One Asian Individual

By Ruth Baja Williams

One Asian Individual follows Ruth Baja Williamss first memoir, Detour Berlin, which chronicles her experiences in Cold War Berlin. After returning to the United States, Ruth becomes an American citizen. She misquotes the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. She thinks one nation indivisible is one Asian individual. Ruth decides that what she thought she heard was accurate after all because the second half of her life is about discovering herself, her Asian self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514425848

Ruth Baja Williams

Although she was born in Manila, Ruth Baja Williams never lived in the Philippines. Leaving the land of her birth at age two, she was in California at the start of the Second World War. At the war’s end, her father entered the Philippine Foreign Service. Now as the daughter of a Philippine diplomat, Ruth lived in Hong Kong, Djakarta, and Sydney. Undergraduate studies brought her to California, but Cupid lured her to Germany, where she spent twenty years. On returning to the United States, she realized she belonged everywhere and nowhere.

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Copyright © 2015 by Ruth Baja Williams.

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Rev. date: 11/30/2015

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CONTENTS

Chapter One: Leaving Manila

Chapter Two: Charles

Chapter Three: Berlin

Chapter Four: The U.S. of A

I dedicate this book to Charles, my husband,

my soul mate, my lover, my best friend

and

to my children Lynne and Scott, to my

daughtger-in-law Kimberly

and to my grandchildren Simone, Sebastian and Stefan.

CHAPTER ONE

Leaving Manila

In October 1941, my family set sail aboard the SS President Coolidge from Manila, leaving behind a tearful gathering of relatives and friends. The ship would carry us from Asia to the Western world. I was two and a half years old.

My father had been awarded a scholarship for post-graduate study in International Relations at the University of Southern California. Seizing this opportunity to bring family to the U.S., dad booked passage for us. Mom told me later that they sold everything they owned to raise money for the voyage even dishes and your toys. Our accommodations were in steerage.

Dad chose not to heed the warnings that war was imminent. Japan was poised to strike the West Coast of the U.S. mainland which was precisely where he was taking us. It was six years after immigration to the U.S. from the Philippines had closed. He was a graduate student. He would travel as though he were a pensionado, a member of the Philippine elite, whose sons and daughters were sent abroad to study. But dad was not part of the Philippine elite. He was a poor boy from Mahabang Dahilig, a small barrio in Batangas in central Luzon where the rivers still ran clear and clean and rich soil supported lush vegetation.

I heard the tale often enough of how weeping friends and family had gathered on the pier in Manila harbor to bid us farewell. No one thought that the Philippines would be the target of Japanese bombardment in a war that began just six weeks after we arrived in America. Of course, no one on that wharf in Manila could have imagined Japanese bombs falling on American warships in Hawaii. Those in Manila would suffer under Japanese bombs, Japanese occupation and later American bombs, while my family was safe in Los Angeles.

On leaving Manila, in October 1941, the SS President Coolidge, headed north to Yokohama but a cable to the ship’s captain warned of dangerous consequences if our American-owned vessel entered the Japanese port. So the ship sailed to the coastal city of Shanghai, China instead, then eastward to California.

Years later dad would describe how he came to classes whose size dwindled daily because his classmates, were enlisting one by one in the U.S. armed forces. When Dad’s graduate school courses were complete, he was hired by the Office of War Information in San Francisco. He would be broadcasting war propaganda to the Philippines, speaking in Tagalog, his native tongue, under the nom de guerre Agapito Magturo. He exhorted his fellow Filipinos to stand firm against the Japanese invaders, for America was building an unbeatable arsenal and would soon come to their rescue.

I was about five when daddy would take me with him to the barbershop owned by Filipinos. On the wall was a poster of a man, his T-shirt torn and bloody. Behind him was a tattered Philippine Flag. Daddy read the poster’s title to me, The Fighting Filipino. I was most fascinated by this man and by the spittoons that occupied certain places on the floor.

My mother’s sister, my beautiful Aunt Polly, had fallen in love with a Filipino preacher, Cassiano Coloma who served the Filipino community in Los Angeles and Filipino laborers in nearby farms. According to Tia Polly, uncle’s flock was a diverse group of mostly Filipinos, but there were also some Mexicans, an occasional black member and several Japanese. As often happens, Cupid was busy among the young and the beautiful, and intermingling of the ethnic groups produced children. Leaving Aunt Polly and her new husband in Los Angeles, Mom, Dad, my brother Ernest and I, moved to San Francisco where dad began his work at the Office of War Information (OWI). There followed several trips by train between San Francisco and Los Angeles for my mother visited her younger sister often. On those train trips, I would see black porters in white coats taking care of passengers. The porters always smiled kindly at me and sometimes winked while my mother sat ramrod stiff, staring straight ahead.

Once or twice I went with Dad to the radio station. I was allowed to sit in the control room where the kind radio people told me to watch the second hand on the large wall clock as it swept up the left side of the clock’s face. When the second hand reached 12, the radio man poked a hole in the air with his forefinger and Daddy would begin speaking.

Our third floor walk-up San Francisco apartment was on Webster Street. After entering the apartment, one faced a long flight of stairs. The apartment itself was one long corridor with rooms leading off one side. The living-room was at one end of the corridor, the kitchen was at the other end. My room was near the kitchen. The living-room was for people to visit politely, like people from the First Methodist Church, which we attended every Sunday. The congregation was predominantly white. Prayer meetings were sometimes held in the living room of our long, skinny apartment.

Sometimes a blackout was announced on the radio. Thick black window shades were drawn, to block out any light and thus hide the fact that a city lay below enemy planes flying overhead at night. Some of those planes might be carrying bombs.

JUST RIGHT

I was about six when dad told me this tale: God, the Creator of the whole world, decided one day to make people. He picked up some clay from the banks of a river and formed a man. Then he baked the man in an oven, just like bread. But he got distracted, left it in the oven too long, and it burned. So God made another figure out of clay. This time he kept on opening the oven door to make sure the clay figure wasn’t burning. He took it out of the oven too soon, it was underdone. One more time he tried. This time when he took the figure out of the oven, it was a beautiful brown. It was just right. I don’t know how often daddy told me this story,