The family that writes together

Oh, yes, they stay lovingly together, even if a daughter is currently finishing studies in New York, and her older sister has moved on to the great beyond – well beyond any great wall that enclosed a unique family as a transnational unit of endearing writer-artists.

At 6 p.m. this Friday, May 5, at National Book Store, Shangri-La Plaza, the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation and Anvil Publishing Inc. will launch Beyond the Great Wall, jointly authored by Mario, Alma, Maningning and Banaue Miclat.

The Miclat family, now ensconced in a lovely home in the hills of Antipolo, manifests its sterling quality as a nurturing collective by surrounding their breezy residence with a great variety of flora – many of them exotic and brought up with tender loving care by Alma and Mario both.

They have had a distinctive brand of romance together. Finding themselves in exile in China at the advent of Marcos’ martial law, they stayed for a good 15 years, raising their two daughters who were born there, working in broadcasting and translation – and as a family, engaging in the arts in several modes and languages.

Their long sojourn away from home covered the fateful years and historic highlights of the great dragon waking. More essentially, they learned how it was to adapt to a foreign, often forbidding setting, even as their own Gang of Four enclosed themselves in good old Pinoy warmth of tradition and caring.

Now they tell their story with a selection of personal essays "on China, the Chinese, and being Filipino." This fascinating family journal, replete with photographs as vivid mementoes of those years, also arranges within four thematic concerns their individual essays on the arts, culture, the economy, politics, and society.

The preface alone, written by poet, writer and UP professor Mario Ignacio Miclat, makes for immediate interesting fare.

"For 15 years, my family of native Filipinos lived in the shadows of the Great Wall. All through 1971 to 1986, we experienced the Middle Kingdom in depth and breadth. We made regular sojourns to different places, many of which were restricted not only to foreigners but also to the ordinary Chinese. We were privileged to see a world beyond the Great Wall. It was a world much bigger than China itself.

In our first seven years or so, my wife Alma and I lived in the closely guarded Shibasuo, the Compound Eighteen Mansions. It was situated in a wooded area where the ancient Wanshoulu Road wound along the Yongdinghe Canal at the suburban Western District of Beijing. Our elder daughter, Maningning, was born here. For the most part of our stay in this exclusive compound for foreign comrades, only four or five mansions were lived in on a more or less permanent basis. The rest served as guesthouses for secret foreign delegations, high-ranking officials of the Chinese Communist Party, or favored cultural revolutionists of the regnant revolutionary committees.

"It was a period that saw Mao Zedong consolidating the gains of his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, followed by the ascendancy and then the sudden collapse of the so-called Gang of Four and the abrupt appearance of a Chairman Hua Kuo-feng. Early on, our Chinese hosts had advised us not to be too cozy with our neighbors. We could never be sure, so they said, who our friends and enemies were in a complicated internal and international situation China was constantly in. We were ushered in and out of this compound almost solely by a chauffeured Red Flag limousine, a Shanghai green car or, later, a Mercedes Benz.

In 1979, following Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power at Zhongnanhai, my family transferred to a freer, but still exclusive, Foreign Experts’ Building of the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television. The five-story apartment building was hidden in a corner of Nanlishilu Street at Fuxingmen, just outside the ancient, but no longer existing, city wall. It was here that our younger daughter Banaue saw the light of day. In that semi-open international community, she grew up with children from ‘the four seas.’ Now, we were able to ride the public buses, the subway and our own bicycle whenever our exclusive carpool or exclusive buses could not accommodate our preferred schedules. Who would think that the bicycle or the overcrowded buses and train could spell for us the word ‘freedom’ in capital letters? Three more choices were better than an exclusive chauffeured limousine.

"We came back to our home country following the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986. Reversing our people’s diaspora, we continued searching for ourselves as a family, as individual Filipinos and as sporadic writers. Our essays, fiction and poems appeared in either one of three languages that we have come to know – Filipino, English and Chinese…. Some versions in this book are actually translations from the original languages we wrote them in."

The gentle, soft-spoken padre de familia served as editor in determining the four section headings: "Situating the Family," "Searching for Self," "Reversing the Diaspora," and "Finding the Nation."

"I tried arranging the essays in some particular order, dividing the book into four broad themes….

"The book starts with ‘Situating the Family.’ Alma begins it by reminiscing about our nuclear family in ‘China: Past and Fast Forward,’ ‘Peking Apples’ and ‘China Lass.’ She recalls her roots in ‘Mother of Pearl.’ Maningning gropes, trying to understand her parents and her older generation in ‘Morning is a Bit Cold’ and ‘Padlocks, Doors and Dolores Feria.’ I grapple with language in ‘Learning My First Mandarin Words.’

"Banaue starts the second part, ‘Searching for Self.’ Interspersed in her ‘Winter Tales’ of the New York subway are memories of ‘snow-covered winters’ of Beijing and the ‘sunshiny summers’ of Manila. Maningning tries to fit herself into Philippine life in ‘Fixing My Room,’ ‘Visual Poetry in Chinese Bamboo and Xieyi Painting’ and ‘Unveiling Curtsey.’ She cries in ‘A Keeper of One’s Voice.’ Alma rubs elbows with Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing in ‘Chinese New Year in Beijing.’ I bare my writer’s soul in ‘A Confession of Faith.’

"The third part is entitled ‘Reversing the Diaspora.’ We have come back as a family. It goes without saying, however, that China has become so much a part of us. Until now, we like our soup scalding hot. We use chopsticks eating Filipino pancit. Alma still prefers her homemade kimchi, yogurt and apple pie. We greet people that we meet along the way anytime of the day with a hearty ‘Kumain ka na ba?’ instead of ‘Saan ang punta?’

"… In January, when the room temperature in our house on a hill in Antipolo plunges down to 15ºC (compared with Beijing’s subzero), I invariably dream in my sleep that I plod on frozen ground. In their first experience of a tropical typhoon up on our fourth-floor condominium unit in Quezon City, Maningning and Banaue excitedly called me to show the rain being buffeted and scattered by the strong wind. They thought it was the first sign of crystalline snow. Yet we are Filipinos and the Philippines is our country. We have to come back.

It has fallen upon us to share with our people a unique view of a country as old and as alive as our neighbor China. I start the third part with the essay ‘Beyond the Great Wall.’ In her ‘The Mysterious Smile in the Louvre,’ one can read how Maningning goes back to the Forbidden City even while in Paris. In ‘The Commune is Dead, Long Live the Commune,’ ‘A Massacre in Peking,’ ‘Tiananmen: The Other View (Go Fly a Kite)’ and ‘In Quest of Democracy,’ my Filipino heart sympathizes with the Chinese as a nation, as a people and as fellow human beings….

"The fourth part, ‘Finding the Nation,’ continues our long process of situating the family and searching for self, if in a broader sense. Maningning goes ‘Revisiting the National Museum.’ She attempts at looking for the Chinese in us even as she delves on ‘The Chinese in the Filipino, the Filipino in the Philippine Chinese.’ I try to decipher meanings in ‘Edjop, the FQS and Other Rebo Lingoes’ and ‘From Bakya to Reebok.’ An earthquake and a failed coup d’etat in the Philippines trigger my writing ‘Dizhen! Earth Shake! Lindol!’ and ‘Memories of a September Coup’ about similar events in China. The penultimate piece bids farewell to specific friends, ‘Paalam, Mrs. E; Goodbye, Dr. SV.’ The book ends with ‘Globalization and National Language.’ In it, I swear in a manner many of our people do, but in the context of an old-fashioned love of country: ‘Only in the Philippines!’ If only for that love, I should be ready in a not too distant future to write a more organized account of our lives in China as a Filipino family in exile…."

Alma Miclat is SVP of Data Center Design Corporation in Makati. Banaue is a film and theater actress who is graduating in June with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. The dear departed Maningning was a multi-awarded artist, poet and writer in Filipino, English and Chinese.

Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation Inc. (MMAFI), a non-stock, non-profit organization. The MMAFI has been holding the Maningning Miclat Trilingual Poetry Competition during odd-numbered years and the Maningning Miclat Art Competition during even-numbered years. This year, MMAFI will hold the art competition for visual artists 28 years old and below, with the grand prize worth P28,000 and a glass sculpture trophy by the eminent artist Ramon Orlina. (For details, e-mail maningningfoundation@gmail.com or acmiclat2004@yahoo.com and visit www.maningning.com.)

The book will also be launched at the Cranwell International Center of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA on May 25. Signing tours are also scheduled for New York and San Diego by next Spring.

Would that all families produce such a journal of how it was to grow together, whether in strange climes or ordinary times. But then our times are hardly ordinary, rather prone to everyday strangeness that can only strengthen families, whether they are core or extended.

In the Miclats’ experience, they have been admirably core, and more than that, they have extended their tender loving care well beyond all walls of isolation, all borders of national, regional or global understanding.