Prisoners of Memory

I thank Juaniyo Arcellana for this kind review. Gratitude to this gentle younger friend.

The Land Has Many Voices

Asian Wall Street Journal, July 2-3, 1999

ROMEO P. VIRTUSIO

"Your husband is going to live a long life," Dr. Dioscoro Umali said to my

wife, Lulu. We had just told the late dean of the University of the Philippines

College of Agriculture about our purchase of a piece of farmland in Batangas,

home province of my father.

That was almost 15 years ago, not long after my father passed away. The

dean was a gentle intellectual and a man of the land--he understood and shared

my attraction to farming. Dr. Umali may yet be proven correct. Yes, I wanted the

plenitude of my allotted years. But that is up to God. It is not why I bought my

little acre. Nor did I feel the lure of the land in terms of crops or cash or

even the honor of the appellation. I never was going to be an authentic farmer.

Let me explain. My father died after 30 years of service in the national

prison system, where he did time as a prison guard and then a minor functionary.

But long before working in the prisons, as a young man, he had farmed in a

little village near the town of San Juan, Batangas. He was a sharecropper.

Somebody else owned the land, and he helped till it in return for a part of the

crop. He plowed the field with all his heart, but at the end of the season all

that he got was several cavans of rice.

So like most other young men of the poor families of that time, he left

his native village and tried his luck in a faraway province, in the Bicol

region, where he worked in the copper mines. Just before the war he worked as en cargado, or manager, in a big estate, this time back in our own

region, in the province of Laguna. Finally he ended up working in the prisons.

It was a rough life. When I began working in the city in public relations, the

newspapers were filled with reports of young punks making mayhem as pseudo

gangsters. The punks never impressed me. As a child I'd seen the real stuff in

the prisons, death-row convicts in orange uniforms that had the figure of the

black cross on the back, walking to the communion rail in our prison chapel.

All this time my father never stopped thinking about his birthplace.

Every year until the end of his life, he would go back to the barrio of

Palahanan. He would tell his cousins, I want to come back here, I want to plant

rice and things in my own small place here.

His life never gave him that opportunity. My father belonged to that

worldwide tribe of migrants who get up at the break of day to ride a bus out

into the provinces to see relatives whose numbers dwindle from year to year

until there are only a handful of them. He would insist that they too come for a

visit, and they would, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. There are many

like my father who spend 40 or 50 years in one place and still dream of going

home, back to the village that might have disappeared from the map or from other

people's memories, but not from theirs. All his life, my father pined for his

San Juan.

Now I have this piece of land in memory of my father. It is years since

we bought it, but I have only just recently begun planting it with mango and

vegetables, rice and beans, often without success. I named the land after Lulu,

who adores it, but it is really in remembrance of him.

Now the place is beginning to bloom. There is a cottage on it. The mango

saplings are growing branches, there are four neem trees from India, which the

giftgiver assures us will work miracles. There are many kinds of vegetables and

beans, as well as mahogany trees.

As we were building the cottage, old men ambled over to us and said to

me, indeed you are his son. They revealed small but vivid details about the

young man who went away. They described the way he lacked diffidence, or the way

he talked of stealing away to foreign lands. Now that I have settled here I plan

to seek out my father's cousins, the last half a dozen or so, to pay my

respects.

Even though I myself didn't grow up on this land, I know how to work it.

When I was growing up, the national prison reservation was a paradise of garden

plots. We grew radish, eggplants, cabbage, mongo beans, tubers, roses and

daisies. We children tended these plots in school and at home, helped along by

our teachers.

But for gardening I favored the guidance of the prisoners. The most

skilled were the Chinese inmates. What exquisite gardens they fashioned, robust

green plants on perfectly straight plots just outside their cells! From them I

learned how to punch holes in a tin can for watering plants, and for fertilizer

to apply horse manure from the animals that drew the calesas,

because that was before the time of the jeepney and the pedicab.

One of the first acts of love I performed for my family was offering

them those fresh crops from my gardens. And now much of what I harvest from my

Batangas farm will be given away to friends, or donated to some project for

other people. As for the mangos, with more than a couple hundred of these trees

yielding fruit in three years or so, my brother in law assures me I will have

some figures to tote up.

I don't care about the money, however. My farm calls me for other

reasons. I have a hoard of Marcel Proust, Federico Garcia Lorca and Anna

Akhmatova, and I will search amazon.com for all the Bella Akhmadulina that they

have. I will invite my old friends from the public relations trade to help me

make an oral history of PR practice in my country, or do a bit of pro-bono work

that might help San Juan win investors for its tourism-oriented projects based

on its fine sand beaches.

But mostly I will read. My decades of work have earned me this right, to

read without shame. In our house in the city and in the office, I was always

starting on two or three books, but I would end up finishing just one in half a

year. In our cottage on the farm, I shall be brazen, after planting and weeding,

delighting over Rizal, Balagtas, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, Pasternak--whose

Dr. Zhivago I translated to Tagalog when I was 21--Saint Augustine, all the

letters that have been written to me over the decades, all the histories that I

can lay my hands on of Batangas and its people.

When she began college years ago, my daughter said, please keep your

farm for me, I shall put up an orphanage on it. In college she was chairperson

of a Catholic organization that helps minister to orphans, children who are

terminally ill, cancer patients, and slum dwellers. I believe her when she says

she wants to make use of this land in the service of others.

She has just begun working for our firm, and is teaming up with her

mother, a sociology major and professional manager, in setting up a small

foundation working for the advocacy of the Filipino family. Our son, who,

uninvited, began working for our firm when he graduated from college five years

ago, is completely quiet about the land. I do not want to prejudge him.

My years with corporations are numbered. In time, I will stop receiving

letters, e-mails and phone calls that make me feel more important than I am. I

will have to yield the corner office to somebody else, who I pray will be my

son. I am exhilarated by that prospect.

I shall be ready to retire. The process begins with pondering what your

diminished powers will allow you to do. You plot it out with care, never in

fear, always in hope that the end of a career, such as it is, will mark the

start of another joyful life. In my case, I will try to do some good, but I

would like to do it on and with the land. The land totally enchants me. The land

has many voices, and one of them could be that of my father. Now they will ring

truer because they will be speaking to me when I, at last, will be ready to try

to understand what they mean.

please follow instructions below and nicely reformat, for my blog, etc. thanks!

Listening to the Land

Asian Wall Street Journal, July 2-3, 1999

By ROMEO P. VIRTUSIO

"Your husband is going to live a long life," Dr. Dioscoro Umali told my

wife, Lulu. We had just told the late dean of the University of the Philippines

College of Agriculture about our purchase of a piece of farmland in Batangas,

home province of my father.

That was almost 15 years ago, not long after my father passed away. The

dean was a gentle intellectual and a man of the land--he understood and shared

my attraction to farming. Dr. Umali may yet be proven correct. Yes, I wanted the

plenitude of my allotted years. But that is up to God. It is not why I bought my

little acre. Nor did I feel the lure of the land in terms of crops or cash or

even the honor of the appellation. I never was going to be an authentic farmer.

Let me explain. My father died after 30 years of service in the national

prison system, where he did time as a prison guard and then a minor functionary.

But long before working in the prisons, as a young man, he had farmed in a

little village near the town of San Juan, Batangas. He was a sharecropper.

Somebody else owned the land, and he helped till it in return for a part of the

crop. He plowed the field with all his heart, but at the end of the season all

that he got was several (ITAL)cavans(UNITAL) of rice.

So like most other young men of the poor families of that time, he left

his native village and tried his luck in a faraway province, in the Bicol

region, where he worked in the copper mines. Just before the war he worked as en cargado, or manager, in a big estate, this time back in our own

region, in the province of Laguna. Finally he ended up working in the prisons.

It was a rough life. When I began working in the city in public relations, the

newspapers were filled with reports of young punks making mayhem as pseudo

gangsters. The punks never impressed me. As a child I'd seen the real stuff in

the prisons, death-row convicts in orange uniforms that had the figure of the

black cross on the back, walking to the communion rail in our prison chapel.

All this time my father never stopped thinking about his birthplace.

Every year until the end of his life, he would go back to the barrio of

Palahanan. He would tell his cousins, I want to come back here, I want to plant

rice and things in my own small place here.

His life never gave him that opportunity. My father belonged to that

worldwide tribe of migrants who get up at the break of day to ride a bus out

into the provinces to see relatives whose numbers dwindle from year to year

until there are only a handful of them. He would insist that they too come for a

visit, and they would, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. There are many

like my father who spend 40 or 50 years in one place and still dream of going

home, back to the village that might have disappeared from the map or from other

people's memories, but not from theirs. All his life, my father pined for his

San Juan.

Now I have this piece of land in memory of my father. It is years since

we bought it, but I have only just recently begun planting it with mango and

vegetables, rice and beans, often without success. I named the land after Lulu,

who adores it, but it is really in remembrance of him.

Now the place is beginning to bloom. There is a cottage on it. The mango

saplings are growing branches, there are four neem trees from India, which the

giftgiver assures us will work miracles. There are many kinds of vegetables and

beans, as well as mahogany trees.

As we were building the cottage, old men ambled over to us and said to

me, indeed you are his son. They revealed small but vivid details about the

young man who went away. They described the way he lacked diffidence, or the way

he talked of stealing away to foreign lands. Now that I have settled here I plan

to seek out my father's cousins, the last half a dozen or so, to pay my

respects.

Even though I myself didn't grow up on this land, I know how to work it.

When I was growing up, the national prison reservation was a paradise of garden

plots. We grew radish, eggplants, cabbage, mongo beans, tubers, roses and

daisies. We children tended these plots in school and at home, helped along by

our teachers.

But for gardening I favored the guidance of the prisoners. The most

skilled were the Chinese inmates. What exquisite gardens they fashioned, robust

green plants on perfectly straight plots just outside their cells! From them I

learned how to punch holes in a tin can for watering plants, and for fertilizer

to apply horse manure from the animals that drew the (ITAL)calesas(UNITAL),

because that was before the time of the jeepney and the pedicab.

One of the first acts of love I performed for my family was offering

them those fresh crops from my gardens. And now much of what I harvest from my

Batangas farm will be given away to friends, or donated to some project for

other people. As for the mangos, with more than a couple hundred of these trees

yielding fruit in three years or so, my brother in law assures me I will have

some figures to tote up.

I don't care about the money, however. My farm calls me for other

reasons. I have a hoard of Marcel Proust, Federico Garcia Lorca and Anna

Akhmatova, and I will search amazon.com for all the Bella Akhmadulina that they

have. I will invite my old friends from the public relations trade to help me

make an oral history of PR practice in my country, or do a bit of pro-bono work

that might help San Juan win investors for its tourism-oriented projects based

on its fine sand beaches.

But mostly I will read. My decades of work have earned me this right, to

read without shame. In our house in the city and in the office, I was always

starting on two or three books, but I would end up finishing just one in half a

year. In our cottage on the farm, I shall be brazen, after planting and weeding,

delighting over Rizal, Balagtas, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, Pasternak--whose

Dr. Zhivago I translated to Tagalog when I was 21--Saint Augustine, all the

letters that have been written to me over the decades, all the histories that I

can lay my hands on of Batangas and its people.

When she began college years ago, my daughter said, please keep your

farm for me, I shall put up an orphanage on it. In college she was chairperson

of a Catholic organization that helps minister to orphans, children who are

terminally ill, cancer patients, and slum dwellers. I believe her when she says

she wants to make use of this land in the service of others.

She has just begun working for our firm, and is teaming up with her

mother, a sociology major and professional manager, in setting up a small

foundation working for the advocacy of the Filipino family. Our son, who,

uninvited, began working for our firm when he graduated from college five years

ago, is completely quiet about the land. I do not want to prejudge him.

My years with corporations are numbered. In time, I will stop receiving

letters, e-mails and phone calls that make me feel more important than I am. I

will have to yield the corner office to somebody else, who I pray will be my

son. I am exhilarated by that prospect.

I shall be ready to retire. The process begins with pondering what your

diminished powers will allow you to do. You plot it out with care, never in

fear, always in hope that the end of a career, such as it is, will mark the

start of another joyful life. In my case, I will try to do some good, but I

would like to do it on and with the land. The land totally enchants me. The land

has many voices, and one of them could be that of my father. Now they will ring

truer because they will be speaking to me when I, at last, will be ready to try

to understand what they mean.

Wen Manong (May 19)

Wednesday next week, we, PR folks, will be honoring one of our own. Max Edralin, nearly 79, is our PRmeister, colleague, teacher, and on occasion, critic.

Through "Wen Manong'" his friends will be paying him a simple no-frills tribute, with some singing, and inevitably a lot of ribbing.

Before he got lured (by better pay) to PR, Manong had been a journalist, a pretty good one. On 7th December, 1955, he was sent to jail, with four other newsmen, for having refused to reveal to the Court of First Instance in Pasay their source for a story on a cause celebre of the day.

As a PR man, Manong Max has been around for the better part of 50 years. He served at San Miguel, rose to become VP and Public Affairs Director of Citibank, and on his retirement counseled other banks.

Since 2000 he has been PR consultant at the Bangko Sentral.

A zestful unselfish man, Max was President of the Boy Scouts, Operation Smile, and the Makati Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In his book, we must place the leadership skills and the depth of experience that we acquire in PR in the service of society.

He has fought for adherence to professional ethics, the expansion of PR into corporate social responsibility, improvement of the teaching of PR courses in colleges and universities, stronger cohesion among PR organizations, and for wider recognition of PR as a profession.

"We will win our own sterling place only through quality service and consistent professionalism," Max keeps on saying.

Max is one of those who have not met a microphone they didn't like. Just as well, because he has been preaching PR much of his life: in small schools and graduate schools, before teachers and soldiers, in grand halls here and abroad.

Last month, Manong Max saw his wife, Fe, and granddaughter, Alexis pass away within days of each other and buried on the same day.

Come and say hello to Max Edralin.

Max and His Fe and Alexis

Max J. Edralin, Jr., has been a friend of mine, and of a great many others for years, mine for decades. He is going through one of the most trying tests a mortal man could ever be put through.

Early morning of 22nd April, his beloved wife, Fe, passed away after years of battling cancer. Her remains are at the Capilla de San Francisco, Santuario de San Antonio in Forbes Park. She will be buried tomorrow.

Early this morning 25th April, Alexis, adored granddaughter, light of Max's life, young and of bewitching soprano voice, followed her Lola to heaven. Max loved and lavished care on them.

There must be a way to understand things like this. There must be a way to plumb the depths of a friend's sorrow.

All this friend can do is pray for the souls of Fe and Alexis, and marvel at and thank the Lord for the courage and loving kindness of Max.

A Beautiful Daisy

She is in her 80s now, and I haven't ever met her, but judging from her memoirs, The Drama Of It, A Life on Film and Theatre, Daisy Hontiveros Avellana, National Artist for Theater, is a beautiful lady.

Everything about her exhudes freshness-- a lifetime devoted to a singular passion, an idyllic childhood in a provincial town in a placid time, triumphant early years in U.P. before the war, a beautiful story of love and struggles with a genius who was not above designing her bridal gown, and now the quiet years, of affectionate remembering.

How I enjoyed reading this book! edited by my friends Monina Allarey Mercada and her daughter, An-Mercado Alcantara. Of her life during the Japanese Occupation, which saw a golden age of Philippine theatre, and her helping her husband Bert, as writer and over-all aide, produce and direct plays, and this man of hers horsing around with a Japanese officer to save his family from harm, and before that Bert's group of bright Ateneans, doing their thing in college theatre and later, during the War, fighting in Bataan and as guerrillas.

I like her evocation of Binan, where Daisy and Bert shot Nick Joaquin's Portrait of the Artist as Filipino which turned out to be one of their most memorable collaborations. Bert and Daisy founded the Barangay Theater Guild, which put on plays on radio and stage. She wrote the story for Sakay, Bert's first directorial job, now a classic.

Mrs. Avellana is a lady of great humility, a fact quite evident in this book. She could have gone on and on about the plaudits, and the talent and fortitude that won them, but does not. Or about her distinguished siblings, including Lenny and Father Ed Hontiveros, or her artist daughter Ivi, or her summa cum laude father, a Supreme Court Justice, and chooses not. She praises her grandchildren and great grandchildren

I like the quietness and tenderness of these memoirs. Did many people know Daisy wrote short stories as well? They are here, told with a clear sure voice. Especially precious is a still photo from Sakay, with Leopoldo Salcedo and, unnamed here, Arsenia Francisco.

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil who writes the Foreword, notes she wishes she had written this "splendid memoir" herself. Splendid too was their time and the people, including the valiant youth, who lived in it.

Read this book about a life of abiding freshness.

PR Seminar for Entrepreneurs, April 22

Although entrepreneurs are a smart lot, they need help, too. Like, in marketing and PR, making the most of new and traditional media, gaining new customers, creating buzz and enhancing competitiveness, and a lot of others.

The International Public Relations Association, Philippine Chapter and the Public Relations Society of the Philippines (PRSP) are together mounting a seminar to precisely address this need: PR for Entrepreneurs: How To Make PR Work for Your Business, Thursday 22 April, at the SMX Convention Center, Mall of Asia Complex.

Edd Fuentes and Butch Raquel, President, IPRA Philippines and PRSP, respectively, announced that speakers at this seminar will be Rene Nieva, President/CEO, Perceptions: How PR Can Improve Your Business; Illac Diaz, social entrepreneur and founder, Pier One and MyShelter Foundation, Creating an Entrepreneurial Revolution Through PR; Ramon Jimenez, Founder, Woo Advertising, Traditional Media: How It Helps Your Business; Mike Enriquez, President, RGMA Network and Corrie Narisma, Assistant Business Editor, Philippine Daily Inquirer, What Makes News?; Jay Bautista, Executive Director, Nielsen Media Research, Why Media Analysis; Rupert Japlit, Marketing Director, Roque Digital, Inc., The Power of the New Media, and Carlo Ople, Managing Director, Catalyst Interactive Marketing, The Appeal and Value of Social Networking.

There's an advantage to registering for this seminar before 15th April. Find out from Ms. Sheena Ramos, 8939355, 8183109, sheenaramos@fuentesmanila.com. or Ms. Sonia Tejada, 6380010, publicrelations.prsp@yahoo.com.

The country's two major PR organizations are well-advised to carry on with this message: PR is for real, PR has real value.

Hail, IPRA Friends, Greetings Indonesia!

Our colleagues at the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), several hundreds of them, have begun to fly into Jakarta for their international conference which goes on this week, Feb 3-5. The President this year is the charming powerhouse, Dr. Elizabeth G. Ananto, yes, of Indonesia, and we know that she and her fellow directors have left no stone unturned to make this conference a rousing and long-lasting success

Theme of the Conference is particularly relevant for PR practitioners, Global Reach, Regional Leadership.

While PR has without doubt become truly international, it is high time for us to ask how we, in our particular locations, can assert stronger leadership and get the rest of the world to give us the attention that we deserve.

On the other hand, we also need to give more of the best of ourselves, like our view of the world, on top of our particular needs, to our fellow practitioners beyond our shores.

Two Filipino members of IPRA, are there in Jakarta right now to take part in the discussions. Edd Fuentes, chairman of our Philippine Chapter will attend a meeting of the IPRA Council, and Rene Nieva , President of Perceptions, will make a presentation on how his Agency crafted and made a success of a corporate social responsibility program for one of its clients.

Wish we could join you, Dr. Elizabeth... you have worked mightily hard and relentlessly to bring this gathering to your country. You will make it, and do Indonesia and all of us your colleagues proud.