Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions: A Novel

Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions

By Mario I. Miclat

Copyright to this digital edition © 2010 by Mario I. Miclat

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor, Quad Alpha Centrum

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Sales & Marketing: (632) 4774752, 4774755 to 57

Fax: (632) 7471622

marketing@anvilpublishing.com

www.anvilpubhshing.com

First printing: September, 2010

Second printing: January, 2011

Cover and book design by Mervin Concepcion Vergara Photo by the author

ISBN 9789712727788 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

To an unidentified boy, whose life was cut short by a terrorist bomb in Plaza Miranda, August 21, 1971

CONTENTS

By Way of a Prologue

1 Talahib Plumes

2 Into the Vortex

3 Movement Underground

4 Eighteen Mansions

5 Quarter Storms

6 Twice Incognito

7 Manila! Manila!

8 Shimmering Red Star

9 Wonder of the World

10 A Plaza to Heaven

By Way of an Epilogue

Letter #1

Antipolo Hills

November 29, 2002

Dearest Wei,

I’ve just been declared a non-person.

Your Nanay was at the National Statistics Office (NSO) today. She and I need birth certificates to apply for a Japanese visa. We’ll watch you at the annual Tokyo theater festival!

Unlike the US embassy, which asked for our passports and records of our financial assets on the day of the consul’s interview, applications for Japan need more prior documentations. As usual, your mom thought getting our birth certificates would be easy.

Since my heart by-pass, she developed a way of not making me worried. She told me by cell phone, Tatay, I’ve already got my birth certificate. Don’t be surprised...

What? I said, surprised. They don’t have the record of my birth?

Sort of, she said, and assured me that she’s going to Marikina City to get my original birth certificate before she goes to work.

I told her it’s enough for the day. She already drove all the way from Antipolo to the NSO in Diliman. It didn’t matter, she said. She’s driving a new Honda Civic.

Oh yes, I drive her old car now, and you’ll have mine. Lucky, her office has a car plan. No insurance company dares to risk its assets on a poor UP professor like me. I can’t even buy half a secondhand cart. That’s why I’m careful not to park under the spreading mango tree. The sap of its leaves ruins the car paint. I prefer the banaba’s little shade, its mauve flowers carpeting my car later in the afternoon.

How are you doing in northern Japan’s winter? How about the rest of the Filipino and Thai cast? You were born in Peking. Kaya mo ’yan!

Nanay said Director Hasegawa added scenes in Indian Summer especially for you. Wow! You sing classical in public now. I know Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, but it’s the first time I’m hearing of Caccini’s Ave Maria. You deserve the best voice tutor and piano accompanist that Hirosaki can give you. I’m sure you’ll wow them when your play finally goes down to Tokyo.

My day has been uneventful. The signage on the banaba where I parked, bearing the tree’s native and scientific names, was gone. I asked Temyong, the gardener, about it.

He said, "New car, sir, a."

He’s holding the chopped signage. He’s building a fire between mossy tuffs in the garden, rather, the vestiges of Dean Saniel’s garden. Natural adobes were intended to give accent to the greenery. But Temyong found them more convenient to use as bipods for his primitive stove.

"Cooking ’pang lunch ko sir, e. He said with a smile that seemed like begging for approval. I smiled back that meant to ask whether he knew about the original plan for this garden. Until now, our old college staff still heave their sighs of admiration every time they recall how our former Dean carefully chose the flower plants, shrubbery, and trees that represent tropical Asian flora. Temyong gave me back a smile that meant, What plan are you talking about?"

I looked beyond the one-hectare garden. The university fence was covered with wild talahib grass, tall and erect with their white plume-like flowers. How can there be such beauty in Philippine waste?

I walked towards our derelict-looking building. Its massive walls and narrow windows topped by a steep pyramidal roof were designed by Juan F. Nakpil and Sons during the nationalist exuberance of the 1970s. They based the architecture on the fale house of Banaue, from whence your full name came. It’s suited to the perpetually cool highland climate of the Cordilleras. But here in Diliman, just 12 kilometers inland from Manila Bay, it can be stifling. Even during these cool windy days, we need the air conditioning working full blast.

In the lobby, Tita Medy, our chief administrative officer, pointed with her kisser lips a lady seated at the sofa. "Ay, sir. There is a student waiting for you there, o."

The student introduced herself as a Ph.D. candidate from the College of Education. She wanted me to be a member of her dissertation panel.

Why, I asked, flattered, wanting to know whether she’s read any of my papers or listened to my lectures.

"Sir, my adviser is your former student, kasi, and he thoroughly enjoyed your class," she said, smiling to feign personal familiarity. I expected a hint of intellectual curiosity. Ego busted, I casually asked what her topic was, the schedule of her proposal, and who the other members of her panel would be. I said she must write a formal letter to her college secretary.

I wanted to talk with the Dean, who recently appointed me coordinator of our Philippine Studies Program. I’m known as UP’s China expert. But Medy called me again. She lightly tapped with her forefinger a gentleman in front of a computer.

"Mr. Wong, he is here na, o; the professor who speaks Chinese. She told the man, even as she was looking at me to say in Filipino, Sir, si Bryan, research fellow taga-Hong Kong."

Mr. Wong shook my hand and said, "Oh, so it’s you, sir. Ch’ien tao nin hen kaohsing."

"Duibuqi, I said, apologizing for not having heard his name quite clearly. Mei ting chingchu nide mingzi."

Oh, you speak better Mandarin than me, he blurted out, handing me his calling card. I’m doing research on the sociopolitical dynamics in Tuguegarao for my Ph.D. in anthropology at Oxford, sir.

I wondered how fast he had adopted our use of sir to address elder people, but instead asked, Why did you choose that town in northeastern Luzon as topic?

He said, justifying his choice, Tuguegarao is one of the most competitive small cities in the country, ranking second in terms of quality of life, while archeological finds reveal its relations with China as early as the Ming Dynasty. How about you, sir, what is your specialization?

Ego busted again. He heard me only from Medy. He should know that Asian Center professors specialize on a geographic area in Asia from a multi-disciplinary approach. I said, I did a master’s thesis on the rise and fall of the commune system in China, while my Ph.D. dissertation was the first ever Chinese...

Oh, you mean the people’s commune? He sounded like saying my contemporary topic was ancient history. He paused and asked, Do you know anybody in the northeast that I may interview, sir?

I gave him some contacts from the state university in the area. I asked where he’d stay. He replied, At my uncle’s, sir.

So you have a relative in Tuguegarao?

The city mayor, sir.

Medy reminded me about the signing ceremonies with the Chinese ambassador. China was donating a computer center to the university. I rushed to the Administration Building. The Board of Regents room was empty. The protocol officer had barely finished checking the preparations. She told people to come thirty minutes in advance in anticipation of Filipino time. Good for Filipinos like me, your O.C. Tatay, who always come on time. I went out to the corridor.

The university president’s executive secretary greeted me. "Kumusta! Long time no see, a."

I smiled, trying to recall her name. She remembered how I first came to have an audience with President Angara 20 years ago. She said it as though I remembered them the way she did.

"I asked if you had any appointment, didn’t I? You said you had none, didn’t you? So I said, ’sorry sir, you just have to come back another day.’ You said if I could just please mention your name to President Angara, you’d gladly sit in the sofa at the waiting lounge for as long as it took, didn’t you? I hesitated, but did as you bid. I’m still amazed every time I remember returning to you from the inner office to say you can come in. Naku! You were given an audience in the sanctum sanctorum for more than 30 minutes. It turned out you’re the one who could not come home to the Philippines before because of martial law!"

She was interrupted by the arrival of the ambassador followed by the university president. Around the conference table, the protocol officer presented the university officials. She introduced me as a longtime resident of China. All throughout the meeting, I played wall décor.

I met your Tito Del at the car park. He’s now dean of Arts and Communication of the UP campus in Baguio. Ha, ha! My friend activists from the underground are now school administrators even upland in the Cordilleras.

He said his literary criticism student made my short story Antonio and his China Wall her topic. As he talked about her comments, I remembered a colleague’s criticism of it. That colleague told me that the story convinced him to believe that I must join their Party group discussions to cleanse my mind of bourgeois impurities.

When your Áte Maningning was a student of Mathematics at UP Baguio, Tito Del invited me to teach summer classes there. I asked if his invitation still stood.

He said, Of course! What would you teach?

His question sounded to me like the doctoral candidate’s, the research fellow’s, and the statistics office’s record. A plumed talahib seed swirled in front of me, nestled on my eyeglasses, and then flew away with the breeze. I tried to hide the tears beginning to swell in my eyes.

Well, my dear daughter, in the few months that you’ve been away for your rehearsals and performances in Japan, I feel I’ve already grown old and extremely sentimental.

Love and kisses,

Tatay

P.S. Tita Beth’s having a party in New Jersey for her 55th birthday today. Don’t forget to email her a greeting card.

Ditto

Letter #2

Antipolo Hills

March 22, 2009

Dearest Wei,

I watched Mari Ramos on CNN predicting sunny spring weather for you in New York today, instead of the usual snow at this time of the year. The rains started early here in Manila. But after the rain, it’s again hot and sunny, like our typical Kuwaresma weather, 28 degrees C here in Antipolo. But it won’t be Holy Week until half a month from now. Climate change?

Funny, while Nanay and the maids were in church for the Sunday service this morning, I opened her dresser and found, without looking for it, a green folder containing a copy of my original birth certificate from the civil registrar of Marikina City. I knew she had kept it there since that time I tried to get my NSO authentication the second time. FYI, in case you need it someday, the form about my live birth is recorded under Registry No. 761 on page P.B. of its 1949 Book No. 8. Stapled to the certificate is a copy of a certification forwarded to the NSO. Under these papers were two officially marked copies, dated March 1, 2005, of the statistics office CRS Form No.1, parenthetically entitled negative certification of birth, yet again! In order to save my and the government’s time, money, and energy in producing my authenticated record, I’ve told Nanay to just get a copy later of my birth-and-death-certificate-in-one.

I’ve been clearing up my library these past few weeks and found myself collating my old notes. They’re scattered papers I’ve written about particular moments in our life. It’s about time you read them as you come a-visiting in September. Time flies so fast for elder people, you know. Just last week, Nanay and I attended Mithi’s debut at Conspiracy Restaurant. Know what? The waiter ushered us to one table and said, "This po is the seat for the elderly." Imagine!

So the notes and the certificates may come in handy sometime sooner than we think.

Nanay and I shielded you from our past, making but vague references to it, allowing you to just infer how we lived our life in the Underground, UG for short. It’s not that they’re really that important. But it’s not also bad if you knew it now? You may need it as a springwell in your acting career on the New York stage.

No offense meant, but I should think Áte Maningning had a strong sense of the nature of our UG life. For one, she was seven years your senior and experienced life in the Eighteen Mansions. She grew up at a time when all the Chinese films, plays, and Peking opera that she watched all followed the Maoist revolutionary themes, featuring communist UG work. For another, she was educated in Chinese schools from primary to junior high under an experimental Cultural Revolution curriculum steeped in ideological indoctrination.

We had transferred residence to the Foreign Experts Building when you were born. That’s why you couldn’t recall the Eighteen Mansions when we visited it in 2002. We never mentioned it to you before. Also, we purposely sent you to the International School in Peking which used English as the medium of instruction. No wonder then that you thought it was only in 1986 when we came back to the Philippines from China that we became best friends with Boyong and his family. Boyong keeps reminding me that had he not met me in college and gone UG, he would be leading a good life by now. I couldn’t ask him what he means by a good life.

As it is, he has three accomplished children: a journalist working with a glossy magazine outfit in Singapore, an international award-winning director twice exhibited in the Cannes Film Festival, and a teacher who has given him two grandsons. And all three of them have you as friend!

Tito Boyong met your Tita Nil in UP when he resumed his college course after the initial turmoil following the declaration of Martial Law. Of course, she’s now vice president of PhilAm Life, the only viable AIG affiliated company in the world today.

Their suburban house is not bad either. They have three cars in their garage – a sedan, a van, and an SUV. For sure, he was not accepted back to the elite’s Ateneo University because of his kind of politics. But could sticking by Ateneo and not meeting Tita Nil in UP be the better alternative? He also complains that while they were left behind in Martial Law Philippines, I had spent a comfortable life of exile in China. I don’t complain against his, well, vituperation. If he only knew how lucky he is to have someone like me, besides Marcos, to blame in the face!

You’ll find in my library cabinets and drawers with folders and envelopes of documents, manuscripts, and notebooks. Even I find it difficult now to put them in proper order. That’s why I’ve been writing the notes. They are my recollection of events. I’ve written them not at the time they happened but years later. They may be subject to lapses in memory. Or I may be overestimating my own worth.

Whenever I open an envelope or folder from the drawers, or if a magazine article, radio/TV commentary, or news item appeared slightly relating to my personal experience, I’d go to my computer and write my version of the event. They are honest accounts, written with much retrospection. Many times I countercheck my version with other existing materials. I also ask old friends who might have been witnesses to the episode.

I called people by the names they used at that time, many of which are UG aliases. Some comrades, I never really knew by their real names. I have to refer to you and your Áte by name, in the third person, to avoid confusion. Your mother will always be Nanay to me, as she is to you.

The dates I write at the upper right hand corner of the notes refer to the time when the events had most probably happened, not to the time I wrote them. That’s why I could already comment and add some insights or related incidents I would have not known when the events were unfolding. The dialogues in quotation marks are just approximations in English of what the characters might have said.

I have been accumulating hard copies of the notes and started numbering them in files as though forming chapters in a book. I haven’t gotten to arranging them chronologically, but relate them to the topic at hand. You’d perhaps be bored, anyway, if I had.

Ours was taunted as the dawning of the age, whatever it was. To usher it, we thought we had to change the world. We unveiled a future even darker than our youth’s darkest days. Lucky you who are still young! Old people see darkness where the youth see the light. In our Spring and Autumn Period, we’d let a hundred schools of thought contend and our hundred flowers wilted. We fervently prayed to reach the apex even as we jumped into a bottomless pit. Our age simply refused to dawn.

Our generation has suffered most from the greatest internally induced havoc to a nation. Kampuchea, after its holocaust, has strengthened its people’s resolve to better themselves. Iraq continues to search for a system best suited to its culture and temperament. China has moved on from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and built a most vibrant economy, the world economic crisis notwithstanding. Bangladesh, well, Bangladesh! But us?

All we have produced is a society that has atrophied from one of the most dynamic to one of the most sluggard in Asia. Our bayanihan spirit of mutual cooperation among and between classes for the betterment of the nation has been replaced by mutual calumny and distrust. I have been away, shame to say, but I was in the midst of it all. I, too, helped create the Philippine monster. And the monster has devoured not only me.

We pass this world but once. I’m glad your passage is not as tumultuous as ours.

Hugs,

Tatay

March 10, 1986

I paid the university president a courtesy call with no prior appointment. We did some small talk. I was unsure of my future plans. He asked if I would be interested in teaching. I said I’d give it a try. He knew from our previous conversations in Peking, when he came to lead a top educators’ delegation and talk with UP graduates there, that I had a bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service. He shook my hands and started writing a note. He was busy now, so I bade him farewell.

On my way down from his office, I was too excited to wait for the elevator. But I needed to go to the toilet even as I was taking the wide marbleized stairs with wrought iron baluster. I asked the security guard manning the main door downstairs where the men’s room was. Since we did not have armed guards like him before, his voice seemed to me as intimidating as the gun he carried.

He said, "C.R. is there, o."

I’m asking for the men’s room. I said.

"E di C.R. nga. Comfort Room!" And he pointed it again with his kisser lips. It is amusing that people saw in a Balikbayan returnee like me an urban Filipino in every way acting like an ignorant probinsiyano.

Now I remembered. We regularly came here during registration as it used to house the registrar’s office. I wondered if the building was still called Admin, short for administration building.

The C.R. still had the massive American Standard urinals, now darkish in tint. With its tiled floors and walls, the room seemed immaculately white in my youth. Now it looked dull and gloomy, cramped with big drums of water to use for flushing and washing one’s hands with. The taps were dry. One corner near the door seemed to be the janitor’s permanent closet with his laundry, civilian clothes and freshly ironed uniforms hanging. His mop was left soaking in a pail. The People Power Revolution of February abruptly ended Marcos’ authoritarian rule and made my visit possible. Could it be the revolution or the authoritarian rule that made individuals claim as their booty small corners of public property?

Bulletin Today, one of the Philippine papers we received in Peking, carried the news about a fire that gutted the interior of this wing of the admin a year or two earlier. It reported that the fire destroyed records, documents and antiques. The report did not mention the framed Philippine flag captured by US forces at President Emilio Aguinaldo’s house in Kawit in 1899 and displayed at the high-ceilinged lobby. The faded flag made vivid our revolution against Spain and the Filipino-American war that followed in its wake.

I went out to the building’s central platform with its eight Doric columns, each about 15 meters high. Admin lay at the western fringes of UP Diliman’s 493-hectare campus. The setting sun painted the sky with all possible shades of red, serving as backdrop to the wide University Avenue lined with coconut trees in groups of three.

In China, all gateways of importance must face south, while paintings and poetry depicted the rising sun. Would I now come back to my tropical isles, be Filipino and celebrate our sunsets?

August 21, 1983

Our family preferred not to go to Beidaihe seaside resort, without realizing that it was the beginning of our trip back to the Philippines.

Every individual in China belonged to a danwei unit. Nanay and I used to be with the International Liaison Department (ILD) of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The ILD gave us a yearly, all-expense paid vacation to revolutionary bases, historical spots, model communities, and exclusive resorts. In addition, we occasionally had long weekends at popular destinations like (take note!) revolutionary bases, historical spots, and model communities. Exclusive resorts were not popular destinations. People did not even know they existed.

Our family was transferred to the Foreign Experts’ Bureau under the Foreign Ministry in 1979. We had to adjust to a new set-up. We now had to pay for either one of a two-week vacation or a two-week tour within each year of a two-year contract while getting the other one free. Those who were able to go to their home country were given a round-trip ticket if they signed another two-year contract, and could join only the weekend tours, not the vacations, during the second year. Confusing?

I went to see Lao Liu, the bureau’s external affairs officer, to be clarified on the matter. He explained that Chinese men belonging to the working class got 60 days of rest a year, women got 61. Foreigners were given an extra 14 days, and the Soviet Russians another two weeks on top of what other foreigners got because of their one-week’s travel each way by train to Moscow. Since the Soviet experts left in 1957, their two-week extra were now given to foreign comrades and friends. The Soviets were former comrades now considered ideological enemy no. 1.

Did that mean we should have a three-month leave a year? No. Lao Liu explained that 52 of the 60 days referred to the Sundays each week, and the rest to the holidays: New Year, Labor Day, Communist Party Day on July 1, Army Day on August 1, National Day on October 1, and Chairman Mao’s birthday on December 26 which, by the time I asked, was no longer a holiday. Three days were given for the Spring Festival. Female comrades had an extra rest on March 8, Women’s day. Since the end of the GPCR, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and because Nanay and I were long-time sojourners, we got to get all the tours and vacations. I said I chose to pay for the Beidaihe trip.

But in 1983, we wanted to reserve our vacation for another trip. We had practically been all over Han China – from Shandong in the east to Yunnan in the southwest and from Hainan Island in the south to Manchuria in the northeast. There were talks that the bureau might arrange a trip, for an additional fee now, to Tibet. Who would not want to see the Potala Palace in Lhasa? Nanay still regretted why we did not join our Turkish friends Maçi and Yvonne on their trip to the Turkic city of Kashgar in Xinjiang. They returned to Peking earlier than expected. They could have stayed longer if we were with them. The Brazilians Fernando and Andrea boldly went to Huhehot in Inner Mongolia and also swore that they would have enjoyed the trip more had we joined them. Now we wanted to reserve our two weeks for some vague trip in the future.

Since August 21 was a Saturday, another extra half-day weekend rest for foreigners, a day whose significance I wanted to forget, we accepted an invitation to dine at Tony Co’s house.

He phoned me one day and introduced himself. He preferred to be called Mang Tony, the Tagalog way. He was born in Tayabas province on eastern Luzon before the war and spoke Filipino without an accent. He and his wife opted to spend their retirement in China after years of living in Brazil. Could we meet? Nanay invited him to have dinner at home.

The invitation for this evening was for a return dinner and, of course, an occasion for us to meet his wife. At 4:00 p.m., the service car brought us to an out of the ordinary, well-maintained government housing on the newly opened erhuanlu, ring road II. (I always referred to it as C2, for the circumferential road of our American English.) The driver would wait until 7:30.

Mang Tony was holding in his hand a book he consulted to see the familiar American brand for the generic name of the medicine his wife took. She had been cooking since early morning. In halting Tagalog, she thanked us for the wine we brought and proceeded to peel apples for Banaue. Maningning settled for the grapes after borrowing the book of generics and ensconcing herself in an armchair. After exchanging some pleasantries with us in Chinese, Mrs. Co excused herself to go back to the kitchen.

"You need some help, po?" Nanay asked.

"Ni xiuxi xiuxi," Mrs. Co replied.

Alma did not insist, used as we were now to seeing the woman of the house retreat to the kitchen while the husband entertained the guests.

Mang Tony showed us his college graduation annual. Ah, so he graduated from Harvard! He showed us his old pictures in the Philippines. He proudly said, "I am the only one who got the highest grade of 1.0 in two simultaneous engineering courses in UP. There were no computers at that time yet, you see? And the registrar could not check all the schedules, if there were conflicts or not, you see? E, I needed to take the two courses badly as prerequisites for the next semester. My professor agreed naman. I topped both exams pa nga."

Oh, so he was also enrolled at UP. He showed us his pictures with past Philippine Presidents Quirino and Magsaysay at either Malacañan Palace or Manila Hotel. In fact, his wife still carried a Philippine passport to be able to regularly visit their sons who were taking charge of their business concerns in the Philippines. Ah, he was also a successful businessman!

When Mang Tony learned that Maningning did Chinese traditional painting, he said his next-door neighbor, Pu Jie (yes, the Pu Jie we know – brother of the last emperor), painted well. Maningning told him how she had met and talked with the venerable old man during an exhibit of her painting teacher at the Garden of Violet Bamboos.

Our host shifted from one topic to another. Turning to politics, he said, No, the Philippines can never be the 51st state of the American union. The Americans will see to it. Imagine, a nation whose population, upon becoming a state, will amount to 20% of all the United States?

By the way, Mang Tony suddenly remembered, do you know what day it is today?

Exactly 12 years back was that day whose significance I wanted to forget. It was the day of the Plaza Miranda bombing when the Liberal Party was to proclaim its congressional election candidates in downtown Manila. Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus following the carnage, giving him license to arrest suspected subversives without a warrant. The blacklist carried 63 names, including myself.

"You have forgotten, na? Mang Tony exclaimed. Ninoy might be coming home today."

Sayyid Massoud Majrooh, my Afghan friend, was seated at the bench outside Zhuanjialou, the Foreign Experts’ Building, when we got back home. I commented on the gnats circling above his head in the early evening.

I’ve been waiting for you, he said. But my observation about the gnats distracted him. He asked, Yes, why do I attract mosquitoes?

They’re not just mosquitoes, I remarked, but a swarm of males trying to ensnare a female into their lair.

So! They’re like the Soviets ganging up on our women. When the Soviet army came to occupy Kabul, Massoud’s father, the president of Kabul University, was arrested. He and his wife Mo took their two children scores of kilometers by foot in the snow and escaped to Peshawar, Pakistan and then to China.

Nanay returned for me from the lobby. She reminded me that the last elevator trip up was waiting for us. I bade her to go ahead with the children and I would just take the stairs.

Massoud broke the news, which he heard over the shortwave radio. A prominent anti-Marcos politician was shot dead on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport as he stepped off a plane upon returning from political exile in the United States. Oh, no! Ninoy Aquino was assassinated.

February 26, 1986

Nanay’s parents and kin did not know me. Neither did mine, her. It was not until eight years after we had left the Philippines that Nanay wrote her family. Ling Fang, a friend from the Communist Party of Kalimantan Utara who had migrated to Hong Kong in August 1979, volunteered to relay letters for us using her address. Only then did Nanay’s family learn from her that she now had two daughters. Well, she had now a husband, too, in my person. Her mother tracked down mine in Olongapo City, just 30 kilometers away from her town of Orani, Bataan. They gave us a US address through which we could write, if in a circuitous way. My brother’s Chinese-American friend was just too familiar with stories of separated Chinese families and was willing to help. I came to learn of Daddy’s death six and a half years after he succumbed to cancer.

Unlike other Filipinos who openly visited China, we were advised by our ILD hosts to introduce ourselves as Indonesians when we arrived in Peking in August 1971. Nanay was to be Tini and me, Harri. But our ID cards showed her as Hong Xing, and me as Shi Anning.

Visiting Pyongyang in 1973, Vice Premier Kim Il wanted to call us Philippine comrades by our native names and not our Chinese aliases. I introduced myself as Romeo Macaraeg. It was the name I used in my passport when we left the country. I often failed to acknowledge el camarada interprete whenever he called me camarada Romeo. Not knowing much about the Philippines, our North Korean hosts gave us Spanish and French interpreters in case we spoke any of those languages. Both remained with us even when the high-level English interpreter was finally commissioned the following day. In Albania in 1975, when I told our interpreter Peter that he could call me Mario, he commented that every other guy was named Mario. He was sure it was not my real name. In 1983, a Philippine delegation watched the performance of the China Central TV Children’s choir where Maningning was introduced as a Filipino member. She spoke in Filipino with them, but clammed up when she was asked her father’s name. Joshi, the Indian expert, read my palm and commented, You have many names.

We were the UG people who led a life in the underground. Like the plumed talahib flowers, we went to many places, talked with people, experienced events, but our stout rootstocks remained beneath the earth, incognito.

We suppressed our cheers as we watched Robert Jaworski and the rest of the Philippine basketball delegation play with the newly formed and still clumsy Chinese team. We clapped a barely audible clap from our choice balcony seats as the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company performed the Tinikling, the Madrigal Singers sang Leron Leron Sinta, or Filipino Pabs Dadivas rocked Australian pop. We sighed in relief when Chinese singers we coached to perform in the Philippines or for visiting Philippine officials reported back to us how the audience loved them. We smiled when Interpreter Meng related how Gemma Cruz was amazed that he knew she was once a Miss International beauty queen. We stood abashed when Filipino activist priest Father Hilario Lim threatened to streak at Tiananmen if he would not be given audience by Chairman Mao. We remained bewildered when Comrade Meng showed us the request for asylum of a Moro leader named Nur Misuari (my former teacher in Political Science 11 & 14) and refused it on the basis of possible implications of his Maoist struggle to the status of China’s own Muslim communities that, next to the Han, constituted the second biggest nationality in China. We knew of Imelda Marcos’s itinerary in China in September 1975 even as, like Father Lim before her, she insisted on meeting the Chairman. We knew all about the Filipinos coming to China; they did not know about us. Ours was a virtual world in the midst of the real.

Three Philippine groups came to stay in China in 1971 – a delegation of student activists from the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), a band of airplane hijackers, and us, the UGs. In 1974, another UG group came to stay, the arms and ammunition smugglers who called themselves, in Hollywood fashion, the Dirty Dozen.

Some UGs got to meet some hijackers, some the MDPs. Parents, relatives and friends of those concerned and who were able to insinuate themselves into official delegations coming to China, got to meet some MDPs and UGs. But Nanay and I remained the most UG of UGs. Death in the family, birth of a child, or months of suffering from tuberculosis and acute infectious hepatitis could not be reason enough to expose us to the open world, lost as we were somewhere along the thick tapes of Red bureaucracy.

It was enough that this comrade or that should say in our meetings that it was not yet the time to expose us, and the decision became final. When the group no longer met formally, the earlier decisions held sway. Or the comrades simply forgot all about us altogether.

When an opportunity presented itself, my mother- and sister-in-law came as tourists in October 1981. When they saw that we were living a rather privileged life – riding a chauffeured car at our beck and call (well, we actually had to book early enough), buying at special stores selling otherwise hard to find goods, and having friendly international neighbors – they advised us to stay. My mom and brother Manuel also came the following summer. But for the fact that our children could not openly talk about our Filipino identity, Mamma said China was now our home. Then the People Power Revolution erupted in 1986.

The Voice of America, BBC and Radio Australia have all ended their three-day coverage as soon as US Ambassador Bosworth put Marcos and his entourage on an aircraft to Guam on his way to Hawaii shortly before midnight of February 25, 1986. We heard our Japanese neighbor’s radio still on. Was NHK still covering it? Nanay and I knocked at the door of Mr. Junichiiro Ide, wanting to know more about the latest developments in our country. We knew that his wife, Kazuko, was in Japan for a holiday, and he was alone. He had a bottle of champagne in his hand when he opened the door. He thought we were already asleep and contented toasting himself for the peaceful downfall of the Philippine dictator. His wife later sent us by express mail hours of Betamax tapes about the EDSA event.

Peking was covered with frost the following day. I rose from bed and saw Nanay off where the car from her new office fetched her. I preferred to tarry, unsure how I would be greeted by my officemates at Radio Peking. The day before, I walked out from work. It was my turn to read the news. It headlined Marcos’ swearing in as reelected president, omitting the fact that Cory Aquino was also declared president by the People Power revolutionists. I had always edited the news, citing grammatical lapses on the part of the translators, to conform to reality as much as possible, to lessen the impact of disinformation that Radyo Peking broadcast as the CCP’s propaganda arm. But this time, I could not do much about a one-liner news. Our section chief, Lin Fei, could not believe our officemates when they told him that I refused to record the day’s news. He phoned me at home. I told him I could not tell a lie.

What are you hinting at? he wanted to know. It was the first time he raised his voice. I said I was making more than a hint. I realized more than ever why Radyo Peking announcers read the news and features as though they were unfeeling voice machines. The colloquial writing and conversational reading style I had introduced was totally incongruent to a totalitarian set-up.

I said, I often wonder how you can sleep at night after reading the news that you’d later claim were obvious fabrications of this or that party clique.

He said, You can’t say that over the phone!

He remained quiet for a while before adding, "Sige, when you come to the office tomorrow, be sure to bring your doctor’s certification that you’re sick."

As I walked to the office, Mori-san, a Japanese expert who was all too reserved, walked directly to my path, took off his winter cap, and bowed his lowest bow. I choked. My Chinese officemates were red-faced as I entered the office. It turned out that yet another Japanese expert, Ms. Hiroko Motoko, visited for the first time early in the morning. She opened a bottle of strong baijiu liquor for them. Offering congratulations to the Filipino nation, my wife and me, she dried a cup. She was a teetotaler.

Going to the Friendship Store on the special foreign experts’ bus, those who all the while correctly suspected that we were Filipinos talked to Nanay