Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, December 31, 2007


I'D LIKE to give this last column of the year over to some readers who’ve been writing in with their comments, concerns, and other things to share.

From my former student Gina Verdolaga—who’s been around the world and some—came two questions at the end of her message: “Your personal parade-of-pants essay entertained me immensely. Indeed, degustibus non est disputandum. I recall elephant pants, hot pants, harem pants (that displayed aerodynamic properties when twirled on the dance floor), and BangBang! denims from Hong Kong. Wearing funky BB! meant your parents were, as they say, ‘can afford.’ Fast track to leggings, bootleg, capri, then skinny jeans (pencil-cut redux). These days, I’m in tokong surf pants without the surf.

“By the way, could you kindly explain the function of the little mysterious square known as the ‘secret pocket?’ Why was that a male domain/concern? And what about unabashed high-rise thong underwear? Don’t make me go there!”

Well, Gina, I don’t have much to say at the moment about thongs and such—it’ll be added to my long list of research priorities—but secret pockets I can certainly advance a conjecture about, as a self-respecting ‘60s “Amboy” who wouldn’t have dreamt of walking around in his tailored “Burlington” jeans, button-down oxford shirt, and cordovan mocs (with lily-white sport socks, natch) without a secret pocket stitched into a not-so-secret place—right above the semi-horizontal slit that was your regular pocket. (Just years earlier, at the height of the rage for the beltless, clip-on “continental” cut, the same secret pocket was a discreet wink in the belt line; in the ‘70s, it migrated to the inside of the waistband, beside the rubber strips that helped keep your pants up.)

So much for ancient history. Why secret pockets? You’re right, it’s a guy thing—girls don’t have them. (Well—let’s just all nicely agree they don’t. In fact, Beng keeps complaining that women’s clothes, in general, suffer from a paucity of pockets; my jackets all have inner pockets for passports, tickets, etc., but hers don’t.)

My first explanation for these mini pants pockets is a practical and therefore corny one: back when you could get from Cubao to Diliman with a ten-centavo coin and the pedestrian’s nemesis was the ubiquitous mandurukot, it made good sense to stash some loose change into that pocket, so you could get home just in case without having to bother some surly police sergeant. It was more a psychological crutch than anything: you were insured by sartorial foresight against the world’s wiliest fingers. If you couldn’t feel someone poking into your secret pocket, then you might as well have been dead to the world—a world that deserved to end, if a 20-centavo coin (yes, boys and girls, they came in twenties then, and it could buy you a Coke) was worth picking your holy of holies for. (In 1967, the National Treasurer estimated that P3.86 million worth of coins was lodged in secret pockets all over the archipelago.)

My second theory has to do with fingers—yours, the wearer’s. Don’t ask me why, but guys love to stick their hands in pockets. It pacifies them, makes them feel cool, comfortable, and pleasantly occupied. They can twiddle their fingers all they want inside pockets, or scratch some even more secret itch. In idle moments, daydreaming about Ipanema or Barbarella (folks, if you don’t know the reference, so sorry), a guy might find his forefinger straying into his secret pocket and pawing the fabric of the lining there—something like scratching your chin, but less obtrusively, so as not to embarrass yourself or whoever you may be speaking or listening to with your wildly vagrant distractions.

Sad to say, secret pockets long went out of fashion, which probably explains why men are less pensive these days and more prone to outbursts of baboonish expressiveness. At least that’s what I think.


FROM READER Ted Limpoco—a true-blue Atenean judging by the company he keeps—came this reaction to my second-anniversary musings on blogging:

“I agree that frontierless literature is a cute misperception, even with the broadened possibilites of cyberspace. Most Internet users are urban and cosmopolitan, which immediately marginalizes a substantial number of readers and consumers of literature. I do not have the romantic notion that my blog reaches legions of readers. The audience that I have in mind are the few friends who know about my blog, and, hopefully, casual strangers that accidentally come upon it and just so happen to share my interests. Given that I do not purposefully seek out blogsites myself, and just stick to the few that are my friends', I presume that the latter group is perhaps statistically insignificant. But, the possibility still exists, and I cling to it out of my own need to have an audience as a writer.

“I used to write a bit of poetry before I left for graduate school in the US. I was miserable during my first year here, and what helped me the most was my small investment in a Moleskine notebook that encouraged a modest habit of journal keeping. I tried keeping journals before without success, perhaps because of my aversion to gushing, lurid confessionals. I like keeping myself in check—in other words, to edit myself. My friend Rofel Brion asked me if I would consider collecting my émigré emails/journal entries and publishing them. I felt that, somehow, the written page was not the proper home of these informal wandering texts. And then I discovered the possibilities of the blogosphere through my friend, the Mindanao artist Jean Claire Dy, and have been blogging ever since.

“I love the open, unstructured format, and also its immediacy. This gives the form a certain exuberance that attracts youth. This also makes the need for self-editing more urgent, which I continue to strive for. Most of all, for me, the blog is way to converse, with friends, with like-minded people, and—as Jonathan Franzen says in How to Be Alone—with writers I love to read.

“I read or heard somewhere that people marry essentially to find a person to be a witness to their lives. I think the same need is at work here. It can have extreme narcissistic manifestations in the form of reality TV, but it also drives great writing that connects us with people and with our inner selves. The blog can be both.

“Somehow, after finishing a blog entry, I feel same way I do after emailing friends, which is just not the same feeling I get when I write in my Moleskine journal: I feel less alone.”

Very well put, Ted. It’s unusual, though, that you even think of self-editing, when many blogs seem to be written for precisely the opposite purpose—to serve as a bedpan for a kind of digital diarrhea. But then again that’s literature in its infinite and ineluctable variety, the vigor that comes with rawness and audacity. Here’s to both livelier and more thoughtful blogging in 2008.


PETTIZOU TAYAG, vice president of the Quiz Bee Foundation, reports that that the 28th National Quiz Bee—the country’s longest-running and most respected academic competition—has reached its National Grand Finals. The two-part finals opened yesterday and will end on January 6 at the Development Academy of the Philippines Auditorium in Tagaytay City. They will be shown on Studio 23 from 6 to 7:30 pm.

The regional contenders in the subject categories of Elementary Makabayan (Philippine history, culture & Sports), Elementary Mathematics, High School Science & Technology, and Collegiate General Information & International Affairs had to beat 6 million student aspirants to get to Tagaytay.

Aside from the competition itself, the finalists and their teacher-coaches also enjoyed a four-day all expense paid live-in camp with tours, seminars, and fellowships in what’s been called the “Summit of the Super Quiz Bees” in preparation for the competition.

Substantial, education-oriented prizes will be won by the students, their coaches, and their schools, divisions, and regions.

As a high-school quiz team captain myself, I can only root for my fellow nerds, who’ll probably end up writing columns instead of nursing anterior cruciate ligament injuries. How can you think of basketball when there’s Avogadro’s number and the value of pi to figure out?


LANGUAGE AND communications expert Dr. Dups de los Reyes wrote in to say that his new book Watch Your English is now available at National Book Store and Fully Booked.

A fellow alumnus of the UP English department, “Dr. Dups” is a much sought-after resource person for seminars and training programs on corporate and interpersonal communication. As I noted in the book’s blurb, which I was glad to provide, “In simple, clear, informative, and engaging chapters—many of which will make you laugh as you learn—the author walks us through the minefield of English, reminding us of the subtle but important differences between infer and imply, stationery and stationary, and so on. He takes the pain out of learning and remembering grammar and usage, and provides helpful exercises to consolidate the lessons.

“Watch Your English is a book that will be of great help to students and professionals, but more than a guide to better English, it’s fun to read on its own. If our language tells us and others who we are, then Watch Your English has a lot to reveal about ourselves—and how to use English to our best advantage at home, in the classroom, and in the office.”

Check it out!

Penman for Monday, December 24, 2007


WHILE I was sitting on the throne a few weeks ago, my royal attention was caught by a TIME article reporting on what it called the “boxer rebellion”—a move by lawmakers in several US states to ban low-rise baggy pants that expose the wearer’s briefs or boxers. “Bans are being considered in at least eight states, and several towns have already passed ordinances,” the report read. “In Delcambre, La., violators can receive a $500 fine or spend up to six months in jail.”

Good grief, I thought—jail time for exposing not even your nether regions, but your flowered underwear? And in this day and age, when people can cross the highway naked without stopping traffic? While I don’t think I’m in any danger of being hauled off to prison for this offense (but then again, if it’s me doing it, maybe I should be locked up in reclusion perpetua), I’m reflexively averse to any law against any fashion, or even bad taste, which is its own punishment.

I tried to remember what the fashions and the rules were in our time—“our time” being when I was young and foolish enough to think that it actually mattered to the universe if my trouser hem swept the ground (sayad) or revealed my shins (bitin). Today I’m old and foolish enough to still believe that, although waist size and body shape, more than anything, now determine what I can wear (never mind what I want to wear).

Back in high school in the mid- to late ‘60s, we were obliged to wear uniforms, which then as now was a sensible idea, and like all sensible ideas was bound to be staunchly resisted by the young and the restless. I thanked God I was born a boy, because all we were tasked to wear was a white polo shirt and charcoal-gray long pants; the girls had to wear bright yellow outfits that lent them a sunny disposition through a kind of artificial lighting. Our pants, however, were only ours to wear, and not to measure.

The school administration’s pet peeve then (this, mind you, while bombs were falling on Hanoi and the kids were making more kids to the accompaniment of Jim Morrison and with a little help from their chemical friends) was “tight pants”—pants that looked more like they had been sprayed on than gotten into. If baggy and saggy is the in thing for today’s homeboy, it was sleek and tight back then, the tighter the sexier—although it’s hard to attach “sexy” to the image of a pimply, pubescent 13-year-old sporting a PMT crew cut and smelling like last week’s socks, which he was probably wearing.

The law-enforcement types among us (the yearbook should have marked them as The Ones Most Likely to Break Strikes) went around pinching people’s pants, to see if they could hold on to anything with their puckered fingers; if they couldn’t, then the pants were too tight, and the violator was sent home to contemplate his offense and his benighted future. (This was a science high school, so you could be Galileo and defy the Pope—but not wear tight pants. But hold on—surely Galileo wore tights while he was figuring out the phases of Venus? Didn’t they all?)

Eventually, we all succumbed to higher authority—certainly not that of the principal, but of fashion itself, which dictated at some point that the days of slinky pants and mid-calf boots were over, to be replaced by (insert drumroll here) bellbottoms. I was an early adopter even then—the trendy sort who watched every “Monkees” episode with a connoisseur’s eye and who ran the next morning to the local tailor (La Jolla, in Barrio Malinao in Pasig) with a sketch and several yards of whatever I could filch from my mother’s odds and ends. Naturally, I was among my school’s first bellbottom boys—walked right into a party, ready to shing-a-ling and to boogaloo, in my brand-new pants that still clung to my thighs like they hadn’t seen each other for years (and of course they didn’t) and, to complete the porma effect, a white turtleneck sweater with green horizontal stripes. Oh—did I say the pants were checkered red and green, and hanging about two inches off the dancefloor?

Lawlaw and sayad pants would come still later—if ripped jeans became all the rage in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, then tattered hems were it for a while in the late ‘60s. Your hems had to be as wide as your shoes; we all looked like Gumby, the Ultimate Clayboy, thus prefiguring the hip-hop era, minus the gold chains and the baseball caps. With the ‘70s came Levi’s and flared pants—the bellbottom revisited, but with a rakish angle to the tailored hem, the better to reveal your platform shoes. If people should be incarcerated for what they wear, the ‘70s would have turned the world into a penal colony—especially with the advent of double-knit pants (coming in a waffle pattern, in my case) and pointy collars you could mop the spaghetti sauce with.

Now, I say, thank God for double-vented, double-cuffed khaki slacks with hidden elastic waistbands and spare buttons for the inevitable pop-off. (I can see all these twiggy twenty-somethings clutching their throats and begging each other, “Shoot me, please, if you ever see me wearing gabardine slacks!” Well, guys, I’ll shoot you in 15 years, prepare to die.) Having successfully sidestepped ripped jeans (like a good middle-aged Pinoy, I press my denims, not tear them apart) and cargo pants, I worry less about how my pants will look than if they’ll keep hanging above my waist close to my armpits, like the man in the barrel.

Of course, I could always let them slide down, lower… and lower, below my overflowing gut. And maybe reveal a smidgen of my periwinkle boxers. Or maybe not. (Here, insert the track of “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred.)

Oh, sorry—was that your breakfast on the floor?


OKAY, LET'S move up from the ridiculous to the sublime. I can’t let the year pass without delivering on a promise to a good friend and his noble cause—architect and heritage conservation advocate Augusto “Toti” Villalon. Toti wrote me late last month to report that a very important meeting of international heritage experts was going to be held in the Philippines, and it was, from December 2 to 8.

The delegates belonged to ICOMOS (the International Council of Monuments and Sites), the official international organization of architects, landscape architects, urban planners, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, tourism professionals, lawyers, and other professionals involved in the heritage conservation profession who are recognized as international leaders in the field. ICOMOS has its headquarters in Paris, and it regulates the international conservation profession.

This year’s meeting of the Committee on Vernacular Architecture of ICOMOS was devoted to “Protecting Endangered Traditional Landscapes”, and much of the conference took place at the Rice Terraces in Banaue, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Villalon explains: “The meeting focused on the current status of the five terrace clusters located in Ifugao province inscribed in the World Heritage in Danger List. The ‘In Danger’ designation simply means that conservation measures for a site on the World Heritage List must be stepped up to prevent its rapid deterioration.

“At this moment, physical repair of the terraces is necessary. However, restoring the terraces and their walls must come together with establishment of cultural and economic opportunities that make terrace life more viable for the 21st century.” Among other solutions, UNESCO has suggested the establishment of additional income-generating opportunities such as community-based cultural and ecotourism programs.

The ICOMOS meeting also allowed Filipino conservation practitioners—many of them quite young—to interact with their foreign colleagues, a rare opportunity, given the absence of conservation courses from our curricula. Many challenges lie ahead for our heritage conservators, but Toti reminds us that it’s important to know that “Good conservation work is actually being done in the country. Our heritage is not going down the drain like everyone seems to think.”

The meeting was supported by the US Ambassadors’ Fund for Cultural Preservation, e8/TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), Fundación Santiago, Ayala Foundation, Ramón Aboitiz Foundation, Department of Tourism, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).


AND SPEAKING of the NCCA, here’s a reminder that nominations for the next National Artist Awards are now being accepted in the fields of music, dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film and broadcast arts, and architecture and allied arts. Since Fernando Amorsolo received the first award in 1972, 57 Filipinos—15 of them still living—have been given this highest of distinctions. Please check the NCCA website at www.ncca.gov.ph for more details.

Meanwhile, may we all have that most impossible of wishes for the season: a stress-free Christmas, and money in January!

PS / I've turned on comment moderation on this blog, but the Haloscan servers must be processing a barrage of comments this season, so it might take a few hours for your comment to appear. Many thanks!

Penman for Monday, December 17, 2007


SOMETIME LAST month, my blog (“Pinoy Penman”, at www.penmanila.net) hit two milestones within a few days of each other: its second anniversary, and its 100,000th hit. I began blogging on November 25, 2005 for two reasons: (1) it seemed like an interesting thing to do; and (2) I wanted an easily accessible, online repository of everything I was writing, as much for my own reference as well as that of others.

I know that a lot of skeptics out there still see blogging as a digital form of shameless self-promotion, and maybe it is; as a personal and unsolicited newsletter, the blog certainly requires a bit of cheeky exhibitionism, in the very least some expectation that you’re going to be read by perfect strangers. But then again, isn’t all writing? Doesn’t blogging simply short-circuit (not to mention cheapen, by a mile) the print-publishing process, taking no more than a few minutes and a few keystrokes to serve up your latest oeuvre to theoretical thousands?

There’s a downside, of course, to consider: the absence of editing (and thus another pair of critical eyes), or perhaps just the absence of self-awareness and plain good sense. More than a few bloggers use their blog as a trash bin and a barf bag, ready to receive its daily load of rants and sundry discontents; others wield it like a battle axe, emboldened by the Internet’s cloak of anonymity. I’ll admit to having done a little bit of both, but I prefer to see my blog as an old-fashioned portfolio, a satchel full of papers and notes jotted on the fly.

Over these past couple of years I’ve managed to meet and make new friends over the blog (like Bro. Ronron Lorilla in Naga, Dr. Remy Lacsamana over in Florida, and Pat Schork in Pennsylvania) as well as, inevitably, attract a few persistent gadflies, stalkers, and trolls (they know who they are). The pluses definitely outweigh the minuses, and I don’t regret for one minute having opened my digital doors to the world at large.

By some stroke of serendipity, I was invited to speak two Sundays ago at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the Philippine PEN, and I couldn’t resist opening my brief remarks with something I suddenly remembered: that I had begun my blog with a piece on the very first national PEN conference in 1958. And thus did past and present come together—maybe even the future, because our session was devoted to “Literature Without Frontiers,” opened by a piece on blogging by the Dumaguete-based writer Ian R. Casocot.

I shared Ian’s enthusiasm for blogging as a means and a medium of literary expression—I think the best of the form and of its use is yet to come—but I’m not as sold as I should be on the idea of “Literature Without Frontiers” (it’s a phrase from the PEN Charter) as a present or even imminent reality. It’s one of those notions that sound very smart and timely, that are supposed to give us a warm and fuzzy feeling—almost as if we held hands and sang “It’s a Small World”—but I deeply suspect that it just isn’t true: it hasn’t happened yet, and might not happen soon.

I realize that we live in this age of globalization, where boundaries are supposed to have vanished and the Internet has made everything accessible to everyone. But real boundaries and frontiers remain. Even the Internet, with all its promise of democracy and liberation, is in fact the province of a relative few—of predominantly young, educated, affluent users.

The Internet as we Filipinos have been using it remains largely a playground for young people, and the kind of literature it will engender will be a young person’s literature—full of immediacy, intimacy, but also a certain narrowness of focus.

As someone who’s been writing for a living for the greater part of his life, I’ve never really looked at writing with a moist, romantic eye, and am acutely aware of its materiality as a profession and an industry. In this respect I have to say that Philippine literature is still bounded by many frontiers—in terms of language, publishing, translation. From the writing and publishing angle of things, we still write for very clearly defined and rather small audiences who look and sound a lot like ourselves.

But then again the Internet also offers new possibilities for more obscure and disadvantaged voices to emerge—bypassing the need to print and sell expensive books to people who prefer or privilege tradition. The encoded word may never take the place of the printed one, but it stands on its own frontier, looking out into a great and exciting space beyond.


CONGRATULATIONS ARE in order for some young Filipino authors who made a name for themselves on the global stage this year. I got a message from Philippine Genre Stories publisher Kenneth Yu to share the happy news that a number of PGS contributors and regulars got published in various magazines abroad and online.

As I was telling some of my colleagues at the meeting of the National Committee for Literary Arts in Cebu last week, someone should be working on promoting Philippine literature abroad as much as we promote our literatures among ourselves. The fact is, the foreign reader won’t know or even care whether a Filipino work was written by a Tagalog, an Ilonggo, or an Ilocano—it will all be Philippine literature to him or her. (That’s why I think we should put more effort and money into translation, because that’s the only way we can equalize access to international attention, presuming we’re interested in it—and please don’t tell me we’re not.)

According to Kenneth—who himself published a story recently in a US-based e-zine—the following young writers broke new ground for us abroad: Kate Aton-Osias, Nikki Alfar, Kristin Mandigma, Crystal Koo, and Chiles Samaniego. A number of other PGS friends and contributors also did well at the 2nd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards sponsored by author Neil Gaiman and Fully Booked, reports Kenneth.

Great work, folks—that’s the way to do it: don’t wait for anyone to hold your hand; just write the best way you know how, send the story out, and write the next one.


LIKE MANY Manileños this season, I had to shuttle between three Christmas parties and events last Saturday evening, but one of them—smack in the middle of the PhilMUG and Newsbreak parties—gave me special cause for pleasure: the launching of the first book of a former student of mine, Migs Villanueva, at the EDSA Shangri-La mall. It’s always a source of joy and pride for a teacher to see his or her students come into their own as authors, and for Migs—a painter, videographer, and mother of four when she’s not writing prizewinning stories (the Palanca and NVM Gonzalez Awards now crowd her resume)—this first book has been a long time coming.

It isn’t a book of her fiction, yet, but a sumptuous overview of the works of the illustrious Saturday Group of Artists, now entering its fourth decade under the leadership of the master Mauro “Malang” Santos (who, if there’s any justice in this universe, should be on next year’s roster of National Artists, despite his own expressed disdain for the award).

The Saturday Group Art Book brings together both the best of Villanueva’s talents and the best of the SGA—with stalwarts Cris Cruz, Lydia Velasco, and Fernando Sena backstopped by bright younger talents such as Caloy Gabuco, Omi Reyes, Bus Convocar, Anna de Leon, Roel Obemio, and Migs herself, who also crafted the text and designed the handsome-looking book.

It’s too bad that the author wasn’t around for the launch—she was in Hong Kong, I think, on more urgent family business—but good books like this one are savored and get better long after the launch, and I look forward to another milestone from Migs in the form of her long-due book of stories—a second “first”, if you will, for this many-faceted artist. Congrats to you, too!

Penman for Monday, December 10, 2007


IT WAS the busiest of weekends for Filipino writers, with both Writers Night and its related activities and the Golden Anniversary Conference of the Philippine PEN taking place at the same time. Aside from minding the launch of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature on Writers Night, I was due to take part in a PEN panel discussion first thing Sunday morning (oooh, my hangover) and to fly to Cebu early Monday for the election of the new board of the NCCA’s National Committee for Literary Arts.

I make it sound as if writers lead exciting lives—and maybe sometimes we do—but weekends like this are a happy break from our long and torturous dates with the blinking cursor, the Muse’s Mephistopheles, that constant reminder of her ineluctable thirst for fresh blood: the next letter, the next word, the next phrase.

Thankfully, I’ve hardly been alone in keeping this deity happy, and the best proof of this lies in the journal we launched last Saturday—out, finally, after over a year in production. Let me take a page or so from the introduction that I and my associates—J. Neil Garcia and Lilia Quindoza Santiago—put together for the inaugural issue:

“Likhaan was conceived to invite and to showcase the best of new and unpublished Philippine writing in English and Filipino. It is a journal of Philippine—and not just university—writing; by this we mean creative writing of any kind that has some vital connection to Filipino life and Filipino concerns, no matter who writes the piece or where it is written….

“The editors received a total of 225 submissions—128 in English, and 97 in Filipino. These totals comprised 54 stories, 59 suites of poems, 14 essays, and one play in English, as well as 55 stories, 25 suites of poems, 16 essays, and one play in Filipino….

“Charlson Ong’s excerpt from his novel Banyaga: A Song of War is a powerful account of exile from childhood and its original grace, brotherly devotion, misfortune, predestination, molestation, an ill-fated boy taking wing in the end. All throughout the gloomy smell of incense and guttering candles pervades, alongside intimations of Peking Opera costumery and music. The storytelling is vintage Ong: robust and dramatic, but infused with the wistful magic and authority of the traditional tale.

“’An Epistle and Testimony From June 13, 1604’ by the Ateneo graduate Douglas Candano is a reassurance of sorts that the older Ong’s ‘Chinoy’ or Chinese-Filipino project is in good hands. This fabulistic narrative clearly draws on the friar-concocted cronicas and relaciones in Blair and Robertson, and has succeeded for the most part (and despite a few historical lapses we can yield to the fiction) in appropriating their voice.

“Socorro Villanueva’s ‘Foggy Makes Me Sad’ is the most elegantly narrated and clear-eyed of the lot, a restrained, well-paced middle-class family drama evoking Amy Tan in the feminine continuum it presents of Lola, Mama, Tita, and the daughter, whose innocence is both burden and gift. Other than its elegiac recollections of a lost (and breathable) Baguio, it is memorable for the twist in the end, cruel and terrifying though it may be. A painter and book designer with a background in psychology, Villanueva has an unerring eye for significant detail, more than capably illumined by her masterful language and urbane but sympathetic sensibility.

“Alexis Abola’s personal essay, ‘Pilgrim of the Healing Hand,’ is a kind of travelogue recording an actual trip from Cubao to Lucena. The physical journey is paralleled by a quest for coherence, for meaning in disparate facts and events. While its insight that fiction is neater than life is certainly not new, the details of his journey are, as well as their juxtapositions against each other, and the unique and, for many city-dwelling Filipinos, strangely collective story they tell. The interesting suggestion here is that, like many writers and artists, Abola—a professor of English at the Ateneo whose quiet fiction has also earned him critical attention—must himself have been hurt by life into art.

“Gemino Abad’s essay on Fernando Maramag historicizes this early Filipino Anglophone’s poetic utterances, arguing for their continuing relevance in relation to the question of a ‘Filipino poetry from English.’ This, of course, is Abad’s famous and impassioned hypothesis, which he pursues once more in this essay: what Filipino poets write is not in English, but from it, inasmuch as their imaginations cannot be said to be constituted linguistically, being pre-verbal and pre-symbolic.

“Mikael de Lara Co’s suite of poems impressed our readers for their ‘raw nerve tempered by passages of lyric articulation.’ His work was ‘sensitive to the urban mood of rush, frenzy, and agitation,’ and was ‘set apart by its rude, jagged music.’ Another reader took note of ‘a poem full of enjambed lines, as though holding itself tight against the threat of loss or change or suffering. The central images of wind and leaves start off as literal physical details which, in due course, attain a resonance, convincing because gradually built up.’

“The poetry of Joel Toledo—a recent winner of Britain’s prestigious Bridport Prize and among our finest new poetic voices—is a sustained feat in the lyrical mode. The various poems ring out in different tonal registers, each one well-crafted, and everyday matter gains a philosophical dimension through the poet’s meditative lens. Demonstrating perfect poise and subtlety, a Toledo poem does not rage against the dying of the light, but is quiet and accepting, coming to fullness without bombast.

“The even younger Raymond de Borja’s suite was found by the readers to be ‘fearless in its attempt to fuse seemingly unrelated cognates of poetic thought, and inventive in language without straining the given idioms. His ‘The Limits of Archaelogy’ probes the limits of reconstructing and understanding a past life, or way of life. There are only bones, finally; death and disruptions are forever.’

“The selections in Filipino display an equal richness of talent and material, and a fine blend of mastery and innovation.

“Francisco Arias Monteseña’s ‘Iluminado’—the only poetry collection selected—is a display of verbal virtuosity by a writer with a remarkable linguistic repertoire in the national language. The play with, and of, words is ‘illuminating’ which apparently is the spirit behind the dynamism in poetic expression and creation. The poet creates couplets in Filipino with ease and insight minus the florid (bulaklakin) and wordy (maligoy) style that characterize the writings especially of beginning writers in Filipino.

“’White Love’ by Rene Villanueva is a play that investigates and interrogates one of the most notorious episodes of Philippine colonial history: the attempt by then Secretary of the Interior Dean Worcester to muffle the freedom of the press and of expression to advance the interests of imperial America in the Philippines. Through the use of the ‘Koro’ (chorus) as ‘conscience’ and a foil character, Mateo, the Filipino who acts as Worcester's aide, Villanueva unfolds the drama of early American exploration in the highlands of the Cordilleras.

“’Rayuma’ by Alwin Aguirre is speculative Filipino fiction at its best. The writer uses his keen understanding of the quirks of tropical weather and merges this with an incisive description of the pain of longing and aging. The main character in this story is thus vested with an intense desire to live through it all—the nasty and unpredictable weather, and old age itself, in order to reach a destination and a dream.

“’Ang Heredero ng Tribo Hubad sa Isla Real’ by Mayette Bayuga is a peregrination story that combines mythmaking with clear references to anthropological excavations and historical accounts and taunts our sense of identity and reality. The protagonist in the story is baffled by the mystery of the naked tribe on Isla Real, only to find himself one among them. And like all members of the tribe, he does not know where fantasy ends and reality begins.

“’Huli’—here pronounced ‘HOO-li’, malumi not mabilis, and meaning ‘catch’ or ‘caught’—is a story by a very young writer, Catherine S. Bucu, and uses the device of double intention ingenuously. The narrative depicts how a friendly and exciting fishing expedition for the butanding (the Philippine whale-shark) turns into an extraordinary event for friends and lovers. An outstanding quality of this story is its unfolding of passion, courage, and drama on the high seas, making it one of surprisingly few Filipino stories that acknowledge and make use of the Philippines’ archipelagic waters as a setting and factor in the narrative.

“’Minsan sa Binondo’ is a nostalgia piece by Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio—a writer better known for her drama in English and her advocacy of children’s literature through her puppet troupe, Teatrong Mulat. In this excerpt from her first novel, Binondo, a familiar haunt in the imagination of many Manileños, is relived and revived. Memory is aided by a narrative that exhibits a childlike wonder for the old, innocent and untainted Binondo, long since lost to urban sprawl and decay.

“Reuel Molina Aguila’s meditation on the ‘Haibun’ is a challenge to both poets and literary critics. Aguila compels us to see that Haibun can deepen our mastery of our own poetic forms as well as liberate Filipino poetics from all manner of inhibitions and repressions.

“In addition to these contributions, the editors also actively solicited two pieces that should serve as templates for future articles of a similar nature: an interview with National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera and a pictorial essay on the great, groundbreaking poet-critic Alejandro G. Abadilla.

“While we have been deeply gratified by the quality and variety of this first crop—our most senior contributor, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, was born in 1930 and the youngest, Catherine Bucu, was born in 1986—we know full well that this journal can yet be better, sharper, and more comprehensive.”

And—speaking as this inaugural issue’s editor—I’m sure it will. Likhaan’s editor for 2008 will be none other than National Artist Virgilio Almario, and we’re hoping to receive an equally impressive range of responses to that damnably demanding, imperturbably impertinent blinking cursor.

PS. I sent in the column above just before I learned of the passing of Rene Villanueva and Monico Atienza. My deepest condolences to their families and friends—and we'll set aside, for Rene's, a copy of his Likhaan play that he'll never get to see.

Penman for Monday, December 3, 2007


TO ADD just a bit more to what I was saying last week about why we don’t write more novels, but should:

Even before we dream of selling our books in New York or London, we Filipino authors in English have to sell more books in this country, and I’m coming around to thinking that the fault, dear Brutus, is no longer in our readership but in ourselves. True, books of almost any kind are expensive here. Also true, we may have focused on just producing what we think of as great art because there’s little money to be made, which isn’t so bad. But it’s also a fact that many Filipinos are buying books—and let’s face it, these book buyers are primarily middle-class—except that they’re not buying us. In other words, the market is there but we’ve given up on fighting for our share of it.

By this I mean that we’re not writing about the things that might prove interesting to our potential readers; we wouldn’t mind being popular, but we shun the popular. The crimes that pepper our tabloids hardly ever make it to our fiction. Clearly, we need to write more popular or genre fiction—novels that employ not only the fantastic, but also more crime, more sex, and more humor. They may not necessarily be great novels, but good ones—novels that can attract and develop a new class of readers, be serialized, be turned into movies, be talked about over Monday-morning coffee. We also need more professional translators who can turn the best of our novels in Filipino into internationally marketable manuscripts.

I should admit, as soon as I say this, that I’ve done very little myself to fill my own prescription. Younger writers like Felisa Batacan and Dean Alfar and his group of “speculative fiction” writers are doing much more by raising the profile of a kind of fiction that seems to resonate with younger readers and can acquire a substantial following.

I gave myself curious little goals when I was working on Soledad’s Sister. I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to do another take on the Noli, although I still felt sucked into it in terms of creating, say, representative towns and townsfolk. I didn’t want to do—at least for now—a novel populated by writers, artists, muses, anyone quoting anyone else or giving lectures on epistemology or baroque music. I didn’t want to do a novel that spans centuries and involves dons and doñas and anyone with a three-part Spanish name. In other words, I didn’t want to write an epic. I wanted to do a small, mostly quiet, darkly comic novel involving ordinary people in absurd situations and covering no more than a few days of real time.

I think that’s sort of what I did with Soledad’s Sister, which needs more work even at this point, and which I’ll be revising soon for publication early next year. After that, it could be back to the short story for me—or maybe I never left it, because, in terms of narrative structure, Soledad’s Sister is really a long story rather than short novel. There’s a lot more for me to learn, and a lot more for us to do, about writing the novel.


STILL ON this writerly thread, let me remind interested readers that we at Likhaan: The UP Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) are now accepting applications for the 47th UPICW National Writers Workshop to be held in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 5 to 12, 2008.

I’m going to be directing this workshop—something I haven’t done since the first “Kumustahan” workshop in 2003—so I’m looking forward to working with a fresh group of writers in what we might call their early “mid-career”, writers who’ve already published or are just on the verge of publishing their first books.

More strictly speaking, “mid-career” should really mean someone with about five books to his or her credit, but admittedly few of our writers produce more than ten books, so we’ll take a relaxed view of this idea for now, and look instead for writers in both English and Filipino who’ve been consistently producing good work over the past few years and can be depended on to do more soon.

Following the “Kumustahan” concept, we will be reserving eight slots for fellows to be identified and invited by the UPICW; but we will also leave four more slots open to application and competition. (And let’s get this clear from the start: there should be no dishonor to getting in competitively, as that competition will be pretty stiff.) The ICW reserves the right to reapportion the number of reserved and open slots, depending on the responses and the quality of applications received.

There’s a bunch of qualifications and requirements to meet, if you’re thinking of applying, so let me just refer you to the Likhaan website at www.panitikan.com.ph for these details. Please don’t ask me or any of the UPICW associates to invite you; that will almost certainly guarantee the opposite effect. Also, this is not a workshop for first-timers, so please make sure you meet the minimum requirements before applying.

During the UP workshop, fellows will be expected to make a presentation of a chapter or draft of a work-in-progress, and an essay on an aspect of their writing or of the genre in which they work. They must be present for the full duration of the workshop period. The deadline for submission is January 15, 2008. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Ms. Eva Cadiz.


AT LEAST two major writers’ events are coming up this Saturday, December 8. As has been its tradition for many years now, the UPICW will be holding Writers Night at the Hermogenes Ilagan Theater of the Faculty Center (also known as Bulwagang Rizal) in Diliman. But there’s more than the usual reunion of workshop fellows and virtual concert to look forward to this year.

At 5 p.m., we will be formally presenting the Madrigal-Gonzalez Award to this year’s winner. The Madrigal-Gonzalez goes to the best first book by a Filipino author of the past two years, alternating between English and Filipino books (it’s English’s turn this year). The 2007 shortlist comprises Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar; Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature and Becoming Human by Maria Isabel Garcia (ADMU Press), Barefoot in Fire by Barbara-Ann Gamboa Lewis (Tahanan Books); Love, Desire, Children, Etc. by Rica Bolipata-Santos (Milflores); From Inside the Berlin Wall by Helen Yap (UP Press); and Kapwa: The Self in the Other by Katrin de Guia (Anvil).

This will be followed shortly after by the launch—finally, after more than a year’s wait—of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature. As issue editor, I’d like to invite this inaugural issue’s authors—namely, Alexis Abola, Gemino Abad, Reuel Molina Aguila, Alwin Aguirre, Mayette Bayuga, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, Catherine S. Bucu, Douglas Candano, Mikael de Lara Co, Raymond de Borja, Francisco Arias Monteseña, Charlson Ong, Joel Toledo, Rene Villanueva, and Socorro Villanueva—to join us for this signal event to receive their copies.

There’ll be a lot to celebrate in UP on Saturday evening, so if you have anything to do with writing, we hope you can be with us. (Unfortunately, the event coincides with another get-together in Manila that same time sponsored by the Philippine PEN, which is also holding its Golden Anniversary Conference Dec. 8-9 at the National Museum. I’ll be speaking there the next morning in a session on “Literature Without Frontiers.” I better not party too hard!)


FROM LONGTIME reader Dr. Henry Lim Yu comes this notice that the Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM) is celebrating its 50th year with a grand event billed as “50 Years of Excellence in Medical Education” December 2-8, 2007 at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel.

As part of the weeklong celebration, a medical-surgical mission will be held December 3-7. A Medical World Congress will likewise be held December 5-7 at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel, with the theme “Challenges & Innovations in Medicine.” Hundreds of CIM alumni from all over the world will be coming home to join this big event, and if you’re a CIM graduate, Henry’s inviting you to come on over.

Penman for Monday, November 26, 2007


I WAS asked to say something at the 12th Biennial Symposium on the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia Pacific Region at the University of the Philippines last week, and here’s part of what I told the participants:

Don’t look now, but March 31st, 2008 is going to be a very important day in the calendar of the Filipino novelist. On that blessed day, three major competitions involving novel-writing will mark their deadline: the Palanca, which receives novels once every three years; the one-time, P200,000 Gawad Likhaan UP Centennial Award, which has a category for the novel (or short story collection) in English and Filipino; and the Man Asian Literary Prize, for the best Asian novel yet unpublished but submitted in English.

The big question is, how many Filipino novelists will rise to this occasion (presuming they’re interested in winning prizes—which, believe me, no matter what they say, they are)?

I’ve recently found myself wondering about the answer to that question, which seems to be “Not very many.” When I attended the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize ceremonies in Hong Kong earlier this month, there was some curiosity about the state of the Filipino novel. (We have to realize, of course, that in the currency of global literary publishing, the novel is just about the only thing that counts—not the poem, not the short story, not the play.)

I told them that the novel was alive and well in the Philippines—that our writers in both English and Filipino were coming out with new work every year. On the other hand, the volume of work being done was nothing to crow about. Few novels were being written, and—like my own recent one, Soledad’s Sister—most of them were slim, no more than 200 pages in published form. Dean Alfar’s Salamanca (2006), for example, is 159 pages; F. Sionil Jose’s Vibora (2007) is just 118. Based on the current proofs, Soledad’s Sister will be around 180 pages when it comes out early next year. A notable exception is Charlson Ong’s 368-page Banyaga (2007).

Of the short story, on the other hand, we have no shortage. I was a judge in this year’s Palanca Awards for the short story in English, and I believe that we received the highest number of entries ever in this category—147 stories.

By comparison, of the 243 qualified novels received by the Man Asian, only about ten, I was told, came from the Philippines. More than half came from South Asia (mostly India, whose authors also accounted for 11 of the 23 works on the prize’s long list—four of them from just one city, Chennai). Ten novels from Manila is not a bad turnout for a new contest, except that, as with the other countries, these presumably included works that had long been in progress, or had been started much earlier.

It should be interesting to see how many novels turn up for the three big events next year.

These competitions will certainly encourage the writing of more novels, but they still won’t change the fact that we Filipino fictionists don’t write nearly as many novels as our neighbors do. The question is, why?

My own quick answer is, why should we? At least until recently, we haven’t seen enough artistic and other incentives to consistently write and publish novels, or to choose to write novels over other alternatives. As every novelist knows, writing a novel typically takes several years. Even if the physical act of writing it could be much shorter than that, the novel as a project takes a much larger and longer emotional and psychological toll on the writer than a story, poem, or essay will. We sleep, eat, defecate, and fornicate with our novels perched on our shoulders.

And all of this for what? For a first and most likely a last edition of 1,000 copies, which will take over a year to sell, if it does at all. Even at a relatively high royalty of 15 percent, presuming the book sells for a modest P300 or just over US$6 a copy, a Filipino novelist will stand to earn P45,000 or about US$1,000 for a few years’ work. There will be no overseas markets, no film rights, no residuals, and—unless the book is picked up by schools for teaching—no reprints to look forward to.

This isn’t to say that all we should write for is fortune and fame—although a little of both will always be welcome. Stories, poems, plays, and essays won’t get us very far, either. But given a range of options, the Filipino writer can hardly be blamed if he or she chooses less tedious forms of artistic expression. Short stories, for example, can be written in a matter of days and published within months; screenplays can give vent to our novelistic impulses, aside from earning us much more, provided we make the right connections and break into the industry.

But other than material reasons, I suspect that we Filipinos don’t write novels as much as we write other forms of literature because—and I realize how controversial this statement might be—we generally don’t have the sensibility or the athleticism for it (and may I emphasize “generally” here). Novels have traditionally required a largeness of vision, a broadness of scope, and our best-known ones—Rizal’s Noli and Fili, Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales series—have certainly demonstrated that. I’ve often remarked that our contemporary novelists inevitably labor in the shadow of Rizal—you can almost feel him breathing down your neck—with the result that many modern novels have become reworkings in a way of the Noli and Fili: love stories set against the crimson backdrop of revolution, with middle-class characters torn between what they know, what they want, and what they actually can do, which turns out to be not very much. Rizal is a tough act to follow, and rather than produce just another update of the Noli—with a new cast of heroes and villains in the same old society, which seems to be our fated plot—I might opt to do something else, like a small private story.

Novels traditionally demand sweeping views from the mountaintop. Our problem is, we have very few mountaintops here in the Philippines; of the few that we have, even fewer of us have the lungs or the inclination to scale them. Instead we have become master pedestrians, or masters of the street scene, which is why we do so well with the short story, which requires little more than a few hours or a few days of action in places like cafeterias, boarding houses, and alleyways. We often complain that our attention span as a people is very short—such that the past 30 years of our politics might as well never have happened, since no real wrongs have been redressed and no one has really been punished as we lurch from one mishap to the next. That might explain why our attention spans as readers and writers are equally brief. We see history as a distant, bloody, romantic past that we dress up for to commemorate—not as the continuously unraveling, insidiously common thread it is.

We—especially our writers in English—rarely venture out of the city; thus the only panoramas in our predominantly short fiction are those on travel posters on the wall of the office cubicle. Our forests—albeit our denuded ones—and our oceans do not figure in our work, and neither do the lives of our people in these places. In other words, our fictional space has become very small and very crowded, with a very low ceiling. This is not again to say that we cannot do or have not done wonders within that space—within, shall we say, that rat’s eye view of the world—but I’m afraid that many of our younger writers might start believing that the world is indeed that small, and shrink their brains and imaginations just to fill it rather than expand that space.

Of course as I say this I have to add that, maybe precisely because of their larger canvases, our contemporary novels—few as they are—have tended to do bigger and different things. Prof. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo—herself an accomplished fictionist and novelist—did a recent study of four of these novels: The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café by Alfred A.Yuson, The Firewalkers by Erwin Castillo, Sky Over Dimas by Vicente Garcia Groyon, and Banyaga: A Song of War by Charlson Ong. She noted that these novelists continue to share, with Rizal, a fascination for the big picture, the acute awareness of history in progress, of history in the present; but they are also seeking new ways and forms of dealing with the material, within and beyond realism.

And this is exactly why we need to write more novels: because they are exceptions unto themselves; because they force us to form fuller, clearer pictures of ourselves; because they have so much more room to grow; and because—I say this with some trepidation, knowing that I’m making a gross generalization—no one will take us seriously on the global stage unless we announce ourselves with big, emphatic, memorable novels. As unfair as that may sound to the writers of other genres—and also to writers who may not care at all, for their own good reasons, to be read abroad—it’s the hard fact of literature as a global industry. Collections of poetry and short fiction will be picked up by university and small presses and released in small editions; but the novel is the big whale in the ocean that publishers and agents have their harpoons at the ready for.

(I’ll add a bit more to this next week.)

Penman for Monday, November 19, 2007

I'VE POSTED a shorter version of this on my blog (which I've edited since, below), but since not all Star readers have Internet access or the time and inclination to go over such ramblings as bloggers inflict on their followers (or their stalkers and “trolls”, as we inevitably acquire), let me say this in print as well.

I’m sorry to have to tell you all that I didn't win the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, for which my novel Soledad's Sister was shortlisted and which was given out in Hong Kong last November 10. (That's me up there with Tim Rainsford of Man Investments, receiving my shortlistee's trophy.) That distinction was achieved by Chinese writer Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem—which, going by everything we've heard about it, is a finely wrought, 450-page novel on an epic scale of nomadic life in Mongolia, the original Chinese version of which has already sold more than two million copies in China (and many millions more, I’m told, in bootlegged copies, which says something about its true appeal).

I had a chat with Jo Lusby of Penguin China—which bought the English rights from Jiang for $100,000 (no great shakes by Western standards, but a historic high for any book in our part of the world), and she told me that Wolf Totem’s strength was in its ability to be interpreted in many ways; I gathered that you could read it as being sharply critical of the regime, or (as the government surely prefers) as an argument for consensus and coexistence.

My fellow “shortlistees” and I were very happy for Jiang, who was prevented by illness from joining us for the ceremonies and was represented by his Beijing publisher. We didn’t spend more than 36 hours together—I was joined by Reeti Gadekar of India (who lives in Berlin), Xu Xi of Hong Kong (now based in New York), and Nu Nu Yi Inwa of Burma (who was happy just to be permitted to leave Yangon)—but it was enough to see not only how much we shared in terms of our backgrounds and concerns, but also how different our works were, in sensibility and substance. The heartening message is that “Asia” is not one mass, not one face, not one experience, not one thing, as Orientalist impressions would have it. In both joy and tragedy, we are as richly diverse as we are umbilically connected by land, water, and history.

We also derived pride and comfort from the fact that, aside from the very warm reception extended by our hosts, the judges, the sponsors, and the Hong Kong literary community, we received many inquiries from publishers and agents eager to publish our work for broader audiences beyond Asia. I and the other writers who made the shortlist and even the longlist of 23 are now in the unusual situation of having to decide which agent or publisher to deal with; and—as I’ve taken every opportunity to inform these interested parties—there’s lots more like me where I come from, like my partner-in-crime Charlson Ong.

It was actually Charlson who pushed me to join the Man Asian when we were both panelists at the UP Writers Workshop last March, and his only misfortune was that his epic Banyaga had just been published at that point, disqualifying him from entering it (only works unpublished in English are eligible). I’ve also been telling friends writing in Filipino that this would be a good time for them to get their novels translated into English. (Jiang’s translator Howard Goldblatt received $3,000 for his efforts.)

It’s not the only game out there, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we write just for prizes, but the Man Asian has been a great breakthrough for all our literatures and writers, and we who figured in its inaugural look forward to being followed by our compatriots in this new annual competition—the next albeit unannounced deadline for which, I must remind anyone interested, is only a few months away, on March 31st, 2008.

It's been a great ride, and we had a wonderful weekend in Hong Kong. Among other abbreviated delights, I was happy to revisit the fabled Foreign Correspondents Club, and to see Ms. Clare Hollingworth—now a very old lady, but once the intrepid correspondent who scooped the world on the German invasion of Poland, and thus the Second World War. We held a reading at the China Club—a visual feast I can only describe as neo-deco—owned by Shanghai Tang’s David Tang, who also ran the posh Cipriani restaurant in the old Bank of China building, where the awards ceremonies were held. (It was a black-tie affair, but thankfully I brought a barong along, and wore it proudly.)

The next morning, my only free time, I stepped out of the hotel for a quick breakfast at a McDonald’s across the street—only to realize that it was a Sunday, and that all of Hong Kong’s maids were having their day off, and for a moment I just stopped in the middle of the street, watching hundreds of them form small, happy knots, laying out blankets on the pavement, sharing their own food, selling phone cards, doing each other’s hair. I was, I suddenly thought, among the people of my novel, the girls from Calbayog and Cabadbaran who had come to places like Wan Chai to lay their own claims to whatever the world had to offer. Most would come home, and a few would not—or else return like my fictional Soledad did, in a wooden box.


Many, many thanks to all who sent me their good wishes—and now to revising and publishing the novel. And to writing my next one—oh, if I just had the time and the concentration to write what I really want to!


IT DOESN'T happen very often—although it should—that I fly out somewhere with Beng with me as the excess baggage, the Bill to her Hillary. But when it does I’m happy, because it means that she’s getting the professional recognition she deserves for her work, and I can slink away somewhere to enjoy the scenery and peck quietly at my keyboard on some project I can’t finish quite as languorously back home.

This was why I jumped on the chance to accompany Beng down to Cagayan de Oro sometime last month, where she had been invited to speak at a seminar-workshop sponsored by the Society of Filipino Archivists, Inc. on the subject of “Paper Conservation: Types of Deterioration and the Analyses and Diagnoses of Paper Deterioration.” I knew that she’d been working hard on her lecture—with a topic like that, I would have, too—so I was anxious to see how her presentation would go over with the crowd.

And a huge crowd it turned out to be, for something so esoteric as “The Conservation of Document Heritage Collections,” the theme of the SFA’s gathering. More than 180 archivists, librarians, and other professionals engaged in documents management and preservation came from all over the country to listen to a battery of experts discuss and demonstrate various paper conservation issues and techniques.

Founded in 1990 and headed by Emma Rey (director of the House of Representatives Archives), the SFA conducts these seminars and workshops at least three times a year in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The October 22-24 Cagayan de Oro seminar was supported by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. The participants came from government and private libraries and archives of colleges, universities, government agencies, and private institutions (such as the UP library, UP Infirmary Records and Archives, the Central Bank Archives, the Vargas Museum, the National Historical Institute, the Intramuros Administration, and the Manila Observatory).

Aside from Beng, the lecturers included, among others, Roberto Balarbar (“The Material Nature of Paper-Based Documentary Heritage Collection and Its Environmental Requirements/Emergency and Disaster Planning”; Bernardita M. Reyes (“Conservation Treatments”—mechanical, chemical cleaning, washing, lining and sizing of paper); Arnulfo Junio (“The Material Nature of AV Heritage Collection and Its Deterioration”); Yolanda Granda (“Encapsulation”); and Emma Rey (“Enclosures”).

While I spent most of my time in my room working on a new biography—and otherwise sampling the savory fish tinolas at the Food Court in nearby Limketkai mall—I couldn’t resist peeking into the seminar-workshop and marveling at how some people could dedicate themselves so assiduously to the care and preservation of paper.

But of course, as a writer and teacher myself, I could understand and even celebrate those efforts. In the course of my own reading and research, I’ve often come across library books less than a hundred years old that had turned a flaky brown and which came apart in my hands at the slightest touch, as well as books printed in the 1700s which, on the other hand, looked white and new, the letters crisply printed. (No big mystery there: the older books were made of linen from old rags, and were actually stronger than the later ones which used pulp and acid, which then later oxidized, thus the “slow burn” effect.) As Beng would say, paper also reacts to pollutants and moisture in the air, which causes acid hydrolysis. And as the other lecturers pointed out, we Filipinos live in an environment laden with all kinds of threats—pests, man-made disasters, natural calamities—and often inadequate resources to save and preserve our documents with.

(My own personal response has been to digitally scan every important document and to upload vital files such as ongoing projects to an online “safe.” But that’s just making copies, not saving the originals themselves.)

If you’re interested in this subject or your job hinges on it, drop the SFA people a line. Another seminar-workshop will take place December 10-12, 2007, in Baguio on “Safeguarding Records and Archives.” For details, call Emma Rey at 931-5966 or e-mail her at emmamrey@yahoo.com.

Penman for Sunday, November 18, 2007

KUNMING ISN'T the first city most people would think of when they plan on touring China. It can’t come anywhere close to Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, or Xian in drawing power. While it can boast of its Stone Forest, its year-round temperate climate (for which it’s been called the “City of Eternal Spring”), and its rich variety of ethnic minority cultures, Kunming is far enough off the usual path—out in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, close to the Burmese border—to be ignored.

Indeed, when you motor on the sleek highway from the airport to your suburban hotel—plowing through the downtown area and its McDonalds and KFCs—you’ll wonder quickly where old Kunming has gone. There may have been a time when this 2,000-year-old city, like many of China’s frontier outposts, possessed a certain roughness of character that today would be worth traveling thousands of miles to see, but it’s all been replaced by high-rise apartments and swanky new hotels with bling-bling lights and splashy signs.

But for a few days earlier this month, all tourist roads in China led to Kunming, where the eighth edition of the China International Travel Mart (CITM)—one of that country’s biggest travel expos—was being held from November 1 to 4. Since anything in China is big, this is how big it was, exactly: over 2,000 exhibitors from 90 countries, spread out over six exhibition halls, each one of which could have hangared four 747s.

The CITM alternates each year between Kunming and Shanghai—an interesting idea, because the two cities couldn’t be more different: one provincial and mile-high (at an elevation of 1,900 meters), the other coastal and cosmopolitan. They share, however, the same commercial energy, drawing from the same trough of China’s mindboggling 10 percent annual growth rate (some cities in the interior are growing even faster, like Kunming’s and Chengdu’s 13 percent).

In Kunming, the economic engine is driven primarily by industry, minerals like salt and phosphate, and crops like tobacco, but tourism is rising, driven by such major events as the 1999 Horticultural International Exposition and the CITM. (You know it’s a work in progress when you see an office building with a sign that says “Yunnan Service Center for Sparse Tourists”—yup, I also did a double-take.)

The CITM, of course, serves not only Kunming but all of China, and all the world. That’s where the Philippines’ Department of Tourism comes in. This year was its fourth foray into the CITM market, and our small but lively contingent was led by the DOT’s “Team China” (one of seven such teams organized by Sec. Ace Durano to focus on our strongest and priority markets—China, Korea, Japan, India, the US, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe) under Usec. Eduardo “Edu” Jarque. The urbane but unpretentious Edu is as enthusiastic and as indefatigable a promoter of Philippine tourism as you’ll ever meet, and he was ably supported by team members Arlene Alipio, Marian Obispo, and Shanghai-based Gerard Panga, as well as a 12-member troupe of Bayanihan dancers and musicians.

Just as importantly, private tour operators and related entities also represented the Philippines, including Jeron Travel and Tours, Winfar Cebu Travel and Tours, Direction Travel and Tours, CK & Philippine International Travel, the Panoly Resort Hotel, Best Cruises ‘N Resorts, the Philippine Retirement Authority, and Cebu Pacific. With the Bayanihan’s day-long and unflaggingly high-sprited performances drawing in the crowds to the Philippines’ 90-sqm. booth—dressed up as a beach with a sunny blue sky, and strategically located near the entrance to the middle hall—all these representatives pitched in to sell the Philippines to both casual passersby and travel professionals.

With all the political travails we’ve been going through—including that explosion in Makati the investigators have yet to figure out—you’d think that selling the Philippines to tourists would be an unenviable and even fruitless task. Think again. As it turns out, tourism demand is rising at an even faster pace than we can accommodate potential visitors.

I witnessed this myself when a tour operator pleaded with Team China to open more flights and hotels because more of his clients wanted to fly to Boracay. I was incredulous—weren’t these people the least bit apprehensive?—but as Edu Jarque explained it to me during a similar sortie last June in Shanghai, tourists from China “don’t worry about travel advisories,” unlike their Western counterparts. “They know what they want, and they’ll go and get it.” (Most interestingly, Jarque says, Chinese tourists value souvenirs with the word “Philippines” stamped, silkscreened, or etched on them.)

With China’s rising affluence, it’s easy to see why overseas travel is booming among the Chinese, and why everyone in the rest of the world wants a piece of it. The Chinese now account for the fourth-largest group of foreign tourists in the Philippines, out of a total estimated to hit the three-million mark by the yearend. (The list is topped by Koreans, followed by the Americans, and the Japanese; the decline in Japanese tourists, Edu says, is a general phenomenon, and not confined to the Philippines.) To bring in even more visitors, the DOT has worked with other government agencies like the Bureau of Immigration to relax the usual requirements, such as by reclassifying Chinese and Indians as “non-restricted nationals” and allowing groups to come in under group visas.

These tourists usually head for the predictable top spots—the beaches of Bohol, Boracay, and Cebu. But Edu notes that other destinations and kinds of tourism are cropping up. “Believe it or not,” he says, “the Koreans and the Japanese love volcano tourism. Some of our partners are promoting kulinarya or food tourism. Our spas promote wellness tourism. Our schools are undertaking education tourism by teaching English and by offering sought-after courses like illustration and aviation mechanics. And speaking of film tourism, two Bollywood companies are coming over in November just to shoot their dream sequences here!”

Meeting the challenge of developing new destinations and upgrading facilities are fresh investments that now total some US$4 billion, Jarque says, poured into such places as Marinduque, Romblon, Davao, and Iloilo, as well as into the renovation of old standards like the Manila Peninsula and the opening of a Banyan Tree resort on an island in Northern Palawan. Complementing investments is the lowering of fares by local carriers and the aggressive promotion of Philippine attractions in international fairs like Kunming—for example, Palawan dive tours in Europe, where six travel fairs will be held in just the first half of 2008 (“The Germans have fairs for spark plugs,” Edu observes wryly).

Domestic tourism is also on the rise. Jarque notes how “It used to be that you went to the province to visit an aunt, but that’s no longer the case.” There’s still Tita Mely to visit, of course, but our hinterlands now offer added attractions such as the butanding or whale sharks of Donsol, Sorsogon. For this new, eco-friendly activity, locals who used to drive tricycles if not butcher these animals were retrained to serve as “Butanding Interaction Officers” who now guide limited numbers of tourists to the whale sharks and ensure a peaceful encounter.

Local government units, Jarque says, are beginning to understand and profit from the value of properly managed tourism. To help them along, the DOT provides them with tourism master plans, as well as translators to promote their attractions in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

Filipino-Americans are no longer as interested in the bahay-kubo experience that might require them to huddle under the roof with a dozen gawking relatives, Edu says. “They’re now looking for more high-end housing,” buying homes in Tagaytay and condos in Libis or Makati as investments and getaways.

Again, with distractions like the Glorietta explosion, it’s hard to imagine all this activity going on, but—as Undersecretary Jarque notes, “not one cancellation” happened because of the Makati incident. Apparently, one of Philippine tourism’s strengths is its imperviousness to politics. (Now, if they can only leave politics out of tourism administration!)

Our target of three million tourists is still a long way off from Thailand’s 12 million annual visitors, and basic problems need to be attended to if we’re to meet that objective, like infrastructure. (Hmm, did anyone say “Terminal 3”?) Direct charter flights will be starting soon between Shanghai and Kalibo—but that means, Edu Jarque says, that Kalibo airport will have to be ready to receive international flights and travelers, not just in terms of the runways and lights, but also in terms of people to provide immigration, baggage, customs, and transport services. Jarque hopes that agencies like the DOTC and the LGUs will pitch in to sort things out.

Let’s pray they do, or all that goodwill our dancers and agents generated in Kunming could go to waste, and what a pity that would be.

Penman for Monday, November 12, 2007

ONE OF the pleasures of covering the promotional sorties of the Department of Tourism—aside, of course, from exposure to new sights, flavors, and sounds—is traveling with a group of Bayanihan dancers and musicians, as I was fortunate to experience last July in Shanghai and again last week in Kunming, China. (I’ll be filing a separate story soon on that trip to the China International Travel Mart, so keep an eye out for it in the Sunday travel section.)

If you’re a Filipino, you know what “Bayanihan” means—and I’m no longer referring to that charming if backbreaking practice of helping your neighbor lift up his bamboo house, but to the troupe that rightfully calls itself the Philippine National Folk Dance Company. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Bayanihan has become synonymous with beauty and grace, and with the country’s representation abroad by its best cultural ambassadors.

It’s the native dances, of course, that the Bayanihan has become world-famous for, winning scores of awards from such as their most recent victories in Palma de Mallorca and Turkey. The tinikling, the pandanggo sa ilaw, and the singkil remain crowd favorites and Bayanihan staples, never failing to elicit delight and wonderment from their audiences, especially foreigners who know nothing of us and of our culture.

But sharing the same flight with this group to and from Kunming, and spending a couple of days with them in the Philippine booth, introduced me to a Bayanihan most people don’t see—the people offstage and off-camera.

You’ll probably expect me to say that they’re very different when they’re not performing—that they revert to blue-jeaned, cigarette-puffing, beer-guzzling pedestrians much like you and me. In their most private moments (which I wasn’t privy to), that might happen; but in public—meaning, wherever they could be seen and heard by anyone else, Filipino or foreigner, whether in the hotel lobby or around the baggage carousel—they conducted themselves just as if they were onstage and being watched by a thousand pairs of eyes. Beneath the charm was a tensile discipline imbibed from years of unrelenting practice.

These performers travel in smart, impeccably pressed uniforms, carrying the same, company-issue bags (as you can imagine, with all the poise of a pandanggo dancer). They don’t shriek, they don’t sweat, and no matter how fatigued they may be from performing the same dances all day before different crowds at the same exhibition hall, they never lose their smiles and their composure, even after the show. Without being asked to, they share in the chores of promoting the Philippines to the public at large, handing out brochures and gamely posing for pictures with passersby lured by the infectious music and cheerful boisterousness of our folk dances.

It’s no wonder they’ve become suki partners of the DOT, whose seven promotions teams (China, Japan, Korea, India, Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe) fan out regularly to sustain the ongoing boom in Philippine tourism, which expects to have drawn in a historic three million visitors by the yearend. Numbering more than 50 members at full complement, the Bayanihan divides itself into smaller traveling groups for special assignments such as the Kunming CITM, one of China’s biggest and most important travel shows. This particular party had 12 members—eight dancers and four musicians; another such group was set to leave the following week for a major promotions project in Paris.

It sounds like an exciting and glamorous life, and I’m sure the Bayanihan members would be the first to agree that it is, or they wouldn’t be there. But they just make hard work look easy. The traveling alone would bring others of a lesser constitution to their knees. One dancer had been with the company for 14 years, during which she had visited 30 countries. Most surprisingly, even if they may have epitomized professionalism itself, none of them was doing it for a living; many were students, others were professionals and employees. A modest grant from the NCCA helps with the expenses, but it’s clearly the love of dance and performance that has sustained the company, whose youngest member is all of 15. (On the senior side of things, the Bayanihan counts, among its most prominent alumni, politician Lito Atienza and his wife, and broadcast journalist Che Che Lazaro.)

And five decades of high achievement hasn’t stopped the Bayanihan from trying new things. According to Ferdinand “Bong” Jose—a former chemist who served as the Kunming group’s leader and is also the company’s dance director—they’re constantly developing new dances to expand their repertoire (among them, the bangkero, sapatero, and pearl-diver dances), as well as all-male dances designed to attract more men to the art.

“We get walk-ins all the time,” Bong told me when I asked him how Bayanihan applicants—aside from being outrageously talented and good-looking (that’s two strikes for me; I’ve often told friends that I’d have traded half a dozen Palancas to be able to boogie and do the cha-cha)—got into the company. “But the most important thing is the interview, which reveals something about the applicant’s background and likely behavior.” There’s little room for prima donnas in this ensemble (among whom the donnas, in any case, were certifiably prima).

Back in my hotel, sighing as I gave my swelling paunch a jiggle in front of the full-length mirror, I imagined what life might have been like if I’d flexed my toes instead of my fingers thirty years ago. I struck a John Travolta pose, pronounced it obscene, and returned to my laptop to type up my notes for this piece.


STILL IN the general neighborhood of art, let’s move from cheers to jeers as well-deserved as the former.

I nearly choked on my airport coffee when I read the tawdry news from home about that mural commissioned from a group of Angono artists by the National Press Club. Supposedly conceived to celebrate press freedom, this mural was “retouched” to remove any references to the some of the most burning political issues of our time.

That “retouching” was, is, and will forever be unconscionable. That it was done on the eve of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s visit, and that its purpose was clearly to remove details that would have offended Arroyo had she seen them, tell us more about the people who commissioned the artwork than those who made it.

By the account I read, NPC President Roy Mabasa reportedly got the artists to agree beforehand that “the killings of journalists and libel would be highlighted by the mural and that no political statements were to be made.” How on earth, I thought, was that possible? Even putting aside the flagrant persecution of journalists through murder and libel, how could anything related to press freedom not be political in a society like ours? What did the NPC bosses think those journalists were savaged and dragged to court for?

Another NPC officer was even quoted to have described the muralists as “the lowest kind of artists” for insisting on the integrity of their work and on the price they quoted. I don’t know what he meant exactly by that remark, but it makes me wonder what it takes to be the lowest kind of journalist—will sucking up to the powers that be at the expense of those fighting for the truth qualify?

This leads me to the even bigger mystery of what the NPC is and what it stands for these days. I remember how—many years ago just before martial law, when I was starting out as wet-eared reporter for the Philippines Herald and then as a correspondent for Taliba—the National Press Club represented something vastly different, a gathering of freethinking, sharp-witted men and women who not only could hold their beer and scotch but could stand up to whoever was sitting in the Palace by the Pasig. Every time I went up those steps I trembled in awe of my seniors, and I felt truly proud to have been able to crash the profession of journalism.

Over the martial law years and through the systematic coercion and co-optation of the media, that pride and awe would be replaced by shame—which is what any right-minded citizen should feel over this incident. How embarrassing that it should take normally meek and inarticulate painters to remind these tough, gun-toting journalists what they should be fighting for—the truth, reason, and justice, and not a pat on the back from Malacañang.

I’m no Polyanna, and I understand the concessions to life and livelihood that writers have to make. But sometimes we have to do and say something for ourselves, so that—even the depths of guilt and corruption—we can remember the better part of us that still knows how to hope and dream. That mural would have been some such statement, a refreshing spark of insurgency in what’s become another venue for slippery subservience.

Any “national” press club that imagines it can get away with being “apolitical” while inviting someone whose husband tried to sue the pants off 43 journalists to unveil its mural to “press freedom” has to be joking. Worse, it’s got to be a sorry joke of a press club.

Penman for Monday, November 5, 2007


I'M WALKING on air, after receiving the happy news that my novel Soledad’s Sister made it to the shortlist of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize, along with four other Asian writers: Reeti Gadekar of India, Nu Nu Yi Inwa of Myanmar, Jiang Rong of China, and Xu Xi who’s Chinese-Indonesian. We won’t find out who won until we get to Hong Kong on November 10, but I’m elated enough to be on the shortlist (and to be treated to free dimsum in HK).

Anvil Publishing will be coming out with my novel early next year, most likely under the title The Woman in the Box—the self-contained short story that makes up its opening chapter. I’ll be revising the manuscript over the next few weeks to give it just a little more heft and tie up loose ends. Meanwhile, I was asked by the organizers to submit a synopsis and a brief excerpt from the novel, so I’d like to share those with my readers.

I’ll abbreviate the synopsis to leave out the ending, which I think keeps with the darkly comic beginning: “A casket arrives at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, bearing the body of someone manifested as “Aurora V. Cabahug”—one among over 300 overseas workers who return as corpses at this airport every year. The real Aurora, however, is very much alive, a karaoke-bar singer in the distant town of Paez; the woman in the box is her sister Soledad, who used Rory's identity to secure a job abroad. No one knows for sure how Soledad (Soli) died; the body bears signs of foul play and abuse, and now waits to be claimed at the airport. A Paez policeman, Walter, is assigned to drive out to Manila to pick up the body, accompanied by Rory. Both Walter and Rory, who vaguely know each other, find their own lives redefined by the sudden return of the dead Soledad: Walter has been left by his wife and son for a new life in England; Rory feels herself standing on the brink of great things, ambitions that her sister never achieved.”

And here’s an excerpt from a chapter titled “Walking on Water”:

THE ONLY thing Jose Maria Pulumbarit ever wanted to be was a sailor. He had grown up in Olongapo, on the fringes of one of Asia’s largest American naval bases and home to its Pacific Fleet, and from the moment he saw his first American sailor step off the USS Belleau Wood in white cap and jumper, Jomar knew that a ship was the world’s best place to be—an ever-moving island in a planet of fixed addresses. An uncle of his was already out there, serving as a “steward’s mate” or messboy on an aircraft carrier that spent most of its time in the Atlantic, and Jomar eagerly awaited the man’s letters to his mother and the chocolates that came with them, or whatever reached him after his father and two elder brothers had rifled through the stash.

But his father had other plans for his sons, especially for Jomar who seemed fine-limbed and, to the old man, even effeminate, given Jomar’s delicacy of movement and his love of anything that had to do with travel and exotic places. Jomar hung around the real sailors whenever he could, running to light their cigarettes, doing errands for their girls, leaning into the open hoods of jeeps to watch mechanics replace distributor caps and fan belts. His two brothers signed up for base jobs, hoping to work their way onto the ships and then on to San Diego and the great American beyond.

Jomar filched blue-seal Philip Morrises and sported Ray-Bans, and at age 16 was caught by the base MPs at the wheel of a jeep filled with commissary-sized boxes of Hershey’s, Frito Lays, Folger’s, and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific. The local police beat him up and, when his father claimed him, Jomar got thrashed again—not because of what he had stolen, but because he had gotten himself caught, jeopardizing his brothers’ jobs. The caper cost Jomar a cracked tooth and a broken rib that took weeks to heal, but it also strengthened his resolve to leapfrog his way out of Olongapo and not get stuck digging ditches and painting rooftops like his brothers did. He would walk on water.

And he did, in a way; six months after getting his bones crushed, Jose Maria Pulumbarit was at sea in the white togs he had imagined wearing since he learned how to tie his shoelaces—albeit a size too large, for they belonged to Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Rufus B. Melnicki, who wasn’t even on that ship, but on the USS Cushing, back in Yokusuka from maneuvers in Subic. Jomar had slipped into the USS Abraham Lincoln in the great confusion that attended the evacuation of dependents when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo suddenly spewed megatons of mud and acrid smoke. The Lincoln was more than halfway to Guam when they found him in the galley, dazed from the heat and dehydration. Even so he spun his captors a story of childhood abuse at the hands of brass-knuckled uncles and the providential relief afforded by the volcano’s wrath. Instead of tossing him into the brig, they took him on a guided tour of the carrier and plied him full of Canadian ham and mashed potatoes. He had to remain on board the ship when it docked in Guam, but he had, in a way, achieved his dream, and when he took the captain’s gig to transfer to the USS Juneau for the trip back to Subic, he felt more hero than interloper, and used the time to learn about radio electronics and grades of engine oil.

And Jose Maria Pulumbarit’s life could have taken a permanent upturn from then on, but the first thing he did upon debarking in Subic was to swipe some warrant officer’s wallet to bankroll his next great exploit, an escape to another bay in another city 110 kilometers to the south, Manila.

THIS WAS the same Jomar Pulumbarit who, many stints in City Jail and a rack of tattoos across his back and around his thighs later, had sought refuge from the pelting rain under the Aristocrat’s awning, observing the diners as they streamed in. The impish glint in his eyes had long been replaced by a dull but unrelenting gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses; the insolent grin had turned into dry, sealed lips that resisted reading. He had learned to reduce his presence to near-vanishing point. Guam and the rolling ocean was a distant, even painful, memory.

The water was but a minute’s walk from where he stood, and where he lived in Pasay, he could have brushed the sagging lines of laundry aside to see the bay from his galvanized iron roof, and point out, had he wanted, the yolk-like sun to any of his five children. He could carry the small ones, too—his slender arms had acquired some strength from hoisting cast-iron car parts and jacking four-ton vehicles. Those arms bore scars—the cuts of blades, the imprints of hot metal and nylon ropes—but the one thing Jomar had retained from his youth was the softness and the precision of his touch. Two of his right fingers had been broken by a vise grip, but he had taught that hand to work with three, and had passed the rest of its wisdom to the left.

Today he was here on a mission for the Novaliches-based gang he had hired himself out to. They needed a van—not a new one, not a fancy one, and indeed the more nondescript the better. It would be used for the getaway in a plan to remove several objects of great value from a house in Corinthian Gardens, the exact composition of which he did not need or want to know, except that he was told they would involve a certain size and weight. In that case he needed a particular make and model, and when the Tamaraw emerged up the service road in the rain, Jomar knew that he had found his mark. Tamaraws plied the city in the thousands, left no lasting impressions on anyone who saw them, and ran reasonably well; all it would take was a length of wire to pop the locks and a bit of fingerwork with the ignition to claim temporary ownership of the machine. There were other utility vehicles in the restaurant’s parking lot—a Ford Fiera had arrived earlier and would have done as well—but what clinched it for Jomar was the sight of a uniformed policeman stepping out of the Tamaraw; now the mission became a sweetly personal one, because Jomar loathed policemen, from the very first ones he met who cuffed him in the ear from a passing jeep and sent him sprawling on Magsaysay Boulevard to the one who applied the vise grip to his fingers and turned the screw, in a safehouse somewhere in La Loma, in the neighborhood that specialized in roasting whole pigs on a spit; the cop’s own fingers had been glistening with pork fat as they held him down and asked him to confess where the Mitsubishi Pajero was, or at least the money they had been paid for it. “I just steal cars, I don’t sell them!” he had screamed as they wedged his pinky into the grip, and the next thing he remembered was a torrential rush of blood from that tiny finger to his brain. When he came to, they put another finger into the slot and raised the same tiresome questions. In the end it was they who broke, not him, and Jose Maria Pulumbarit earned his professional moniker among the bukas-kotse gangs, “Boy Alambre,” both for his tool of choice and his own admirable resilience. He kept that tool—a thin coil of clothesline wire—on his forearm beneath the sleeve that also covered his tattoos; the other hand held an umbrella, the better to mask his moves; on dryer days it would have been a newspaper, or even a bag of groceries. A passerby might have seen a clerkish man dutifully waiting for his wife for their twice-weekly dinner out, and this was what Walter Zamora saw but failed to notice as he dashed back to the Aristocrat’s entrance to catch up with Rory after parking the van. Jomar had seen the girl, and she would have seen him, too, but Rory had a visceral dislike for men with glasses, and she focused instead on her rain-soaked driver, drawing a small hankie from her purse to mop his brow with.