Declaration of Independence

On my way to becoming a lawyer, I became a journalist. I was always told I had to be practical about what I wanted to be, what job or occupation I should prepare for. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer before I could figure out what that meant. And that was that.

I remember my grade school teacher asking me about my ambition and I said I wanted to be a writer like my idol Jose Rizal. She said nothing. Turning to the girl next to me who said “nurse” and the boy after who replied “policeman” in a loud voice, she quietly expressed disdain or indifference to the fondest dream of my boyhood years.

Dad was more emphatic. “Writers starve,” he declared most gravely when I first expressed interest in a career in the future. “There are no jobs for writers, they are condemned to be poor.”

What he couldn’t say, but which struck me so clearly, was that it was suicidal or downright silly to follow the footsteps of Rizal. But it was Dad who had pushed Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo on me even before I could read. I remember being entranced by the story of the moth and the flame. He never explained why the moth was drawn to the flame that would burn it to death.

Dad was a complicated man. He was proud of his revolutionary lineage (my grandfather fought the Spaniards and the Americans) and he raised me and my siblings on nationalist ideals. Rizal and Recto were his patron saints. But he was no wide-eyed idealist. He made it clear that he did not want his children to starve or die for a hopeless cause. To avoid this bitter fate, we would have to be on the good side of the law.

As a future lawyer, he kept saying, I would have to be practical and to provide for my own future. He took pride in never having been employed by anybody except when he was in the army. He made a living from dentistry and investments in cattle-raising. He was his own boss and Mom worked as treasurer and assistant.

I was proud of Dad. I took after his fierce sense of independence. He was a nationalist who made his own money and lived within his means. He wanted me to have it both ways: patriotism clothed with bourgeois success.

There was no war, revolution or martial law when I was growing up in Bukidnon. I did not see any danger in being a writer. Not even starvation, really. Genteel poverty I could live with. Why would any government kill writers? I was that naive.

I went along with Dad and Mom who, I learned early enough, were frustrated lawyers. Dad’s older brother preempted law, so as the second son he had to settle for dentistry. Mom dutifully quit college to marry her first and last love; it was one of her younger brothers who became a lawyer in her place. They made it clear that my best option in life was to be the purpose-driven but sharp-as-nails lawyer they did not become.

I soldiered on through high school and found what I was convinced was my rightful place in the scheme of things in the University of the Philippines. I was on the way to becoming, after my two uncles, the third and perhaps “most likely to succeed” lawyer of the family.

By the time I entered UP, however, the rules had changed. Instead of the old two-year pre-law course, one had to have a full four-year bachelor’s degree before taking the four-year law course proper. Truly a tough act to pull off:  a total of eight years of hard college work plus the bar examinations.

Dad was aghast when I told him that I intended to take history or journalism for my first bachelor’s degree. “Historians and journalists starve,” he exclaimed in a familiar tone from my childhood years. “Why don’t you take up accounting?”

He had it all figured out. I would go to business school instead of the history department or journalism school. As certified public accountant and lawyer, he declared, I would have a truly secure economic future.

But I couldn’t see myself as an accountant and I stood my ground. We compromised on marketing, a more creative and less-quantitative field of business school. At least, it was not as boring and cold-blooded as counting money or balancing accounts. In fact, I would come to like the competitive and fun spirit of advertising enough to imagine a career in it.

Still, advertising/marketing and the law loomed as no more than way stations to a political career that Dad had ultimately mapped out for me. The cat was out of the bag as I entered my freshman year. Dad had been town councilor and provincial board member; he had run for and lost as governor in my junior year and that really hurt.

Had he been a CPA-lawyer instead of a dentist, he kept insisting, he would have become governor and perhaps moved farther up the political ladder. I got his drift and shuddered about what was coming up for me in a few short years.

Dad was not impressed when I was chosen as editor of the Philippine Collegian, more so after I made noises about becoming a journalist. I thought he would think of being a reporter or editor as an acceptably practical ambition compared to being a poet, novelist or history teacher. At least newspapers offered regular jobs with some glamour thrown in because journalists dealt with politics and business; not high-paying jobs, yes, but with living wages nonetheless.

For him, the Collegian was extracurricular matter, not to be taken too seriously. In latter years I came to realize what he meant: except for Renato Constantino, none of my predecessors or even my successors went into journalism after Diliman. They became lawyers, politicians, corporate bigwigs. Even Constantino worked for the Lopezes and lived off his considerable inheritance. My peers quietly deemed themselves too bright, too ambitious for the smell of printer’s ink. Only working students from downtown schools took newspaper work as a viable career.

This working-class bias was not strange at all. In the United States, the best editors and writers tended to be drawn, not from the Ivy League, but from community colleges and the school of hard knocks in the Deep South or the prairie states. American journalism’s passion for the common man and the middle-class and its sense of practical idealism may be traced to this vital connection to the heartland.    

I cringed at the very thought of following Dad’s footsteps into provincial politics. I saw no comfort in being assured that this would be a temporary inconvenience in the quest for a national career that my peers also aspired for. I knew the unholy cast of characters only too well. I was determined to avoid this fate like the plague.

I knew that this deadly game had almost pauperized our family. It seemed foolish that I would be pushed into the fray when we could cut losses and quit before we were wiped out for good. We could resume our uncomplicated family life before Dad caught political germs and it became a fever in his blood. We had a flourishing cattle business and Mom was preparing to open a rural bank. That alternative future seemed far brighter and less stressful. We would have fewer or no enemies at all. 

Although Dad appeared chastened by his debacle, he was not the type to give up so easily. I was too polite or too intimidated to cause him any grief. I just hoped for something to come up that would settle the painful dilemma — anything to break the insufferable impasse.

The First Quarter Storm of 1970 turned out to be the unexpected game-changer. Looking back, I now understand why I plunged into that cauldron of restlessness and anger in the name of democracy with wild abandon. It was my personal declaration of independence. I said goodbye to any thought of traditional politics and whatever glory or power that it promised.

Swept by the tide of revolutionary idealism, I quit law school and broke my parents’ hearts. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the good boy and model son my siblings were taught to emulate.

Dad never cried but he wept bitter tears when I told him, most firmly, that I would never go back to law school. Why be part of a corrupt and dishonest elite? I had never been so devastatingly cruel in my life and it was Dad on the receiving end. 

All Mom could do was to embrace me tightly and whisper that she would always love me in spite of everything. I still cry when I remember how she vainly tried to smile and hold back her tears. I never saw her again. In the last letter I got after she passed, there was a cryptic message: “Go on living no matter what happens.”

It was a blessing in disguise that I was exiled in America, away from Marcosian tyranny and the career path Dad in his infinite wisdom had laid out for me. I went full-time into journalism with a vengeance. My friends and I put up an anti-Marcos dictatorship paper and I went to graduate school. After Columbia, I began my career as a reporter in the leading newspaper of New Jersey, just next door to New York. 

A fellow exile, another incorrigible politician like Dad, tried to save me from what he frankly called a foolish decision. “What will you get out of journalism? Get an MBA and go on to Wall Street. Money talks in America. In the Philippines, it is lord and master.”

But having just freed myself from the nightmare of a dream that was never mine, I thanked him for his concern and took the train to Trenton. It was the beginning of a new life under my own terms.