Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, May 28, 2007


BETWEEN DOWNTOWN Seoul and the city’s new international airport in Incheon is a huge stretch of what seems to be a riverbed or a lakebed—vast, moist, and absolutely empty except for a stray piece of driftwood. Tall mountains loom in the far horizon, and in the haze of the late afternoon, thanks to some kind of mirage effect, the small round islands in the distance seem to be floating on thin cushions of mist. Not one speck of garbage mars this spectacle—not one plastic bag or oilcan, much less one squatter shanty.

I watched this scene through our bus window on our way home from a week in South Korea, where I and a group of motoring journalists (almost all of us first-timers) visited Hyundai’s carmaking and shipbuilding facilities in Ulsan, and once again—as could happen in many places in North Asia—I had to struggle to reconcile the pristine serenity of the scene with the unrelenting industrialization that has delivered Korea, Japan, and many parts of China squarely into the 21st century. Back home—I couldn’t help thinking—we produce megatons of waste and suffer infernal volumes of smoke, grime, and noise—and dump it all around us for the delectation of our visitors—with little to show for all our huffing and puffing.

People who’d been to Korea decades ago remember when it was a murky backwater, reeling from a disastrous war and trying to build up its industrial base (partitioning had left the North with most of the peninsula’s industries). Strong-willed economic planning and a heavy emphasis on science and technology changed all that.

As I reported last week in my roundup of our Hyundai plant visits, Korea’s now as First World as they come—minus much of the urban blight that’s afflicted countries that modernized much earlier. A greenbelt around Seoul—where all construction was banned since it was put up in 1971—has provided more than visual relief; the limited real estate meant that the city center kept getting rebuilt and rejuvenated.

We got to see that center from one of the city’s best vantage points: the posh Top Cloud restaurant on the 33rd floor of the Samsung building in downtown Seoul. Sheathed in glass and smartly furnished, it looked like something out of a Star Trek set, providing a magnificent if hazy view of the Seoul skyline. The lunch menu was preponderantly Western and cosmopolitan—which, for this incorrigible carnivore (and, I should add, culinary philistine), meant a smallish steak that melted in the mouth.

If I felt like a famished Oliver Twist tempted to plead “Please, sir, may I have more?”, that evening’s dinner would disabuse me of any notion that Koreans skimped on the bloody red stuff. The traditional Korean fare at the pretty Samwon Garden restaurant at first threatened to be little more than a multitude of platters laden with vegetables of every kind—a prospect that dismayed my tocayo Butch Gamboa, who’s even more devoted to horns and hooves than I am.

But after nibbling at the obligatory kimchi—which proved surprisingly more agreeable than I expected—I had to duck as a platoon of waitresses marched in bearing tubs of raw beef; the circular metal mounds on our tables turned out to be hotplates, onto which the waitresses deposited liberal portions of sweet beef—the famous bulgogi—that sizzled to irresistible morsels. A few of us actually did the proper Korean thing and demurely tucked a slice of beef into a cabbage leaf before biting into it; the rest of us risked barbarism by ordering steamed rice, which had been pointedly left off the menu.

Korea is a bad place to be a cow. It’s probably even worse to be a party sponsor. A large tub of beef—which I’m sure we consumed several times over—cost an even bigger tub of Korean won (“the won I lost,” I would sigh later, stepping out of the casino in Busan). The beef kept coming, the veggies wilted, the consommé got colder, and yet more beef arrived in strips and ribs. We washed the vittles down with red wine, shoju (a slyly potent rice spirit), and Cass Fresh Beer—the “Sound of Vitality”, the label assured us. For some reason, it seemed easier to do all this prefaced by a hearty cheer of “Weehayo!” (Korean, I think, for “Down the hatch!”).

Most of my companions had whetted their appetites earlier that afternoon by shopping in one of Seoul’s most popular tourist districts, Itaewon. “Please, we don’t jaywalk in Korea!” our guide Flora shrieked as we surged forward across the street to Itaewon in defiance of a glaring red light. I quickly realized that the place was full of clothes and bags—not exactly my thing, having been spoiled by our ukay-ukays—so I spent the hour at work on a project I’ve undertaken across four continents these past many years: comparing Kentucky Fried Chicken offerings around the planet. (My Australian historian-friend Greg Bankoff abhors KFC, perhaps as much for ideological as gastronomic reasons, and I suppose I’m lucky—or he is—that I never dragged him to one all those times he visited us in Manila.)

After seven years of prowling, I’m glad to report that KFC Amsterdam (near the Central Station) has met its match in KFC Itaewon, where the chicken came with a crispy crust to die for, while oozing with tenderness within. My KFC meal of two pieces of chicken and a tumbler of Coke set me back $5 (comparatively, bottled water on the street cost 50 cents; beer in the hotel cost $6 dollars). As chicken-juice trickled down the sides of my mouth, I surveyed the street scene out the window, and took in Seoul by the leisurely eyeful. Quick impressions:

The cab drivers wear neckties.

95% of all the cars on the street are Korean.

“Hamilton”, “Nashville”, and “Houston” aren’t places in North America—they’re stores in Itaewon.

The look du jour is lacy and layered—something like wearing three half-slips on top of the other (no, I’m not looking at cab drivers here).

Unfortunately or otherwise, except for a passing visage or two, the stunning Korean beauties that my friend Krip promised would be swarming all over me seem to have decided to stay home.

I stepped back out into the street to unleash a happy burp among the chattering cab drivers. As our guide had impressed upon us, the Korean language is unique, like Finnish or Basque, and I could believe it; I couldn’t understand a word.

Fronting KFC were branches of MacDonald’s and Burger King, and we were never too far from a Starbuck’s anywhere we went. But at the train station the following day, on our way to Busan, I saw that enterprising locals had put up some competition to the global giants: Steffihotdog and Yogur Berry Café, among others. And who needs 7-11 when you can duck into Buy the Way for a packet of noodles?

In Busan, a major port city and industrial powerhouse, I saw something again that ably defined the aesthetic of the place: a long steel fence marked off the pier from the rest of the city, but this whole stretch of unfriendly metal was softened by a running garland of rose bushes.

At our last stop on the island of Jeju—a pretty getaway for honeymooners, with sprawling beaches, pine forests, and wave-lashed basalt cliffs—we checked into the Haevichi Resort hotel, another Hyundai operation. On the elevator up to my fifth-floor suite—which turned out to be large and well-provisioned enough for a family of five to romp in—I confirmed what I’d observed in Seoul: that Korean buildings don’t have fourth floors, perhaps having to do with the Sinic disinclination to have anything to do with a figure associated with death. In Haevichi they didn’t have a second floor, either—another mystery to figure out another time.

While my companions chose to get down and dirty driving all-terrain vehicles around the Jeju countryside, I signed up with Tepid Tours (or something like it) and had a surprisingly fine time strolling around a bonsai garden featuring 150-year-old trees. But while every care had been taken to shape the pines and elms into miniature perfection, someone had named the place “Spirited Garden”, perhaps a tad too lively for such reposeful figures. In that same Zen-like spirit, we quietly savored Jeju’s bounty of green tea, tangerines, and sweet chestnuts.

But there was nothing quiet about our last night in Jeju. We were traveling, I should add, in a party of over a hundred people who had come to Korea from all over the Asia-Pacific for Hyundai’s 40th anniversary convention, prompting a friendly rivalry between Pinoys and the Kiwis involving those famous medieval sports: alcohol consumption and minstrelsy (a.k.a. karaoke). Anyone can drink a barrel of beer, but speaking of world-class skills as I did last week, no one can vanquish a mike-wielding Pinoy, and C! car magazine executive editor and STAR contributor James Deakin—a dead ringer for Simon Cowell—brought the house down with his rendition of “Play That Funky Music.”

Earlier that evening, at a farewell dinner that featured B-Boys (Korea’s latest rage: breakdancing homeboys), miniskirted violinists, and, yes, more steak, we had yelled a few more lusty “Weehayo”’s, As we sped back to Incheon Airport the following day, I gazed bleary-eyed at that trackless landscape, in the vacancy of which the “Weehayo”’s echoed weakly, and I thought of all the work and the grimy heat awaiting me back home—not to mention that upcoming Monday’s election—and I shut my eyes.

Penman for Monday, May 21, 2007


A FEW weeks ago I told a story about a book—an autographed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s epic novel America Is in the Heart, which I had been hunting down for ages and finally found a week before my daughter’s wedding in San Diego. I gave that book as a wedding present to Demi and Jerry, effectively returning it to California, where Bulosan himself had inscribed it to future Chief Justice Fred Ruiz Castro 61 years ago.

And I thought that was that for the Bulosan book. Well, guess what?

Last week, arriving late at night from a visit to Korea (about which more, below), I was greeted by a book on the table—it had been covered by a sheet torn out of an old magazine, so I couldn’t tell what it was. When I opened it I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was another copy of the very same book, a later printing of the same first edition, not signed by Bulosan but by another writer I hold in even higher esteem—“G. C. Brillantes 1949.” This time it was inscribed “To the father of the bride” by Greg, who had acquired it very likely as the 17-year-old Ateneo freshman he would have been in 1949.

I haven’t properly thanked Señor Brillantes yet—he’d be the first to acknowledge a little hearing problem and I don’t want to end up screaming “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” at him over the phone—so here’s a very public muchisimas gracias. Greg’s gesture reminds me of the generosity of quite a few of our senior writers toward their juniors and friends. Greg Brillantes, I suspect, has been quietly distributing his personal library to some fortunate recipients. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to receive presents of books, pens, and ephemera from Franz Arcellana, NVM Gonzalez, Jimmy Abad, and other writers I admire. In good time, I hope to be able to return the favor with another generation of recipients.

I know some readers and critics will be put off by this seeming fetish of old men (and some women) for yellowed paper and scratchy signatures. These are people to whom books are just products (or should we say “cultural commodities”) and words just text. Happily I feel otherwise. I’m not saying we should revere the book, or even the author, but I do appreciate the book as the physical proof of a writer’s long labor—indeed, as the author’s extended signature.

For me, a personal inscription on a title page, no matter how casual, turns the book into something almost like a letter, which I will read with more attentiveness than I would accord other works on a long shelf, depending on its sender.

I'M CONVINCED that there’s an extra gene or at least an extra nerve in every male that produces a pleasant twitch in response to things that move—cars, trucks, trains, planes, and boats. It’s a lifelong fascination that begins with Tonka toys (or, in my time, sardine-can racecars with bottlecaps for wheels) and, with luck and learning, culminates in factories, assembly lines, and shipyards, those “marvels of engineering” that make grown men sigh with boyish longing.

And so it was that when my editor rang me up last month to ask if I was willing to go on assignment to Korea to peek into the achievements of one of that North Asian neighbor’s chaebols or industrial giants—with the almost apologetic coda that the mission would “involve some plant visits”—I leapt with the same kind of glee another lifestyle writer might reserve for a Prada launch or a cruise in the Bahamas. I love plant visits—this is the frustrated industrial engineer in me talking, having entered university as an IE freshman—and have enjoyed gawking at how things are made, from the Coke bottles of grade-school field trips to a day-long tour of Volkswagen’s famed Wolfsburg factory a couple of years ago.

Our sponsor in this present case was Hyundai—a company that started out 60 years ago as a construction company, then moved on to carmaking 20 years later powered by one man’s dream (helped along by engines initially borrowed from Mitsubishi) and which has since grown phenomenally to become, among other things, the world’s largest builder of ships. Founder Chung Ju Yung died in 2001, but Hyundai has more than handsomely survived. Pedestrians like you and me know Hyundai as the maker of such popular vehicles as the Sonata, the Starex, and the Getz; few realize that it and its subsidiaries make high-speed trains and submarines as well, and operate hotels and resorts, among other enterprises.

In the Philippines, Hyundai has been represented by Hyundai Asia Resources Inc. (HARI), a young but rapidly growing company led by the dynamic team of Richard Lee and Fe Agudo, who carried over their marketing skills from real estate to the highly competitive automotive industry. Starting from 11th position five years ago, HARI has moved Hyundai up to fifth among local car brands, against the dire predictions of industry hands who believed that Hyundai would sell no more than 2,000 units a year (they’re now doing twice that volume).

Like all things Japanese and Taiwanese many decades ago, Hyundai and other Korean manufactures entered the Philippine market disadvantaged by the longstanding preferences of consumers for American, European, and Japanese brands; “Korean” suggested cheap Japanese copycats, shoddily made and poorly serviced.

But that’s no longer true. Aside from Hyundai, brands like Samsung and LG have opened the world’s eyes to the superior quality of Korean goods—not to forget all those telenovelas that have become another major Korean export—products that roll 24/7 out of highly automated assembly lines like Hyundai’s car plant in Ulsan.

Again, for most Filipinos, the word “Hyundai “ is still synonymous with cars, and this was what I (in a group composed mainly of motoring journalists) came to Korea to see. Ulsan is a city in itself close to the southern port city of Busan, and this is where Hyundai has chosen to locate its largest and most important manufacturing facilities in a global operation that produces more than 1.4 million cars and 80 big ships a year in Ulsan alone.

Getting to Busan from Seoul, more than 400 kilometers away, was already part of the Hyundai story. We boarded a sleek KTX high-speed train in Seoul; just exactly how fast “high-speed” was soon became clear when the TV monitor overhead began to display the train’s current speed—just a shade under 300 kilometers per hour. (Imagine it this way: if there was a railroad running straight and flat to Baguio, this train would get you there in 50 minutes.) The train—as our unfailingly pleasant and patient Korean guide Flora informed us—had been built by Rotem, a Hyundai subsidiary.

Our Busan/Ulsan sojourn began with a temple visit, and you almost wonder what ancient Buddhist shrines, with all their picture-book serenity, have to do with the hustle and bustle of modern manufacturing. But you look and think longer and it’s all of a piece, this steely resolve of a people to rise up from the ashes of the wars that have periodically ravaged the peninsula to claim their own space—literally and figuratively—between the political and economic behemoths China and Japan. We learned that Busan became South Korea’s temporary capital during the Korean War in the ‘50s, lying farthest from the North’s rampaging forces; but many centuries earlier, the same temple we visited had been sacked by the Japanese warlord Hideyoshi—Busan being the closest city to Japan.

Modern Korea’s newfound confidence asserts itself most strongly in places like Ulsan, where thousands of gleaming new cars fill sprawling lots in neat rows awaiting shipment. This is no used car lot: this is 21st century car manufacturing at its most efficient and—to this overgrown boy—most dazzling and mindboggling.

Life for a car begins as a sheet of metal that goes through a series of cutting, stamping, welding, and sealing, until the familiar box with holes takes shape, color, and substance. Here in Ulsan, much of that work was done by hundreds of industrial robots—eyeless and headless but many-handed machines doing the welding, etc., hovering above and around each metal hulk like solicitous nurses around a newborn. I watched as robots took hold of two front seats, the left and the right, stuck them into either side of an assembled frame, and bolted them down before the frame inched forward to receive windshields front and back.

If the automotive assembly line was impressive, the shipyard on nearby Mipo Bay was breathtaking. I’d seen this facility on the Discovery Channel, but nothing quite prepares you for the scale of “heavy” as it means in the name “Hyundai Heavy Industries, Inc.”, which operates the shipyard.

The 2,000-acre yard resembles a giant set of building blocks, strewn with massive parts of ships waiting to be conjoined. Smaller parts are moved around by Goliath cranes—nine of them—which can lift up to 1,500 tons. Flatbed trucks each with 148 wheels and a driver’s cockpit on either end skitter around the place like yellow bugs.

The shipyard consumes some 1.8 million tons of steel plates a year, and the joke is that Hyundai produces its cars out of the leftovers. One out of every four ships afloat on the world’s oceans is made by Hyundai, the first company to develop the technology to build ships on dry land; 28 of these ships are under construction at any one time, and it takes from eight to ten months to finish one, which requires 30,000 liters of paint to look spiffy.

The shipyard employs 40,000 people—just feeding whom involves 51 restaurants and the daily sacrifice of no less than 50 cows, 240 pigs, and 20,000 chickens.

Witnessing all this was exhilarating (unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures of the industrial facilities from within), and I’m sure that everyone there with me who was seeing it for the first time was awestruck by the spectacle of industrial muscle being flexed in ways we Filipinos could only dream of. Part of me wanted to weep, thinking of the educational infrastructure required to make this possible—all the scientists and engineers we would have to produce before rolling our own cars and ships off the assembly line.

Was there anything comparably impressive and world-class we Pinoys had to show the rest of the globe, or even just the Koreans? “Shopping malls!” someone said, and we all laughed in easy agreement.

Next week: Seoul food and the lighter side of our Korean sojourn.

Penman for Monday, May 14, 2007


SOMETIME LATER this week, the Board of Commissioners of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) will be meeting to decide, among others, on the funding (and therefore the fate) of one of our most successful cultural ventures to date. By “our” I mean, in the immediate sense, the University of the Philippines Institute for Creative Writing (UPICW), which also holds the annual summer writers’ workshop in Baguio for our brightest young literary talents. But “our” here is really Philippine literature as a whole, because the project in question isn’t just for UP but for all Filipino writers in all languages, past and present.

Over a year ago, the same board gave its go-signal to a new project called Panitikan.com.ph, the world’s portal to Philippine literature, from which anyone online could access vital information about the subject and find links to just about anything and anyone having to do with Philippine literature in English, Filipino, and the regional languages. The regional element is important, because far too little is known and published about writers and writing in Iluko, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Bikol, among others.

Panitikan.com.ph was set up precisely to address such omissions and promote Philippine literature both locally and abroad over the Internet, which has become the most efficient means of disseminating any kind of information—quickly and widely to more people than print or even TV can reach. In just a little over a year, from February 2006 to April 2007, the website posted over 1,480,000 hits—including a record one-day high of 14,000 hits.

That’s phenomenal by any standard (unless you count certain kinds of websites better kept away from children). It now contains over 250 author-profiles and 400 literary works, and its lineup of articles is updated at least twice a week. These articles provide students, teachers, researchers, and other writers with an invaluable resource.

There’s another, much more massive, online project supported by the NCCA called elib (www.elib.gov.ph), a consortium of the National Library, the University of the Philippines, the Commission on Higher Education, the Department of Science and Technology, and Department of Agriculture). Elib puts journals and the full texts of theses online, and some 3,500 members—institutions and individuals alike—subscribe to this service. Elib and Panitikan.com.ph, however, meet very different and specific needs.

Of course, Panitikan.com.ph is a service that can’t come free—maybe not even cheaply—but it’s money well spent by a government that every now and then likes to trumpet its support for education and the arts. We’re hoping that our National Committee on the Literary Arts—headed by writer Lito Zulueta—succeeds in making the case for sustaining NCCA support for a project that allows us to showcase the best of the Filipino literary imagination to the rest of the world, for a lot less than it takes for a municipal councilor to get elected in this country.


SPEAKING OF elections, please do your best to vote today and to make it count. I may be naïve in thinking that individual action can still result in social change, but it can’t hurt you to pause and contemplate seriously—for once, or once in three years—what you want from the people who will make important decisions on your behalf.

The list of candidates you’ll be holding and the candidates themselves will be far from perfect; I can’t think of a senatorial candidate who won’t have something said against him or her, perhaps for cause. But that’s true for each of us as well.

For me the question is: who among these people will likely do more for us than they will do for themselves? What issues matter most to me, and where do the candidates stand on those issues?

Truth to tell, as of this writing a few days before May 14, I haven’t filled up my “sample” ballot yet. I’ve just realized, for example, that I should’ve done my homework as far as the local candidates are concerned, as these people’s actions will probably have a more immediate impact on my life when they’re elected than the national ones.

I do know a few names I’ll be putting in my senatorial lineup. My big issue is education, and I’ll be voting for people on both sides of the political fence—and one or two in between—who have consistently championed bigger budgets and more autonomy for state colleges and universities, higher and stricter standards for schools, more emphasis on science and math, more public libraries and Internet access, and the modernization and computerization of our educational system. (I’ve been telling friends, half-jokingly, that any candidate who promises free wi-fi will get my vote.)

I know who these people are, and I think you do, too. Again, they may have their individual flaws, but their willingness to invest in the quality of the minds of our next generation will almost surely make up for their own shortcomings.

Another important issue for me is population policy. I’ll look favorably on anyone who’s willing to take on the Catholic Church and its medieval appreciation of this problem.

Much as I abhor political dynasties, I’ll probably end up voting for two or three familiar names, just because I think the child or the sibling will be an improvement over the incumbent relative. I might also reserve a few votes for people without a statistical chance of winning, but whose candidacies I’ll use to send a message upstairs—that I’d rather choose these seemingly hopeless idealists than the lackluster and even insulting choices foisted upon us by the established parties, who have no real ideologies to begin with.

But do vote, and fill up those blank spaces before someone else does. In the very least, make it more difficult for others to cheat. We might even get lucky, and actually elect a few good men and women who can restore our hope in our ability to govern ourselves justly and rightly.


I WAS playing blackjack at the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas a few weeks ago when I looked up at the TV at the bar and saw the word “massacre” flit across the screen. I watched in horror as the story of the shootings at Virginia Tech unfolded on CNN. No suspect had been identified as of that moment. Later, it would be established that South Korean-born Seung-Hui Cho was responsible for over 30 deaths, including his own.

The news was of some personal interest to me because of two improbable connections. First, our department in UP had had a long and fruitful academic exchange program with Virginia Tech—a distinguished university to which we sent a succession of our teachers, especially young faculty members working on their graduate degrees. (Sadly, that program ended when two of our scholars reneged on their commitment to come home and serve here.) Our Virginia Tech alumni still look back to their Blacksburg experience and to that campus with fondness.

Second, Cho came from Centreville, Virginia—where my sister Elaine lives with her husband Eddie, and where I’ve stayed a few times and have come to know quite well. It’s a quiet, pleasant suburb just outside of Washington, DC, and one of its main attractions for me is a huge Korean supermarket that stocks everything an expat Asian might crave. There’s a large Korean community in Centreville, and this boy Cho would surely have gone to that same grocery for his needs.

It’s amazing what a small world, indeed, our planet has become, with our personal trajectories transecting those of others at the oddest points, in the strangest ways. That some of those connections and collisions turn tragic—as this one did—shouldn’t make us forget that most of them work out for the better, often wonderfully.

As another ironic twist would have it, I’m sending in this piece from Jeju Island in Korea, on another sojourn you’ll be reading about over the next couple of columns.

Now go out there and do your civic duty, and maybe we can yet achieve what the Koreans and most of our neighbors have managed in less than two generations. But more on that next week.

Penman for Monday, May 7, 2007


IT's BEEN more than a month since the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio, but I haven’t stopped thinking about how—possibly without meaning to—quite a number of the workshop pieces submitted by our younger writers had to do with martial law, when many of them hadn’t even been born yet.

You know—martial law?—that seemingly ancient time when pesky people kept getting dragged off the streets into military camps while more agreeable fellows strode down clean-swept boulevards in double-knit bellbottoms, humming “Betcha By Golly Wow.”

I’m not sure why, but martial law seems to be back in literary fashion—and it’s about time, too, because I’ve always argued that we haven’t written enough and thought enough about it, enabling and abetting the kind of romantically revisionist malarkey that often begins with something like “Mabuti pa noong martial law….”

It’s a sad measure, of course, of how crazy and confused our politics has become, of how poorly served we’ve been by the people we’ve trusted with our freedom and our future. But before this degenerates into the kind of editorial I used to crank out every other day for another newspaper, now dearly defunct, let me just say this: trust me, folks—me, the martial law “detainee” (to use one of the period’s most enduring euphemisms) who literally lived to tell the story—martial law was no fun and no paradise, unless you were part of that coterie that rode around town with the Madame.

What intrigued me during the workshop was the specific question of whether something so horrifying—as the mutilated corpses of our captured comrades kept reminding us, against the popular conceit that our martial law was a benignly “smiling” one—could be treated with any kind of humor in writing. Would one be guilty of disrespect or do gross disservice to the memory of martial law’s many victims if one were to find something funny about that period and to write about it in a comic vein?

My quick answer then to the first question was a resounding “Yes!” Rightly chosen and deployed, the comic attitude can ennoble and elevate, rather than belittle and trivialize; it is a deliberately combative and subversive response, one thought out rather than merely felt. The late, great Kurt Vonnegut steeped his Slaughterhouse-Five—otherwise a memorial to the firebombing of Dresden, from the smoky pits of which Vonnegut had had to drag out bodies—in saucily dark humor; Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful set a tale of insistent and delightful innocence against the backdrop of a concentration camp.

In other words—and to be very Filipino about it—the best way to face and to fight adversity and absurdity is sometimes to make light of it, as a form of resistance. We smile and laugh not to deny reality nor to wish it away, but to strengthen ourselves for that hour when, as Leonidas rallies his Spartans with in 300, “we dine in hell!”

So was there anything funny at all about martial law? (Let’s just make it clear that “comic” and “funny” are not necessarily and not always the same thing, but don’t worry about it. Funny is always a good place to be, in my book.)

Well, yes—to me, at least in hindsight. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, because it means you’re looking back at something from a presumably safe and comfortable distance. (The trouble with martial law in this country is, you’re never sure if it’s securely in the past, never to return.) Let me share a few martial-law stories that I can now afford to tell with a chuckle. They’d make for great Kafkaesque fiction, but they just happen to—well, have happened.

I’ve already recounted the time when, as a political prisoner itching to get more than a glimpse of the world outside after having been cooped up in Fort Bonifacio for months (to this day, “The Fort” doesn’t compute to “Le Soufflé” for me, but something decidedly less palatable). So I managed to wangle a day pass from the camp commandant in exchange for drawing some posters. My mother came by for me and—with an M-16 toting guard in tow—we all went out to see The Godfather. The Escolta moviehouse was SRO; but when we walked in with the armed escort, three seats miraculously appeared, and a good movie time was had by all. Next time you walk into a packed theater, you know what to bring.

Much earlier than that, a few months before martial law, I’d been sleeping alone in the plyboard palace we were squatting in on Tandang Sora just outside of UP when a stranger—obviously military, from his looks and demeanor—came looking for me. “I’m Captain Q. We’ve been looking at you,” he said, “and you seem to be a smart boy. Why don’t you join us?”

“Us,” the smart boy quickly gathered, was military intelligence, for which he had nothing but loathing and, okay, more than a little fear, especially since he was all by his lonesome and this officer looked like he used placards for toothpicks. But then again being smart, the prospective recruit said, “Uhm, let me think about it. Why don’t we meet Friday at XXX cafeteria and talk about it there?” Thinking he had made first base, Captain Q left.

That Friday, he returned to the place I’d mentioned—to find himself surrounded by about a dozen of my fraternity brothers, whom I’d hastily rounded up to serve as my escort. The man seemed suddenly very small, and certainly very red-faced. I think I even launched into a speech: “You know what? Instead of me joining you, why don’t you join Victor Corpus instead?” (I was referring to the PMA officer who had defected to the rebel cause.) Everybody laughed except the captain, who left in a huff.

Flash-forward to January 1973. I’ve just been arrested (another story in itself: I’d sort of gone underground, but only half-heartedly, and like a good Catholic boy went home for Christmas, only to find myself sharing a beer with a military asset, who turned me in), and the first thing I see in the room in Camp Aguinaldo where they’re holding us is the sofa from our safehouse, from which I and another friend had fled a week before. Durnit, I thought, I’m busted for sure.

The next morning, we’re all lined up for interrogation outside another room for which someone has thought up the reassuring name of “Exclusion Area.” Just when I think things couldn’t get any worse, a strangely familiar figure starts walking up the corridor in our direction—who else but Captain Q, who turns out to be one of the lords and masters of the dungeon. I slink behind a wall and try to make myself as flat and inconspicuous as a house lizard—and, Deo gratias, he leaves, and the moment passes, and I live on to my present age of 53.

After a little over seven months, I’m released—but naturally with a touch of drama. I’m in the camp shower, imagining that I’m being lathered by one of the pretty Army psychologists they send us to mess with our brains and hormones, when I hear my name on the PA system: “Dalisay, to the guardhouse!” The last time that happened, I’d been in for a rude shock, deputized as a punching bag by some free-spirited prison guards. “Oh, boy,” I groan, “it’s only ten in the morning and they’ve run out of fun things to do.” So I towel myself dry—where are those psychologists when you need them?—and drag my feet over to the guardhouse.

A captain in uniform is seated behind a stack of papers. He fishes one out with my name on it. “Dalisay,” he says. “You’re still here?” Uh-uh, I want to say with some barbed witticism, but I remember Captain Q and decide to keep it simple. “Well, we have nothing on you, so pack your bags and go home.” And that’s how I get out of martial-law prison, free to watch all the movies I want, so long as I don’t jaywalk or stay out past curfew or otherwise disturb the New Society that’s been a-borning in my absence. I’m 19 years old, and feeling lucky to be alive.

At some point I realize that, like any good law-abiding citizen, I need to get a job (somehow, for some reason, I think that going back to school under martial law is a dumb idea). But to get a job you need to get NBI clearance, and early one morning I join a long column of well-groomed and well-mannered jobseekers at the NBI headquarters to get the NBI’s seal of good citizenship.

Unfortunately, there’s a glitch somewhere in the bureau’s pre-digital files, and one of my worst nightmares happens. I’m shunted down a special corridor that bears the inimitably creative sign “Quality Control.”

“Dalisay, you’re not supposed to be here, you’re supposed to be in prison. There’s a warrant of arrest for you. See here!”

“That can’t be!” I splutter. “I’ve already served my time! Look, here’s a copy of my release order. Besides, the person you’re looking for is Jose C. Dalisay, I’m Jose Y, for Yap, my mother was part-Chinese.” “Patriotic Chinese,” I want to add, but apparently you just need some reading ability to get into Quality Control, and the officer reads the two forms with a beady-eyed skepticism before letting me go.

And so I get my precious clearance and join the ranks of the responsibly employed, in a government ministry no less—at least until my boss gets a visit from the intelligence people (maybe Captain, now Major Q?) who tell him that the guy who’s writing his speeches is a risk to national security…. But that’s another story, for another time.