Mother Doreen

I first read Doreen Gamboa Fernandez when she wrote a review of Nick Joaquin’s An Almanac for Manileños. It was published in Philippine Panorama in the late ’70s. I liked the style of writing, light but not lightweight, and the sensibility rooted in Philippine history and culture.

I first heard of Doreen as a teacher when my friend and neighbor, Erwin Rommel Dalisay, became her student in the Freshman Merit class at the Ateneo. Rommel told me how he got a B in his first composition and thought it was a bad grade, until Doreen passed around mimeographed sheets of the students’ best essays, and saw his work there. Doreen marked the essays, typed them herself, and discussed them in class, workshop style. Her point was that students learnt best from reading the finest work written outside the classroom–and the finest work of their peers.

In 1979, I became a Business Management major at the Ateneo, where I belonged to the regular Freshman English section. One day, my teacher passed around a mimeographed essay written by Doreen. It was about Van Cliburn playing at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, about how the First Lady, Imelda R. Marcos, had flown tulips from Holland especially for the occasion, the pomp, the hypocrisy, the madness of it all. It was, as usual, a well-written piece. But it was 1980, and the Marcos dictatorship was still regnant in the land. So my teacher asked us to return copies of the essay to her after we had read it.

When I became the editor-in-chief of Heights, the Ateneo’s literary journal, I changed our bulletin board into a poetry board. I typed the poems of the campus writers, asked our artists to illustrate them, then pasted them on the board. We changed the poems and the illustrations every week. To our surprise, it became a hit. Every Monday, students would crowd in front of the Heights Poetry Board and read the new poems and look at the new drawings we had put up. Doreen donated delicate and beautiful Japanese paper for our board, and told the UP Writers’ Workshop that summer of what we had done.

I also started the Ateneo Writers’ Club and we had a poetry-writing contest. Being president also meant being fund-raiser, and with my begging bowl I did the rounds. One of our donors was Doreen. Afterward, I would run to her, when I needed help with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride March. Later, I would call her up or e-mail her when I needed advice about what another writer called "the shipwrecks of the heart."

My friendship with Doreen deepened when we went on teacher-training workshops, when we banded together against an unfair administrator, when we went to the meetings of the Manila Critics Circle, and when we went out to eat. Once we went to the Central Luzon State University in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija to give a workshop under the Ateneo Center for English Language Teaching. Her driver, Arsenio, drove Doreen, the poet Rofel G. Brion, and myself all the way to San Jose.

"Now we know the way to San Ho-say," I sang as Rofel and Doreen giggled. Oh how I remember Doreen giggling, then laughing that trademark laughter of hers: low and rolling, her lips smiling widely, her eyes full of light.

The teachers recognized her from her columns. Aside from writing a food column for a newspaper, she also wrote a monthly column on teaching for the Philippine Journal of Education, which has a wide readership. When my mother was still teaching, she was also a regular subscriber to the PJE. The teachers in Nueva Ecija were charmed by Doreen’s humility and her common sense. "When we teach composition," she said, "we should not ask our students to write about Greece or Rome. We should ask them to write about things close to home, like their family, their friends, why, even the market."

And so the next morning, after a breakfast of Tagalog beef steak, garlic rice and a glass of Milo ("this glass of Milo reminds me of my childhood," Doreen said), we went to market. Doreen was an enthusiastic observer. She asked about the name of a fish she did not know, and then we listened to a vendor singing sweetly, to entice the customers to her table of freshly-caught fish. The next week, that vignette was already in her column.

In the mid-’90s an Ateneo administrator fired three teachers up for permanency. But we thought the whole procedure was rigged, and so the whole department was in an uproar. Doreen saw the injustice of it all, and in her own way, helped us press our case. The case has since gone to court so I cannot talk about it. But I remember the time Doreen, Fr. Galdon, the administrator and I were having a meeting. The administrator had a clumsy grasp of the English language. That day, she said, "Okay, let’s have a quickie meeting now."

And Doreen, who disliked inelegance in language, clapped her hands and said, her eyes, sparkling: "Oh, how delicious!"

The administrator snapped: "We should be serious!"

And Doreen, bless her witty soul, opened her sleek, black bag and said, while putting the contents one by one on the table: "Okay, let’s be serious now. Who’s not serious?" And one by one, the table was filled with her pen, her small notebook, her memo pad, the syringe she used for her diabetic shots. And one by one, she returned these things to her sleek, black bag.

I wanted to burst out laughing.

Doreen would also drive to the meetings of the Manila Critics Circle. She would pick me up in the English Department, and we drove to Café Ysabel or the University of Santo Tomas or wherever it was the MCC would be meeting. Our group read dozens of books and chose the best books of the year for our National Book Awards. On the way, Doreen and I would update each other.

She would be reading the new novel by John Le Carre or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She read novels voraciously, preferably newsprint because they were cheaper and lighter to carry. There would be one novel in her car, another on her work desk, and another beside her bed. She would tell me how she watched this historical play ("How atrocious, Danton!") and how she fled during the break, taking a circuitous route so as not to meet the playwright on her way out.

She never liked giving a bad review, whether of a play, a book, or a restaurant. Instead of giving a bad review, she just ignored it. On hindsight, I thought it would be better to get a negative review than to be totally ignored. But Doreen’s point is that it was a waste of space–and psychic energy, I suppose–to talk about the unwatchable, the unreadable, or the inedible.

But boy, this woman had spine. During the meetings of the Manila Critics Circle, she would argue clearly, coolly, but firmly against a book or an author’s style of writing or his/her documentation or the inclusion of a person in the MCC. "She writes like a schoolmarm," or "His Spanish is mistranslated," or "That social-realist novel is full of cliches," or "He needs to know more about Philippine literature!" Then we would eat–and eat well, after which, Doreen would open her bag, get her syringe, and inject herself with her diabetic shots. The macho men of the MCC would cringe.

Shayne Lumbera also told me how Doreen would visit Bien Lumbera at the Bicutan Detention Center during the early years of martial law. One apocryphal story went that since only nuns and priests could go in and out of Bicutan, Doreen dressed herself as a nun so she could visit her friends. She would bring drinks, food (Doreen=food, in our collective memory), and cigarettes for Bien and company. One time, when the writer Ricky Lee collapsed from a lung problem, Doreen brought her own personal doctor–the best lung doctor in the Philippines–to Bicutan. Aside from ministering to them, Doreen also told them stories on what Ferdinand Marcos and his extravagant wife Imelda were doing to the country, on what the people are doing, in their own ways, to subvert this darkness over the land.

Doreen, of course, is not a saint. Or was now; it’s still hard to talk of Doreen in the past tense. Oh the many other stories she told me about writers and artists, matrons and politicians, pretenders to the throne and mistresses of illusion. But they were so acerbic, so sly, so wicked I am reserving them for my memoirs–which I will write 50 years from now. And she told me these stories when we went out to this or that restaurant to eat. She needed a male companion to check out the men’s bathroom for her restaurant review. Like my father, she knew how to eat the head of fish, savoring the gelatinous part; or nibble even the eye of a fish. She knew the pleasures of the table and the text.

I will write about these stories later, but not the catalogue of books Doreen had written. They include The Iloilo Zarzuela: 1903-1930, In Performance, and with Edilberto Alegre, The Writer and His Milieu, Vols. 1 and 2, Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food, Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness, and the Lasa series of restaurant guides. She also wrote a book on how to conduct interviews, Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater, Fruits of the Philippines, and Palayok. She also wrote video scripts on culture: Tikim, Panitikan, and Dulaan IV: The American Colonial and Contemporary Traditions in Philippine Theater. Moreover, she translated into English the plays of Valente Cristobal, Tony Perez, Rene O. Villanueva, and Cris Millado.

Because she had given us a universe of words, I thought that we, too, owe her a homage in words. So in 1999 I asked Jonathan Chua of the Ateneo to edit a festschrift for Doreen for the Office of Research and Publications, which I used to manage. Called Feats and Feasts, the handsome book gathers together essays, stories, poems and interviews done by Doreen’s friends. It was launched when I was studying in the US, and I was happy that the ORP donated the hardcover editions of the book for the launching of the Doreen G. Fernandez Chair, which will fund the training of new teachers.

I was asked to write a script for the Tribute to Doreen, Jason Lorenzana of the Communication Arts Department directed it, and the video documentary was shown during the launching of the DGF Chair. Our video docu was brisk and breezy, full of vintage photographs bridged by Doreen’s favorite songs. And I still remember Doreen’s smile that night: it was shimmering with light, the eyes of the Mother Doreen we all love.