Shame

November 26, 2009 at 9:53 pm (Philippine History)
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Gloria, what do you have to say to this?

Shortly after Hillary’s visit, promising to aid the Philippines in the fight against the Abu Sayyaf, a much more insidious home-grown terror has raised its head:  the entrenched provincial elite.

57 people were murdered in the southern Philippines a few days ago.

Among the 57 were 17 journalists.

Let’s say you took all the journalists active on the Peninsula, gathered them together in one place — say, on the pretext of having some Thanksgiving turkey — and then set loose a fusillade of bullets. At one stroke, everyone who wrote for the local papers, gone. If you were crazy enough, you might pat yourself on the back and say, That’s an end to those pesky writers!

Or, let’s say President Obama got really really mad at Fox News. So he got Bill O’Reilly and Glen Beck and various other Fox News reporters and invited them to come to Washington, and they all got on the same plane, and then in one fell swoop –

That is how awful the situation is/was.

Years ago, self wrote a story called “Mayor of the Roses,” about the evil mayor of Calauan who raped and murdered Mary Eileen Sarmenta.

Self heard he was released.  He was supposed to serve seven consecutive life terms.  That was the sentence handed to him by a courageous judge, Harriet Demetriou. Self got a copy of the judgement. It ran to almost 150 pages.

If it’s true and he was released (though rumour sprouts like weeds in the Philippine capital), then at the very least the judge should have protection.

Gloria, what do you have to say to this?

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Today at the Asian Art Museum

October 4, 2009 at 11:45 pm (Opportunities, Philippine History, Places, Surprises, Writers and Others)
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The Asian Art Museum is astoundingly beautiful. Self only realized this today, when she actually went inside. She’s such a creature of habit: for a long time, she was mad that they moved from Golden Gate Park, for she loved wandering between the de Young and the Asian Art Museum and the Academy of Sciences.

She knew it was there, of course, standing right next to the San Francisco Main Library on Larkin Street.  But not once did she ever feel moved to step inside.  She’d look at it from the sidewalk and her overall impression would be one of heaviness, gray-ness. So unlike the MOMA, which is funky and cutting edge.

The closest she’d ever come to going to an exhibit there was the recent “Lords of Samurai” exhibit (ended Sept. 20, boo).  Ever since she discovered Kurosawa, and ever since son began to enjoy the novels of Lensey Namioka (nay, ever since she took Jeffrey Mass’s courses on the Japanese bakufu, at Stanford), she’s been fascinated by this aspect of Japanese culture. But she never actually made it inside the museum, until today.

October is Filipino American History Month (Which tireless groups worked to ensure that every October is a way for us to commemmorate our history?  Self would like to offer thanks to them, whoever and wherever they are).  Today was the first time that the Asian Art Museum undertook to host an all-day event celebrating Filipino American History Month, and self knows it took a lot of hard work and coordination between many many groups of people, but self thinks the bulk of the work was done by these three:
Read the rest of this entry »

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Better Late Than Never: Mila D. Aguilar on Cory Aquino

October 4, 2009 at 3:36 am (Opportunities, Philippine History, Places, Quotes, Voices, Writers and Others)
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Self happened upon Mila D. Aguilar’s first-person account in the September 2009 issue of Filipinas Magazine.  (Self is proud to say: she’s been subscribing to the magazine since the very first issue):

My President has been laid to rest. Now I can break my silence. For the one who presently sits on her manufactured throne is not my president. She never was.

My President is she who freed me from a Marcos prison in 1986. I know that she alone is not responsible for 1986, for the Read the rest of this entry »

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“Ginseng” Redux: The President’s Special Research Project

August 30, 2009 at 8:02 am (Books, Philippine History, Places, Quotes, short fiction)
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The building was old. How old exactly, no one was certain. The records of the construction were lost in the great fire that struck Manila in 1915. Judging from the style of its architecture and its ancient, weather-beaten look, however, it had been built at the turn of the century.

This was the building that housed the National Archives. The shelves were full of dusty, yellowing documents from Spanish times, newspapers with courageous names like La Independencia and La Solidaridad, and books on history and geography compiled by the Spanish friars. No one had looked at the books for a very long time. They were piled together in haphazard fashion on the shelves. The pages were coming loose from the bindings. The newspapers were slowly crumbling to pieces. Perhaps the past was not very important, or perhaps no one wanted to remember that before the New Society of the dictator Roberto Suarez Gomez, there had been such a thing as an intellectual life in the country. At any rate, the building’s long, narrow corridors were empty. Nothing disturbed the shafts of sunlight slanting quietly through the high windows.

    — From self’s first book, Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila (Calyx Books, Corvallis, Oregon). Also published in the Philippines by the Ateneo University Office of Research & Publications

NOTE: Self’s great-grandfather, his brother, and Antonio Luna were among the earliest editorial staff of the real La Solidaridad. The first name of the paper was “La Patria,” but the new American occupiers found it too incendiary a title. So they changed the name to La Independencia and published it in Malabon, which at the time (1898) was beyond the Americans’ jurisdiction. The maiden issue ran on Sept. 3, 1898.

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The New Mayor of Colma

April 18, 2009 at 3:27 pm (Philippine History, Quotes, Relatives, Surprises)
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First, there was the name beneath the picture: Joanne del Rosario. Hmmm, del Rosario is Dearest Mum’s maiden name. Curiosity piqued, self reads further:

” . . . her family tree includes great granduncle and revolutionary hero General Gregorio del Pilar, great grandfather and Malolos signatory Simplicio del Rosario, and brother and immediate past Ambassador to Washington Albert del Rosario . . . “

It was the “Malolos signatory” that did it. Self’s great-grandfather was also a Malolos signatory. But the name “Simplicio,” somehow, doesn’t Read the rest of this entry »

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A Meditation, A Lament: Allen Gaborro’s “EDSA Forgotten”

February 23, 2009 at 1:53 am (Philippine History, Places, Quotes)
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“EDSA Forgotten” by Allen Gaborro (FilAm Star, February 16-28, 2009)

For most Filipinos, the remembrance of their country’s past has not been much of a useful resource nor a compelling pursuit.  It is a signature theme of our globalized century that the world rotates around economics.  Filipinos have become creatures of this theme.  They know as well as anyone else that the world rotates around economics.  Filipinos have become creatures of this theme.  They know as well as anyone else that economics has been placed front and center on the global stage.  Today’s Filipino, perhaps more than at any other time in Philippine history, has contorted this historical inheritance in the quest for material goods, so much so that a blinding philistinism has set in.

The EDSA I uprising took place twenty-three years ago in what was then, for a few days at least, a Philippines reborn.  Those heady days in February 1986 saw, probably for the first time since World War Two, Filipinos truly united in two noble causes:  the removal of a corrupt dictator to begin the awesome task of rebuilding the republic into the nation that they always thought it should have been.

EDSA I was Filipinos’ best chance in years to right so many wrongs from the past. It was the chance of a lifetime for Filipinos, a chance to wipe the slate clean and to start anew. History it seemed, was finally rewarding Filipinos for their long suffering, for their collective martyrdom, and for their loss of respect in the international community and amongst themselves.

Like the abortive 1899 Malolos Constitution however, EDSA I had an abbreviated shelf-life in the Filipino consciousness. Once everyone came down to earth from the euphoric atmosphere of EDSA, they had to face the daunting Philippine reality that loomed before them. That reality would eclipse the miracle of EDSA I and what its significance was to the Filipino people.

What did EDSA I mean to Filipinos, other than the deposing of a reviled autocrat? In an essay for the 10th anniversary of the EDSA revolt I wrote that the event launched the Philippines “on a refreshingly new course: the nation, once again united under the banner of freedom and democracy, could now be pointed towards the collective goal of improving all aspects of Filipino life. People Power, coming in the wake of an exposed military conspiracy for the seizure of government, became a lesson for all Filipinos, a lesson in both conscience and consciousness.”

In the essay, I added that EDSA I also “represented a new dawn for the common Filipino. With their future all but mortgaged and their existence turned into a reservoir of despair and degradation, the common Filipino folk were shown by the new leaders of the country the tapestry of social and economic reform. People Power helped revive the hearts and minds of the masses for it granted them a hearing for their long-ignored needs and concerns. The masses now discerned a positive meaning in the countless wrongs and deprivations that had been inflicted on them under the Marcos administration. The success of People Power promised to reward their suffering with their rebirth as a proud, liberated, and prosperous people.”

How hollow my observations sound now for Filipinos have squandered the miracle of EDSA I. Since 1986, the Philippines has experienced the historic continuum of growing socio-economic inequality, rampant political corruption, massive levels of poverty, and a host of other intractable problems, problems that should have been alleviated, if not completely solved, by now had the country had any lasting semblance of credible and effective political leadership. Whatever episodes of success have actually materialized in the story of the post-EDSA I Philippines have fallen through the proverbial cracks. 

In the 21st century Philippines, materialistic attitudes do the talking. History meanwhile has devolved into a redundant, almost irrelevant feature of Philippine society. For these reasons, EDSA I has been relegated to being a historical afterthought, especially for Filipino youths. Older folks lament the fact that the so-called “EDSA spirit” is barely visible on the radar screen of younger generation Filipinos. These younger Filipinos simply have other more acquisitive priorities than thinking about something that happened before many of them were born.

The more time we put between our present era and that of the seminal EDSA uprising, the more distant the intrinsic value of Philippine history becomes at our own peril. Modernity has taught Filipinos to avoid living in the past. Yet, they can never escape that past until they understand its lessons and implications for the future.

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Reading for the Day: Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s “People in the War”

February 22, 2009 at 7:16 am (Philippine History, Places, Voices, Writers and Others)
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Self discovered this short story only this evening, dear blog readers.  It’s from the book, Brown River, White Ocean:  an Anthology of Philippine Literature in English (Rutgers University Press), edited by Luis H. Francia:

Our front door opened right onto the sidewalk, and the street sloped down to a lily-dappled river, in our house in the city.  Across the river a soap opera was always taking place:  a man with two wives lived in an unpainted house beside the lumber mill.  When the sun went down the wives began to quarrel, clouting each other with wooden clogs, and a bundle of clean wash came flying out of the window into the silt below.  We watched them chase each other down the stairs, clawing each other’s clothes off and rolling down the embankment, and the dogs of the neighborhood surrounded them, barking and snarling –  till from the lumber mill the husband emerged –  a shirtless apparition with a lumber saw in his hand.

At least once a month they held a wake on the river bank.  They rented a corpse, strung up colored lights and gambled till the wee hours of the morning.  Sometimes a policeman wandered in –  having heard some rumor, and poked around with his night stick.  But there would be the corpse, and it was truly dead, there would be the card games, but no suspicion of betting (the chips having been scooped away together with the basket of money) and the policeman would saunter away, wiping a tear, leaving the poor relatives to their grief and their gambling.

We must move to another neighborhood, my father said every day.  We planted trees to screen them from sight, we planted trees to preserve our respectability.  A truck unloaded two acacia trees on our doorstep, saplings no bigger than I.  The houseboy made a bamboo fence around their trunks and every afternoon the maids hauled out pails to water them.

Self is completely, completely entranced by the dream-like weave of this story.  She would like dear blog readers to know that Ms. Cordero Fernando is alive and well and still beautiful and still living in Manila, and those dear blog readers who reside in the Philippines should count themselves lucky because they can go to a bookstore or a library and begin to read everything this writer has written.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Another List: Non-Working Holidays in the Philippines

February 7, 2009 at 8:42 pm (Holidays, Philippine History, Places)
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Since hubby is currently engaged in deep conversation with someone from the San Francisco Symphony (We are second-year subscribers, natch, and there’s a Tchaikovsky piano concert we’re attending tonight), self will attempt to distract herself from eavesdropping by engaging in some useful activity.

Luckily, she has close at hand a list she cut out of The Philippine Star of 9 January 2009.  The plan for the day is to mark these in her calendar, so she can post something commemmorative on each of these days.  We’ll see.  (This is probably # 57 of her 2009 New Year’s Resolutions :-) )  Looking over the list, self thinks she’ll probably have to be pretty creative to say something about “Last Day of the Year Holiday”, Dec. 31.  Which is usually a holiday here, too, in the States, only we call it “New Year’s Eve.”

In addition, self only just noticed that the list of holidays begins with June 12.  Wha’ happened to the first half of the year?  Holy Week and so forth and so on?  Oh well, let’s just say this is an abbreviated list :

Independence Day:    June 12

Ninoy Aquino Day:    Aug. 21

National Heroes’ Day:   Aug. 31

All Saints’ Day:    Nov. 1

Bonifacio Day:    Nov. 30

Christmas

Rizal Day:    Dec. 30

Last Day of the Year:    Dec. 31

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Growing Up Filipina: Excerpts from a Review

February 4, 2009 at 3:37 pm (Books, Philippine History, Places, Quotes)
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Self’s review of Helen Madamba Mossman’s A Letter to My Father:  Growing Up Filipino and American (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008  ) was featured in the Winter 2008 issue of The MultiCultural Review:

Among the many pleasures afforded by reading Mossman’s account of growing up as the child of a Filipino father and an American mother, there is the sheer pleasure of encountering a vanished world:  the world of pre-World War II Philippines . . .  Her father, who was not a rich man, got to pursue graduate studies in the United States, where he met and married Mossman’s mother, an Oklahoma farm girl with ambition.  The couple returned to the Philippines, where Mossman’s mother set up housekeeping on the island of Negros while her father worked for a rich sugar-growing family.

Initially, life on the island was idyllic:  the Philippines was far from the center of world politics, and news of the conflict in Europe reached the family as a distant echo.  Their first contact with the Japanese came in January 1942:  Mossman and her younger brother were “building sand forts” by a lagoon near their house when her brother said, “Hear those planes coming in?  They sound like washing machine motors.” . . .

For the next two years, the family lived in hiding, with little more than the clothes on their backs.  Mossman’s account of their ordeal is riveting, but more hardships followed when the family returned to the United States, a country where racism was an ever-present reality.

*   *   * *

And here are the rest of the books self is interested in reading, after perusing the Winter 2008 issue of The Multicultural Review:

After reading Anne Serafin’s review:  Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agalusa’s novel, The Book of Chameleons, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

After reading Dena El-Saffar’s review:  Deborah Akers’ short story collection, Oranges in the Sun; and Saudi Arabian author Abdulbaker’s novel, Wolves of the Crescent Moon.

After reading Jaswinder Gundara’s review:  The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories:  Flash Fiction From Contemporary China, translated from the Chinese by the editor, Shouhua Qi.

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The Chinese in the Philippines

January 21, 2009 at 2:36 am (Food and Drink, Philippine History, Places, Quotes)
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Breakfast this morning:  daing, fried rice, Bacolod chorizo, boiled saba bananas with muscovado.  Oh God, can self ever stop eating???

Since today self has no car (Dear Bro mumbled something about “color coding” being in effect) self has to content herself with roaming the thickets of her imagination, perusing newspaper articles and imagining herself at the place being described.  (Of course, National Museum is open today, the day when self has no car.  Such is the very unfortunate timing that seems to be one of the hallmarks of this entire trip. But, once again, I digress.)

In yesterday’s Inquirer was an article on an interesting museum in Intramuros:  Bahay Tsinoy.

Among the many interesting things self learns from reading the article, which is by Queena N. Lee-Chua:

  • “The Chinese found the Philippines trustworthy . . .  The Chinese would often leave the goods with the village chief, who guaranteed that his people would pay for them.  Then the Chinese would go to other shores for more trade and come back after many months, assured that the Filipinos would give back native goods in exchange.”
  • “The Chinese helped build many churches, foremost among them San Agustin Church, which still stands today.  The arms on the chairs are of Chinese design, and there are dragons on the roof . . . “
  • “Many leading personalities in politics, religion, business, media and the arts are of Chinese descent like Corazon Aquino, the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, Henry Sy, John Gokongwei, Lucio Tan, Julie Yap Daza, and Jose Mari Chan.”
  • “There is no such thing as pansit Canton or lumpiang Shanghai . . .  in Canton or in Shanghai.  Since Philippine society was so open to Chinese influences, particularly in food, perhaps the pansit done here was tagged Canton because it was served by a Chinese cook . . .  all vegetables with tsay and taw –  petsay, kintsay, kuchay, tawge, sitaw, bataw –  were introduced by the Chinese.”

It’s a very, very interesting article.  Bahay Tsinoy is at Anda St., corner Cabildo, Intramuros, Manila.

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