Father & Son: Overlapping Ordinary Lives on the Sidelines of Extra-Ordinary Times 20Th Century Philippines

By Lope Lindio

I have recorded in this book happenings and encounters in the first 33 years of my life. I am half expecting that they are, for the most part, of interest only to me, the curious members of my family, and friends, who are either nosy of what I had gone through, or just evoking memories of their own youthful past in 20th Century Philippines. These memories are mostly fragmented recollections of what I heard and saw when growing up in a small village, and while going to school and starting life, after the end of the 2nd World War and the start of Philippine independence.

This book is about the unadorned simple life in a village of a newly independent country that was slowly emerging from a backward colonial past and its coming of age after the 2nd World War. At the people level, I have tried to narrate how the young typically responded to the demands of the outside world. Here you will meet family and friends, ordinary people, as well as some of the colorful characters in the 20th century Philippines I encountered from the sidelines of power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503544673

Lope Lindio

An attorney, he is admitted to the bar of the Philippines, Illinois, and Texas. His early education was in a small village of Madridejos, Alegria, Cebu, Philippines. He finished his undergraduate studies in Cebu City and Manila. His law degrees were received, respectively, from the University of San Carlos and Illinois Institute of Technology/ Chicago-Kent College of Law. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Lope Lindio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/01/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

633438

CONTENTS

Personal Notes

PART I: Boyhood

1. Time of Birth

2. Earliest Memories

3. Childhood Recollections

4. MacArthur has returned!

PART II: My Parents

5. Through My Parent’s Eyes

PART II-A: Father

6. Aura of an Ilustrado

7. Knowing My Father

8. Getting Ready

9. Persona

PART II-B: Mother

10. Going to Manila

11. Self-Abnegation

PART III: Home

12. Wartime Exodus

13. Madridejos, Alegria, Cebu

14. Compadre System

15. The Way with Money

16. Life by the Sea

PART IV: Food

17. Rice & Corn

18. Sea Foods

19 Waterhole

PART V: Religion

20. Catolico Cerrado

PART VI: Schooling

21. Independence Kids

22. Village Education

23. A Know-It-All

24. Working Student

PART VII: Teenage Life

25. City Kid

26. Carriage Conductor

27. College Student

28. Summer of 1960

PART VIII: Starting Out

29. Graduation

30. Job-hunting

31. Benjamin N. Tabios

PART IX: On the Sidelines of History

32. Political Players

33. Presidential Election in 1946

34. Political Vignettes

PART X: Martial Law

35. On the Cusp of Martial Law

36. Life under Martial Law

PART XI: APPENDICES

37. Thinking out Loud

PART XI-A: Philippine Issues

Politics, Parties, and Politicians in the Philippines

Self-flagellation

Crab-dancing

Zamboanga Junior League

Killings for Money

Investing in the Philippines

Suffocating Nationalism

Half-hearted Investment law

Keep the land of your birth

Filipino tragedy: circumvention of the laws

Term Limit: Politico’s Nightmare

Diosdado Macapagal – The Triumph of the Common Man

Fall of Marcos 10th Anniversary

US Travel Advisory

Employment Mentality

Population Control

Fiesta Time Again

Philippines 2000

Outdated nationalism

Education not for export

Domestic Helpers

Postwar Boys and Girls

From Being Filipinos to Philippinese!

Comparing Cultures

Language Reality Check In The Philippines

Understanding Rizal through the people who knew him

Rizal No Hero If He Did Not Die

Rizal Would Have Become A Cebuano

PART XI-B: Houston Issues

Beauty Queens

Making Better Wheels

Loss of the Philippine Consulate General

The Making the Filipino Nation?

Time to build a community center?

Why build a community center?

More on the community center

Cultural reevaluation vs community center

The death of grandstanding

Joking only

Hate crimes

The Saga of the Filipino Veterans Equity Act

PART XI-C: U.S. Issues

Republicanism among Filipinos

The truth about taxes?

The quibbling over taxes

Comparing Carter and Reagan

George Bush and Ferdinand Marcos

George Bush is a Democratic spy

The Fight over Family Values

Time is Over for Mean Politics

More Taxes and Less Spending

Mass media bias

Media slant against GOP

The Rule of Law

The Case of Rodney King

Big-time Filipino Taxpayers

The Case of Concealed Weapons

Abortion

Good Science For Cure of Diseases

About The Author

Dedicated to the memory

of my parents:

Lope Lerio Lindio

Fortunata Go Lindio

Inspired

by

Wife, Aurora Yap Lindio

Son, Alex Lindio and

his wife Lien Do

Daughter, Lee Lindio

Heartened

by

Granddaughter

Thea An Lindio

PERSONAL NOTES

Lendio to Lindio

Our family name is now L-i-n-d-i-o after my father changed the letter e in Lendio to i. There are public records showing him already using the letter i as of May 13, 1941. The shift in spelling has divided my father’s Lendio clan into two, the unyielding Lendio loyalists, and the free-spirited family mavericks. If you are curious as to who belongs to which group, all that you have to do is read the annual fiesta souvenir program of barrio Madridejos, Alegria, Cebu, Philippines, my father’s home ground. There are now two columns of relatives, the Lendios and the Lindios.

Message to the reader

I want to believe that those who come after me would be as curious of my life and times as I have been of my parents. I have always wondered since I reached the age of awareness from whom I came and how I have become who I am. I do not want to disappoint them in their inquisitiveness. I am writing these memoirs because no one else will do it either for scholarship or profit.

My memoirs are not just of my life. They include what I learned from the people I knew and the country where I come from. The events included here are as I remember and understand them, with all due regard to the facts. Since this book is a record of what I can remember, I have not taken the cumbersome task of first laying out a plan for coherence and good organization. I feel, rather defensively, that such an outline would entail time and talent to get the work done. I memorialize my past so my children will not be in the dark as to where they come from. Moreover, if those who know me will come to understand my life better through this book, then that would be an unintended outcome of a project of modest purpose. I checked the facts cursorily to validate that they actually happened. However, I did not undertake any further scientific or scholarly research to verify their accuracy.

My apologies to readers from the Philippines who might feel trivialized by making them read well-known and well-worn stuff already known to them. Those looking for great ideas or earth-shaking experiences might also be disappointed for not finding them in this narrative of ordinary people. I am mindful of these concerns. Unfortunately, there is no way of separating the places of origin or the unique interest or sophistication of those who happen to get hold of this book. They just have to read it for what it is. It may be worth their time, though, to make a review of what they already know, or learn from the lives of ordinary people. They may yet better understand the wider picture of the country from the angle of my whole story.

Memoirs of ordinary people

There is no doubt that about ninety-five percent of Filipinos belong to what may be called ordinary people. My parents came from their ranks. Their sole claim to fame is fathering and mothering children they consider their most valuable possessions on earth. The other five percent is the ruling class. They have been in charge of the country for centuries, having collaborated with high-ranking people or worked in and out of the governments of colonial powers, and of the republic.

My grandparents saw the turning over of command from Spain to the United States. However, the Filipinos declared a short-lived Philippine independence before the Americans could take over. This assertion of sovereign rights led to the Philippine-American war. It was an uneven fight between what remained of the ragtag Philippine revolutionary army that fought Spain and the well-oiled American war machine that muscled into the country. The outcome was predictable. The Americans won and finally took over. However, they allowed the Filipinos successive levels of autonomy that prepared the way to the inauguration of the commonwealth status in 1935, and the grant of independence on July 4, 1946, at the conclusion of the Second World War.

Just less than a quarter of a century after independence, the president at the time, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law on September 21, 1972. His strong grip on the civil, military, and political establishments discouraged any credible resistance after the leaders in the opposition were rounded up and imprisoned, leaving only those who capitulated to Marcos. They found courage only after the ordinary people went to the streets in a show of force of the People’s Power in February 1986, which ended the dictatorship.

Years before the Second World War

All that I know of the years before the Second World War was what I read or heard from folks who lived through that era. I do not intend to belabor your reading by repeating here what you already know unless I deem it a necessary backgrounder to the narratives of the people I have included in this book. My account of the war years is from the eyes of a child who started schooling in 1946 when the Philippines became independent. This class of ’46 was in step with the country as it moved forward, making us the independence kids, for better, or worse.

The ordinary people, among them my parents and I lived through these extraordinary times. The change of colonial government right at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century was yet one more striking event. No less remarkable was the transition from Spanish to American regime. Under Spain, the state and the church were jointly running the affairs of the country. This set-up was remodeled in the image of American society where there is separation of the church and the state, a pivotal transformation that sent shock waves throughout the islands. The split between state and church threw churchgoing Filipinos into a frenzy of crossing themselves and murmuring susmariusep. They were in shock and deeply worried about the uncertain direction of their spiritual lives.

The introduction of the public schools was yet another social changer that came with the new American dispensation. The dominant purpose of education during the three hundred years of the Spanish regime, especially in the lower level, was the teaching of catechism. Under the Americans, the emphasis was primarily reading and writing, and getting the schoolchildren on to the higher grades. Another extraordinary transformation was in the political process. The new political system brought down the elections to the level of the ordinary people. The phenomenon of being able to vote empowered them to participate in the government, and, up to a certain degree, be involved in the parliamentary struggle led by the ruling five percent who were demanding immediate, complete, and absolute political independence.

Reckon how the ordinary people figured in these extraordinary times. I have the nerve to say that the life of my parents and mine during these interesting times in the twentieth century is a snapshot of the struggles of ordinary Filipinos. However, the narrative in this book covers only the years around the beginning of the twentieth century up to the year 1972 when Marcos declared martial law, plus two years more when I left the country in April 1974.

The way I close this gap in the narrative of one hundred years is to include in this book some of my writings that survived in some forgotten places. I wrote for fun and the bragging right, as a regular columnist in a number of newspapers published in Houston, Texas, notably, the Philippine Sentinel, Manila Headline, Philippine Observer, and Fil-Am Press. These materials cover mostly the years following the Marcos regime. The articles could very well express the reaction of the ordinary people to the extraordinary times taking place in the country. Peoples’ Power in the Philippines, for example, captured the attention of the world as news of the Marcos downfall splashed on TV in the age of cable news and electronic communication. The ordinary citizens’ mass movement pulled down the Marcoses from power. Copycat revolutions in other countries also deposed the rulers in South Korea, Haiti, Poland, and a couple of other countries. The Filipinos came of age before the eyes of the world.

Figure%201.%20War%20destroyed%20Legislative%20bldg..jpg

War destroyed Legislative building

Earliest Known Date

The earliest possible date of reference that I could get handily without doing any intensive research on the obscure and nebulous origins of the Lendio family came from my father’s cousin, Cunigunda Lendio, a schoolteacher. Her father, Bernabe Lendio, my father’s uncle and the family patriarch, was born on June 11, 1893. He was five years old when the Spaniards lost the Philippines and the Americans hijacked the country from the Filipino revolutionaries who declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. These extraordinary events happened within a few years around the turn of the twentieth century. My father was born on September 25, 1905.

These memories of distant time, people, and places, including fuzzy childhood recollections, come back to life at any time, when something in the air reminds us of the past. We get lucky sometimes. A long forgotten event suddenly returns afresh, even when given up as lost, like, it just happened the day before. Whatever it is, it fills the gaps in our memories. It is the missing link in our search for answers to the questions of who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

It is natural for people to be embittered by what hurt them in the past, just as it is normal for us to bask in the glories of days gone by. This could lead us to become selective sometimes in what to remember because memories come in spurts of unfiltered and unsorted bits and pieces. The enlightened course to follow, if you cannot stand the stress of sorting them out, is to take to heart the latest buzzword that is dismissive of things that are past arguing or altering. Been there, done that.

Wide memory net

Nevertheless, I cast my memory net as far back as my imagination can permit, regardless of the form or shape of the yield. I just want to reach the treasure troves in the past that can illuminate my own and the lives of ordinary people I have known. Sequences of events are oftentimes uncertain. We cannot assure ourselves, which came first, and how it ended. However, that is immaterial. What is important is that they did happen in our past life, not too long ago, or far back out in the past that the lapse of time is already casting doubt on what we can remember.

We might be told when checking facts, that the possibility of our recollection being true or right is slim, even when our own memory is clear. I have learned to trust more what I feel, what I remember, rather than what others tell me to the contrary. People, after all, always differ, and forever dispute what they remember of the past.

This is especially true during childhood. No one is certain at what point does a child start storing significant memories. However unreliable or uncertain they come, we need them to patch up a break or fill the void in our recollections in order to provide coherence and continuity. Of course, memoirs could become subjective too. People tend to give way to their biases and self-pride. The thing to do when faced with something awkward or embarrassing is not to dispute or disguise it, or cut it off. Let our unique insight explain the puzzle or ambiguity.

These plain folks survived the sweeping changes in their lives because of their simple rural resiliency. Like the flexible bamboo that sprouts untended just anywhere in the countryside, they are adaptable to the swaying movement of change. I do not want them to exit this world unremembered and unmentioned anywhere. Their lives, when taken all together, sum up the life of the ordinary people in small villages dotting the country where my parents came from.

I am not saying that the ordinary people I have known did not have the will to take the time and effort to do the heavy lifting needed to attain a better life. I have to write this book because while it is supposed to be about my life, and of the people I have met along the way, it is really a tale of the struggles of the common man to do better than when he started. I do not want my crowd of ordinary people to pass this world unnoticed; leaving nothing that would inform others about them. I feel I owe it to the departed to remember what they had been through in their time. I owe it to the next generations that they would know how their ancestors lived.

This book has to get into their hands.

Figure%202.%20Philippine%20Indepedence%20Proclamation.jpg

Proclamation of Philippine Independence

PART I

Boyhood

1

Time of Birth

You will understand more these memoirs if you start reading from the Personal Notes. Then you would know what this book is all about and why I am writing it in the first place. Knowing the reason for these memoirs will give you a good start in understanding the chain of events that led to my birth on a Wednesday, July 10, 1940. Before midnight, when stillness was slowly descending on the blue-collar Paco district of pre-war Manila, the residents were already falling asleep after a hard day’s work. A few were not awake but not asleep either. My mother knew it. I was getting ready to make a grand entrance onto the world stage from her womb.

Figure%203.%20%20with%20Cesar%2c%20Helen%2c%20cuz%20Pising%20carrying%20Lourdes.jpg

Earliest known picture of brother Cesar, myself, sister

Lourdes on the arms of cousin Pising, and sister Helena

It was daytime at the other side of the world. The Second World War was already in full swing and raging in Europe. Right when a government midwife was helping my mother bring me into the world, the German Luftwaffe, all 2,000 of them, were flying over the British Isles. The Battle of Britain had begun. History considered this aerial incursion the turning point that started World War II although the nations of the world had already taken sides ten months earlier when Germany invaded Poland.

If I am inserting this bit of world history, it is not to give any international dimension to my humble birth. It’s just that the outbreak of the Second World War and the power plays of the dominant countries at that time influenced, affected, and decided what happened next in my life, and in many other ways than just the fate of nations.

I have marked down Wednesday as my lucky day. I thought that if nature reserved it for my birthday, then it is my day for taking examinations, going for medicals, and doing other chores where the result is unpredictable.

The time of my arrival, though, was not the best of times in our household. My father’s ambitions and varied interests were beyond his personality, talent, and resources. A good part of what he was aiming for was more than what he could handle. He just had gone through a legal encounter with the Philippine government concerning his publishing business. On top of these troubles, the relationship of my parents by the time I came as their third surviving child was far from being harmonious.

Plans were already afoot for us to move to Davao and Cotabato, in Mindanao, the second largest island of the Philippines and start a new life. However, the timing of my birth delayed it one year longer than originally planned. When we finally arrived in Davao, it was just days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This was reportedly the long awaited reason, actually more an excuse, President Franklin D. Roosevelt needed to convince isolationist Americans to get involved in the war. War hysteria descended on the country, especially in Manila.

I never had a chance to visit my birthplace until the summer of 2012, not even during the years I worked in Manila after I became a lawyer in 1963. My wife’s nephew, attorney Francis Yap, and his wife, Christine Verzosa, accompanied us on a tour of Paco. What I saw during this visit were some of the scattered shards of memorabilia that I often heard from my mother’s narrative of her life in this place when she was carrying me around for nine months.

Paco, Manila

All that I knew of the place was from the lips of my mother. My father was not one to get into small talks about little things. His interests were always on profound subjects, mainly politics. She looked back to her years in Paco with a tinge of sadness but fondly. She remembered most of all the navigable river that cut across the district. It probably still exists today in one form or another, very likely the same river I saw when I went there. She used to spend considerable time sitting by the riverbank, wondering about my father and pondering over her sad life. Afternoons she watched the coming and going of vessels, slow and fast crafts, and cascos. The rumor was that the Siamese twin sons of the wealthy Yangco family were getting joy rides around the river, which was often referred to then as the Yangco River. My mother never seemed to know if it was named in honor of the millionaire businessman Teodoro Yangco or because his vessels were plying the waters. Residents in the area often talked about the generous act of the childless Yangco couple in adopting the conjoined twins, who were known to come from parents who could not handle their special needs.

Figure%204.%20The%20Yangco%20twins%20seen%20by%20mother%20around%20Yangco%20River.jpg

My mother saw the Yangco twins while in motorized boat rides around the Yangco River.

Baptism

Children had to be baptized during those times in Catholic Philippines as soon as possible, the better if within months or even days from birth. The church takes it as a sacrament for the remission of the original sin. However, my father thought of himself as a modern man. He believed that matters about religion are too important for parents to decide for their children who have not yet reached the age of reason. He rationalized that infants should not be made to take on something they do not understand. Apparently, he did not yet have the courage of his conviction to contend with his neighbors’ religious sensibilities when my elder brothers were born. He had my elder brothers Napoleon and Cesar baptized Catholics on time, but my sister and I had ours when I was eight and she was eleven. My younger brothers and sisters did not have their baptisms until past ten years old.

Figure%205.%20Cesar%20with%20twin%20Helen%20and%20twins.jpg

Brother Cesar with twins Francis and Patrick, and sister Helena.

Background is the village schoolhouse.

All of us children paid a high price for his wayward religious principle. Our contemporaries in the barrio called us herejes or heretics because they knew some of us were not yet baptized. The elders were just sorry to see us lose our souls. Yet, when my father decided that the time for baptism was up and the long wait was over, the delay did not empower us at all to choose what religion to follow. He did not even bother to ask us at all. In addition, even if we had a choice on this matter, the only other alternative was Iglesia ni Cristo, a church that existed only in Manila until after the 1960s when it spread throughout the country. My mother joined them for fellowship during her loneliness before we left Manila. But I never heard her missing its service or ceremony. Neither did she mention of returning to their fold. We came to know of her Iglesia connection only when she told us that her considerable biblical knowledge mostly came from an Iglesia pastor. After all, our mother, like most women in the countryside, was a very devout Catholic early on, a devotee of the Virgin of Sorrow, or Dolorosa. Another practical reason for us to become Catholics in any case was that everyone we knew was Catholic, without exception.

2

Earliest Memories

In recounting my life, I try not to let nostalgia or idyllic impulses influence me. I want my memoirs to come pure as they come, like the smell of the earth, the sight of the fruit trees, the games of kids, pictures in albums. I reckon that my earliest childhood memories started to build up when I was age three or four. My very first recollection was during the height of the Second World War in the Philippines. A celebratory flurry of excitement was taking place in a cluster of houses of war evacuees who moved farther east to the mountains in order to be away from the fearsome Japanese military patrols in the lowlands. The neighborhood stirred to learn of the sudden arrival of a local boy who went off to fight in the war. Maximino (Menong) Javierto was given up for lost or dead but he made it back home anyway. The soldier was a son of a close friend of my father’s family. Their house was located down hill from where our evacuation house stood.

It was around the days following the American surrender to the Japanese on May 6, 1942, in Corregidor and Bataan, when the regular Philippine army was disbanded and the soldiers encouraged to join guerrilla units being organized in different parts of the country. I learned from Menong years later that it took him several months before he could find his way back home. If his homecoming was in 1943 or early 1944, his arrival then followed right on the heels of our coming near his parent’s place. My aunt Felicidad’s family took us to their farms in these parts for safety after our arrival from the island of Mindanao where the war caught us.

Evacuees from Mindanao

My father’s family considered it a miracle that he was able to come back home from Davao, a part of the country then considered a remote corner of the world. It is even farther than the fabled far Zamboanga, that distant place celebrated in a folk song as too far for a loved one to go. During those days of difficult travel, getting to a place that far in the southeastern tip of Mindanao was like going to another planet. Middle-aged parents of young men who ventured to become pioneer settlers in those faraway places never expected to see them again. When my father was stranded in Davao at the outbreak of the war, just less than a month or two upon our arrival from Manila, he said he was shaken and wondered if he could make it back to his hometown in Cebu to ride out wartime uncertainties.

The unforeseen wartime difficulties in Mindanao troubled him. Having just arrived recently, he was still unable to establish contacts with the people he thought could be counted on for communal support. He mused later, when reminiscing about the war, that civilians are often the collateral damage in the collision course of the mighty powers who could not agree on how to carve out the world among them. While combatants are trained to survive wartime life, civilians are unprepared to face the inevitable hardship.

In our case, the world war drove us from Mindanao to mountain hideouts in Madridejos, Alegria, Cebu, which could be reached only by following small but well trodden pathways that had been in use since time beyond recall. Generations of my father’s family settled in the lowlands, but this general area was where most of them produced their foodstuff. It was here where we waited for the war to come to a halt. Then, our father could move on, and possibly take up again the business he wanted to start in Davao.

Mountain hideout

People who had been to these mountain areas between Dalaguete and Alegria swear that the climate in these parts is unlike any other place they knew. Its higher altitude than the lowlands makes the weather very agreeable to farming crops that makes it the vegetable basket of the province of Cebu. The soil, though, is just regular, not really fertile, but it can be coaxed by hardy farmers to produce vegetables grown mostly in temperate places, like, cabbages, potato, onions, beans, plants not usually known to grow anywhere close to the seacoast.

What you would see around are high hills, which have not risen to the dignity of the mountains, with no forest or stately trees covering the landscape. Cogon grass that grows like American hay protects the earth from sandstorm and erosion. Wartime evacuees built their houses on the hillsides or at some vantage points behind thickets, or under cover of trees or banana grooves, very much like the newly built house of my aunt, where they could see the approach of people coming from a distance. I remember my cousins competing with each other in guessing approaching figures as they were coming closer and more recognizable. I sometimes joined them in straining our eyes hoping they were not strangers who could be Japanese soldiers or spies. Maybe I just heard about these wartime narratives from others, but reflecting about those days, I believe I really had some personal involvement myself, enough for me to claim some ownership of the hide and seek experiences they told me we had gone through.

The Japanese are coming!

I saw early on the face of danger when I was three or four years old. A Japanese contingent came to our house inquiring about the whereabouts of my father. People love to hear this episode. They always rushed me up to say what happened next, and could not stand to wait knowing the tense details that day when our lives stood on a balance.

The Japanese had already by this time a terrifying reputation for cruelty to civilians picked up for interrogation on just about anything, especially guerrilla activities. When they went out patrolling or looking for somebody, everyone was afraid of their mission. Their outing must be worth the risk of being captured or killed by the local folks in inhospitable territory. It was well-known that when the Japanese stopped by, they were not just asking for direction or the whereabouts of somebody. Lives were always at stake, but this time the life that we could lose was that of my father.

I remember standing next to my mother at the doorway of the small evacuation house. The Japanese soldiers halted at the landing of the bamboo stair contraption that looked more like a wide ladder than a staircase. The leader went about his mission without any pleasantries. He asked where my father was. Of course, we already rehearsed for this question because we knew they were coming. My father had been the municipal treasurer of the town, a position he could not refuse when the Japanese-appointed mayor offered it to him just as soon as he arrived from Mindanao.

Everyone in the household was ready. Each knew what to do. We had instructions in how to behave and what to say. My mother positioned me to stand next to her in order to convince the Japanese that she was harmless. It was not by chance that we knew of their coming. The evacuees had already in place a surveillance system which could warn in advance on the movements of the enemy as they were moving along the pathways and animal trails in a land the locals knew like their own backyard. Sentries observed them and they sent out messages, from the safety of the hills, behind big boulders, on some tall trees, or while blended in the landscape, that the news of the enemy preceded their arrival.

Stringed cable

One of my constantly reinforced childhood memories is that I saw people manning a system of string cables made of abaca fibers strung between houses or connected to trees in strategic places at intervals. I cannot say for sure if they were just teenagers play-acting wartime games, or if they were really doing guard duty. But I remember them using a contraption that supposedly emitted sound when jerked roughly, once the watcher downstream jiggled it forcefully to signal the coming of a message. Then the switchboard operators took to their ears receivers, which were made of discarded sardine cans. They said that the activation of this system was good enough to transmit messages. The advance warning enabled the evacuees nestled in some secure places beyond to have a lead-time to scamper around for safety or get ready for armed encounter.

I learned from my mother that my father was away attending a meeting with local guerrillas. My aunt, who possessed a take-charge personality, immediately sent a runner to let him know about the visiting Japanese party. He was instructed to come home looking like somebody who had just finished working on a farm, with dirtied hands and soiled clothes. The Japanese were apparently satisfied with what they saw because they did not make a scene. They just quietly took him into town. However, just as soon as he was able to send us to safety, he escaped and worked for the guerrillas as a depot supervisor and supply coordinator.

3

Childhood Recollections

Hardship

My father left the confused wartime conditions in Mindanao hoping to find security among relatives in his hometown. We arrived barehanded and without means of support. At a time when everything was scarce, my aunt had to take us into her household. None of us could do any kind of productive work. My mother was in the last trimester in her pregnancy and soon gave birth to a set of twin boys. The three of us kids were really still too young to work.

Traditional family pride and wartime reality muddled our ability to cope with the demands of the war. My father’s relatives took him to be an educated ilustrado, and, apparently, he did not discourage them from this notion. It was supposedly beneath his dignity to dirty up his hands or to work on a farm. As troublesome as it was having to support us in our aunt’s household, my father’s relatives would not have approved of him going into farming, even if he wanted to as a matter of economic necessity. They would rather keep us forever in their care than go down in the estimation of their friends who, they imagined, admired and envied them for having an educated brother. The idea of their hero falling back to working in the field again, which was the lot of their fathers, was going to be a big let down.

Out you go!

Living together in close quarters is never easy, more so during wartime when people live on their nerves and everything is scarce. Conflict was inevitable in our living arrangements and it came to a head soon enough.

One evening, my mother had to drag all her three children out of the house in the middle of a pitch-dark night. She just had a violent quarrel with my aunt over something I had no idea what caused the rumble. I imagine that my brother Cesar, who was just 10 years old, carried our few belongings, while my seven-year old sister, Helena, held my hand. It was difficult for my mother to locate the way to a homestead where we were to ask to be taken in for the night.

All that we had to light the way around the unmarked landscape we traveled was a torch that was made of tightly rolled coconut leaves. My mother had been there only one or two times, perhaps. Socializing was not possible for a mother of three very young children. The demands on her time were just overwhelming. In addition, given the fact that we were just added members of the family, she had to take it upon herself to run the household while all others were working on the farm. Nevertheless, we managed to get to the other side of the hill. It helped that in the darkness of the night, we could see the household lights in a cluster of three or four houses from afar to give us direction to where we were going, like starlights, even from a distance.

This traumatic experience affected me deeply, like a sad story written into my personality. Only the passage of time had exorcised it slowly. However, the episode left me overly sentimental and easily driven into a misty mode every time I see a mother cuddling a child while attending to the needs of her other kids. I still have trouble making an effort on putting up a heroic facade of being oblivious to such a sorry sight. Movies are no exception. Maturity has somehow strengthened my resolve to look emotionally strong, but when I was growing up, it was no easy task to look cool.

Howling of dogs

One other unforgettable boyhood flashback took place in Caleriohan, a village that is part of the town of Dalaguete, Cebu. The scare and threat of the Japanese manhunt for my father drove us farther inland and closer to the other side of the island of Cebu that faces Bohol. My mother came to know of a family living somewhere nearby. We passed by their house once. I was impressed that compared to our shack, it was made of wooden siding and topped by galvanized iron, a rarity in the area.

My mother said that a woman there was having a difficult childbirth and in the throes of death. When she died, one or more dogs were howling regularly at sundown and continuing into the night as I passed into deep slumber while shaking in fear. My mother said that the dogs were warning the house of an attacking airborne witches coming closer to get inside and pick up the heart of the deceased. The wailing sound was very scary and to this day, I always associate this canine bellowing with death.

Going nuts for guns

My father sometimes came home on a horse when he could get one. He always took time to hold me atop the horse and keep me mounted for a few minutes when he was feeding and cleaning up the animal. He really looked smart bestride the horse with a sidearm in a holster around his waist. He was my idea of a soldier at a time when I had no knowledge about cowboys.

His sidearm was supposed to be caliber 45, the kind of toy old men love to fondle and boys wish to get their hands on and play, just like the adults. For fear of an accident, our parents kept a close watch on me and my older brother when my father was home. In fact, some boys in the neighborhood also came just to see or touch the gun. They just wanted to be able to brag to their friends. In truth, we were never allowed to hold it in our hands for long, and, of course, it was unloaded at all times.

I outgrew my fascination for guns over the years, having slowly lost interest in anything that could kill, culminating the time when everyone in the Philippines was required to give them up after Marcos declared martial law in the country. Ironically, I turned my childish ardor for guns into intense dislike, as I became an adult. I have seen lives of innocent children lost because of parental negligence. When I came to the U.S., my aversion for guns only intensified as I noted a whole culture of gun worshipping that has developed in a cross section of American society, even among those not expected to be so possessed by a killing device. I have been writing over the years against gun ownership. It is a personal philosophy of mine not fully understood even among my friends.

Whenever my father had to leave the house again, after just a day or two of furlough, I always badgered him to take me along on his horse. He had to come up with all sort of excuses to get loose from me. One time, he seemed ready with a reason. He said that if I stopped crying, he