Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, November 27, 2006


I CAN'T avoid sounding self-congratulatory about this, so let me go right out and pat myself on the back for completing my first year of blogging last Saturday, November 25. If you still don’t know what a blog is, it’s a “Web log”, a kind of diary or self-published magazine some people maintain online to share their experiences and ideas (read: rants, raves, heartaches, pontifications).

I’d resisted blogging for the longest time, thinking (correctly, as it turned out in my case) that it was something of an exercise in self-indulgence. But the attraction proved too strong—here, after all, was a digital soapbox for practically free, from where I could inflict my views about and on the universe with a few clicks of the mouse.

There are all kinds of free blog sites on the Web where you can put up your shingle in a few minutes using the software onsite (www.blogspot.com, for example), but I just had to do my blog the hard way, buying a piece of software called Blog.Mac which is tied in to my Apple DotMac account. If you’re not a Mac user, never mind the gobbledygook; what it simply means is that I had to be teased and challenged into building my own site, and maybe having had to pay for it challenged me some more to maintain it from week to week. (Don’t we just love to flog ourselves?)

At first, I was just looking to archive this column, and some other pieces I regularly write for the San Francisco-based monthly Filipinas Magazine and the political biweekly Newsbreak. I’m a compulsive cataloguer—I have digital files going back to 15 years ago, when we were using 5.25-inch floppy disks you could fan yourself with on a warm day—and while I back everything up on at least three hard drives, there’s nothing like having the material online, searchable and downloadable (hmm, somehow I can’t imagine Thoreau ever using those words) by anyone who needs them.

Then I got to thinking that a blog wasn’t really a blog if you just used it as a digital dumping ground, and that a real blog deserved some original material written expressly for it, not for republication or recycling. And so, on top of everything else, I started what I’ve called my “Flotsam & Jetsam” pieces (the title comes from an old W. Somerset Maugham short story), short personal reflections and impressions, much like jottings on the Moleskine notebook that I still keep.

Over the past 52 weeks, it’s been an exhausting but also exhilarating effort to keep the blog alive and fresh (beginning, of course, with keeping myself alive and fresh, the slings and arrows of middle age notwithstanding). Over that year, I produced about 60 Penman pieces (52 plus a few special assignments, and the occasional piece for Wednesday’s “M” section), 12 Filipinas “Manileño” columns, three or four Newsbreak commentaries and features, and 26 Flotsam & Jetsam pieces. As of this moment, I’m counting about 30,000 unique hits, averaging 81 hits a day and posting 116 links on 91 blogs. It’s been a busy neighborhood.

As regular readers know, since I started this column five years ago, I’ve written about a mixed bag of things; I get bored fairly quickly, and if I’m bored with a subject—it’s happened more than once—I’m sure my readers will sense it. So I try to come up with a different topic from week to week, although I inevitably gravitate toward my pet themes and concerns: the writing life, writing instruments (i.e., computers and pens), my cat Chippy (and occasionally other family members), teaching in UP, food I love and hate, the irretrievable past, and faraway places.

Going by the responses and messages I’ve gotten in my inbox, my most popular or controversial column-pieces this past year have been, in ascending order:

1. “Three-part harmony” (Feb. 6, 2006), on a concert of the Lettermen at the Araneta Coliseum. Hard-nosed realists though we may pretend to be at work, there’s nothing like nostalgia to reveal the sappy heart in every Pinoy, and nothing like old music to crank up the memories (“pressed between the pages of my mind”... see how easy it is?).

2. “The world of Macworld” (Parts 1 and 2, Jan. 16 and 23, 2006), my reportage on my sojourn to San Francisco to kneel at the foot of my guru, the great Steve Jobs. Jan. 11, 2006 remains the busiest day for my blog, with 179 recorded hits.

3. “Things men hate” (July 26, 2006), a compendium of stubbornly male complaints about and directed at females. Here’s a sample: “1. Don’t make me change my routine. If I prefer going to Makati from Quezon City via EDSA instead of C-5 (or vice-versa), don’t tell me that this route will consume XXX less minutes or XXX less liters of gas. I don’t care. I’m doing the driving, and it comforts me to see familiar signboards and traffic lights where I expect them. If I’ve perfectly enjoyed barako coffee after dinner for 30 years, don’t imagine for a minute that I’m giving that up for some Himalayan tea or even some fruit-flavored coffee.”

4. “Better than banning” (Oct. 9, 2006) and its sequel the following week, “Taglish is not the enemy”, my personal appeal to Filipinos not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to improving our skills in English. For us Pinoys, the language issue seems to have “HIT ME” written all over it in big block letters, and not since I dissed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 did I get so many messages from angry and anxious readers desperate to set me straight.

5. “One for my father” (Sept. 25, 2006), a remembrance of my father on his tenth death anniversary. Whatever our politics, whatever our backgrounds, death and loss remain the great levelers, and I received messages—they almost read like condolences—from Filipinos all over the world, who felt equally bereaved.

More than words, the blog has also allowed me to share whole albums of pictures, which I happen to enjoy taking. Soon, I fearlessly predict, blogs will routinely feature embedded videos, turning bloggers into short-short filmmakers, and I hope to be right there with my documentaries of the beach life in Ipanema and the gaming tables of Monte Carlo—as soon as I can find a willing sponsor for my fantasies.

Thirty thousand hits in 365 days may not look like much, when you think of that number as a small fraction of just the daily circulation of a major broadsheet like the Star. But it’s still more than all the books I’ve ever written, published, and sold in all my life. And running a blog has made me aware that there’s another community out there—of people who might not hold a newspaper in their hands for weeks but who religiously log in to the Internet several times a day for their regular dose of information and opinion.

To all these faceless friends, my deepest thanks for your patronage, and here’s to another year of flotsam, jetsam, and other musings by this Pinoy penman.


AMONG THOSE readers I just referred to is a lay brother named Ronron Lorilla who has been trying to find charitable citizens willing to invest in the education of bright but impoverished young Filipino minds down in Bicol. Ronron actually wrote me weeks ago with a rather generic appeal, so I asked him to give me real people needing real help, and he’s just written back to tell us about two such worthy subjects: Emmanuel Baeselico and Fermin Curaming.

Emmanuel is 17 years old and a sophomore at Ateneo de Naga University, working on his BS in Business Administration. He was born without knowing his real father, and later abandoned by his mother when he was in high school. Since then, he has been taken care of by the Jesuits in Naga.

Fermin Curaming graduated last year from high school and desperately wants to go on to college, where he plans to take Electronic Communications Engineering. He took the entrance examination to the Ateneo but had to withdraw his enrollment application for lack of money. The eldest of six children, Fermin comes from a broken home. He and his siblings depend on the generosity of relatives for their day-to-day sustenance.

If you can help these boys and others like them in any way, especially this Christgmas, please email Ronron directly at rrfreehire@yahoo.com.


LET ME put in a plug as well for another reader, Saturday Group member Anna de Leon, whose first one-woman show titled “Fragments” will be running from December 5 to 17 at the Crucible Gallery at the Megamall.

An accomplished interior designer by profession, Anna will be exhibiting a series of nudes, which symbolically represent her own emergence as an artist.

“I have always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of flowing lines, patterns, and textures,” Anna writes. “The colors that resonate with me are earthy shades complemented by a stroke of bright color. I like to render my paintings in soft applications, and even as I often use some very bright hues, I still want to evoke a feeling of lightness.”

Her art has gone through many phases and transformations, only to find its fullest expression in the female nude. She adds: “I might have gone the way of the ‘artist’ earlier, had I not been afraid of rendering the human body. All these years, I felt intimidated by it. Years of practice, and going to endless sessions of life sketchings, allowed me to overcome my fear of rendering the human form, and so I feel that the female nude is an apt metaphor for my coming out into the art world. While a first show is indeed a beginning, it is also an act of daring, and in many ways, a triumph.”

Indeed it is, and I’m just sorry I won’t be around to savor her subject and enjoy the cocktails. Congratulations and best wishes!

Penman for Monday, November 20, 2006


OK, ENOUGH of language and literature for this week; let’s have some fun talking about another subject I can’t have too much of—shopping. (That’s right, shopping—see my Penman piece on “Men Who Shop” in my blog below.)

With Christmas bells (sounds more like cash registers to me) ringing from Mandaluyong to Milwaukee, you’ve got to be thinking of presents for others to justify all those presents for yourself, so let me help ease that burden by walking you through what could well be the final frontier of shopping for most Filipinos: eBay. We’ll boldly go where few Pinoys have gone before—the growing galaxy of online shopping, a world filled with amazing discoveries and bargains, but also fraught with three-headed monsters just waiting to feed on the trough of your bank account.

With eBay’s partner PayPal just having opened for business in the Philippines (and I’ll tell you more about PayPal in a minute), Filipinos can now participate more freely in this truly global market. That’s just a statement of fact; I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I suppose that if your wife or daughter went on eBay to acquire a dozen pairs of Blahniks charged to your account, then that’s bad; if you bought yourself bound copies of the 1960s Playboy magazines that fueled your pubescent imagination (but let’s call them “collectors’ items” now, shall we?), then maybe that’s good.

But seriously (aw, do we have to?), there’s more than a few good things out there in that bottomless cornucopia we call eBay. My noblest and most sober purchases have included:

- A DVD containing the copyright-free texts of 47 important works of Philippine history and literature, including the full Blair & Robertson series, the Derbyshire translations of Rizal’s novels, a trove of Philippine folk tales, and Mary Fee’s recollections of her life as a Thomasite—all for about P1,000;

- A colorful selection of 29 Philippine stamps from the late 1800s, for about P150;

- A complete copy of one of the earliest issues of the Philippine Collegian, from December 1922, for a few hundred pesos; and - A 2-oz. bottle of Pelikan 4001 fountain pen ink in brilliant brown, for about P350.

But lest you imagine that I spend anxious hours and gouts of money in a valiant effort to preserve the tattered remnants of our glorious past, think again. On the more mundane side of things, I’ve also picked up:

- A Banana Republic blue linen blazer for about P1,000;

- A brand-new iBook G4 battery for about 2,000; and

- A four-disc CD set of instructional videos on badminton for P450.

I’m not even going to tell you how many pens, watches, computers and parts thereof, digital gizmos, and esoteric items (key fobs stamped with the Apple logo, VW car keys, a Suzuki steering wheel) I’ve dragged home from my periodic trawlings and dredgings of eBay. Suffice it to say that eBay—founded in September 1995 as AuctionWeb—got its present name and form in September 1997. By December 1997, I was an eager member, happily claiming a 1950s Pelikan fountain pen from a seller in Germany. When the pen arrived unscathed in the mail, I was convinced that eBay was humankind’s greatest invention since, well, the Internet, and I was hooked for life.

At any given time, there are millions of items up for auction or direct sale on eBay. (You want shoes? At this very minute, you can choose from 96,884 women’s pairs, and 39,658 men’s. You need a wristwatch? Take your pick of 102,139.) Its Wikipedia history tells us that since it put up its digital shingle a decade ago, eBay has grown to a $4.5-billion company with 11,600 employees. It makes money by charging sellers a percentage of their sales. (Potato chips? Get 60 bags for $18.00.)

Whoever thought of that business model deserves all the potato chips he can get his hands on. That’s a French-Iranian-American guy named Pierre Omidyar, a disgustingly young (39 years old) immigrant who, at one time, helped write the software program MacDraw for Claris, an Apple subsidiary (I knew there had to be an Apple connection somewhere).

Why do people shop on eBay? It’s convenient, it’s cheap, and it’s exciting. The auction format introduces an element of competition—heck, of gambling—that you simply don’t find strolling down the aisles of department stores, staring at fixed prices. I’m an inveterate bargain hunter, and Lord knows how many exquisitely useless things I’ve bought on eBay because they were too cheap to pass up. If you’re like me and you can’t be stopped from firing up that computer and typing in www.ebay.com (or its local version, www.ebay.com.ph), keep a few pointers in mind:

Know what you want. To be honest, this often has very little to do with what you need. But you could save a lot of time looking if you can narrow down your search term to something as specific as “Pelikan 140 pen 1952” or “Apple logo sweatshirt XL” or “Bulosan America first edition” or “watch strap leather brown 20.” Of course, what often happens is that while looking for something else, you stumble on that one thing you absolutely don’t need but just gotta have; I think of nice words like “serendipity”—what’s your excuse?

Know your size. We Pinoys typically see the world in terms of S, M, L, and XL, but one man’s large could be another man’s medium (just ask the women). And there are crucial differences as well in the way sizes are measured in the US, the UK, Europe, and the Philippines—not to mention between men and women. For example, my size 9.5 shoes would be 10.5 in the US and 43-44 in Europe. The most common sizes you’ll need to know are those for your shirt (collar) and shoes, but it’ll help to find out such arcana as your hat size and your prescription for your lenses.

Know your product. While eBay and its sellers may offer some limited guarantees, you’re basically on your own and taking chances. Caveat emptor! This shopping paradise is full of snakes and apples. There’s no telling if that designer bag or perfume is truly what it’s advertised to be, not until you get it. Some things may still be better bought at the mall (plus you get instant gratification, instead of having to wait for weeks).

Read every little detail of the specifications, inspect the pictures, and be just as aware of what you’re not being told or not being shown. (For example, I’ll never buy a pen that doesn’t show its nib—nibs are easily bent or broken, or exchanged with another pen’s.) Along this line, know your acronyms: NOS (new old stock), NWT (new with tag), NWOT (new without tag), NIB (new in box), EUC (excellent used condition), etc.

Know your seller. The closest thing you have to a guarantee on eBay is the seller’s reputation, here measured in terms of the seller’s feedback rating. This is the compilation of the comments left behind by previous buyers—positive, neutral, and negative. I wouldn’t touch a thing from a seller with a positive rating of less than 95% (like students evaluating their teachers, some buyers can also be capricious or vindictive). If you want a quick check on a seller’s neutral and negative feedbacks, go to www.toolhaus.org and type in the seller’s eBay ID. Although it takes some doing, feedbacks have been known to be faked, so you might want to check on who’s posting them as well.

How reliable is this system? Well, in around 150 transactions over the past nine years, I’ve received everything I ordered, except for one item, for which I claimed and got a refund from the seller in Hawaii. I don’t want to sound discriminatory here, but I will, anyway: there are certain places and countries around the world I will never buy from on eBay, given their reputation for scams.

Rule of thumb: if sounds too good to be true, stay away. If a seller is offering a new MacBook announced just last week by Steve Jobs for half the official price, stay away. Laptops are among the most popularly scammed items on eBay, by the way—so again, know who you’re getting it from.

Know your limit. Auctions are competitive by nature, and there’s nothing like knowing that someone else out there wants exactly the same thing to get your hackles up. Do some product research—review current market prices or completed auctions—and set a clear, firm limit on how much you want to pay for that milkmaid figurine or that World War II canteen before you even make a bid.

But instead of putting that figure down right away, you might want to start with a low bid, just enough to leave a personal marker on that item—then do your best to be there, finger at the keyboard and Internet connection humming, in the last three minutes of the bidding. (Don’t forget that eBay time is officially Pacific Standard Time in the US. Go by their clock, not yours.) This is the all-important part of any eBay auction—the last few minutes or seconds, when everyone around the planet comes out of the woodwork to “snipe” the others. This is when you punch in your absolute limit. If you lose, don’t worry—given eBay, there’s probably another one just like it, or there will be one soon.

I’ve seen silly bidding wars erupt over, say, a Parker pen that cost me no more than $20 but which fetched $112 in another auction. It might feel good to win such tussles, but you’ll feel sorry and sick to your stomach afterward. (An eBay bid is legally binding—once you bid, you commit to buy.)

Now, having just won that bruising battle for that lost Da Vinci drawing or that 14K pussycat pendant, what next? You pay—and here’s where PayPal comes in. PayPal is eBay’s in-house payment system, which requires separately registering a credit card or bank account against which eBay payments can automatically be drawn (see how easy they make it for you to lose your money?). After steering clear of the Philippines for ages, PayPal finally relented and now lets Filipino eBayers pay locally for their global purchases.

Take note that foreign sellers will also often give you the option of paying by credit card, by personal check (in US funds drawn on US accounts), or by money order—but all of these take extra time and fees to process. I’d be very, very wary of sellers who insist on getting paid only by telegraphic transfer such as by Western Union. WU itself is an old, reliable company—but scammers have used that same efficiency to get you to send them money across the void.

Is PayPal safe? Again, it’s not absolutely foolproof if you’re paying a scoundrel on the other end, but I haven’t lost a dollar yet in all these years (I set up a US account years ago), and for security’s sake, I opened a small, limited bank account just for this one thing.

So there you go—and I haven’t even said a thing about selling on eBay, which is what you just might end up doing with all that junk you’re getting. Happy hunting! (And just to make things clear, I offer no guarantee against your losing your shirt or your wits on account of reading this article.)

Penman for Monday, November 13, 2006


FOR THE past five years, the UP Institute of Creative Writing has recognized and honored the best first book of the year with the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. The award actually covers the preceding two years, alternating between English and Filipino. Previous winners have included Life After X, a story collection in English by Angelo R. Lacuesta (2001); Paghuhunos, a novel in Filipino by Ellen L. Sicat (2002); Smaller and Smaller Circles, a novel in English by Felisa H. Batacan (2003); Makinilyang Altar, a novel in Filipino by Luna Sicat-Cleto (2004); and The Sky Over Dimas, a novel in English by Vicente Groyon (2005).

It’s a unique award in this country. In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been sponsoring a similar award since 1965, starting out with fiction and eventually encompassing all genres. There are several such awards in the US and Canada.

As a teacher and promoter of creative writing, I put more value on distinctions like this than on the usual prizes, because they encourage the production of books, beyond individual stories or poems. Like I often remind my graduate students, it all comes down to books: if you think of yourself as someone seriously committed to writing, you’ll inevitably have to think in terms of coming out with your first book, and then your second one—“the book with your name on the spine,” I like to tell them.

It’s easy enough to churn out a poem or even a story overnight, but a book challenges the writer to demonstrate both a certain breadth of vision and a consistency of style (or a range thereof). When you’re a young writer who can barely finish that 15-page short story or those ten poems the teacher expects by semester’s end, a book seems the farthest object on the horizon, or a cruel mirage. But you’d have to wonder how all those people who wrote books ahead of us (you know, people like Rizal, Faulkner, Woolf, Mishima, and so on) managed to pound out all those volumes despite the lack of computers, Google, Starbucks, Red Bull, and the other support systems—not to mention the workshops and fellowships—we have at our fingertips today.

A first book is the writer’s announcement of his or her presence, and a great one often presages even more wonderful things. T.S. Eliot’s first book was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); Ian Fleming’s was Casino Royale (1953). In the early ‘70s, an alcoholic teaching high-school English started his first novel, only to toss it into the garbage; his wife retrieved the manuscript and urged him to get back to work. The book became Carrie, and the author was Stephen King. And it was only in 1997, can you believe it, when an unknown writer named J. K. Rowling got her first book—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—published by Bloomsbury, which turned out an edition of a measly 300 copies (any one of which is now worth at least 10,000 pounds to collectors—that’s a million pesos to you and me).

This year, two fiction books and three poetry collections are on the short list for the Madrigal-Gonzalez award. The fiction books are Iskrapbuk (UP Press) by Allan Derain and Pangangaluluwa at Iba Pang Kuwento (UP Press) by Jimmuel C. Naval; the poetry collections are Mga Tulang Tulala: Mga Piling Tula sa Filipino, Bikol at Rinconada (Goldprint Publishing House) by Kristian Sendon Cordero; Order of the Poets: Poems in English and Filipino (Akdang Bayan) by Jaime Dasca Doble; and Ibang Daan Pauwi: Mga Tula (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) by Manolito Sulit.

The winner will be announced on December 8, 2006, after a book forum with the finalists at 2 p.m. Both will be held at the Pulungang Recto, Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman, Quezon City.

The winner will receive a cash prize of P50,000. The award was established in February 2001 and sponsored by the Madrigal and Gonzalez families through Atty. Gizela Gonzalez Montinola, writer and granddaughter of Bienvenido Gonzalez, former UP President, and daughter of Gonzalo Gonzalez, former member of the UP Board of Regents. This year’s members of the board of judges are prizewinning writers Malou Jacob, Luna Sicat-Cleto, and Rene O. Villanueva.

Incidentally, with my former student and sometime badminton and poker buddy Joel Toledo placing second in the international quest for the prestigious Bridport Prize, it can’t be too far-fetched to imagine that a Filipino can win yet one more important prize we haven’t claimed: the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, administered by the University of Pittsburgh Press, that pays the winner $15,000 plus publication by the press. The prize is open to writers of collections of fiction in English, no matter where in the world they come from. For more information, check out this page.


SPEAKING OF first books, I’m pleased to announce that the editors of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature have selected the works that will make up the first issue of this journal, envisaged by the UP Institute of Creative Writing to represent the best of Philippine literature today in both Filipino and English.

I can’t release the list just now, pending notification of all the writers of the entries we accepted from several hundred submissions. But having seen that list, I can say that it represents a fair and exciting balance between writers old and new (as well as old and young). Likhaan accepted a total of 14 works in the two languages, divided evenly by language, but somewhat differently by genre, depending on the quality of the submissions. Eight of those 14 names are familiar to me in varying degrees, which means that I—for all my exposure to the workshop circuit—know nothing of the work of the other six, a healthy sign that great changes are taking place, and that Philippine literature is being reshaped by a new generation of writers voicing new concerns.

Please don’t write me at this point to ask who’s in, or what happened to your submission. Again, I’ve seen the list by e-mail, but being away in the United States, I wasn’t personally involved in the selection process, although I would’ve stepped in to break any tie (there was none). My associate editors and I relied on a corps of referees—all of them distinguished writers and academics themselves, both within and outside UP—to make the toughest decisions and to justify them in notes that we will publish in an introduction to the first issue.

We had hoped to launch that issue on Writers Night this December, but it looks like late January will be a more probable date for the launch, given how Pinoy brains seem to refuse any serious work for the greater part of December. That’s good for me, because I’ll be back by then, and can personally present the authors featured in this new journal with their copies.


IF YOU'RE an alumnus or alumna of the Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, or East-West Center programs administered by the Philippine American Educational Foundation (PAEF), bookmark Saturday, December 2, for a special event you’ll be sorry to miss, if you value networking or just want to know whatever happened to all those fine people you enplaned for the US with decades ago.

That’s when the first national conference of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA), Fulbright Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association (FPAAA), Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Association (HHHAA), and East-West Center Alumni Association (EWCAA) will be held in Escaler Hall at the Ateneo de Manila University in Loyola Heights, QC. Made possible by a US Embassy-Manila grant to PAEF, the conference will see how these scholars can help further in strengthening Philippine-American relations and advancing national development.

Opening formalities will start at 9 a.m., with US Ambassador Kristie A. Kenney invited to give a message. A plenary session will follow till noon, with representatives from the four alumni associations as panelists: Ms. Corazon de la Paz, SSS President and CEO, for the PFSA; Dr. Rudy Undan, President of Central Luzon State University for the FPAAA; Dr. Noemi Silva, Academic Vice-President of Notre Dame of Marbel University, for the HHHAA; and Congressman Nereus Acosta of Bukidnon for the EWCAA. Breakout sessions will be held in the afternoon on issues important to the alumni. The conference should be over by 4 p.m.

On behalf of the PFSA board of which I’m a member, we’d like to thank the key people from the US Embassy supporting this conference—Lee McClenny, Public Affairs Officer and PAEF Board Chairman, and Bruce Armstrong, Cultural Affairs Officer and PAEF Board Treasurer. For more information, please call PAEF at 812-0919 or email them at fulbright@paef.org.ph.


I'VE RECEIVED more mail about the language issue—I swear, few things inflame our passions more than language—including a message from a reader named Alvaro who argues that “The 50 years of English (100 by now), compared with the 333 years of Spanish presence, suggest that Castilian would give better ‘identity’ to this archipelago and insert them in the community of 600 million people of Hispanic America and Spain, a growing empire.”

I’m going to give this discussion a rest for now, with the reiteration of my notion that language is made in the streets (do I hear some people crying, “Horrors!”?), and not in or by academies.

Want to help in the promotion of better English and better Filipino? Mind your own language. Use it well. Use it freshly. Use it to be understood by ordinary people, to excite and to engage their imagination—not to elevate or separate yourself from them. If patriotism has been said to be the refuge of scoundrels, linguistic snobbery just might be the refuge of those who have little else to say.

Penman for Monday, November 6, 2006


LET ME begin by giving thanks to some fine people who sent me unexpected pleasures in the mail. (When you live where I’m living now, almost anything in the mailbox is an unexpected pleasure.)

The first was a book of sorts—the 2006 edition of Filipino Yellow Pages USA, edited and put together by longtime San Francisco resident Luz de Leon, who took me out to lunch during a visit to that city last January. As the title suggests, the Yellow Pages is a handy compilation of Filipino-American businesses, services, organizations, and other useful addresses not only in California but all over the United States.

As Fil-Am concerns go, that’s everything from real estate brokers, travel agencies, and remittance centers to catering services, chambers of commerce, and community-alumni associations. If you want to book Rex Navarrete for your benefit concert, he’s here; if you’re looking for a Pinoy psychic, you can choose from 11 of them in Southern California. Philippine-based enterprises are also represented in this phonebook, which you can look up at www.filipinoyellowpages.net.

For many years now, Luz has been spearheading the Pistahan Parade and Festival in San Francisco. This year’s Pistahan was held on August 13 and highlighted the centennial of Filipino immigration to the US. Luz (the sister of former Civil Service Commissioner Corazon Alma de Leon) also advises the Filipino American Arts Exposition (FAAE), which runs the Pistahan.

I was going to flip through Luz’s phonebook for the nearest supplier of “Boy Bawang” when something else turned up in my mail: a huge, heavy box that had cost its sender no less than $24 to post by priority mail from California. It came from an Efren Salvaleon, who proudly identified himself as a member of the first batch of the Philippine Science High School—my senior by two years. I thought it was a pile of books for me to while away the wintry hours, but it turned out to be something far more palatable—a boxful of Pinoy goodies, including cans of Victorias bangus sardines, bundles of Sunflower crackers, dried mangoes, canned fruit, corned beef, guinataang mais, and a stack of CDs full of my kind of music (i.e., anything before 1980).

In a letter that he sent along, Efren said that he and his wife Gie had seen a picture of my cupboard on my blog, and had decided that my stash of Ligo sardines and Nissin’s Ramen probably wasn’t going to last too long—and hence, the present of a season’s worth of ulam and merienda.

A million thanks, Efren and Gie, for your unexpected kindness; on a chilly autumn day, there’s nothing like that hot bangus on a plate of steaming rice to warm the spirit!


CLOSE ON the heels of last week’s column on Taglish came this response from a young reader named Aldrin Fauni-Tanos, who’s apparently studied the history and development of English more closely than I have, and for whose clarifications I’m most grateful. I have some further comments to make on Aldrin’s views, but first let’s hear him out:

“I'd hate to sound like a PC thug, but I'd just like to clarify that post-1066 English was not a hybrid language. English was, and always has been, largely Germanic in structure. Borrowing a great sum of foreign vocabulary (or even grammatical features) does not necessarily mean the language that fosters them becomes a hybrid.

“And it's not German (as in Deutsch) per se, but Proto-West Germanic—German being one out of many of its modern descendants. Although now that I think of it, calling 5th century English a form of German doesn't sound so bad at all.

“The Norman borrowings weren't entirely accepted by each and every Englishman. Each socio-economic bracket welcomed (or shunned) Norman vocabulary quite differently from the other. Much like a spectrum with upper classes taking in more French/Latin and the lower classes remaining largely Germanic. Ergo, you'd probably hear more Saxon in the marketplace whilst the lords cussed in Norman.

“While I fear greatly for the degeneration of English competency in our country, however, I would like to stress a greater fear—the waning of our mother tongue/s. I notice it everywhere. Youngsters are beginning to forget what the native words are for certain things/ideas. And this poses a great threat to the sovereignty of our ethno-linguistic identity.

“I'd also like you to know that not everywhere in this country do people find Taglish most useful. I've encountered Tagalog natives who would rather have me speak to them in straight Tagalog than Taglish. And those natives do number far higher than the Taglish-employing urbanites. So I wouldn't be too confident in referring to Taglish as a very efficient mode of speech. Just a popular one.

“Kraft Eden Cheese and Tang, quite disgustingly, use written Taglish on their products. I trashed the carton in shock. It may not be the sole culprit in the degeneration of our mastery of English and/or Filipino, but it certainly gives the wrong impression to our youth. It breeds confusion. I was just horrified upon seeing the language options in this BPI cashpoint. It read: English/Taglish. What a horrid, horrid option.

“Don't get me wrong here, sir. I, actually, agree with you that Taglish shouldn't be singled out in this war against language incompetence. And that rather banning the use of something inevitable and natural, people should give greater focus on improving the ‘underfunded, unimaginative, and sloppy teaching’ of both English and Filipino. I've grown more tolerant now of Taglish. I'm not as hostile to the idea of employing it as I was before. But I still do not approve of its careless usage. While do use Taglish and not have it ruin my Tagalog/English, other people—most people—do not know how to ‘separate’ the two in intellectual conversation. Instead when asked to explain themselves in straight English/Tagalog, they are at a dumb loss for words. How sad, eh?”

Sad indeed, Aldrin, and many thanks again for your own insights, but I’ll return to a basic premise of my position, which is that all these languages and varieties—English, Filipino/Tagalog, and Taglish—coexist in society and each have their value to different members of that society, or to the same members at different times and in different circumstances. Appropriateness is all. Whatever works best in a given situation is the best language for that situation, so no language for me is intrinsically superior to another.

If a bank thinks that its ATM customers are better served in Taglish, that’s perfectly fine by me, as it reflects, more than anything, corporate sensitivity to customer needs. I’d rather have that than the more common situation where ordinary citizens are shut out of much corporate and legal discourse (in plain speak: they often get cheated out of their rights) because of their lawyers’ penchant for abstruse and arcanely Latinate English. At the other extreme is the patent silliness of a spiel we undergo every time we take a domestic flight: those urgings for us to fasten our “sinturong pangkaligtasan” in our “sasakyang panghimpapawid.” Who writes these things? For heaven’s sake, why not say “seatbelt” and “eroplano,” the better for people to understand what’s being said, and the better to save their lives in a tight fix? That’s where a blind insistence on using “pure” English or Filipino can lead us.

As a fictionist and essayist in English and a playwright in Filipino, I share in every creative writer’s joy of exploring language for its own sake. Language as a realm of art goes far beyond grammar (just ask James Joyce, or even Lewis Carroll); but literary art is also acutely aware of and celebrates the demotic, the language of the streets, finding in it a vibrancy, an honesty, and a potency you’d be hard put to find these days in meticulously edited academic journals and corporate reports.

As an editor myself and a professor of English, I cringe at every mangled sentence and every malformed word that crosses my desktop (and then, perversely, I thank my lucky stars that people make these mistakes, or I’d be out of a job).

But in whatever capacity, I don’t forget for a minute that language—humankind’s first and most useful invention—came about as a means of communication before it became anything else: a medium of art, a subject to be learned and taught, a system of rules to be observed. Its utility remains its greatest virtue—and English, Filipino, and Taglish all have their distinctive utilities.

The irony of it is that the current crusade to promote English above other Philippine languages sometimes masquerades as a romantic appeal to preserve the “integrity” of each language, to segregate one from the other. There’s no such thing. As far as I can tell, modern languages are eminently and mutually permeable; to survive, they have to be. I can’t even buy into the argument to fight for the “sovereignty” of our national identity through language. Our identity “is”—it exists, it’s dynamic, and in constant formation. Even if we have an ideal identity in mind, it should take our linguistic realities into account (including all of Filipino’s infusions from English and other languages) instead of setting artificial and ultimately breachable boundaries.
If our mother tongue is to survive, it will have to grow and to mutate just like anything else, and to prove its usefulness to a new generation of Filipinos. No amount of activism is going to exhume and successfully revive a dead language like Chitimacha (last spoken in 1940 in Louisiana) or Negerhollands (US Virgin Islands, 1987) unless it’s useful to someone. Latin and Sanskrit survive not as living languages, but as sacred languages that meet certain ecclesiastical and scholarly needs.

To sum things up: if we have to improve and promote the teaching of English—and I believe we should, given its importance in today’s world—let’s do so for very clear and very practical reasons. I propose that we teach English not even as “our second” language (this proprietary sense—yes, we do own a variety of it—can lead to all kinds of illusions) but as an international language, one that we need to converse with the world and to some extent with each other, requiring the observance of certain global standards of grammar and usage. We are doing so not because we love the language (leave that to the writers and the language professionals) or because God created English on the fifth day (so Adam could say to Eve, “Well, hell-ow, baby!”) or because English will bring us to America (trust me: half of New York doesn’t even speak it), but because our economy depends on service industries that in turn demand a high level of English proficiency.

I propose further that this can be done without eschewing or devaluing any other language, which we can use to our hearts’ content until and unless we need to switch to English. How difficult is that?

(By the way, Aldrin has more to share on his take on Taglish here. It’s worth a look!)