Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, May 29, 2006


I WAS amazed by the number of e-mailed responses I got to last week’s column, a reprint of the talk I very recently gave before this year’s batch of US-bound Fulbright scholars. It was the most mail I ever received devoted to one issue, and it almost made me forget the nasty hate mail I got for critiquing the prose style and plotting of The Da Vinci Code the week before (you can read both the critique and the feedback on my blog).

Predictably, most of the messages in my inbox were inquiries about the Fulbright program itself—what it is, how one gets a Fulbright scholarship, and what you’re expected to do or to be once you get one. The questions arrived with such regularity that I had to fashion a pro forma answer, much like a call-center agent fielding a client: “For more information about the Fulbright program, please go to http://www.paef.org.ph or call 812-0945.”

I wasn’t too happy doing that—not because the Philippine American Educational Foundation (PAEF), which administers the program, can’t answer any pertinent question the public may have, but because I could sense that behind every query was an ardent and deep-seated hope, for oneself or one’s child, to get a chance to study abroad for free with some of the best minds in one’s chosen field. In other words, these were questions that deserved a more personal answer, which I’ll try to provide below. I hardly need remind you—but I must—that the views and opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and that whatever PAEF tells you overrides anything I might have said about the program mechanics.

The Fulbright-Hays program started in the Philippines in 1948 to enable the brightest Filipino scholars in nearly all academic fields—the arts, the sciences, the law, engineering, etc.—acquire graduate degrees from American universities. Call it American postwar PR; but Sen. William J. Fulbright was thinking smart and thinking right when he figured that investing in the intellects of young people all over the world was better than spending on bombs and bullets.

To date some 2,000 scholars have benefited from the Philippine Fulbright program (it works both ways; we send people out, and American scholars interested in the Philippines also come in). Filipinos going to the US for their master’s or doctoral degrees are expected—nay, duty-bound—to come home after their studies and render return service with their institutions (usually universities, but they could also be government agencies, private companies, or NGOs).

As you can imagine, it’s an extremely competitive process, and hundreds of applicants may vie every year for one of the seven or eight slots open; the actual number, which used to be much larger, depends on the budget and the kind of arrangements PAEF and the US-based Institute of International Education or IIE can make with US universities. (PAEF also administers the Hubert Humphrey fellowships for mid-career professionals and the East-West Center scholarships, as well as the Fulbright Senior Scholars grants; all are also highly competitive. Outside of grants, PAEF specialists can advise students and parents interested in American university education on their options and the procedures to follow.) The many hundreds or even thousands of initial applicants are winnowed down to a shortlist of about a hundred who will be personally interviewed by a Selection Committee composed of respected academics (often former grantees themselves) and PAEF representatives.

It helps to be an honors graduate—you can almost presume that’s what most of the applicants will have been—but being a summa is no guarantee of acceptance, and neither will the program dismiss offhand someone with an impressive work record, or who can make a persuasive argument for the usefulness of his or her study program to Philippine society as a whole. A couple of years ago, the Fulbright batch included Raymund Narag, a former UP fratman who wrongfully spent seven years in prison and who fought for prison reform and against fraternity violence; he’s taking his master’s in criminal justice at Michigan State University.

When I applied for my Fulbright in 1986, I had already been teaching a couple of years (after working elsewhere for much longer), had published my first book, and had five or six Palanca awards under my belt. For all that, and to improve my chances of being taken, I invested in the Graduate Record Examination or GRE—a grueling two-part exam that takes the whole day and cost me about $100 twenty years ago for the general and subject tests; it’s like a graduate SAT or UPCAT, and it’s what US universities use to gauge your fitness. (You don’t have to do this; the program will pay for your GREs once you’re accepted; but I suspect that my luckily good scores, which I presented to the panel, helped.)

In other words, you have to strategize, and to prepare a plan of study that makes sense not only in terms of your personal career goals but also in terms of how your institution or community can benefit from your study abroad. (And just to put things in perspective, the Fulbrights aren’t the only game in town: the British Council, and the Japanese and the German governments, among others, offer scholarships for graduate students and professionals in certain fields.)

In this respect, it may just be a tad easier to justify a program in, say, environmental law or in avian flu research than in lyric poetry or installation art—but selection panels are always impressed by a clear, sound, and sincere presentation, no matter what one’s discipline may be. In the final selection, effort is also made to ensure a broad representation of disciplines (although certain priorities and exclusions—such as medicine—could be set) as well as, to some extent, regions.

It used to be, in the good old days, that successful applicants could choose whatever university they wanted to go to; inevitably, places like Harvard and Yale prevailed over others, but as the tuition for just one of these schools could finance two other scholars elsewhere, the program will now ask you to cough up the tuition beyond a certain threshold if you insist on becoming an Ivy Leaguer. PhD grantees are also supported for only the first two years, after which they should find other sources of assistance (not all that difficult, if you’re that good).

Grantees are expected—nay, obliged—to come home and render return service to their home institution for a number of years. And there’s the rub, because some grantees—after seeing what it’s like in America—seek and find ways of getting around this payback rule. That’s why I gave last week’s speech, to remind departing grantees of their legal and moral obligation to return and serve.

But one of the most interesting and thought-provoking responses my speech got came from reader Daniel Saracin, who drew on India’s experience to argue that a nation’s best and brightest need not be working at home to serve their country in the most effective way.

“The elite graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management are not tied down by commitments to stay in India. Fifty years later, this was considered very far-sighted and revolutionary for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, founding father of these elite institutions. Today, the best and the brightest of India are in Silicon Valley, teaching in Harvard, or managing billion-dollar funds in the financial centers of London and New York. These elites laid the foundation for whatever India is becoming now, acknowledged powerhouse in IT and brain-intensive economic ventures. Investments flow back to the source of these brains, i.e., Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. but the confidence of Indian capabilities were planted by Indian PhDs working in the giant US pharma, IT, airlines, even the World Bank and IMF….

“(But) in the Philippines, we persist and continue to delude ourselves with limiting our best and brightest to our own soil, to our own stagnation as an insignificant global pushover. I say limiting our brainpower to local soil is denying the realities of global competition. I further say it is ‘false nationalism’, which should be eliminated and dismantled from our consciousness.”

I wrote Daniel back to thank him for his perspective, and to say that I certainly agreed with the gist of it. There’s no point, for example, in holding hostage highly-trained people who can’t find the labs for world-class research hereabouts. That kind of myopia kills. I have scores of friends—many of them former Fulbrighters or Philippine Science High School batchmates—who are doing very well abroad, not just financially but in terms of making significant contributions to human knowledge as a whole; indeed, they may be best where they are.

But the difference with the Fulbright grants is that public money is being spent on them, mostly for people in teaching and similarly influential positions. I have no problems with people getting an education abroad (using their own means) and staying there, from where they can continue to help people back home, on even better terms.

But I don't see the sense of spending and average of, say, 2 to 3 million pesos of taxpayers' money (both American and Filipino taxpayers’ money, as we continue to pay for their salaries while on study leave) on a scholar who'll just teach at Berkeley or work with American Express after graduation, when that knowledge could have been shared with many others here through return service (which isn't forever, either). If we’re going to pay to educate people just so they can immediately work with Boeing or General Electric, who’s going to teach our engineers here, and what are those student-engineers going to learn?

Indeed there’s long-term and short-term payback; but a few years of making good on what you promised to deliver can’t hurt too much, can they?

Penman for Monday, May 22, 2006


I was asked to deliver the keynote speech for this year’s batch of departing Fulbright scholars (including Hubert Humphrey and East-West Center grantees) last Friday, and given how many Filipinos are going abroad these days for college and graduate work, I thought I’d share with you what I told my fellow Fulbrighters.


CONGRATULATIONS, FIRST of all, for having come this far. You are embarking on what will truly be a life-changing experience.

I have only one real message for you today: study well, enjoy America—and come home and serve our people. The first two I am sure you will do without being told.

The third—coming home—is something we all probably feel we do not need to be reminded of; it is, after all, part of the basic agreement you entered into, and as full of patriotic fervor as you may be today, it is almost an insult to suggest that the thought might cross your mind to renege on your commitment and find a reason and a way to stay in America.

The fact is, it has happened before—not as often as one would think, given the long queues outside the US Embassy of Filipinos seeking to work and live in America, but often enough to disturb a former Fulbrighter like me who takes personal commitments, especially those made to one’s country, very seriously.

It’s even happened that—once when I was sitting as a member of the Selection Committee—one candidate whose sterling qualifications would have allowed him to write his own ticket to any graduate school was candid enough to admit that he was planning to stay in America after his Fulbright. He never left. You can be too honest, or sometimes you can forget to read the rules.

But better and stronger than rules is a personal understanding of what you’re here for today and why people like you—not just people like you but you yourself—were chosen for this rare privilege.

A Fulbright scholarship is one of life’s great gifts to the Filipino scholar. Over almost half a century, about 1,500 Filipinos have received that gift, repaying it many times over in their subsequent careers of service to the Filipino people.

But like all overseas work—which it is, except that it’s work of an academic nature—it comes at a price, often an emotional price.

When I left for my Fulbright in 1986—20 years ago—there were no cellphones or text messages; the PC and the Internet were in their infancy, with something called “Compuserve” available only to a few of the most IT-savvy. Still, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I entered one of the computer halls at the University of Michigan, where, at that time, they already had 4,500 computers for the school’s 40,000 students, many of them open—with unlimited laserprinting—24/7.

And yet, for all that advancement, it still took about ten days for a letter to cross the Pacific. Phone calls still cost a fortune—and I had to hoard my news and my messages for my Sunday morning three-minute calls from the corner phonebooth, reading from a scribbled list of things I wanted to say. I didn’t see my family for at least three years; I missed out completely on my daughter’s high school education. We suffered other—costlier and more painful—losses. Emotionally, I left the Philippines a bubbly boy; I came home—on the day Pinatubo’s ashes fell in June 1991—a man suddenly grown older beyond his years, “astonished,” I was to write later, “by how a life could be complicated further.”

But I learned. I learned not only to read a whole Elizabethan play over the lunch break, the facsimile edition in one hand and a home-made burger in the other; to teach a roomful of inner-city kids whose freshman essays spoke of gang wars, rape, drugs, and despair; to strive to be the best in my creative writing class, not only because I could write well but because I was a Filipino—and not only because I was a Filipino, but because I could write well.

I learned all these, but I also learned to cook—at first for myself, and then for a living, over five months at minimum wage, as a combination cook-waiter-cashier-busboy-janitor for a Chinese takeout in an underground mall; I learned to take the cheapest though not always the safest routes, by Greyhound, to faraway places; I learned to reconnoiter sidewalks for throwaway furniture, and I knew where all the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores were by heart; I learned how to live for almost two weeks on $20, on a diet of turkey backs and rice. Once, in Michigan, I picked up empty softdrink cans on the campus so I could cash them in for the 10-cent rebate, until I realized that the only other people doing that were the very drunk and the very poor, and I decided not to give them any more competition.

If I’m beginning to sound like some tragically unhappy story by Bienvenido Santos and not like the federally-funded Fulbright-Hays program, it could be because the year I left was when something called the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act came into effect, drastically slashing Fulbright benefits, among other targets, in seeking a balanced federal budget. As a result, I could hardly balance mine. Unlike you, all I got for my Fulbright was an airplane ticket, a book allowance, and an assistantship from Day One. But those hardships turned out to be providential in other ways.

Those of you who will be going on teaching assistantships should relish the challenge and the opportunity. If you can teach in the US, you can teach anywhere. The students won’t rise to say “Good morning” and they’ll call you by your first name; they’ll call you at all hours to discuss a paper or a problem, but they’re frank and forthright, they’ll push you to the limit, and they’ll remind you of what a teacher needs to be at all times.

In Ann Arbor I taught well scrubbed, mostly white upper middle-class kids; when I moved to Milwaukee for my PhD I dealt with the children of the working class. The realization that these people need you to help them is a great balm for your own loneliness, and you can only hope that you have left them with a vivid impression of a Filipino who knew his stuff and understood them and enlarged their world a bit for one fall or winter term.

We Pinoys spend our lives preparing to go to America. As a young boy in a private school I remember reading about “state fairs” and “heifers” and “mackinaws”, and to this day it amazes my American friends that I can tell the capitals of nearly all the 50 states because we had to memorize the map of the US and pencil in those names—yes, in a Filipino elementary school.

Today, with satellite TV and the Internet, the actual experience of going to America might almost be anticlimactic for many. I’m sure that many of you have been there before and might look at this forthcoming trip as just another one in the course of business. In some ways, it will; America has been so demystified for us by the media and by Hollywood that we think we know it much too well.

On the other hand, the marvel of America is that while it can prove to be very small, it can also be very large—much larger than the media and Hollywood can make it to be, in the realm of the personal encounters and experiences to which you and your imagination will be delivered by that 747. The American people are a fabulously, sometimes perplexingly, diverse lot, blessed with the capability of fitting into neat stereotypes and then just as quickly breaking out of them.

Even the Filipino rich can learn in and from America. A few months ago I spoke in this vein before a group of American educational counselors who had come here to recruit the sons and daughters of affluent Filipinos for their schools. I remember a palpably mutual sense of embarrassment over our awareness of that fact. But then I told them that one of the best things our young patricians could do would be to study in America—where they could learn to tie their own shoelaces, cook their own meals, and learn something about the fundamental equality of people under the law.

Some of you—if not most or even all of you—will learn to love America, warts and all. It’s not a difficult place to love or learn to love, like the rich neighbor you grew up with and sort of had a silent crush on, whom you suddenly find yourself going out to the prom or on a date with.

But to go back to my first message: love America all you please, but never forget where your home is, which is here—not even here in 21st century Makati, but in those parts of our country which languish in the 20th and even the 19th centuries. We go to the great schools of America not just to improve our lives but theirs—those Filipinos who cannot even read, or are too hungry and tired from work to read. We are their emissaries, their agents, their speaking voices in a world so caught up in wealth and newness that it can despise and dismiss the ancient pains and plaints of the inarticulate poor.

You can swear today that your commitment will never waver, but try not to speak too soon. The test and the temptation are part of the experience. You will come across or even be offered attractive jobs and opportunities for postgraduate work. Some of you might even find that ideal—or, well, that acceptable—husband or wife who somehow managed to elude you for so long.

You can make all kinds of arguments, justifications, and rationalizations: my life circumstances have changed; I’m no longer the same person who made that promise; I can find the money to pay back whatever I owe the program or my university; our facilities back home are too primitive for the kind of research I need to do; my department has forgotten all about me; the political situation back home is too volatile for my safety and that of my family. All of these could be true—and in the end, all of them would still be, in your heart of hearts, false.

None of these conditions exist in the fine print of our contracts with our people; we pledge to learn, to return, and to serve unconditionally, as our way of saying “thank you” for all the new knowledge we will be privileged to gain—for all the brilliant autumns and the showery springs ahead of you, for all the lectures that will leave you breathless, for all the bottomless libraries, for all the summer frolic on the beaches of another ocean, for the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the sunsets of San Diego.

Again, for all these, study well, enjoy America—then come home to say “thank you.”

Penman for Monday, May 15, 2006


ALL BECAUSE of a silly notion (dare I say plot?) by some government and Church poobahs to ban the screening of The Da Vinci Code, I stayed up till 5 a.m. the other day doing what I thought I never would—I actually read the book (OK, OK, so I’m the last person on the planet to have done so). I suspect I wasn’t alone in this reaction, and that—when the movie is finally shown, and I’ll eat my left shoe if that doesn’t happen—many thousands more Pinoys will troop to the theatres just to see what the fuss is all about.

I’ll tell you later why—until last week—I wasn’t too keen on curling up under a mango tree or a ceiling fan with a copy of Da Vinci. That’s a bit odd in itself, because I love thrillers and adventure stories of all sorts—spy, crime, detective, medical, forensic, sci-fi, horror, erotic, sword and sorcery, etc.—and The Da Vinci Code, I was to find, is nothing if not all of the above.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Len Deighton, Adam Hall, John Le Carré, Michael Crichton, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many other authors we tend to call “popular” or “genre” writers, often in an all-too-dismissive vein. They’re not Faulkner—in truth, they’re loads more fun than Faulkner—but they’ve proven themselves capable of great writing (especially someone like Deighton, who can lay down a line in a spy story with as much finesse as John Updike illuminating a breakfast table).

The pleasure we get from reading authors like this (and let’s include names like Harold Robbins, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, and Stephen King) is different from whatever we derive out of reading, say, poems by Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, or Louise Gluck, or stories by J. D. Salinger or Greg Brillantes. Thrillers tend to—have to be—plotty, and their plots can be as thick and thorny as a Scottish bramble. For writers like Salinger and Brillantes, complexity and density of character’s the thing.

But like I’ve always told people who worry about this whole highbrow/lowbrow divide, I don’t see why we can’t have both, for different moods and times of the day (or night). Sometimes we might hanker for a fine merlot or shiraz; at other times, a tall glass of ice-cold Coke is all we really need and want.

So why didn’t I take to The Da Vinci Code as soon as it came out? Why didn’t I feel—like someone from the Library Journal clearly did—that “This masterpiece should be mandatory reading. Brown solidifies his reputation as one of the most skilled thriller writers on the planet with his best book yet, a compelling blend of history and page-turning suspense. Highly recommended.”?

My answer—and let me emphasize that this is just me, lest I court the wrath of 25 million Dan Brown fans who’ll surely whack me over the head with lines like “How can you argue with success? How many dozens of copies have you sold of your Selected Stories, anyway?”—is that I found Da Vinci sloppily written. I picked up a copy of the book very early on, read the first couple of pages, and fell asleep. (I can just see somebody out there go “Wha’??? But this is the best thing I’ve read in my whole life!” Down, boy.)

Let me repeat that: it’s excellently researched (some might say cobbled together), but sloppily executed, from this writer’s point of view. The very first line begins “Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the… etc.” That’s slapdash characterization—the easiest trick in the book, which is to describe a character by tacking on an adjective (“renowned”) instead of taking your time to flesh the person out.

It gets worse: when the police come on site, we’re treated to a load of movie French (I can’t quite get Inspector Clouseau out of my head). She may have had a cosmic role to play in the grand scheme of things, but for the longest time in the book, this poor girl Sophie is stuck between Langdon and Teabing, dutifully mouthing the equivalent of “Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?” and provoking pages of learned disquisitions from either fellow. A means of escape—a secret passageway, a voiture (let’s get into that French stuff), an armored truck, a plane—is always just around the corner, invariably followed by a villain (hulking albinos preferred).

I’ll stop here before the postman comes with two trash bags full of hate mail from the Official Dan Brown Fans Club. You catch my drift.

Was it wrong for you to enjoy the book for whatever pleasure it may have given you? Heck, no. If you got your money’s worth of thrills and spills, that’s great for you and for the author. I got my sleepless night’s worth of research on the Templars, Mary Magdalene, Leonardo da Vinci, and all that jazz—even if most of the beans had already been spilled by all the TV documentaries that they trotted out before the movie.

I had, in fact, a special reason to get to the end of the book: aside from the Louvre and the Vatican, I’d visited Rosslyn Chapel just outside of Edinburgh (as has every Hawthornden Castle writing fellow, about a dozen of us Pinoys). Was getting there worth it? To Rosslyn (in the picture on the left), yes; to the end of the book, well, I’ll just say I’m glad I was reading a borrowed (and lavishly illustrated) copy. The next time I want breathless prose, I’ll dust off Harold Robbins.

So will I see the movie? You bet I will—if only to stand up to the lamebrained censorship that, I’ve always argued, threatens to lobotomize our citizenry, Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It’s fiction, for Christ’s sake (and ours as well).

Don’t let me spoil your fun—read the book, see the movie, and make up your religious and aesthetic mind. And thank God Dan Brown never went to the UP Writers Workshop, or he’d be a pauper like the rest of us.


LAST WEEK'S piece on theater got me this e-mail from my old (not too old, just a few years older than myself, as a matter of fact) teacher Lorli Villanueva, now based in New York:

Dear Butch,

Your article brought tears to my eyes. Nothing can be more gratifying than to know that I have made a difference and touched someone’s life. A friend in LA, who was another one of those who found the magic of theater and worked with me for many years in PETA, Ivy Cosio Bautista, emailed me about your article.

The article brought many memories back about those early days in the theater. Not that I have left it; I have not and I guess always will be an educator and mentor. I had several high school students while I was teaching at La Salle Academy here in NY, who because of the great experience they had in my theater classes and productions have now become professionals in off-Broadway productions.

I had a class where all eight boys landed roles in the summer Broadway production of Aida. They came to theater training classes with me after school hours and as you know, it is blood, sweat, and tears when I do that. They also had to do it outside of class loads but nothing could be so fulfilling when many of them got roles in Aida and are now well into NY theater.

One outstanding student (who had dreams of becoming a professional writer) came looking for me after he had graduated and was completing theater arts at NYU. He is now a producer and wanted his maiden production to be directed by me. We produced Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Producer's Club theater. It ran to standing-room-only crowds and was named “Play Pick for the Month” of February 2005 by New York Magazine. Metro News wrote about it. Reviews called it "magnificent" and "the best interpretation of Godot ever produced".

After 9/11, together with Miguel Braganza, a major dancer/choreographer/actor (now based in London for the run of Ms. Saigon), we put up a children's theater dance company called InArte.

We trained children from age 5 to 15 in acting and musical theater. It was designed to help children cope with the trauma of 9/11. We produced two big shows at the Citicorp auditorium in NY and soon after even the youngest member became professional actors in Lion King! Many Filipinos back home do not realize the number of Filipino children singing and dancing in Lion King as professionals and I cannot be prouder in the feeling that I have been part of their lives. Two of those children played lead roles in The King and I which is also now on tour.

As the Deputy Chair of the Graduate School of Education & Special Education at Touro College in Manhattan, I have incorporated theater in our graduate school curriculum. This has allowed the Filipino population in the graduate program to increase as I am the one evaluating their acceptance to the program and help them to be ultimately certified to teach in NY. I have conducted private review classes at home for these teachers so they can pass the teacher's certification exams. When they do (many now have), it is like heaven has touched me.

As managing director for Small Pond Productions, we strive to bring to production new works from new writers, actors and production people.

I have been a member of SAG (Screen Actors Guild) for many years. Did a few films where I was nowhere a major star but the experience watching and being a part Hollywood films and the big name stars as Michael Douglas and Glenn Close (who are all curious about Philippine theater), is part of my adventure. It is a learning process all the way to the end of this life.

A special Penman for Sunday, May 14, 2006

THE FIRST thing you notice about Ian Wright is that the man just can’t keep still. He’s constantly in motion; even when he’s standing, his eyes might be rolling toward the ceiling while his tongue might be hanging downward. He’s forever clowning—perhaps a throwback to his days teaching drama to children, which is what his adult audiences quickly turn into. His hands will dart about like uncaged birds, pecking at a point here and fluttering around another there. He can’t be taller than a couple of inches above five feet but he can fill the stage with the kind of presence politicians would kill for.

The STAR sent me to Singapore last month to interview the famous “Globe Trekker” through the auspices of the Discovery Travel & Living channel, which is running a new six-part series titled “VIP Weekends with Ian Wright.” As the title suggests, it’s a good many steps up the social ladder for this street-smart Cockney, who had to trade in his sweaty T-shirt and cargo pants for a tidy tux.

“From beer to champagne!” is how Ian himself exuberantly describes his momentary transformation from the poster boy and patron saint of backpackers to the houseguest of an English lord and an Indian princess, among others. (The complete list includes Hong Kong celebrity Karen Mok; the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon; Princess Bhargavi and the Mewar royal family of India; the Alvaro Domecq family of Spain; the UK’s Simon Woodroffe; and France’s Florence and Daniel Cathiard.)

Over lunch, dinner, and a 20-minute personal interview in between, I managed to learn a bit more about the man than even his travelogues have revealed.

To begin with, he’s 40. And sorry, ladies, but he’s married, with two stepchildren aged 17 and 19. (He gets along just fine with them, but doesn’t spoil them, and they’ve apparently gotten over their dad’s global celebrity.) Ian comes from Ipswich, about an hour by train from London, and is a diehard Ipswich football fan. (When I told him that I lived for a while in Norwich, a few stops down the railroad tracks, he snickered, relishing the memory of a great football rivalry.)

As you can imagine, he’s been through a lot—even before he began globetrotting on everyone else’s behalf. He went to art school, was a cycle courier for a while, then ran a market stall at Spitalfields in London. “I used to make paints, jewelry, weld things up, make candlesticks, clay artwork, jams, chutney, and mint sauce and sell them there,” he recalled in a previous interview; then he taught art and drama to children.

When the call for a TV “presenter” (as the Brits call their hosts) for a travel show came, a bulb lit up in his head. He had already done a bit of traveling—to India, Nepal, Egypt, Guyana, and all of Europe—and having done some video work as well, it seemed a natural thing for him to join the search, even for a lark. He sent in a typically funny take on arriving in Liverpool Street Station and falling all over the place—and the rest, as they say, is globe-trekking history. Twelve years of it, in fact.

When he strides into the China Club for his first meeting with the press, he’s in a crisp black tux and bowtie. “I’m Ian Wright,” he says, “and I am the luckiest bastard in the world. You’ve got to remember it’s not my fault, yeah? If someone comes to you and says, this is the job, we’re going to send you around the world, we’re going to give you a chance to meet the most incredible people, see the most phenomenal sights, and we’re going to pay for your food and your accommodations, give you some spending money, and if that’s not enough, here’s a fat wad of cash as well, what would you do, eh, what would you do?”

He goes away about seven, eight times a year. We all think we’d love to do that, but it’s a punishing lifestyle. “The only problem with having the best job in the world is that you’ve got no friends,” he says smiling, but you know there’s some truth to that.

As if to banish the backpacker blues, he starts talking about food—we’re meeting, after all, against the backdrop of the World Gourmet Summit, which Singapore hosts yearly to claim its spot on the global gastronomical map. Ian prefers to go vegetarian—except when he’s on the road, which happens to be most of the time. “The country to me with the worst food in the world is America. It’s rubbish there, rubbish. Obviously if you go to New York or Chicago, they’re countries on their own, and the food there is heaven. But beyond that…. Our driver in the US asked me once, ‘Are you hungry? If you want, we can get some snacks from the supermarket, but if you want a proper meal, we can go to McDonald's!’”

Still, a Big Mac can’t be half as bad as the other things we’ve squirmed to watch him having to devour in the name of global goodwill—a sheep’s eyeball and a Cambodian cockroach, among others. “The worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth was in Iceland, which was rancid shark,” he says. “You get your shark, stick it in a hole, then leave it there for eight months until it gets all moldy and rancid, then you pick it up and dry it for another four months… It is the worst taste!”

But there is, he reminds us “the hospitality thing: you can’t really say no.” The sheep’s eye, for example, the Mongolians give to the visitor as a sign of respect. “The taste isn’t too bad, it’s the texture. It’s like that white glue stuff, crusty on the outside and gooey on the inside, that’s what an eyeball is.” The switch from all that to champagne and caviar may have required a corresponding shift in mindset, but being what he is, Ian remained his true irrepressible self in this new series. “What I like about this series is that every single one is different,” he would tell his dinner audience. “You never know what you’re going to get next, because the crux of the program is me getting on with them, and I’ve never met them. You meet them on a Monday, and if you don’t get on it’s going to be a very short series. You never know until you’re there, and that’s the exciting part of it.”

Authenticity and spontaneity are mantras to Ian, who acknowledges that “It’s harder for them (his upper-class hosts) to come down to my level, because they’re not used to that.”

He can’t work very well with scripts, beyond a general outline of what the episode will cover and contain: “You put them into your own words. I can’t read from a script, or read very well. If I see a word, fine, if I don’t, well, then just tell me. My favorite ones are when I’m doing and saying something at the same time. It just makes it more spontaneous. I never know what I’m going to say or going to do or how I’m going to react to whoever, and I don’t want to, you know what I mean?”

He’s proud of his working-class roots and connections: “My wife is staunch working-class like you would never.... When I think of my kids now and what they’ve got, they would think that my era was medieval.... My wife was brought up in absurd working class conditions where she had nothing, with six sharing a bed.... On my mum’s side, my great granddad’s Welsh, and they’re from an old coal-mining family.”

During our sit-down interview, a fellow journalist remarks how kind and honest the English were, in her personal experience. “You do judge places like that,” Ian responds, scratching his chin, “even though they might have been one-offs. The fellow sitting next to you might have been through something completely opposite. When I got mugged in Morocco, I wrote the whole country off because of one stupid bad experience. The funny thing was even when I was getting mugged they kept haggling the price down. We got to my hotel, and the guy kicking me said I’ll kick you anyway when you come out, so why not give me a hundred and I’ll go away? I offered sixty, he asked for eighty, and we settled on seventy-five.”

He loves Southeast Asia, but has never been to the Philippines. Did he have any pre-formed impressions of it, I ask?

“The women look really nice!... But nothing, really, I don’t know anything about the Philippines at all. But I would love to go to the Philippines. I don’t want to know that much about it, that’s why you go there.”

“What’s a real personal vacation for you?” I follow up.

“A bed and breakfast in England. I love an English seaside. That’s because as a kid that’s what I grew up on, and you can’t get that away from you. I loved it even in winter when it was cold and breezy and you could hear the sign outside the pub go ngeeek-eeek-eeek! You looked outside and it was cold but there was something comforting about a nice, warm pub.”

Has he ever gotten into any seriously life-threatening situation?

“I remember we were in Vanuatu, which is an island in the Pacific between Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and it had the most active volcano—well, the most acceptable active volcano. It was almost like a park-and-ride, you know... You walk up and then you see the smoke, but it’s not like an old film where it’s all lava, there’s little vents that come up every now and then, and they’re just flying up in the air pitching lava, and the sound is unbelievable. And just like kids you wait for the last big blowout, and with the crew, we go right up to the top of the volcano. As it gets dark, the lava cools down and becomes more ferocious. We didn't realize that the wind had changed and suddenly an explosion sent lava literally five meters from us. At the next explosion we started to run down the path. It was mad!”

The longest Ian’s been away from home is seven months. But he can’t think of living anywhere else. “I love England, to be honest. Being away for so long, you just get fonder and fonder of where you live. And I can’t live anywhere without four seasons.”

But he’s a firm believer in the salutary effects of travel—even if our version of it doesn’t quite match up to his shark-swallowing standards. “Every bloke should leave home and live on his own for at least three years, that would be my policy.” After twelve years on the road, you’d think he’s been everywhere and seen everything, but there are, believe it or not, places he has yet to visit and would love to: “Antarctica, Central America, Vietnam.”

And the Philippines? “Yes, of course! Take these people’s phone numbers down!” he instructs his staff in jest, but who knows—one of these days, that guy buzzing your doorbell just might be Mr. Wright.

“VIP Weekends with Ian Wright” is showing Sundays, 10 p.m. on the Discovery Travel & Living channel.

Penman for Monday, May 8, 2006


AS A MEMBER of the board of trustees of Tanghalang Pilipino, I was happy to learn that TP is now opening its doors to a new crop of applicants wishing to join its Actors’ Company for its 20th theater season. I’ll post the details below, but allow me for a minute to recall a bit of my own life in theater—something that’s almost a distant memory now, but which was an important part of my growth as a writer.

Few people know this (and why should they?) but I began my writing life more as a playwright in Filipino than a fictionist in English. It was in high school, in the late ‘60s, where my senior batch encountered one of those young, gifted teachers who can turn gravel into fairy dust; her name was Lorli Villanueva—not even out of her teens, herself—and she introduced us to the magic of theater. Under her tutelage, we mounted the staples of the period such as Paul Dumol’s “Ang Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio” (a great vehicle for playing the pulubing baliw, which we all thought was the acme of acting), and later wrote and directed our own short plays (predictably replete with more madmen and madwomen). Lorli’s lifelong gift to about half a dozen of us was to push us to join a summer class with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) in 1970—one of those summers you never quite forget, a summer full of songs and pretty girls and midnights under the Fort Santiago moon.

We breathed art; we learned the rudiments of acting, directing, playwriting, lighting, and stagecraft and design; we sold tickets, ushered, watched in awe as professionals strode onstage and became someone utterly different for one enchanting hour. Very early on I realized that I was about as talented as an ironing board as far as acting was concerned (I had one line as the Waiter in "The Good Woman of Setzuan": “Would you like another cup of tea, Mrs. Yang?”, for which one less-than-deathless line I had to rehearse and stay up late like all the others; neither did I have the stomach nor the patience for direction; so I gravitated back to my early love, writing, and resolved to become the next Pinoy Brecht or Chekhov.

My first moment of glory came when, still a high-school senior bent on crashing the big and endless dinner party that the world of theater seemed to be, I picked up a copy of a teleplay for “Balintataw”—then on Channel 5, a dramatic anthology that provided breaks for such later luminaries as Lino Brocka, Elwood Perez, and Joey Gosiengfiao, among many others. Never having even seen a television play before, I was astounded to discover (in the brazen simplemindedness of youth) that all it took to write one was to divide a page in half between the visual and the audio parts—plus, of course, the little matter of a good story and good dialogue. A scene taking place in one locale or as one dramatic unit was a “sequence,” which could either be interior or exterior, day or night, etc. In short, I wrote a teleplay—a melodrama about a street urchin titled “Bethlehem”—and earned the enormous sum of P250 for my labor.

That started me on a two-decade run of plays, teleplays, and screenplays, nearly all of them in Filipino. The stage plays I wrote for the art and the wonder of the thing; the teleplays I wrote for the economy (with two cameras and two or three sets at most to use, you learn dramatic economy and discipline pretty quickly); the screenplays I wrote for the money.

Over the years I came to understand that theater, television, and the movies may be related in some basic way, but were also very different in others, and that the loneliest life among the writers of all these genres was that of the playwright for the stage. That playwright has at least three major anxieties to deal with: first, that of writing a good play; second, that of getting the play produced; and third, that of reconciling the finished product with one’s original vision or conception.

It’s almost unavoidable for that vision to change and to be changed; the marvel of theater is its very mutability, its ability to be this play of that same title (such as “Romeo and Juliet”) yet be completely different from one version to the next. The mutability derives from theater’s nature as a collective and collaborative effort, with the playscript being no more than a printed recipe far removed from its final flavors. Individualists as we are, many writers have a hard time subsuming our ideas and perceptions to those of others, especially people we never heard of or don’t know.

But theater is its own compensation. Even if there’s hardly any money to be made in it or from it, at least for playwrights, there’s still nothing quite so aesthetically and even emotionally rewarding as watching your own play and then watching the audience watching it. Tears are fine, but laughter is heaven-sent. You could die (or kill) for an audience rolling on the floor because of something you wrote at your kornik-strewn and roach-infested desk one loveless Friday evening. Short of laughter, there’s that glazed look of sheer transport that comes over that viewer whom you instantly recognize as The One You Wrote the Play For. When I watch my plays, half the time I’m watching the audience, scanning their half-lit faces for that glimmer that is my prize; at the same time, a knot forms in my stomach whenever an actor flubs a line or breezes through it in blithe ignorance of its nuances. Theater-going, for the playwright, can be both an exhilarating and harrowing experience.

Given the great expense of producing even the simplest plays, it’s a successful play in this country that gets more than one production and one run. For most Filipino playwrights, there’s no such thing as a second chance—unless your name happens to be Nick Joaquin, Rene Villanueva, Boy Noriega, Malou Jacob, Tony Perez, or Paul Dumol. You could get lucky enough to be produced, but a bad production could also be your first and last one.

I haven’t written a play for the stage since “Mac Malicsi, TNT”, “Aninag, Anino”, and “Ang Butihing Babae ng Timog” in the early ‘90s; the seductions of fiction and the instant gratification you get from finishing a story have just proved too strong. Much earlier than that, I shifted to writing stories in English, partly because the late great Boy Noriega—a good friend, fraternity brother, and officemate at NEDA—kept trouncing me in the Palanca and CCP playwriting contests, and one day I decided that I’d had just about enough. (This Harvard-trained economist, on the other hand, confessed to dreaming of writing a novel in English, to the point of briefly enrolling in our PhD English program at UP.) Sometimes I miss writing a crisp exchange of dialogue or working out a scene just by moving people around without the benefit of long descriptive prose passages that are, for me, among fiction’s best pleasures. But my exposure to drama, I feel, helped my fiction along. It taught me to make my characters speak only when they needed to; it taught me that the best dialogue conveys more than surface information; It taught me the value of physical, nonverbal action, as well as of setting. In other words, I learned (or thought I did) the potential power of every square foot of the dramatic stage, which was for me to mine. All the world’s a stage, indeed, and I try never to forget that, even in fiction.


NOW, FOR those of you with fervid dreams of acting onstage, you might want to audition with Tanghalang Pilipino, one of our country’s best theater companies.

Auditions will be on May 13 and 20, 2006, 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Bulwagang Amado Hernandez (Conference Room), Upper Basement, CCP Main Bldg. You have to be at least 18 years old, and you’ll need to prepare a three-minute monologue in Filipino from a published foreign or local play, any song of your choice, a short movement piece, and a joke. Fifteen scholarships/apprenticeships are available. To learn more, call the TP office from Tuesdays to Fridays at 832-3661 or 832-1125 locals 1620 / 1621.


JUST A note to say how glad I was to stumble—on one of my periodic forays into the Megamall—into the opening last Thursday of the latest exhibit of paintings by art critic and advertising executive Cid Reyes in Soler’s gallery at the Artwalk.

Reyes had two series of abstract-expressionist (I hope I got that right, Cid) works running alongside each other—the first, in broader strokes and cooler platinums and golds; the second, much more colorful splashes and squiggles or reds, yellows, and whites. I found myself contemplating two forms or planes of energy.

What was unique about the exhibit was Cid’s pairing of each of the “warmer” pieces with the poem that inspired it—not his, but classics written by such poets as Carlos Angeles, Tita Lacambra Ayala, and Raul Ingles. Such “interactive” projects often fail because of the relative weakness of either the writer or the painter—more usually the former, when the exhibitor goes for puerile poetry or prose; in this case, by choosing only the best poetry to work with or work off, Cid Reyes set and met a suitably high standard—for any artist, the only standard worth going for.

Penman for Monday, May 1, 2006


A COUPLE of weeks ago, I had the amazing opportunity to meet with and to interview Ian Wright, a.k.a. the Globe Trekker, in Singapore where he was launching a new show for the Discovery Travel and Living channel. That series—which begins airing this Sunday, May 7—is titled “VIP Weekends with Ian Wright”, and it marks a huge step up the social ladder for the proudly scruffy, cockney-talking 40-year-old, whose mug has graced many a backpacker’s dream. “From beer to champagne!” is how he describes his new assignment, which takes him from the usual company of Mongolian yak herders and Bantu tribesmen to the palace of an Indian maharajah, the studio of a Hong Kong megastar, and the castle of an English lord with family ties (of a sort) to Tutankhamen.



We sat down to a longish interview with Ian at Singapore’s posh 52nd-floor China Club, and I’ll be reporting on that encounter in another piece for the Star’s travel section very soon. All I can say for now is that sitting at the same table with Ian Wright is like trying to sleep in a rollercoaster—the man’s energy is incredible and infectious, and he can warm up a crowd in ten seconds flat, even with just a grin and a grimace. Of course he’s had at least 12 years’ experience dealing with the most difficult audiences in the world—club-swishing bandits and chattering monkeys among them—so the boyish charm is as good a survival tool as any other.

The Wright interview took place against the backdrop of the World Gourmet Summit—a gastronomic extravaganza that Singapore has been hosting for about a decade now to claim its spot in the global food and arts map—and it was with much trepidation that I flew to Singapore, since you all know what a culinary philistine I am, preferring Ma Mon Luk mami to all other treats on the tabletop. (Many years ago, in blithe ignorance of this fact, a well-connected friend secured me an invitation to a very exclusive dinner to be prepared by Manila’s top 20 chefs; I declined as politely as I could, short of kicking and screaming.) It was a relief to be reassured that we were there for Mr. Wright and not the chocolate-glazed artichokes or whatever passes for haute cuisine these days.

Still, the man and the menu met at dinner, one specially crafted by Ian for about 300 guests at the Hyatt around the theme of “The Food I Like.” Now, I know you’re thinking sheep eyeballs and rotten shark meat and that kind of extreme cuisine, but there was (thankfully) nothing of the sort on the menu, which turned out to be eclectically delicious, even for a regular meat-lovin’ bloke like me. If you are what you eat, then this is what Ian Wright is.

We started out with what I’ll call “drinks” (duh): Montesia Brut NV, S. Pellegrino Sparkling Mineral Water, Acqua Panna Still water, and RIPE Juices. Of course I doubled up on the champagne, which tasted, uhm, sweet-sour. I passed on the sparkling water—I’ve always felt funny drinking bubbly and slightly salty water, like ingesting a mouthful of ocean. The menu proper opened with Potato and Green Pea Patis (probably not the patis we know; this was something solid; but then again I can’t find another online definition for patis); Tomato, Onion, and Chinese Parsley Salad, with Yoghurt and Mint Dressing. I must’ve liked this because I don’t remember pushing any leftovers to a corner of my plate.



This was followed by a glass of 2005 Oyster Bay, Sauvignon Blanc (hmm, more sweet-sour), and then by the first dish that caught my eye: Thai Noodle Soup with Minced Chicken and Coriander, served in an open buko (the thick meat of which we Pinoys, of course, shoveled into). The 2004 Wolf Blass, Red Label Semillon Blanc served as a prelude to Fish ‘N Chips—the first dish I could actually identify with, if not plain identify—appropriately served in a folded newspaper especially printed for the purpose.

A 2003 Castello della Sala, Chardonnay introduced the main course: Roasted Sirloin of Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, with Braised Carrots and Red Wine Sauce. The roast beef affirmed my prehistoric kinship with Ian—and, finally, some red!—2004 Oyster Bay, Pinot Noir. Dessert consisted of a selection of Los Postres del America del Sur (Desserts from South America), which turned out to be lots of bite-sized chocolates, and the biggest strawberries I’ve ever seen in my life, the size of our itlog na maalat. I could hardly pronounce what we downed all that sweet stuff with, which was 2003 Wolf Blass, Gold Label Brotrytis Gewurtzraminer. As if my bladder wasn’t bursting yet, we had Freshly Brewed Coffee and a Selection of Fine Teas, and my pal Krip will forgive me (probably not) if I passed on the nightcap, a Macallan Sherry Oak 12 Years Old single malt to go with the Cacao Barry Pralines.

When you think of all the questionable comestibles Ian had to endure in his jaunts around the world, this decidedly more upscale yet still jologs-friendly menu was a perfect compromise between street food and the kind of dinner you drop a year’s pay for but can’t even pronounce (or maybe even eat).

Good chow. The only thing missing was rice.


I HAVE A feeling that I’m opening the floodgates here to an army of mute inglorious Miltons blushing unseen in the Marikina air, but this bit of news is too good to keep to myself.

I chanced upon this announcement of the Bridport Prize in the website of the British Council Philippines giving notice of one of the richest writing prizes in the world for a single story or poem. Folks, forget the Palancas (no, I don't mean that; but you had only until yesterday to join it, so that’s moot now). Take a look at the terms below and hie over to the BC link above to download the entry form. The Bridport Arts Centre in Dorset has issued a call for entries to the richest open writing competition in the English language.

Up for grabs are GBP5,000 for a short story (up to 5,000 words) or a poem (42 lines). Second prizes are GBP1,000 each, and third prize for each category is GBP500. (FYI, one British pound is about 100 pesos, so you do the math.)

Anyone can enter, so long as the work is unpublished. Entries must be in English, typewritten, single-sided, with pages numbered and securely fastened. Stories should be double-spaced. Entries must not show any name, address, nor identifying marks other than the title. All details should be on the entry form.

Submit your entries to the British Council office, 10th floor Taipan Place, Emerald Avenue, Ortigas Centre, Pasig on or before May 15. Entries will not be returned, and no corrections may be made after the receipt. Entry fees for qualifying works from the Philippines will be covered by the British Council.

Grand Prize winners in the worldwide competition will be notified in writing by the beginning of October 2006. Prizes will be awarded on November 18 during the Bridport Literary Festival.

The winning stories and those shortlisted will be read by leading London literary agents with a view to representing writers. The top 26 stories and poems will be published in the 2006 Bridport Anthology. The top 13 stories will be submitted further to the National Short Story Prize, worth GBP 15K, and the top four poems to the Forward Prize.

The Bridport Prize has been the first step in the careers of established poets and novelists such as Kate Atkinson, Tobias Hill, Helen Dunmore, and Carol Ann Duffy. It has been a yearly opportunity for writers since 1973.

For details, contact 914-1011 to 14.


LEST YOU think international prizes and distinctions like these are pipedreams, think again. There’s a long list of Filipinos who’ve won prestigious international writing awards (ahem) and many more who’ve realized their dreams of studying with the very best teachers of writing, simply because they backed up their talents with the guts to risk their pride on an application or entry form.

The story I best like to tell people about banking on one’s talent has to do with Gina Apostol (author of the novel Bibliolepsy), who, as an undergraduate, typed exquisite little pieces of prose about earthquakes in Mexico, the weather in Leyte, and such apparitions. She mailed them (in envelopes; this was in the mid-1980s, well before e-mail) to John Barth, a writer she admired who was teaching in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He wrote her back, saying how much he admired her work, and offered her a graduate assistantship in the writing program of Johns Hopkins, which she took and completed.

Another story has to do with the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford—one of America’s most sought-after—which a bunch of writer-friends and I heard about from the late Cochise Bernabe over beer after the launch of my very first book in December 1984. Cochise had just visited the US and had picked up some Stegner forms, which none of us seemed to notice that evening. The next day four of us, presumably stone sober, applied for the Stegner. We heard no more about it until one bright April day when the call came for one of us—the most junior, as it turned out, the brilliant Fidelito Cortes, who went on to study under Denise Levertov, among others.

Sometimes great things happen to good guys. Believe it.


THIS FRIDAY, May 5, at 6 p.m., a unique book of essays will be launched at National Bookstore’s Shangri-la Mall outlet. The book is titled Beyond the Great Wall, a family collaboration coming from Mario Miclat, his wife Alma, and daughters Banaue and the late Maningning. Mario describes it as a book “on China, the Chinese, and being Filipino.” Few Filipinos have the qualifications the Miclats have for writing such a book, having lived in China during the momentous years between 1971 and 1986.

And now we can see that China, too, in this book, published by Anvil. Proceeds will go the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation, Inc.