durant that “Apocalypto” opens with: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

I’ve been talking about what a pleasant place America has been for me, but even this Christmas, it’s been hard to escape reminders—some of them quite rude—of what a fractured society America remains, despite its mighty efforts to promote multiculturalism and racial harmony.

The first was when we were visiting the Library of Congress, and admiring, as most tourists do, its magnificent Reading Room from the balcony. A guide was giving a lecture to another group of tourists, and explaining all the figures and symbols that crowned the inner dome of that building, the great civilizations that had contributed to humankind’s progress: “The Greeks,” the tour guide said, “gave us democracy…. Islam gave us mathematics—and terrorism,” he added with a chuckle.

But never mind the lowly tour guide, who probably thought he was just being uncannily witty. There’s a US Congressman named Virgil Goode—a Republican from Virginia (yes, Virginia, there is a Congressman named Goode)—who issued a statement the other day reacting to the request of newly-elected Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) to be sworn into office using the Quran. Ellison happens to be the first Muslim elected to the US Congress.

Rep. Goode, presumably a Christian (or some kind of Christian) had this to say about his new colleague’s plan: “When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Quran in any way.

“The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.

“We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.”

Merry Christmas to you, too, Congressman Goode. Why do I get the feeling that I saw you somewhere in that Gibson movie, brandishing an obsidian knife and thundering about how great and strong your civilization was and how weak your enemies were?

At that movie’s end, we trudged back home, but compared to the ancient horrors and labors we had witnessed onscreen, our little march was like a walk in the park—and indeed it was, as life in America seems, sometimes.


I HAVEN'T spent a Christmas abroad in ages, but this year, I’m with family in Virginia, at the tail-end of a four-month teaching stint in the US. In a week’s time I should be back in harness teaching a full load in UP, but we’re very fortunate to be together here for the time being, especially since we’re not a family that can jet off to Disneyland or to the south of France whenever it strikes our fancy.

I must admit that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have traveled so much for so little, thanks largely to my work as a writer, but it takes an army of piggybanks to bring Beng and Demi with me anywhere farther than Mindoro or Bulacan. The important thing is, we’re all here, reasonably healthy and safe, for which I’m deeply thankful.

I’d like to take this opportunity as well to thank and to send our warmest Christmas greetings to some very special people whose friendship and support made our American visit a most productive and delightful one: John and Gertie Holder, Bob and Barb Boyer, Jiji and Susie Palines, Kokkeong Wong, Sarah Griffiths, Julie Hill, Jody and Marivi Blanco, Elaine and Eddie Sudeikis, Jana and Senen Ricasio, Connie and Jun Capati, Mike and Gloria Galang, Louie and Anna Galang, Joe and Rose Jaucian, Rudy Ledesma, Efren and Gie Salvaleon, Monroe and Karin Lerner, Maurice and Janet Kilwein-Guevara, Peter and Mary Blewett, Romy and Necie Aquino, Deling Weller, Pat Naylor, and Juanito Co. May the best of the New Year come to you and to all my readers!

Penman for Monday, Dec. 18, 2006

WHILE SOME of us may already be drunk with the spirit of Christmas, we just got done with final exams for the fall term here in the US. They don’t have any Lantern Parades where I am—at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin—but it feels better to know that you can face the New Year with all that work behind you: done, kaput, finis.

I’ve been giving exams for more than 20 years, and as any teacher learns fairly quickly in his or her career, constructing them can be an art in itself. The challenge consists in framing questions that are tough to answer but easy to grade, questions that will produce answers that provide not only objective information but nuanced arguments and attitudes, that tell you right off if the student has done his or her homework and knows what he or she is talking about.

This semester—for my class in the American short story and another on Philippine Culture and Society—I required three quizzes (a combination of objective questions and a short essay), a midterm and final (both essay-type, open-book exams), and a 10-page term paper. The objective quizzes keep the students on their toes and are an easy check on their reading; I have to confess that, perhaps unnaturally, I loved such quizzes myself as a kid, treating them as a trivia game. But these days I believe firmly in the necessity of full sentences and paragraphs as a gauge of the student’s command of the subject and powers of articulation. I don’t expect perfectly punctuated compound-complex sentences, but I do demand clear, sharp, and interesting ideas with some corroborating detail—evidence of a mind at work, beyond the “spitback” or regurgitation of lecture notes.

Now and then I get inspired (or desperate) enough to try new things with my exams, and this semester I thought of alternative ways of getting the same old information out of my students. PHLP 100 introduced 33 young non-Filipinos to Philippine history and culture, and this was how I tried to see how well they understood and internalized what we had been discussing in class.

1. (One of my two midterm exam questions.) Pretend that you’re a member—an officer, an enlisted man, a nurse, or a cook—of the Wisconsin Volunteers regiment of the American occupation army in the Philippines. It is March 1902. You have been fighting Filipino forces in the countryside (you can choose where), and are back in Manila for two weeks of rest and recreation, before being sent out again on a yet-unspecified mission.

Write a letter home to your father or mother, telling them about where and how you are, giving them your most vivid impressions of the Philippine Islands and its people, and of your experience as a combatant.

The letter should be personal, convincing, and with some sharp, memorable details (you can make up a few for as long as they are defensibly realistic). I’m looking for a letter that will capture the mindset of an American soldier, and the temper of the times. (Note: the Wisconsin Volunteers never fought in the Philippines, in historical fact, but served in Cuba.)

2. (What I called the “creative option” for their term paper: “A Day in the Life.”) Choose a specific date from 1521 to the present, a character, and a place in the Philippines, and walk me through a day in the life of this character, from the moment he or she wakes up to his or her bedtime. I’d like to get beneath the flesh of this character, to see the world through his or her eyes. What’s his or her biggest problem or concern for that particular day? What will he or she eat, wear, visit, make, do? What can make this character laugh, cry, curse, or sing? Who are his or her parents, siblings, friends, and enemies? What will this character want or dream of for the morrow?

3. (Their sink-or-swim final exam, which I intended to reveal how they appreciated large political, economic, and social issues from an American standpoint.) Assume that you work as a senior official for the US government, and that you’ve just been assigned as Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific, with the Philippines as one of your key areas of responsibility. To improve US-Philippine relations, the President has authorized you to spend $50 million in foreign aid for one high-impact project in the Philippines. This assumes that you’ve done your homework, and understand both the historical and contemporary Philippine situation thoroughly.

What project will you recommend for that money, why, and what problems do you expect to encounter in its implementation? What activity or reform will benefit the Philippines the most, for which a $50 million fund could make a real difference? What historical imbalances or inequities will your chosen project address? Why this particular project and not others? Cite possible alternatives and their merits or demerits.

Write your answer in the form of a formal memorandum to the President, in the White House, beginning with “Dear Mr. President” (or “Dear Mrs. President”, if you prefer), and sign it in the end with “Very truly yours,” followed by your name and signature.



SPEAKING OF education, I came across a very interesting article in the December 18 issue of TIME, a cover story that had to do with the American classroom and the challenge of bringing American students into the 21st century global economy. The piece spoke of the dangers of stagnation in American education, and issued a wake-up call for educators and students alike, listing several prescriptions for making that vital and effective transition from the previous to the present century.

I thought I’d go over those prescriptions and see how we in the Philippines match up. How are our own kids and our system doing?

1. “Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way.”

My recent teaching stint in the American Midwest offered painful proof of how far young Americans have to go in this direction. I found that the best friend of ignorance in this case wasn’t the lack of money or the means to go, but complacency, a lulling sense of contentment with what one knew and was comfortable with.

Here our discomforts and discontents give us a leg up. We Filipinos are naturally interested in the outside world—we have to be, to survive. We bring our little barangays and mindsets along wherever we might end up, but there’s no such thing as a place too far for the Filipino. In a sense, we’re global citizens as much as or more than anyone else, but whether we act as global citizens—responsible not only to and for our families and country, but to and for the world—may be another matter. In any case, let’s keep a map of the world in every Filipino classroom, or better yet, a twirling globe.

2. “Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy—the ones that won't get outsourced or automated—‘put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos.’… It's interdisciplinary combinations—design and technology, mathematics and art—‘that produce YouTube and Google,’ says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.”

I think we Pinoys have first-rate minds and wonderful creative talents, but I suspect that the physical and institutional infrastructure just isn’t there to spark these “interdisciplinary combinations” that make for trailblazing departures from the usual way things are made or done. There’s little incentive for serious research; we think in terms of tomorrow and next week, not next decade; we punish or ignore the nonconformist; and we’re mostly quite happy to be employed by someone else and to claim a paycheck twice a month, instead of gambling on a dream or a notion. We’re creative, sure, but not too imaginative (does that make sense?).

3. “Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't.”

For most of us, the world of new media—the Internet, satellite TV, the iPod, Counterstrike, blogs, digicams, DVDs—is still a playground, built mainly for fun, and full of nice people who’ll push your swing. We’ve yet to appreciate it as a battleground or high-speed chute for ideas, commercial pitches, outright lies, and—somewhere among them—tons of useful information.

Here I think we’re pretty even. While young Americans of course have much easier and wider access to high technology than their Filipino counterparts, all these kids use the Internet and other digital media for mainly the same reasons—entertainment, homework, and social networking. They spot the same opportunities, fall into the same traps, pine for the same objects and objectives. Indeed, the Internet (and MTV before it) has helped to create a global youth culture, something much more homogenous and more widespread than their parents could have imagined or would have been willing to take part in.

And again, we’ve adapted the Internet and cellular telephony to our very specific needs. I can’t forget that roomful of nursing students on their lunch break in Davao, hunched over monitors in an Internet café across their school, each one looking for a potential mate abroad on a matchmaking website. That’s a sight you’ll never see in the States.

4. “Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. ‘Most innovations today involve large teams of people,’ says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. ‘We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.’

Here Filipinos excel. We aim to please, and please the world we do, with exemplary—indeed biblical—patience and industry.


Over an end-of-the-semester lunch with my fellow instructors, I shared my summary impressions of American collegiate education today—some very positive, some not quite so. The resources of a modern American university or college are awesome, and the energy and candor of its students refreshing. But they, too, face daunting challenges. Sometimes I got the sense that schooling in America is designed to achieve a level of comfort—a kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay” ethos—when education could be more useful by promoting the opposite, a deep-seated if occasionally ugly disquiet.

But I have to say that I had a great time in De Pere, one of the most peaceful and pleasant places in America you can ever hope to be in: I came, I taught, I learned.

Penman for Monday, December 11, 2006


A RECENT visit to San Diego—to give a lecture on literature and politics in the Philippines before a crowd composed mainly of Filipino-Americans at the University of California, San Diego—produced some pleasurable discoveries, thanks to the generosity of our host, Mrs. Julie Hill, an old Manila hand who has since retired to a pretty bungalow in Rancho Sta. Fe.

Among the highlights of that weekend sortie was a performance of The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse—a theatre founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer, and rebuilt in 1982 to be co-managed by UCSD’s Department of Theatre and Dance. It was recently renovated again to include all manner of 21st-century theatre technology, and the wizardry of the machinery proved more than appropriate—indeed, vital—to this latter-day interpretation of Frank L. Baum’s 1900 tale of a girl in Kansas and of the strange menagerie that forms around her on the journey down the Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz has, of course, seen any number of versions and adaptations for screen and stage, most notably the 1939 hit starring Judy Garland and even a 2005 Muppets TV movie. The Wiz was a 1975 Broadway musical with an all-black cast, and was itself turned into a 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Directed by Tony Award winner Des McAnuff, the La Jolla production—which had at least two Filipinos in the cast, as far as I could tell from the production notes—was a dazzling, spirited, exhilarating sensory treat, the kind that made you want to get up from your seat and dance to the musical’s most popular tune, “Ease on Down the Road,” and warble along with Dorothy when she launched into The Wiz’s other showstopper, “Home” (you know that song: “When I think of home, I think of a place where there's love overflowing…”).

The production, I hear, is now bound for Broadway, where—good grief—it’ll command $150 tickets; I don’t have that kind of loose change, so I’m mighty glad we saw it in San Diego.

I’d been to San Diego a couple of times before—my sister Elaine and her husband Eddie used to live there—and it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to live in, presuming you can afford the real estate (now you know why Elaine and Eddie are in Virginia). San Diego’s combination of sun and sea are matchless, and the city has attractions galore for visitors of all persuasions, from the 15-museum cluster in Balboa Park and the windswept coves of La Jolla to the Spanish missions that dot the countryside (in one of these, in San Luis Rey, we found a santo with distinctly Chinese eyes that had been made in the Philippines in the 1600s). Beng’s favorite spot—an unexpected find—was a compound in Encinitas that turned out to be shrine to her guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, who lived there in the 1930s.

My own moment of awe occurred on a visit to the UCSD campus, where my host and former UP colleague, the bright young scholar Jody Blanco, took me on a tour of the many-faceted, glass-sided Geisel Library, from the top floor of which you could see in all directions of the compass, and on whose shelves probably stood enough stored knowledge to illuminate every little corner of the human condition. Students in shorts and jeans nonchalantly worked off laptops as ubiquitous as the spiral notebooks and slide rules of our undergraduate years. I had stumbled on a similar sight a month earlier at the University of Michigan—a hall the size of a basketball court, housing row upon row of computers open for student use 24/7.

This, I realized, was truly education in and for the 21st century, and as Jody and I left the library for my decidedly low-tech lecture in the adjoining building, I wondered how long it would be before my students in UP could enjoy such a plenitude of study aids.


WHICH BRINGS me to Dorothy’s favorite place, home—Diliman, to be specific.

With what I’m going to say next, I’ll probably lose half of my student readers and earn myself a few stinging denunciations in some corners of the blogosphere—no “love overflowing,” here—but I can’t help wading into this debate over raising tuition fees at the University of the Philippines. And I’ll state my position outright: it’s about time UP did this, and it should be doing even more to raise extra revenues, even as it demands and deserves support from a government unlikely to meet all its needs.

I’ve been following this from a literal and figurative distance, so I might be missing out on some of the details of the arguments, although I’ve looked into position papers from both the administration and the student groups protesting the increase. But I think I can speak to the issue anyway as someone who’s been on both sides of it—as a student activist many years ago, and more recently as a university administrator.

The basic facts, as I appreciate them, are that the UP administration plans to raise tuition fees from the present P300 per unit to P1,000 in Diliman, bringing up full tuition from about P6,000 a semester to about P18,000. It’ll be the first such major increase for UP since 1989. The administration says it needs the increase to help it cope with the university’s growing needs, which its annual budget just can’t meet, and that the increase, as large as it is, will most sharply affect those who can afford it, leaving the poorest of UP students untouched.

Some students—the UP Student Council chairman, among others—will have none of it, arguing from the position that UP students shouldn’t be paying any tuition at all—in other words, Filipinos have a right to a free college education.

This may sound like another one of those tempests in a teacup that our so-called Diliman Republic is famous for, but as the country’s premier state university, UP is every Filipino’s business. If you pay taxes, then you’re subsidizing UP and all its teachers, students, and staff; even if you’re too young or too poor to pay taxes, you can still get into UP if you’re smart and lucky enough, and partake of its benefits.

Is a 300 percent increase reasonable? Not unless you take a hard look at some other figures. Again, bear in mind that since 1989, full tuition at UP Diliman has cost students P300 per unit or less than P6,000 for an 18-unit semester.

By comparison, tuition at the Ateneo cost P2,200 per unit in 2004; at 18 units, that’s almost P40,000 per semester. Just for the heck of it, let’s go even farther afield to those two US universities I visited. Tuition fees for California residents at UCSD were about $3,500 or P175,000 a semester this year, and $9,000 or P450,000 for non-residents. For Michigan, the comparable figures are P250,000 in-state and P750,000 out-of-state, per semester for 2007.

Now of course we can argue that we can’t possibly compare UP to American universities and expect to pay as much as they do. (Although it boggles my mind to know that some Filipino parents are actually growing enough dollars in their backyards to send their kids overseas, and to even fancier schools.) But that’s true only up to a point, because if we want the same world-class education, then we’re going to have to buy the same books, the same computers, and so on, which will cost us the same if not more, saving basically on our poor professors’ salaries. In other words, we’ll eventually get what we pay for; native talent and resourcefulness can only go so far.

I have no doubt that there will be some families who will be hard-pressed to cough up the extra tuition—and for these families, I hope some form of assistance will continue to be available. That assistance can even come from the money earned from those who can afford to pay full tuition under UP’s socialized tuition scheme.

And there are clearly those who can and who will pay that much for whatever a UP education is still worth. Why shouldn’t UP charge them a fairer price for its services? Why should a state university—our best one, where slots are severely limited, and admission to which is already easier for those with superior high school backgrounds—subsidize the affluent?

It isn’t even just a question of money, but of mindset.

The position paper issued by a group called the “Kabataan Party” opposing the tuition fee increase points out—correctly—that this government has other, higher spending priorities than education. Now, we can cry “We deserve to be fully subsidized! Cut the military budget!” until we’re blue in the face, and be politically correct in that position—but we might as well wait until the Second Coming before that happens, precisely because we know this administration isn’t going to heed that call.

To resist even reasonable tuition fee increases—or other internal means of improving university finances—is, in effect, to declare a hunger strike, to choose to starve in the vain hope that someone up there will take pity and give us what we deserve, against the entire history of state support for higher education in this country. Starving ourselves will merely play into the hands of those who would be happy to see UP gutted from within, gutted because it can’t afford to keep its best teachers nor to upgrade its facilities, too weak to make a difference where it counts—in the production of intellectual capital to serve the Filipino people.

A university that leaves itself at the mercy of an indifferent government for its finances is courting dependence, not independence.

Quezon Hall’s an easy target, but it’s the wrong one: march on Congress and Malacañang—they’re the ones who decide how much UP and the other state universities and colleges get. They’re the ones who keep creating new SUCs without adequate funding, just to make some local politicians look good. What we need to do, if we’re all so worked up about greater government support for education, is to militate for a national leadership and for people in government who will make this happen.

Who really wants tuition fee increases, or tuition fees for that matter? Nobody. Who wants to pay taxes? Nobody. Who wants to pay the electric and the water company? Nobody. But there’s literally a price to pay for these utilities, and for social services like education. For those who can’t afford to pay it, let’s seek subsidies and generate scholarships; for those who can, let’s take their money, spread it around, and put it to good use.

If you have better, more practical ideas, I’d be glad to hear them—and I have a feeling I will.

Penman for Monday, December 4, 2006


I WAS working on an entirely different topic for my column, here in Wisconsin, when I got a text message from a sender whose identity immediately suggested to me what the news was going to be about—and I didn’t expect it to be good. True enough, the message began with a mention of “no wake for Paeng Buenaventura,” confirming what I had feared when I last met with the man several months ago—that I would never see him so well and so happy again.

We had chatted for over three hours one afternoon at the Manila Golf Club for a book I was writing on him and his three siblings—Cesar, Elisa, and Chito Buenaventura—and he seemed happiest when his young grandson interrupted us to tell his lolo something that could only have been more important, for Paeng, than whatever it was we were discussing. Now and then other club members and guests would come by to pay their respects to the “Gov,” as the former Central Bank governor was universally known, but none of them got his attention as much as his grandson, who can’t have been more than nine or ten years old, and unmindful of all the stories his grandfather was telling me.

Those stories went back a long way. Rafael Baltasar Buenaventura was 68 when he died last week—too soon, for a man well loved by his family and friends can never live too long—but he could remember scenes from early childhood, during the war, when he and his family had to flee Baguio on foot to escape American bombs and Japanese soldiers, sleeping in makeshift caves and subsisting on camote and river water.

Most of the people who mourned Paeng’s passing knew and remembered him as the “Gov,” the compleat banker who headed Citibank’s regional operations back when a country like Malaysia was a backwater. To them and to those who never knew him, let me reintroduce Paeng with a few excerpts from my book-in-the-making on the Buenaventuras. I’ve retained the present tense for Paeng’s recollections.


PAENG TOOK the De Dios Transit bus from San Andres Circle to Loyola Heights. Maryknoll had also moved to Quezon City, and the Maryknoll girls took their own bus the same way—unfortunately, another bus altogether, a JD liner, so while Paeng and his buddies began to be aware of the other sex, there was little opportunity to know them better. They tried—in less than endearing ways. “When we were in first year high school, we used to sneak frogs into their school bus. We’d go early to frighten the girls, not knowing how important they later would be in our lives,” Paeng says.

The Ateneo was exhilarating for Paeng, who took naturally to the character formation provided by a Jesuit education. “Those four years in Loyola Heights were super,” he says, remembering mentors like Father Campbell, who would bring the boys to a spot beneath a mango tree and talk to them about his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, converting them all to a team they’d never seen; he introduced them to the music of Schubert, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the racy tales of Damon Runyon, and to the adventures of the Hardy boys. They studied Cicero in Latin.

Paeng wasn’t in the honors section—something that came to him as a relief rather than a disappointment. His two brothers were both A students—with Chito working a bit harder than Cesar for the distinction—but “I was an average B student, and proud of it,” he says. His mother was happy for as long as he didn’t flunk, and Paeng treasured his summer vacations too much to endanger them by flunking a subject, so a B was a good place to be. Much later, when he received his Management Man of the Year Award from the Management Association of the Philippines, Paeng would claim that his life was proof that even B students could make it. Later, a friend of his came up to him and said, “Paeng, that’s not completely correct. You were a B student because you insisted on being one. You could have made it easily to the honors section but you took great pains not to.” Paeng laughs at that recollection, but maintains that “I just didn’t try to. I didn’t want to be an overachiever and kill myself in the process.”

His favorite subjects were Math and English, his grades in which were in the comfortable 80s—no 70s, but no 90s, either. He didn’t know in high school that he wanted to be or would become a banker. “My mother was thinking I should take medicine, since we already had an engineer and a lawyer. But one time, in high school, there was an accident and I saw all this blood, and I almost fainted. I remember telling my mother that that was the end of my future in medicine. She thought I was just faking it, but I wasn’t. I also said engineering was too hard, and the law would take too long. So I figured, if I went to the Ateneo, I’d have to take an AB, and it had a lot of Latin in it. That’s when I figured I’d just take Commerce in La Salle.”


WEIGHING HIS options, Paeng chucked accountancy and took up the obvious alternative, with a little help from an uncle on his mother’s side. The Rufinos were part owners of Security Bank, which had opened in 1951 as the postwar period’s first privately owned, Filipino-controlled bank. Security Bank was expanding aggressively—at one point, it had the most branches among all banks in Metro Manila—and it seemed like just the outfit and the profession for Paeng to join. He had to start as the accounting clerk he didn’t care to be, but, within six months, he got promoted to credit investigator, which was much more interesting.

“That’s where I learned to be street-smart,” Paeng says. “You were usually assigned five names to whose credit history needed to be checked with around 25 banks in Escolta.” Escolta—downtown Manila’s old business district—was also where Security Bank’s head office was located. Paeng had friends in other banks, former classmates who were also credit investigators. “We used to bump into each other as we were doing our rounds. So about three or four of us started asking, ‘Hey, why are we going around 25 times? Maybe we should meet every morning, you have five, I have five, he has five, and we exchange names.’ We trusted each other to cover the names assigned to us, and the system enabled us to finish our work early in the afternoon. I would go back to the bank, where I would write a report and a secretary would type out my notes. Because I was too lazy, I wrote my notes in cryptic fashion, which required me to dictate them to the secretaries. They were older women who chided me for dictating to them when I wasn’t even their boss, but I charmed my way into getting them to do my work without my having to write things down.” Later in his long career, when did become the office boss, these “people skills” would serve Paeng well, and endear him to his staff.

He was paid about P120 a month at Security Bank—“big money then, enough to pay for my gasoline and parking.” He had been driving his parents’ Pontiac since his senior year in college. Cesar had to use a bike when he was in UP, and he would point out the inequity: “Why should you be driving a car when I had to use a bike?”

Paeng continued working in Security Bank during his senior year, moving up to credit appraiser, and graduated in 1960. Chito was already studying in Georgetown then, and Paeng thought that—like his two brothers—he too should go to the United States for his master’s degree in business. He applied to and was accepted by the MBA programs in Columbia and New York University, among others. He chose NYU, because it had night classes, and Paeng wanted to lighten the load on his parents, who were still also contributing to Chito’s education. Night classes would allow him to get a day job and earn a little. He found that job as a trainee with Manufacturers Hanover, leaning on his Security Bank connection. He took an apartment in Forest Hill, and plowed into his work and his studies, finishing his MBA in almost three years. Again, Paeng was a B student.

It was also Paeng’s first trip abroad. The freedom was exhilarating, and Paeng made full use of it. After his stint with Manufacturers Hanover, he worked briefly for a cousin who owned a freight-forwarding company, trading his suits for a dockworker’s togs. This cousin needed help with organizing his business, which was making good money but was in disarray. “I was just finishing my MBA and was doing my thesis when he hired me to get the office organized. But in the process, I learned how bundle a carton, since I had to go to the back of the office where the packing was done. I wasn’t a strong person, but I learned the rudiments of the business. If we had to get certain important documents at the docks, I would occasionally do it because no one else had the time. So I got to know the seamier side of New York.”

Luckily, Paeng met with nothing too unpleasant on that job. It was tough, he says, but he enjoyed it. After a year, he was on the move again—back to Manila, to avail himself of a unique opportunity that was going to define his life for the next several decades.

A banker at heart, Paeng had wanted to work for Manufacturers Hanover (or “Manny Hanny,” as it was known in the business), but the problem was that the bank had no offices overseas, only representatives—just two expatriates in Manila, at that time. However, Citibank was expanding its global operations. Founded as the City Bank of New York in 1812, Citibank had become America’s largest bank by 1894, and three years later was the first US bank to establish a foreign department and trade in foreign exchange. By 1902 it had set up offices in Shanghai and Manila.

In many ways, it was ideal for Paeng, who had his feet planted in both Manila and Manhattan. He could have opted to stay in New York as a trainee, but that meant being one among several hundred such trainees, with his being a foreigner possibly working against him. But Paeng met with a Citibank VP who was going to be assigned to Manila, and who told him about an executive training program the bank was going to set up there. He invited Paeng to join the program. “In one year,” he promised Paeng, “you’ll be an officer of the bank.”


AND SO began a long and illustrious career with Citibank and, ultimately, with the Central Bank—a position that he would devote his unflagging attention and world-class expertise to, but which would exact a terrible toll on his energy and well-being.

It was a distinction he never asked for, and tried to evade. His father, a provincial treasurer whose career suffered when he refused to condone corruption, had expressly forbidden his children to enter the government service, to spare them the same grief. But when duty to country called in 1999, Paeng couldn’t say no. He and Cesar had to go to their father’s grave to pray for the old man’s understanding and forgiveness.

Perhaps their father was right about the grief. But he should be pleased with what his sons—particularly the B student—did for the country, and the family name.