NUNILO

This is a story that just has to be written. It’s about someone who lives such an outstanding and selfless life but keeps a very low profile making me feel uncomfortable just writing about him. He is unassuming to a fault.  A voracious reader, up to this date, he even takes post-graduate online courses.

When Corazon my younger sister contracted end-stage kidney desease, Nunilo, my selfless elder brother readily donated one of his kidneys allowing her to continue normal life for an extra 25 years. His sacrifice enabled her to give birth to Celeste    

I will therefore request those closest to him to comment and in effect, add, if not approve this article about him.

Being a writer-historian he introduces himself thus: “I was born in Manila, at the Mary Johnston Hospital on Quesada St., overlooking Manila Bay.  The North Harbor area was still under the sea then and Calle Bangkusay, which is now some distance from the sea, was then the shoreline of Tondo.

My parents were schoolmates at the Bulacan Provincial High School in Malolos and my father had been wooing my mother since high school.  Father was a senior Bachelor of Science in Commerce student at the University of the Philippines while Mother was in fourth year of her Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy course at the University of Santo Tomas when they were wed, and “Tatang” had to find a job.  Having to mix work and studies, he only got his diploma the year after their marriage.  When they were married, “Inang” had stopped her studies, as it later turned out, for keeps. We lived in a rented accessoria, as budget-priced apartments were then called, on Calle Ilaya, very near the Tondo parish church.  UP was then on Padre Faura St. in Ermita district, Manila while UST was where it continues to be, along España Blvd.”

Nony is my elder brother, less than 2 years my senior. My earliest memory of him was that he was someone to emulate.  So I would always be at his side. When I started reading aloud, he would correct me: I remember specifically the words “bureau” and “gathered”- words that I mispronounced literally like buryaw and gat-her-ed. I learned so well that my grade school teacher, a nun, told my mother that she had to look up such words as kinky in the dictionary because she did not know there were such words.

I lost track of him when he started high school in Malolos, while I went ahead to the big school in Manila. He was in a different league when he also transferred to Ateneo college. We had our own school barkadas.

Cousin Josie Pena and he were classmates in high school at Immaculata Academy. Both were at the top of their respective classes. Nony almost gave up his designation as valedictorian of the boys’ class, because he shunned delivering the valedictory speech. Josie had no problem delivering her valedictory speech.  

Tampoy Tales included my story in our early years.

He enrolled in Ateneo Padre Faura – finished LittB, a liberal arts course, which allowed him to work in various sales jobs, one of which was Del Rosario Brothers.

I remember another joint altercation.  Sometime in 1958, while I was job-hunting, I was hiking in the underdeveloped area of Pasig towards Resin Inc., where I was to be interviewed by Ito Carlos, along came a US Tobacco van to rescue me from the dust and the sun. Yes, it was my KUYA who took me to Resins. I did not take the job because I could not readily commute to Resins in the wee hours of the day or night.

When we 6 siblings were already studying in the big city, we stayed in a rented house in Vermont St., Malate in Manila. This house was within walking distance to Ateneo in Padre Faura and St. Paul College along Herran St.  Two years later, when the Ateneo moved to Loyola Heights in Quezon City, we moved again, this time to a brand new bungalow which Inang had purchased on South 12th St. (later to be renamed Dr. Lazcano St.) near Sacred Heart Parish, Quezon City, two bus rides and a fifteen-minute walk from my college classes at the Bellarmine Hall, overlooking Maryknoll College.

That South 12th St. house was to serve as a residence of quite a few close relatives.  Cousins Diana, Inday and Tessie lived there during their college studies.   Joby was there during the early years of his working career.  Tio Carlos stayed with us whenever he had to visit the Department of Public Works head office in Port Area, Manila.

He quotes: “I did not know it then but that initial move to Manila would be the last time I would see myself as a resident of Tampoy.  I would be back later for various reasons; I even stayed in Tampoy for a year when northern Bulacan province and southern Pampanga were my sales territories in one of my first jobs after college.  None of these later visits would be quite the same as before.  I guess the “Huckleberry Finn perspective” with which I looked at Tampoy in my early years was no longer there.  The Tampoy of my childhood was gone and there was no returning.  Of the more than a dozen houses I have lived in, it is only Tampoy that appears when I dream of home, probably because my most memorable early experiences happened there.” 

Inspired by Boo Chanco

Over the past few days, social media had a lot of commentary about how noble, patriotic, and honorable of the Japanese Prime Minister to resign from office just because he has a medical condition that prevents him from giving his position his all. That will never happen here, many commentators said.

Of course, it won’t. Japanese officials resign at the mere whiff of something gone wrong under their wing. Some even do the extremely honorable act of seppuku or hara kiri after being accused of corruption.

Honor and country above all. But the nature of our politics and culture is vastly different from Japan. Politics here is a personal blood sport, a zero-sum game where showing any sign of weakness is suicidal.

Here, public office is too good to be relinquished. It is the family business. It is as an opportunity not so much to render public service, as a chance to amass power and wealth. A leader’s primary responsibility is not to the nation (an abstract concept for many), as it is to those around him.

Parochialism is why presidents do not choose the best and the brightest as members of his Cabinet. We have many capable Filipinos who can help manage some of our most chronic problems, but have no political connections.

Very rarely do we get leaders like the late Jesse Robredo and the current mayor of Pasig, Vico Sotto, whose primary reason for seeking public office is to render public service.

We elect officials whose values are known to be rotten to the core. It is fair to say that the officials we elect reflect the nature of our electorate. And yet we complain and wonder why we are being left behind.

What is our problem? Is it our damaged culture?

I decided to torture myself and re-read the James Fallows article on our damaged culture. Well... very little has changed since that article was written in 1987. Many Filipinos may bristle at the suggestion of our damaged culture, but look what we have today... 33 years after... we only got worse.

Our political history is horribly personal. In the midst of a war for independence against the Spaniards and then the Americans, our political leaders were liquidating rivals. Look at what happened to Andres Bonifacio. Look at what happened to Antonio Luna.

And since we were just a collection of independent tribes living in dispersed islands bundled together by the Spaniards and called them the Philippine Islands, we never really developed a sense of national identity or national loyalty. Even in the main island of Luzon, our identities are wildly dispersed into Ilocanos, Ibanags, Kapampangans, Tagalogs, and Bicolanos. I remember my late grandmother in the 1940’s refer to us in Bulacan as “Tagalogs” instead of Filipinos. Because we were forced to be a country, we have failed to accept the concept of national interest that is above everything else.

To me, that explains why we fell behind in the region. As Fallows observed: “The countries that surround the Philippines have become the world’s most famous showcases for the impact of culture on economic development.

“Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore — all are short on natural resources, but each of them through hard study and hard work had been forced to unify and  defend themselves against war-mongering aggressive neighbors. Unfortunately for our people, because of over 350 years of colonization, the Philippines illustrates the contrary: that culture can make a naturally rich country poor…

“I’ve never before been in a country where my initial impressions were so totally at odds with the standard, comforting, let’s-all-pull-together view. It seems to me that the prospects for the Philippines are about as dismal as those for, say, Vietnam are bright.

“In each case the basic explanation seems to be culture: in the one case a culture that brings out the productive best in the Vietnamese (or Koreans, the Japanese, or now even the Thais), and in the other a culture that pulls many Filipinos toward their most self-destructive, self-defeating worst.

“Officials in both South Korea and the Philippines have pointed out to me that in the mid-1960s, the two countries were economically even with each other, with similar per capita incomes of a few hundred dollars a year.

“The officials used this fact to make very different points. The Koreans said it dramatized how utterly poor they used to be (“We were like the Philippines!” said one somber Korean bureaucrat), while to the Filipinos it was a reminder of a golden, hopeful age… Since the 1960s, of course, the Philippines has moved in the opposite direction from many other East Asian countries.”

But Fallows believes “It can’t be any inherent defect in the people: Outside this culture they thrive. Filipino immigrants to the United States are more successful than immigrants from many other countries. Filipino contract laborers, working for Japanese and Korean construction companies, built many of the hotels, ports, and pipelines in the Middle East.

“’These are the same people who shined under the Japanese managers,’ Blas Ople, a veteran politician, told me. ‘But when they work for Filipino contractors, the schedule lags.’”

Fallows makes his diagnosis: “I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism… a feeble sense of nationalism and a contempt for the public good. Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused.”

We are “a country where the national ambition is to change your nationality,” an American who volunteers at Smoky Mountain told Fallows.

“The US Navy accepts 400 Filipino recruits each year; last year 100,000 people applied. In 1982, in a survey, 207 grade-school students were asked what nationality they would prefer to be. Exactly 10 replied ‘Filipino.’

“’You are dealing here with a damaged culture,’ four people told me, in more or less the same words, in different interviews.

“It may be too pessimistic to think of culture as a kind of large-scale genetics, channeling whole societies toward progress or stagnation…”

But how can we explain what we have become… unable to keep the pace of our Asean neighbors?

Until we are able to elect a nationalist leader who is neither Cebuano, Visayan nor Tagalog but who can unite us and inspire us as never before, we will always scratch our heads with admiration every time some Japanese leader does something that puts national interest ahead of everything else, unheard of in our country.