Christmas and New Year remind us of mankind’s yearning for renewal and hope in a better tomorrow. I interviewed one of the country’s most courageous newspaper editors and the first victim of martial law repression of mass media, 82-year-old Rizal Yuyitung of Chinese Commercial News (CCN), who is now battling incurable brain cancer with indomitable hope and good cheer. He lives in Toronto, but CCN director and columnist Melanio Cua Fernando informed us that Yuyitung briefly visited Manila to give instructions on how to continue CNN operations.
At the dinner were their defenders in their 1970s legal and political struggle against persecution – former Senate President Jovito Salonga and his wife Lydia, Senator Joker Arroyo, Philippine STAR publisher Max Soliven, writer Jose F. Lacaba and his wife Marra Lanot. Other defenders included the late Atty. Juan Quijano; lawyers Juan David and Joker Arroyo; Joaquin "Chino" Roces; Teodoro Locsin Sr. and his son Teddy Boy; Napoleon Rama and others.
Max Soliven was president of the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC), where Quintin was immediate past president. They were arrested in MOPC. Soliven sought the intervention of the International Press Institute (IPI) and US publishing tycoon Barry Bingham joined him in visiting the Yuyitung brothers in Taipei. Quintin eventually served two years, and Rizal three years.
Pete Lacaba said he was 25 years old when he wrote an article defending the brothers in the Philippine Free Press. When Lacaba mentioned that he is copy editor of Summit’s Yes! magazine, Rizal Yuyitung’s wife, painter Veronica Lim-Yuyitung said, "Mano Po 1 and 2 of Regal Films were negative and full of stereotypes which did not do justice to the true culture and experience of us Chinese in the Philippines. I hope Mano Po 3 will not be the same."
Salonga said: "The Japanese bombed the Philippines on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dec. 8, 1941, eight hours after bombing Pearl Harbor. I was then a law student. Instead of the Japanese this year putting up a Kamikaze statue in Mabalacat, Pampanga, they should have put up a monument in Clark Air Base where their bombing raid in one day wiped out the US Air Force in Luzon. We Filipinos should build an anti-Japanese monument for our resistance fighters in Capas, Tarlac."
I asked World War II questions because the Yuyitung brothers drew their inspiration from their courageous late father and CCN’s first editor, Yu Yi Tung, who was executed by Japanese forces after the Fall of Bataan in April 1942. Today, there is a memorial hall in Manila’s Chinese Cemetery, with memorials to 10 martyrs of the Chinese community who were executed by the Japanese regime for opposing their imperialism in Asia.
Rizal Yuyitung explained that my activist grand-uncle Dy Hoc Siu was officer of the Boycott Committee of the Khong Tiak Hue or Anti-Japanese League. In the mid-1930s, the boycott committee advocated all-out economic boycott of Japanese goods due to Japan’s attacks on China. His father Yu Yi Tung was officer of the propaganda or Public Affairs Committee of the Khong Tiak Hue. The Anti-Japanese League’s national president was my grandfather’s cousin, Chinese Commercial News/Fookien Times/China Bank founder and Chinese Chamber of Commerce president Dee C. Chuan. Yuyitung said that before World War II, Japan in 1914 already invaded China, and tried to take over German interests in Qingdao and Shantung province, imposing 21 demands on China which furiously ignited the May 4 nationalist youth movement.
Inspired by his father’s fearless idealism and defiance of Japanese imperialism in Asia, Rizal Yuyitung was a Boy Scout assigned to posts in Manila to watch for trucks with Japanese goods. He and other Boy Scouts reported Chinese traders buying Japanese goods so that the Boycott Committee could impose penalties through moral suasion. The boycott hurt Japanese economic interests, so that seven out of the 10 Chinese martyrs belonged to the Boycott Committee.
Though the Japanese forces occupied Manila on Jan. 2, 1942, it took them four months to subdue the valiant Filipino and US soldiers in Bataan and Corregidor who lacked food, ammunitions, medicine and other supplies. After the Fall of Bataan, the Japanese herded Filipino and American troops to prison camps in the cruel and barbaric Death March, despite availability of US military trucks.
Rizal Yuyitung recounted: "General Homma waited until the Fall of Bataan and Corregidor on April 10, 1942, then he immediately tried to control the Chinese community. The Japanese demanded the community pay double the amount of donations we had sent to China in support of the resistance war. But Yu Khe Thai said that Chinese business leaders were detained, businesses were closed, how could they donate? Among the many Chinese arrested were Yu, Albino SyCip and others; the 10 martyrs including my late father were sentenced by a kangaroo military court to death. The others got 20 or 30 years’ jail sentences in Muntinlupa."
The 10 men were lined up in the Chinese Cemetery in front of a dug-up canal and shot in cold-blood. Their relatives were never notified. The executions were witnessed by a Filipino caretaker in the cemetery who, after the war, helped identify their burial spots. "There were many more in our Chinese community who later fearlessly gave their lives fighting alongside Filipino guerrillas in the war against Japanese military occupation."
When asked why he could still laugh and look forward to a happier 2005 despite doctors giving him only seven months to a year to live, Rizal Yuyitung smiled and said, "I believe in the power of positive thinking. I have always been an optimist. All my life, I believed in the love of my fellow human beings. With hope, one can overcome any crisis."