Pinoy Penman

Manileño for January 2007

I HAD a very pleasant and engaging semester as a visiting professor at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, last fall, a welcome break from my teaching duties at the University of the Philippines, where I should be back in harness by the time your read this. Not only did my stint at SNC allow me to introduce the Philippines to about 50 of my own students, only three of whom were Filipino-Americans; I was also able to speak before several groups of students and compatriots in other schools—the University of Michigan, the University of California at San Diego, and Marian College in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

With UCSD having one of the biggest Asian-American student populations among US universities, my encounter with the students there after my formal talk proved the longest and most challenging. Here, a student raised a question that I would hear in other places: what was the best thing Filipino-Americans could do for Filipinos and the Philippines?

I’m sure that it’s a question that occupies Filipino-Americans all the time, and for which there are any number of answers, some easier and more obvious than others.

When a supertyphoon hits the Philippines and ravages the land, then relief goods are always welcome; when poor Filipino boys and girls can’t go to school despite their talents, their lives can be changed by scholarships from Fil-Ams who also worked their way up the educational and economic ladder. Many US-based doctors make regular pilgrimages home on medical missions to poor communities. Some Philippine schools receive loads of used books and computers from their alumni in America.

All of these efforts are noble and much appreciated, for sure. A few of them may have been undertaken more to burnish the image of the donor than to uplift the lot of the receiver, but in the end, it doesn’t matter: some public or private good has been done.

At the same time, such humanitarian projects are basically defined by a relationship of dependency, with America as the perennial giver and the Philippines as perpetual receiver. It’s a relationship that, like I told the students in San Diego, can sometimes grate on both sides, with Fil-Ams feeling like the only thing they’re useful for is another donation to another needy cause, and Filipinos feeling like they’re seen as little more than mendicants.

It gets worse when—dependency or not, and whether out of frustration, bossiness, or a genuine concern—some Filipino-Americans dispense quick and easy prescriptions for the cure of Philippine maladies as though nobody back home had the brains or the guts to come up with such ideas on their own.

One such bromide Pinoys often hear is, “Why don’t you just unite behind the President and stop bickering with one another?” Sounds good, but it makes me wonder why more than two million Filipino-Americans can’t get together under, say, just one dozen regional associations and one alumni association for each major university or college, and elect a congressman or US senator among themselves.

The fact is that the best and worst of our culture manifest themselves on both sides of the ocean. Our generosity, our sense of self-sacrifice for the good of the family, our commitment to education, and our industry and resourcefulness have helped us back home as much as they have gained our compatriots a firm footing in American society. On the other hand, the same sorry habits of inggitan, intrigahan, and siraan have fragmented Filipinos in Manila and Manhattan, in Cebu and Chicago, in Davao and Detroit (I’m using these cities metaphorically, but I’m sure you can supply the damning details). One of the worst examples I heard of recently had to do with the visit some years ago of a Philippine president to a Midwestern city—only to find two competing Fil-Am organizations holding two separate programs in two hotels facing each other across the street.

So what did I tell the bright and idealistic Fil-Am students who asked me what I thought they could best do for the Philippines?

Be good Americans, I said—whatever that may mean to each of them. Get engaged in America’s political processes, and make a difference in your own sphere of action. Vote not just for fellow Filipino-Americans—although a few more such voices in high places could help the community as a whole—but for political leaders who will make responsible decisions that will benefit peoples everywhere, including Filipinos. As the world’s only remaining superpower, America needs all the critical intelligence (and I don’t mean military intelligence) it can muster, and Filipino-Americans can make themselves heard on both domestic and foreign-policy issues, instead of simply going with the flow and making themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

And what’s our claim to being in a unique position to tell Americans and American leaders something they don’t know? Well, we lived with America for half a century. As I often tell my American friends, we were their first Vietnam; and yet we also view America with much greater affection—some would say unreasonably so—than they can ever expect from Afghanistan or Iraq.

Overseas charity is good for the soul and is always welcome; but as they say, it begins at home, as does good global citizenship.

Penman for Monday, January 8, 2007


I'M TYPING this up on my laptop somewhere far above the Northern Pacific midway between Detroit and Tokyo, on a New Year’s Day that happened somewhere, sometime, somehow; when we boarded the plane about seven hours ago it was just past noon of the 31st, and now it’s nearly 10 am Tokyo time on the 1st of January. Nobody even told us where or when we crossed the International Dateline; nobody took to the PA system to holler “Happy New Year!” and to warble “Auld Lang Syne” like they do in those disaster movies that always begin on a note of mindless cheer.

I’d expected something odd like this to happen—strangely enough, I also completely missed out on my birthday almost a year ago by flying home from the Macworld Expo in San Francisco via Honolulu the night before and landing in Manila on the morning of the day after. I don’t mind losing important dates to flying—I’m a sucker for travel, especially if someone else is paying for my ticket—but perhaps I was expecting fireworks on board, or some Homeland Security-approved version of it, or at least some free champagne, or bonus mileage credits, or a box of sweets—something, anything to compensate us for the foregone holiday, but I suppose the airline read the boy in me and figured that any day I’m flying is a holiday, is holiday enough for me.

Given all the dates on the calendar, why am I traveling on New Year’s Day, anyway? I remember calling my travel agent to rebook my ticket just so this would happen, because of, uhm, a legal emergency. Originally I should’ve been back home a couple of days ago, but an interesting complication came up—I’ll spare you the nasty details, which you can pick up on my blog—creating the possibility, however unlikely, of my being arrested upon arrival at the airport for having failed to post bail in that case that I shall, for the time being, willfully ignore.

It’ll all be history (or, to put it more modestly and more accurately, a footnote in 6-point Times Roman—heck, I’m no Ninoy, like I told my friends) by the time you read this, but it seemed ridiculously dramatic when I first heard about it (or again, more accurately, read about it online, just before giving my final exam in the American Short Story to my students in Wisconsin). Even online it was just a passing mention, but having made the news without having won the lottery, I of course let my Walter-Mittyish imagination parlay that tidbit into a headline screaming, in 72 points, all caps: PENMAN DUCKS BAIL, DRAGGED OFF TO JAIL. Or some such rhyme, never mind the reason.

A flurry of online and phone consultations with legal-minded friends established that I most likely wasn’t going to be arrested or murdered at the airport—trust the Pinoy’s partying mood to divert everyone’s attention to more pressing matters, like the doggie roasting on an open fire—but it was still possible to be served the warrant by a rogue cop (or worse, by a truly conscientious one) before I even got to baggage claim, and so therefore the more prudent thing to do—short of vanishing into the Black Hills of South Dakota—was to arrive just as soon as I could post bail after the holidays and not any sooner, or risk being detained a few days until the judicial system recovered from its gin-bulag hangover. Since I prefer to spend the New Year in the air, 36,000 feet above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (not to mention the Batang City Jail), here I am, tapping away on a keyboard in semi-darkness above blue-veined tracts of polar ice. I do not know what fate awaits me, as Tex Ritter put it so tremulously in “High Noon,” but I’m enjoying the pretzels and the Christmas jazz music on my earphones (“Frosty the Snowman” in bebop, no less).

Maybe I’m in denial, but it’s not like I don’t know what prison is; and maybe that’s why I’m in denial, if I am. On another January morning—lemme see now, 34 years ago—I was picked up by the military and “detained” for seven months, having gone home for the holidays like a good Catholic boy and having chatted up a neighbor who turned out to be a snitch. But that’s another story—in fact, it’s a novel, so you can read about it there; of course I wrote it up to make it sometimes sound like I was clapped in irons on Devil’s Island, but while it was never that bad for me, it most certainly was for many others, and I can attest to the fact that prison, in general, may be an edifying but never a pleasant experience for anyone. Been there, done that, don’t care much for seconds, thank you very much, even if it’s only for a night at the precinct station.

I spent my last few dollars in Detroit on some magazines, among them a copy of the latest Details; it’s a mag meant, as the advertising spreads make it abundantly clear, for younger and more raffish men, who can wear a Hugo Boss suit with an open shirt and a lantern jaw, three days unshaven—in other words, the kind of guy we potbellied profs wish we were, or yet could be. I was attracted by the titles on its cover, which to my mind beats anything written by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville in buy-me-and=read=me points: “The Return of the Yuppie: How Gen X Became What It Hated Most”; “The Computer Geek Who Broke into the Pentagon”; “Why the Sexual Fantasy Has Been Ruined by Internet Porn”; and “The Ultimate Guide to Black-Tie Dressing.” These guys know guys; maybe they missed out on mentioning cars on the cover, but I noted with approval that it carried an ad for the Land Rover (one of my dream drives, alongside the Mini Cooper) and a feature on the 2007 Ford Shelby GT inside.

In his “Letter from the Editor”, Details bossman Daniel Peres bemoans how “If my 20-year-old self could see me now at 35, he’d want to kick my ass.” He goes on to chronicle a typical day when “Dressed in Levi’s, a white Turnbull & Asser button-down, and a YSL navy blazer (circa Tom Ford), I climb into my black BMW SUV and head off for the first meeting of the day…. 3 P.M. Back at the house, I change into a pair of James Perse drawstring pants, Tod’s moccasins, and a Ralph Lauren cashmere V-neck and sit down in the office to write my ‘Letter from the Editor” on a wafer-thin laptop.”

Hey, I thought—how self-obsessively familiar. Of course Peres is being playfully parodic—it’s almost all we can do these days, isn’t it?—but it strikes a chord in me. I can’t say that I had the same sneering dismissiveness for what would have been our yuppies during the First Quarter Storm; I got sidetracked for a while and favored Ho Chi Minh rubber-tire sandals over Hush Puppies, but I caught on quickly after my release from martial-law prison and was sporting Polaroid sunglasses, four-inch-wide neckties, Tar-Gard cigarette holders, waffle-pattern double-knits, and the obligatory attaché case and clutch bag by the mid-‘70s.

Some days I might wish I were 35 and not the 53 I’m going to be pretty soon, but I’m certainly happy, at least sartorially speaking, to no longer be 23. I can dress sedately and sensibly (read: in the corniest clothes money can buy). I’ve thought about that on this trip home, of course; if I was going to be arrested at the airport, then I was going to be arrested in style—in a navy linen blazer (didn’t I just read that in the magazine?), gray button-down pinpoint oxford shirt, cuffed khaki slacks, and boat shoes, toting an Eddie Bauer messenger bag. Taking things more seriously as mothers always do, my mom gave me new pajamas for Christmas, to wear at the precinct station, or wherever I was going to be detained. I feel like I’m going to a country club.



FAST FORWARD: As things turned out, I got uneventfully past immigration, stood for a full hour unmolested at baggage claim awaiting four huge pieces of luggage stuffed with thrift-shop treasures, beef jerky, old pens, and other souvenirs from Toyland, USA. Two days later I posted bail.

The story gets a little longer (and, so far, funnier), but something tells me I better shut up and save my reportage for later, when I can chuckle in the safety of proven innocence. In the meanwhile, for the record, I’m biting my vagrant tongue, and I humbly submit myself to the kindness of the court and the majesty of the law. Affiant further sayeth none, so help me God!

Penman for Monday, January 1, 2007

LIKE MANY specialized interests, the world of fountain pen collecting can be a little strange. In dimly lit corners of the Internet and in annual conventions that take place in suburban hotels all over America and in a few other spots around the world, “stylophiles” (as some pen lovers might prefer to be called) gather to discuss the advantages of converters over piston and lever fillers, rare 1929 Wahl coral Deco Bands, an over-the-top, diamond-studded modern Montblanc that sells for $160,000, and “school pens” that went for a few dollars each in the 1950s and 1960s and which people tend to remember with an affection reserved for childhood candies.

In one of the two or three fountain-pen message boards I belong to on the Web (www.fountainpennetwork.com, or FPN), one of the hottest discussions has had to do with the relative merits of vintage and modern pens. Like watch collectors, pen fanciers tend to divide themselves into those who favor old things versus the new. (The term “fancier,” by the way, is a throwback to Victorian times, when it was deemed fashionable and smart to take a fancy to something—in other words, to develop some esoteric expertise, leading to devotees of “the dog fancy” and “the cat fancy,” and so on. In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, for example, Sherlock Holmes declares: “I am somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a better grown goose.”)

New pens and pen makers abound in the market these days, spurred on by the recent revival of interest in fountain pens—often less as actual writing instruments, sad to say, and more as personal jewelry, status items meant more to convey a message than to write one. But aside from fogeys like me, fountain pens hold a genuine appeal for some new young romantics who—growing up in a digital age where one might spend whole days at the keyboard without ever touching a pen—find the act of committing pen to paper a refreshingly tactile, even sensual, experience, with one’s penmanship becoming an assertion of one’s individuality in a sea of ones and zeroes, in blooming royal blue or mocha ink.

New pens have some obvious advantages. Theoretically at least, they should’ve worked out all the problems of the past, as far as durability of materials, stiffness of nibs, and filling mechanisms are concerned. They shouldn’t bubble over and create a sudden blot on your shirtfront when you go up in a plane, like some old pens were known to do; they shouldn’t gunk up within in a sludge of caked ink and crumbled rubber, if you leave them be for too long; and they should be refillable from cartridges you can buy at the nearest book store, instead of forcing you to dash home for that bottle of ink.


You’ll find a good range of these new pens, too, in terms of style and price, from the ultra-modern, Hummer-like Rotring Core to my current Holy Grail, the Japanese sword-like Waterman Serénité. There are also cheap but functional modern school pens you can get for a couple of hundred pesos—the Chinese seem to have mastered the art of, shall we say, reproducing the best of ‘50s and ‘60s pens like the Parker 51 under the Hero and Wing Sung brand names, among others.

In a strange twist I’ll explain later, new pens made up to look like old ones cost a whole lot more than the originals they were modeled after. And here’s that explanation: sometimes it’s a matter of styling, and people seem to agree that retro looks are better and retro looks are therefore back—but at 21st-century prices. Revived classic designs include those for the Parker Duofold, the Parker 51, the Sheaffer Triumph Imperial, and the Faber-Castell and Yard-O-Led pens whose lines and materials evoke the hard-rubber pens of the 1920s.


(Their beauty can make you weep, but so can their prices, which start at around $200. Still, that’s nothing compared to so-called “limited editions”—numbered, often way-too-fancy modern pens whose prices make you want to reach for the nearest Bic: say, $15,500 for the Krone Tutankhamen Magnum fountain pen. If you think that’s outrageous—as I do—don’t run for comfort to the world of watch collecting, where $5,000 won’t get you far beyond a bling-y Franck Muller, and the truly, gorgeously classic Patek Philippes start in the six figures, in US dollars.)

On the other hand, there’s a hard core of vintage pen enthusiasts for whom the best in penmaking came and went about 50 to 60 years ago. Typical of these sentiments were those expressed on FPN by some members (names in parentheses, below):

(rosey) “I like vintage fountain pens because I love most things vintage. Houses, furniture, housewares, cars, etc.... I think what attracts me to the Parker 51 so much is its reliability every time I pick it up to use it. My pens are 50 years old and write better than a lot of moderns. I also like vintage pens because they have had previous owners and I like to think about what they wrote with their pens. The appeal, I think, is mostly the history of the pen.”

(FrankB) “I suppose I must join those who love the sense of history derived from using a vintage pen. I like vintage firearms, too, but shooting most of them is an invitation to disaster. Yet I can write with an 80-year-old pen and enjoy the experience very much. I always wonder where the pen has been and what messages it has written over the years.

“I also like to get a feel for how fountain pens have evolved. The technology might be essentially the same, but the pens of yore are different in some interesting ways from contemporary pens. One example that comes immediately to mind is the flex in some of the older nibs. It is a type of nib that I cannot find in modern pens, although some come quite close to replicating that vintage flex.”

(psfred) “I can get a top of the line, very nicely working pen for a small fraction of what a nice pen costs today. Vintage pens were sold as workaday tools, by and large (with the exception of the 14-karat gold-bodied ones). Most of the development money and effort went into the actual function of the pen. They are lighter (very few metal bodied pens) and usually a very nice diameter. In other words, [they were] tools, not pocket bling to show off how much money you can spend on ‘fashion accessories.’ A Pelikan 1000 may write OK, but I'm willing to bet not better than any of my Triumph-nibbed Sheaffers or Parker 51s.”

(jirish1957) “Bang for the buck is certainly one consideration. It's hard to find a gold-nibbed new pen for less than $100 nowadays while plenty of vintage pens are available…. As for durability, any pen made of plastic (1930s forward) is at least as durable as a new one, and the gold plating on clips, bands, etc. tends to be thicker than that found on new pens. Chosen wisely a vintage pen will outlast you and, as long as there are folks out there who enjoy restoring them, will probably be used by your heirs in the 22nd century. Incidentally, while I don't use my Leica M3 as often as I'd like, it's one thing I'll grab if the house catches on fire.”

Which brings me to my thesis, which really doesn’t just deal with pens old or new: even as we rush to embrace the new—especially in a global culture that extols the latest and greatest, or the latest as greatest—we naturally seek and find comfort in the old and the familiar, even to the extent of romanticizing or exaggerating its virtues.

We might think, for example, that old pens are much more durable and write better, because the ones we’ve retained are the restored survivors, the Parker Vacumatics that have had their diaphragms replaced and their nibs straightened out and smoothened. From our vantage point—walking through museums, pawing through display cases of antiques and collectibles, leafing though illustrated histories—the past could look more well-ordered and benign than it actually was, preserved in objects of great and enduring beauty. We see little or nothing of the dross, the garbage that defines cultures and civilizations as well as their finest products, and so the past becomes a kind of Eden when people and things were more sensibly made and honestly sold.


Maybe it was, back in the days when things like pens were made by craftsmen working with hard rubber or celluloid blanks and lathes, and when pen salesmen were obliged to serve each customer with an individual finetuning of the nib for smoothness, flex, and angle. Today, we imagine, computers and machines turn out and assemble nearly everything we use; we buy things online, and speak to a faceless someone with a foreign accent from several thousand miles away if the new gizmo we ordered breaks down. Maybe it’s that lost personal touch or signature that we hanker for.

It’s that homespun familiarity—and the ageless design of vintage pens—that modern pen makers are cashing in on, by revivals that mimic classic models. Younger buyers eager to buy tradition without having to deal with the arcana of vintage pens (and the perils of eBay) can walk into a department store, plunk down a wad of money, and go home feeling as fulfilled (or at least as ink-filled) as their grandfathers.

Myself, I keep a fair balance between old and new, and try to make sure whether I’m getting a pen (or a hat, or shoes, or a watch, or an umbrella) for the sentiment, the shape, or the sheer practicality of it. Like many others, I love old things—I have a fondness for art deco pieces, in particular—because of the smartness-cum-simplicity of their design. Most of my favorite pens either come from or hark back to the ‘20s and ‘30s; I think the most beautiful watches, on the other hand, were crafted in the ‘50s, when gold, round, and thin was in, as opposed to today’s tank-like stainless-steel behemoths.


On the other hand, I’m a sucker for digital gadgetry, the newer the better. As I’ve often said, getting your hands today on something that most people won’t be using for another four to five years (think of smartphones a few years ago) is another way of cheating time, just as using 100-year-old furniture is. I easily get smitten by the newest computers and digital doohickeys—I can’t wait for whatever Steve Jobs comes up with in next week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco (the bets are on an Apple phone and a subcompact MacBook)—but I keep a soft spot for early computers, and, yes, tend a small museum of early Macs around the house.

Whenever I visit the Smithsonian, I pay my respects to the geek’s equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling—the late-‘40s ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator to you), a collection of about 20,000 vacuum tubes that made up the world’s most powerful electronic computer of its time. (The Smithsonian houses just five of the original 40 panels, with each panel the size of a tall bookcase.) It’s charming to think how they must’ve used fountain pens to write down all those early codes.


So even with the new, we drift back to the old, as F. Scott Fitzgerald closed one of my favorite novels: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

A Happy New Year to all!

Flotsam & Jetsam (30) for Saturday, December 30, 2006


AS OUR American sojourn draws to an end, herewith a small album of snaps from my point-and-shoot Lumix, of people and places I saw, was in, was with, was intrigued by, will miss, will remember. (Click twice on the images for their full-sized versions.)

Penman for Monday, December 25, 2006


My sister Elaine and her husband Eddie treated us to a movie at the local Cineplex last weekend, and most of us voted to see “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson’s latest foray into that special genre we’ll call “bloody, gruesome movies with strange languages requiring subtitles.” Eddie didn’t care much for subtitles and my mom’s eyesight was too poor to keep up with them, so they went off to catch “Blood Diamond” instead. But we all decided to make the 15-minute walk to the movie theaters, a matter of crossing two or three residential blocks of this pleasantly wooded and grassy suburb of Centreville just outside Washington, DC.

Now, I know I also used the word “pleasant” just last week to describe De Pere, Wisconsin, a small town of about 22,000 people (about 20,000 of whom must have been indoors watching football when we were there, because we never saw them). I don’t mean to turn that description into a cliché, but it happens to fit these two places I’ve been in recently.

De Pere’s pleasantness comes from old-fashioned manners and good-neighborliness; there wasn’t a person I met on the street who didn’t say hello or at least flash me a smile. Centreville, on the other hand, is almost singlemindedly safe and uneventful, a cluster of neat, new subdivisions serving as bedroom, kitchen, and playground to Washington’s working stiffs.

While De Pere can look back to centuries of trading between the Indians and the French voyageurs on the banks of the Fox River, Centreville had always been something of an aspirant or claimant to grander destinies. Its name derives from a wishful notion—expressed sometime in the 1700s—that it was going to sit smack in the path of a major road about to be built; as it happened, the road escaped the village.

While its neighbors such as Manassas and Chantilly proudly wear their scars as Civil War battlegrounds, Centreville served as little more than a supply depot for the Confederacy. This might explain the decidedly low profile it keeps today; it hosts a population of CIA spooks, blue-jeaned software engineers like my bayaw Eddie, Foggy Bottom drones, and enough Korean expats to warrant the erection of the most interesting place in town, an Asian grocery the size of a basketball gym. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that Centreville is pleasant because it has to be, thereby making a virtue out of its irrepressible modesty.

Where was I? Oh, yes, we were going to see a movie. I’d wanted to see “Apocalypto” because I’d seen the trailer, which promised gory action (truly, nothing relaxes me as much as grievous injury inflicted on someone else; some people call that sick, the Greeks called it “catharsis”). And while I’d also seen all the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapon” movies—and let’s not forget “Braveheart”—I didn’t think all that much of or about Mel Gibson until I saw “The Passion of the Christ,” which inexplicably made me shed a tear, in that scene between the son and the mother. I’m not a churchgoing person (much to the dismay, I suppose, of my Catholic hosts in De Pere) so that was probably cinema, and not religion, at work.

I’d like to say that Mel Gibson might do better staying clear of hard liquor and anti-Jewish diatribes; on the other hand, that subliminal mess could be where his intensity as a director comes from. Gibson’s view of life is anything but pleasant, and his reconstruction of a Mayan civilization in the throes of decay has a few forced moments that challenge credulity (his protagonist’s energy would put the Eveready bunny to shame). But overall, I thought, it was a great action movie—a chase movie, to be more precise, where the hare outfoxes the hounds (did I just get my animal metaphors all mixed up?).

Take it as anything more than that and you run into the kind of flak “Apocalypto” has received from critics who obviously didn’t get treated to the movies and popcorn by their sisters and brothers-in-law. Here’s a few of those swipes, lovingly chronicled by rottentomatoes.com:

“It is Mel Gibson's latest proof that as a director, his ambition is boundless and his energy nearly so, but his judgment is sorely lacking.”—Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle

“The premise of Cornel Wilde's ‘The Naked Prey,’ the jungle savagery of a 1980s Italian cannibal film and the sadomasochistic martyr-complex obsessions that apparently churn like a ball of snakes inside Mel Gibson's head are all here.”—John Beifuss, Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

“Apocalypto wants us to believe there is an overpowering darkness in the land, while I can't quite get past a suspicion of overpowering darkness in the filmmaker.”—Michael Booth, Denver Post

“In this family-values action film, you could never accuse Gibson of being unconvincing where blood and sadism are concerned.”—Jules Brenner, Cinema Signals

Well, you get the idea. I don’t know if and when “Apocalypto” will be showing in Manila—it wouldn’t be my first choice for a Christmas movie to take the kids to, in lieu of “Enteng Kabisote”—but if and when it does, ask yourself first what you’re having for dinner later, because those plans could change.

Whatever brought me then to think and talk about “Apocalypto” on Christmas Day? There’s a third point or vertex to this strange confluence of ideas besetting me this season, and it’s a take-off in a way on the quotation from the historian Will Durant that “Apocalypto” opens with: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

I’ve been talking about what a pleasant place America has been for me, but even this Christmas, it’s been hard to escape reminders—some of them quite rude—of what a fractured society America remains, despite its mighty efforts to promote multiculturalism and racial harmony.

The first was when we were visiting the Library of Congress, and admiring, as most tourists do, its magnificent Reading Room from the balcony. A guide was giving a lecture to another group of tourists, and explaining all the figures and symbols that crowned the inner dome of that building, the great civilizations that had contributed to humankind’s progress: “The Greeks,” the tour guide said, “gave us democracy…. Islam gave us mathematics—and terrorism,” he added with a chuckle.

But never mind the lowly tour guide, who probably thought he was just being uncannily witty. There’s a US Congressman named Virgil Goode—a Republican from Virginia (yes, Virginia, there is a Congressman named Goode)—who issued a statement the other day reacting to the request of newly-elected Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) to be sworn into office using the Quran. Ellison happens to be the first Muslim elected to the US Congress.

Rep. Goode, presumably a Christian (or some kind of Christian) had this to say about his new colleague’s plan: “When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Quran in any way.

“The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.

“We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.”

Merry Christmas to you, too, Congressman Goode. Why do I get the feeling that I saw you somewhere in that Gibson movie, brandishing an obsidian knife and thundering about how great and strong your civilization was and how weak your enemies were?

At that movie’s end, we trudged back home, but compared to the ancient horrors and labors we had witnessed onscreen, our little march was like a walk in the park—and indeed it was, as life in America seems, sometimes.


I HAVEN'T spent a Christmas abroad in ages, but this year, I’m with family in Virginia, at the tail-end of a four-month teaching stint in the US. In a week’s time I should be back in harness teaching a full load in UP, but we’re very fortunate to be together here for the time being, especially since we’re not a family that can jet off to Disneyland or to the south of France whenever it strikes our fancy.

I must admit that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have traveled so much for so little, thanks largely to my work as a writer, but it takes an army of piggybanks to bring Beng and Demi with me anywhere farther than Mindoro or Bulacan. The important thing is, we’re all here, reasonably healthy and safe, for which I’m deeply thankful.

I’d like to take this opportunity as well to thank and to send our warmest Christmas greetings to some very special people whose friendship and support made our American visit a most productive and delightful one: John and Gertie Holder, Bob and Barb Boyer, Jiji and Susie Palines, Kokkeong Wong, Sarah Griffiths, Julie Hill, Jody and Marivi Blanco, Elaine and Eddie Sudeikis, Jana and Senen Ricasio, Connie and Jun Capati, Mike and Gloria Galang, Louie and Anna Galang, Joe and Rose Jaucian, Rudy Ledesma, Efren and Gie Salvaleon, Monroe and Karin Lerner, Maurice and Janet Kilwein-Guevara, Peter and Mary Blewett, Romy and Necie Aquino, Deling Weller, Pat Naylor, and Juanito Co. May the best of the New Year come to you and to all my readers!

Penman for Monday, Dec. 18, 2006

WHILE SOME of us may already be drunk with the spirit of Christmas, we just got done with final exams for the fall term here in the US. They don’t have any Lantern Parades where I am—at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin—but it feels better to know that you can face the New Year with all that work behind you: done, kaput, finis.

I’ve been giving exams for more than 20 years, and as any teacher learns fairly quickly in his or her career, constructing them can be an art in itself. The challenge consists in framing questions that are tough to answer but easy to grade, questions that will produce answers that provide not only objective information but nuanced arguments and attitudes, that tell you right off if the student has done his or her homework and knows what he or she is talking about.

This semester—for my class in the American short story and another on Philippine Culture and Society—I required three quizzes (a combination of objective questions and a short essay), a midterm and final (both essay-type, open-book exams), and a 10-page term paper. The objective quizzes keep the students on their toes and are an easy check on their reading; I have to confess that, perhaps unnaturally, I loved such quizzes myself as a kid, treating them as a trivia game. But these days I believe firmly in the necessity of full sentences and paragraphs as a gauge of the student’s command of the subject and powers of articulation. I don’t expect perfectly punctuated compound-complex sentences, but I do demand clear, sharp, and interesting ideas with some corroborating detail—evidence of a mind at work, beyond the “spitback” or regurgitation of lecture notes.

Now and then I get inspired (or desperate) enough to try new things with my exams, and this semester I thought of alternative ways of getting the same old information out of my students. PHLP 100 introduced 33 young non-Filipinos to Philippine history and culture, and this was how I tried to see how well they understood and internalized what we had been discussing in class.

1. (One of my two midterm exam questions.) Pretend that you’re a member—an officer, an enlisted man, a nurse, or a cook—of the Wisconsin Volunteers regiment of the American occupation army in the Philippines. It is March 1902. You have been fighting Filipino forces in the countryside (you can choose where), and are back in Manila for two weeks of rest and recreation, before being sent out again on a yet-unspecified mission.

Write a letter home to your father or mother, telling them about where and how you are, giving them your most vivid impressions of the Philippine Islands and its people, and of your experience as a combatant.

The letter should be personal, convincing, and with some sharp, memorable details (you can make up a few for as long as they are defensibly realistic). I’m looking for a letter that will capture the mindset of an American soldier, and the temper of the times. (Note: the Wisconsin Volunteers never fought in the Philippines, in historical fact, but served in Cuba.)

2. (What I called the “creative option” for their term paper: “A Day in the Life.”) Choose a specific date from 1521 to the present, a character, and a place in the Philippines, and walk me through a day in the life of this character, from the moment he or she wakes up to his or her bedtime. I’d like to get beneath the flesh of this character, to see the world through his or her eyes. What’s his or her biggest problem or concern for that particular day? What will he or she eat, wear, visit, make, do? What can make this character laugh, cry, curse, or sing? Who are his or her parents, siblings, friends, and enemies? What will this character want or dream of for the morrow?

3. (Their sink-or-swim final exam, which I intended to reveal how they appreciated large political, economic, and social issues from an American standpoint.) Assume that you work as a senior official for the US government, and that you’ve just been assigned as Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific, with the Philippines as one of your key areas of responsibility. To improve US-Philippine relations, the President has authorized you to spend $50 million in foreign aid for one high-impact project in the Philippines. This assumes that you’ve done your homework, and understand both the historical and contemporary Philippine situation thoroughly.

What project will you recommend for that money, why, and what problems do you expect to encounter in its implementation? What activity or reform will benefit the Philippines the most, for which a $50 million fund could make a real difference? What historical imbalances or inequities will your chosen project address? Why this particular project and not others? Cite possible alternatives and their merits or demerits.

Write your answer in the form of a formal memorandum to the President, in the White House, beginning with “Dear Mr. President” (or “Dear Mrs. President”, if you prefer), and sign it in the end with “Very truly yours,” followed by your name and signature.



SPEAKING OF education, I came across a very interesting article in the December 18 issue of TIME, a cover story that had to do with the American classroom and the challenge of bringing American students into the 21st century global economy. The piece spoke of the dangers of stagnation in American education, and issued a wake-up call for educators and students alike, listing several prescriptions for making that vital and effective transition from the previous to the present century.

I thought I’d go over those prescriptions and see how we in the Philippines match up. How are our own kids and our system doing?

1. “Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way.”

My recent teaching stint in the American Midwest offered painful proof of how far young Americans have to go in this direction. I found that the best friend of ignorance in this case wasn’t the lack of money or the means to go, but complacency, a lulling sense of contentment with what one knew and was comfortable with.

Here our discomforts and discontents give us a leg up. We Filipinos are naturally interested in the outside world—we have to be, to survive. We bring our little barangays and mindsets along wherever we might end up, but there’s no such thing as a place too far for the Filipino. In a sense, we’re global citizens as much as or more than anyone else, but whether we act as global citizens—responsible not only to and for our families and country, but to and for the world—may be another matter. In any case, let’s keep a map of the world in every Filipino classroom, or better yet, a twirling globe.

2. “Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy—the ones that won't get outsourced or automated—‘put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos.’… It's interdisciplinary combinations—design and technology, mathematics and art—‘that produce YouTube and Google,’ says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.”

I think we Pinoys have first-rate minds and wonderful creative talents, but I suspect that the physical and institutional infrastructure just isn’t there to spark these “interdisciplinary combinations” that make for trailblazing departures from the usual way things are made or done. There’s little incentive for serious research; we think in terms of tomorrow and next week, not next decade; we punish or ignore the nonconformist; and we’re mostly quite happy to be employed by someone else and to claim a paycheck twice a month, instead of gambling on a dream or a notion. We’re creative, sure, but not too imaginative (does that make sense?).

3. “Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't.”

For most of us, the world of new media—the Internet, satellite TV, the iPod, Counterstrike, blogs, digicams, DVDs—is still a playground, built mainly for fun, and full of nice people who’ll push your swing. We’ve yet to appreciate it as a battleground or high-speed chute for ideas, commercial pitches, outright lies, and—somewhere among them—tons of useful information.

Here I think we’re pretty even. While young Americans of course have much easier and wider access to high technology than their Filipino counterparts, all these kids use the Internet and other digital media for mainly the same reasons—entertainment, homework, and social networking. They spot the same opportunities, fall into the same traps, pine for the same objects and objectives. Indeed, the Internet (and MTV before it) has helped to create a global youth culture, something much more homogenous and more widespread than their parents could have imagined or would have been willing to take part in.

And again, we’ve adapted the Internet and cellular telephony to our very specific needs. I can’t forget that roomful of nursing students on their lunch break in Davao, hunched over monitors in an Internet café across their school, each one looking for a potential mate abroad on a matchmaking website. That’s a sight you’ll never see in the States.

4. “Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. ‘Most innovations today involve large teams of people,’ says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. ‘We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.’

Here Filipinos excel. We aim to please, and please the world we do, with exemplary—indeed biblical—patience and industry.


Over an end-of-the-semester lunch with my fellow instructors, I shared my summary impressions of American collegiate education today—some very positive, some not quite so. The resources of a modern American university or college are awesome, and the energy and candor of its students refreshing. But they, too, face daunting challenges. Sometimes I got the sense that schooling in America is designed to achieve a level of comfort—a kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay” ethos—when education could be more useful by promoting the opposite, a deep-seated if occasionally ugly disquiet.

But I have to say that I had a great time in De Pere, one of the most peaceful and pleasant places in America you can ever hope to be in: I came, I taught, I learned.

Flotsam and Jetsam (29) for Thursday, December 14, 2006


I WOKE up this morning to find this in my daily digest of news from home. The other day I’d just received a message from Marites Vitug, our editor-in-chief at Newsbreak Magazine, a statement on the libel case that had been filed against us more than a year ago by one Jose Miguel Arroyo, husband of one Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. I gathered from that statement (see below) that the prosecutor assigned to our case had concluded that there was merit enough for us to be haled to court for trying to “besmirch and impeach” Mr. Arroyo’s reputation (about which I will primly reserve comment, for the time being).

Now comes the news that we’ve been asked to post bail, that an arraignment is coming up, and so on—all while I was 8,600 miles away giving an exam on the American short story. Oh, dear. I always knew I was newsworthy, or at least worth some newsprint, but hardly this way. Now I'm sure I’ll be getting a warm welcome home—from some burly and decidedly un-merry gentlemen with toothpicks twitching from the sides of their mouth.


Statement
Dec. 14, 2006
On the Libel Suit of First Gentleman Miguel Arroyo versus Newsbreak


YESTERDAY, WE received a tip that the Manila prosecutor had issued a resolution charging us with libel in the case of First Gentleman Miguel Arroyo versus the following from Newsbreak Magazine: Marites Danguilan Vitug, editor in chief, Glenda M. Gloria, managing editor, Ricky Carandang, former business editor, R.E. Otico, editorial consultant, Jose Dalisay, editorial consultant, and Booma Cruz, former contributing editor.

The resolution dated Nov. 13, 2006 and penned by Fredy Gomez, assistant city prosecutor (Manila), said that we, the accused, “meant and intended to convey false and malicious insinuations” against the First Gentleman, “imputed… a crime…” and therefore our story was “highly libelous and offensive and derogatory to the good name, character and reputation…of the First Gentleman.”

The resolution further said that the article was “solely prepared, written, and published by the accused for no other purpose than to impeach and besmirch” Mr. Arroyo.

The same prosecutor, in the information, said that our intent was to “expose” Mr. Arroyo to “public hatred, contempt and ridicule…” and that we were “clearly bent in destroying his reputation.”

Clearly, our story is not libelous. It’s amazing that we’ve been singled out for prosecution. The message we’re getting is this: no matter how responsible journalists are, you can no longer seek protection in the law.

It is quite unfortunate that the Manila prosecutor misunderstands the role of the press. Never in the course of our work do we write “solely to besmirch” the reputation of a person. Our foremost duty is to inform readers on issues that are vital to public interest. Mr. Arroyo is only one among many public figures we have written about.

We’re ready to face Mr. Arroyo in court. We worry, though, about the impact of this libel case on our profession.

Background:

The story referred to is a short “Inside Track” item (Dec. 8, 2003) following our cover story on the Arroyos’ undeclared properties in San Francisco, California (November 10, 2003). We said that in the course of our research on the California properties, we got leads from reliable sources about two houses, the addresses of which we provided, allegedly owned by Mr. Arroyo. We said that we searched the ownership and acquisition details of these properties but these yielded names that could not be linked to the First Gentleman. We said that our sources told us that the one who supposedly acquired the properties for Mr. Arroyo was a male relative of his who’s into real estate business in California.

The article was very transparent: we said these were leads and that we pursued them and stated our findings. Our cover story on the Arroyos’ undeclared properties in San Francisco provides proper context to this follow-up article.

Marites Danguilan Vitug
Editor in Chief, Newsbreak

Editors file bail on libel case filed by First Gentleman
By Tetch Torres
INQ7.net
Last updated 10:18pm (Mla time) 12/14/2006


EDITORS OF a news magazine on Thursday posted bail of P10,000 each on a libel case filed against them by First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo.

Lawyer Rizalina Endoso, clerk of court of branch 6 of the Manila Regional Trial Court, said those who posted bail were Marites Danguilan-Vitug, editor in chief; Glenda M. Gloria, managing editor; Ricky Carandang, former business editor; and R.E. Otico, editorial consultant, of Newsbreak magazine.

Only editorial consultant Jose Dalisay and former contributing editor Booma Cruz failed to post bail.

The next step following the posting of bail is the arraignment of the accused journalists, who are among the 43 facing various libel cases filed by the First Gentleman.

The cases have prompted several media organizations, both here and abroad, to call for the decriminalization of libel in the country. A petition to this end has been signed by more than 600 Filipino journalists.

Arroyo‘s complaint stems from a short "Inside Track" item on December 8, 2003 following Newsbreak’s cover story on the First family's allegedly undeclared properties in San Francisco, California.

Last November 13, 2006, assistant Manila city prosecutor Fredy Gomez approved the filing of the libel case before the court saying the article was "meant and intended to convey false and malicious insinuations" against the First Gentleman, "imputed…a crime…" and therefore our story was "highly libelous and offensive and derogatory to the good name, character and reputation…of the First Gentleman."

Gomez also said Newsbreak's intent was to "expose" Arroyo to "public hatred, contempt and ridicule…"

But Vitug, in a statement said, "Clearly, our story is not libelous. It's amazing that we've been singled out for prosecution. The message we're getting is this: no matter how responsible journalists are, you can no longer seek protection in the law."

"It is quite unfortunate that the Manila prosecutor misunderstands the role of the press,” Vitug said. “Never in the course of our work do we write ‘solely to besmirch’ the reputation of a person. Our foremost duty is to inform readers on issues that are vital to public interest. Mr. Arroyo is only one among many public figures we have written about."

"We're ready to face Mr. Arroyo in court. We worry, though, about the impact of this libel case on our profession," she said.

Penman for Monday, December 11, 2006


A RECENT visit to San Diego—to give a lecture on literature and politics in the Philippines before a crowd composed mainly of Filipino-Americans at the University of California, San Diego—produced some pleasurable discoveries, thanks to the generosity of our host, Mrs. Julie Hill, an old Manila hand who has since retired to a pretty bungalow in Rancho Sta. Fe.

Among the highlights of that weekend sortie was a performance of The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse—a theatre founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer, and rebuilt in 1982 to be co-managed by UCSD’s Department of Theatre and Dance. It was recently renovated again to include all manner of 21st-century theatre technology, and the wizardry of the machinery proved more than appropriate—indeed, vital—to this latter-day interpretation of Frank L. Baum’s 1900 tale of a girl in Kansas and of the strange menagerie that forms around her on the journey down the Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz has, of course, seen any number of versions and adaptations for screen and stage, most notably the 1939 hit starring Judy Garland and even a 2005 Muppets TV movie. The Wiz was a 1975 Broadway musical with an all-black cast, and was itself turned into a 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Directed by Tony Award winner Des McAnuff, the La Jolla production—which had at least two Filipinos in the cast, as far as I could tell from the production notes—was a dazzling, spirited, exhilarating sensory treat, the kind that made you want to get up from your seat and dance to the musical’s most popular tune, “Ease on Down the Road,” and warble along with Dorothy when she launched into The Wiz’s other showstopper, “Home” (you know that song: “When I think of home, I think of a place where there's love overflowing…”).

The production, I hear, is now bound for Broadway, where—good grief—it’ll command $150 tickets; I don’t have that kind of loose change, so I’m mighty glad we saw it in San Diego.

I’d been to San Diego a couple of times before—my sister Elaine and her husband Eddie used to live there—and it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to live in, presuming you can afford the real estate (now you know why Elaine and Eddie are in Virginia). San Diego’s combination of sun and sea are matchless, and the city has attractions galore for visitors of all persuasions, from the 15-museum cluster in Balboa Park and the windswept coves of La Jolla to the Spanish missions that dot the countryside (in one of these, in San Luis Rey, we found a santo with distinctly Chinese eyes that had been made in the Philippines in the 1600s). Beng’s favorite spot—an unexpected find—was a compound in Encinitas that turned out to be shrine to her guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, who lived there in the 1930s.

My own moment of awe occurred on a visit to the UCSD campus, where my host and former UP colleague, the bright young scholar Jody Blanco, took me on a tour of the many-faceted, glass-sided Geisel Library, from the top floor of which you could see in all directions of the compass, and on whose shelves probably stood enough stored knowledge to illuminate every little corner of the human condition. Students in shorts and jeans nonchalantly worked off laptops as ubiquitous as the spiral notebooks and slide rules of our undergraduate years. I had stumbled on a similar sight a month earlier at the University of Michigan—a hall the size of a basketball court, housing row upon row of computers open for student use 24/7.

This, I realized, was truly education in and for the 21st century, and as Jody and I left the library for my decidedly low-tech lecture in the adjoining building, I wondered how long it would be before my students in UP could enjoy such a plenitude of study aids.


WHICH BRINGS me to Dorothy’s favorite place, home—Diliman, to be specific.

With what I’m going to say next, I’ll probably lose half of my student readers and earn myself a few stinging denunciations in some corners of the blogosphere—no “love overflowing,” here—but I can’t help wading into this debate over raising tuition fees at the University of the Philippines. And I’ll state my position outright: it’s about time UP did this, and it should be doing even more to raise extra revenues, even as it demands and deserves support from a government unlikely to meet all its needs.

I’ve been following this from a literal and figurative distance, so I might be missing out on some of the details of the arguments, although I’ve looked into position papers from both the administration and the student groups protesting the increase. But I think I can speak to the issue anyway as someone who’s been on both sides of it—as a student activist many years ago, and more recently as a university administrator.

The basic facts, as I appreciate them, are that the UP administration plans to raise tuition fees from the present P300 per unit to P1,000 in Diliman, bringing up full tuition from about P6,000 a semester to about P18,000. It’ll be the first such major increase for UP since 1989. The administration says it needs the increase to help it cope with the university’s growing needs, which its annual budget just can’t meet, and that the increase, as large as it is, will most sharply affect those who can afford it, leaving the poorest of UP students untouched.

Some students—the UP Student Council chairman, among others—will have none of it, arguing from the position that UP students shouldn’t be paying any tuition at all—in other words, Filipinos have a right to a free college education.

This may sound like another one of those tempests in a teacup that our so-called Diliman Republic is famous for, but as the country’s premier state university, UP is every Filipino’s business. If you pay taxes, then you’re subsidizing UP and all its teachers, students, and staff; even if you’re too young or too poor to pay taxes, you can still get into UP if you’re smart and lucky enough, and partake of its benefits.

Is a 300 percent increase reasonable? Not unless you take a hard look at some other figures. Again, bear in mind that since 1989, full tuition at UP Diliman has cost students P300 per unit or less than P6,000 for an 18-unit semester.

By comparison, tuition at the Ateneo cost P2,200 per unit in 2004; at 18 units, that’s almost P40,000 per semester. Just for the heck of it, let’s go even farther afield to those two US universities I visited. Tuition fees for California residents at UCSD were about $3,500 or P175,000 a semester this year, and $9,000 or P450,000 for non-residents. For Michigan, the comparable figures are P250,000 in-state and P750,000 out-of-state, per semester for 2007.

Now of course we can argue that we can’t possibly compare UP to American universities and expect to pay as much as they do. (Although it boggles my mind to know that some Filipino parents are actually growing enough dollars in their backyards to send their kids overseas, and to even fancier schools.) But that’s true only up to a point, because if we want the same world-class education, then we’re going to have to buy the same books, the same computers, and so on, which will cost us the same if not more, saving basically on our poor professors’ salaries. In other words, we’ll eventually get what we pay for; native talent and resourcefulness can only go so far.

I have no doubt that there will be some families who will be hard-pressed to cough up the extra tuition—and for these families, I hope some form of assistance will continue to be available. That assistance can even come from the money earned from those who can afford to pay full tuition under UP’s socialized tuition scheme.

And there are clearly those who can and who will pay that much for whatever a UP education is still worth. Why shouldn’t UP charge them a fairer price for its services? Why should a state university—our best one, where slots are severely limited, and admission to which is already easier for those with superior high school backgrounds—subsidize the affluent?

It isn’t even just a question of money, but of mindset.

The position paper issued by a group called the “Kabataan Party” opposing the tuition fee increase points out—correctly—that this government has other, higher spending priorities than education. Now, we can cry “We deserve to be fully subsidized! Cut the military budget!” until we’re blue in the face, and be politically correct in that position—but we might as well wait until the Second Coming before that happens, precisely because we know this administration isn’t going to heed that call.

To resist even reasonable tuition fee increases—or other internal means of improving university finances—is, in effect, to declare a hunger strike, to choose to starve in the vain hope that someone up there will take pity and give us what we deserve, against the entire history of state support for higher education in this country. Starving ourselves will merely play into the hands of those who would be happy to see UP gutted from within, gutted because it can’t afford to keep its best teachers nor to upgrade its facilities, too weak to make a difference where it counts—in the production of intellectual capital to serve the Filipino people.

A university that leaves itself at the mercy of an indifferent government for its finances is courting dependence, not independence.

Quezon Hall’s an easy target, but it’s the wrong one: march on Congress and Malacañang—they’re the ones who decide how much UP and the other state universities and colleges get. They’re the ones who keep creating new SUCs without adequate funding, just to make some local politicians look good. What we need to do, if we’re all so worked up about greater government support for education, is to militate for a national leadership and for people in government who will make this happen.

Who really wants tuition fee increases, or tuition fees for that matter? Nobody. Who wants to pay taxes? Nobody. Who wants to pay the electric and the water company? Nobody. But there’s literally a price to pay for these utilities, and for social services like education. For those who can’t afford to pay it, let’s seek subsidies and generate scholarships; for those who can, let’s take their money, spread it around, and put it to good use.

If you have better, more practical ideas, I’d be glad to hear them—and I have a feeling I will.

Manileño for December 2006


OVER THESE past few months, I’ve been privileged to be invited to small gatherings of Filipino-Americans all around the US and to give short talks to some of them about the current situation in the Philippines. I’ve been very happy to oblige these requests—although, being neither a political scientist, an economist, nor a diplomat, I’ve hastened to qualify my opinions as those of a journalist and otherwise as a creative writer who can afford to take the long view of things.

If you’ve followed this column to any significant extent, you’ll know what I’ve been telling people: that, basically, we have many serious and persistent problems to deal with—abject poverty, massive corruption, rank injustice, an administration fighting for its political life at all costs, and an opposition still too fractured and fatigued to make any great headway.

At the same time, I take care to emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. There’s hope; there has to be. Even as I’m unhappy with our country’s leadership, and—like many Filipinos—believe that there are a few too many cheats and crooks in government, I also suspect that it may not be all that bad that we’re stuck for the moment with Mrs. Arroyo and her crew. While GMA may have bought some time to shore up her defenses and even go on the offensive, her opponents are also learning in the interim what it takes to wage a strategic political war beyond winning another week-long skirmish on EDSA.

She’s won some, and lost some: she pulled out of her “Hello, Garci” tailspin last July and warded off a coup last February. But the Supreme Court—manifesting a surprising independence—struck down her Executive Order prohibiting senior government and military officials from testifying before Congress without her permission. Even more surprisingly, it stonewalled a dubious “people’s initiative” that would have railroaded the Charter change Mrs. Arroyo has been very keen on. Next May’s midterm elections will be a telling and crucial test of how well Arroyo’s allies and her opponents have convinced the public at large to cast their lot with their camp.

But as engrossing and entertaining as it may be to dwell on Arroyo and her political fortunes, we have to remind ourselves that the future is much longer and larger than these next three years. Think beyond Arroyo; for better or for worse, she can’t hang on to power forever. It’s just as important to visualize what lies beyond the immediate horizon, to set targets for ourselves well beyond the turmoil of the medium term.

And what do we want to achieve? Nothing too impossible: a country of bright, able-bodied, industrious people for whom jobs exist at fair wages; where the laws are observed; where families can stay together; where children will not go unschooled, unfed, and unsheltered; where talent, merit, and virtue are recognized; where the most basic things work—buses, banks, faucets, clinics, classrooms, telephones.

What will it take to get these? First, the willingness of the many to press for the changes and reforms they require—changes not just in government but also the way we vote and how those votes are counted; changes in our perception of our country, from a hellhole to desert to a home to build; and changes in ourselves, from a mindset of just being the servitors and scavengers of the world to the designers and makers of great new things. They will also require the willingness of the few to yield many of their unearned privileges—or risk the periodic bouts of social violence that may never lead to a full-blown armed revolution (four decades of trying should tell us that we just don’t have the stomach for it) but will still hinder our efforts to move forward together as a nation.

In other words, we need a revolution—not a bloody, explosive one to decapitate the leadership, but a widespread and sustained campaign from the ground up, in several forms and phases, starting with elections and electoral reforms at the local level. By their very nature, national campaigns involve the kind of money that effectively shuts out truly worthy but under-funded candidates; citizens tend to feel a more personal stake in local elections, and basic changes may be difficult but not impossible to secure.

I’m betting on what we can call a revolution of expectations—and here, the people of our diaspora, including Filipinos in America, will have much to contribute. One in every ten Filipinos is working and living abroad, and many of them come home. These returning Filipinos are no longer the same ones that left the NAIA years earlier, many on the first plane ride of their lives. These are Filipinos who have experienced a better life in a better albeit imperfect world, who have seen what their own hands can build for others. These Filipinos will not be content to slink back into the old ways of their barangays; they will look for running water, cheap electricity, good schools, reliable transportation, and will look as well for leaders who can deliver on these expectations.

That’s the unintended payback from all those lonely years of hard labor in countries like the US, Singapore, and Dubai that I’m counting on—the natural and irrepressible desire of people for better things. Once we Filipinos realize what or who stands between us and the future we deserve, I think we can choose our leaders more wisely, if not become leaders ourselves.

Penman for Monday, December 4, 2006


I WAS working on an entirely different topic for my column, here in Wisconsin, when I got a text message from a sender whose identity immediately suggested to me what the news was going to be about—and I didn’t expect it to be good. True enough, the message began with a mention of “no wake for Paeng Buenaventura,” confirming what I had feared when I last met with the man several months ago—that I would never see him so well and so happy again.

We had chatted for over three hours one afternoon at the Manila Golf Club for a book I was writing on him and his three siblings—Cesar, Elisa, and Chito Buenaventura—and he seemed happiest when his young grandson interrupted us to tell his lolo something that could only have been more important, for Paeng, than whatever it was we were discussing. Now and then other club members and guests would come by to pay their respects to the “Gov,” as the former Central Bank governor was universally known, but none of them got his attention as much as his grandson, who can’t have been more than nine or ten years old, and unmindful of all the stories his grandfather was telling me.

Those stories went back a long way. Rafael Baltasar Buenaventura was 68 when he died last week—too soon, for a man well loved by his family and friends can never live too long—but he could remember scenes from early childhood, during the war, when he and his family had to flee Baguio on foot to escape American bombs and Japanese soldiers, sleeping in makeshift caves and subsisting on camote and river water.

Most of the people who mourned Paeng’s passing knew and remembered him as the “Gov,” the compleat banker who headed Citibank’s regional operations back when a country like Malaysia was a backwater. To them and to those who never knew him, let me reintroduce Paeng with a few excerpts from my book-in-the-making on the Buenaventuras. I’ve retained the present tense for Paeng’s recollections.


PAENG TOOK the De Dios Transit bus from San Andres Circle to Loyola Heights. Maryknoll had also moved to Quezon City, and the Maryknoll girls took their own bus the same way—unfortunately, another bus altogether, a JD liner, so while Paeng and his buddies began to be aware of the other sex, there was little opportunity to know them better. They tried—in less than endearing ways. “When we were in first year high school, we used to sneak frogs into their school bus. We’d go early to frighten the girls, not knowing how important they later would be in our lives,” Paeng says.

The Ateneo was exhilarating for Paeng, who took naturally to the character formation provided by a Jesuit education. “Those four years in Loyola Heights were super,” he says, remembering mentors like Father Campbell, who would bring the boys to a spot beneath a mango tree and talk to them about his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, converting them all to a team they’d never seen; he introduced them to the music of Schubert, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the racy tales of Damon Runyon, and to the adventures of the Hardy boys. They studied Cicero in Latin.

Paeng wasn’t in the honors section—something that came to him as a relief rather than a disappointment. His two brothers were both A students—with Chito working a bit harder than Cesar for the distinction—but “I was an average B student, and proud of it,” he says. His mother was happy for as long as he didn’t flunk, and Paeng treasured his summer vacations too much to endanger them by flunking a subject, so a B was a good place to be. Much later, when he received his Management Man of the Year Award from the Management Association of the Philippines, Paeng would claim that his life was proof that even B students could make it. Later, a friend of his came up to him and said, “Paeng, that’s not completely correct. You were a B student because you insisted on being one. You could have made it easily to the honors section but you took great pains not to.” Paeng laughs at that recollection, but maintains that “I just didn’t try to. I didn’t want to be an overachiever and kill myself in the process.”

His favorite subjects were Math and English, his grades in which were in the comfortable 80s—no 70s, but no 90s, either. He didn’t know in high school that he wanted to be or would become a banker. “My mother was thinking I should take medicine, since we already had an engineer and a lawyer. But one time, in high school, there was an accident and I saw all this blood, and I almost fainted. I remember telling my mother that that was the end of my future in medicine. She thought I was just faking it, but I wasn’t. I also said engineering was too hard, and the law would take too long. So I figured, if I went to the Ateneo, I’d have to take an AB, and it had a lot of Latin in it. That’s when I figured I’d just take Commerce in La Salle.”


WEIGHING HIS options, Paeng chucked accountancy and took up the obvious alternative, with a little help from an uncle on his mother’s side. The Rufinos were part owners of Security Bank, which had opened in 1951 as the postwar period’s first privately owned, Filipino-controlled bank. Security Bank was expanding aggressively—at one point, it had the most branches among all banks in Metro Manila—and it seemed like just the outfit and the profession for Paeng to join. He had to start as the accounting clerk he didn’t care to be, but, within six months, he got promoted to credit investigator, which was much more interesting.

“That’s where I learned to be street-smart,” Paeng says. “You were usually assigned five names to whose credit history needed to be checked with around 25 banks in Escolta.” Escolta—downtown Manila’s old business district—was also where Security Bank’s head office was located. Paeng had friends in other banks, former classmates who were also credit investigators. “We used to bump into each other as we were doing our rounds. So about three or four of us started asking, ‘Hey, why are we going around 25 times? Maybe we should meet every morning, you have five, I have five, he has five, and we exchange names.’ We trusted each other to cover the names assigned to us, and the system enabled us to finish our work early in the afternoon. I would go back to the bank, where I would write a report and a secretary would type out my notes. Because I was too lazy, I wrote my notes in cryptic fashion, which required me to dictate them to the secretaries. They were older women who chided me for dictating to them when I wasn’t even their boss, but I charmed my way into getting them to do my work without my having to write things down.” Later in his long career, when did become the office boss, these “people skills” would serve Paeng well, and endear him to his staff.

He was paid about P120 a month at Security Bank—“big money then, enough to pay for my gasoline and parking.” He had been driving his parents’ Pontiac since his senior year in college. Cesar had to use a bike when he was in UP, and he would point out the inequity: “Why should you be driving a car when I had to use a bike?”

Paeng continued working in Security Bank during his senior year, moving up to credit appraiser, and graduated in 1960. Chito was already studying in Georgetown then, and Paeng thought that—like his two brothers—he too should go to the United States for his master’s degree in business. He applied to and was accepted by the MBA programs in Columbia and New York University, among others. He chose NYU, because it had night classes, and Paeng wanted to lighten the load on his parents, who were still also contributing to Chito’s education. Night classes would allow him to get a day job and earn a little. He found that job as a trainee with Manufacturers Hanover, leaning on his Security Bank connection. He took an apartment in Forest Hill, and plowed into his work and his studies, finishing his MBA in almost three years. Again, Paeng was a B student.

It was also Paeng’s first trip abroad. The freedom was exhilarating, and Paeng made full use of it. After his stint with Manufacturers Hanover, he worked briefly for a cousin who owned a freight-forwarding company, trading his suits for a dockworker’s togs. This cousin needed help with organizing his business, which was making good money but was in disarray. “I was just finishing my MBA and was doing my thesis when he hired me to get the office organized. But in the process, I learned how bundle a carton, since I had to go to the back of the office where the packing was done. I wasn’t a strong person, but I learned the rudiments of the business. If we had to get certain important documents at the docks, I would occasionally do it because no one else had the time. So I got to know the seamier side of New York.”

Luckily, Paeng met with nothing too unpleasant on that job. It was tough, he says, but he enjoyed it. After a year, he was on the move again—back to Manila, to avail himself of a unique opportunity that was going to define his life for the next several decades.

A banker at heart, Paeng had wanted to work for Manufacturers Hanover (or “Manny Hanny,” as it was known in the business), but the problem was that the bank had no offices overseas, only representatives—just two expatriates in Manila, at that time. However, Citibank was expanding its global operations. Founded as the City Bank of New York in 1812, Citibank had become America’s largest bank by 1894, and three years later was the first US bank to establish a foreign department and trade in foreign exchange. By 1902 it had set up offices in Shanghai and Manila.

In many ways, it was ideal for Paeng, who had his feet planted in both Manila and Manhattan. He could have opted to stay in New York as a trainee, but that meant being one among several hundred such trainees, with his being a foreigner possibly working against him. But Paeng met with a Citibank VP who was going to be assigned to Manila, and who told him about an executive training program the bank was going to set up there. He invited Paeng to join the program. “In one year,” he promised Paeng, “you’ll be an officer of the bank.”


AND SO began a long and illustrious career with Citibank and, ultimately, with the Central Bank—a position that he would devote his unflagging attention and world-class expertise to, but which would exact a terrible toll on his energy and well-being.

It was a distinction he never asked for, and tried to evade. His father, a provincial treasurer whose career suffered when he refused to condone corruption, had expressly forbidden his children to enter the government service, to spare them the same grief. But when duty to country called in 1999, Paeng couldn’t say no. He and Cesar had to go to their father’s grave to pray for the old man’s understanding and forgiveness.

Perhaps their father was right about the grief. But he should be pleased with what his sons—particularly the B student—did for the country, and the family name.

Flotsam & Jetsam (28) for Monday, November 27, 2006


This story was posted today online by CNN, and I thought it was creepy enough to republish here, what with Christmas just around the corner. Read this, then read my piece below it, an essay I wrote 11 years ago.


DENVER, Colorado (AP)—A homeowners' association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.

Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, said Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs.

He said some residents believed the wreath was a symbol of Satan. Three or four residents complained, he said.

"Somebody could put up signs that say drop bombs on Iraq. If you let one go up you have to let them all go up," he said in a telephone interview Sunday.

Lisa Jensen said she wasn't thinking of the war when she hung the wreath. She said, "Peace is way bigger than not being at war. This is a spiritual thing."

Jensen, a past association president, calculates the fines will cost her about $1,000, and doubts they will be able to make her pay. But she said she's not going to take it down until after Christmas.

"Now that it has come to this I feel I can't get bullied," she said. "What if they don't like my Santa Claus?"

The association in this 200-home subdivision 270 miles southwest of Denver has sent a letter to her saying that residents were offended by the sign and the board "will not allow signs, flags etc. that can be considered divisive."

The subdivision's rules say no signs, billboards or advertising are permitted without the consent of the architectural control committee.

Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn't say anything.

Kearns fired all five committee members.

Goodwill to Filipinos
(Barfly, Dec. 19, 1995)


THIS COULD have happened only to Filipinos, and only to Filipinos in the US. The story was told to me and Ishko Lopez at Sam's Diner a couple of weeks ago by film director Gil Portes, and I found it so funny that I got his permission to retell it here in Barfly. I may have embellished it a bit—you'll excuse my fictionist's meddling mind—but Gil swears (and he'll do this again, hand on a Bible) that the essential points of the story are, as they say, nothing but the truth.

We were talking idly about a telesine I was scripting and that he was going to shoot in New York, when Gil remembered that he had to go back to New York after Christmas, to put in a court appearance, as a witness for the prosecution. (Or was it the defense? It doesn't really matter, as you'll soon find out.)

It seems that Gil—who's long been living in Queens—got this call from one of New York's Fil-Am busybodies. “Could you please be a member of the board of judges for the Miss Maria Clara of Lower Manhattan (or some such district) beauty pageant?” the other guy implored. Either feeling extraordinarily sociable or having nothing better to do at that moment but throw the garbage, Gil agreed, asking only that his cab fare from Queens and the cost of having his tuxedo drycleaned—about $40—be refunded by the organizers.

After the obligatory quarter-turns, interviews, talent show, and a slew of musical numbers, Gil and his co-judges picked out a winner—ta-rah, Miss Maria Clara of Lower Manhattan of 1995!—only to discover, as the poor miss did, that she hadn't exactly won, not just yet. The day's black-tie affair was only a preliminary event, prior to a runoff among the top finishers, with the final results to be decided by—what else—ballots to be bought and sent in by the Filipino-American masses of New York. That should've been enough to faze sensible people like Gil, who was understandably miffed (I never got to ask him if he got back his cab fare), but you don't know Fil-Am fathers and mothers.

Ballots were printed and sold like there was no tomorrow (although we don't know of too many Puerto Ricans, Italians, Lithuanians, Moroccans or even Koreans who bought ballots—must've been too busy with their own pageants). With just a day to go, it appeared that the preliminary winner, whom we'll call Miss A, was trailing the original No.2—Miss B—by so many thousand votes.

That's gross injustice in any Fil-Am parent's book, and so Miss A's mother promptly whipped out her checkbook, and dashed off a check—a postdated check, mind you—for an amount enough to put her girl over the top. Hooray! Victory! Justice! Or was it?

Miss B's folks certainly didn't think so, citing a provision in the fine print of the pageant rules, expressly prohibiting the acceptance of postdated checks for ballots. (And what this tells us is that they must've had even funnier experiences with postdated checks.) Miss A's mom asked what the problem was—the check, after all, did clear; she just wanted to make sure that another check she had deposited would clear first.

In any case, what do you think happened next? But of course—Miss B's parents sued Miss A's parents, and the whole feathery and sequinny pageant was soon marching into court—the girls, the parents, the organizers, and the judges, including Gil, minus his tuxedo. There was pandemonium as one family's boosters heckled the other, as the girls whined, as the judges reviewed their choices and vented their displeasure with the process itself, and as the organizers pleaded shrilly for sobriety.

The American lady judge banged her gavel and screamed above the fray: “Will somebody please tell me, what's a Maria Clara???”

The case is still being heard, folks, and—given the possibility that it won't be on CNN or on the cover of Newsweek, although it should—we'll keep you posted as soon as we hear from Gil.

“Here we are trying to work out this silly telesine plot,” I told Gil before he left Sam's Diner, “and you tell me this story. Let's shoot this one instead!”

Meanwhile, let's wish for peace on earth and goodwill to Filipinos—especially Filipinos in Manhattan.

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!)

Flotsam & Jetsam (27) for November 1, 2006


I'M EAGERLY awaiting the arrival of my newest "baby": a Pelikan M800 fountain pen I just got off eBay (forced by wintry winds to remain indoors, I had to seek some warmth and comfort online--that's my official excuse). I remembered that this whole column and blog came about because of my insane love of fountain pens (especially truly old ones from the '20s and '40s), and it occurred to me that most of you have no idea what I'm talking about, so here, in their full glory, are some of my favorites in my collection.

From left to right, they are: a Swan Eternal ca. 1927, a Waterman Red Ripple ca. 1925, a Sheaffer Lifetime ca. 1932, a Wahl-Eversharp Doric ca. 1935, a Parker Vacumatic Oversize ca. 1934, a Sheaffer PFM V ca. 1959, an unnamed German pen in black hard rubber ca. 1897, a Parker Duofold Centennial (red marble) ca. 1990, a Parker Duofold International (silver) ca. 1992, a Parker Duofold International (pearl & black) ca. 2000, a Pilot maki-e lacquered pen ca. 1990, a Montblanc 149 Meisterstuck ca. 1980, and a W. A. Sheaffer Commemorative Limited Edition pen ca. 1996. If you have any of these stashed away and gathering dust in a drawer at home (maybe Lolo's weapon of choice?), drop me a line. Click on the image twice for a closer look. Enjoy!

UPDATE, Nov. 2: It's here--it's alive! Ooooh, happiness! This M800 is such a great writer, with a smooth, broad nib. Lookee:

Flotsam & Jetsam (26) for October 30, 2006


Here are some shots I took around San Diego last week with my point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix LX1. Enjoy!

Penman for Monday, October 30, 2006


A NEW anthology of plays has just been published by the University of the Philippines Press. Edited by playwright and Palanca Hall of Famer Rene Villanueva and performance poet Vim Nadera for the UP Institute of Creative Writing, Ang Aklat Likhaan ng Dula 1997-2003: Kapangahasan bilang Kaligtasan is the ICW’s second collection of recent and outstanding Filipino plays. Both established and new playwrights are represented in the book, including Teo Antonio, Nicolas Pichay, Chris Martinez, Jun Lana, and Allan Lopez.

The book’s title—which translates to “Daring as Deliverance”—hints at a crisis in Philippine drama: its slide into obscurity these past few decades, beset by dwindling audiences, rising production costs, and the competition from all sorts of alternative media for the Filipino’s attention and entertainment peso.

When I began writing plays for the stage in the 1970s, Philippine theater—particularly theater in Filipino—was undergoing a welcome resurgence; the Philippine Educational Theater Association was at the peak of its powers, the Cultural Center of the Philippines was showcasing the best of world and local drama through Teatro Pilipino and Bulwagang Gantimpala, and a new generation of playwrights was emerging, including Bienvenido Noriega, Rene Villanueva, Tony Perez, Bonifacio Ilagan, Malou Jacob, Edgardo Maranan, Reuel Aguila, and Isagani Cruz. School-based theater was also very much alive in such places as UP, UST, Ateneo, and St. Paul’s College.

It felt good to be writing plays, not only because of the prestige that went with winning a Palanca or CCP Award—how hungry we were for these distinctions in those days!—but also because we could expect our work to be produced almost as soon as they were written, such was the demand for new material and the willingness and ability of various theater groups to stage them, anywhere from the plush Little Theater of the CCP to a flyblown corner of Sta. Mesa Market.

As I’ve often remarked, playwriting can be the most taxing of the literary arts because of the many levels of anxiety the playwright has to endure: the rush to finish the play, the search for its producer and the wait for its production, and the high (or the crushing letdown) of watching its performance.

This new anthology revives those anxieties, as well as the hopes that come with them for the revival of Philippine theater itself, pinning those hopes on the audacity of these new playwrights. (That audacity can be extremely funny or extremely disturbing, as recent plays by Chris Martinez and Allan Lopez have shown.)

The book is available at Aeon Books on Katipunan, Popular Bookstore on T. Morato, Solidaridad, Powerbooks, National Book Store, Bound Bookstore, Fully Booked, and the University of the Philippines Press bookstores in UP Diliman, Baguio, Iloilo, and Davao.


I'VE BEEN having interesting exchanges with some readers following my recent piece on language issues, where I argued against the growing mode of thinking that English can only or best be promoted in this country by eschewing Filipino and Taglish. Taglish in particular seems like an easy target, as it appears to mangle both English and Filipino, impairing the learning of both languages and producing masters of neither language.

I don’t know if the linguistic evidence will bear that out; I’m inclined to believe that, like many seemingly obvious things, it’s actually false, and I’d be glad to hear from serious scholars what the truth of the matter is, and how a language is really learned and mastered. (I’m asking for academic proof, not for more opinions probably just as faulty as mine.)

A reader named Peter observed that “In all the countries where English was used to conquer, there has always been some resultant form of mish-mashed English that results, and we know this as pidgin English. The Bahamas has it, the Philippines has Taglish, Puerto Rico has Nuyorican. And I’ve noticed that Vietnamese English speakers in America also use some form of Viet-English combination. How about the French Canadian spoken in Quebec, which the mainland French scoffs at when they hear it? And pity the fool who tries to interpret French Haitian. I am sure there are other derivations such as Dutch-Indo, Viet-Chinese, etc. But Taglish should not be used as an excuse for the lack of English speaking in the Philippines. Remember, it is the media that the public mimics, and we are so guilty of it.”

As I wrote Peter in response, he was right about these spin-offs of English; they're inevitable, and they're how languages grow. Old English itself, or Anglo-Saxon, began as a form of German in the 5th century, and then took in a massive dose of French (and its Latin pedigree) after the Norman invasion of 1066. You can imagine the horror of both Anglo-Saxon and French purists, if there were any, at the emergence of this hybrid language in the markets and the military camps. And what would it have been called—“Franglish”? (Many modern Frenchmen deplore and yet can’t help speaking what in the ‘60s became Franglais.)

That’s how I see Taglish; as a language or a variety of it, it’s objectively neither good nor bad, neither better nor worse—it just is, and will be. And it is, because it’s useful and often easier on the tongue and on the mind. Some people make fun of it by trotting out the oft-quoted “Let’s make tusok-tusok the fishballs,” but that’s just as ridiculous and pointless an example as the old salumbola and salumpuwit straw dummies that anti-Filipinists have used to malign the language. In other words, whom do you know really speaks that way? Most of us—yes, including many who might otherwise compose their papers and messages in letter-perfect English—will more likely say, “Hindi ako maka-relate sa topic ng lecture niya” or “Paki-fax na lang ng estimate mo sa akin bukas.”

I dare anyone to tell me those same things in unadulterated Filipino (whatever that means; as far as I’m concerned, Filipino is already, necessarily, and wonderfully enriched by its borrowings).

Can I say these things in “pure” English? Sure: “I can’t relate to his lecture topic” and “Please fax me your estimate tomorrow.” But then again, why should I, if the social or speaking situation doesn’t demand it? How many among us—including we Filipino PhDs in English—speak in straight, complete, and impeccably composed sentences in English, anyway? And again, why should we, if we’re not in Cambridge, in Geneva, or even in South Dakota? If you’ve tried lecturing two full hours a day in English, four days a week, as I’m doing now in northeastern Wisconsin, you’ll know how that can lead to lockjaw, and what a relief and how natural it is to meet a fellow Pinoy and say, “O, pare! Tapos ka na bang mag-grade ng midterms mo? Mag-relax naman tayo mamaya, may replay daw n’ung championship game kagabi diyan sa Faculty Lounge.”

Anyone who has nightmares about Taglish replacing English in our newspapers and schoolbooks anytime soon needn’t worry. People often forget that Taglish works best as a spoken language; it’s a pain to read over more than a few sentences, no matter how easy it may be on the ear. Someone thought otherwise and paid dearly for it in the early 1970s, when the country’s first (and, to my knowledge, only) avowedly Taglish tabloid newspaper, the Sun, opened and failed with a deafening thud. As for TV, well, that's another matter, since it's more of a verbal medium, and class considerations take over in terms of the language used by particular programs (e.g., no Taglish in English newscasts, Filipino/Tagalog or Taglish for sitcoms).

To sum things up, as I told Peter, I like Taglish; it's useful and speakable, and a whole lot friendlier than English. At the same time, we should promote English as an international language and a smart option for the 21st-century filipino—and there are ways of doing it, too, but cutting down on Taglish isn't one of them. Taglish isn’t the enemy; underfunded, unimaginative, and sloppy teaching is. The best thing you can do for your children’s English is not to threaten them with a P50 slash in their cellphone load allowance for every Tagalog word they utter, but to buy them good English-language books and magazines suitable for their ages and interests—something that says “Read me, I’m interesting!” instead of “I’m a lesson in English.”

As it turned out, Peter and I were on the same side of the issue, and he had a startling insight to share. He was, in said, also very much in support of improving English instruction in the Philippines, but “…. Speaking English, in my opinion, has been detrimental to us Filipinos who moved to the States. Because we can speak English, we can easily assimilate (ourselves in American) society, get good jobs, go to school, and be even better. But the poor non-English-speaking immigrants are out of the running for those good jobs.

“And what do they do? They are the ones who open up businesses, and they flourish. They are the Korean grocery and deli owners in Manhattan. They are the Bangladeshi clothing vendors on Broadway. The Greeks are the pizza shop owners in Boston, the Lebanese the gasoline station owners, the Vietnamese the Laundromat operators. They are the ones who are actually supporting the majority population with their small businesses, and who are making a good living because of it—while we Filipinos are happy to work side by side with the Americans or the other English-speaking immigrants, and settle for our just reward—the paycheck— and we are stuck in this mode!”

Amen, Peter, amen!

Penman for Monday, October 23, 2006


So sorry for the late upload, folks--am on the road on the way back to De Pere from San Diego, and just found my first wi-fi hotspot in days here in Minneapolis!


I HAD an interesting after-dinner conversation the other evening with a friend and colleague here at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin—Dr. John Holder, who’s been to the Philippines many times (he’s married to a Filipina, Gertie) and who teaches Buddhist and American philosophy, aside from administering my weekly whipping in badminton. Like me, John’s been teaching for over 20 years, and has seen all kinds of academic situations, the good as well the bad—but more lately, it seems, more the bad than the good.

We had just gotten done with midterm exams, and—in a mood made more expansive by a few bottles of Canadian beer—were wondering half-idly where higher education was, and where it was going, in light of what we were seeing in our classrooms.

Now, it’s easy to imagine a posse of sophomores getting together in a bar swilling whatever they can get at their age (or despite it; the legal drinking age in Wisconsin remains 21) and moaning and yelping away at perceived injustices suffered at the hands of their sadistic, abusive, mean-spirited professors. Less familiar to most imaginations is the opposite scenario: those professors (no longer demonic, but wise and all-too-merciful) lamenting the decline of undergraduate civilization—manifest in the absence of manners and the overflow of vacuous thought in some of these young citizens—as the symptom of a larger cultural malaise (pass the pale ale, please).

John and I had fended off some rather nasty slings and arrows in our time in front of the blackboard, and appreciated the opportunity to trade professional gripes. John recalled, for example, how one student had dismissed his professorship by saying that “You’re just my intellectual chauffeur.” Yet another student complained in his evaluation form that “This teacher forced me to think!” (Ironically, that comment would help secure John’s tenure at the college.) I told John about how one of my department colleagues had a student complaining about how “the exam she gave us was too difficult.” Just that morning, one of my own students—having been inexplicably absent the previous day—had come up to me and blithely asked, “So, did we do anything yesterday?” (I looked at him with the thinnest of smiles and said, “Yes, we do something everyday.”)

But never mind the insults—for, more often than not, they know not what they say. John and I were speculating where higher education was headed, and the outlook seemed bleak.

Fresh on my mind was the growing chorus back home for “English! English! English!” as though learning it quickly was some kind of panacea that would cure our economic and social ailments in a fortnight, courtesy of the booming call-center industry and other English-using service industries. (More on this next week.) “There’ll be a greater demand for skills,” I said. “ Faced with an academic smorgasbord, students—and universities and colleges—will identify which specific courses they need to meet the minimum requirements for certain jobs, and will find the shortest and straightest route to a diploma.”

“That’ll be the end of liberal education,” John said, and I could only agree.

As we saw it, the problem is that we often mistake the acquisition of skills—as important and indispensable as they are, especially in societies in desperate need of employment—with a well-rounded college education, or the idea itself of “education.” Skills allow you to perform tasks; education, well, forces you to think—not just about which buttons to press, but which judgments to make for the greater social good.

Education involves values, and these values are learned in less direct ways than through flow charts and pronunciation guides; they concern right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and the lack of it, justice and injustice.

Not everyone can have or can afford a college education that rounds the person out; most of our countrymen (and many Americans, for that matter) will just have to get by on their driving, typing, tailoring, plumbing, and janitorial skills. They’re nothing to scoff at; they keep the rest of us alive and our economy afloat, and we have these workers to thank for our relative leisure—including the leisure to sit back and gripe. But what a sorry waste it would be if our colleges and universities that can do something more and something else for our best-prepared citizens reduced themselves to technical schools—and if our students and their professors rode on this well-greased slide to mediocrity.

Ah, ale, more pale ale, please!


THE MORNING after that chat, I picked up a copy of the New York Times and stumbled on an article that indirectly offered one explanation for why we Filipinos have the hardest time becoming leaders and innovators rather than followers and imitators in the 21st century economy we all seem to be intent on crashing.

The Times reported that “For nine months of the year, Dr. (Shing-Tung) Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed ‘theory of everything.’ In 1982 he won a Fields medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.”

For the other three months, however, Dr. Yau—born in 1949 in a poor village outside Hong Kong—returns to China to help produce new PhDs and push China’s science agenda forward.

The Times continued: “’In China he is a movie star,’ said Ronald Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend.... And last summer Dr. Yau played the part, dashing in black cars from television studios to VIP receptions in forbidden gardens in the Forbidden City. He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world’s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part: “Beautiful indeed / is the source of truth. / To measure the changes of time and space / the smartest are nothing.'”

A world-class math professor recognized and lionized in his own country who goes out of his way to replicate himself: does that speak to anything Filipino? Many of our best minds go abroad—and stay there. If and when they come home to offer help, no one knows them; if anything, they’re looked upon as meddlers and interlopers, with nothing to contribute to their local counterparts and juniors.

And did I say math? We’d rather sing and dance—that’s what all the lunchtime shows suggest we do, if our poorest people want to get anywhere in life and in this world. I have nothing against entertainers and movie stars, many of whom are indeed exceptionally talented professional artists who work very hard, and who deserve every accolade they get. But even they know and understand the need to broaden their horizons—and some of them are doing something about it. Former film star and Playboy model Tetchie Agbayani is completing a master’s degree in Psychology at the Ateneo; Sharon Cuneta (of whom I must admit to being a longtime fan) has quietly been taking distance courses with UP’s Open University.

It’s a long hop from intellectual chauffeur to movie star, but if our students were just as willing to think a few things through with us, I’m sure that John and I wouldn’t mind driving them around this maze we call an education—at the end of which neither would we mind a VIP reception or two.


MOST PEOPLE know my home province of Romblon only for its milky marble; but many years ago, on October 24, 1944, its waters played host to one of the most important naval encounters of that war: the Battle of Sibuyan Sea, a phase of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf which led to the collapse of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In Sibuyan, the Japanese lost its super-battleship Musashi.

To commemorate that event, Romblon officials and their guests will converge today in my hometown of Alcantara, thanks to the efforts of the Romblon Cultural Heritage Association, Inc. headed by Gen. Dominador Resos, in cooperation with the office of Cong. Eduardo C. Firmalo, the Philippine Navy (particularly Rear Adm. George Uy, commander of the Philippine Fleet), the US Military Retired Activities Office in Manila led by its director, Virgilio A. Medina, and the local government units of Romblon.

I can only hope that beyond marking such military milestones, that cultural heritage association will soon embark on significant cultural projects for Romblon’s present and its future. The real battle, gentlemen, is no longer on the ocean, but in the mind.


TO SPARE many readers the trouble of copying and typing in my kilometric blog address (http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html), I’ve found a way—thanks to a special deal from Yahoo offering domain names at cut-rate prices—to reduce all of that to this: www.penmanila.net.

It’s done by something called “masked forwarding”—in other words, you click on the “penmanila” shortcut but you’ll actually be delivered to my longer “homepage” address. That means, though, that I had to buy “penmanila.net” from Yahoo for around P500 a year—not too bad a price, I think, for the convenience. Even if you don’t have a blog, and just want a simple webpage to put your personal or professional shingle on (say, to advertise your expertise, as you’ll see by checking out www.acesinfo.info), buying a domain name (as in yourname.com) could well be worth it. Depending on what’s available, you can even choose from .com, .org, .net, .info, .biz, etc.

To learn more or to sign up, go to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains. (Now, can’t they shorten that to something easier on the fingers?)

Manileño for November 2006


WHEN HE visited the University of the Philippines late last September to attend a forum hosted by the Association of Political Science Majors, Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. was pelted with eggs and mud, reportedly by members of youth groups identified with the Left, as he was leaving.

Ironically enough, the forum was devoted to the topic of "Untamed Conflict and Arrested Development: Finding a Way Out of the Vicious Cycle", and speakers from different political persuasions were invited to participate in the discussion.

The pelting incident left me wondering what the rules of engagement are, if any, in these civil (well, up to a point) encounters. Was the pelting good? Was it bad? In what way, and for whom? Can a reasonable argument be made for deliberate rudeness as a free expression of one’s beliefs? Was the pelting any worse than the systematic annihilation of activists alleged to have been perpetrated by the military? Has all civility gone out the window, or is it (as we thought in our time on the streets) a bourgeois affectation we can ill afford in such a dire situation?

Sure, one can argue, what’s manners when hundreds of people are being murdered left and right without so much as a by-your-leave? And where was the outrage when the lives of all those militants were snuffed out, allegedly if not presumably by agents of the military organization that Esperon now heads?

And then again, as the APSM put it later in a statement deploring the incident, “How do we create a culture of peace in the midst of these kinds of actions? How can we propose solutions to the protracted conflict in the country and the underdevelopment and suffering of our people when some groups do not know what it means to be civil?”

I didn’t imagine that a few broken eggs would spawn so many questions, but there they are—perhaps compounded by the fact that I personally know “Hermo” Esperon from way back, even as I’ve taken a different position on some basic political issues. As I mentioned in an interview I did with Gen. Esperon for this magazine, we went to the same high school, and I know him to be a decent and affable fellow. But that’s hardly an endorsement of his official position—a hard-line, take-no-prisoners approach to communist and military rebels alike.

Presuming I didn’t know him and despised his views, would I come up and shake his hand? Maybe not, if I can avoid it, and I probably would do my best to avoid it. Would I pelt him with an egg? Maybe not, either—but maybe only because I’m 52 now, and can think of more creative ways to be nettlesome.

Whoever threw that egg, I’m sure that creativity was the last thing on his or her mind. The pelting came out of anger and frustration, meant not to be witty but to be blunt.

I was about to make the argument that whether or not I agreed with the protestors, such boorish behavior had no place in the civilized society and discourse we all aspire to. Witness, for example, the politeness, the polish, and the panache with which seasoned politicians debate with one another in Britain’s House of Commons.

And then, on a whim, I looked up “pelted with eggs” on Google, and discovered that even the urbane British have hardly been beyond losing their cool in the heat of political warfare.

In May 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair was pelted with condoms filled with purple flour as spoke in front of Parliament. In January 2001, a visit to Bristol netted him a rotten tomato on his back. In April 2004, his former spokesperson Alastair Campbell got the gooey egg treatment from students rallying, again in Bristol.

And, of course, who can forget how George W. Bush’s limousine got pelted with eggs on his inauguration? Closer to home, let’s remember how the First Quarter Storm was practically triggered by students tossing a wooden coffin at Ferdinand Marcos as he stepped out of Congress after delivering his SONA in January 1970.

These instances put Hermogenes Esperon, Jr. in good company, and make me wonder if a grand (though maybe not great) tradition now exists of throwing ridiculously non-lethal objects at—short of assassinating—the leader in putative democracies where the normal grievance processes seem to have failed.

To be fair—if that’s at all possible—to those who do the pelting, these acts are often more symbolic than literal, less an affront to the person than to the institution he or she represents, and to whatever that institution may have done. It could have been Esperon, or his predecessor or successor, and the sticky results would have been the same. (Or maybe not; even as he challenges his detractors to prove their charges, many believe him to have conspired with the Arroyo administration to rig the 2004 elections in Mindanao, lending a personal element to the ill will against him.)

I know that it’s hard to say “hate the person, but respect the institution” when you believe that that person dishonored the very same institution you’re supposed to respect. The courage and audacity of those who protest injustice in the face of overwhelming odds deserve our commendation.

But again—and this is one huge “but”—I still find myself asking what exactly the Left gained by chasing Esperon out of UP with a shower of yolk.

Media mileage? Certainly, but the general got off a good shot in his own defense by calling his ambushers “bad eggs.” The Left scored a point by proving its militancy—then lost it just as quickly by proving how intolerant it is of contrary opinion. I can’t help thinking some Muslims assailed the Pope (of whom I’m no blushing fan, either) for suggesting that Islam was a religion of violence—and then retaliated by reportedly killing a nun.

Personally, I would’ve found it more effective and more UP-like for the protestors to have staged a special “Oblation Run” for their super-macho guest: a sudden rush of male streakers and mooners, to show that—even while political murder and mayhem may be no laughing matter—we can still say what we want and be heard loud and clear without having to shut others up.

Penman for Monday, October 16, 2006


A COUPLE of months ago, I lamented the decline of penmanship skills among Filipinos—myself included—because of the way the computer keyboard has taken over the pen in our daily lives. A whole week can go by without us writing more than our signatures in longhand—much less an entire letter, or a speech, or a short story.

I never had much of a penmanship, but like any schoolboy and schoolgirl of my generation, I trained for long, laborious hours writing letters (I don’t even mean amorous missives, but As, Bs, and Cs) in that loopy style we call cursive. Back then, these letters had little cowlicks and tails. They rode a straight line and leaned rightward, like a row of ducks boldly bucking a stiff current.

Somewhere along the way, we—or our kids—lost all those tiny squiggles and the visual idiosyncrasies that make your penmanship yours and yours alone, replaced by squarish, indistinctive block letters that could just as well have been written by the person next to you. When computers arrived, we didn’t just write badly by hand—we wrote a lot less, and cursive took a deeper dive. Except for a few private schools which still insist on their students writing in a particular way (great for discipline, but no leap forward for individuality, either), Penmanship the subject has gone the way of Spanish for Filipinos.

As it turns out—and as you might have expected—we are not alone. Comes now a report from the Washington Post declaring that “The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.”

Apparently, they just don’t teach penmanship anymore, given the demands of other, presumably more important, subjects on class time. “Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth grade, said Dennis Williams, national product manager for Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum,” says the Post. “At its peak in the 1940s and '50s, most teachers insisted on as much as two hours a week, but a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan.”

While the loss seems to be a largely sentimental one—a case of old fogeys like me wishing the world had remained the familiar playground that we knew as kids—there’s some scientific basis for believing that better penmanship means better thinking. As the Post reports:

“The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better—a lifelong benefit…. In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.”

The problem is—with our own fingers having atrophied and feeling just about as flexible as firewood when clutching a pen—who’s going to teach the kids? How are we going to revive the joy that comes with looking at an emotion emerge from a sentence, wet but also as indelible as ink, the thought and feeling shaped as much by the stretch, the leap, and the hesitation of the letters as by the words themselves?

I wonder if the time will come when some of us will once again, as in truly olden days, require the professional services of an escribiente—a scrivener, a scribe—to write our personal letters for us, just as calligraphers draw place cards for the parties of the very rich. I suspect not. As nostalgic as I may get about pens and penmanship, I’ll take a laser-printed paper—double-spaced and set in 12 pts. New York or Times Roman—over the barely legible, chicken-scratch scrawl that passes for my students’ handwriting, any old time.


INCIDENTALLY, THAT Washington Post heads-up was sent to me by Romy Aquino who, along with his gracious wife Necie, hosted Beng and me in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I gave a lecture a couple of weeks ago. Romy got his PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Michigan and stayed on—just one in a long line of Filipino scholars who went to Michigan (U-M or “the U of M,” to its alumni) for their graduate degrees. It’s a list that’s included, among others, Estefania Aldaba-Lim, Emerenciana Arcellana, Jose Abueva, Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Rene Cayetano, and Raphael “Popo” Lotilla—and, many rungs lower on the food chain—yours truly (MFA Creative Writing, 1988). (The controversial Dean C. Worcester, colonial Secretary of the Interior, also studied in Michigan, which now houses his papers.)

It was a good visit that allowed me to reconnect with old friends and haunts, and with an unusually productive if unsettling time in my life—perhaps the last time I might’ve thought myself young. I hadn’t stepped into Angell Hall in almost 20 years, and I just sat in its lobby, amid all that marble and bronze, while I waited for my writing mentor, the amazingly prolific and gifted Nick Delbanco, to arrive. (Another teacher was Charles Baxter, who’s gone over to Minnesota.) Over tea at the Hopwood Room, we had a quick chat in a vain effort to cover the missing years, and I ended up blabbering like a student hard put to explain a twist in the plot.

Later that day, at the end of my lecture, I read lines from a work I’d begun in Ann Arbor: “I come from a country without snow and raspberries. Instead we have pounding rain and coconuts. When the typhoons come the coconuts fall in a rain of their own….” And the thrill of creation swarmed back to me, particularly that odd sharpening of the senses that you get when you’re thousands of miles away from the object you’re describing, because it isn’t just your eyes or even your memory but your imagination at work.

I wasn’t the first Filipino writer to study in Michigan—Aida Rivera-Ford and Lilia Amansec proudly waved the flag there long before I did—and I certainly wasn’t the last, with Peter Mayshle recently graduating with an MFA and Gad Lim now doing a PhD in Education (both, incidentally, are Ateneans).



I met up with the Ann Arbor oldtimers, and was privileged to be hosted for dinner by Dr. Paz “Pat” Buenaventura Naylor and her husband Barney. Pat was a teenager when the Second World War broke out, and she retains many vivid memories of a colorful youth that included early widowhood, from a marriage to a soldier who became a Korean war hero, and then a prestigious Barbour scholarship to Michigan.

According to Dr. Naylor, there was a time when Philippine Studies at U-M was the best such program on the mainland, and second only to that of Hawaii. It covered many areas including anthropology, archaeology, history, and political science. But it lacked a Filipino language component, until a Luce Foundation grant enabled the establishment of the Tagalog program in the Department of Linguistics and the hiring of Pat Naylor as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics with the mandate to set up the program.

Today, with Pat retired, Adelwisa “Deling” Agas Weller—a UP Political Science alumna who has long been based in Ann Arbor and who has played godmother to generations of Pinoy grad students—teaches Filipino to a class composed mainly of young Filipino-Americans eager to reclaim an important part of their heritage. For Deling, it’s just one more connection between Michigan and the Philippines—an association that goes all the way back to the 1920s, when the Philippine Michigan Club was organized.

Along with Romy Aquino, Deling Weller is leading a valiant though often lonely effort to raise funds for the Philippine Studies Initiative at U-M, to keep alive a program severely threatened by budget cuts. There are dozens if not hundreds of potential donors even within the Fil-Am community in Michigan itself, many of them prominent achievers in their fields, and I can only imagine—or at least hope—that it will not take too much out of each of their pockets to raise the $10,000 minimum that it will take to keep Filipino afloat in one of America’s most distinguished universities.

Our visit ended with an early-morning jaunt through Ann Arbor’s weekend Farmer’s Market, looking for Oriental vegetables in the chill of an early fall with Romy, Necie, and a jolly former dried-fish dealer-turned-Ford engineer named Juanito Co. I was never much for veggies, and thankfully we found none; but that day I could taste the bitterness of ampalaya on my dreaming tongue, and I didn’t much mind.

Penman for Monday, October 9, 2006


THESE PAST couple of weeks, I’ve had two opportunities to give lectures on a pet topic of mine, “English in the Philippines”, at St. Norbert College and at the University of Michigan.

In presentations like these, I always get asked one question in the open forum afterwards: “Is Taglish or Filipino itself the cause of the deterioration of our people’s skills in English? Shouldn’t we ban the use of Taglish and Filipino in schools to improve those skills?”

The question frankly makes me cringe, but I understand where it comes from—a sense of frustration over what many people perceive to be the loss of one of our comparative advantages as an economy, especially in a globalizing world that speaks English more than any other language.

As a professor of English, I witness these degraded skills every day—not just in my students’ work, but, sad to say, also in my professional environment, in the media, and in general usage. It isn’t just a matter of subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, and wrong prepositions; what I’m finding is a basic inability to express oneself clearly—in complete, fluid clauses and sentences, using precisely chosen words—in English.

So this much, I will agree with: we need to work on our English, to make ourselves better understood by each other and by the world at large. But as for what we need to do to improve our skills in English, the worst thing we can do is to throw Filipino out the window and pretend like we were little Thomasite schoolkids all over again.

The situation’s far from hopeless, but it will take a lot of sustained and substantial effort to promote English and use it to our economic advantage without losing or perverting our Filipino-ness, as devalued as a trifle like “identity” now seems to be to many.

It’s very tempting to use Filipino as the scapegoat for our ailing English, most easily by associating it with a narrow and self-destructive nationalism, especially at a time when many people embrace “globalization” as if it were God’s gift to humanity and when “nationalism” sounds like a bad word we should never bring up in polite conversation.

The other usual suspect is Taglish, that eminently speakable mongrel tongue, which allegedly results in the speaker knowing neither English nor Tagalog well enough to pass the UPCAT.

But if these factors are to blame, then why do I find almost exactly the same problems in the written exams of my American students, who of course can speak English as fluently as they should, but a good number of whom have the hardest time articulating their ideas on paper with clarity and precision?

I could go on all day proposing possible remedies, but let me tell you right now about one option I won’t be rooting for. Banning Filipino or Taglish from the school or workplace may sound bold and daring, as though somebody with guts—looking suspiciously like a politician in need of an easy target or a pet cause to inflame the middle class—were finally taking action.

But it’s stupid, because it won’t work; it never has, and it never will, beyond small, short-term, and tightly controlled situations. Prohibiting people from speaking a language that makes sense and feels comfortable to them will have as much chance for success as King Canute ordering back the ocean waves. For all his powers of less than subtle persuasion, the redoubtable Lee Kuan Yew has so far failed miserably in his desire to root Singlish out of the Singaporean as one more way to make Singapore more First World than it already is. Singlish continues to be spoken with much energy and enthusiasm on the street, in the malls, and in the local plays and TV shows that could very well be the best and the most interesting effusions of a truly Singaporean culture. (Senior Minister Lee was reported to be particularly horrified by a comedian’s Singlish admonition that went “Quick, quick. Late already. You eat yourself, we eat ourself!”—meaning, “Hurry, we’re late. Let's eat separately.” OK, so it sounds silly, but as far as I’m concerned, if it makes perfect sense to two Singaporeans, they can happily eat themselves as much as they want.)

What policymakers forget is that language isn’t a zero-sum game: that you can learn one without unlearning another. Standard, “grammatically correct” English can very well coexist with Filipino and Taglish in the same brain and on the same tongue. Instead of focusing on the negatives and on the “don’ts”, we could be promoting Standard English as a positive option that anyone who wants or needs to communicate with the world should learn and master. The important thing is for the user to know and to understand when to switch from one language and one register to another, depending on what the specific situation requires. Appropriateness is key. Real life is full of situations when Filipino or Taglish could save your skin—rather than letter-perfect English.

The real problem, I think, is that our teaching of English has deteriorated sharply, as well as the learning environment you need to provide around the language.

If we’re serious about improving our English—and beyond easy legislative declarations of English as the language of instruction—we should improve the English language training of our teachers, provide interesting and up-to-date learning materials on CDs and DVDs to schoolchildren, expand access to computers and the Internet, and beef up our public libraries. That sounds like a lot of money (do I hear more for education, and less for discretionary “intelligence” funds?), but since when did precious knowledge come free?

This should also mean, for example, ensuring the quality and correctness of teaching materials by weeding out corruption in the Department of Education, particularly in the selection and procurement of textbooks.

As you can see, repairing our fractured English is far more complicated than simply punishing students for splitting infinitives (incidentally, a rule that never really was) and for saying “Ay naku!” instead of “Jiminy cricket!”


AND NOW a couple of quick plugs for good causes.

The Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) will be hosting a writing workshop with author Alice McLerran on November 11 from 9 am to 5 pm at the Filipinas Heritage Library on Ayala corner Makati Avenue in Makati City.

The workshop is a chance for budding authors to have their manuscripts critiqued while spending a day with the New York-based McLerran, says SCBWI head Beulah Pedregosa Taguiwalo. “The workshop is for adults who write or want to write for children and young people—amateurs and professionals, published and unpublished authors, freelance writers, college students, teachers, parents, educators, and others who have a keen interest in children's literature. The workshop is also helpful for illustrator-writers, visual artists who are interested in the writing process, and those who are eager to know more about the kind of creative collaborations that can take place between authors and illustrators. We hope to give all the participants an intimate glimpse into what Alice describes as ‘the kind of rewriting that is such an important part of the writing process for me.’”

It’s interesting to note that, before she turned to writing for children, Alice McLerran earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of California in Berkeley, and later an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Registration will cost P1,750 until October 16, and P2,000 until Friday November 3. For more information, contact Beaulah Pedregosa Taguiwalo at beaulah.taguiwalo@yahoo.com or 0917-787-4956, or Nikki Garde Torres at nikkigarde@yahoo.com or 0917-667-1267.

Quiz Bee Foundation vice president Pettizou Tayag also wrote in to report brisk sales for their Official Quiz Bee Reviewer Book titled “Answerboards Up!” Launched at the Manila International Book Fair last month, the book has proved to be a hit, selling 1,500 copies to date.

“Surprisingly, 20% of our book sales come from yuppies and business professionals. We initially thought that it would only be parents, students and teachers who would show interest in the book. We are also a recommended reference book for libraries at public and private schools, universities and colleges,” Pettizou says.

You can get the book in all Goodwill Bookstores nationwide for only P170, or order it online through www.quizbee.org. To know more about the book or about the Quiz Bee itself and its upcoming events, you can also call the Quiz Bee Secretariat at 712-0682 or mobile 0917-892-2560 or send an email to pettizoutayag@yahoo.com.

Manileño for October 2006


I WAS one of those people happy to see Joseph Estrada leave Malacañang Palace in January 2001 in the wake of reports and revelations about his scandalously un-presidential behavior. But where does the Arroyo government today get off stamping a recent documentary on Estrada with an “X” rating?

That’s “government” in the form of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB)—the latest incarnation of what used to be called, in plainer and perhaps more honest language, the Board of Censors—the watchdog and traffic cop of anything Filipinos watch and hear on public airwaves and screens.

With all due respect to liberal-minded friends on the board such as poet Alfred Yuson (who wasn’t part of this particular review panel) and film critic Mario Hernando (who cast the sole dissenting vote), I find the MTRCB an anachronism in a supposedly democratic and modern society. It’s one of the last few vestiges of martial law, having been created in 1985 by Ferdinand Marcos through Presidential Decree No. 1986 to control the airing of anti-government propaganda. Until a Supreme Court decision (and even so, a wobbly one, having been dispensed under martial law) turned against it, that new board almost managed to get the Lino Brocka scorcher “Kapit sa Patalim” banned, supposedly because it projected a negative image of Philippine society.

But it hasn’t been just Marcos. MTRCB members who tried to exercise some openness of mind have found themselves in for a nasty shock. Shortly after warming her seat in Malacañang, President Arroyo overturned a board decision allowing the screening of “Liveshow”—a film on Manila’s wild (and real) nightlife—prompting MTRCB chairman and scholar Nick Tiongson to resign.

Indeed, for the greater part of its institutional existence, the MTRCB and its predecessors have had a long and colorful history of banning, or attempting to ban, films that may have been controversial in their content and treatment but which had gained critical acclaim elsewhere. Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” got banned; Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” almost did. To its credit—as I mentioned in this column just a while back—the current MTRCB showed some nerve by allowing the screening of “The Da Vinci Code,” despite the loud (and uninformed—he hadn’t even seen the movie or read the book, by his own admission) urgings of Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and some religious groups to have it banned.

And then the MTRCB just as quickly showed what a confused and confusing assemblage of voices it was by suspending an award-winning TV program (“I-Witness” on GMA-7) for airing a documentary that featured a 200-year-old folk ritual among women of Kalayaan, Laguna involving the use of wooden phalluses at weddings. “Distasteful and objectionable” was how MTRCB committee chairman Manuel Cases described the documentary, which showcased the research of dance scholar Ramon Obusan, recently named National Artist for Dance.

And now the MTRCB has given a documentary on the life of Estrada titled “Ang Mabuhay Para sa Masa” (To Live for the Masses) an X rating, effectively keeping it off TV screens. On what grounds, pray tell? Because it fell under restrictions sanctioning films that “threaten the political stability of the state; undermine the faith and confidence of the people in the government; [be] libelous or defamatory; [pertained] to matters that are sub judice in nature.” What the review board ostensibly found most objectionable was the documentary’s extro, which declared that “nalalapit na ang bagong umaga dahil sa lakas ng puwersa ng masa at muli nang babangon [a new day is dawning because of the power of the masses, and will rise again].”

Huh? Come again? “A new day is dawning because of the power of the masses.” That gets you banned?

As political rhetoric goes, it’s even trite and corny. But is it seditious or inflammatory? Will it drive sober (albeit unhappy) Filipinos to get off their movie seats and march to Malacañang shouting Erap’s name? Is it some kind of secret code, a la Al Qaeda, meant to spark an uprising among Erap’s unshod battalions?

For a government that’s been clucking about its stability—especially after a second impeachment motion in Congress that predictably failed—I can’t imagine what kind of service the banning of an Erap documentary can do, except to reveal just how nervous and insecure it really is. If there’s anything distasteful and objectionable in this whole affair, it’s this decision itself.

The fact is, the only reason many Pinoys think about Erap—some of them too wistfully—is because GMA hasn’t proven to be the redemptive replacement she was supposed to be. A “threat to the political stability of the State?” Try the fertilizer scam; try the mess in the military; try the ostentatious, devil-may-care behavior of those in power. Picking on a movie about your political enemy—in all likelihood a bad and lopsided production—isn’t going to score you any points for confidence and stability.

As for the MTRCB—whose members are all appointed by the President of the Philippines, so don’t tell me that politics had nothing to do with it—it’s time to change tack or close shop. (And please, my American friends, don’t even suggest that censorship is bad for Americans but okay for Filipinos.) Sure, in the United States, there’s a Motion Picture Association of America, which—in cooperation with the National Association of Theater Owners—gives the G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings that American moviegoers are familiar with. But the MPAA ratings are the result of a voluntary system set up by the industry to give parents and viewers a guide—not a legally enforceable judgment as to the quality, morality, or political volatility of a movie or TV program.

Of course, as my beer buddy Krip Yuson says, someone’s got to protect the children. I fully agree. Then let the MTRCB give descriptive—not prescriptive or proscriptive—ratings. And besides, we’re not small kids whose impressionable minds need to be shielded from stories about a talented and charismatic character who probably wined and womanized himself out of the presidency.

Penman for Monday, October 2, 2006


WALKING HOME from my class in the American Short Story—where we’ll be dealing this semester with about 50 stories from Washington Irving to Jhumpa Lahiri—I had one of those “aha!” moments that Oprah keeps talking about.

I’d been mulling over something I’d heard at a party for local Pinoys over the weekend—a remark from an American friend, John Holder, who’s married to a Filipina, has been to the Philippines many times, speaks Filipino, and knows the country better than many of us do. John observed how we seem to have a penchant for lacing our prose with big words. “I’ve even come across words I hadn’t heard in years, words like ‘pertinacious’,” John said.

That wouldn’t be too surprising, of course, if you’re Jimmy Abad, who occasionally peppers his papers (hmm, that’s a tongue-twister) with jawbreakers like “discombobulate” and “embrangle.” But then Jimmy’s a poet and a PhD, so he probably has a right more than most others to use words that your average Pepe or Pilar will never meet in a lifetime of reading, much less use in a sentence. His learning and passion for exotic words like “aposiopesis” notwithstanding, Jimmy has been very careful to employ them sparingly and precisely, knowing that the longer words get, the more likely you are to misuse them.

(Before anyone else points it out, let me hasten to admit to one such lapse in my column last week, when I wrote about having a “predilection” for hurting the people I loved the most. I knew the second I sent off the piece that there was something not quite right about that word, but it was too late to fix the problem. The problem is that “predilection” means “a preference or special liking for something,” as in “a predilection for chocolates” or “a predilection for wide-brimmed hats”—in other words, for generally positive things. The word I should’ve used was “propensity”, “an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a particular way,” such as “a propensity to miss crucial shots.” This example demonstrates that while two words might look alike and suggest generally similar things, they can have subtle shadings that could change or even subvert what you mean.)

But education—or the lack of it—hasn’t stopped many of us Pinoys from throwing words around the size of sumo wrestlers. Sometimes it’s to show off, other times it’s to intimidate; once in a while, it’s plain exuberance, such as when our old village in San Mateo finally got electricity after wallowing in sooty darkness for many months, prompting the barangay captain to sign his letters with a glowing “Electrifically yours.”

Indeed, I’ve always believed that politicians and our tradition of political bombast have a lot to do with the way we think about words and what passes for good (meaning grandiloquent) language. I parodied this in my 1992 novel Killing Time in a Warm Place, where I had the Governor introduce Ferdinand Marcos as “a man of indescribable genius, of multifarious talents, of boundless enthusiasm, the culmination, the epitome, the peerless paragon of our achievements as a race!” Elsewhere in that novel I had a character named Mandoy Imoy speak of the narrator’s father (whom you’ll recognize from last week’s piece) as a man of many and mysterious words: “Your tatay,” Mandoy Imoy said as I staggered to the gate on his arm that night in Kangleong, “he was a bright boy, what a brain the guy had! We went to the same school, did he ever tell you that? He memorized the whole multiplication table when he was five, and he knew English words nobody had ever heard of, things like, uh, fagelistic or runcimian, you ever hear words like that? What a brain. But he didn't know money. You're okay, you have a nice job, you go abroad, I think your brains are all right. But your father—ay, he should've made real money, maybe he's not so smart after all, eh? Maybe he was, uh, fagelistic, ha-ha-ha!”

This week’s “aha” moment came after I’d taught two stories: “Europe” by Henry James and “The Caballero’s Way” by O. Henry. If you’ve never read James, here’s a typical example of the prose produced by that Harvard-educated cosmopolite: “Though wasted and shrunken she still occupied her high-backed chair with a visible theory of erectness, and her intensely aged face—combined with something dauntless that belonged to her very presence and that was effective even in this extremity—might have been that of some immemorial sovereign, of indistinguishable sex, brought forth to be shown to the people in disproof of the rumour of extinction.”

Did you get that? I certainly didn’t, not until I’d looked at it twice or thrice, stumble as I did over the thicket of those polysyllabic words. But Henry James defined—for his generation and for long afterwards—the standard of literary suavity and composure, encouraging hordes of wannabe Jameses to ape the same Latinate style without achieving quite the same polish and roundness of effect in the end. Now here’s O. Henry, describing the Cisco Kid’s muchacha:

“As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.”

There’s a verbal flourish here and there, a touch of the exotic: he uses the word “vagarious” and strange phrases (to his insular audience) like “gitanas of the Basque province” but pulls it off by draping the whole production with the mantle of theater. He chooses and uses words more for dramatic than scholarly effect, and I can almost imagine him chuckling with excitement as he wrote these sentences for his public’s delectation. In other words, O. Henry—however his later critics may have deplored his unabashed sentimentality and outrageously contrived plots—was fun, and had fun. He knew exactly what he was doing, and did it to shameless excess.

I can show nothing to prove this now except my own high-school education, but I suspect that we Filipinos read O. Henry more than we did Henry James, if we even got to the latter at all. And as sacrilegious as this may sound, I don’t think we lost much in the bargain, in terms of appreciating stories that feel like they were written by a circus magician rather than by a taxidermist.

The only—the big—trouble is, we often don’t seem to know the difference, trying to sound like one Henry and coming out the other. Myself, I’ve found that as I get older, my vocabulary tends to get simpler—most of the time. Like a sign in a local car dealership reminded me the other day, “Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will do!”


SPEAKING OF big words, I usually delete e-mail messages preceded by a “FWD” without even looking at what they contain, especially when they’re addressed to a hundred people, most of whom probably do exactly as I do. But I couldn’t resist peeking into a message forwarded me by an old friend from Ann Arbor, Deling Weller, who had received it from some other Fil-Am. Just in case this skipped your mailbox, here’s the latest edition of the outrageously funny “English-Tagalog Dictionary”:

1) Contemplate - kulang ang mga pinggan
2) Punctuation - pera para maka-enrol
3) Ice Buko - nagtatanong kung ayos na ang buhok
4) Tenacious - sapatos na pang tennis
5) Calculator - tawagan kita mamaya
6) Devastation - sakayan ng bus
7) Protestant - Tindahan ng prutas
8) Statue - Ikaw ba yan?
9) Tissue - Ikaw nga!
10) Predicate - Pakawalan mo ang pusa
11) Dedicate - Pinatay ang pusa
12) Aspect - Pantusok o pandurog ng yelo
13) Deduct - Ang pato
14) Defeat - Ang paa (ng pato)
15) Detail - Ang buntot (ng pato)
16) Deposit - Ang Gripo (Call DIPLOMA if DEPOSIT is leaking)
17) City - Bago mag-utso; a number to follow 6
18) Cattle - Doon nakatila ang Hali at Leyna
19) Persuading - Unang Kasal
20) Depress - Ang nagkasal sa PERSUADING
22) Defense - Ginamit ng mga pangsulat sa kontrata sa PERSUADING
23) It Depends - Kainin mo ang bakod
24) Shampoo - Bago mag-labing-isha (11)
25) Delusion - Maluwang (kapag maluwang ang damit, eh DELUSION)
26) Delivery - Walang bayad. Kapag working lunch, eh DELIVERY na ang tanghalian
27) Profit - Patunayan mo
28) Balance Sheet - What comes out after eating a balance diet
29) Backlog - bacon saka egg
30) Beehive - magpakatino ka
31) CD-ROM - tingnan mo ang kwarto
32) Debug - ang ipis
33) Defrag - ang palaka
34) Defense - ang bakod
35) Defer - ang balahibo
36) Deflate - ang plato
37) Detest - ang eksamin
38) Devalue - 'yon ang susunod sa letrang V
39) Devote - ang boto
40) Dilemma - brownout, a!
41) Effort - 'dun nagla-land ang efflane
42) Forums - apat na kwarto
43) July - nagsinungaling ka ba?
44) Liturgy - what comes after litur F
45) Thesis - ito ay...