Autobiographical Essay

The President’s Premonition and the First Yawp
One rainy day in September 1978, President Marcos had a premonition. With his son and daughter flying from Laoag to Manila on separate planes, something made the strongman shake and place a call to his children's security detail. Within minutes a game of musical chairs ensued as, breaking protocol, the presidential children were transferred onto a single plane. My father, a member of the Presidential Security Group, moved to the ill-fated plane which crashed into a pond in Paranaque – beheading a young mother who was watching television as it plowed through a row of houses on its way down. Four months later, I was born and named after my Daddy Efren.

I’ve heard it said that the unborn child absorbs all the emotions of the mother while floating in the womb. Curled in her own little universe, the child is nourished by a banquet of joy, fear, sadness and all the other flavours of the emotional cosmos until she pierces the waiting world with a mighty yawp. Thinking of my mother, widowed all those years ago with two young boys and a bun in the oven, I think then that I may have been reared on a diet of uncertainty and tenacity.

Learning to Dream in English at the Expense of a Spoon
My mother remarried a stern Israeli businessman a few years after Daddy Efren’s death and we transferred from Malacanang Park (upon whose banks we would chuck stones into the Pasig River) to a sprawling home in Paranaque. It was under Tito Eli’s rigid watch that I began thinking, speaking and dreaming in English. We would have to come to dinners prepared to recite a verse from Shakespeare or ready to expound on a newspaper article of our choosing. A casual evening consisted of a few rounds of Trivial Pursuit in between bites of falafel. But for all the cerebral gymnastics we had to contend with, there were some things that were harder to learn – I also remember being severely scolded for insisting on using a fork and spoon to eat my meals, especially as my brothers had already learned to master the knife. At the dinner table, my brothers looked quietly down on their plates as my step-father glared at me – close to tears from hunger and shame as I fumbled with that damn knife.

China and Two Revolutions
Tito Eli’s work eventually brought him to China where my mom found a job as a cultural attaché at the Philippine consulate. China offered an idyllic if not sheltered childhood. At our school, we were a bit of an oddity – the only Filipino family. I remember a line of students waiting to try our transplanted pedicab in which I rode to school each morning (weather permitting) with my brother pushing effortlessly at the pedals. It was also in China that I recall first being publicly praised for my writing by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Dugal, an Indian lady who wore flowing saris and who lived just a few floors above our apartment. Even though her audience was just a bunch of rowdy, uninterested children, the incident was the first time I had ever been singled out for anything and though I was slightly embarrassed, I grew more and more intrigued at this business of words. Because she was my favourite teacher, it became something I wanted to be good at.

China in the mid to late 80s was a country on the cusp of embracing capitalism, but I recall it as a child’s paradise. Beijing’s parks were expansive tracts of land filled with temples, lakes, caramel apples, dumplings and legends of lions and monkey kings that sent me into a tizzy. But I suppose for children, any place can be a playground. I was also happy enough to walk to school each morning, if only to slide across a good portion of the street which would freeze over in winter or make little books on folded pieces of paper about a dinosaur named “Speed.”

Back home in Manila though, things were brewing and changing as the People Power Revolution captured the world’s imagination and attention. I did not know what was happening, but I remember people (Chinese and foreigners) waving to us on the street and flashing us the thumbs up sign. “Go Philippines!” they’d shout. And it made me as proud as a second grader could be.

In the middle of everything, our teacher assigned us to give a presentation on our home countries with our parents in attendance. I remember insisting on wearing a yellow t-shirt saying “I stopped a tank with my heart” sent from relatives back home to the presentation – but more because I hated dresses and other formal wear than for any symbolic statement. As I recited my report, I unwittingly elicited laughter from the parents when I read, “Ferdinand Marcos is not famous because nobody likes him.” And again, I became intrigued at how words and their speakers could affect people. (Just a few years later, China would try its hand at its own people power movement – and I still get chills whenever I see that famous image of a lone man standing in the path of a column of barrelling tanks and remember how the little Philippines once achieved something so inspirational.)

Symptoms of Dis-Ease
We returned to Manila after a few years where I finished my schooling. While I focused my energy on sports, I still received some attention for essays and stories written as class assignments. One highlight came when a short story I wrote in the fourth grade was anthologised in a CCP publication featuring young writers. I remember reading the story at the launch, this time surrendering to my mom’s urging to wear a decent dress. Even though the story was silly (revolving around “smushed” chocolate cake and roller coasters), mom still likes to joke that I was a published writer before she was and it was my first experience that people other than teachers could be interested in stories.

Although I was an average student, I managed to win a partial scholarship to a university abroad where after careful deliberation, I chose to study International Development. It seemed a noble choice, but I was almost immediately taken over by a sense of dis-ease when I entered the lecture hall for the basic course in Development Problems. I could also not ignore the irony of learning “development” from one’s former colonisers. While I had never considered myself anything but Filipino, I began to realise that I was a weak voice to speak on behalf of my homeland and offer another perspective to my mostly western classmates, since I was just as westernised as they were. But at the same time, my heritage stood out and was mis-interpreted. I was once roused from my sleep by a bunch of Caucasian dorm-mates who asked if I could speak “Asian” to a Korean student and convince her to open her door.

I also recall being assigned Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. The professor asked us how the Indian villagers may have perceived Kenny – the white doctor who attempts to build a hospital in their community. I remember one blond-haired boy replying that the villagers probably saw Kenny as “the land.” He was the provider from which life could flower and I remember the broad gestures of this boy’s hands as he expounded on his ideas. I wanted to speak up and say that I thought that the villagers found him more like the tannery – a foreign institution which had turned their lives upside down but to which they had to submit despite their mistrust. But I was too timid. And it was a moment of cowardice and insecurity that I’m still looking to amend.

Finding a Thread and Another Revolution
My sojourn abroad however only lasted a semester. In the midst of the Asian crisis, I returned to Manila where after a year of drifting like a foetus in a harsh and barren womb, I enrolled at De La Salle University. Despite my mom’s concerns about my future, I chose to pursue a degree in Literature (which is ironic since she herself was a Literature graduate). To be blunt, I did not enjoy my university years. Older than most of my classmates, I had different concerns and preoccupations. For one, I wondered if my speaking, thinking and writing in English precluded me from being considered Filipino. My accent meantime compounded my natural shyness and I was uncomfortable speaking in class especially as it seemed to betray my westernised upbringing, which is precisely what I was struggling with. My goal was simply to get in and out of college as quickly and quietly as possible.

But it was in one of my major classes that I was first introduced to postcolonialism and where I felt that I had found a thread to follow in my attempt to reconcile my western upbringing with my being a Filipino. The ideas of otherness, neo-colonialism, hybridity, exile and subversion excited me and began to encourage me that I could be more than a vacuous voice with an amusing twang.
Meantime, in my final year of college the seeds of revolution again began to grip the country. This time, I was older and present and I wanted to be a part of history, rather than just a distant witness. I recall walking an hour from my house to the Edsa monument and joining the crowds in the rhythmic chants for resignation and at the same time worrying that the overpass would crumble from the weight of all the people.

During the first Edsa revolution, I had been a naive child in a different country. During the Tiannamen protests, I was still naive but could understand its gravity although again I was witnessing it from afar. But now, I was in the moment. And I recalled a paper I wrote for a Filipino History class in high school. Change will always happen, I wrote. All of us will be witnesses, some of us will be participants and perhaps one day, one of us may even be the catalyst that brings about that change.

Detours
After graduation, I naturally gravitated towards jobs that were centred around the written word. I got a job as a reporter at a broadsheet where I covered the justice and defence beat for two years. Again it seemed like a noble profession – to be history’s first witness. And I approached it with a certain degree of gung-ho. But the familiar feeling of dis-ease again began to creep in and I felt as if I was doing a disservice to the craft of writing and storytelling somehow. I became convinced that journalism was limited and by my experience of how media is practiced in the country, I again felt lost and disillusioned. Stories soon became quotas to fill before deadlines which were then quickly forgotten. Disasters such as ferry sinkings, bombings and typhoons were under my domain but the editor only wanted to know how many people had died and how many pesos in damages had been incurred.

One night, I had a dream that my colleagues were sitting on top of a dock in the middle of a grey body of water. Under the dock were bloated carcasses of people. My colleagues were eating them and calling me over to join them. I remember waking from that dream gripped with anxiety and guilt. It didn’t help that I was still grieving a personal loss and was physically overwhelmed after another bout with anemia that required my second round of blood transfusions. Burned out, lost and feeling like a failure, I eventually resigned.

I moved to a corporate investigative firm run by a former Israeli Mossad agent (possibly the only other Israeli in the Philippines after my first step-dad who my mom had long left). My stint in the defence beat had sparked an interest in security issues in me and I applied for the position of a writer whose task I thought was to analyse news reports. But on my first day, I was assigned to join a group of agents to conduct a surveillance on a target at a hotel. There we were in the parking lot, monitoring the target’s vehicle while another group was stationed inside the lobby. I stayed for two weeks but then again became uncomfortable. I was supposed to gather “dirt” on people for cases whose details I would not be briefed on and to use fake names to find my information. I remember sitting in the big boss’s sofa as I told him that I was resigning and returning my salary.

“Why would I care that you’re returning your salary? I made $1 million last year. People from the underworld have sat on that sofa. I’m not impressed with you. You’re never going to succeed because you have no sense of responsibility,” he told me as he leaned back on his chair. I don’t know how I felt about my chances of succeeding in life being compared to criminal kingpins, but I endured his tirade with tongue-and-cheek agreements, and then walked out and practically skipped down Ayala Avenue. It was my birthday. And the first thing I did was go to Time Zone. (While I emerged from the experience with an empty pocket and a bruised ego, at least I learned some techniques on how to evade a potential stalker – turn around and walk directly toward the person you think is following you. He will have to abort his mission. And how to tell the difference between a two-way mirror and a regular mirror – place your fingertip against the mirror. If the reflection of your fingertip touches your actual fingertip, it is a two-way mirror.)

Then began a slew of half-hearted attempts at different jobs. Emboldened by my “confrontation” with the Israeli boss-man, I felt no urge to stay in a job that produced any uncomfortable feeling within me. Sometimes I think I was addicted to that feeling of freedom after quitting a job and I justified it selfishly. I worked as a speech-writer for the military, an English tutor, a news writer for two different organizations, a commercial PR writer, a web writer, and an analyst for two different companies – usually staying only a few weeks at each position. Convinced that I could not tolerate an office job, I went into freelance writing but soon found myself disillusioned by the formulaic writing that I was spouting. I blamed it on the magazines but I wondered if perhaps I had lost my voice or if I ever had a voice to begin with. Or if I did have a voice, was I even brave enough to be heard?

I cringed whenever people asked what I did for a living. I could not stomach hijacking the sacred title of a “writer” simply because my words had seen print and I was suspicious and resentful of people who did. Or maybe I just sucked at writing and all those praises were just flimsy memories of a childhood long gone. Finally, I went into transcription and content writing, where I could still “write” but not have to think.

The pay was good and it was work I could literally do with my eyes closed. But I knew that it offered no growth and was not something I could do forever. As a writer, I felt I had fallen to the lowest level. Reduced to a monkey at the keyboard whose only talent were fast fingers. Since I came from a family of lawyers, I thought I would apply to law school – another noble choice. But I dropped out after the first semester. I realised that while I enjoyed reading cases, I did not want to be a lawyer whose sense of right and wrong were dictated by statutes, clients, and decorum. I wanted a creative life. Plus, I was on the brink of failing anyway.

The Lion’s Den
It’s been about three months since I entered the MFA program. I’m still a little dissatisfied with my writing but it’s good to be back in an environment that cares about words. Slowly, I think I’m returning to the fold.

Looking back though, I know I made selfish decisions and justified them with the easy alibi of searching for one’s self. I made some decisions out of fear and some out of laziness. But I don’t know how I could have done it any other way with the limited store of strength and knowledge that I had then. I remember asking my mom once how she felt when Daddy Efren died and how she managed to get on with her life after such a loss. Her two pieces of advice are what I try to live by.

The first is that you have to make decisions and live your life in a way that you can sleep well at night. The second is that everything happens for a reason and though you may not see it then, there is a lesson to be learned that you will one day understand.

I wonder how different my life would have been if Daddy Efren’s plane had landed safely and he had disembarked to kiss his pregnant wife and rub her full belly. I wonder where I would be now if I had had the chance to finish my schooling abroad. I try to think of the reasons that things have happened and the lessons that I was meant to learn. And maybe the lessons I can share. I think about how all our personal experiences inform the vocabulary of our imagination and the pitch, treble and volume of our unique voices. How our experiences train our voice to tell our stories. And I brace myself for more lessons to learn.

For several years, I vacillated on pursuing an MFA. Although in the back of my mind, I knew that I would eventually follow this trail (wherever it may lead), I kept its reality at a distance and instead explored different avenues. I think I was afraid. It seemed dangerous to pursue it at the first instance. What if I learned that I had no business trying to string together words or that I had nothing original or interesting to say? Where would I go from there?

Instead I stayed in the realm of safe writing where I could still be among words. But dead factory-ensemble words that couldn’t talk back and were cold to the touch. Like components of a machine. No wonder I balked at calling myself a writer. I think I was more of a mechanic – a technician who knew where each part belonged to make the sum operate.

But I think that a writer’s task is more like a lion tamer’s. It requires mastery, courage and a healthy dose of insanity because you know that you are dealing with living things infinitely more powerful than yourself, things that can eat you alive. If you succeed in directing its movements, it is not because you’ve imposed your will on it but more through a rare moment of harmony. I imagine that lion tamers and real writers both conclude their feats incredulous that they’ve escaped with their lives.

I’m still a little afraid but at least I’m in the lion’s den. And now, 30 years after that first yawp, I think I’m finally learning to speak.