I, Wushu, Therefore I Am
April 1, 2004
TODAY is April Fool’s day, a year after the misfortune, I dont want to fool myself into believing everything could be undone. I am lost, I have lost everything. That is not a metaphor. I am at my lowest point, I am down and people are kicking me in the face. That is also not a metaphor.
Where art thou, friends? (Do I have real friends?)
From hereon in, I would disabuse myself from thinking of black and evil and death and wailing and gnashing and blood and hell and... instead, I will start blogging, postpone insanity and maybe try to collect some entries worth reading by the time I am really old.
August 28, 1968
FLASH! FLASH! FLASH! During the Democratic national convention in Chicago, 10,000 anti-war protesters gather on downtown streets and are then confronted by 26,000 police and national guardsmen. The brutal crackdown is covered live on network TV. 800 demonstrators are injured. The United States is now experiencing a level of social unrest unseen since the American Civil War era, a hundred years earlier. There have been 221 student protests at 101 colleges and universities thus far in 1968.
I was born on August 28, 1968, the eight in a brood of nine, from a devoutly Catholic middle class family and grew up in the suburbs. I have presented through other entries in this blog some of the highlights during my childhood. Below, I dedicate this page to introduce you to the two persons and instruments of God to whom I owe my life.
As a kid I rarely saw my father, Emmanuel, whose work entailed being away from home for most of the week. Unlike the way young fathers do with their kids, our bonding never went beyond bedtime stories and driving around in his car since he was already 41 when I was born. I think he was ahead of his time because I was just around 7 or 8 when he talked of virtual reality TV and computers and auto-pilot cars. He said he dreamt of many things including becoming a lawyer so when he was young he took up law and worked part time at an uncle’s law office but things did not turn his way so he never pursued this particular dream. I remember the closest thing he bore a resemblance to a lawyer was his tenacity over a friendly debate with his inebriated pals. Instead, he excelled in managing business—owned by a close associate of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos—selling farm equipment to landlords and middle-class farmers.
My mother Leonita came from a huge conservative working class family. She spent her teens with a sibling in a mining company in Baguio—a mountainous region some five thousand feet above sea level—where her father Geronimo worked. It was also in this city where Leonita earned her college degree. She taught in a public school in a southern Islamic town in Cotabato where she and my father met. Her mother Ruperta—who smoked Marlboro blue seal even in her 90s—reared nine children and a rambunctious lot of grandchildren and great grandchildren.
During my family’s rare visits when we were kids at Ruperta’s eerie two story old house in Inmanduyan, she would tell us with the eloquence of a Stephen King ghost stories and village folklore over dimly lit oil lamp. She smoked the stick as one does with a betel nut and would read our palms and tell us bright eyed how great the future will be for us. She died peacefully in 2003 at the ripe age of 93.
My father’s parents were Jose and Trinidad, namesakes of my brother and sister. Jose was a traveling trader while Trinidad made candies using processed carabao’s milk. Jose’s tragic death from illness in 1932 left the struggling Trinidad as single parent to their eight young children. Misery would have gripped them even further if not for her decision to entrust some of her children to the care of relatively well-off kin where my father, Emmanuel, and another sibling were sheltered and sent to school.
My father rose to become one of the prominent business leaders in our hometown. I would surmise, with unguarded impartiality, that Emmanuel was the most intelligent among his kin, always ahead of his time, strongly willed, tenacious and passionate in achieving his goals. His spirits—and physical condition, as well—broke during three momentous events in his life—the eventual closure of his business and the ensuing tragic demise of his sons Conrado and Benedict in a span of two years.
TODAY is April Fool’s day, a year after the misfortune, I dont want to fool myself into believing everything could be undone. I am lost, I have lost everything. That is not a metaphor. I am at my lowest point, I am down and people are kicking me in the face. That is also not a metaphor.
Where art thou, friends? (Do I have real friends?)
From hereon in, I would disabuse myself from thinking of black and evil and death and wailing and gnashing and blood and hell and... instead, I will start blogging, postpone insanity and maybe try to collect some entries worth reading by the time I am really old.
August 28, 1968
FLASH! FLASH! FLASH! During the Democratic national convention in Chicago, 10,000 anti-war protesters gather on downtown streets and are then confronted by 26,000 police and national guardsmen. The brutal crackdown is covered live on network TV. 800 demonstrators are injured. The United States is now experiencing a level of social unrest unseen since the American Civil War era, a hundred years earlier. There have been 221 student protests at 101 colleges and universities thus far in 1968.
I was born on August 28, 1968, the eight in a brood of nine, from a devoutly Catholic middle class family and grew up in the suburbs. I have presented through other entries in this blog some of the highlights during my childhood. Below, I dedicate this page to introduce you to the two persons and instruments of God to whom I owe my life.
As a kid I rarely saw my father, Emmanuel, whose work entailed being away from home for most of the week. Unlike the way young fathers do with their kids, our bonding never went beyond bedtime stories and driving around in his car since he was already 41 when I was born. I think he was ahead of his time because I was just around 7 or 8 when he talked of virtual reality TV and computers and auto-pilot cars. He said he dreamt of many things including becoming a lawyer so when he was young he took up law and worked part time at an uncle’s law office but things did not turn his way so he never pursued this particular dream. I remember the closest thing he bore a resemblance to a lawyer was his tenacity over a friendly debate with his inebriated pals. Instead, he excelled in managing business—owned by a close associate of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos—selling farm equipment to landlords and middle-class farmers.
My mother Leonita came from a huge conservative working class family. She spent her teens with a sibling in a mining company in Baguio—a mountainous region some five thousand feet above sea level—where her father Geronimo worked. It was also in this city where Leonita earned her college degree. She taught in a public school in a southern Islamic town in Cotabato where she and my father met. Her mother Ruperta—who smoked Marlboro blue seal even in her 90s—reared nine children and a rambunctious lot of grandchildren and great grandchildren.
During my family’s rare visits when we were kids at Ruperta’s eerie two story old house in Inmanduyan, she would tell us with the eloquence of a Stephen King ghost stories and village folklore over dimly lit oil lamp. She smoked the stick as one does with a betel nut and would read our palms and tell us bright eyed how great the future will be for us. She died peacefully in 2003 at the ripe age of 93.
My father’s parents were Jose and Trinidad, namesakes of my brother and sister. Jose was a traveling trader while Trinidad made candies using processed carabao’s milk. Jose’s tragic death from illness in 1932 left the struggling Trinidad as single parent to their eight young children. Misery would have gripped them even further if not for her decision to entrust some of her children to the care of relatively well-off kin where my father, Emmanuel, and another sibling were sheltered and sent to school.
My father rose to become one of the prominent business leaders in our hometown. I would surmise, with unguarded impartiality, that Emmanuel was the most intelligent among his kin, always ahead of his time, strongly willed, tenacious and passionate in achieving his goals. His spirits—and physical condition, as well—broke during three momentous events in his life—the eventual closure of his business and the ensuing tragic demise of his sons Conrado and Benedict in a span of two years.
posted by Oji Sanchez @ 2:01 AM
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