It turns out that because it has a copyright, my memoirs cannot be sent out as an e-book (this according to JPS, my agent and publicist). I can only provide excerpts. So allow me to share only one more chapter from my memoirs, Chapter 3, "My Father." Like my grandfather Lolo Cinte, my father Gening doted on me, his third daughter, whom he nicknamed “Mike” because he wanted a boy after his first two daughters were born. So “Mike” I was called, even if I looked and behaved more like “Clarissa,” my baptismal name. When he was being playful, my father called me “Miyek.” “Miyek, bow-wow-wow, what a funny, funny thing!” That was the first line of a song he sang in my name. Although outrageous, “Mike” was not the craziest name in our family. It was my brother Ken’s nickname “BOCHOK,” Tagalog for “buchug,” which means “fat boy.” I thought I was my father’s favorite because I overheard him tell his friends, “Mike is the ace up my sleeve.” He liked to say that I brought him luck because it was shortly after I was born that he got the job where he stayed for thirty-six years until he retired, the Development Bank of the Philippines. The two daughters before me—Cristy (1944) and Jojo (1945)—were born during the Second World War. They were our family’s first baby boomers. When I was born in 1947, the Philippine Republic was enjoying a period of great reconstruction. The ten years of American tutelage called the Philippine Commonwealth had ended, and the Philippine economy was progressing by leaps and bounds. Under the sponsorship of Senator Primitivo Lovina, then DBP Chairman and my uncle Uring’s father-in-law, my father got his first job as a Chief Engineer/Appraiser at the bank, in charge of overseeing the granting of loans for the reconstruction of postwar businesses. It was at the DBP where my father saw his career take off. And so I was born at a lucky time in his life. Besides the DBP, my father is linked in my memory with USAFFE (United States Armed Forces in the Far East) and the Corps of Engineers to which he belonged. In his autobiography Eto Ako (Here I Am) which he wrote in 1986, my father recounts how he saw the Pacific War firsthand as a participant in the Death March and later as prisoner of a death camp in Capas. I allude to his “heroism unknown/Though death stared in his face in Bataan and Tarlac” in a poem that I wrote in 2005: USAFFE Memorial Two hundred and eighty strong They came, proud families Of USAFFE heroes, laying wreaths For General Lim his bravery enshrined In bronze and stone atop Tagaytay hills October wind and rains the previous night ignored My father even prouder his heroism unknown Though death stared in his face in Bataan and Tarlac No memorial for his Silver Stars his actions strong and bold Six pillars with a thousand names in gold no match A better war memorial: his American daughter’s poem. In 2005 my father spearheaded a committee entrusted with building a war memorial in Tagaytay to honor General Lim and other Filipino World War II heroes. I knew from his autobiography that my father had won a Silver Star for saving his fellow soldiers during the war and I wanted to honor him in a poem. I made sure I signed off as the “American daughter”—I knew it would make him proud. As a postscript, I had become an “American” daughter only because my father had sponsored me as an unmarried dependent when he himself became a U.S. citizen. Like my Lolo Cinte, my father was very much a product of the colonial environment in which he lived. Whereas Lolo Cinte faithfully represented the ilustrado class, the landowning and educated upper class of Hispanized Filipinos to which he belonged, my father, who was born and raised during the American colonial period and a product of public education from American instructors in Laguna High School and the University of the Philippines, faithfully represented the Westernized liberal Filipino who owed at least half of his loyalty to the United States especially after the Second World War. I looked up to my father for being smart, for being an achiever, for being physically and mentally excellent. We knew that he graduated from the UP School of Engineering, was the grand archon of the Tau Alpha fraternity, and took fourth place in the national board exams for engineers. Not content with one degree, my father earned a law degree in 1953 when he was already married and a father of five. We were proud that he got 83.35% in the bar exams. Because he was a good swimmer, my father belonged to the varsity swimming team at the UP; we were upset when we learned that he had missed by a few seconds being sent as Philippine representative to the Olympic swimming meet. All of us children were very proud of his accomplishments. But most of all, we loved him because we saw him, as my mother did, as a good man, a family man, who did everything he could for his wife and children. “I am nothing if not a family man,” he said to us once. Moreover, we were all happy that he adored our mother and called her his “OAO” (One and Only). After dinner when we were kids, my father would take my mother by the hand for some ballroom dancing while all of us seven kids watched admiringly from the sofa. My father had bought a hi-fi when he was in the States on which he played Glenn Miller tunes, especially their favorite, “Moonlight Serenade.” After dancing with my mother, he would dance with each of his daughters, one by one.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 13:17:29 +0000
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