Merely the punctuation

I’ve been fortunate to receive quite a few awards for my work as a writer and teacher, for each one of which I’ve been deeply grateful. Two weeks ago I received another one, and this was special because it went all the way back to my childhood and to the school that taught me words, and more. Last Oct. 28, I joined more than a dozen other alumni who were conferred Lasallian Achievement Awards in fields that ranged from business, philanthropy, information technology, and medicine to sports, education, and, in my case, literature.

I’ve written here before about my time in La Salle Green Hills, from 1960 to 1966, and I really don’t want to keep harping melodramatically on what it was like to be poor in a rich boys’ school, except to say the obvious — that it wasn’t easy and led to an awkward moment now and then. What I did emphasize in my acceptance remarks was that what I remembered more strongly from those years was the kindness of my classmates — some of whom offered me rides home, others their sandwiches—and the generosity of the Brothers, who let my cash-strapped parents (whose only fault it was to dream of sending their eldest child to this school) pay for my fees in trickles. Because of this, I said, I learned resolve instead of resentment, and hope instead of hate. Along the way, I learned to love books, which was how and why I became a writer.

Purely by coincidence, I’ve just finished writing the draft of a yet-unpublished book on the 100-year history of the La Salle Brothers in the Philippines. It follows the story of how a small French religious order reached our shores at the behest of an American Catholic archbishop at the turn of the 20th century, and then began the college and later the university and 17-school, nationwide “One La Salle” system Filipinos know today. There are many wonderful stories in that book — some tragic and touching, many uproariously funny — about the Brothers.

The personal upshot for me was that I reconnected with my Lasallian roots, and began to understand questions that had troubled me since childhood, such as “Why does an order pledged to serve the poor build schools for the elite?” I learned that, at the beginning, it was the only viable way that the Brothers could accommodate Monsignor Harty’s request to open a Catholic school here that would teach in English. Once academic leadership was established and finances secured, the school and the congregation would be in a much better position to help the poor.

The Brothers themselves — especially the more socially aware and more politically engaged Filipino Brothers of the 1970s and onward — would see to it that renewed priority was given to the apostolate of the poor and the disadvantaged. This has been carried through in the decision of the Brothers on the occasion of their ongoing Centennial that any new school they will open will be for the poor, on top of such schools that they are already operating in such places as Bagac, Bataan, and Bo. Obrero in Bacolod City.

I was honored to share my Lasallian achievement award with the likes of ophthalmologist Jorge Camara, philanthropist Gene de los Reyes, IT entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, malaria vaccine researcher Rhoel Dinglasan, and banker-brothers Lorenzo and Nestor Tan. Similar awards were given to outstanding sports alumni (including a pair of pretty lasses with fearsome reputations—Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion May Masuda and wakeboarder Samantha Bermudez) and if there was any question that La Salle had not produced well-rounded individuals, it was answered by basketball ace Ren-Ren Ritualo, who described his education with what I thought to be the sharpest rhetorical shot of them all: “Basketball wasn’t the story; it was merely the punctuation.”

Personally, the highlight of the evening for me was reconnecting with classmates I hadn’t seen in 45 years, particularly Johnny Valdes (the “Johnny” in Johnny Air Cargo), our class’ perennial declamation champion, and Manny Herbosa, a descendant of Jose Rizal and now BPI SVP. It was funny and strange to be meeting men in their late 50s and to keep seeing them in my mind’s eye as 10-year-olds —and, for a moment, to feel like a kid again myself, running on the Green Hills grass without a care, at least until the bell rang.

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Krip Yuson already mentioned this in his column last week, but let me elaborate a bit on what took place at the recent Singapore Writers Festival, which I caught up with the morning after the La Salle event. I had been invited (along with F. Sionil Jose, who came and spoke earlier) to join a panel and to hold a meet-the-author session, and I was only too happy to oblige. As Krip noted, there seems to be a special relationship between Filipino and Singaporean authors — perhaps because of our proximity, our colonial histories, and our use of English in a multilingual setting.

At any rate, I had a very interesting conversation with the British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, with whom I shared a panel on “The Writer’s Challenge in a Globalized World,” moderated by Singaporean poet and professor Kirpal Singh. Caryl and I agreed that one danger facing writers, especially in Third World countries like ours, was that of being buried under the seemingly unstoppable avalanche of entertainment products coming from the West, via Hollywood and the Internet. Like I’ve often said before, the Filipino writer’s chief competitor isn’t another Filipino writer — it’s Harry Potter and Twilight.

We can’t blame readers for liking what they do — part of the problem is that we haven’t been writing what most people like to read — but there has to be some room in the Filipino mind for the kind of introspective, self-critical assessments that our writers and artists produce.

I noted that much of what passes for “globalization” these days is actually Westernization, or more specifically Americanization — the uncritical acquisition and acceptance of foreign tastes and preferences and the progressive erasure of an already-diminished sense of nation and nationhood among us, especially young Filipinos. I didn’t mean to sound hypocritically xenophobic or anti-American; God knows I can’t survive for long without my Macs and Parkers and Coke and KFC. But we should try to find, understand, and remember which parts of us, deep beneath the surface, remain inalienably Filipino, and learn to value those as well, so we can find our footing in this very slippery and rocky world of the 21st century. That’s a job our writers will be highly challenged to undertake.

I’ll be developing these ideas more fully for a paper on digital publishing that I’ll be delivering at another conference in Perth, Australia early next month, but let me not forget to thank my sponsors in Singapore and our culture-savvy embassy staff there, particularly Consul General (and poet) Neal Imperial and Vice Consuls Cathy Torres and Rei Quiñones, for the warm welcome and support they accorded me.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.