Me, Myself & Wushu

Wushu lineage

2005-08-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

PAMPANGA and Pangasinan are two provinces made prominent by our country’s colonial history. These are also places where I trace my roots.

The core of my lineage is entrenched in Magalang—a rustic little town northeast of Pampanga and host to the mystical Mount Arayat. During the Spanish period, Pampanga was an important source of food, forced labor and lumber for Spanish colonizers but the province eventually became a seat of agrarian unrest. In 1660 the forces of Melchor de Vera, under the orders of Andres Malong of Pangasinan, tried to incorporate Pampanga into a Pangasinan-based kingdom but were thwarted and eventually defeated in a battle in Magalang. Pampanga would later earn the distinction of being represented as one of the eight rays of the sun in the Philippine flag symbolizing eight provinces that started the 1896 revolution against Spain.

During the 1890s, one of the trusted Katipuneros (peasant rebels) of the Magdalo faction was my great great grandfather—a young man named Rosendo. He was born in Bautista, Pangasinan and later served as one of the captains in the revolutionary government under Andres Bonifacio who is now a national hero. Rosendo married Maria Rivera Javier from Laguna and had a son named Jose— the first patriarch of my lineage. Rosendo and Maria settled in Manila and had two other children named Roque and Juancho.

My prolific ancestors sired numerous offspring with innate mercantile and leadership qualities. Rosendo’s brother Jose Rojas was a successful businessman whose children and grandchildren migrated to Germany and the United States. Another sibling named Magdalena had eleven children while her brother Mariano sired fifteen offspring. Mariano served as municipal mayor of Rosario, La Union in 1914.

Meanwhile, my great great grandfather Isidoro of San Vicente, Bacolor, Pampanga and great great grandmother Ana Pineda David from the poblacion of the same town got married and brought forth fourteen children but only eleven of them lived to reach adulthood. Their ancestral home at San Vicente was buried by lahar (volcanic debris) during the deluge in 1991. Isidoro had good education and served as escribiente or scribe doing clerical work in the municipio of Magalang. With so many mouths to feed, he also worked as accountant of some hacenderos in the same town.

Isidoro’s wife Ana inherited a small culinary business from her parents and managed the enterprise to help augment Isidoro’s income. She supplied home-cooked meals, made candies and baked an assortment of pastries. The children (and grandchildren) of Isidoro and Ana later became successful doctors, lawyers, engineers and businessmen, while some even became members of the clergy.

One of their daughters was Trinidad— the first matriarch of my lineage. If there was a former mayor (Mariano) in the lineage, Isidoro and Ana Ayuyao produced two former mayors of Magalang: brothers Servillano (Commonwealth period), a doctor married to a hacendera named Petra Feliciano; and lawyer Isidoro II (1941).

It was my grandmother Trinidad who inherited her mother’s business acumen and skills in the art of candy making. Trinidad baked for the old-time gentry and hacenderos who ordered especially cooked sweetmeats for their after-meal indulgence.

Around this time, Rosendo’s hard-working son Jose, earned his living as an alajeros or an itinerant merchant who bought and sold jewelries and an assortment of goods around Manila. Jose’s trade brought him to faraway Magalang while his charms brought him to the heart of a beautiful lass named Trinidad. And so in 1914, after a brief romance, Jose married Trinidad— a union that brought about eight children. The family resided in a house near a church in Magalang and Jose continued with his buy and sell trade while Trinidad attended to candy making, baking and rearing the children.

Jose’s tragic death from illness in 1932 left the struggling Trinidad as single parent to the eight youngsters. Misery would have gripped them even further if not for her decision to entrust some of her children to the care of relatives. Through the kindness of uncles Isidoro II and Porfirio, a lawyer and engineer, respectively, and aunt Magdalena, siblings Emmanuel (my father) and Inocencia were sheltered and sent to school. Also generous and caring during Trinidad’s hardship were her doctor-brothers Claro, Conrado and Servillano. Her sister Nunilon and brothers Ricardo and Raquel also helped nurture Trinidad’s children in their own humble ways.

These children of Jose and Trinidad— second generation of the lineage— built and raised their respective families mainly in Pampanga. The eldest Modesto (Estong) married the former Natividad (Nida) Dizon of Angeles City and worked as a trusted associate of the prominent Tablante family. Modesto sired seven children with Nida: Rosendito, George, Rufinidad, Delilah, Samson, Marissa and Ana Marie.

Lourdes is the third generation candy-maker in the lineage. She is well remembered by her world-class pastillas and pastries. Luding’s husband Rustico (Sico) Carreon worked as among the first cashiers at a state-run college. They have four children, namely, Alfredo, Restituto, Carmelita and Virgilio, who grew up and resided in Magalang.

Jose (Peping) fought during World War II and as a veteran served as chief supply officer of the government’s Public Works department. He married a Davaoeña named Luz Barrios, a professor at the Ateneo de Davao, and lived in faraway Davao city with their six children: Erlinda, Zenaida, Adelaida, Rosendo, Gil and Rolando.

Maria (Mary) married Donato Gozun, a public school principal from Magalang, and an active member of the religious community. The couple’s seven children are Lutgarda, Reinfrido, Magdalena, Maria Luisa, Prospero, Trinidad and Consuelo— all raised in the same town.

It was also in Magalang where Justino (Tinoy) and wife Lucia Suing raised their sons Reynaldo and Luisito. Following his father’s footsteps, Tinoy earned his income through buy and sell business. After Lucia passed away, Tinoy married her sister Carmen (Mameng), and brought forth eight more children, namely, Clarito, Maria Agnes, Maria Giselle, Maria Josephine, Maria Neila, Francis, Maria Rina and Pio Jesus.

An educator and trader named John Nayan from Pangasinan married fellow teacher Patrocinio (Nene) and have four children: Natividad, Remedios, Fideles and Alvin. John served as school principal before running a farm inputs supply business in Magalang.

Emmanuel, my father, managed a farm tractor business owned by the illustrious Aranetas. He met Leonita, a public school teacher from Manaoag, Pangasinan, in a far-flung barrio in Cotabato city, got married and sired nine of us. In 1976, the family migrated to Angeles city after more than a decade relocating to San Fernando, Tarlac and Dagupan city.

The youngest among the brood was Inocencia (Isa) who married Fernando (Ding) Arevalo. Ding, who once managed a lumber processing company, sired three children, namely, Imelda, Roberto and his namesake, Fernando Jr. The family resided in Pasay city.

My ancestry from the generation of Rosendo to Jose and Isidoro to Trinidad to their children and grandchildren lays claim to members who excelled in the field of medicine, engineering, business, academe, government service and diplomacy and in the legal profession. Several family members joined the clergy or gained prominence in the world of sports, journalism, revolutionary movement and the arts and culture.

The family tree went forth, multiplied, and is now spreading roots in Metro Manila, Laguna, Davao, Iloilo, Zambales and at least four countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Those who came before us lived a useful and meaning life and, as they passed by, somehow made it a better lineage. While most lived the comforts of gracious parenting and good education, important values were also instilled in the family—solid kinship, faith in God, academic excellence and service to fellowmen—inherent traits bequeathed upon the generations that followed. I will keep this Wushu lineage in memory as I owe it to our predecessors to uphold the legacy.

(Originally written May 1, 2004)

Games We Played

2004-08-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

GROWING up as a kid in the 80s, we played the precursor of extreme games of today.

Rue de Paree, including its adjoining streets, was our playground for the better and worse of times for my brothers Benedict aka Butiki (houze lizard), Mano whom we call Bunikol or, roughly, a pot-bellied twerp, and I, known as Batbatog (bullfrog).

Our house was a typical suburban middle class bungalow with four messy bedrooms, an equally cluttered huge master’s bedroom and an extensive but literally dirty kitchen. The garage—where the broken down Mercedes Benz rusts to eternal damnation—was interchangeably used as a basketball court even if its tiles were smudged with engine oil while the uneven driveway served as a skateboarding arena.

Need for Speed

We rode our BMX bikes without helmets on and pedaled our way as far as San Fernando near the old Coca-Cola plant. Dad’s car had no seat belts or air bags in it but I was able to survive our frequent trips to as far as the Babuyan Islands near the Taiwan Straits. And I would never forget: it was always a good trip riding at the back of a speeding pickup truck.

At the driveway in Rue de Paree (that's the swing again!), three young,
carefree souls, heirs of the Great Wushu Toto.

Battlefield Lansangan

My brothers and I would play all day at home, on the streets without fear of getting run over by a speeding maniac or in someone else’s backyard in the village. Since cell phones were still unheard of, no one was able to reach us all day. We played maro (a variation of “tag”), skateboarding, hide-and-seek, jolens, “flyball” (where the ball really hurts), cops and robbers (where Benedict insists on playing cop), 2-on-2 basketball, “kickball”, and swapped comic cards. We bathe and frolicked in the rain and swore at kids singing “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” If we were lucky during weekends, my big brother Conrado would bring us to the village pool where we would dive, dip and drench in the water till our bellies ache and our skins burn.

All-Terrain Creatures

We would walk or bike around the village to look for abandoned houses and cast stones at light bulbs or window panes like they were sinners from the Scriptures. We would muster creativity to the hilt to make up games and were contented with illusory exploits from metal scraps and junk. Once, we dug a hole for about a week—reaching nearly fifteen feet deep, four feet wide—in a vacant lot near our house and played Neanderthals living in a cave. We also had a penchant for heights so we often climb mango or guava or aratilis trees and make a feast of their produce, or climb our roof or the neighbor’s roof and laze in its warm galvanized iron sheet. As dusk nears, we would try and hunt spiders (the mean-looking, the better) and secure them on matchstick boxes for their future fights, or catch a salagubang (Atlas beetle) and tie a string around its neck like a frolicking puppy on a leash.

Hi-Tech? Duh!

We did not have a PC, Play Station or Nintendo 64 or X-Box, no 160 channels on cable, no DVDs, mobile phones or Internet chat rooms. But we learned to spend time with plenty of friends and playmates just outside our gate. We weren’t couch potatoes so Sesame Street was already a treat for us and Bert and Ernie (who we learned later was gay), The Count, Super Grover, Oscar the Grouch and Snuffalufagus were totally endearing to us. By late afternoon, we would be glued to Voltes V, Mazinger Z and Daimos. At night, Benedict and I would keep the transistor radio to ourselves in our room and listen to a local AM station play Another One Bites the Dust and My Sharona.

Generation of Risk Takers

They say you’re not a kid of the 70s or 80s if you don’t have scars on your knees and elbows. We had accidents; got bitten by dogs (and cats, too!), bumped our heads stupidly, crashed our bikes, crashed with one another in rough plays, fell off from trees, got cuts and bruises and broken bones and teeth. Oh yes, we had fights (usually Benedict and I), punched and kicked each other and got black and blue but learned to get over it and lived to play the following day.

My brothers and I drank water from the garden hose and not from a mineral water dispenser. We were addicted to sugar but we were never overweight. Our sisters Josephine and Trinidad would spare us some centavos and we would sprint to the nearby store to stuff our faces with FlatTops and Chocnuts, strain our gum-filled jaws with Texas, Tarzan or Bazooka Joe, ate hot pandesal with coconut jam and drank gallons of Fresh or RC Cola.

In spite of ourselves, my brothers and I never got tired of playing. Before the sun sets, we would come home starved and smelly from sweat and grime to mom’s eternal dismay.

The Eight Centavo Question

2004-06-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

IF I WAS BORN on the 28th day of the eight month of 1968 and as the eight child in the family, soothsayers, mystics and even sages from Barrio Balitucan will obviously say eight is my lucky number.

Assuming for argument’s sake that eight indeed is my providential number, what number then is the bane of my existence?

It must be Number Seven, judging from what I posit as the cyclical seven years of misfortune and bliss, whichever comes first. I will let you in on my entries (some still unfinished) from 1968 to 2004, seen in the blog's archives.

Go and try to figure it out yourselves.

I, Wushu, Therefore I Am

2004-04-01T02:01:00.000-08:00

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.

Swing, Memory Swing

2004-02-22T23:39:00.000-08:00

Memories of childhood bliss and atrocious hairdos on the ubiquitous swing in Calasio; circa 1970.

2nd Cycle: 1969 to 1975, Calasiao

I ONLY HAVE hazy recollection of my first seven years in Calasiao—either traumatic and joyful memories that stuck like back-up files in my brain’s RAM. I remember our old two-storey house with a huge (relative to my size as a toddler, of course) front lawn, my favorite swinging iron benches, dad’s nicotine-reeking Mercedes Benz, the rusty steel-matted fence under an enormous guava tree, the space consuming National turn-table scratchily playing Lennon-McCartney’s “She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah!” in the morning even before breakfast was served and aunts and uncles from somewhere visiting us.

Nothing to do with our hometown’s seat of power; mere aesthetic. (foto from a US-based kabaleyan)

Our home had all sorts of merriment, parties with important-looking people, Christmases and New Year’s Eve revelries where liquor flowed, food was plentiful, toys and presents abound. My obscure recollection of these gatherings looks like they came out from mom’s collection of sepia colored pictures where men’s locks glistened with Tancho and women’s hairdos defied gravity.

I remember the dreaded storeroom under the stairs where my disciplinarian sister Josephine introduced us to the misery of solitary confinement. She also taught us that lye—an inedible ingredient of soap—purifies juvenile tongues from cuss words and makes us polite and well-mannered. My other sister Trinidad’s petulance was also a cause of panic to us although I especially remember how she cuddled me and introduced me to her weird cheek-pinching friends.

All I remember about my big brothers Roman and Conrado were that, well, they were big and were always making it a point to look at the dining room mirror whenever they pass to flex their muscles or ensure themselves that they look like what they want to be. I remember my studious brother Edilberto either writing something or reading while my other brother Eric was a quiet Boy Scout and that stuck to my head. Benedict, who was two years older than me, bullied me every time we play and he would always insist on playing the cop or the good guy while my youngest brother Manolito and I would always play as villains.

The music of Fab4 from Liverpool were some of my first influences.

Now that I got my memory juggled, I feel like Calasiao was a surreal time and space and event all lumped into one everlasting recall sensor in my head. I remember being lucky to go to a big Catholic school where nuns teach. I was all the more lucky than the Brosas kid next door because we were drove to and fro school in no less than an Bat Mobile-inspired Mercedez Benz. I had a mop top hair and I was quite plump and my cheek was a favorite pinching object of grown-ups I meet, which annoyed me no end. I wasn’t a gawky looking kid at all but I always had the misfortune of tripping or stumbling in the playground, hallway or inside a room.

During summer, siesta was strictly enforced. My brothers Benedict and Mano and I should have sued our elders for child labor for forcing us to take a nap since it absolutely took a great deal of labor faking sleep while, every five minutes or so, a guardian would peek in our room to check whether we were deep in slumber or just about to pillow-fight. Although there wasn’t much to do in the house—no PC, no DVDs or PS2, there wasn’t even a phone for crying out loud!—why oblige us to sleep instead of—uhmmm well, letting us read the encyclopedia, for instance? Okay, okay. Actually, what we sorely missed during imposed siestas were times playing backyard basketball, hanging around the swing, rolling marbles, converging with dirt and navigating improvised little boats made of cigarette wrapper floating on Patring’s murky laundry lagoon.

On second thought, maybe siesta—fake or actual—was the most effective way to restrain us or it truly gave us more heft and height. Or zimberguenza, maybe my folks just took pride to our purported Kastileloy ancestry.

One day in kindergarten, I poo-pooed in my pants and our classroom teacher—Sister Margaret, I think—who seemed accustomed to shitting toddlers patiently held my hand, walked me along the corridor in full stinking view of everyone and brought me to the toilet for an overhaul. I don’t remember where or how I got a new pair of pants after that but now I think Sister Margaret ought to be canonized as Patron Saint of Caregivers.

I also remember our daily trip to the school canteen—we had to have lunch together, it was dad’s commandment—where our daily provisions of either omelet or hotdogs were placed in a huge circular white Tupperware with a funny-looking holder resembling Yoda’s ear. The canteen was full of diners, crisscrossing our corner and buzzing with animated conversation while our table was unusually quiet while we ate like we were androids programmed to sit prepare consume pack leave.

For Wushu Toto's family, it was cardinal rule to recite the Angelus daily, say the Novena on Wednesdays, hear Mass on Sundays and kiss the hands of his siblings, with or without presents for us.

We went to the beach once when I was around five or six years old. I joined my brother Conrado with his friends and our cousins or uncles—around 10 or 12 in all—in one big floating rubber interior afloat the sea. As the smallest in the circular raft, I clung and tightly hugged its girth while enjoying to my heart’s content huge waves heaving us afloat. Without warning, my hands slipped from where I gripped and all I could recall was having tasted brine and being surrounded by the ghostlike silence of the deep as I slowly descended.

I imagined I was that big-eyed fish in my coloring book who was calm and seemingly unafraid of drowning. In spite of my delusion, I recited the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end—not minding whether I missed a word or a line—because dad said it was also a prayer for fishes. Just as I asked to be delivered from evil, amen, I felt a hand hauling me upward to break the surface and gasped at the Lord’s oxygen like it was all that mattered. By this time I learned that it was Conrado who bailed me out from drowning. It would have been a heartwarming Kodak moment for us brothers except that I felt woozy and nauseous from brine and all I wanted was to get back to the shore, run to our hut and gulp a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola.

If Josephine enlightened our young minds with the concept of responsibility and good-manners, my other sister Trinidad introduced us to the wonders of microchip processors. Arriving home one late afternoon, she brought out a big box, emptied its contents and plugged several wires to our black-and-white television. Voila! In real time, we had a game of lawn tennis and ping-pong and some other Atari favorites right there in the living room. Shortly after, however, she broke our hearts after telling us that the device was just borrowed and had to be sold elsewhere.

The Rogue Who Hated Babies

2004-02-10T21:10:00.000-08:00

First Cycle: 1968, Dagupan

TOUGH LUCK befell even before I was baptized.

Dad leisurely drove to Carranglan on the day I was to become a Christian while mom sat in the front seat and a nanny named Patring clutched me at the back of the car. A neighborhood rogue, who was apparently stoned or drunk, blocked our way and halted the car, arrogantly brandished his firearm and demanded money or the baby inside the car would be harmed.

One ordinary Sunday a helium-depleted balloon descended from the ceiling of this Calasiao cathedral and eerily glided directly where the five year-old Wushu sat.

Luckily, there were bystanders around who recognized dad and who were luckily more rogue than the would-be holdupper. I am not so sure whether the villain gave way because dad gave him money or because he was nearly lynched by the mob. I was either busy sucking my thumb to slumber or enjoying the furor thinking it was part of Christendom’s welcome rites.

The House in Angela's Village

2003-08-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

3rd Cycle: 1975 to 1982, Rue de Paree

IN 1975, Dad decided to leave Calasiao and bring the whole family and migrate to a city near the former Fort Stotsenburg of the United States Air Force where we had our first superficial taste of Baby Ruth, Fruit of the Loom and the great American dream.

Gang of Three

2003-07-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

4th Cycle: 1982 to 1989, Rue de Paree, New Valley

IN 1982 at age 14, I was finally expelled from high school—along with Danny D and Richard R, my best buddies back then—after a series of warnings and suspension for a string of misdemeanors ranging from stealing, vandalism, cutting classes, affiliating to a fraternity, juvenile brawls and attempted arson. Our school was a former seminary ran by some Dutch clergy. The least my forlorn dad could do was to walk me over at the door of the missionary house where the Prefect of Studies handed down the verdict to the Gang of Three.

Although anticipated, I still had a stinging dressing down at home from my sister and school benefactor Josephine—she and my other sister Trinidad sent us five boys to high school and college—while I continuously sobbed realizing that the world had stopped revolving and I was slowly melting from her scorching admonition. Yes, I was a nuisance, yet at hindsight, I have to admit high school excitement was worth remembering more than the hours spent learning the basics of Philo, Algebra and Physics combined.

Goodbye to Golf

2003-07-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

I WAS still in high school when Dad’s farm equipment business finally closed shop. I saw how broke he was, in kind and in spirit, whenever I looked at him. He was almost always at home insipidly tending plants and boringly feeding the pets as diversion to his misfortune. He sold his car, jewelries, golf set and practically every valuable possession he once had just to augment mom’s budget for food and bills. Once he brought me with him to sell our old Underwood typewriter—the gadget where I learned to type—for a measly three dollars.

Evidently old but still strong-minded, he later on partly managed a molasses farm for racehorses. Dad brought me once to this farm and introduced me to his friend and farm owner, an aging but still burly American war veteran named Sprout, who had a prosthetic arm in lieu of the one that got blown away during the Iwo Jima offensive.

Tool Keeper

2003-07-07T15:11:00.001-07:00

WITH dad’s prodding, I continued my studies by going to night classes in another school. Dad had me hired by a family friend who owns a huge vehicle repair shop near the former Fort Stotsenburg as a tool keeper and earned a measly seventy dollars a month.

In my new school, I had to put up three more years with either hopelessly dim-witted or excessively over-aged classmates who were all duped into believing that earning a high school diploma would deliver them from the rut they were all in. I easily topped my junior and senior class (except in PE and military training) even if most of what I did during those years was to party, smoke pot, get drunk and get laid.

Exodus of the TV, Toaster and Turntable

2003-07-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

AS A teen, I knew our family was in dire financial straits judging from mom’s dwindling food stock and the exodus of our appliances to the buy-and-sell shop downtown. Even the well-loved and memorable swinging bench in Swing, Memory Swing (see February 2004 Archive) had to go.

As if things weren’t bad enough, my twenty-one year old eldest brother ran off with her girlfriend who was heavy with their first baby while another brother who wasn’t satisfied with the weed got high with another substance and got low with demeanor. Later on, even my little brother Mano—the family’s cute little Bunikol—got hooked with drugs even while still in high school.

Dogma and Thai Astrology

2003-07-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

I GRADUATED in 1985 and enrolled at an architectural college, and later on for an engineering degree, but after having failed miserably on all subjects related to numbers, formulas and equations, I dropped out without batting an eyelash. I decided to take up political science instead. I attended night classes and usually impressed the faculty and won debates on dogmatic political doctrines. But I was usually a loser when it comes to pocket money so I thought of getting a daytime job and asked help from, who else, Dad.

Dad’s one-armed Yankee friend, Sprout, who loved horses, also loved Thai women and I learned that his Thai wife owned a small restaurant and an astrology reading shop near the century-old parish church downtown. The Yankee hired me for a daytime job to help his wife manage a Thai eatery that I—and any guzzler would do—eventually turned into a trendy Thai-inspired waterhole. The astrology-reading wife, perhaps guided by the stars, regarded me as heaven-sent because I bring some of my cute girlfriends to the Thai bar after school and, in turn, these girls also bring along their boozer friends and make the cash register incessantly ring and the astrologer’s stars blink with delight.

Hammer and Sickle for Beginners

2003-07-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

AT home looking for a stick of Marlboro, my curiosity one day was roused when I entered the room of my elder brother Eric and saw instead a stack of documents in his closet and papers cluttered on the bedside table. I snooped closely and noticed the reading materials were mostly typed-written mimeographed papers with stylus-drawn hammer-and-sickle insignia with banners calling for the overthrow of this and that system or with illustrations of people with headbands, clenched fists and howling postures.

The year was 1983, I was in high school, and I knew from the news on TV and from some papers that there were demonstrations at the capital city opposing the more than ten years of military rule of the president. So I figured kuya must be one of those demonstrators who want to overthrow the president or he must have written those rebellious documents.

I learned later that Eric was neither a demonstrator nor a subversive writer. He was a youth organizer working incognito for a local underground Maoist group.

"Toka Atam Gawuh!!! Akab Ikam!!!" (foto lifted from philrevocouncil.org)

I eventually joined their secret society, marched countless demonstrations, chanted slogans and read voluminous literatures of Mao, Fidel, Lenin and Marx. Subsequently, my behavior, insight and beliefs were altered while my ways of mischief—especially drinking binges—were drastically cut down because of the group’s stern orders. (Funny however, after clandestine drinking sprees inside a similarly clandestine boarding house for activists, we kept empty Red Horse bottles safe and unseen inside the cabinet.)

The transformation proved to be precursors of the tedious process I would undertake to become—picture this—one grim, disciplined, non-drinking and devoted militant, a revolutionary unfettered by worldly desires to liberate the poor and put to death all money-making capitalist exploiters and oppressors in this unjust God-forsaken world.

Malicious Mischief

2003-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

IN FEBRUARY 1985 at around two o’clock in the morning, I painted—along with five fellow Maoist fanatics and devoted liberators of the earth—political graffiti using cellophane covered rubber foam and crimson-colored latex on a concrete wall of a huge downtown building of the city’s power company. Whether our look-out was overwhelmed by panic or just plain stupid for not signaling us of an oncoming jeepload of para-military men in uniform, we never knew. We stopped dead on our tracks like deer to oncoming headlights and were arrested in flagrante delicto.

At every summer's turn, our elders—youthful adventurers—hike and spend the night at the peak of this majestic mountain.

The six of us were booked and charged with inciting to sedition and detained, manhandled and badgered overnight inside the city’s police command camp. The balding police chief met us armed with a wide grin showing his nicotine-stained dentures. Ironically, we found out later that he, too, was a former Maoist revolutionary but turned into a rabid anti-communist after a friend of his was killed by the guerillas.

Inciting to sedition in this country is a capital offense and, juvenile or not, our entrails shook with the thought that we would soon rot in prison. Luckily enough, a lawyer-politician who was a fellow activist—and later on in the 90s became prominent for figuring in a video sex scandal—came just on time, bailed us out and was completely elated by the fact that we vandalized a property owned by his business nemesis. He further reduced the felony to, what else—malicious mischief.

Seeing Red

2003-07-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

A YEAR after, the dictator and puppet Ferdinand Marcos and his equally spiteful family flew to Hawaii—still under the auspices of Uncle Sam—to escape the fury of throngs of people who stormed the Palace. In lieu of the puppet, we had a charismatic leader as president but who only perpetuated a system of oligarchy where the rich robs and kicks the poor in the face and the poor gladly obliges.

We were nonconformist, obnoxious fleas then weakening an enormous, cruel beast. (foto lifted from philrevcouncil.org)

Because of this rotten system and military abuses, the communist ideals lived on. Surprisingly enough, some of us remained anti-establishment even without the revolutionary fugitive and icon Dante to inspire. (Dante resurfaced after the regime change, joined the new government and was given a multi-million farm business to manage). My morale went to greater depths after several of my close friends—among the few of the funniest and brilliant minds—and fellow members of the secret society were jailed, tortured or summarily executed while some who became guerillas died in clashes with government troops.

Seeing Redg

2003-07-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

THE hostilities reached our city in 1989. For several months, Maoist partisanos assassinated military agents in broad daylight while para-military vigilantes retaliated by executing just about anyone who quacks like a communist at a ghastly average of one victim per week.

During the same year, I completely disregarded paranoia and suppressed terror from the bloodbath and fell madly in love instead to a pretty lady named Regina, with emphasis on mad.

Regina was a lovely twenty year-old single mom who wrote for the Literary Section of the university paper I edited. We were both in our sophomore year. She came from a middle class Catholic family and schooled by Benedictine nuns. She was the stunningly petite, bubbly business management student who loved parties while I was the hungry, penniless, handsome pretentious writer trying very hard to look like a serious Marxist revolutionary.

Her story was the familiar unwanted pregnancy and teenage parenthood doomed for failure. After dumping her inconsiderate partner, she continued to pursue college while raising her two-year old daughter—Angelica—with the help of her mom. Regina and I were caught in youthful ecstasy and the proverbial seventh heaven affair. In June of the same year, we tied the knot in austere rites and a month later, our union bore a child we named Julio.

Safe in my arms, I carried two year-old Julio while we both viewing this furious 600 year-old dormant volcano start to throw up just kilometers away from our backyard.

Walking Away

2003-07-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

IT wasn't difficult to see the world of difference between my home and the secret society as a second family. I had a temperamental father, an emotionally weak mother and an aloof kin. Most especially, my brothers and I had to endure dad’s insensitivity and petulance, his ostentatious guidance and loathing of the miserable life without the comforts of wealth or power or influence.

Once, I displeased dad over an argument of some insignificant subject. He went ballistic and tore down my prized posters of Che Guevara and tortured prisoners pasted on the bedroom wall and smashed my guitar into several jagged pieces. After the incident, I just sulked and left the house thinking that Dr. Spock—with all his reputed expertise of child-parent harmony—failed to diagnose that a defiant teenager and an edgy father in mid-life crisis were indeed an explosive combination.

So to diffuse the ticking family bomb, I rarely went home and stayed instead at Regina’s place or at our society’s clandestine house and scrimped on simple amenities.

Home

2003-07-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

I KNOW the worn-out phrase “a sense of belonging” is a cliché. But at hindsight, I truly felt I belonged to the secret society and with Regina’s circle. My fondness with her small family and my convergence with a rebellious group probably filled the void that dysfunctional families inadvertently create.

"He who fails at home, fails in life."

Although I peculiarly felt at home in the company of our secret society, I abandoned it later on when I found another home where my better half and I would try to build a world for our children with less juvenile delinquents, soldiers of war, temperamental fathers, emotionally-abused mothers, capitalist exploiters and Maoist rebels as well.