Congratulations, first of all, for having come this far. You are embarking on what will truly be a life-changing experience.
I have only one real message for you today: study well, enjoy America – and come home and serve our people. The first two I am sure you will do without being told.
The third – coming home – is something we all probably feel we do not need to be reminded of; it is, after all, part of the basic agreement you entered into, and as full of patriotic fervor as you may be today, it is almost an insult to suggest that the thought might cross your mind to renege on your commitment and find a reason and a way to stay in America.
The fact is, it has happened before – not as often as one would think, given the long queues outside the US Embassy of Filipinos seeking to work and live in America, but often enough to disturb a former Fulbrighter like me who takes personal commitments, especially those made to one’s country, very seriously.
It’s even happened that – once when I was sitting as a member of the selection committee – one candidate whose sterling qualifications would have allowed him to write his own ticket to any graduate school was candid enough to admit that he was planning to stay in America after his Fulbright. He never left. You can be too honest, or sometimes you can forget to read the rules.
But better and stronger than rules is a personal understanding of what you’re here for today and why people like you – not just people like you but you yourself – were chosen for this rare privilege.
A Fulbright scholarship is one of life’s great gifts to the Filipino scholar. Over almost half a century, about 1,500 Filipinos have received that gift, repaying it many times over in their subsequent careers of service to the Filipino people.
But like all overseas work – which it is, except that it’s work of an academic nature – it comes at a price, often an emotional price.
When I left for my Fulbright in 1986 – 20 years ago – there were no cell phones or text messages; the PC and the Internet were in their infancy, with something called "Compuserve" available only to a few of the most IT-savvy. Still, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I entered one of the computer halls at the University of Michigan, where, at that time, they already had 4,500 computers for the school’s 40,000 students, many of them open – with unlimited laser-printing – 24/7.
And yet, for all that advancement, it still took about 10 days for a letter to cross the Pacific. Phone calls still cost a fortune – and I had to hoard my news and my messages for my Sunday morning three-minute calls from the corner phone booth, reading from a scribbled list of things I wanted to say. I didn’t see my family for at least three years; I missed out completely on my daughter’s high school education. We suffered other – costlier and more painful – losses. Emotionally, I left the Philippines a bubbly boy; I came home – on the day Pinatubo’s ashes fell in June 1991 – a man suddenly grown older beyond his years, "astonished," I was to write later, "by how a life could be complicated further."
But I learned. I learned not only to read a whole Elizabethan play over the lunch break, the facsimile edition in one hand and a home-made burger in the other; to teach a roomful of inner-city kids whose freshman essays spoke of gang wars, rape, drugs, and despair; to strive to be the best in my creative writing class, not only because I could write well but because I was a Filipino – and not only because I was a Filipino, but because I could write well.
Ilearned all these, but I also learned to cook – at first for myself, and then for a living, over five months at minimum wage, as a combination cook-waiter-cashier-busboy-janitor for a Chinese takeout in an underground mall; I learned to take the cheapest though not always the safest routes, by Greyhound, to faraway places; I learned to reconnoiter sidewalks for throwaway furniture, and I knew where all the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores were by heart; I learned how to live for almost two weeks on $20, on a diet of turkey backs and rice. Once, in Michigan, I picked up empty softdrink cans on the campus so I could cash them in for the 10-cent rebate, until I realized that the only other people doing that were the very drunk and the very poor, and I decided not to give them any more competition.
If I’m beginning to sound like some tragically unhappy story by Bienvenido Santos and not like the federally-funded Fulbright-Hays program, it could be because the year I left was when something called the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act came into effect, drastically slashing Fulbright benefits, among other targets, in seeking a balanced federal budget. As a result, I could hardly balance mine. Unlike you, all I got for my Fulbright was an airplane ticket, a book allowance, and an assistantship from Day One. But those hardships turned out to be providential in other ways.
Those of you who will be going on teaching assistantships should relish the challenge and the opportunity. If you can teach in the US, you can teach anywhere. The students won’t rise to say "Good morning" and they’ll call you by your first name; they’ll call you at all hours to discuss a paper or a problem, but they’re frank and forthright, they’ll push you to the limit, and they’ll remind you of what a teacher needs to be at all times.
In Ann Arbor I taught well scrubbed, mostly white upper middle-class kids; when I moved to Milwaukee for my PhD I dealt with the children of the working class. The realization that these people need you to help them is a great balm for your own loneliness, and you can only hope that you have left them with a vivid impression of a Filipino who knew his stuff and understood them and enlarged their world a bit for one fall or winter term.
We Pinoys spend our lives preparing to go to America. As a young boy in a private school I remember reading about "state fairs" and "heifers" and "mackinaws," and to this day it amazes my American friends that I can tell the capitals of nearly all the 50 states because we had to memorize the map of the US and pencil in those names – yes, in a Filipino elementary school.
Today, with satellite TV and the Internet, the actual experience of going to America might almost be anticlimactic for many. I’m sure that many of you have been there before and might look at this forthcoming trip as just another one in the course of business. In some ways, it will; America has been so demystified for us by the media and by Hollywood that we think we know it much too well.
On the other hand, the marvel of America is that while it can prove to be very small, it can also be very large – much larger than the media and Hollywood can make it to be, in the realm of the personal encounters and experiences to which you and your imagination will be delivered by that 747. The American people are a fabulously, sometimes perplexingly, diverse lot, blessed with the capability of fitting into neat stereotypes and then just as quickly breaking out of them.
Even the Filipino rich can learn in and from America. A few months ago I spoke in this vein before a group of American educational counselors who had come here to recruit the sons and daughters of affluent Filipinos for their schools. I remember a palpably mutual sense of embarrassment over our awareness of that fact. But then I told them that one of the best things our young patricians could do would be to study in America – where they could learn to tie their own shoelaces, cook their own meals, and learn something about the fundamental equality of people under the law.
Some of you – if not most or even all of you – will learn to love America, warts and all. It’s not a difficult place to love or learn to love, like the rich neighbor you grew up with and sort of had a silent crush on, whom you suddenly find yourself going out to the prom or on a date with.
But to go back to my first message: love America all you please, but never forget where your home is, which is here – not even here in 21st century Makati, but in those parts of our country which languish in the 20th and even the 19th centuries. We go to the great schools of America not just to improve our lives but theirs – those Filipinos who cannot even read, or are too hungry and tired from work to read. We are their emissaries, their agents, their speaking voices in a world so caught up in wealth and newness that it can despise and dismiss the ancient pains and plaints of the inarticulate poor.
You can swear today that your commitment will never waver, but try not to speak too soon. The test and the temptation are part of the experience. You will come across or even be offered attractive jobs and opportunities for postgraduate work. Some of you might even find that ideal – or, well, that acceptable – husband or wife who somehow managed to elude you for so long.
You can make all kinds of arguments, justifications, and rationalizations: my life circumstances have changed; I’m no longer the same person who made that promise; I can find the money to pay back whatever I owe the program or my university; our facilities back home are too primitive for the kind of research I need to do; my department has forgotten all about me; the political situation back home is too volatile for my safety and that of my family. All of these could be true – and in the end, all of them would still be, in your heart of hearts, false.
None of these conditions exist in the fine print of our contracts with our people; we pledge to learn, to return, and to serve unconditionally, as our way of saying "thank you" for all the new knowledge we will be privileged to gain – for all the brilliant autumns and the showery springs ahead of you, for all the lectures that will leave you breathless, for all the bottomless libraries, for all the summer frolic on the beaches of another ocean, for the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the sunsets of San Diego.
Again, for all these, study well, enjoy America – then come home to say "thank you."