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1971 Erika's long hot summer

11/30/2014

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Mom organizing slides as Erika takes shape.

After the 1971 New Year, Manila bursts into flame —six big fires in one week, the worst in the city's history. In a demonstration over increasing oil prices, students and jeepney drivers blockade Sampaloc’s streets. They called it the “Battle of Mendiola.” Students press against a military blockade, capture a fire truck and ram it against the gates of the Malacanang Palace. Through the night they battle police and non-striking drivers. Six students are killed and students use TNT pillboxes which explode on impact. When a few backfire, three student dormitories burn to the ground.
This triggers a wave of student protests I've already told you about: the “first Quarter Storm."

Mom, weary and depressed, calls us to the sala.It’s not about the demonstrations, strikes, or fires.
Even dad joins us. This is serious. So we act wenky.
“Could you settle down for a minute, I have something to say.”
Oh, too bigat.
“You’re pregnant” I quip. She shoots me a dark look. My stomach churns. This is my 40-year- old mother.
“How did you know?”
Oh.my.god. Mom is pregnant.

We are already embarrassed by our budding and nubile bodies, with our pheromones in fruitless bloom. With a mother so thoroughly modest, let's call it an annunciation.

“Wow, how many months?” Johanna. Someone had to ask.
“Five.”
In unison, “Five?!”
Scott calculates, “Another Poethig by….May.”
She looks heavy-lidded and withdrawn. Jo and I relapse to silly Manila Girlness.
We can finally adjourn.
We get silly: "How about Raven Coal Black, or Edgar Allan Poe(thing)?" Mom and dad settle on a long middle name. Sentimental: a Poethig scrap book for posterity in which we feature prominently. Then return to teen solipsism. I embark on my anthropological journey southward right after she arrives.

It's so hot by April that the bomba (Rated X) film, "Erika’s Long Hot Summer" conquers our imagination.

Erika Christy Peter Poethig arrives on May 3rd at St. Luke's Hospital. She's born before dad can get there.
The only Poethig born in the Philippines.
Spunky Erika.

This hot-hot-hot summer, Eleanor Palm, Johanna and I turn to swimming pools. There’s a pool at PhilAm, but it’s crammed with kids. We discover Sulu Hotel, an easy jeepney ride up Quezon Blvd. It's small, often deserted, and the staff are easy going, so we don modest bikinis and swathe ourselves in coconut oil. Johanna’s JASMS barkada joins us – Marilee, Nene, Marilyn, Valerie, wild happy burgis girls. Sometimes we bring Margaret, Margie Palm and their friends to convince our mothers we're generous.

Hot-hot-hot politics are brewing a block from Sulu Hotel. At the "Concon," the Constitutional Convention, three hundred twenty delegates rewrite the Philippine 1935 constitution modeled after the American constitution. The cynics (almost everyone) say this is a Marcos ploy to extend presidential term limits to eight years. A bribing scandal to extend term limits proves it true.

We think this hot convergence presages Erika's political acumen.

Since it's an election year, the campaigns are equally hot and controversial. In August, at Plaza Miranda by the Quiapo Church, someone lobs a grenade onto the platform where Liberal party candidates are speaking. Our very own Protestant Sen Jovito Salonga is swept into the maelstrom. Marcos suspends the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. He blames the bombing on the communists, although the Liberal party is the opposition. In popular retaliation, three months later, the Liberals win a majority of the Senate seats, and only two Marcos candidates are elected.

It only promises to get hotter.

Halter gals

Meanwhile, in Makati with the burgis

My latest depressive composition begins, "everyone's on downers I don't need a pill to get me there."
In June, at the start of the new school year, I glumly comply with parental demands, sentenced to American purgatory.
"OK, I'll go to International School."
So, no bus-jeepney-through-Quiapo to UP Prep, instead I board the JUSMAG bus with military brats or take a taxi from the Quezon Circle along Hiway 54 through Cubao, over the Guadalupe Bridge into gleaming, suburban Makati to the imperialist, burgis International School.

At least I discover the existentialists. Camus lives with me on the dark side of my moon. I read The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, then Kafka's Metamorphosis. But the Camus I love is, Lyrical Essays, drunk on the Mediterranean sun.

To graduate early, I take additional correspondence courses so that by the end of December 1972. The plan is to go to college in the U.S. So, I sign up for all the writing options at IS: the newspaper, Kudyapi, the high school poetry journal for the second year in a row, the yearbook. Mrs. Silverman, a New Yorker who has also introduced me to John Ciardi and Robinson Jeffers, suggests Rutgers, her alma mater.
"It has a good major for Creative Writing."
But Anthropology is my only love and there is no place in the world for Anthropology but the University of Chicago.
I don’t say that back to her.

1970Scott leaves UP for College of Wooster,

http://www.arkibongbayan.org/2011/2011-02Feb01-DilimanCommune/dcfeb

If 1970 was the Congress of the Streets, this year inaugurates the Battle of University of the Philippines, Diliman. When Sampaloc ignites, the Manila campuses catch fire.

Our "Brother Love" becomes a college freshman at University of the Philippines at Dilliman. He takes a bus past Monumento to Quezon Blvd to the acacia-lined campus. He attends Hair as an induction. It may be the Age of Aquarius in America, but in his UP English class, they're comparing Vietnam to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. His classes are like sputtering spark plugs - bright, out, hot, dead.

The Diliman tempest arrives in January. Radical students, led by Ericson Boculinao president of the UP Student Council, set up barricades along University Avenue to protest oil prices. When police remove the blockades, someone shoots. It breaks into all-out war returning bullets with pillboxes and Molotov cocktails. We hear that tear gas cleared out the ladies’ dorms.

Scott walks to Basilan Road, shaken. A UP professor, rebuffed at the barricades, had returned with three guns, a helmet and vest and began shooting at the students, killing one. UP students retaliate by burning the professor’s car, bombing the UP guard house, and breaking windows in the Administration Building.

At first UP President Lopez takes a permissive stand. He removes police from the campus on Wednesday to prevent violence, and negotiating with students and faculty. Many of the faculty who live on campus were practically incommunicado since no phones worked, but they and other students are afraid to leave because of looting. In the meantime, pressure groups call for a return to law and order in the university, the resignation of President Lopez and a police take-over.

Gradually, the students take full control of the campus, and set up the “Diliman Commune”. The Diliman Commune set up checkpoints in and out of campus. They prevented all traffic in and out, except for some who wanted to walk. They renamed the buildings, flew red flags from the roofs, manned the radio station, broadcasting revolutionary music and analysis all day. We heard that they commandeered the Chemistry department for molotov cocktails and the Home Economics kitchens for baon for their kasamas at the barricades.

Diliman Commune posts this statement on Feb 13, 1971:

"WHEREAS, the UP Student Council has expressed solidarity with the Filipino people in their valiant struggle against the American imperialist oil cartel and its local bureaucrat-capitalist allies;

WHEREAS, the UPSC has endorsed the barricade as a form of protest against such evils;

WHEREAS, the UPSC vehemently condemns the fascist-puppet State and its campus agents for employing brutally sadistic methods in suppressing legitimate dissent;

WHEREAS, the UPSC salutes the militant resistance put up by the broad United Front of progressive students, faculty members, non-academic workers, and campus residents who resolutely struggled to defend and liberate the University;

BE IT RESOLVED AS IT IS HEREBY RESOLVED, that the UPSC commend the revolutionary courage of the heroic defenders of the Diliman Commune against the fascist State and its campus collaborators.

An alumnus of UP Prep, Scott, no radical, is sympathetic. When the mayor of Quezon City and others negotiate with students to remove the barricades, he joins a “fire brigade” line to disentangle the barricade and return the chairs to their classrooms.

The College of Wooster now seemed like his best option. So my oldest brother applies to Wooster in February and is gone by July.

When he turns 18 on July 13, dad takes him to the US Embassy to register for the draft. We hadn't thought about that, so St. Margaret prays for a high number. Mom tells grandmother, “I don’t think Scott has thought about leaving nearly as much as he has thought about getting his two papers in anthropology done.”

He writes papers, continues to deny. Then finally, days before the flight, he packs all his important objects: jeepney signs for Espana Taft Paco, his collection of bus tickets, 12th and 13th century porcelain bowls found at grave sites in Tala caves. Forget the clothes. “Here, take this,” he passes his record player to a surprised Johanna.

Dad is going with Scott. I wear my new copper-colored peasant blouse hipster pants and macrame belt. We chug happy Erika, pass her around from hip to hip. Scott’s the first to go and gets a real despedida send-off. UP Prep friend Alex, George Padolina, our SS Wright stalwarts. It’s crazy and hot at the airport terminal since the aircon is broken. We gather, mingle and talk about nothing, just to linger.

We hear Philippine Airlines’ last call for Hong Kong and they haven’t gone through immigration!! “Go, go now!” Dad trails Scott down through the closed doors. We think they’r going to come back, but in the confusion, they don’t return. So we dash to the departure deck and wave to the plane as it taxis, takes off, up into the smoggy air. Like that, Scott’s gone. We stand there watching a little longer, then go home.

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Christmas 1970

11/22/2013

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By the close of 1970, neither Pope Paul VI's visit nor the sugary glow of a thousand Christmas parols can lighten spirits. We are worn down from wildcat strikes and student unrest, brownouts, typhoons, floods, fires and looting. After the battering typhoons, sickness sweeps through the city.

An undercurrent of anxiety wends through the house. Dad’s looking for a job in the States, Scott is edgy at UP, I am now traveling to International School in Makati, Margaret is being bullied by her two American girl friends at JASMS, and mother has a secret she isn't sharing. Only Johanna seems immune to the pall that has fallen over us. We are thus determined to make an event out of Christmas. During the “forced vacation” (Scott’s term) of so many typhoons, floods and student demonstrations, Scott carves a block print in Brother Love style: Peace-Hope-Joy. Mom assembles us, her Christmas elves, to address and stamp the 200 letters. Margaret, already the most organized, helps mom bake a fruitcake before a late-season typhoon arrives. Scott wins the jostle for trimming rights, so our shiny aluminum tree is adorned with red crepe flowers. Somehow we know this is our last Christmas as this Poethig constellation under the Southern Cross.

Mom describes our gift buying to in a letter to grandmother:

Margaret is the first to buy and wrap her presents. She gets them all out of her P2.45 a week allowance and never asks for a subsidy. This year her presents included a piece of lead found after the typhoon which she gave to Scott to melt into peace symbols, a box of carefully burned matches which were usable as charcoal for Johanna to draw with. She made chokers for Kerry out of velvet ribbon with buttons or lace. I got a block ring she made at school and a baby bottle.

Johanna saves her money, plans presents carefully and in advance, and often gives expensive gifts.This year she ordered the popular very wide belts to be laced up the front and worn with peasant-style dresses from a shoemaker in Marikina. They didn’t arrive on time, because the man’s wife had a baby, but when she did get them they were a big hit. She’s now going to take orders and set up a business.

Scott takes presents very seriously and loves to shop for them. He can never keep a secret, which is just as well this year as four times he bought presents duplicated by others. He and Kerry bought Dick identical umbrellas, he and Johanna both gave me a telephone book (Hagen [the dog] ate up the last one), he and Martha Clark both gave Johanna an art pen and he bought Kerry a book of poems she had already gotten from someone else (that didn’t end the coincidences. Kerry bought Johanna large gold loop earrings. Later Johanna shopped at the same Cubao store and saw the earrings and bought herself a pair!)

Kerry never has any money, can’t think of what to buy, and usually ends up giving Dick a collection of her poems. In self-defense she usually goes together with someone in giving presents. This year Scott gave way to her and let her give the umbrella to Dick, I volunteered to receive the poems, Johanna picked out sunglasses for Scott, and she contributed to the family present to Margaret.

Margaret's dollhouse is mom’s project, so we are all enlisted. We know she imagines a Manila version of her Victorian dollhouse in Dayton, Ohio. The magnificent two story house her father made had wallpapered rooms and exquisite tiny furnishings. Manila’s carpenters are rebuilding real houses after the typhoon, so mom orders picture frames and Scott hinges them together in pairs and secures cardboard for freestanding walls. I glue Christmas wrap wallpaper. Johanna stitches a velvet and felt wardrobe. How to replace the crippled, aging dolls? Our dog Hagen chewed off their arms and Skipper's head has fallen off the neck knob. No matter, Margaret says. She likes to comb Skipper's hair. Barbies have not yet made it to Manila. Mom phones Marie, grandmother's former Peace Corps roommate. Marie's back in the Philippines since her new husband is working on "population control". This time she has PX privileges. Our wiry, blond American angel arrives with Skipper and Christie.

We labor on the dollhouse through Christmas Eve day. Mom fights with the Singer sewing machine to finish Scott's costume of Hell for “The House by the Stable.” She calls it "Faustian." I have to look that up. SS Wright Auntie Joy is the director. Her husband, Cesar Virata, is now Finance Secretary of the Philippines, so we have a real star on our SS Wright tree.

After the long Quezon City-Malate round trip, we plunk down in the sala. I slump on the couch.
“Haaay, let's open presents tomorrow” I sigh. Johanna will have none of it.
“We have to open presents tonight. It’s tradition!”
So, slowly, then with more delight, we deliver our gifts to the aluminum tree, feel a bit better for the look, a little paltry with a sense of plenty. Margaret’s dollhouse sits on a table under a miniature tree, with Christie and Skipper nattily dressed.

We set candles around the sala and celebrate peace-hope-joy.

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Yoling 1970, Yolanda 2013

11/20/2013

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There is no way to write about Yoling without a fearful nod to the devouring maw of Yolanda. The names of these November she-furies are now "retired." I never knew a wilder storm than Yoling in 1970, and I can't imagine the ferocious winds of this new era. For earlier reflection on Pagasa's names for storms and their impact, go back to my post Bagyo on Dading.

http://www.rappler.com/nation/special-coverage/weather-alert/43085-20131107-yolanda-am-update

Both Yoling and Yolanda had a Kali-like ferocity. I am stricken with sadness at the suffering and hope of survivors, furious at those who capitalize on it, and obsessed with figures, stories and conditions of recovery.

Yoling was the mistress of her own historical moment. She was the twenty-seventh named storm and seventh super typhoon of the 1970 Pacific typhoon season. Yoling was the deadliest typhoon to sweep through Manila until Ondoy in 2009. She was, in a small way, our Yolanda. I am telling 1970's stories, so let this be my envelope to hold this larger disaster.

http://www.weather.unisys.com/hurricane/w_pacific/1970/index.html

Yoling was the whip-tail of the 1970 "triplet" storms, separated only by days or weeks. The most fierce was Typhoon Sening, third most deadly storm through Luzon til Yolanda, a super typhoon at 175 mph (275 kph). It left thousands homeless and 500 dead. Typhoon Titang followed a few days later. Its single fatal landfall left 600 dead. But we Manilenos remember Yoling with more dread. She cut straight across Luzon from November 17 though 20. Yoling ran amuck, with a peak intensity of 155 mph or 250 kph diminished to 130 mph when she arrived in Manila, but she was still a fury.

I was babysitting at the gracious Makati manse of Rev. Leon, pastor of Union Church, the American church in Manila. "Ok, I will be their American ate." I'd been pleased when Rev. Leon asked me to stay with the kids while he and his wife took a short trip to Hong Kong. I didn't know the kids, but Union Church library had fed my craving for Nancy Drew, Ozma, Sherlock Holmes, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and a host of literary creatures. I had deep utang. The Leon children were 7, 5 and 1 ½. We were a houseful, since the yaya of the infant, a cook and driver were also there.

Memory is murky from this distance, and I don't remember any of their names. But I do know Typhoon Signal Number Three alarmed us (with the memory of Sening so fresh). We knew to prepare for the worst. Since there would soon be no phone-electricity-water, I called my Basilan Road family to check in and for reassurance. Three little children in Signal #3 is a bad convergence. The cook checked the fridge; we prepared candles for a dark night and the yaya wisely set up a play room in the back study. Makati had a patrician feel in the 1970's with expansive parks and sturdy two story homes. But Yoling respected no one. She arrived in a fury, stripping off prim red roofs and hurling them across the field. She was wild, wild, downing acacias and palm trees; she ripped out their foliage like hair. The Leon house was not spared. An hour into the storm, the sliding glass doors shattered and wet wind whipped through the lanai and living room. Glass spattered in a whirl of rain and sharp wind. We played in the back room. "Where are mommy and daddy?" they asked.

Then, that sound of iron ripping off its nails, a hair-raising metal screech as the roof rips off. Now we could hear the wind in wrap-around sound. I ran upstairs trying to decide what to save. Up in the muddy sky, the storm kept singing to itself. Here, it set its wet skirt down on the bedrooms - the mattress drunk and soppy, and bureau in wild disarray. What to save, so I scampered in teenage wisdom: electronic equipment first, and sticking them in closets, between sheets to hide from potential looters (the Lyons themselves called to ask where I'd hidden things it later on.) After several trips I joined everyone in the study room. It was a dismal sight. The little one buried her face in her yaya's breast, too frightened to cry, and the little boy looked up at me drenched with misery.

For a moment the howling ceased. I slipped out to the front yard and looked up. Her purple bruise of an eye gazed down, assessing her damage. I gave her silent tribute. The second winds seemed less terrible. As her final wave of hurling winds left us, the staff and I assessed the damage. The house was wilted, wet and dangerous, but the kitchen and their room was dry. Concerned about our safety the kind driver returned from his own home. Perhaps if I'd known someone in their church, we would have stayed in Makati, but, like the children, I wanted my family. "Bantayan ako ditto," the cook assured us, more brave than she felt, I'm sure. So the rest of us piled into the car for the tortuous post-Yoling trip along Hiway 54 -- past downed trees and telephone poles, tangled and dangling electric wires, over Guadalupe Bridge and shattered homes, past Fort Aguinaldo and Camp Crame, through flooded Cubao, around the rotunda past Quezon Boulevard to Philam homes. We stalled a few times in the flooding and gasped at the damage. People milled everywhere, shell shocked but already assessing damage for recovery.

PhilAm houses fared a little better because they were low. "Kerry!" mom exclaimed, surprised to find me at the door with two children, a yaya and baby in tow. The following day was bright, hot, and blue. But there was no electricity or water and the food in the fridge was spoiling. The Basilan road house of eight eased its shoulders to take in another four. The littlest cried without ceasing; absorbing the anxiety of her siblings. Brother and sister, certain they had been abandoned, played politely with us or quietly on their own, as hostages might who want their tormentors to forget them. "When are mommy and daddy coming?" "Soon," said mom in a way only mothers know. There was enough to do, waiting in lines for water at the fire hydrant, clearing brush, trying to find food for all of us, and how others were faring. Mom telegraphed the parents. "Oh, don't tell them," I begged her. Don't ruin their holiday. Now I think, what planet denial was I living on? Two days later, guilty anxious parents swept up their orphaned children. I don't remember seeing them again.

Yoling left misery behind her. Manila, bruised and battered, did not get up so easily. But we Americans woke up on Thanksgiving morning and the electricity had come on. All old plans revived, we had an impromptu pot luck with some SS Wright families, eating spaghetti, casserole, salad and then a song fest, truly thankful to be together, intact, and dry. We found each other and collected stories - who had or hadn’t escaped.

Mom says it was a tale of deliverance and survival. Manila had suffered a great blow. But it was blow upon blow - a longue durée of the first quarter storm. And it was a year of storms: strikes, demonstrations, earthquakes, winds and rains.

As a gift for this long suffering year, Pope Paul VI arrived in late November for the Pan Asian Bishops Conference. This was the first Papal Visit to the Philippines, the only Catholic nation in Asia. Dad told us that squatters hoped to present the pope with a manifesto and I will tell you more of this story in a little while. Imelda had built him the Coconut Palace but he wouldn't stay in it. Get behind me, you can hear him mutter, as though he knows what's coming.

But if Yoling and Yolanda are cousins, I wager another Pope might visit the Philippines soon.

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David Baradas visits

9/8/2013

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“Hello Dick,”
The resonant voice carries through our Basilan Road screen door.
"David! Good to see you," David Baradas is here! We girls scamper to our rooms to primp and preen. How we love David Baradas. Margaret especially, round-faced, curly-haired Margaret. He poses with baby Margaret at grandmother's pine cabin in Wisconsin, on his lap in Malate, and here on Basilan Road, QC. She curls shyly like a cat.

David Baradas disappears and reaapears without a season. Whenever he shows up, mom's prettier and dad's sharp. Scott's his favorite. We three girls saunter into the sala and try not to stare as he laughs, or watch the soft swoop of this black hair. I imagine a sarimanok perched on his shoulder, insouciantly chewing its claw as he speaks. An incipient adventurer, I'm transfixed by his fieldwork in Mindanao. David Baradas, like grandmother, weave a good tale from any yarn. Their stories awaken a kind of anthropological mysticism, a romance of primordia.

We always call him his full name, DavidBaradas. Never Tito David or Mr. Baradas. He is always older than us but never a grownup. David Baradas and Del Saupalo (Imo) are our favorite kuyas, older brothers, whom we adored. In those Malate years they help dad with the car (in order to drive it, says Imo) and joke, treating us kindly with virile charm. "We were Eagle Scouts," laughs Imo, as if that explains everything.

David Baradas was grandmother's favorite. He is the first recipient of Juliet Blanchard's scholarship for international students at the College of Wooster. He's at Wooster during our first furlough the States so he joins us for Christmas at snowy grandmother's house on Adirondack Trail. We give him our mumps. After Wooster, where he studies the Amish, he heads to University of Chicago for a doctorate in Anthropology. “U of Chicago is the only place for Anthro,” he says. It's true. Think Fred Eggan, Frank Lynch, Robert Fox, and Landa Jocano.

Kulintang, the music of God

When I’m 12, the Poethig family visits David Baradas on Simulan island across Lake Lanao where he is conducting fieldwork. He meets us at the Iligan airport to take us to Marawi. We first drop in on the Van Vactors, fraternal workers teaching at Dansalan College in Marawi. David gently pulls my father aside, “Dick, don’t say you’re a pastor. Tell them you’re a teacher.”

What to wear so as not to draw unnecessary attention? I choose my favorite blazing pink kulots and sneakers. We are all in tacky colonial whites - except for Scott.

First we take a pump boat across the cool blue Lake Lanao. Two men curl up in their malongs on the pumpboat floor. Coconut trees and minarets spike the shoreline. The pump boat can't get all the way to beach, so we clamber into the muddy shallows, but the three girls are carried on the shoulders of strong men and let down at the shore. David Baradas guides us to his gracious dark wood slat house. "This is your room,” he gestures to a dark space with one bed and mosquito nets. Johanna, Margaret and I, we look around gingerly, Manila girls in bundokland. “There’s no bathroom,” Johanna murmurs, alarmed. David Baradas points to a white metal chamber pot. She gulps and holds herself valiantly, but later in the dark, I climb out of the mosquito netting to tinkle in the pot.

Everyone wants a peek at the Americanos. Towards twilight, the sala is crammed with visitors; latecomers stand on the porch and lean on the open windows. Someone’s six-year-old girl is urged to play the kulintang. A frame of horizontally-placed gongs is set on the floor. She takes her place and deftly pounds out a rhythm with two rubber-coated sticks. I want to remember this magic, here with the gongs in a wood house on Lake Lanao. After a while, the percussive gongs mesmerize the crowd. I think they know and await this moment, the quiet that overtakes you when you are caught up in the syncopated heartbeat of God.

David Baradas is here because this is an old Maranao village and the weathered wooden stilted houses are among the remaining few with elaborately carved eves and winged panolongs (house beams).

See this site for Philippine architecture. http://openthedorr.wordpress.com/2013/04/

We seek out the mythical Sarimanok, a Maranao symbol of good fortune to anyone who can catch it. Sarimanok means multicolored garment (sari) and chicken (manok). It always holds a fish in its claw and talons. In one story, a sultan of Lanao has a daughter called Sari who is swept away by a multicolored rooster who turns into a handsome prince. For the more devout, Muhammad finds in the rooster in the first of the seven heavens. It is so big, its head reaches the second heaven. David also instructs us to “look for the naga design.” The naga, a dragon or serpent design, shows up on the houses and cloth, woven by women on their backstrap looms in gloomy interiors. I gaze with awe at the last generation of a dying craft. Only their ghosts weave with that tenderness to detail.

Birds, serpents, and trees of life emerge from the abstract patterns. I read later in Tales from Lake Lanao and other Essays about birds of paradise. Hadji Ali Alawi tells Nagasura Madale that the tree is a form of sorta, the leaves are tipak and heaven is called sadiarathul montaha. For every child born, a new leaf grows and written on the leaf is the name of the child and life span on earth. When the leaf falls, it take three to seven days for the life to be finished. Then Malakal Maut, the Angel of Death, will arrive to take the soul. Children perched on the branches are rapas; those who die immediately after birth are called papanok sa aras, birds of heaven/paradise. Hadji Ali Alawi dreams that his own soul becomes a beautiful bird.

He comes and goes, David Baradas, like the sarimanok.

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Virgin Anthropologist in Siquijor, Marawi, Zamboanga and Bontoc

9/7/2013

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Kerry likes the provinces” remarks mom dryly. Dad’s eyes widen as she hands me 400 pesos in birthday money for flights to the Visayas and Mindanao for my birthday.

I set out like the fabled Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta and return with pasalubongs for everyone. Here begins a compilation of various travels.

Siquijor, Negros Occidental

"Siquijor? The sorcerer’s island? Ingat!” We hear this often at Silliman University, the UCCP-related college in Dumaguete. You can see small Siquijor island from the Dumaguete seawall. A friend from Silliman takes red-haired Nancy and me across on a banca, a canoe with a bamboo outrigger. The sea breeze is stiffens our hair, and the spray salts our clothes. From the banca, the coconut-tree-lined island looks welcoming enough. Now, with so many web encounters of mangkukulam, the worry is only for show.

We arrive at Siquijor's port stiff but happy. Visayas' sun glazes the azure sea, blue and clear as breath. Breathless, I put my hand through the air to meet transparent water. Below, a parrot fish glides above orange coral and a neon blue starfish. I think of Narnia tales and Reepicheep, the little mouse on the Voyage of the Dawn Treader in search of the end of the world where the water is sweet. Is it sweet, this sea? Naked boys jump off a ferry for centavos, laughing. I throw a cinco and laugh too.

We three wedge into a pedicab and buzz along the coconut-fronded avenue in search of a mangkukulam. I hear they take a doll part, a sliver of fingernail, lock of your hair and whisper a spell to make you sick. But I want to see, to learn what they do. What would it take to be one?

First we make a courtesy call to the mayor who invites us into his dark concrete house for a Coke. He laughs when he learns why we’ve come. Silly American girls playing with fire. Yes, he knows a mangkukulam. He motions the pedicab driver over to give him directions. He also knows. It’s a small place. We stop at a nipa hut on stilts.
A young man in a red tee shirt looks out and comes down his ladder.
"Magsalita na kayo ng Tagalog?" I ask, a little shy.
"Konte lang," the young man says shyly. "Cebuano."
His wife ignores us. She curls quietly on the hard wooden bench nursing their new son. We climb up the ladder to his one room where a single calendar of President Marcos and Imelda adorn the walls.
“Pahinga ditto,” he points to a wooden bed. We’re both a little nervous. I go over and lie on my back. He takes a straw and blows bubbles in a water glass that muddies as it travels above my body.
"To cleanse your spirit daw," my friend translates.
“Ay salamat.” I nod, hoping he’ll believe that I believe him.
“May love potion ba kayo?” Love potion! This he knows about. He leaps up on his wife’s bench to russle about in the eves, extracting a small chunk of charcoal. Handling it carefully with both hands, his eyes sparkle as he offers it to me. My friend gives instructions: Say your name over this seven times, and put it in the personal belongings of the one you want to love you. He wraps it in a little piece of paper with markings I don't understand.
It’s clearly time to go. We thank and thank and leave some pesos as a gift, “para sa anak mo” (for your child).
"Tapos na ba?" asks the pedicab driver.
He will embellish the tale for buddies at the palenke by the port. The sea spray sops us again on our banca back to Dumaguete. I never try the love potion.

Marawi, Lanao del Sur

Samira Gutoc-Tomawis, my hostess in Marawi in 2005.

We first visited Marawi bordering Lake Lanao first with David Baradas. The Islamic City of Marawi is Maranao territory, full of exquisite artistry from their weaving to silver inlay to architecture. This is far, far from Manila and a the most exotic place I visit. When I'm fifteen, I return to visit Barbara Cort, a Frontier Intern whose father John Cort administered the Philippine Peace Corps program for several years. Barbara teaches at Dansalan College with a beautiful view of the lake. It is no competition for the Mindanao State University's expansive campus.

Barbara plaits her hair like abaca and winds the rope around her wide, tan face. She calls to the woman above in the dark house, ‘hoy Jasmin,” and the unseen woman appears at the dark wooden window. Jasmin clucks and her laughter scatters the birds in the eves. Two Muslim boys saunter by, one pulling the knob of his malong tight at his waist, They gape.
“It is because,” states Barbara, “if a boy would stare at his own women that way, she could force him to marry her.” “Then we are being molested?” I ask
"Well, maybe more like tested,” she says and laughs again. The birds return to the eves.

It takes the car an hour and a half to drive from Marawi to Iligan. I miss the flight back to Dumaguete. On the way there, the driver tells me, I think to justify our delay, that two planes crashed that week, one at the Iligan-Marawi airport. Another flight is ready to taxi as I drag my bags to the counter and a kind steward rushes me onto it just in time.

“She’s that age,” writes mom to grandmother about the steward's special care.
“Fortunately for concerned mothers, it’s hard to disappear in the Philippines, and although I had heard nothing from her, I found out she had gotten to Marawi all right and back to Dumaguete safely from people who had seen her. I met them on the steps of Ellinwood. How’s that for personal reportage?”

Zamboanga, city of flowers

Zamboanga of 1970 and Zamboanga of mid-2000 are different cities. Red-haired Nancy and I stay with the dad's friend Cipriano Malonzo when we visit Zamboanga in the summer of 1971, but it's the Zamboanga visit of my 15-year-old self that I cherish. In those years, Zamboanga is a bustling, lush, edgy but hospitable smuggler town. Zamboanga city was colonized by the Spaniards as an long-standing outpost against Muslim pirates. This is why Chavacano is a kind of creole Spanish. Zamboanga carries an aura of the borderlands - edge of the nation, the edge empire, post-colonial Spain, American unease with Islam. The city is gracious with wide lanes, bougainvilleas and old acacias along the sea wall. In the 1970's the Badjao, sea gypsies, still use unfurl their colorful sails, and Yakan weavers of Basilan sell psychedelic woven cloth. In the 1970's, I am too much a hybrid "imperial Manila" girl to detect trouble brewing. This is before we know much about "Jabidah," the massacre of Muslim trainees by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in 1968, or understand the effects of Visayan settlers in Mindanao, or understand the anger and demands of the Moro National Liberation Front. This is before Mindanao is synonymous with "conflict zone." When I arrive in the 1980's under Martial Law, the city has the feel of a free-fire zone. A year later during the Marcos-Cory campaign season, one feels a sliver of hope. When I return in the mid-2000's, it is still lovely but seems both spiky and worn down from the conflict. Now the only Americans who visit seem to be military sent by the Visiting Forces Agreement.

My first trip Zamboanga in 1970 is an encounter with leprosy. Since Aunti Soli is head of the American Leprosy Mission, she takes Luna and me to the leprosarium there. "We call it Hansen's disease now," she says, but everyone knows it as leprosy. We've also visited the Tala Leprosarium in Caloocan city, 30 miles from Manila. We are collecting family data for the Christian Children’s Fund to identify children for sponsorship. Since the leprosy colony is split between Muslims and Christians, we need to find an equal number of eligible children in both communities. The sherbert-yellow administration building of the leprosarium is circled by a carabao grass lawn shaded by high acacias pink with bloom. A wide-horned carabao grazes in the far corner of the lawn. To the right of the administration building, a pre-school adds happy chatter to the air.

Leprosy is a zombie terror; it is slow terrible horror. Since you lose nerve endings, you don't feel pain when rats gnaw off fingers in the night. Eventually, your face eats itself; your ears and nose rot. Your body collapses in on itself like an old soggy house. That night before I tuck the mosquito net into my mattress, I get down on my knees
"Please, so that I don't cringe," I pray. In the morning, Luna and I set out in different directions. It's hot, hot, hot, of course, and wearying. But the days humble us. We are comfortable Manila teenagers greeting families of healthy and leprosy-stricken members who have been ostracized to this place. We ask simple questions about their family size and children’s ages, but even this simple meeting is excruciating. The youngest hugs his mother’s knees. I touch withered hands, trying to look casually at the sunken withered faces of people who do not look at me. We stop at the gate of a ramshackle nipa hut and a child comes out. No, she won't come, she says. For years, I see the faces of the children playing in front of their houses. They look up, freeze in a blank look. Run away. What is it like for a healthy child to be imprisoned as a pariah?

After this, we visit Basilan Island. Aunti Soli's brother manages the Menzi plantation on Basilan Island, so we visit the rolling hills of rubber. Rubber, as far as the eye can see. But Basilan's future is due for upheaval. In 1988 after the Marcos dictatorship, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) splits up foreign-owned plantations and replaces them with plantation cooperatives. Then, Basilan joins the Autonmous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and the Muslim Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf set up base camps and hold hostages there.

Back in Zamboanga, we walk along to the old Spanish fort, then barter in the Muslim market for old brass and smuggled batik from Malaysia. Luna turns over some batik, which has doubled in price now that they see me. “Anong akala mo sa akin, Americano?” I toss my head in a suplada-mestiza way. As usual, it’s effective. The tinderas laugh good-naturedly, start up a Tagalog interchange and the price comes partway down.

The next day Aunti Soli takes us to the Muslim burial island, hot white sand and old carved boats marking the dead. “Sometimes there are bones on the beach,” says Aunti Soli. Luna and I don’t know whether she’s teasing. We walk there respectfully, but it's so blazingly hot that all the color is leached from the air. I long for a cold calamansi juice.

In Manila, I can't forget, reflect on what the body is and "how hulls are cast from fruit." But we also wear our newly aquired batik outfits to the Cultural Center.

Turn 16 in Bontoc

In April 1971, red-haired Nancy, a friend from International School, her boyfriend, and I visit the Cordillera mountains. I have never been north of Baguio, our family Christmas destination. Banaue, Ifugao Province is world famous for the rice terraces. We'll go there first, then though Mountain Province to Bontoc and finally the artist colony of Sagada. We'll loop through Baguio, Benguet Province before arriving in Manila.

In the mid-1980s I retrace my virgin mystery tour with Jenise, my sporty girlfriend. We enter in through the same portal to vertical worlds wary of lowlanders. The mountain people are muscular and easy to exoticize: Kalinga, Igorot, Ifugao, which means mountain people Their god Matungulan supervises the sacred process of rice planting. For a Manila Girl this mountain life is a bit too stressful. It's a lot of nature and walking up and down.

On Banaue's paddies distant figures transplant rice; our bus climbs higher and deeper into clammy fog. Nancy, her boyfriend and I reach Banaue a scappy town late afternoon. In the chilly mountain twilight, the sky is suggared with stars. Our breakfast of soggy pancakes with fresh strawberries is the most delicious I ever tasted. I am 15 and on an adventure.

"How about Batad," suggests Nancy the next day. Batad is a lovely amphitheater of a town where Marshall Scott lives, I think. The Poethigs don't hike. After a muddy climb in sandals your heart hurts! At the top, Ifugao women with rattan backpacks chuckle at me and generously offer some aid: swing your hips, back straight. It's a lesson I never forget.

We board a Bontoc-bound jeepney. At one point, the jeepney driver maneuvers over thin plank covering a wash-out crevasse. Rice terraces are replaced by a surprisingly lush foggy mountain jungle .Mountain slopes are mostly mournfully denuded. But in river valley, small gardens carved into the slope are planted with spirals of vegetables: cauliflower, green beans, carrots. The cauliflower curlicues are like an earth tattoo.

Bontoc is a market town nestled in a high valley along the rocky Chico river. Why am I so enamored with Bontoc? Is it the Cordillera moutons close around us? Is it the chortling Chico river? In a few years Marcos will provoke armed struggle throughout the Cordilleras. The Kalinga will resist his plan for a Chico River mega-dam. Kalinga women will stand against troops and Macli-ing Dulag will refuse the envelope of Manuel Elizalde of PANAMIN, a nonprofit for cultural minorities. Macli-ing Dulag will say, “This envelope can contain only one of two things – a letter or money. If it is a letter, I do not know how to read. And if its money, I do not have anything to sell. So take your envelope and go." He will lose his life for this. These provinces will become the Cordillera Autonomous Region. In 1971, there are only tremors.

I turn 16 on April 16, an Ifugao festival for the end of rice planting. Out my window a double rainbow! All I want is Bontoc Hotel's signature breakfast of Nescafe coffee and tap-si-log which consists of tapas (dried meat), garlic rice, and itlog (a runny fried egg). Then another hike over the Chico and past the wake for an Igorot elder whose shrouded body, strung up on a rattan bed, decomposes in the cool high air. When we reach the town of weavers, I buy my own birthday shroud, a woven with blood-red and purple geometric designs.

So, you squat and await transport to Sagada where Ifugao hang coffins from cliffs. An Igorot woman shows me a green skein of yarn from her basket. I buy and keep it for another 16 years. We catch a third class Dangwa bus which is open-sided so you can peer over the cliffs as it careens around the turnabout. I'm not ready to go back to the bustling metropolis (Baguio or Manila). This is what I want to be doing at 36, I say to no one in particular.

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Fraternal ranking

8/22/2013

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If we were kana Manila Girls to our pinoy friends, we were mks to each other, the children of long-staying fraternal workers. We joked, cajoled, counseled, and competed. Our tight clan had its own pecking order, depending on who was the rooster. In our chicken coop, we rated fellow mks by their depth of exposure without losing American identity. Given our parents' political inclinations, we also classified by political astuteness (anti-American, pro-left). This intensified with the post-Qtr Storm ethos.

We had our favorites like the Millenburg boys, but of our generation, the A/B+ families lived in Cebu, Davao, Diliman, and Dumaguete. They were mostly blond for some reason. I adored the wave of American "Frontier Interns" --- church-related college grads who arrived to work in community centers, housing, assignments similar to the Peace Corps. Aunty Soli called the Peace Corps, "mga paa ng Americano" (American feet, but not in a nice way), so maybe they were the kamay (hands).

Johanna and I were closest to the M. girls though they lived far south in Mindanao and were more evangelical on the face of it. It was K (she told me I couldn't use her name) who updated us on the revolutionary shift from sanitary pads to tampons.
“Something you stick Up There!”
“Aray!”
“How do they look?”
“White sticks, here, kita mo," She digs in her bag for show and tell. "And you can go swimming.”
We were nowhere near a pool.

I admired their nonchalance about their bodies, which we attributed to their Norwegian mother raised in China. She was holy, a hedonist, and an unabashed socialist. Their father was lanky with a wry sense of humor. I envied them their parents since ours were so modest. The fusion granted them high marks, and though Jo and I were hip Manila girls, K. got extra points for sending us into sheer silliness.

We dealt the lowest ranking to those who attended Faith Academy, Brent, or American school. There were so many private parochial schools in the Philippines and medium of instruction was English. Why go to schools where American kids could cluster? The American school in Makati was geared to business kids and some military brats; few mks attended. I was eventually one of the casualties, but ignored this contradiction. We never visited Faith Academy, and based our evidence on the mk girl who lived across from us on Basilan who was an emotional wreck. As far as we were concerned, this was a school for pious parents who didn't trust the country they’d come to convert. F.

But you had to succeed in both places, the Philippines and the U.S. It was a trip wire.
It went like this:
“Hey, Jo, remember the R. boys?”
“The guys who were Ifugao?” (raised in the Cordilleras mountains)
“Kinda, bakit?”
“I heard from dad that they got back to the U.S. and bottomed out.”
“Wow, angel angel down you go.”

A for Ifugao, D for American disaster. We figured that Scott, now "Brother Love", was due for a C in the America face-off. Johanna would get an A because she was tall, leggy and matapang, fearless. Me maybe a B, bahala na. Margaret was in 4th grade, so maybe the US would be more kind. We weren't sure about that.

That trip wire; would we make it? Can you avoid the question, "why did you grow up there?"
"Missionary kid" produced such an awkward silence.

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Scott graduates, goes to the prom, becomes Brother Love

8/21/2013

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Poethig girls with their brother at Basilan Rd. Shelly in the back is an mk from Dumaquete. She brought her friend. I am looking for more relevant photos.

In March after Margaret's Holy Week visions, my academically driven brother graduates from UP Prep, the first American to do so. He's Science Student of the Year, Social Science Student of the Year and first in Editorial Writing at the National Press Conference for Public High Schools. Recall that he is graduating at the edge of the First Quarter Storm and that UP Prep is the feeder for UP Dilliman, where heated demonstrations are brewing. So, though Scott's GPA would have designated him valedictorian, he isn't listed in the honor roll. There's an explanation: he was a junior during our purgatory year in the States. His beloved biology teacher is furious and compensates by donating a gold medal for Academic Excellence. I'm not following this closely, so I don't know why Scott exhibits such equanimity. But when I consider his bluster and misery attending that Ohio high school and match it with the quirky, intense American pinoy boy jousting with congenial peers at UP Prep, perhaps he considers it a pay-off. Scott doesn't apply for Wooster college as expected. He enrolls at UP Dilliman.

Emboldened by a sense of closure, Scott invites Cynthia Ortega to the prom. It's their first and last date. Following UP Prep practice both mom and dad accompany them and join other parents in a side room until the dance room closes at 3am. My mother finds this charming, and reports it to her mother. It won't happen again since the Poethig clan departs before my graduation. My parents meet Cynthia's mother and eventually her father, a colonel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, who arrives late from a Quezon Blvd skirmish with students. He was "protecting buses from rock-throwers".

Student demonstrations and jeepney strikes raged on and on. A general walkout is called by the unions to force action on raising minimum wage. Then, with much of the commuting city under ‘house arrest’, an intensity 6 earthquake shakes Manila, which is built over a fault and shifting sand. An elementary school collapses. One radio persona comments "well for once we were all united – united for a few minutes in panic!"

On Sunday a few weeks later, a second earthquake shakes the city. This time, the new wing of City Hall collapses and more than a dozen new school buildings contracted by the City of Manila are destroyed. The Department of Education declares all elementary schools to close immediately, but that high schools and colleges could continue with final exams. Margaret walks to JASMS to pick up her things. Johanna’s graduation from 7th grade is rescheduled to my 15th birthday, April 16. So we embark on the post-Qtr Storm summer with a spotty academic record.

In the Poethig teen pantheon, Johanna and I are more sosyal than Scott, so we get him a radio gig to increase his cultural capital. Our new teen bodies are skinny if not curvaceous. We climb in our bikinis from the low fence to the roof of our one-story house. We think it's private.
“Hi.”
“Huh? Uh-oh,” I murmur to Johanna as we nervously raise up on our elbows to look around for the voice. A brown version of John Lennon peers up from his leafy side of the fence.
Our new hippy neighbor! We don't mind this form of intervention.
“Hi,” we giggle.
"I'm your neighbor,"
We nod. We'd noticed their arrival.
“What’s your names?”
“I’m Kerry, "Johanna...."
“I'm Charlie Brown.”
“Huh?! “
“Yeah, you know, DZUW, DZRJ, the station that plays rock all day long.”
“Oh, uh huh.” We don’t.
“I’m the DJ, Charlie Brown.”

So we call him Charlie Brown. We come down and introduce him to Scott. After he invites Scott to volunteer as a DJ, we don't really see him again. He's too cool for high school girls. To our surprise, Scott decides to join the station. He calls himself “Brother Love.” At first he’s so nervous he gets sick, but he gets on with it, and plays hours of music we can’t fathom.

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Manila Girls and the First Qtr Storm, 1970

8/20/2013

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The 70's burst upon us as the “Congress of the Streets” when 50,000 students, peasants, and urban poor encamp in front of Congress to protest President Marcos's policies during his inaugural address. The brutal police response prompts rallies across Metro Manila. Five days later, tens of thousands of college and high school students march to Malacanang over Mendiola bridge. As students mill at the gates of the presidential palace, all lights are extinguished. In the dark, the Metrocom riot police are stealthily replaced by AFP troops with armalites. What follows is the "Battle of Mendiola" that leaves four students dead and hundreds wounded.

My father interprets the context for the “Battle of Mendiola” in an Easter letter to his network and extended family.

In front of Malacanang is a section of old two-story frame Spanish-style houses. The wide street, Mendiola, in front of Malacanang, leads to the university district of Manila. A few blocks from the palace over 200,000 students live and study in about a half-dozen universities…a crowded, sordid district of decaying boarded houses, and high-rise classroom buildings divided from each other by narrow sidewalks…Cement, smoke-belching buses, overloaded jeepneys, neon-lighted clothing stores, cubby-hole second-hand bookstores, and endless young people who attend school in shifts—these are the features of Sampaloc. Sampaloc—the student district—faces Malacanang with all the questions about why things are the way they are in the Philippines today.

The students fight police at Mendiola all night long. Lacaba recounts in Days of Quiet, Nights of Rage,
About seven times the cops attacked; about seven times they retreated, often on the run, an army routed by a band of children. Each time they attacked, the cops grew more frenzied, maddened and bewildered by a defiance they had not expected and could not understand.

Demonstrators also surge on the American Embassy on Roxas Boulevard across from Luneta Park, shouting “Yankee go home!” They rip off the US seal from the wall and toss Molotov cocktails over the fence. When the US Marines arrive, the crowd retreats, burning cars and smashing windows. One newspaper notes ironically that students destroy a restaurant called The Front, with posters of Marx and Mao, but don’t touch The American restaurant.

In the next three months, jeepney drivers stage a series of wildcat strikes when Marcos devalues the peso and the gasoline prices rise. Cycles of rallies-to-riots spice up our commute to Padre Faura since Quiapo is a hub of action. At UP Prep, Scott's radical classmates accuse our father of CIA affiliation. It's the “First Quarter Storm.” Mirroring student uprisings globally, we are caught up in a protracted rage of things as they are: American militarism in the Pacific and its stranglehold on Philippine politics, peaking oil prices, Marcos's staged comeback and the increasing militarism of everything.

Johanna's Marxist history teacher at JASMS invites the class to a "mass action."
"No," says mom firmly and shakes her head, "No, you can't."
"But dad is working with those Maryknoll guys and they have demonstrations against housing demolitions!"
"No. You're American girls. It's too dangerous."
So, with school cancelled again, we take to the privacy of the roof, listening for updates. A few friends are at the rally. We are silly in a stupid way.
“What’s dis pers quarter storm, tawad sa isang piso storm?”
“Bakit kaya wala kaming notification? Not even “we regret to inform you that due to di fak dat you are a running dog imperialista and your fadder is a CIA, you are not invited to di mass aksyion.”
“CIA kaya ang fadder namin?”
Tanga! Ip so, why no PX? Bakit walang Seventeen Magazine? Belib in me mare, our fadder is BIA – Balding in Action, pero no CIA.”
"Stupida!"”
I turn up the radio for more news.

Manila is roiling. We roil with it.

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Sosyal: The burden of a Kana Manila Girl

8/19/2013

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Showing off our new halter tops on Basilan Road. Erika loves it.

Party at the Palms - Kenny Villanueva with a nose flute, George Padolina looking at the camera, Nene and others.

Marilee B and me making lakwatcha at her house.

Erlyn and Nene Bernardez with a former boyfriend, then Butch and Luna Grino and me

Johanna's barkada and extras

Our room, a photo moment

After year-long purgatory as gawky American pre-teens, Johanna and I are ready to be sosyal. It's a short shelf life. We indulge: long phone calls, birthday blow outs, movies in Cubao. We make pasyal to the new Greenhills shopping center on Ortegas Ave, or take a bus to Divisoria for ethnic clothing adaptations. Like a Marawi malong knotted over a bare shoulder at the posh new Cultural Center of the Philippines, or a gown from cotton rice sacks at PhilAm Auditiorium.

When you are a Taglish-speaking missionary kid Manila girl, you are not tisoy or kana. You are not diplomat kid Americans, not Faith Academy evangelical mks who don’t get out much, nor American business kids confined to country club Makati. You are definitely not the part-timer Vietnam-surge military brats who live in the JUSMAG compound. You’re not a Fil-Am from the U.S. who can't tismis in Tagalog, or an unavailable gorgeous mestiza with an authoritarian father. Which means you can stay out longer at the dance parties, since everyone knows where you are anyway. You can say ‘yes’ when a boy ask you to slow dance, even if he’s high on qualudes. And everyone knows you won't take them.

Our sosyality is an exception to the rule. We don't have a storied past, or any extended family, or a clear class location. We're church girls with an attitude. We don't have syotas, any of us, which is both a concern and relief. But barkadas have syota-friends. I join Johanna's JASMS barkada which includes guys from la Salle. When Luna sails into town from Silliman U in D'guete, I make sabit. Or we get together with our SS Wright clan whose boys, Butch, Clyde, Leslie, Lyncir, Glenn, George, dismiss us as the uncoordinated kanas they've known since kindergarten.

So we're not real Manila girls, either.

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Part III: Days of Rage 1969-1972

8/18/2013

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Balik (bayan?)

We didn't return to our beloved Malate house, six blocks from Manila Bay. Our Poethig family encamped on Basilan Road in the PhilAm Subdivision. In Quezon City off Hiway 54, it was close to the UCCP offices so dad could walk to work. JASMS had moved nearby. Johanna and Margaret strolled to class. Hiway 54 met Quezon Boulevard at the rotunda. You go left to UP Diliman or turn right to Quiapo. Since Scott and I attended UP Prep, we took the dusty red Philippine Rabbit bus down to Quiapo and a jeepney to Padre Faura back in Malate.

These are our last years in the Philippines. We recombine (Erika Christy Peter Poethig arrives in 1971), then dissolve as a family unit. We smile into despedita cameras, terrified and relieved to finally make the last journey "Stateside." Not balik, not bayan.

In clusters, we disappear into the American fog. Scott's the first. He wants to go. It’s agony here, it’s agony there. But he wants to go. He leaves with dad in July 1971 to attend the College of Wooster. Dad returns and takes Margaret back with him early in 1972, then in the summer Johanna, mom, and Erika sell or pack up everything left in the house. I stay to finish high school and leave in December. It will be years before we gather as a family without distress.

So, let's return to Cosmic 1969:
We arrive in Manila in time for the Moon Walk. Neil Armstrong plants the Stars and Stripes in grainy b&w on our TV. More thrilling for the Philippines, Gloria Diaz is crowned Miss Universe. Tisoy (short for mestizo) comics summed it up, “The US has captured the moon, but the Philippines has captured the Universe!”

And lest we forget, Ferdinand Marcos won a second term as president. Two weeks after this, mom writes her mother about the "Exposé of US subsidy of Philcag troops in Vietnam"

The man on the street favored sending the troops to 'help a neighbor whose house is on fire' but the exposé of Fulbright shames the Philippines in the eyes of the world and attributes base motives to what the average Filipino did in good faith. This hurt is so deep I’m not sure it will really be able to be expressed in words. Instead I predict there will now be a hard coldness where once there was always a warm friendliness even when Filipinos had differences of opinion with the US. There is no fight more vicious in the Philippines than that between brothers. The sad part is that Americans will never know what goodwill and love they have lost because few ever loved the Philippines in the first place. As I have said before, Americans despise the meek.

Love, Eunice

UP Beloved...

“Hoy, Katoy, WAIT!” I yell as the Rabbit bus careens on Highway 54 towards the PhilAm Subdivision gate, a tail of diesel fuel wags behind, ready for the race.
“Hur-ry!”
At 5:30am, my hair is limp from the shower. I kick a loose shoelace and shift the bag of books. For once, Scott and I are going to school together: UP Prepatory High School. Scott's a senior and I’m starting first year. Since I had 8th grade in the States, I’m a year behind my UES classmates who transferred to UP Prep and are now sophomores. It’s awkward.
The bus slows down but doesn't stop so we catch the rail and swing up. Two white kids in uniforms. People look. We find an empty wood plank and settle in. The ticketer shakes her tin canister full of coins. “Quiapo, dalawa.” Scott hands her a peso to make up for me. She blandly whisks out two tickets, rips them and hands them with the change, with quick disapproval at my wet head.

Here's a Flickr link for those Rabbit buses.

“This is TANG-GA - racing Ephren to school,” I grumble. Ephren, Scott's funniest buddy, always gets to school first and Scott is determined to beat him.
Scott ignores me.
I don’t really mind going so early. The thick diesel-fumy congestion of jeepneys, buses, and cars hasn’t yet congealed on Quezon Avenue. In Quiapo, near Plaza Miranda, the bus disgorges us into a river of oncoming jeepneys with signs in their windshields: Taft, Espana, Mabini, then Padre Faura, that’s us. Scott flips his hand, and since we’re so visible (white kids in uniforms), several jeepneys swerve to us. We swing up and bend into the low cavern. I swipe my pleated blue skirt to keep the folds neat. The Padre Faura jeepney cruises over the Quiapo bridge, past the US faux Greek Post Office, the town hall, down Taft, past UN Avenue, swinging right onto Padre Faura. “Ssst, para.” The driver stops as our coins travel up to him hand by hand.

This is my brother's kingdom, University of the Philippines Preparatory High School, the kalaban of UP High in Diliman. We trudge up three flights of drab marble that used to be the Philippine Supreme Court. Our high school is on the decrepit third floor where night classes have left their dunked cigarette butts and coffee cups scattered around the rooms. No matter, I pull out a notebook, find an old chair and write out the homework for Philippine History. I love this place with a proleptic nostalgia.

Quiapo convergence

Liberated to travel by jeepney and bus, the city is a great bazaar. When Scott doesn’t accompany me though the smoky diesel-clouded downtown, I move through the traffic like the White Lady. Quiapo church at Plaza Miranda the big transfer point is a favorite sanctuary.

This is the "Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene" and known for its overwhelming processions.

But I am there for the anting antings cluttering Evangelista street behind the church. Albularyo stalls are piled with mysterious potions in small bottles, mandrake root, tawis, other herbal remedies. Sometimes I squat beside a lola who tells my fortune with her cards on a small table on the back patio of the church. Before you enter the old cathedral, you buy red, black, or white candles in human shapes for different intentions. I choose a white one for purity of thought. Over the church threshold, in the quivering light of votive candles, wizened women shuffle towards the altar on their knees. Others mumble through the stations of the cross.

The Orange Jesus’ famous brother, the Black Nazarene, lies enshrined in glass at the back of the church, as if snoozing between processions. I don’t begrudge him the rest. He looks old and worn with the loving, needful touch of so many followers. You could imagine those two, their backs to me, making tsismis about their churches. Actually, I wasn't conversing much with Orange Jesus per se. Or, let's say, I was conversing with more versions: Mary, acacia trees, the bulol rice gods of the Ifugao.

But when it come to interventions, you take whoever’s available.

My UP Prep barkada go to Ideal (I-dee-al) Theater, the old art deco building on Avenida Rizal, once the Broadway of Manila. At the credits, the screen goes dark. Another brownout.
We cram to the exit. Someone jams their elbow into my back.“
Hoy! Ano ba?" Swept up in the panicking crowd, we edge our way out the Exit, and gasp.
“Susmarijoseph!” The entire block is ablaze! Wild flames lick the blackened sky. Fire engines can’t find enough water to dampen the inferno. It’s pandemonium as the fire leaps buildings.
We have to get out of here!
Someone tells us public transport has detoured due to the fire.
“Sige, Kerry, ayos na, OK?”
“OK lang, ingat, ha.” We separate. I wend through the confusion back to the Quiapo intersection. But when I get to Quiapo, it is crammed with people. Thousands of devotees are gathering for the largest procession of the season – the feast of the Black Nazarene. How did I miss this?

“Nasaan po ang mga bus ng pagpunta sa Diliman?” The man at the edge of the procession turns to me, startled. He didn’t expect a skinny white girl.
“Ay nakareroute nila, hanapin mo yon sa Quezon Bld.” He points vaguely towards Sampaloc. Smoke wafts into Quiapo as the Avenida fire travels deeper into the city. The Black Nazarene procession moves forward undeterred, his image jostling in the thick crowd. Black Nazarene devotees are unfazed by bombscares, demonstrations, or fire. The pandemoniums converge, and I am swept into them.
“Do you nid help?” I glance back to see a young man coming up behind me.I pick up my pace.
“Excuse me, mum, do you nid help?”
He’s running a little behind me. I don’t know why, since he probably is only trying to help the one American girl in Quiapo, but I panic and duck down a crowded street. Oh Jesus, where am I? Disoriented, walking, walking.

Then the ribbon of Quezon Boulevard appears ahead. I arrive across from the rambling campus of University of Santo Tomas about the same time as the UST students across the boulevard. They're pouring out of the campus gate, fists pumping upwards, in call and response,
“Ma-ki-baka!!"
"Hwag ma-takot!”
"Ma-ki-baka!"
"Hwag ma-takot!”
Their gathering is spiky with jubilation and tension.

Our side of Quezon Boulevard is pooling with commuters who have hiked from Quiapo. Jeepneys and busses are crammed so full that men hang by one arm out the doorways. The UST student crowd builds and someone starts shouting into a bullhorn. Wailing sirens indicate the arrival of the police. Our group of commuters is skittish.
Since First Quarter Storm, we know the regimen: Molotov cocktails, police gunfire, general melee, pickpockets. Should I begin walking home at twilight? It will take hours. Nobody knows where I am.

I send out a desperate prayer to the Black Nazarene since His procession is on the prowl. A hand reaches out and pulls me onto the only crowded bus that slows down.

PhilAm subdivision is dark and ghostly after the maelstrom. In a dazed calm, I find everyone at the dinner table. Mom and dad jump up when I arrive. “Where WERE you!” Scott calls out, angry and anxious, “The radio says crazy UST students are throwing rocks and molotovs at the police!”

Police battled the students up and down Quezon Blvd across from UST all night. The fire, procession, and battle caused the worst traffic jam in Manila’s history until that point.

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1971 Erika's long hot summer

1970Scott leaves UP for College of Wooster,

Christmas 1970

Yoling 1970, Yolanda 2013

David Baradas visits

Kulintang, the music of God

Virgin Anthropologist in Siquijor, Marawi, Zamboanga and Bontoc

Siquijor, Negros Occidental

Marawi, Lanao del Sur

Zamboanga, city of flowers

Turn 16 in Bontoc

Fraternal ranking

Scott graduates, goes to the prom, becomes Brother Love

Manila Girls and the First Qtr Storm, 1970

Sosyal: The burden of a Kana Manila Girl

Part III: Days of Rage 1969-1972

Balik (bayan?)

UP Beloved...

Quiapo convergence

Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

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