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epilogue

1/5/2017

Victoria and I took the Spring 1989 semester off from Union Seminary. On our way to India, in Bangkok, I got a letter from my father. It was an ecstatic letter written in a large generous hand. He had just learned from an East German genealogist with whom he was corresponding that his great grandfather Seyfarth was a helmsman on a merchant ship.

One hundred years ago, my father wrote, Chinese pirates in the South China Sea had attacked them. They had to winter in Hong Kong. The South China Sea! Where you are now, your ancestors have been before! To my father, who has worked painstakingly to recover the storyline of his East German laboring ancestors, this news held an immense significance. His own work in Asia had been a return.

If we track back and out far enough in any of our lives, our stories dispel the illusion of fixed boundaries, fixed national origins. We all create in some ways what Australian aborigines call "song lines", a musical cartography of the land. By singing the story as they traverse the land, they bring it into being. By my father's letter, I traveled with a new sense of the a kind of mixed up, mestizo history. We are always leaving, always coming home.

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despedita/ buenvenida

1/5/2017

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It’s 1972 and none of us know that Marcos will remain in power for fifteen years, Imelda will dance with George Hamilton, thousands will be ‘salvaged’ or disappeared, Ninoy Aquino shot in the head at this airport where I am waiting for my flight to leave.

Nixon will approve Operation Breakfast, the carpet bombing over Cambodia, then instigates the Watergate break-in and finally faces impeachment, Vietnamese ‘boat people” will wash ashore on coasts throughout Southeast Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, even across the South China Sea in the Philippines; the Khmer Rouge will walk victoriously into Phnom Penh and empty the city, to be expulsed four years later by Vietnamese troops. President Pak Chung Hee, who has just declared Martial Law in Korea, will be deposed.

I don’t know any of that or when I will return.

And I can tell you now: we never forget our first homes, whatever colonies they inhabit. Their images fill the rooms of other homes we choose.

Goodbyes are necessary.

They serve as a ritual act to establish what Sanchez Ferlosio calls "protective borders" between those left behind and those who leave. When misfortune strikes and one must flee, the memory of those goodbyes salve the ache of separation. Saying goodbye hides the fear of no return, that once gone we will wander the skies wearily in search of a resting place.

But we are always leaving and arriving. And so it is with this story, a difficult intuitive journey that ends only as I am really prepared to go. Theology, I have learned, reveals itself on the road. "The clue of the beginning," offers Nelle Morton, a feminist theologian, "is more often than not discovered until near the end - entirely too late to back up and start over again."

We are always leaving always coming home.

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rain, bombs, blackout

1/5/2017

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Two months after the last of my family leaves, it begins to rain. It rains continually for three weeks. The typhoons didn’t really hit us until the last one. The floods have risen considerably the rice bowl region of Luzon has been under six feet of water. About 300 people are dead. Manila is a soggy soggy mess. I’ve helped with relief work last Monday and yesterday, filling boxes with food.

President Marcos declares curfew to finish repairing the roads, he says. Curfew: once you’re somewhere at 10pm you can’t leave til 4am.

Then the bombings began around Manila from March through August. They're meant to send a message, not massacre. The blasts occurr late at night or early in the morning so few people were hurt. Here is a calendar of the bombings: in March, the Filipinas Orient Airways and the South Vietnamese embassy were hit. In July, bombs shattered places I knew—the Phil-American Life building where we’d gone for theater, and the American Express office. In August, the bombs hit first at PLTD (the phone company), the Philippines Sugar Institute, then a water main in Quezon City, again the Phil-Am Life building, and then an armoured car in front of the PBC bank. Later that day, a twelve-pound bomb was found in the Dept of Foreign Affairs.

And then on the night of Wednesday, September 20th, the real explosion. I joined friends for Bernstein's Mass at the Meralco Theater along Ortegas Avenue. We learn the next morning that just down on Ortegas Ave, Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile escapes an assassination attempt -- there are b&w photos of bullet holes in his car.

The 1935 Constitution states that the President can declare martial law only in cases of rebellion, insurrection or invasion or imminent danger thereof.

On September 21, 1972, Marcos declares Martial Law.

That Thursday, no one goes to work or school. We rise early at Villanueva household to a state of controlled chaos. Everyone is home in the most tense of lockdown holidays: Uncle Vil, Auntie Eva, Clyde, Leslie and Kenny. The radio is buzzing incoherently, the Manila Bulletin never arrives, and all TV stations are snowing. Someone in PhilAm subdivision comes over to tell us that there is gunfire at the ABS-CBN TV station nearby on Bohol Avenue. Lopez, the president of the company was a fierce critic of Marcos, and this is payback time. (He was imprisoned along with Sergio Osmena II for five years.)

When the black rotary phone starts ringing, it never seems to stop. Uncle Vil tells us some of it. Some times he listens into the receiver, hangs up, and confers in a low voice with Aunti Eva, who shakes her head slowly, in disbelief. He does tell us this: there are emergency meetings in Congress, the military arrived in jeeps at houses last night and detained this and that church person, a few have disappeared. We had no idea the massive impact of Marcos' next move.

Enrile writes in his memoir,
“Political noises and wrangling were dissipated. Rallies and demonstrations disappeared from the street. Congress was closed. Schools, colleges and universities were also initially closed right after the declaration of martial law but after a month, classes resumed except in a number of colleges and universities. The radio airlines and television broadcasts were cleared of the incendiary and bombastic attacks of commentators. They were silenced.”

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epilogue

despedita/ buenvenida

rain, bombs, blackout

Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

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