Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, June 25, 2007


ON MY way out of ABS-CBN’s Studio 6 where I had gone last week to talk on Pia Hontiveros’s show about writing as a profession, I ran into a former student of mine, Dada Felix, who was coming in for her own interview. Dada’s a Palanca prizewinning fictionist who also happens to be the Vice President for Communications and Stakeholder Relations of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC). We had just enough time to exchange pleasantries in the driveway, where she told me that she was there to make a plug for financial literacy. “Financial what?” She’d email me some materials on it, she said, and we went our separate ways.

Sure enough, the very next day, I received a message in my inbox from Dada, providing details of a program the PDIC was promoting among young Filipinos to encourage them to save, and be contributors to a stronger financial system. The idea is to make students learn about savings and the banking system, through teaching modules in economics and values education to be distributed to 5,000 high schools nationwide.

It was interesting to me, because I’ve been forever lamenting the fact that while we keep arguing about which language to teach our students in, we haven’t taught them enough about numbers and figures—the kind that will make an impact on their lives, whether they’re aware of them or not.

Money and savings are part of that unfamiliar culture of numeracy (ie, being numbers-literate). To put it plainly, people should know how to count, and should understand that figures matter—as much as words, more than the stars, and sometimes even more than feelings and opinions, the staples of Pinoy argumentation. When the venerable General Education program of the University of the Philippines was being revised a few years ago, I urged the inclusion of an introductory course in economics for freshmen and sophomores (in the very least, so they could see how state universities are financed and stop complaining when tuition fees go up once in a decade).

This PDIC initiative is a laudable one in that it will instill in our youngest citizens some awareness of how savings are important—not just to one’s own financial health, but also to the banking system and the economy as a whole. More savings means more money in the system to lend and to invest.

It’s probably a reflection of the general downturn in the economy these past many years and also of our spendthrift culture (I think the two go together: if you don’t make much, you’ll need or want to spend what you have) that we don’t save. While it’s been picking up a bit, our savings rate (whether on the national or the household level) remains one of Asia’s lowest—roughly 20% versus Taiwan’s almost 50%.

You and I know the PDIC as a kind of guarantor of deposits. They’re the people you normally don’t want to be dealing with, because if you are, it most likely means that something’s gone wrong somewhere. But it devised this financial literacy program precisely to keep that from happening—to help ordinary citizens become aware of how the banking system works, how to avoid scams, and how to keep the system healthy.

According to the PDIC, “Through their Araling Panlipunan classes, students will learn the significance of savings mobilization in the financial environment and the role of PDIC in looking after the soundness of the banking system. Values education classes, on the other hand, will inculcate in teenagers the values of thrift, frugality, simplicity and temperance. They will also be more aware of their rights and responsibilities as depositors.

“The Teachers’ Guides are designed to help teachers carry out livelier and more interesting class discussions. For example, the teacher’s guide in economics suggests a panel discussion on the relations of various sectors (government, church, trading institutions, private sector, public sector, and banks) in the circular flow of the economy. It comes with guide questions on the importance of saving and investing and PDIC’s role in safeguarding the interests of bank depositors.”

All the best of luck, folks!


I'M SAYING these things like I’m some kind of math whiz, but I’m not; I respect numbers maybe because I fear them, having had a memorable encounter with my math teacher in high school, where my final score in Freshman Algebra was 39.2%, if I’m remembering my nightmares right. That would get you kicked out of any high school, and it didn’t help that mine happened to be the Philippine Science High School, which was supposed to specialize in turning out people who ate differential equations for breakfast.

Fortunately, all wasn’t lost just yet. In one of the great mysteries of my life, I had topped the PSHS entrance exams just the year before—showing, if anything, that I must have had something between my ears worth stirring. I actually liked math; it just didn’t like me. I suspect that the school administrators realized what an embarrassment it would have been for everyone if their topnotcher were to be shown the door after only a year (during which I also discovered female pulchritude, but that’s another story), so they let me make an appeal.

I promptly set out to draft one, with a little help from my father, and with a 13-year-old’s brazenness that I would later have to unlearn, opening my appeal with “At the outset, let me state that I bear malice toward none….” It must have worked, because I was given a year to get myself tutored and to pass my next math subject, which I did, barely. In college, I kept my flickering ambitions of working in science and technology alive by enlisting as an Industrial Engineering major—but again, one semester pockmarked by absences (what, algebra again?) put a merciful end to those hopes.

I still have a thing for numbers—it’s spooky, but I’ve actually memorized my credit card numbers, my TIN, my bank account numbers, and my social security number—but I know well enough to leave the serious figuring to the pros, and to earn my keep with the only thing I have in seemingly boundless supply, words.

I’m also sure that I’d be a better advocate of financial literacy if I had more finances to be literate about—and I have to confess to being one of those people who leave just enough in the bank to pay for next month’s credit-card bill—but I’m working on it (I mean, I’m saving up for the iPhone and the Foleo and the 20-megapixel, 8-gigabyte DigiHickey my fingers seem just about ready to grasp every 4 am right before I wake up to utter darkness and an urgent need for a dash to the bathroom).


SPEAKING OF words and the PSHS, seven alumni from Batch 1982 have put their heads together to create the “DaPisay Code,” a mystery to be unraveled by brilliantly curious minds. You don’t even have to be a PSHS alumnus or student to join in, and there’s P10,000 and bragging rights in it for you if you break the code. Check it out online here.

This is part of Batch 1982’s campaign to drum up interest in the PSHS’s annual homecoming this September. The puzzle was generated by a group that included Iggy Agbayani, an orthopedic surgeon and clinical professor at UP-PGH; Joey Gomez, a telecom expert and UP engineer; Wen Del Rosario-Raymundo, an obstetrician; Marian Roque, a Math professor at UP; John Paul Vergara, a Math professor at the Ateneo; and Jessica Zafra, “The Ruler of the Universe,” as you all know.

Not incidentally, Jessica and I aren’t the only refugees from Math to have come out of PSHS. In the arts and literature, we share the company of writers Luis Katigbak, Marc Gaba, Fidelito Cortes, and Ralph Galan; film directors Auraeus Solito and Lore Reyes; dancer and CCP President Nes Jardin; composer Joel Navarro; and fashion model Anna Bayle.

No, they didn’t get 39.2% in their freshman algebra. Maybe 60%.


AND SPEAKING of my other alma mater, let me share an invitation from the UP Men’s Varsity Basketball Team to join them and Coach Joe Lipa at a fundraising dinner on June 30 at the Bahay ng Alumni in Diliman.

Fortified by strong recruits from the junior teams of the UAAP and the NCCA, the Fighting Maroons are hell-bent on doing their best this UAAP season, which begins on July 7, as its offering to the university’s Centennial next year. The last time UP took the championship was in 1986—way too long ago.

If you think it’s about time the “matatalino” proved something else on the hardcourt, then show them your support by attending the dinner, which will feature a musical program by UP talents. Call or text coordinator Romeo Nones at 0920-9530381 for details.

Penman for Monday, June 18, 2007

FEW PEOPLE outside of the computing world took notice of it, but a couple of weeks ago a new product was launched that could very well prefigure the way many of us will be writing and working a decade from now.

Yes, it’s a claim that’s been made before, not the least of all for the computer itself. But the computer today is nowhere near where and what it was 20 years ago, its mutations having made it possible to carry entire libraries in one’s pocket and to write notes on the fly—“Buy crabs for Chinee,” “Replace reference to McKinley on p. 32 with quote from GWB”—that you can send out into the ether and expect to be read, almost instantaneously, by someone else on the other side of the world.

The latest wonder-gadget out the door is the Palm Foleo—a small, thin, 2.5-lb. ultraportable laptop (geekier types prefer to call it a “mobile companion” or “Linux Internet appliance”) that can read and write documents and spreadsheets and go online for email and surfing. Palm—a maker of such groundbreaking devices as the old Pilot and the Treo—is touting the Foleo to be something that busy executives would use in lieu of the 15-inch laptop in between major jobs or presentations that would require heavier hardware. (Reality check: back in 1991, at the advent of the laptop age, I lugged home an Amstrad PPC “portable” that had 640K of memory and weighed all of 18 pounds.)

The Foleo isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last gadget of its kind. Already, Asus has announced the Windows/Linux Eee PC 701 ultralight boasting similar features at a price of no more than $200 (the Foleo will cost $500 when it’s released in a month or so); VIA’s $600 Windows NanoBook will be even smaller and lighter than the Foleo.

Predictably, the Foleo’s announcement was met with almost universal wrath and scorn by the Palm faithful (yes, there are such creatures, rivaled in fervor only by Mac freaks such as myself) who had been expecting an updated, upgraded Treo smartphone. Building on Palm’s Apple-like reputation for making things that are incredibly easy to use, the Treo has become the world’s most successful smartphone (i.e, a phone that does more than make calls to Mom and Dad), but has been exhibiting middle-age creep, including an inexplicably lingering lack of wi-fi.

Typical of the rants that met the Foleo was this comment by an irate Palm user: “I was very disappointed in the news about the Foleo. Just another accessory I don't need. Granted it can help when you need to see your docs on a big screen and be able to edit those docs. But how many people actually do this on a daily basis. For $400 I go and just get a cheap laptop or spend the money on useful software for my smartphone. I just wish that Palm came out with a new phone design. This day was a big let down. First the MS tabletop and now this!”

I might’ve said the same thing—having moved away from a Treo to a Nokia E61i because of the latter’s thinness and wi-fi capabilities—but the more I thought about it, the more I saw the sense of a Foleo or some such device. Sure, there’s the old gadget lust to feed—I’ll probably buy a dead log with two blinking Christmas lights on it if somebody told me it was a “digital lifestyle enhancer” or some such thing—but I’m convinced that the Foleo was made not just for CEOs but for writers like me.

Never mind the geeky stuff like Linux and connectivity. In fact, forget the complexity and focus on the simplicity of the thing. I’m looking at the Foleo as a writing machine—a slim, trim one with a decent 10-inch screen and a regular-sized keyboard from which I can email my piece once it’s done and download documents to be edited: in short, everything essential that my laptop can do at half the weight. I don’t need video or DVDs, I don’t need music (I can use my iPod for that); I do need a word processor, I need email, I need Google, and I need my calendar and address book. The Foleo seems tailor-made for those needs, and I’ll probably be first at the checkout counter once it arrives on these shores later this year.



THINKING ABOUT the Foleo got me to thinking about the whole technology of writing, which seems to have come a long way from the days of clay tablets, papyrus sheets, and quill pens, but which in another sense really hasn’t. The means have changed—we now have LCD screens for paper, and keyboards for styli—but the basic scheme remains that of turning ideas into letters or figures that mean something and imprinting them on a medium that can be shared with other readers.

Some such media can be more durable than others (you’d be surprised by how strong and how white 17th-century linen paper is, compared to crumbly, oxidized Victorian newsprint) and some can be both “strong” and yet ephemeral, like email on an LCD monitor, but we’ve always been accustomed to reading words and images off a fairly flat surface. The greater difference has been in the input method, from a sharpened stick or a paintbrush to the keyboard.


Nothing matters more to me in my choice of writing tools than a good keyboard. As some of you know, I collect vintage fountain pens and love writing note cards and signing checks with them (well, I hate writing checks, because it means someone else is going to take a chunk out of my meager savings, but I mind it less when I’m signing one with my Pelikan M800, which makes me feel richer than I am); but I know when the romance of writing ends and the labor begins.

It’s a terrible realization, but I’d have to admit that I can’t possibly hand-write a 1,500-word column within a couple of hours if my life depended on it. Given the volume of work I do, I live by the keyboard, for which no better input method has been devised, except perhaps for direct dictation and voice recognition software, which remains in its relative infancy. (I love the firmness and yet also the springiness of my aluminum PowerBook’s keyboard so much that I have refused to trade up to the newer MacBooks.)

For good or ill, we’ve become slaves to the keyboard. Since the invention of the first practical typewriter by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1873, we’ve pecked away at gazillions of letter keys, arranged in the now-standard QWERTY layout proposed by Amos Densmore in 1878 to prevent jamming. It’s been nearly 130 years since and any number of supposedly superior and more logical alternatives to QWERTY have been advanced, but nothing still makes more sense to our fingers than QWERTY (even to me, who never learned to type properly and depends on three or four fingers to do the work of ten).

The typewriter not only standardized writing and made it easier to read what other people (not to mention oneself) wrote. It changed the look, the feel, and ultimately the character of writing itself.


In a prescient ode to the typewriter, written in 1983 just before the onslaught of word processors and their even sleeker successors, essayist Roger Rosenblatt observed that “Hitler evidently did not use a typewriter, being a dictator, but other writers have found it indispensable. J.M. Synge and Henry James, to name two. Mark Twain, who typed the manuscript of either Tom Sawyer or Life on the Mississippi (the matter is murky), became the first author to hand in a typewritten book to his publisher. Of his Remington, Twain wrote: ‘It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around.’ Twain also began the practice of double-spacing manuscripts, thus providing room for editors ever since to fill the margins with the words ‘awkward’ and ‘Don't get this.’…. The typist in modern folklore is often given a melancholy identity, like the typist in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, who takes her lover as wearily as she lights her stove.”

Poets like Eliot felt the difference acutely and made aesthetic use out of the machine’s maddening consistency. In an essay on what’s been called “concrete poetry”, Mary Ellen Stolt quotes the poet Charles Olson: “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.”

Poet Aram Saroyan, the son of William Saroyan, also “depends while working completely on the typewriter and the word. His ‘obsolete red-top Royal Portable,’ he states, ‘is the biggest influence on my work.’ If its typeface, ‘standard pica,’ were different, he believes that he would write ‘(subtly) different poems.’ He is ‘sure’ that when the ‘ribbon gets dull’, his poems ‘change.’”

I don’t have the space for it now, but it would be interesting to see how differently writers write when they shift from pen to keyboard, and vice versa. I’ve seen with my own eyes typewritten manuscripts of the late National Artist Nick Joaquin where the typewriter ink progressively thins out to nothing, to be replaced later on by Joaquin’s pencil. (The story was that Nick was such a mechanical klutz that it became one of his alalay’s tasks to flip the ribbon-reverse lever for him.)

Some people have proposed that the future of writing technology is in handwriting—that’s right, in a return to good old-fashioned penmanship, with a digital twist. The twist is in the ability of computers to digitize handwriting—to convert your chicken scrawl into those 1’s and 0’s that computers understand and regurgitate as recognizable images, or letters.

A few years ago, handwriting recognition was the Holy Grail of software developers like Mi-Co, whose chief Jim Clary chortled in 2002 that “The idea to collect handwritten information so that it can be recognized and put into a computer has been around for a long time. Apple offered a similar hand-held device about 10 years ago. But the technology wasn't as powerful then, and it was basically a failure. It was ahead of its time. But we believe now with Microsoft demonstrating its ease of use last week and with the emergence of a wide variety of platforms—including Tablet PCs between $2,000 and $3,000—the handwriting technology market is going to take off. The time is ripe.”

Mi-Co still does good business in fields like the hospital industry, where technicians can scribble notes onto digital pads that can be transcribed by its software, but elsewhere Tablet PCs never really took off, and the fact remains that very few people these days really write more than a couple of pages by hand, unless they absolutely have to.

Handwriting has become a stranger unto us; every time we pick up a pen, our penmanship looks more cramped, more unfamiliar, as if someone else were holding our fingers. And bad handwriting can’t help even the best Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and its version for script, Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). As it is, even the most sophisticated OCR software needs help: a 99% accuracy rate means that it’ll fail on one out of every hundred characters, and in a manuscript of 10,000 characters, that’s a hundred mistakes that will need manual fixing. (Incidentally, if you want to improve your handwriting, you might want to visit this site.)

Still and all, there’s probably something to be said for committing pen to paper, at least in creative writing. Asked how she got to her second draft, the poet Denise Levertov responded: “Well, it depends. I might see that the punctuation isn't right, or the line break isn't quite right, or I may want to add or subtract something. If you copy something out by hand, before you move onto the typewriter, you've already gone on making minor changes. This is an intuitive part of the creative process, and one that's eliminated by the use of word processors. People get such a completed-looking copy that they think the poem is done. The word processor doesn't take as much time as actually forming the letters with your hand at the end of your arm which is attached to your body. It's a different kind of thing. They don't realize that this laborious process is part of the creative process.”

Or maybe at least in poetry. I somehow don’t feel that this column would’ve been helped any by scratching it out in cuneiform or longhand. Gimme that Foleo!

Penman for Sunday, June 17, 2006


I DON'T get together with the folks at the Department of Tourism very often, but last week I had a chance to catch up on developments in the sector when I spent a few days on the road with Eduardo “Edu” Jarque, Jr., DOT Undersecretary for Tourism Planning and Promotions. Edu was on top of a project to promote the Philippine spa industry at the 9th International Spa and Wellness Conference and Exhibition in Shanghai, and the STAR had sent me to cover the event—possibly because of my incurable addiction to foot massages, but also, I suspect, because I’d loudly made it known that I’d last been in Shanghai 20 years ago. Once upon a time in China I was a young grasshopper…. But that’s another story for another week. (I’ll do my Shanghai story when the full impact of my impressions sinks in.)

I hadn’t met him before, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Edu Jarque was the kind of seasoned but still sprightly and irrepressibly optimistic career official you want to see in the job he’s holding. A veteran of long postings in LA and London, this ebullient man won’t let pesky problems like politics and natural disasters get in the way of selling the Philippines abroad. In Edu’s world, there may be some things we can’t do much about, but tourism definitely isn’t one of them.

There’s something of a boomlet in Philippine tourism going on, and thanks to DOT Sec. Ace Durano, initiatives like the Philippine presence in trade shows like this one in Shanghai have been part of the reason. International visitor arrivals exceeded 2.8 million last year—with Koreans overtaking Americans for the first time on top of the list; the Japanese came in a close third. That’s still a long way from Thailand’s 12 million visitors, but things are looking up.

“Our best selling points are our beaches and our proximity,” says Edu, “plus the uniqueness of our culture—our Spanish influence, for example, which you won’t find anywhere else in the region. Here, the visitor gets the whole experience, from the water to the golf course to the old church to the mall. They get great value for money. And, of course, it’s the people—in all the exit interviews, it’s the warmth and friendliness of our people that visitors remember the most.”

When Jarque talks about “proximity,” he means our closeness to North Asia, which has accounted for much of the sector’s recent growth. “Focus marketing has been the key,” says Edu. “We’ve targeted China, Korea, and Japan in particular. These people know what they want, and don’t worry about travel advisories.”

Integral to that campaign are the sorties that the DOT has made around the region and in Europe, including participation in trade fairs and exhibitions such as the Shanghai spa convention, which showcases the best and the latest in the international spa and wellness industry, a major tourism driver and domestic employer. China alone has some 157,000 spas and spa-related companies employing 10 million people.

The Philippines had only 87 spa facilities as of November last year, but some of our best spas have already won prestigious international awards, such as The Farm at San Benito in Lipa City, which last year won the second AsiaSpa Baccarat Award given in Hong Kong by AsianSpa magazine. The year before that, Philippine spas also won five out of 16 categories in the first such awards.

The Philippines was represented on the exhibition floor in Shanghai by two very pleasant and well-trained therapists, Catherine Cuesta of Nurture Spa in Tagaytay City and Charisma Berdin of Plantation Bay in Cebu. They were assisted by DOT officials Niel Ballesteros and Gerard Panga, both young and capable professionals eager to answer every inquiry from the visitors who streamed to our seemingly sunlit booth.

Spas are being promoted by the DOT as part of its health tourism program, which draws on our strongest and most abundant resources: our friendly and talented people, and Mother Nature. That’s just one component of a larger effort to bring the best of the Philippines to the world’s attention.

In Shanghai, in particular, not only the DOT but also the Department of Foreign Affairs has been working aggressively to put the Philippines on the economic horizon of the Shanghainese. This week, the Philippine consulate under Consul-General Jesus Yabes and Consul Aileen Mendiola-Rau will be kept busy overseeing a flurry of activities timed to celebrate Independence Day.

The Bayanihan Dance Company—which is marking its 50th anniversary this year after touring in 62 countries and winning numerous international distinctions—is performing in Shanghai and Beijing. Filipino artist Beth Parrocha-Doctolero is exhibiting watercolors inspired by her recollection of books she read as a child. A Filipino Food Fiesta is on offer from June 6 to 13, with the dishes prepared by the master chefs of the Century Park Hotel in Manila. The venue for all these activities in Shanghai is the new Eton Hotel—which, not incidentally, is 100% owned by Filipino-Chinese taipan Lucio Tan.

I had a lively chat over dinner with Ambassador Yabes, who turned out to be the youngest son of a scholar I’d admired since my student days, the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes, who put together what remains the definitive anthology of Philippine short stories (in several volumes, from 1925 to 1955). I reminded him of one Philippine-Shanghai connection I knew of from a book project I was working on: SGV founder Washington SyCip had spent his earliest years in Shanghai with his grandparents, his grandfather having owned the largest printing press in Asia in the mid-1920s, the Chinese Commercial Press.

The ambassador emphasized the fact that among all Chinese, the Shanghainese—who speak a different and somewhat difficult dialect—have always been the most cosmopolitan, with Shanghai having been and still remaining as one of the world’s most important ports. There are about 2,400 Filipinos in Shanghai, Consul Mendiola-Rau told me, most of them businessmen and professionals. Our local taipans, like most Filipinos with Chinese blood (myself included, though no taipan) have ties to Fujian, but Shanghai’s industrial and commercial power in China and the region just can’t be overlooked.

The charm offensive has begun to pay off. On July 12, China Southern Airlines will be inaugurating a Shanghai-Cebu route on 180-seater planes, twice a week; the planes offer business class seats, guaranteeing a range of visitors. Five different travel wholesalers are packaging the flights out of Shanghai, catering to different classes of tourists, from families to gamers to scuba divers. These wholesalers expect to move about 50,000 visitors to Cebu over the next six months.

But it won’t be just Cebu they’ll be hankering for. “It used to be that people went to Cebu, then took a sidetrip to Bohol,” the Cebu-born Jarque says with just the slightest hint of regret. “Now it’s the other way around.” Bohol has become another prime Philippine destination, buoyed by stellar attractions and new world-class facilities such as the Eskaya resort on Panglao Island, beside the Bohol Beach Club, opened recently by a local businessman. “We have about 4,000 rooms in Central Visayas, spread out over many different kinds of hotels,” adds Edu. “And so many new investors are coming in—Donald Trump has expressed an interest in The Fort—that a DOT unit has been created just to deal with them. The airlines have also responded positively, with Cebu Pacific ordering new planes and SEAir offering a ‘Paradise to Paradise’ route that will shuttle people from Boracay to Busuanga in Palawan.”

Boracay, of course, remains the jewel in the country’s tourism crown, bringing in some 250,000 visitors a year from here and abroad, many of them Filipinos coming over for the first time. That popularity has produced both its benefits and problems. In the meantime, Boracay’s boom seems unstoppable. “Marketing used to outpace infrastructure,” Edu says, “but infrastructure has been catching up. The building boom in Boracay best attests to this. The Regency has 90 rooms, the Discovery Hotel 88 rooms, the Microtel 30, and the Shangri-La, when it opens, will add 175 rooms and 50 villas. This is on top of any number of smaller boutique hotels that have sprung up to meet demand. Arriving visitors now land on a new pier so they no longer need to be piggybacked ashore.”

I asked Edu about the environmental impact of all this new construction and of unbridled tourism on the island—particularly the problem of garbage disposal. The government, he says, has allotted P10 million to addressing the garbage problem, and the DOT is taking care of sewage and repiping.

Other, gentler forms of tourism are taking shape. In Donsol, Sorsogon—recently made famous by its resident whale sharks or butanding—the DOT has encouraged the development of a homestay program for the hordes of visitors who have flocked to the town to observe the gentle beasts, only to find that they have few places to stay and little else to do. Twelve homes have signed up for the program, which is part of a new effort to promote Donsol that also involves an exploration of the old town and a firefly tour along the river that tracks incandescent swarms of these insects.

The smart, clean streets and the towering skyscrapers of modern Shanghai reminded me again of how much work needed to be done at home to get from here to there, literally and figuratively. I don’t think even a gung-ho promoter like Edu Jarque believes that tourism can be a magic wand that will banish our woes and deliver us to the 21st century. But he knows it’s a great start and an option that’s so obvious it would be criminal to ignore. “Excuse me if I sound too optimistic!” he tells me more than once with a bubbly, almost breathless, enthusiasm. From a government official, it’s a refreshing change.

For June 11, 2007


SO SORRY, but my piece on Shanghai has been saved by the STAR for its Sunday travel section, so I'll post it here this weekend. Meanwhile, check out some pictures below from that quickie visit.

Penman for Monday, June 4, 2007

DON'T LOOK now, but in just a couple of weeks, the University of the Philippines will be marking the start of its Centennial Year, culminating in the celebration of the Centennial itself on June 18, 2008. That will be a hundred years to the day Act No. 1870 was signed by Governor-General Malcolm Forbes establishing “in the City of Manila, or at the point he may deem most convenient, a university which shall be known by the designation of ‘University of the Philippines,’ the same being organized as a corporation under that name.” A budget of P100,000 was set aside for that purpose.

By the time I was born in 1954, that same university had grown to become the country’s premier institution of higher learning, producing presidents, senators, justices, and any number of business and social leaders. But quite apart from the kind of celebrities who tend to hog the front and back pages, UP also graduated many thousands of people who contributed—perhaps more quietly but no less significantly—to the national life.

For sure, some of those contributions were shameful if not disastrous; universities offer learning, but can never guarantee goodness or wisdom. But the great majority of UP alumni—close to a quarter of a million of them, over this first century—have served their people and humanity well, from our poorest barangays to the farthest reaches of the planet, wherever Filipinos themselves have dwelt and prospered, which today is nearly all the globe, from Isabela to Iceland, from Kidapawan to Kenya.

Keeping track of those alumni and their achievements has been a formidable task.

When I became the UP System’s Vice President for Public Affairs in May 2003, one of the tasks I realized I’d inherited was being nominally in charge of alumni affairs. I say “nominally” because the day-to-day administration of this concern fell to the Director of the Office of Alumni Relations—usually some indefatigably patient and unsinkably optimistic lady professor with the charm of a kitten and the tenacity of a pit bull.

On my first visit to the OAR, I discovered that—while most alumni records have since been computerized—we still kept 3” x 5” index cards on all the alumni known to us, boxes and boxes of them filling a whole wall. One of them, I was happy to see, was my mother’s: Emilia A. Yap of Sta. Fe, Romblon, BSEEd. 1956. (She should have graduated with her batchmates of 1953, but had to pause to deliver and nurse a certain baby—thankfully.)

As I grew up, that mother of mine would play a 78 rpm record of “UP Beloved” flipsided by “Push On, UP” at least once a week—more than broadly hinting that I could go to any college I wanted when I came of age, as long as these were its sacred hymns. The teacher Emilia Yap Dalisay never quite attained the same degree of professional success as, say, the lawyer Juan Ponce Enrile and the playwright Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, who appeared with her in the same 1953 Philippinensian yearbook. Indeed, it would be the labor of bringing up five children and doing the housework of her time—my father never finished college, but did what he could—that abraded the gold class ring she still wears proudly, eventually wearing down the sharp details to a dull sheen. When I graduated from UP in 1984—after 14 years as a vagrant student—no one was happier and prouder than her. All that music had clearly worked.

But for all her obscurity and all those years of struggle—including working as a postal clerk for a minimum wage—she carried herself like the UP alumna she was: the provincial girl who had seen not just Manila but the world through her studies, who learned how to think for herself and to say “No” to patently wrong and stupid notions, to refuse bribes that would have diminished her character, and to do good deeds for others because they were the right thing to do.

I can’t help thinking of my mother when I think of “UP alumni” in general, because she’s probably more representative of more of these UP alumni than the super-achievers we normally—and logically—sing the praises of, especially during major anniversaries. And what bigger one can there be than the Centennial, this long-awaited summation of all the things we are, and all the things we mean?

A thick book won’t be enough to detail the individual accomplishments of even just the 100 most outstanding alumni to have come out of not just Diliman, Los Baños, and Padre Faura, but of the System’s other campuses as well. I’m sure that over the next 12 months, such illustrious figures will emerge or be celebrated, as they should.

But let me take this opportunity today to write in praise of the unheralded, the common, and those long departed and forgotten—those who also served their university and country in their own quiet ways. Let me also praise our alumni as a whole—as a body of men and women constantly refreshed by young blood and open minds, but who have also shown a constancy of purpose and capacity, including the rare ability to think and to come together on issues of the most urgent import, even when the nation itself could not. That constancy has been maintained by generations of both militancy and cooperation, of informed involvement in the concerns of both the university and the larger society of which it is a part.

Almost from the very beginning—since 1916, when Pablo Lorenzo of Law Class 1914 became the first alumni regent—UP alumni have sought a voice in the university’s affairs.

Occasionally that voice has been a strident one—it seems to be the popular misimpression that all UP students and professors can do is rant and rebel—but the alumni have also shown a tremendous generosity of spirit over the years, a willingness to work with all for the common good.

During the Depression years, when UP’s finances fell so low that President Rafael Palma volunteered to have his annual salary cut from P18,000 to P12,000, UP alumni responded warmly to his idea of a P6 contribution from every UP graduate as a membership fee for the UP Alumni Association and its projects; one of those projects was a small press that eventually became the University Press.

During the War, the UPAA supported the resistance and the families of those who fought. Inside the prison camp in Capas, the UPAA planted a Quezon memorial tree; after the War, it opened its Alumni House to released but homeless POWs and set up the Marina Institute to provide skills training to these people and to others in need of work. The alumni—including those in the United States—also spearheaded the rebuilding of the UP Library’s ravaged collections, so that by 1948, these could offer 200,000 books and periodicals once again to their users.

Also after the War, President Jorge Bocobo recognized the value of the alumni’s intellectual contributions by establishing an Alumni Institute and building an Alumni Hall so professors and alumni could brainstorm on the question of bring the university closer to the community. (Interestingly, however, Bocobo pointedly refused P5,000 that the UP Cebu alumni had raised to save their beleaguered college because the money had come from sweepstakes, and Bocobo huffed that “…the university would never accept a single centavo raised in this way.”)

There were quite a few other times when the UP administration and the alumni saw things differently, and said so. When President Bienvenido Gonzalez first broached the idea of moving UP from Padre Faura to (good heavens) Diliman, the alumni led by future President Salvador P. Lopez railed against his “isolationist indifference” and UP’s retreat into an “ivory tower.” Sometimes the contretemps involved the other President—the presumably bigger one. When Elpidio Quirino—not one of Gonzalez’s favorite persons—became the President of the Republic and demanded the courtesy resignations of all top government officials, Gonzalez refused to submit his. When the College of Law ordered cases of beer to honor its most prominent alumni, including President Quirino, Gonzalez halted the delivery and ordered the beer truck off the campus.

Fortunately, the alumni’s relations with their alma mater have much more often been happier. When UP celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1958—coinciding with Vicente Sinco’s assumption of the presidency—the alumni led in the festivities that culminated in the installation of what would become UP’s undying symbol, the bronze Oblation. In 1983, for the UP’s Diamond Jubilee, UP alumni here and abroad responded so enthusiastically to President Edgardo Angara’s fundraising appeal that the Diamond Jubilee Fund overshot its target of P75 million to reach P87 million.

But as important as the material contributions of UP alumni are to the university and the nation, something always reminds us that it’s never just about money. (Money-making, in any case, has never been UP’s strong suit.)

In 1994, President Emil Javier created the Pahinungod program—a corps of “Oblation Volunteers”, fresh UP graduates and seniors who would fan out to the poorest and farthest of Filipino communities to teach people reading, history, mathematics, and other things they needed to learn to become more productive citizens. More than 300 volunteers signed up on the day of its launch; thousands more would follow.

Few of us know the names of these UP students and alumni, who have changed the lives of fellow Filipinos from Mt. Pinatubo to Mindanao. One name—not even a graduate then, but a pharmacy senior at UP Manila—deserves to be remembered: Janvier Gabuna, a Pahinungod volunteer who drowned in May 1996 trying to save a fellow volunteer during a summer immersion program in Aurora province.

As well as my mother, and as well as any year’s Most Distinguished Alumnus, I think Janvier knew what being part of UP and what “service to the people” truly meant. Mabuhay kayo!