My Bucket List

Since the movie The Bucket List, the webcast of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture,” and books such as 1000 Places to See Before You Die, it has become fashionable to do a to-do list. Since the student-produced magazine Bounce published my list of to-dos in its Summer Break issue, letting my bucket list out of the closet (oops! mixed metaphor!), let me go through each of the items in the list. Such self-reflection, though public, may perhaps be allowed since I just celebrated my 63rd birthday. (Thanks, by the way, to all those that texted, emailed, and called to greet me. Special thanks to Crispina Martinez-Belen, who never fails to greet me in her “Celebrity World” column.)

The magazine list does not include any of the impossible things I wish I could do before I die, such as rolling a perfect game in bowling, learning how to do the jump shot in pool, playing blindfold chess against a grandmaster (of course, the grandmaster will be wearing the blindfold), owning a library that looks exactly like that of Henry Higgins in the movie My Fair Lady, directing a superhero movie, finding the perfect banana split (no one remembers anymore how to do the one that Magnolia used to serve in Quiapo), and, of course, to give my Last Lecture and have everyone download it from Google, YouTube, Vodpod, or whatever will come next.

This is my more serious list as published in the student magazine:

1. Win the lottery and buy all the gadgets I want.
2. Get Philippine journals to join Philippine Journals Online (accessed through a UK website).
3. Institutionalize the National Book Awards.
4. Gather fellow Fulbright scholars for common projects that would accelerate the nation’s development.
5. Give 40 educational videos to literature classes and teachers in high schools through a project for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education.
6. Have the Department of Education mandate the use of local languages as the medium of instruction.
7. Establish an Asian Critics Circle.
8. Write the Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature (arranged by language).
9. Write a series for Anvil Publishing from my columns.
10. Write a long-promised volume on Teaching Literature for Giraffe Publishing.
11. Write the third part in my trilogy of plays on Bienvenido N. Santos.
12. Play tournament bridge at a level good enough to compete internationally.
13. Think up more to-dos.

The student interviewer was very good at getting me to reveal all of these to-dos, though I obviously held back in order to appear professorial to the magazine editors. It was, after all, a feature on a professor in a magazine otherwise devoted to features about students.

First, gadgets. Next only to Philippine Star columnist Jose “Butch” Dalisay, I have the most number of gadgets of any Filipino writer. I do not have the financial resources of Butch (which is why I need to win the lotto), who has the latest paper-thin Mac, but I do have the competing Vista-run Acer. (The Acer is great, Vista is not, and if you’re about to buy a computer, be sure it has Windows XP and not Vista. I can hear Butch say, that’s why you should shift to Mac.)

I don’t think even Butch has my latest gadget: a dual-SIM cellphone that doubles as a portable TV set, with all the usual cellphone things (two cameras for video calls, FM radio, 1GB memory for films in mp4 format, and so on), all for less than ten thousand pesos. Oh, I don’t have to pay anyone anything for the TV shows, since the TV works even without a SIM card.

Second on my bucket list is getting Philippine journals to join Philippines Journals Online (PJOL). This wish is about to be completely fulfilled, with the coming to Manila in May 2008 of two key persons from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), which sponsors PJOL.

INASP’s Sioux Cumming (Publishing Programme Officer) and Julie Walker (Head of Publishing Support) will train more than twenty editors of Philippine journals in the use of the free journal management software called Open Journal Systems (OJS). INASP has been very generous to the Philippines, paying most of the expenses of the workshop, even the transportation of editors from outside Manila. C&E is sponsoring the meals, Ateneo is sponsoring the venue and computer time, and various universities are sending their editors on official time.

Why is it important that Philippine journals are available through a website or portal based in the U.K. and Canada? Right now, our Philippine-based academic websites are not exactly on the top of the list of resources scholars refer to when they do their articles. If you googled any of the current hot issues in academic research, it is highly unlikely that an article published in a Philippine journal would be on the first few pages of the search results.

Why is it important that our articles are read or cited by foreign scholars? Because the name of the game is citation.

One of the major criteria for ranking a university internationally is the number of times articles written by faculty members in that university are used in the footnotes or bibliographies of articles in what are known as “ISI journals.” The abbreviation ISI refers to a now-outdated term (Institute for Scientific Information). ISI is a list of journals considered important by scholars around the world, as evidenced by being routinely included in footnotes and bibliographies. The list is available on the Thomson Reuters website.

Thomson Reuters lists about 9,000 journals. A similar journal list, generated by Scopus, covers 15,000 journals. There are an estimated 100,000 journals in the world, with about 30,000 of them published by universities, rather than organizations or commercial publishers.

There is a formula used to find out what are called the “Impact Factor” and the “Prestige Factor” of a journal. As explained in a 2001 article by Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, “the impact factor of a journal is defined as the ratio between citations and recent (previous two years) citable items published or, in other words, as the average number of citations in a given year of articles published in that journal in the preceding two years.” The logarithm for the prestige factor is more complicated and has six independent variables, but the idea is simple enough: a journal is important if most of its articles are cited by scholars.

University libraries around the world subscribe only to journals with very high impact or prestige factors, since no library is rich enough to subscribe to 100,000 journals. Even financially, therefore, it makes sense for a university journal to get itself cited and, therefore, bought by librarians worldwide.

Currently, as far as I know, there are only six Philippine journals included in the ISI list: Philippine Agricultural Scientist (UP Los Baños), Philippine Entomologist (UP Los Baños), Philippine Journal of Crop Science (UP Los Baños), Philippine Journal of Science (Science Technology Information Institute), Philippine Journal of Veterinary Medicine (UP Los Baños), and Philippine Scientist (University of San Carlos). No other Philippine journal is considered good enough to be cited by foreign scholars.

In order for an article to be cited by anyone, it should first be easily accessible and it should be available in full. This is what PJOL aims to achieve.
Once a journal is easily accessible online, because it is hosted by prestigious British and Canadian sites, it can reach ISI or Scopus status more quickly. Although I have been very vocal against ISI (ironically, my anti-ISI article was recently published in an ISI journal!), I do not think we have a choice at this point. We have to have our journals listed by ISI and Scopus.

The first step is to be read by others. Once international scholars read us, I am confident that they will find that we are in step with (and in some cases, ahead of) other scholars outside the country.

As I always boast whenever I speak in international conferences, I have read all of the sonnets of Shakespeare, but who among British or North American critics today have read Florante at Laura? But if we do not get Shakespeare scholars to read our articles about Balagtas, nobody will ever think that Balagtas was as good a poet (though not as good a playwright) as Shakespeare. Sad to say, even most Filipinos think that Shakespeare was the better poet, even if they have not yet read either Shakespeare or Balagtas. But colonial mentality is another topic altogether, and I am too realistic to put the eradication of colonial mentality on my wish list.

Third on my bucket list is institutionalizing the National Book Awards of the Manila Critics Circle.

In 1981, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Alfred A. Yuson, and I met in a small eatery across the street from the University of Santo Tomas and decided to establish the Manila Critics Circle. Except for textbooks, there were very few books being published then in the Philippines. We wanted to honor the authors and publishers of the best of the non-textbooks. The next year, we gave the first of what would be annual National Book Awards, with trophies donated by Eduardo Castrillo.

We eventually invited more book reviewers to join us. We unfortunately also eventually lost some of our members – Salanga himself, Leonidas V. Benesa, and Doreen G. Fernandez. Right now, the members of the Circle are, aside from the three surviving founders, Virgilio S. Almario, Juaniyo Arcellana, Cirilo F. Bautista, Fr. Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., Ruel de Vera, Resil B. Mojares, Danton R. Remoto, and Soledad S. Reyes. Our honorary member who does not join our deliberations because he lives in Michigan is Roger Bresnahan.

Except for a couple of years when I was either abroad or in government, I did most of the secretarial work for the Circle, such as asking publishers for copies of their books, soliciting funds and trophies, and setting up the awarding ceremonies.
Since I was not getting any younger, and neither were most of the other members of the Circle, we decided sometime last year to find a way to get an institution to take over the National Book Awards. We still wanted to be the ones to decide which books should get awards, but we (certainly, I) no longer had the energy to run around looking for money, sculptors, and venues.

We turned to the National Book Development Board (NBDB), which had been supporting us financially in recent years. (In our early years, the Circle even sat on the Board.) We were very lucky that the Chair of the Board, Dennis T. Gonzalez, and its Executive Director, Andrea Pasion-Flores, loved good books as passionately as we did. We asked them and the members of the current NBDB board (also a particularly well-chosen group of governors) to take over the awards, and they agreed.
As authors and publishers already know, the process of choosing finalists for the awards has been democratized, with professional organizations now invited to help the Manila Critics Circle choose the best books in their respective fields. Now, instead of having to read all the books published in a given year (last year, each of us in the Circle had to read something like 400 books, which probably contributed to my having to have a laser operation recently), we have to read only 50 or so pre-selected books.

Now, I have one less thing to worry about.

I believe that a project manager should be able to let go of the project and watch on the sidelines as it becomes more successful once he or she is out of the picture.

Through the years, I accumulated a lot of debts of gratitude, most especially to Primetrade Asia, which hosted the awards during the Manila International Book Fair. To Primetrade and to all the government agencies (such as NCCA), publishers, sponsors, universities, sculptors, and others that supported the National Book Awards, thank you very much!

Fourth on my bucket list is gathering fellow Fulbright scholars for common projects that will help accelerate the nation’s development.

I have had two Fulbright grants, one to study for my doctorate at the University of Maryland from 1972 to 1976, the second in 2003 to read the papers left behind by Bienvenido N. Santos at the Wichita State University Library.

I first became a member of the board of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA), composed of almost 2,000 Filipino Fulbright alumni, in 1988, when the association president was Marcelo B. Fernan, then Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being typecast since college days as PRO of various organizations, I was elected PRO (which was defined as both press relations officer and public relations officer).

One of my first tasks was to write the lyrics of the 40th anniversary song, composed by Lucrecia Kasilag. Unfortunately for me, when the song was performed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in September, 1988, I was on a British Council Senior Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Since the song demanded a full orchestra and only the most experienced singers (it was, after all, a Kasilag composition), it has never again been performed.

Recently, for the 60th Fulbright anniversary, the association wanted me to do another song. Menchie Mantaring of the CCP did the music and I wrote lyrics to fit the music. With Arwin Tan arranging the music and conducting the CCP Chorale, the crowd never knew that, because my schedule was too full to allow lead time, I had written the lyrics overnight.

Among the several projects I was asked by Fernan to handle was an essay contest in 1990 on the American Bill of Rights. We secured the cooperation of Magnolia, the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, the Philippine American Education Foundation (PAEF), and the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, and were able to offer prizes consisting of tickets to the U.S.A., with cash allowances from $1,000 to $2,000 per winner. Another project I enjoyed doing was a rather short-lived PFSA newsletter in 1995 entitled The Filipino Fulbrighter.

Initiated by Fernan was a livelihood project in 1990 in Marilaw, Bulacan, in cooperation with the Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Association, the East-West Center Alumni Association, and the Marilaw Jaycees. I remember distinctly walking the alleys between the houses constructed on top of the dumpsite (this was before Payatas), with Fernan in the lead; he was completely focused on asking the residents there how they wanted Fulbright scholars to help them.

In 1995 Corazon S. de la Paz (still with the private sector then and not yet with SSS) was elected president. I was re-elected to the board; this time, I shared the position of PRO with Ma. Mercedes M. Fajardo-Robles.

One project assigned to me by the board was the editing and publication of two anthologies of public lectures given by Fulbrighters. The first was The J. William Fulbright Memorial Lectures, 1995-1996 (1996), containing the first to the fifth lectures, as well as the acceptance speech of Corazon C. Aquino when we successfully nominated her in 1996 for the very prestigious Washington-based J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. The second was The J. William Fulbright Memorial Lectures, 1997-1998, containing the 6th to 16th JWF Memorial Lectures, launched in 2000.

In 2005 I succeeded De la Paz as president of the association. I wanted to continue the vision of Fernan to engage Fulbrighters more directly in poverty-alleviation projects. I also wanted to be as active as De la Paz, who was a house on fire. Under her, the association engaged in numerous projects. Of course, under me, the association has not been as active as it was under De la Paz (I have less than half of her energy and hardly a tenth of her network).

Having put in so much of myself in Fulbright work, I included on my bucket list the desire to have Fulbrighters work more directly as a group with the poor. There are already hundreds of Fulbrighters working with the poor, individually or as heads of various community-oriented organizations. But I want the association to adopt a municipality, the way we once did with Marilaw, Bulacan.

Fortunately, the other alumni organizations have the same desire. Humphrey and East-West, in fact, have been doing direct community outreach for some time now.
You can imagine how difficult it is to manage a program that involves just about everyone that went to the U.S. on American taxpayers’ money. The only organization outside our federation is the United States International Visitor Program Philippine Alumni Foundation (of which I happen to be a very inactive member), which I hope also one day to invite to our alumni presidents’ breakfast meetings.

My fourth wish on my bucket list is about to be fulfilled. There are high hopes now that the Fulbrighters will be able to adopt a municipality in Laguna, thanks to the efforts of Fulbright board member Liborio S. Cabanilla, who happens to be a board member (and former president) of the Fulbright Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association.

Fifth on my bucket list is giving forty educational videos to literature classes and teachers in high schools through a project for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE).

I am well on my way to fulfilling this wish.

Since June, 2006, FUSE has been funding my project called “Continuing Studies via Technology (CONSTEC) on Literature: A Telecourse for Students and Teachers of Literature,” a series of 25-minute telelessons meant to enhance the teaching of literature in secondary school.

So far, the project has produced twenty 25-minute video lessons showing different ways of teaching literary texts. Each module consists of two parts: the first part meant to be watched by students in a classroom, the second part meant to be watched only by teachers.

If used inside a classroom, a teacher may plan a lesson in which the first part (about 10 minutes) is shown to the students. In that part, an expert discusses the text being studied, and I give instructions to the students on what to do with the text.

Before the class, the teacher should watch the second part (about 15 minutes), which consists of a discussion of the teaching method used in the first part, plus a demonstration lesson taught by an outstanding teacher. The demonstration teachers are either Metrobank Outstanding Teachers or the best literature teachers in Metro Manila as chosen by DepEd NCR. The demonstration students, taught under actual classroom conditions (there is no script; the teacher actually teaches the class), come from different public and private schools.

Printed teacher’s guides are currently being prepared by a team of expert teachers from Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, Philippine Normal University, and DepEd. These guides will help teachers make full use of the videos in their classrooms.

The following are the completed telelessons. Each item lists the title of the literary text, the author (if applicable), the expert, the demonstration teacher, the school where the students come from, and the teaching method used.

For First Year:

Darangen, Nagasura Madale, Regina Tirones, Manila Science High School (MSHS), Jingle Rap.

My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken, Alejandro Roces, the author himself, Patricia Jocson, Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA), Closure.

A Sigh in the Dark, Angela Manalang Gloria, Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Interpretative Reading.

Wedding Dance, Amador Daguio, Bienvenido Lumbera, Nerissa Lomeda, MSHS, Fashion Design.

The Monkey and the Turtle, Jose Rizal, Carla Pacis, Rosalinda Juan, MSHS, Emoticon.

For Second Year:

Frog Haiku, Matsuo Basho, Minoru Kikuchi, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Group Creative Writing.

An Incident, Lu Xun, David Jonathan Bayot, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Talk Show.

Ramayana, Maharshi Valmiki, Juan Francisco, Pamela Tayag Salvosa, MSHS, Music.

A Singapore Fairy Tale, Catherine Lim, Lily Rose Tope, Leny Pagdanganan, MSHS, Debate.

Mama Wata and the Monster, Veronique Tadjo, Carla Pacis, Pamela Tayag Salvosa, MSHS, Quiz Show.

The Spider’s Thread, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Minoru Kikuchi, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Multiple Intelligences.

For Third Year:

The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Kral, Azucena Erencio, MSHS, Virtual Filmmaking.

How Do I Love Thee, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Leodivico Lacsamana, MSHS, Memorization.

I Shall Not Live in Vain, Emily Dickinson, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Journal Writing.

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, Jaime Ong, Patricia Jocson, MSHS, Modern Adaptation.

For Fourth Year:

The Cave (Qur’an), Mashur Vin-Ghalib Jundam, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Open Forum.

Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, Cornelio Bascarra, Cecile Correa, MSHS, Question Matrix.


On Writing Poetry, Margaret Atwood, Elmer Ordoñez, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Exhibit.


Parable of the Talents (New Testament), Bienvenido Nebres SJ, Leodivico Lacsamana, MSHS, Letter Writing.

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Jaime An Lim, MSHS, Twenty Questions.

Secondary schools may request free copies of the telelessons from FUSE. The telelessons are in DVD format.

The series has started airing over Knowledge Channel on the following schedule: Sundays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Mondays 10:00-10:40 a.m., 12:20-1:00 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Tuesdays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Wednesdays 2:00-2:40 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Thursdays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Fridays 7:00-7:40 a.m., 12:20-1:00 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m.

Sixth on my bucket list is getting the Department of Education to mandate the use of the local language as the medium of instruction in all regions of the country.

In our history, there has been only one professional linguist who became Secretary of Education. That was the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, who not only had a doctorate in linguistics from Berkeley, but was recognized internationally as a leading language scholar. He published dozens of articles in international journals on language policy, language learning, and education.

Even before he headed the Department, Gonzalez already believed that English should not be the main medium of instruction in the Philippines. From his studies and experience, he knew that students learn faster and better if taught in their own home language, not in a foreign one. He knew, however, that it was politically naive, not to mention logistically impossible, to shift immediately to a monolingual vernacular medium from the purely English-medium system imposed by Americans at the turn of the century. He, therefore, proposed the Bilingual Education Program (BEP) as a transitory step towards a monolingual vernacular system.

When he became Secretary, he started the Lingua Franca Project, which successfully transformed several elementary schools into monolingual vernacular systems, at least until third grade. When Raul Roco succeeded him as Secretary, I expanded the project from using only three vernaculars (Cebuano, Ilocano, and Tagalog) to several vernaculars (including Bicol, which was Roco’s native language).

After he left the Department, Gonzalez became more vocal about shifting to a purely vernacular system of education. In the writings that he left behind, he made it clear that bilingualism was only a step towards monolingualism within regions. I should stress that monolingualism did not mean, to him, having every Filipino use only Filipino, but that Cebuanos would be taught in Cebuano, Ilocanos in Ilocano, Bikolanos in Bikol, and so on.

I have argued myself hoarse on innumerable occasions about the shift, especially since I happen to be one of Gonzalez’s admirers (read: disciples). I have often wondered, in fact, why people do not believe linguists when it comes to matters of language. In every other matter, we always turn to experts. We go to a medical doctor if we are sick, we go to an architect if we want to build a house, we even get a professional driver to drive our car, but for some strange reason, we do not want to listen to a linguist when it comes to the language of instruction.

I have paid dearly for my stand on the medium of instruction. I will tell you a story I have told very few friends. I worked closely with Cory Aquino on a few speeches and video scripts during the anti-Marcos years.

Once, when we were alone in her office in Makati and she was considering running for president, she asked me, “What would you do if you were Minister or Secretary of Education?”

I answered without hesitation, “Change the medium of instruction to Filipino.”

I remember her answer very well. She said, “Sobra ka naman.” [That’s too much.]

That is probably why she never invited me to become a cabinet member during her presidency.

When Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wrote Executive Order 210, which mandated the use of English as the primary medium of instruction in basic education, I was one of the main signatories to a petition filed in the Supreme Court to declare her action unconstitutional. Since the Supreme Court is still deciding this issue and although I no longer am a party to the petition currently pending, I cannot speak about it because it is sub judice. That is why I write about the issue only in personal terms (my interactions with Gonzalez, Roco, and Aquino), not in the legal terms the Justices are using as they deliberate on the medium of instruction.

Seventh on my bucket list is, or rather, was establishing an Asian Critics Circle.

Because of the success of the Manila Critics Circle (if I may say so myself), I toyed with the idea of bringing together critics from various Asian countries to come up with Asian Book Awards, similar to our National Book Awards.

I made friends with a number of literary critics in Asia, primarily because I met them fairly regularly in international conferences. We referred to ourselves jokingly as conference types, because we enjoyed sitting down in conference rooms for hours and pretending to listen to each other.

I say “pretending” because, most of the time, the talks were either in areas which were so specialized that only the speakers knew what they were talking about or were delivered in languages that needed simultaneous translation.

Don’t get me wrong. Most simultaneous translators are very competent and manage to convey the ideas in conference papers, but they miss the tones and undertones (which, in literary or cultural conferences, are as important as the ideas). Seeing someone saying something in one language and hearing another person on headphones is like watching dubbed movies: it’s distracting, to say the least.

In any case, during conference breaks or evening drinking sessions, much talk passed about choosing this book or that and giving authors trophies or cash awards. Nothing much was ever remembered the morning after.

I did manage to get a huge amount of funding once, from an aging Taiwan professor, to host a meeting in Taiwan of a few leading Asian critics. Unfortunately, he died before we could all agree on a date.

I once also started an e-mail discussion, but revered and aging critics are not as computer-literate as their grandchildren, and there were too few of us digital immigrants in the egroup to make our decisions credible.

One issue always stumped us – that of language. Although most of us were literate in English, all of us thought that some novels in our own native languages clearly deserved regional awards much more than those written in English. The SEAWRITE (the award given by Thailand) manages to circumvent the issue of language by letting national boards do the judging, but we did not want to do that. We wanted to give awards to books that most, if not all of us would have read. Since none of us read more than a few languages, we could not figure out how we could judge works in Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Japanese, Filipino, and so on.

You see, at the highest levels of literary criticism, critics read a work in its original language. Literature is a particular or specialized use of language, and many literary values are lost in the process of moving from one language to another.

We all knew the hazards of basing judgments on translations. The Chinese, in particular, are often upset that the works translated into non-Chinese languages are not their best. (There is, of course, a political dimension here, since most non-communist translators prefer to work on Chinese works that attack the Chinese government.)

I know the limits of translation from experience. When I was teaching in Iran, I learned from my Iranian friends that Omar Khayyam was not their best poet. Since he was the only one I had read in translation, I thought he was pretty good, but the Iranians swore that their other poets were much better. Unfortunately, until I got to Iran, I had never read those other poets. Even in Iran, my Persian was good only for shopping, not for reading poetry.

Sad to say, I have given up on this item in my bucket list. I’m glad that regional awards like SEAWRITE and MAN are around, but critics’ awards like our own National Book Awards would give more significant recognition to the excellent work writers are doing in our part of the world.

Eighth on my bucket list is writing or publishing an Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature, the volumes arranged by the original language of the anthologized texts.
The idea comes from my teacher, mentor, idol, and now National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera.

He was the first scholar to suggest that all Philippine literary texts are part of national literature and that the dichotomy of “national vs. regional” is false. He said that we should not talk of Cebuano literature or Ilocano literature, but of Philippine literature in Cebuano, Philippine literature in Ilocano, Philippine literature in Tagalog, Philippine literature in Maranao, Philippine literature in English, Philippine literature in Spanish, Philippine literature in Chinese, and so on.

This idea has many implications. First, it is not true that our writings in English are more significant than our writings in, say, Bikol. Philippine literature in Bikol is just as important a stream of our national literature as that written in English. In an encyclopedia of Philippine literature, the volume on Philippine literature in Bikol would be as impressive as the volume on Philippine literature in English.

Second, it is not true that our writings in Tagalog are national while writings in, say, Hiligaynon are regional. The Tagalog region is as much a region as the Ilonggo or Hiligaynon region. The National Capital Region is a region and, therefore, has no claim to being more “national” than any other part of the country. Philippine literature in Tagalog enjoys exactly the same stature as Philippine literature in Hiligaynon or in any other language. The word “regional,” therefore, should now be removed from the vocabulary of literary critics.

Third, it is not true that Philippine literature in Chinese is not part of our national literature. For a long time, Filipino writers writing in Mandarin were not taken up in Philippine literature classes, because they were, for racist reasons, not considered by most teachers to be Filipinos. An encyclopedia volume on Philippine literature in Chinese would show that there are many texts written in that language by Filipinos.

I digress at this point to boast a little. The volume Ang Ating Panitikan, which Soledad S. Reyes and I edited in 1984 for the Association of Philippine Colleges of Arts and Sciences (APCAS), was the first textbook, to my knowledge, to include texts originally written in Mandarin Chinese as part of Philippine literature.

Since then, I have been lobbying fairly successfully for the inclusion of Filipinos writing in Chinese in reference materials on Philippine literature, such as the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, a project for which I served as a consultant.

With so many Filipinos winning international awards for their literary works in Chinese, literary critics should not be racist in their treatment of our national literature. Literary critics should rejoice when Hsieh Hsing (Grace Lee) wins yet another poetry award or when Yinchow Sy publishes yet another translation in China.

Back to the idea of an encyclopedia. As publisher of the now defunct De La Salle University Press, I tried very hard to get writers and editors to put together anthologies of Philippine literary texts. I even started a long-term project in the 1980s (still ongoing) called Literary History of the Philippines (LIHIP), which has managed to collect thousands of literary texts written in various Philippine languages. Unfortunately, I got out of the DLSU Press before I could finish the project (because I had to quit when I joined government in 2001).

Now that I am back in De La Salle University as Executive Publisher of its Academic Publications Office, I will try again to get enough editors to spend time on this project. An Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature would be a handsome companion to the CCP encyclopedia.

Ninth on my bucket list is writing a series for Anvil Publishing from my columns.

Books made up of columns are very popular among Filipino readers.

Karina Bolasco, Publishing Manager of Anvil, tells us why. “Columns have a following,” she says during her lectures, “and column readers naturally become book readers.”

Columns have an ephemeral existence. Unless readers take the trouble to clip them and keep them somewhere, columns disappear together with yesterday’s newspapers.
By collecting columns into books, publishers allow readers to keep their favorite writers on bookshelves, to be read and enjoyed once again and, writers hope, again and again.

In fact, one of my first books was a collection of columns. Movie Times, published in 1984 by National Book Store, put together various columns and articles I had written on Philippine films. The publishing manager of National Book Store at that time was Bolasco.

Of course, because columns need not last more than one day, most writers (including me) do not spend more than one day writing them. When columns are collected to become part of a book, they need to be rewritten, checked not just for grammar and style, but for timeliness or, more ambitiously, timelessness.

I have more than enough to fill several books with my columns.

I have been writing columns for various newspapers and magazines since 1972, when I accepted Oscar Villadolid and Gerry Gil’s invitation to join the English daily Philippines Herald as a movie and book reviewer and its sister Tagalog daily Mabuhay as Associate Editor. (I was bilingual from the very beginning of my life as a columnist.)

After I returned from graduate studies in Maryland in the late 1970s, Melinda de Jesus and Rodolfo Reyes invited me to do movie reviews for TV Times. It was at that time that I gained notoriety for bashing popular movies such as The Deer Hunter. The core of the book Movie Times came from this magazine.

In the 1980s, I did weekly movie columns for magazines such as Bulaklak, Glitter, Manila Hotline, Modern Romances, Pilipino Daily Mirror, Silver Screen, and Student Canteen. Part of the movie press then, I frequented showbiz parties and hangouts and got to know many of our superstars and would-be stars. (Oh, the stories I could tell if I dared!)

I wrote less showbiz and, to academics, more serious movie reviewing, as well as general commentaries on books, culture, and education for newspapers and magazines such as Asiaweek, Business Star, Diwa, Diyaryo Filipino, Filipino Magazin, Mediawatch, Observer, Onboard Philippines, Parade, Philippine Panorama, Pilipino Tribune, and Times Journal.

For a while, I was also writing for Starweek and Student Star, until I had to limit my time to this column.

I wrote the editorials of the weekly Tagalog Chronicle, which I did not edit, and of course those of the periodicals I edited, such as Interlock, National Book Review, and Palabas. (To name drop, Boy Abunda was my assistant in Palabas.)

I even wrote daily political columns for Manila Times when Alejandro “Anding” Roces was its publisher. When the editors and writers went on strike, I did not join them, since Anding was my ninong (godfather); for this I was labelled a scab for the first and only time in my otherwise union-friendly life.

All my life, I have put personal friendship above ideology or politics. (This particular trait of mine has puzzled many of my very close friends, some of whom cannot stand each other.)

Why Anvil Publishing? Simple. I have long envied the commercial success of writers such as Margarita Holmes, Ambeth Ocampo, Danton Remoto, and Jessica Zafra, all Anvil authors. Whatever it is that Anvil does for them, I hope it will do for me.
And, yes, I already have two fairly well-selling books with Anvil – A Dictionary of Philippine English (which I did with Ma. Lourdes “Tish” Bautista) and The Basic Education Curriculum in 17 Easy Lessons.

Tenth on my bucket list is doing a book on the teaching of literature. I promised this book ages ago to Gloria Rodriguez, proprietor of Giraffe Books.

I have been preaching (that’s the word, really) two things about the teaching of literature.

First is that teachers of literature should not teach language. Language teachers teach language and literature teachers teach literature. The teaching of literature is not the same as the teaching of language.

After all, the great writers are not exactly good models of language use.

Take Emily Dickinson. She did not care about punctuation, capitalization, nor even grammar. In her poem that begins with the line “The Grass so little has to do,” she wrote, “I wish I were a Hay.” No matter how you look at that last line of the poem, it is ungrammatical. Yet the poem is considered one of the best that she wrote. Clearly, literary value is not dependent on linguistic value.

William Shakespeare, considered by most critics as the best playwright not only in English but in any language, wrote in the first scene of his play King Lear: “stranger’d with our oath.” Grammarians had a field day condemning what they called a mistake by Shakespeare, since he used a noun as a verb. But these grammarians are now all forgotten, and Shakespeare lives on.

Examples are legion of literary masters deliberately (and in some cases, not so deliberately) committing what would be grammatical errors in the hands of lesser mortals. William Faulkner, who won a Nobel Prize, was notorious for not knowing grammar; this was admitted after his death by his own editors at Random House. Our own Jose Rizal, according to at least one major literary critic in Spain, had all kinds of grammatical problems with his Spanish.

In any case, if we were teaching infinitives in a language class, we certainly could do much better than to use Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be: that is the question,” because some smart student will ask how that can be a question since there is no question mark or what the antecedent of the pronoun “that” is or even why there is a comma after the first “to be.” Instead of trying to explain why writers do funny things with language, the language teacher would save a lot of aggravation by simply using what linguists call “authentic texts,” or texts that people actually use in real life, not on stage or in books.

The second thing I preach is that teachers of literature should not lecture. More precisely, although they may lecture occasionally, they should not limit themselves to that particular method of teaching literature. Many literature teachers lecture too much in their classes.

All educators know that the lecture method, while useful in imparting information quickly, is not very good at changing attitudes or empowering students. There are many other ways of teaching literature. In my FUSE CONSTEC series that is now running over Knowledge Channel, I show forty different ways of teaching literature. Only one of these ways involves lecturing or talking for a long time to students.

Since I have written a number of articles on the teaching of literature, Gloria Rodriguez has been nagging me to put them together in a book. I really should, not only because it might be useful to literature teachers, but also because I owe her a great debt of gratitude. While she was with New Day Publishers, she published my first book of literary criticism, Beyond Futility. Although I have now outgrown some of the critical positions I took in that book, it is still one of my favorites, if only because I was very young then and so iconoclastic.

Now, after more than 39 years of teaching literature, I really should share what I have learned with younger teachers. One of these days, I will.

Eleventh on my bucket list is writing the third part in my trilogy of plays on Bienvenido N. Santos.

Santos was my literary father. From him I learned many things, such as the usefulness of memorizing lines of poetry (to get you through life’s crises), the indecency or vanity of calling yourself a writer (instead, other people should call you that), the need to be kind to everyone (he would always say, echoing Tennessee Williams, that he relied on the kindness of others), and the importance of thinking in the vernacular even while writing in English (he claimed that he wrote “in Capampangan, using English words”).

I started writing his biography while he was alive. It was, strictly speaking, not a biography, but a combination literary critique and life story, something like what today is called “creative nonfiction.” He used to call it “Project Numero Uno.” He would sometimes scold me for spending time teaching, lecturing, managing, or even writing a column when I should be writing the book on him. (He may have been only joking, but since he was always joking, it was hard to say when he was already serious.)

On his grave in 1996, I swore that I would finish Project Numero Uno. I applied for a Senior Fulbright grant and luckily got it. The grant allowed to me stay in Wichita State University for three months in 2003. Santos left many of his drafts, letters, and other papers at Wichita (from which he retired as a professor), and the grant paid for my travel, lodging, meals, and research expenses. The librarians there gave me full access to the Santos archives. They even allowed me to photocopy most of the materials. (The photocopies are now with the Bienvenido N. Santos Museum in De La Salle University.)

I was well into writing a regular prose biography of him when I realized that it would not do justice to my personal relationship with him. I had written (and am still writing) biographies of other famous persons, but I had no emotional links to them. The outline I had made for the prose biography had, as its chapters, “Wonderer” (childhood, the first twin novels), an interchapter on poetry, “Wanderer” (exile, hyphenation as Asian-American), an interchapter on fiction, and “Wonder” (return to the Philippines). It might have made a good read, but it would have been too impersonal.

Mang Ben (my nickname for Santos) deserved more than the usual prose biography, I told myself, and promptly decided to do a trilogy of plays on him. That was my creative way to respond to his creative influence on me.

The first of the trilogy, The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos: A Creative Nonfictional Biographical Play in Two Acts, clinched the Hall of Fame award I got from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature. Clearly, Mang Ben worked on the judges from his powerful place in heaven! The play has not yet been staged, but it was broadcast over Radio Balintataw in a Filipino translation.

The second of the trilogy, Bienvenido, My Brother: A Creative Nonfictional Biographical Play in One Act, has been staged as well as broadcast. Both the first and the second plays were published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2005.

What I still have to do is the third play in the trilogy, tentatively entitled Bienvenido’s Santas. It will consist of short monologues by various women in Mang Ben’s life, such as his wife, daughters, friends, students, and fans. Just as I had to take time off my regular activities to write the first two plays, I need to get a grant and stay away for a couple of months to do the third play.

You see, when I finally meet Mang Ben again in the afterworld, I want to be able to face him and say that I fulfilled my promise to him about Project Numero Uno. I am sure he will be happy to know that the man he used to call “the other son I never had” has been true to his word.

Twelfth and last on my bucket list is to play tournament bridge at a level good enough to compete internationally.

I started playing contract bridge in college with friends. I did not know then that I was playing “social bridge” or, more technically, “rubber bridge.”

I had no idea that there were bidding conventions, defensive signals, squeeze plays, and things of that sort. I simply looked at my cards, relied on my instincts, and enjoyed winning or, more often, hated losing.

After college, I discovered that there were such things as bridge books. I learned that there were various bidding conventions and despaired that I could not possibly memorize them all.

There were no computers then, so I could not practice with the bridge programs now available. I just contented myself with reading about the clever tricks famous players did at various tournaments.

Of course, at that time, I really did not know what tournaments were like. It was only much later, when I got invited to contract bridge games at the Manila Polo Club (and various other places, including military social halls), that I realized that my book knowledge and my experience in rubber bridge were not sufficient to make me win duplicates (as players call tournaments where pairs compete with each other) or teams-of-four (as the name suggests, teams consisting of four players compete with each other).

I did win a tournament once, when I was lucky enough to be invited by a Life Master (the equivalent of a chess grandmaster) to be his teammate in a teams-of-four Senior-Junior event. That was the only time I got a trophy from the Philippine professional bridge league. In the innumerable other tournaments I played in, I invariably ended up in the bottom half of the heap, sometimes embarrassingly at the very bottom.

Fortunately, our country’s Life Masters were very good to me, inviting me occasionally to play with them. I suppose it gave them some comic relief from the very high level of play they were used to. (After all, these Life Masters would compete regularly in, and even sometimes win, international tournaments.)

I do have something to boast about, though. While I was teaching one term at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I joined the city individual tournament (individual because you keep changing partners, so your individual score matters, rather than your partnership or team score as in other tournaments). I won the tournament and was declared Athens Individual Bridge Champion. (Applause, please!)

My Ohio story, however, does not have a good ending. Because I was Athens Individual Champion, I was asked to represent Athens in the Ohio state tournament that year. Of course, my teammates (three Life Masters) and I ended up somewhere near the bottom of the rankings. Since we had driven all night to get to the tournament, not to mention paid the huge tournament fees, they did not exactly excuse my horrible errors. I never got to play in an Athens tournament again!

Aside from playing bridge, I have tried to help promote the game. I joined the Philippine professional bridge league and handled its press relations for several years.

I even tried teaching a bridge class at De La Salle University for a couple of years. My students learned so fast that, when I took them to the tournaments, they would beat me regularly. I gave up teaching bridge when I realized that I was not even as good as my students.

Sad to say, I have not joined any tournament for the past few years, due to the pressure of work.

Before I kick the bucket, I want to start playing tournament bridge again. I want to win at least one more national tournament and perhaps even represent the country in a Bridge Olympiad. I must admit though that, since I have weak playing skills, this is the item in my bucket list least likely to be fulfilled.

(First published in The Philippine Star from 15 May to 31 July 2008.)

Update on Medy Cruz

My wife Remedios "Medy" Cruz was discharged from Makati Medical Hospital on July 3, after spending 46 days there, 9 of them in ICU. She still has a bile leak from complications during her original laparoscopic cholecystectomy and the subsequent jejunostomy roux-en-y, but since it will take about a month more for the bile leak to close naturally, there was no point staying in the hospital and risking hospital-acquired pneumonia. She has a colostomy bag (an ostomy pouching system) to catch the bile. She also still has pancreatitis, due to the large number of antibiotics she had to take when she was fighting for her life (and which have been discontinued, even if her white blood cell count is still below normal). Although we still need a nurse to dress her wound, take her vitals, and give her daily injections, she at least has the fresh air of our village and the comforts of home to make her feel better. So far, God has answered our prayers twice by helping her survive two close calls. Her doctors now tell us that they thought she had very little chance of survival, so we can clearly attribute her new life to miracles wrought by, among others, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Piat, Our Lady of Manaoag, and Pope John Paul II, to whom various Catholic prayer groups addressed their petitions, as well as by Jesus himself, to whom my sister Loree's Christian prayer groups appealed directly. We still need prayers for the bile to stop leaking, as well as for her entire body to return to health soon. As soon as she recovers completely, we shall have an ecumenical service to thank God for everything, including the time we spent in the hospital, which was, of course, all part of a divine plan we can barely understand. As for me, since I am still caring for her, I still cannot resume my hectic schedule and have had to beg off from various speaking, writing, teaching, and other commitments. Thank you for your continued concern and support.

Update on my wife

Thanks to your prayers, my wife Remedios "Medy" Cruz is now no longer critical. Although she is still in ICU in Makati Medical Center, she is stable and improving. There is still a bile leak that needs to be plugged, but the complications and infections that threatened her liver, kidneys, lungs, and pancreas have been managed by various specialists. There no longer seems to be danger of death. My two daughters (Emily and Luna) have held up very well. Her siblings have helped a lot by their presence (they came from California and Davao). So have the friends that have waved to her through the glass window of the ICU room.

As for me, I have learned a lot in the past three weeks about medicine, but a lot more about family, friends, and God. I am convinced more than ever that heaven listens, particularly if not only two or three but dozens (perhaps hundreds, if we count the multiplier effect of the Internet, SMS, and prayer groups) of friends come together in His name. I went very quickly through the classic stages of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and testing, and have now accepted that whatever happens is God's will. And I know that everything God does is good for us.

Thank you, dear friends.
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FOR THOSE THAT CAME IN LATE (earlier posting to egroups):

My wife, Remedios "Medy" Cruz, underwent a routine laparoscopic cholecystectomy at Makati Medical Center on May 19, Sunday, to remove her gall bladder. Undetected by the earlier ultrasound, the gall bladder turned out to be embedded in her liver, but the surgeon was able to dig it out. A bile leak developed and a drain was placed on her. She was placed under observation in a private room, where we stayed without much incident until May 29, Thursday. The bile leak suddenly increased in volume (it was supposed to have decreased and disappeared). She underwent an ERCP (a diagnostic procedure), and it was discovered that her bile duct had been cut. On May 30, Friday, she went through a jejunostomy roux-en-y, a technically very difficult operation, which went for nine hours, not including pre-op and recovery, to reconnect the duct. On May 31, Saturday, she had acute renal failure, which was solved within two hours by a team of nephrologists. She, however, developed a fever, which up to right now, still persists, indicating an infection. The usual tests have been done, and so far, it appears that at least one infection comes from the bile. She is being bombarded with all kinds of antibiotics. At the moment, there is no pneumonia, which is commonly contracted by patients staying long in a hospital; in fact, fear of contamination initially led the doctors from sending her to the ICU. Now, they have had no choice but to put her in ICU. Paradoxically, when she was in a hospital room, she could not be visited for fear of infection. Now that she is in ICU, she can be seen through a glass window from a visitors' lounge, though only family members are allowed to enter the ICU room, one at a time. Visiting hours are 10 am to 7pm for those in the Metro Manila area. The doctors (there are so many of them I have lost count) have told us that we might lose her if she develops sepsis (if the infection goes to the blood). It is also not even certain yet if the second operation was successful. The worst possible thing now, next to sepsis, is that she has to undergo a third operation.

It will help a lot if friends storm heaven with prayers. My two daughters (Emily, the one living in Silicon Valley; Luna, the game developer who lives with us) are holding up very well, much better than me, I have to admit. You might want to pray for us, too, especially me. I have never panicked this much before. Thank you. And thank you to all those that been helping, particularly on Thursday night, when we had to find A+ blood, which the hospital did not have in stock, for the operation the next day.

Corruption in Philippine Education

The Asian Development Bank, in a report entitled “Philippines: Critical Development Constraints” (December, 2007), says that fighting corruption is one of the two top development concerns for our country.

There is no doubt that there is corruption in our educational system, perhaps not on the scale of the Malacañang scams involving ZTE, railroads, fertilizers, and swine, but enough to derail efforts to achieve “Education for All.” I am not talking only of DepEd (which has, since the time of the crusading Raul Roco, moved down in the list of most corrupt government agencies) nor of TESDA (despite its highly publicized book publication scam) nor of CHED (where corruption is “moderate” since its budget is minuscule), but even of private schools (some known to pay for permits to open new programs).

It is about time we looked at the kind of corruption or evil, no matter how small, that stunts the development of quality education in our country.

We can begin with an anomaly outside the control of schools.

For example, you can go to Recto Avenue and get yourself a diploma and a transcript from any university in the country. Of course, if that university were ever asked if you graduated from it, you would be found out, but meanwhile, since academic and industry bureaucracies are often as bad as government bureaucracies, you can teach or work for quite a bit of time before anyone finds out that you misspent your youth.

How do we help solve this problem? All we need to do is to have a database of graduates from all our schools. Even with a simple laptop, that is very easy to do. All we need is someone to encode the full names of graduates, with their dates of birth and some kind of identification card number (here’s an argument for a national ID number, similar to the American social security number), with the name of the school, the year, and the degree earned. That will enable anyone to just check if you indeed finished from Boracay University even if you have never been on a boat. (Yes, I am alluding to the Thai minister’s case.)

DepEd and CHED should get some funding (very minimal, because we need only one very fast typist and one very patient clerk, the latter to search all school lists of graduates) to get this database done.

Now let us look at anomalies within the control of schools.

There are a few, admittedly very few cases of school registrars being bribed to change the grades of students. Because the excuse can always be made that it was a typing or encoding error, these erring registrars get away with academic murder when a student suddenly passes or gets a grade high enough to get Latin honors. Since not too many teachers bother to double-check posted student grades, registrars or their assistants have a great opportunity to make a little money on the side.

There are a few, admittedly very few cases of secretaries being asked to get paychecks for their academic bosses, finding a way to cash those checks, and defrauding their own bosses of hard-earned income.

I speak here from personal experience not related to schoolwork. I used to write a weekly column for a newspaper (not the Star) and knowing how newspapers tend to be a little late in paying their contributors (again, not the Star), I did not mind it so much when, after about six months, I had not yet been paid anything.

I would ask my secretary periodically to call the newspaper, and she would always answer that there was no check waiting for me at the newspaper’s accounting office. I would loudly curse the newspaper within her earshot.

One day, when my secretary was out of the office, a messenger from the newspaper came with an envelope. It was cash from the newspaper. I asked the messenger how come I had gotten paid only after so long and why the pay was so small. He said that he had come in every week previously with payment for my column.

All the time that I was raging mad against the newspaper, a messenger had brought in, every week, cash from the newspaper. My secretary had signed the receipts, pocketed the money, and left me looking stupid with my ranting and raving.

Of course, I fired that secretary the moment she returned to the office. Well, not immediately, because I had to go through the usual due process.

If you think it is unusual for someone to get paid cash in these days of checks and ATMs, look again. When I was with DepEd in 2001, I got paid my salary in cash, and so did all of my staff. When Roco tried to start the use of bank ATMs for salaries, he got plenty of flak. Can you imagine why? (If not, you should take Corruption 101.)

I know of some cases, again very, very few cases, where teachers complained about not being paid by a school, only to find out that their salaries had been collected by clerks all along.

Corruption in education starts with the teacher.

Since a teacher has absolute power as far as the grade of a student is concerned, the temptation to be corrupt is great. This is a small but significant example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The most blatant of such behavior is, of course, sexual harassment. There are teachers (admittedly, very few) that demand sexual favors in exchange for giving high or even just passing final grades to students. The sexual favors may range from simple tolerance of sexist remarks (“you look sexy today”) to lunch dates to what Philippine English calls “chancing” to actual intercourse. Sexual harassment is a criminal offense, but it takes a young student extraordinary courage to file charges against a teacher that could, with no one else asking for justification, give her or him a failing mark.

Not related to lust but to greed is the more common practice of teachers asking students to pay for a field trip. A typical field trip requires a rental bus, admission tickets, and meal expenses. Too many administrators ignore such field trips, because they involve a lot of tedious accounting, often with non-official receipts, and focus instead on watching their backs by asking parents to sign accident waiver forms.

Individual teachers take advantage of this administrative laziness. I know of many cases where teachers charged students what seemed like reasonable amounts, then either got commissions from bus operators or restaurants, or just pocketed the difference between what was collected and what was spent. The amounts involved are not huge, but relative to what teachers make, they add considerably to take-home pay.

More abstract but just as corrupt is the practice of some teachers, particularly on the university level, to make money from their own textbooks in their classes.

There is a gray area here, however. In the United States, where requiring one’s own textbook is condemned as unethical, there is no justification for using one’s own textbook in one’s classroom, because there are dozens of other textbooks to choose from. In the Philippines, because of the scarcity of textbooks, teachers can often validly claim that theirs is the only textbook available. (To say that theirs is the best textbook available is not a matter of corruption, but a matter of the cardinal sin of pride.)

I hold no brief against teachers using their own textbooks in their own classes in the Philippines. I do it myself when there is no other textbook on the market or, more often, when my textbook is adopted by my school. The corruption enters when teachers make money (outside of the royalties to which they are legally and morally entitled) by doing actual selling or physically bringing the textbooks into the classrooms and collecting the money from students. More often than not, the money paid by students is more than what the teacher paid for the books, because authors get their own books at a discount.

To remove all doubts about making extralegal money off textbooks, author-teachers can simply direct students to campus or commercial bookstores. In the case of field trips, administrators can make students pay to school cashiers or, better, can include the costs of field trips in the miscellaneous fees collected at the start of a schoolyear.

Part of urban legend (okay, maybe it is not always just urban legend) is the image of the public schoolteacher selling food or dry goods inside the classroom. Unlike store customers that can always walk away and not buy anything, students feel forced to buy anything their teacher sells them. Even if the selling is for a good cause (such as a church raffle), a teacher taking money from students is still corrupt.

Even more of an urban legend (it does happen, though very rarely) is the teacher that sleeps her or his way to the top of the campus ladder.

Finally, in private schools, even in the most prestigious ones, there are teachers that, in effect, bribe their students to put high marks on Student Evaluation Forms. The bribery takes many forms. Some teachers give very high grades just before the evaluation period (typically, in the middle of a term). Some threaten students with failing grades should the teacher herself or himself fail in the evaluation. Some actually prepare very well for their lessons before evaluation but just bum off afterwards.

The old adage that it is not what teachers say but what they do that influences young students still holds true today. When they see that some teachers can be bribed by money, sex, or ego massage, students grow up thinking that such exploitative or manipulative behavior is ethical. When they get out of school, these students naturally behave the way their wayward teachers behaved.

Corruption starts at a very young age. Unless teachers stop looking the other way, students will grow up thinking that cheating is normal behavior.

Let us take college students. College students cheat. That sounds like a gross generalization, and it is. There are, indeed, a few college students that do not cheat. There are those that, despite the examples of their classmates, are satisfied with lower grades as long as they have not cheated on exams or assignments.
A huge number of college students, however, would rather get good grades earned dishonestly than bad grades earned honestly.

How do students cheat? The example from the movie The Emperor’s Club is the old-fashioned way, namely, to write down data somewhere within reach for reference during exams. A cursory glance at student desks in our own classrooms should reveal all sorts of data (called “crib notes”) useful to a student, such as formulas, dates, terms, or mnemonic devices.

How can a teacher fight this kind of cheating? Just suddenly rearrange the seating arrangement, so that students do not sit where they think they were going to. Ask all the students to deposit all their bags and notebooks somewhere in the room, thus depriving them of their carefully prepared microscopic memory enhancers. Have test papers that are completely self-contained, so students need only a pencil or ballpen with them as they take the exam. In extreme cases, examine palms and forearms, where notes could be written.

More complex ways of cheating, however, are now available to students. The cellphone is a marvelous tool. Students may claim that they need the calculator function in their cellphones, but they can easily store crib notes on their phones, text friends, and even access the Web. How to fight such newfangled ways of cheating? Just ask students to deposit their cellphones somewhere in the room for the duration of the exam. For exams that require calculators, you could have students exchange calculators, in case these calculators have the capacity to store crib notes.

Harder to check is cheating by looking at the exam papers of classmates. It is really unfair to penalize a student whose eyes wander around the room. Such eye movement may be completely innocent or involuntary. Such students may even be so near-sighted that they cannot actually see the answers of the students sitting next to them. How can teachers prevent this kind of cheating? The most difficult but most effective way is to have several sets of exams. In a multiple-choice exam, the answers could be coded differently (one set has A as the correct answer, the next B, the next C, and so on). Fortunately, with computers, such tedious work has been made easier for teachers.

The simplest thing a teacher can do is to ask students to cover their answer sheets with other pages of the test. This will not work, however, with students bent on broadcasting their answers to their seatmates. Walking around the room or standing behind students is supposed to discourage this kind of cheating, but who are we kidding?

An easy way to avoid this kind of cheating is to chop up an exam into parts. The teacher can collect the first part after ten minutes (or whatever time it takes to answer the questions) and the rest in irregular intervals. If the teacher makes sure that the questions are so difficult that it would take a genius to answer all of them in the time allotted, students will not have time to broadcast their answers or to look at other people’s papers. When grading the exam, all that the teacher needs to do is to reduce the denominator (instead of saying that a student got 5 out of 10 questions, say that the student got 5 out of 8). This takes into account the lack of time to answer all the questions, but allows geniuses to get extra points (getting 10 out of 8).

The most blatant way of cheating in an exam is to have someone else take it. There are infamous cases like these in the United States, written up in education journals. The example of Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) taking the bar in Catch Me If You Can is not farfetched. There are actually people that take exams for other people or that take exams in subjects they know little about.

To avoid this type of cheating, the teacher should check identification cards before giving out exam sheets. The teacher should not rely on signatures. Signatures are unreliable; students forge each other’s signatures. Students that seldom attend class may have perfect attendance, courtesy of classmates that sign attendance sheets for them.

I used to be naïve about students taking tests for other students. I used to (and still do) give daily quizzes in my undergraduate classes (for better monitoring of student progress). Since my quizzes consisted of mini-essays, I thought they were cheat-proof. One conscience-stricken student, however, eventually snitched: some of my brighter students would do the quizzes of their intellectually-challenged classmates. Now, I check handwriting as well as content.

Under the administration of the late Raul S. Roco, the Department of Education rose from being regarded as the most corrupt government bureaucracy to one of its least corrupt. Succeeding DepEd Secretaries continued some of his reforms and were largely successful in reducing corruption, despite the publicized attempts by Malacañang to use the Department to launder election funds. Were it not for the general corruption that now characterizes the government and therefore makes all government institutions suspect, DepEd would be a model of good governance.

What were (I use the past tense advisedly) the most common ways of being corrupt in DepEd?

The worst, as documented by various news agencies, had to do with textbooks. Because the contracts were in the billions of pesos, crooked publishers and printers had no qualms about offering several million pesos to those in DepEd that had something to do with approving purchases.

As USEC in 2001, I was in charge of evaluating the content of textbooks before they got purchased. The highest bribe I was personally offered (which I, of course, refused) was fifty million pesos. Since I knew that the offers would not stop coming in, I did a very simple thing to stop temptation. I simply announced that I thought no textbook was good enough for me. Since all the textbooks offered had factual or grammatical errors anyway, I had a good excuse not to approve any textbook. When the word spread that I would not approve any textbook, no more bribes were offered to me.

To stop ghost deliveries of textbooks ordered by previous administrations, I formed ad hoc teams to conduct surprise visits to printing presses and warehouses to physically count stocks. Moreover, I reassigned staff that used to be connected to textbook evaluation and purchasing.

I set a date when parents and community leaders would wait for scheduled deliveries to schools. I called the day D-Day, for Delivery Day. Succeeding undersecretaries continued the practice and even improved on it by getting civic organizations and NGOs to serve as watchdogs.

Although I had nothing to do with the bidding process, I got television stations to film the process. During one particular bidding, I saw the usual fixers fixed to their seats, because they saw TV cameras recording any attempt by them to whisper to the bidding committee members. Roco loved to call this the Sunshine Principle: if you let sunshine (in this case, media) in, all the germs will die.

All purchases of goods and services were occasions for corruption. Even a small thing such as reserving a hotel function room for a DepEd meeting would mean a few extra pesos for whoever actually went to the hotel to conduct, in a notorious Philippine English euphemism, an “ocular inspection.” I used to wonder why there needed to be an ocular inspection of a hotel that was used regularly anyway by DepEd, until I realized that there was something to be gained for those doing the so-called inspecting.

The practice that Roco tried very hard to stop through the use of bank ATMs was that of accounting clerks deliberately withholding salary checks from teachers until a little coffee money changed hands. That little money was big money, since even a ten-peso tip twice a month from one teacher meant, since there were half a million teachers, ten million pesos a month. Of course, you can’t buy coffee with ten pesos, so you can imagine how many more millions of pesos went into private hands just because they held other people’s checks.

One of the reasons I left DepEd so quickly was the lack of compensation. At the time I was invited by Roco to help him at DepEd, I was the highest-paid academic in the country (since De La Salle University had the highest salaries and I held the highest rank there). In contrast, in DepEd, I got less than what my own secretary at my university earned. I could have made extra money by writing, but then Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. personally advised me not to continue this column because, as he put it, I should do only DepEd work. I then had absolutely no other income but the peanuts I got from DepEd.

When a new trimester was about to start at De La Salle University, I took it as my cue to leave government service. I contented myself with being an unpaid volunteer for CHED, which I have been since then. At least, as one of the technical experts used by CHED to evaluate schools, I still do my share for education in the country.

Now, I am happy working in four universities and writing a column. I get paid amounts commensurate to what I do. In government, it is all financial sacrifice, unless you are corrupt or independently wealthy. It could even be said that the biggest cause of corruption in government is the low salary scale. Fifty million to someone earning less than thirty thousand a month is a lot, but it is not much for someone earning what a Vice President earns in Makati. (First published in The Philippine Star, 10, 17, 24 April and 8 May 2008)

Book Review: Kapoor and Villa

The examples come mostly from India and the writing is clearly popular, but serious marketing managers can still learn quite a lot from 24 Brand Mantras: Finding a Place in the Minds and Hearts of Consumers by Jagdeep Kapoor (New Delhi: Response Books, 2001, 111 pages).

Kapoor, who manages a leading strategic marketing consultancy in India, uses his own experience with various brands to put across several traditional, as well as innovative, ideas about handling a brand. He uses the usual marketing jargon, such as segmentation, positioning, advertising, promotion, sales distribution, product portfolio design, pricing, and customer service, but by and large, he is able to describe complex marketing realities in words so simple you can read the book while waiting for websites to download when you are surfing.

He has twelve mantras or sayings for the mind and twelve for the heart, both mind and heart being involved in any marketing strategy.

For the mind, he has mantras such as “To build a big brand, adopt a short brand name,” “Sample to sell ample,” and “Brands must make profit, not only noise.” For the heart, he has mantras such as “Be humble, or you will tumble,” “Don’t sell the right product to the wrong audience,” and “Don’t prejudge your consumers.”

He does have a few examples that are not Indian. To stress that “Brand images are fragile, handle with care,” he discusses the Pepsi multiple winners case. Interestingly, he looks at the case in the context of other countries: “The brand took such a beating that the Philippine government had to step in and diffuse the situation. Naturally, repercussions were felt in the neighboring countries as well. While adept handling of the brand saved the day in countries around, in the Philippine islands the Pepsi brand, that had for so many years been lovingly built, stands tarnished.” This was, of course, before Pepsi added a twist to their product.

Some of Kapoor’s insights may seem too simplistic to the seasoned marketing specialist, but for those just starting out to create a name and a fortune for themselves in the marketing field, it will not hurt to heed the 24 pieces of advice he gives.

In the literary field, a brand that has remained strong through the years is the name Jose Garcia Villa. The brand is so strong that the person was even named a National Artist, despite his living most of his adult life in New York City.

One objection to Villa as a brand is his supposedly meager output as a writer. His collected poems will not fill a respectably-sized library volume, though the quality of his poetry is universally acknowledged. Still, in a consumer-oriented society, even in academic circles, quantity is quality, and the brand needed refurbishing.

Jonathan Chua has added to the appeal of the brand by putting together a sizable volume of Villa’s literary criticism – The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism by Jose Garcia Villa (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002, 349 pages).

Villa inspired me to do my own listing of the best poems and short stories published in Philippine magazines, but he was more courageous and more brutal, because he put asterisks to indicate what he thought was the quality, or lack of it, of the poems and short stories.

If the poem or short story was not even deserving of an asterisk, he did not even mention it, or worse, he included it in what he called a “Criminal Record” of “The Worst Compositions.” From 1927 to 1940 he made writers in his Honor Roll feel that they had arrived, and he made writers in his Criminal Record feel that they would never arrive. Curiously, a writer could be in both, being praised one year for having “a mind that has risen to the wisdom of the heart” and being condemned another year for writing a text that was “mediocrity triumphant”!

Here are a couple of quotable quotes from Villa’s prose. Villa was particularly incensed by another annual selector, Cornelio Faigao. Said Villa: “I am harsh against Faigao because I don’t like bad taste.” Villa was merciless about writers he disliked, such as Rafael Zulueta da Costa. He wrote, after Zulueta had won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry, “Mr. Zulueta has no talent whatsoever, not even a trace of it. He has not produced one respectable poem in fifteen years of writing.” Villa was gung-ho in general about Philippine writing, however, proclaiming its virtues to high heaven – heaven at that time being the United States – and insisting that Filipinos were as good, if not better, than American writers.

I am particularly grateful that this book has seen the light of day, because my classes in Philippine literary criticism, which usually start with Jose Rizal and, in the period Villa was prolific as a critic, continue only with Alejandro Abadilla, Clodualdo del Mundo, Salvador P. Lopez, and Buenaventura Rodriguez, will now be comprehensive, with the inclusion of Villa in the canon of Filipino literary criticism. If T. S. Eliot is right that every new text changes all previously existing texts, the publication of The Critical Villa will force us to rethink the history of literary criticism, not just in our country, but in the world.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 24-31 March 2003)

Book Review: Sanchez & Mojares

The grammar is atrocious, the relationship between texts and visuals unclear, and the printing amateurish, but some of the pieces of advice in Marlo Sanchez’s Best Advice for Your Own Business (Muntinlupa: Pinoybisnes Resource Center, 2002, 245 pages) should be useful to the office employee who wants to make it big in the world of entrepreneurs.

Sanchez comes from a rare breed – the breed of Filipino bestselling authors. Appropriately enough, publishing his own books is his own business, and he unselfishly shares with his readers the secrets of his success as an entrepreneur and an independent publisher. The nuggets of practical wisdom in his books are enough to start off anyone seriously thinking of becoming rich.

Unlike his previous Be Smart! Start & Manage Your Own Business and A Smart & Practical Guide for New Entrepreneurs, this latest Sanchez product features cartoons by another well-known figure, Washington “Tonton” Young, creator of Pupung. Young is himself another entrepreneur, managing a small eatery very much like the one featured in his cartoons.

The book is highly recommended for those dreaming, but still afraid, of starting their own business, as well as for Pupung fans.

Much better written and printed is Resil B. Mojares’s Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002, 324 pages). Mojares has set out to find out how Filipinos in the past imagined their world. Or, if we want to be even more precise, how we Filipinos today imagine our world.

Mojares is the major structuralist or poststructuralist or postmodern critic in this part of the world, yet you will find it hard to spot a structuralist buzzword or a reference to a poststructuralist demigod in his work. Mojares has not indigenized contemporary Western critical theory; instead, he has universalized traditional Filipino critical theory. In his footnotes, you will see a lot of names and texts that are the result of his digging in libraries. But in his text, you will be dazzled by a lot of gold ore that comes not from other people’s books, but only from his sharp and fertile mind.

Imagine an essay that succeeds in tying together Maria Makiling, Bernardo Carpio, Rizal, Ferdinand Marcos, Macario Pineda, Jose F. Lacaba, and our desire to steer our own course as a nation. (The word “nation,” by the way, has a very bad press in Mojares’s book.) Or an essay that finds Pigafetta circumnavigating not the globe but the writing process. Imagine doing with Italian texts on the Philippines what Edward Said thought he did with French texts on the Middle East in Orientalism, and subverting or deconstructing (we should say for the sake of those, who, like Mojares, dislike jargon, debunking) Said’s findings. Imagine reading a history or a biography and concentrating on what is not being said, on the unsaid, the unsaid being the real history or biography, whatever the word “real” means. Imagine treating the process of being hailed as a saint – beatification and canonization – as a text. Imagine following the journey of a physical statue and coming up not with a physical map, but with a map of the mind of the Cebuano. Imagine constructing a genealogy of manners, or even a catechism of the body. Or taking an 1891 menu and forming a portrait of the late 19th century in Cebu.

We could say that all this was done before by Jacques Derrida when he wrote a thick book based only on a postcard he bought on a visit to Oxford or by Roland Barthes when he wrote about women after looking only at printed photographs of women’s dresses. We could say this, but we would be wrong. Mojares has done postmodern readings of various texts much better than Derrida or Barthes, at least for Filipino readers, because we know all the references and do not have to research on who exactly the people and what exactly the texts are being used in a Derrida or Barthes essay.

In fact, in my classes on literary criticism, I hardly ever ask my students to read Derrida or Barthes anymore; I just ask them to read Mojares. They get the theories and the methods and the insights accurately anyway, and they get them much faster and much easier than in wading through often unreliable English translations of often badly-written French texts. True, Mojares shifts from Spanish to English to Tagalog to Cebuano sources with equal facility, and expects readers to share this facility. But frankly, what business do we have doing literary theory, not to mention Philippine history, if we do not know Spanish, English, Tagalog, and yes, Cebuano?

Like Rizal, Mojares never seeks knowledge for its own sake, but always, in his own words, “knowledge at his country’s service.” One way we could read his latest book is to wonder why nothing has changed since the old days, why the Philippines is still as invisible as it was when Rizal vainly looked for Philippine weapons in the otherwise complete Museum of Artillery in Paris, why we insist on betraying our imagination by adopting, or even adapting, foreign signs, significations, and sins.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 7-14 April 2003.)

Book Review: Chen and Manahan

Only 3 percent of Filipinos are Chinese, but these 3 percent control 70 percent of all businesses in the Philippines.

If only for this startling fact, the book Inside Chinese Business: A Guide for Managers Worldwide (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001; reprinted in the Philippines by McGraw Hill) by Professor Ming-Jer Chen of the University of Virginia (formerly director of The Wharton School’s Global Chinese Business Initiative) should be required reading for all persons doing business in the Philippines.

Chen correctly points out that non-Chinese doing business with Chinese firms have to understand Chinese history and culture. For instance, formal organizational charts have little to do with the actual decision-making going on in Chinese firms (which he calls “Chinese business families”). In a Chinese firm, there is an unwritten organizational chart that is followed and respected by everyone in the firm. The person on top might not be the one making the final decisions; it could be a person technically lower in rank or a person not even in the chart at all.

Chen’s being Chinese and American at the same time obviously helps him explain to non-Chinese the foundations of Chinese business behavior. In particular, Chen is good at explaining why Chinese business principles can be traced to family behavior patterns, what guanxi really is (it’s not negative, but positive), and why conflicts occur every day between Chinese and non-Chinese negotiators.

A simple observation tells it all: “Traditional Chinese writing runs from the top of the page to the bottom, while the Western writing system runs from left to right. When Chinese people are reading traditional texts, it looks as though they are nodding their heads and saying ‘Yes, Yes.’ When Westerners are reading, they appear to be shaking their heads and saying ‘No, No.’”

Even in the Chinese language itself, differences can be inferred. The first person pronoun is hardly used in Chinese, for example, compared with English, where “I” dominates most sentences in everyday speech. “Who you know is who you are,” says Chen, and this must look strange to Westerners (that term includes non-Chinese Filipinos, who are all educated to be brown Westerners), who value individuality, identity, and individual freedom.

In fact, Confucius taught that we should know others. Contrast that with Socrates who said, “Know thyself.” Clearly, there is a wide gap between the two ways of thinking about the world and about the world’s business.

Chen’s book is too full of insights to be summarized in a short review, but one thing is certain: it contains enough information and advice to make business with Chinese firms much easier and more profitable. There are, in addition, helpful lists of readings and websites, a glossary of Chinese terms, and even short accounts of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu.

Similarly helpful, particularly to foreigners who want to take full advantage of their stay in the Philippines, is the award-winning Street-Bound: Manila on Foot (Anvil Publishing, 2001) by Josefina P. Manahan. The book won last year’s National Book Award for Best Design.

Street-Bound: Manila on Foot describes itself as a “small book,” but it is small only in size. The concept of the design is large, encompassing the choice of the size of its paper, which is small enough to grasped by one hand but large enough to contain all the information the book gives about touring Metro Manila; the choice of fonts, which is pleasant to the eyes tired from seeing tourist spots but still eager to see more; the manner in which the type and the illustrations are set on the pages, which is functional, meant to help the reader shifting eyes from tourist spot to book not to get lost either in walking or in reading.

The book is not only about the city of Manila, but about Metro Manila, or at least those parts of it that are walkable. Among the places one can walk in, for example, are the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center, Quezon Memorial Park, and the tiangge in Greenhills. These offer, as the other places included in the book also do, deep pleasure to those who have eyes to see and ears to listen.

The book has basically four kinds of walking tours, which are not necessarily distinct from each other: nature, historical, cultural, and shopping. Walking around Intramuros, for example, offers one a taste of history and culture, but there is some good and bargain shopping in the area. In fact, Manahan fails to mention that Intramuros even offers a taste of nature, in the sense that trees and wide lawns are rare sights in polluted Manila.

Manahan has a keen sense of observation, and a writing talent that is equal to that sense. For example, here is how she describes walking into Paco Park: “As you enter the inner circle of Paco Park through a fine neoclassic stone archway, take note of two small fountains flanking it: fluted columns surmounted by a lion’s head.”
Tourist books are almost always for tourists only, but Manahan’s book should be useful and delightful even to the native Manileño. Natives do not always appreciate the beauty around them.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 17-24 March 2003)

Book Review: Drucker and Gonzalez

Friedrich Nietzsche said that “the last Christian died on the cross.” On his deathbed, Karl Marx said, “I am not a Marxist.” Sigmund Freud obviously turns in his grave every time a Freudian denies that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud are three of only a handful of people that have totally changed human history. They share a common fate: their successors rarely quote them accurately.

Peter Drucker has to be included in that august company of history changers. Unlike them, however, he has lived to see how great minds are always misinterpreted. Although he invented management in his seminal book The Practice of Management (1954), it has become unfashionable to quote him in management schools, but when he is quoted, he is almost always quoted wrongly.

For example, Drucker describes management as an art, rather than a science, yet his followers insist that there is a science of management.

Drucker is uncomfortable with Management by Objectives as it is commonly understood, yet that technique is always attributed to him. In fact, in his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999), Drucker uses the word “results” rather than “objectives.”

Fortunately for him, management guru Robert Heller has outlined Drucker’s main ideas in the Business Masterminds book Peter Drucker (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2000). Heller does a fine job of putting into 112 pages the ideas expounded by Drucker in more than 30 books. In Heller’s book can be found capsule summaries of Drucker’s key terms, such as customer focus, decentralization, empowerment, knowledge worker, and theory of the business.

In addition, Heller makes his book not only a study of Drucker, but also a management handbook. Heller boils down Drucker’s insights into bullets that translate “ideas into action,” such as, “If the business is growing fast, question your assumptions all over again.”

On the local front, a case study of Drucker in action can be found in Andrew Gonzalez’s An Unfinished Symphony: 934 Days at DECS (Manila, 2002). Gonzalez does not cite Drucker, but it is obvious from the way he headed the Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS) from July 1998 to January 2001 that Druckerian principles contributed to the efficient running of the country’s biggest organization (consisting of half a million people, with more than 15 million customers, i.e., students).

Gonzalez’s book does not only reveal how difficult (yet possible) it is to manage a bureaucratic and corrupt organization, but also provides horror stories about politicians interfering with management. It is hard enough trying to save the losing proposition that is the public educational system (which does not have enough capital nor human resources to serve its customers), but the task is made almost impossible when all the petty politicians sitting in Congress or in Malacañang think that they know better about education than educators themselves.

Clearly because he is afraid of libel suits, Gonzalez does not obviously point a finger at anyone identifiable, but experienced government watchers should be able to read between the lines. Alert and informed readers will even realize that, sad to say, some of the villains during Gonzalez’s time still lurk in the shadows of the education department.

The management problems Gonzalez faced in a government organization can doubtless be found also in private corporations. How he coped with these problems should help other managers through their own private or public hells.

If it is true, as Drucker says, that “it is vision and moral responsibility that, in the last analysis, define the manager,” Gonzalez was, at DECS, the model manager. Too bad morally irresponsible politicians won in the end.

By the way, Drucker and Gonzalez have something else in common, besides being management experts: they both have literary backgrounds. Drucker has written two novels, and Gonzalez took graduate studies in literature. Maybe this is why both see management as an art, rather than a science.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 3-17 March 2003.)

Open Letter to the Philippine Development Forum 2008

From Former Senior Government Officials (FSGO)

As Filipinos who have served in senior positions of our government, we acknowledge with appreciation and gratitude the resources, knowledge and good will extended to our country by the international community. The Philippine Development Forum is an important platform for dialogue between leaders of our country and representatives of the international donor community about issues critical to Philippine development. We have no desire to disrupt your discussions nor hijack your agenda. We only wish to bring to your attention a matter that we believe requires your serious consideration.

For more than six months now, since September 2007, the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines has been investigating a public investment project of our government (National Broadband Network project) that was to be executed by a supplier (ZTE Corporation) and financed by a loan from the government of the People’s Republic of China. The media has called this the “NBN-ZTE deal,” or more often, the “NBN-ZTE scandal.”

Details that have emerged from the Senate investigations are disturbing. Alleged bribery in amounts of more than $130 million. Unexplained reversals of declared policies established by the NEDAICC process. Reported influence of politically connected private persons who are outside the chain of official decision-making. Possible crimes from kidnapping to bribery in attempts to prevent witnesses from testifying. Most disturbing of all, possible involvement of the President of the Philippines in corruption and coverup.

The President had authorized members of her Cabinet to negotiate and conclude the NBNZTE deal despite knowledge of possible anomalies. As details of these anomalies became public from the Senate investigation, the President cancelled the deal in October 2007. Despite the Philippine Senate serving as the only credible democratic institution seeking to uncover the truth about this scandal, the President has continued to impede and undermine its investigation of the cancelled deal.

Months after canceling the tainted deal, the President has still not taken any action herself to establish responsibility for any irregularities that may have occurred, nor has she taken any other action to hold any person in her Cabinet accountable for the international embarrassment and civil disturbance that this scandal has already brought to our country. She stands in the eyes of our people as a suspected plunderer, yet she has not acted to promptly bring out the facts that will clear up all doubts.

It seems to us that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is using her powers with impunity stave off the unmasking of her participation in the scandal. She has thus lost all credibility in fighting corruption, credibility that had already been eroded by her involvement in other unresolved scandals from election cheating to a fertilizer scam to bribery in Malacanang, among others.

We have therefore concluded that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is at the center of corruption and coverup in the NBN-ZTE scandal. Others may not agree with us, and we are open to be proven wrong. We ask those who agree with us, as well as those who think otherwise, to work together to determine responsibility for corruption in this deal, hold accountable those who are responsible, and devise measures to avoid recurrence.

Why is this important to PDF? This is about corruption, which sucks scarce resources crucial to development that benefits the poor, and which erodes public trust and destroys national unity essential to sustainable development. This is about corruption on a very large scale, with alleged $130 million bribes dwarfing costs of many projects financed by donors. This is about corruption within the NEDA-ICC process through which many donor-assisted projects have also been approved. And most important of all, this is about corruption, which may involve the President who is the principal with whom almost all country programs of assistance to the Philippines nominally relate. In the words of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and former World Bank Chief Economist, “Smaller scale corruption is bad, but systemic corruption of political processes can have even greater costs.”

We call on the PDF to examine the NBN-ZTE scandal as a possible example of “systemic corruption of political processes.” We make the following suggestions for the dialogue among PDF partners this year:

* We ask our colleagues who represent our government and our country to explain to the international community why has the President not cooperated fully with the Senate in investigating a deal that she has in fact cancelled as anomalous in October 2007? Why has no one in the administration shown acceptance of responsibility for the damage and disturbance that this scandal has caused? Why has there been no resignation, suspension, or dismissal of anyone officially involved with the cancelled NBN project?

* We also ask our colleagues in the international donor community to consider how the integrity and effectiveness of their assistance programs to the Philippines could be affected if corruption at scale and level of the NBN-ZTE scandal remains unresolved? How could the prestige, credibility and leverage of the donor community be constructively mobilized to help Philippine democratic institutions resolve this scandal? How urgent is it for the President to demonstrate with actions her declared intention to get at the truth and hold those accountable for any corruption in the NBN-ZTE deal?

We must all be disturbed by how weak are Philippine democratic institutions in fighting corruption that is so brazen, so obviously harmful and so clearly destroys public trust in government. Leaving such an awful mess as the NBN-ZTE scandal hanging unresolved and inconclusive can only fuel widespread anger, despair, hopelessness and alienation.

There is a rising tide of public disgust over an administration that remains deaf to calls for major reforms, chooses to be blind to worsening hunger and poverty in our communities, and refuses to acknowledge the corruption driving this deafness and blindness to the common good.

The PDF has already contributed to bringing the issue of corruption into the mainstream of priority development concerns. The PDF has also opened the way for civil society organizations to participate in oversight over procurement, financial management and monitoring of development projects, as a concrete measure to increase transparency and accountability. We are hopeful that the PDF can open a new and positive channel for constructive dialogue on addressing corruption of political processes that is central to strengthening the Philippine institutions to which many of us have devoted so much of our lives and careers.

Signed:
Former Members of the Cabinet, The Diplomatic Corp of Officers,
and Heads of Constitutional Bodies
Florencio Abad, former Secretary, Department of Education
Rafael Alunan III, former Secretary, Department of The Interior and Local Government
Senen Bacani, former Secretary, Department of Agriculture
Angelito Banayo, former Presidential Adviser on Political Affairs
Ramon Cardenas, former Head, Presidential Management Staff
Karina Constantino David, former Chair, Civil Service Commission
Edilberto de Jesus, former Secretary, Department of Education
Albert del Rosario, former Ambassador to the United States of America
Ramon Del Rosario, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Finance
Teresita Quintos Deles, former Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process
Benjamin Diokno, former Secretary, Department of Budget and Management
Narcisa Escaler, former Ambassador to the United Nations
Jesus Estanislao, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Fulgencio Factoran, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural
Resources
Victoria Garchitorena, former Head, Presidential Management Staff
Marietta Goco, former Chair, Presidential Commission to Fight Poverty
Philip Ella Juico, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Lina Laigo, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Ernest Leung, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Josefina Lichauco, former Secretary, Department of Transportation and Communication
Narzalina Lim, former Secretary, Department of Tourism
Felipe Medalla, former Director General, National Economic Development Authority
Imelda Nicolas, former Lead Convenor, National Anti-Poverty Commission
Cayetano Paderanga, former Director General, National Economic Development Authority
Cesar Purisima, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Victor Ramos, former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural Resources
Amina Rasul, former Presidential Adviser and Concurrent Chair, National Youth Commission
Rodolfo Reyes, former Press Secretary
Juan Santos, former Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry
Cesar Sarino, former Secretary, Department of The Interior and Local Government
Corazon Juliano Soliman, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Jaime Galvez Tan, former Secretary, Department of Health
Rene Villa, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Veronica Villavicencio, former Lead Convenor, National AntiPoverty
Commission

Former Heads of Government Finance Institutions and GovernmentOwned
and Controlled Corporations
Leonor Briones, former National Treasurer
Jose Cuisia, Jr., former Governor, Central Bank of the Philippines
Francisco Del Rosario, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Evangeline Escobillo, former Commissioner, Insurance Commission
Vitaliano Nañagas II, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Norberto Nazareno, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Ricardo Mirasol Tan, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Deogracias Vistan, former President, Land Bank of the Philippines

Former Undersecretaries and Heads of Attached Agencies
Tomas Africa, former Administrator, National Statistics Office
Roberto Ansaldo, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture
Gerardo Bulatao, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Sostenes Campillo, Jr., former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Isagani Cruz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Guillermo Cunanan, former General Manager, Manila Airport Authority
Edgardo Del Fonso, former Undersecretary, Department of Finance
Quintin Doromal, former Commissioner, Presidential Commission on Good Government
Jose Luis Gascon, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Milwida Guevara, former Undersecretary, Department of Finance
Juan Miguel Luz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Jose Molano, Jr., former Executive Director, Commission on Filipinos Overseas
Conrado Navarro, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Victor Ordoñez, Former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Walfrido Reyes, former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Melito Salazar, Jr., former Undersecretary, Department of Trade and Industry
Antonio Salvador, former Undersecretary, Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process
Leticia Ramos Shahani, former Undersecretary, Department of Foreign Affairs
Mario Taguiwalo, former Undersecretary, Department of Health
V. Bruce Tolentino, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture

Imagining Gloria Arroyo

One of the exercises I do in my playwriting classes when I want to help my students create a character goes like this: Imagine yourself as the character and, using the first person pronoun, articulate what you feel and think.

Suppose I were writing a play about Gloria Arroyo, how would I write what is known in the drama trade as a monologue? The following, then, is a purely creative exercise; any resemblance to any living or dead person should be considered purely coincidental.

First of all, if I were Gloria Arroyo, I would never resign. That is simply stupid. I would be immediately hauled into jail by whoever replaces me. Even if the new president only puts me under house arrest in my own condo, that would still be very embarrassing, not to mention inconvenient. That is what happened to Erap. The people wanted Erap’s blood, and I had to give it to them. The people now want my blood, and whoever leads the mob will be just too glad to oblige them.

Secondly, I would never give up the presidency. The same reasons that prevent me now from resigning will still be around in 2010. The next president, even if he or she is the one I anoint, will undoubtedly put me in jail.

I had to put Erap in jail, even if I served him hand and foot as his Vice President. The only thing I could do for him was to pardon him the moment the court convicted him. That way, technically, he never spent a minute in jail. Of course, he did spend all those years not being able to move around, but that’s just a technicality. Technically, he was presumed innocent until proven guilty. As soon as he was proven guilty, I pardoned him. My successor will pardon me, I hope, but how many years will I have to spend imprisoned though presumed innocent?

It is not even a question anymore of my being innocent or guilty. Erap still says he is innocent, but I arrested him anyway. I think I am innocent, or at least I think I have done and continue to do the right thing, but no one seems to agree with me, not even my closest aides, who I cannot trust. In fact, I don’t really know who to trust anymore, since Erap’s closest aides betrayed him. Erap’s betrayers are in my Cabinet, for heaven’s sake. As they say, once a traitor, always a traitor.

I could declare martial law. But the Constitution says I cannot do that without Congress looking over my shoulder. It’s a good thing I have made sure that that fellow is no longer in charge of Congress. I never trusted him, even if he always defended me when I needed defending. He is always only for himself, not for anyone else, least of all me. But there’s still the Senate, and I can’t seem to get through to them. Not yet, anyway.

But I am not sure of this new Speaker either. I thought he was for federalism and a parliamentary system and all that. That is why I picked him. But he now says he is against changing the Constitution. A parliamentary system would have made me immune forever, because I can always be a member of parliament.

On the other hand, where would I run as a candidate? My own provincemates elected that pesky priest as our governor.

I don’t know why I ended up president in the first place. I just wanted to be a teacher. I loved being in a university, where you are judged not by who you know, but by what you know.

The die is cast. I have to bite the bullet. Martial law is the only thing I can do, and I better make sure Congress agrees with me. I don’t really care what the Supreme Court says. I have violated all sorts of laws anyway, but since it takes forever to challenge anything I do in court, I will have plenty of lead time to think things through. And to pack my bags.

They say I already have a place set up in Portugal or some other place where no one can touch me. That may be true, but why would I want to go into exile? I don’t want to die like Marcos did, just an unknown foreigner dying in a foreign land. I don’t want to end up like he did, not even having a proper burial as a former president. I want to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, because I am a hero. I saved this country from Erap. That makes me a hero, doesn’t it?

What an ungrateful people these Filipinos are! I have spent my entire life serving them, yet they turn against me just because some of my guys foolishly got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s so hard to get good help these days.

(Published in Philippine Star, 20 March 2008)

Sarap and Lasa

Eat, drink, and be merry, though we’re really starving

“Food, after all,” writes Doreen G. Fernandez, “is primarily for survival,” but you wouldn’t know it if you read Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food (Mr. & Ms. Publishing Company, 1988), a collection of writings by her and Edilberto N. Alegre on why food means a lot more than staving off starvation.

The book brings together Fernandez’s culinary essays (such as her early 1971 “Puto-Bumbong, Bibingka, Salabat, atbp: The Filipino Christmas Table” and her more recent magazine articles) and Alegre’s linguistic studies (such as his 1987 magazine series on “Taste as Language” and “Cooking as Language”). Full of descriptive detail, the essays portray Filipinos as lovers of eating for its own sake (or, at most, for the sake of friendship, family, or religion) and not as a means to get through another day. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Bajaws, for whom “eating becomes only a minor activity.” There is also the Tagalog pantawid gutom or “in-between food,” but even that looks forward to the next meal, not to the next breath. In short, food to Filipinos is far from being primarily for survival.

Because food occupies a central place in our lives, the book is delightful to read. Her disavowal notwithstanding, Fernandez makes us “smell adobo and lechon” (in Nick Joaquin’s words, which she quotes) while we read about where and how she discovered such-and-such a dish. It is not adobo or lechon, of course, that Fernandez identifies as uniquely and definitively Filipino. That distinction is reserved for sinigang. Why sinigang? The answer to that question is precisely the reason her 1975 essay “Why Sinigang?” is now a classic.

Although the two writers are careful to note their separate and independent authorship of the essays, the book is unified by two things they share: they both love to eat, and they both love to talk about language. From street to hotel, from library to kitchen, from North to South, the two authors unselfishly share their culinary discoveries with us. No food is too strange, too exotic, too cheap, or too expensive for the two food detectives.

Similarly, Fernandez and Alegre share a love for language. Their investigations into the history, sociology, and psychology of food invariably begin and often end in the origins and meanings of words. Their etymologies may make older, more traditional linguists uncomfortable, but their intentions are unassailable: they are out to make us extremely proud of our cultural heritage.

Take adobo. The word comes from the Mexican word adobado (a stewed meat dish) and the Spanish word adobo (a pickling sauce). Indigenizing both words and food, we Filipinos now use adobo to refer not only to the basic chicken dish, but to the cooking process itself. We can put it another way: Mexicans have only a dish and Spaniards have only a sauce, but we have a process. One can derive all sorts of sociological insights from this, and the authors do that, not only with adobo, but with every other word for food that they find in Philippine languages.

In matters of food, we Filipinos are never at a loss for words. For rice, for instance, the most important food in our country, we have no less than 160 vernacular words! Fernandez and Alegre do not have the time nor the space to analyze each of these words, but they do try, in several essays, to spell out the implications and meanings that rice has in our culture. Here’s a quick example. One word gives a clue to the richness lying underneath language: the word olam literally means “to be eaten with rice.” The two authors have a lot of fun squaring that meaning with the new ways of eating olam (without rice) in fastfood places.

If Sarap strikes you as too theoretical, since food, if nothing else, is experiential, then try the other new book by this prolific pair of writers, Lasa: A Guide to 100 Restaurants (Urban Food Foundation, 1989). If you think this book is just another guide for tourists who don’t know any better, think again. For one thing, no hotel restaurant is included in the guide, that task having been done much earlier by the Hotel and Restaurant Association in The Dining Guide to Manila’s 50 Best Restaurants. For another thing, these are the same two authors of Sarap, which advises, among other things, that tourists who have “the standard preconceptions and fears” should be left to suffer, blissfully ignorant, in hotels. In other words, just as they challenge readers of Sarap to try out new things, Fernandez and Alegre are out to introduce offbeat places in Lasa.

In Lasa, you’ll find places frequented by taxi drivers (average cost of meal per person: P12 to P25), yuppies (the authors’ witty comment on the dress code: “Shoes required”), new rich (“Jogging pants not allowed inside”), and old rich (“exclusive to members”).

Having been written in September 1988, Lasa now needs some updating. I can’t resist adding some notes from my own experience. Contrary to the authors’ claim that Via Mare Coffee Shop in Greenbelt has “prompt service,” I have found its recent service consistently far from prompt. Grove on Pasay Road is indeed great at lunch, but dinner sometimes finds it serving what may have been lunch. With more tables now, Balaw-Balaw is even better than it used to be, if that’s possible. I miss the Chinese restaurants Gloriamaris, Jade Garden, and China City (the last unfortunately hit by a strike) in the guide, as well as the less expensive Sala Thai (near PWU), the unpretentious Wok Inn (with two branches near Malate Church), and the enduring Za’s Cafe in Ermita.

What obviously has to wait for the next edition are the new Dulcinea in Greenbelt and Becky’s Kitchen for cakes (though they are not, strictly speaking, restaurants), the various places with the word “Sugar” in their names, Kim Anh Vietnamese Restaurant (near Hobbit House on Mabini) with its spring rolls, and if the Dining Guide goes out of print, the hotel places that are exceptions to the general dreariness of hotel food (such as Century Park’s delicatessen and its fabled Coupe Mon Amour, Manila Midtown’s dimsum place, Manila Hotel’s buffet lunches, Silahis’ Italian buffet, and the former Hilton’s Coquilla Glory).

In matters of taste, there can be no dispute, said the ancients, but modern Filipinos know better: food is a matter of personal and national pride and identity, taken as seriously as politics, but much less hypocritically.

BIG PEOPLE IN SMALL JOBS: The government employees assigned to the Promotions Department of the Linangan ng mga Wika ng Pilipinas at the University of Life complex are exceptionally courteous, helpful, and knowledgeable. Similarly credits to their jobs are the drivers of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Makiling Arts Center. When I was recently stranded in Makiling without a spare fan belt, they brought me back to Manila in the CCP car, had my car repaired, and drove my car to Manila to catch up with me. All that in the driving rain. If our legislators would only take their jobs as conscientiously, we would not be in the fine mess we are in today.

(First published in Starweek, September, 1989)

A Contrary View of Miss Saigon

“It would be a rather irresponsible critic or reviewer,” wrote Fr. Nicasio Cruz, S.J., in his Reel World on September 17, 1988, “who would analyze, say, Scorpio Nights, Ora Pro Nobis or Private Show solely on aesthetic grounds, praising its undeniable (though limited) artistry, without making a further prudential judgment about the possible moral dangers for the viewers.” As a critic and reviewer, I have no wish to appear irresponsible. I shall, therefore, venture into a moral criticism of the much-publicized Miss Saigon.

There is no question about Lea Salonga’s achievement as the lead singer of this new musical at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane near Covent Garden at the heart of London’s West End. She is brilliant as the Vietnamese prostitute who falls in love with an American customer, bears his child, escapes to Bangkok where she continues to ply her trade, and kills herself when he decides to stay with his American wife. She is clearly the best singer in the whole ensemble, even besting Claire Moore (who plays the wife), who starred in The Phantom of the Opera. Beside her, the male singers in the cast all look like neighborhood favorites who failed to make it to the grand national finals of Ang Bagong Kampeon. Looking particularly inept because he has to sing several songs with her is Simon Bowman (who plays the American customer Chris), who starred in Les Miserables. Only male lead Jonathan Pryce (who plays The Engineer, a Vietnamese pimp) gets the same kind of applause at the curtain call. The night I saw it (September 22, 1988), in fact, the loudest applause was reserved for Lea Salonga, who got a standing ovation.

“What a lovely voice,” I heard the British viewers saying after the show. “She is very good,” echoed others. There were very few Filipinos in the Grand Circle that night (I was forced to buy an expensive ticket because there was no other ticket left). It could not be said, therefore, that patriotic feelings clouded our judgement. The cheering after the show for Lea was genuine aesthetic delight, brought about by her talent for singing and acting. Let is not be said that I am taking away from her achievement, which has made her an international theater star.

What bothers me about the production – and it has also bothered a number of British viewers and reviewers, including our own Paul Woods who wrote his review for another newspaper – is the blatant racism, sexism, and bigotry of the production.

First, the racism. All the Vietnamese and Thai characters in the story, whether played by Filipino, Malaysian, Italian, French, Dutch, Japanese, American, or British performers, were the scum of the earth – pimps, prostitutes, bar habitues, sadistic and mindless soldiers, anti-nationalist visa-hunters at embassies. None of the Asian characters had any redeeming human qualities. Even The Engineer (played ingeniously by Pryce) helps Kim (played by Lea Salonga) only because her child is his “passport to America.” In the well-hyped production number “The American Dream,” where an enormous Cadillac slides into the stage from the back, Pryce even dilutes the apparent satiric intent of the song by making it too subtle for the American tourists in the audience.

In contrast to the bad guys who populate Asia, there are the good guys in the United States. In a scene set in Atlanta, the Americans (played by all the nationalities I’ve cited) are portrayed as genuinely concerned about the human rights of the children they have left behind. (Interestingly enough, they are not concerned about the women the men left behind.) Chris’s friend John (played by Peter Polycarpou) is portrayed as an all-around good guy, trying to find a way out for Chris while protecting his son. After all, the son has American blood, making him “better” than the pure-blooded Vietnamese. Ellen the wife is so kind-hearted that she even takes Kim’s son under her wing at the end of the show. What the writers try to satirize in “The American Dream,” they forcefully lionize in the characterization. You can’t get more racist than that.

Sexism is something else. The first scene, meant aesthetically to establish the milieu, is actually meant to titillate the men in the audience. The director and designers recreate the inside of our Ermita joints. There is the raffle where the unlucky prostitute (“Miss Saigon”) is given to the lucky customer. There is endless kissing and pawing, with our Filipina actresses getting effectively mauled on stage. There is the baring of skin. In short, under the pretext that the prostitutes are sex objects for the customers, the show manages to make the actresses sex objects for the audience.

One particular stage business says it all: an actor shakes a beer can in front of his groin, thus giving the appearance of masturbation. Pornography under the guise of art is still pornography. The scene set in Patpong (Bangkok’s answer to our Mabini) repeats the pornography. The lascivious dancing of the actresses is done every night both in Patpong and in Manila (or Quezon City or Cebu or any other place where poverty forces women to prositution). There is only one difference between Theatre Royal Drury Lane and our neighborhood beer garden: it’s considered respectable for a man to bring his wife to the Theatre Royal.

Finally, there is bigotry. No matter what we think of communism, we cannot deny that the Vietnamese fought a war to get rid of foreigners in their own land. Miss Saigon makes it appear that the Vietnamese fought the Americans simply because of Ho Chi Minh’s ego, symbolized by a gigantic statue hoisted up by mindless communist soldiers. We might as well say that the Americans fought the British because Thomas Jefferson and George Washington wanted memorials built in their honor, or that Filipinos fought both the Spaniards and the Americans because we wanted to have a Rizal Park. Racism and sexism are recognized moral evils all over the world, but bigotry is just as much of an immorality.

It is the most ironic twist of all that a musical meant to appeal to an eventual American audience on Broadway has to distort the American ideal. If democracy offers us anything, it is openness to other people’s ideas. A play that says that Asians, women, and communists are not worth taking seriously betrays a narrowness of mind unworthy of Jefferson, Washington, Rizal, Ho Chi Minh, or even Lea Salonga.

(First published in Starweek, January, 1989.)

English Not for Critical Theory

Anvil Publishing has been after me for more than a decade to compile my columns into books. Perhaps one way to force me to do that is to upload as many of my old columns as I can, thus enabling me to revise the columns for book publication, as well as to gauge reader reaction. Here, then, is the first of what should be a series of uploaded, updated old columns.

Why English will not do as our language for critical theory

I was not going to reprint in this column the comments I delivered on July 14, 1989, during the Round-Table on Critical Theory of the Third International Philippine Studies Conference held at the Philippine Social Science Center. Although a number of Starweek’s readers are English teachers, I felt originally that the general reader may find the jargon of literary theorists opaque, if not altogether weird.

On August 28, 1989, however, in another newspaper, Arnold Molina Azurin, in a feature article entitled “Who is storming the Ivory Tower?”, quoted my comments sympathetically at some length. If readers of a feature article can get through jargon, I said to myself, then readers of columns (particularly this column!) should have a chance to find out what I delivered that evening in Quezon City.

Here, then, are substantial portions of my paper, entitled “Deconstructing English as a Language for Philippine Theory.” Judge for yourselves if theorists, speaking to other theorists, still have some relation to your real world.

My field is literature – in other words, words. I want to start with a quibble about words.

I think we should be grateful to Edward Said et al. for introducing into English-language critical discourse such terms as orientalism, The Other, and minority discourse. We should not, however, let gratitude blind us to the blindness even of well-meaning American and British theorists.

I want to talk particularly about three terms as used in literary critical discourse: West, Third World, and The Other.

We know that many residents of the United States of America, particularly those in New York City, like to think of themselves as being at the center of the world. Let us indulge them and draw a map of the earth with the Americas in the middle, Asia on the left, and Europe on the right. On such a map, we can easily see that the Philippines is west of America and Europe. We are The West. Our literature, in other words, is Western literature. The literature of America and Europe, then, is Eastern or “Oriental” literature.

The origins of the term “Third World” in literary discourse are lost in political and economic history. The adjective third implies a first and a second numerically, and it also implies a pecking order in terms of value. A first-rate piece of literature is clearly better than a third-rate piece of literature. As all card-carrying New Critics know, words carry with them all their previous meanings; we cannot dissociate the term “third world” from “third-rate.” I ask: why are we in the Third World? Who gave anybody the right to call us the Third World? If I start counting from where I am – which is the accepted way since Descartes – I am the first person, therefore the First World, and all others have to content themselves with being the Second, Third, or nth Worlds. Philippine literature, in other words, from my point of view (using Henry James’s definition of that technical term), is First World literature, and American literature is Third World literature.

Now, The Other. You or even Thou are Other than me, but I don’t see why I should not enumerate pronouns starting from myself. In terms of gender, feminists are now beginning to see that calling the Woman the Other naively accepts the patriarchal Weltanschauung; Woman is Other only to Man. Gayatri Spivak has had a lot of fun deconstructing the term Wo-man. Similarly, in terms of race and geography, we are Other only to Said and company who live in the United States. I prefer to see America and Europe as The Other.

Why, then, do we not call Philippine literature Western, First World, and The One – or whatever is the binary opposite of The Other? I’ll tell you why. Because the English language prevents us from doing so.

Here is where race theorists can learn from gender theorists. Feminists know that the English language has a built-in bias for patriarchy, starting with the generic term for mankind. Feminists have succeeded, in some way, in eroding that bias. If we too, English-speaking non-Americans and non-Europeans work at it, we may yet, one day, put our mouths where our politics is.

Just as feminists have identified language as a key battleground in the war against patriarchy, we must also see the English language as a crucial space in our fight to tilt the balance of power in literary theory. Just as feminists are seeking to demasculinize language, we must seek to deethnicize English.

There is no use denying it, but the ruling paradigm in Philippine literary circles today is still New Criticism, or at least that non-ontological part of it not debunked by the neo-Aristotelian Chicago alumni among the English professors at the University of the Philippines. Teachers and critics still routinely talk about imagery, tone, point of view, metaphor, symbol, irony, theme, organic unity, and the other things made fashionable before the Pacific War by the American Southern Agrarian critics. Structuralist, even post-structuralist, concepts are seen in the Philippines as mere footnotes – albeit jargonized, frenchified, trendy – of formalist close reading. Even Marxists or Maoist-Marxists who explicitly disavow New Criticism invariably read literary texts in the expressive realist, pre-Saussurean, text-centered fashion so ably caricatured by Catherine Belsey. Mao’s aesthetic yardstick, for example, is widely (mis)interpreted to refer to form or craft.

Some critics, of course, while using New Criticism as their everyday method in classroom teaching, in judging literary contests, and in reviewing books and other texts, give the appearance of living in the heady world of foreign trendsetters, but there is little appreciation of the mutual incompatibility of many contemporary critical theories. The word eclectic is used to mask massive ignorance or, at least, muddled theoretical thinking. Nothing electic, strictly speaking, can be called a theory, but that philosophical quibble does not bother even our leading literary critics.

My own theoretical position is blatantly anti-Theoretical. I mean by Theory with the capital T the growing institution – should I say the gradual movement from emergent to dominant ideology? – of theory in British and American universities. Theory has become almost entirely divorced from reading practice.

I believe that the way we theorize should derive from the way we read texts, not the other way around. This has important implications for the linguistic quibble I have with the English language. We tend to read Philippine texts the way we read European or American texts. We call Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere a novel, for instance, thereby immediately implying that we have to apply to it theories of the novel derived entirely from European novels. I know that Rizal thought he was writing a European novel, but that has no bearing on the problem, particularly in these death-of-the-author days. Edgar Allan Poe thought that he was writing British magazine stories, but that has not changed the way American critics read “The Cask of Amontillado.” Soledad Reyes has already pointed the way to more sympathetic readings of so-called sentimental – or worse, “romantic” – Philippine novels, and Emmanuel Reyes has done a similar thing for Philippine films, but we still denounce Philippine serialized novels and films as melodramatic.

That’s about as much as I can get into this column. If you want more of the same, do write me, and I’ll gladly send you a complete copy of my comments. (By the way, I delivered the paper in Filipino, with the English translation given out to the foreign participants.)

(First published in Starweek, August, 1989.)