james soriano's article

James Soriano wrote this Manila Bulletin article on August 24, 2011. It's about English as the language of privilege.

To say it received plenty of attention would be an understatement. It generated thousands of reactions, forwarded on Facebook, blogged about (like what I'm doing now), and shared on Twitter. The day after it was posted in the Manila Bulletin site, I could not access it. There must be so many people wanting to get in on the issue.

They said it was very un-nationalistic. They accused James of 'arrogant elitism.' They said it's a shame that he, being a Filipino, could say all those things.

Personally, I think people took notice because it struck a nerve. But isn't it true? For most of us, we're working overtime to be able to send our children to private schools, where the medium of instruction is English. The best students in class are those who have good grades in English. When they graduate from college, they get interviewed in English, and I, who's in Human Resources, can tell you that companies put a premium on excellent English communication skills. We equate good breeding by the ability to speak English, and therefore, it equates to a good life. And in the Philippines, you might want to check out how many signages along the streets are in English. How often would you see a sign that says "Tindahan ni Juana?" Oh, no, it's always "Jane's Store," with a Coke advertisement on one side.

I'm guilty of thinking in English too. When my daughter comes to me with a homework in Filipino, I translate the directions in English so we can understand what needs to be done. I tell her "pandiwa" is actually a "verb," and she gives me a pained expression. Needless to say, her grades in Filipino leave something to be desired. We exchange text messages in English, and not the "cn i wtch dvd aft skul" version, but the complete words. Definitely not Jejemon, for that matter. And I used to find it funny that my daughter entered grade school without knowing the Tagalog words for "banana" and "crab" and "gate."

So does that make me less of a Filipino? No. Choosing to communicate in English meant that I had a better chance to compete in the real world, where salaries need to be earned and deals have to be made. Speaking English will allow my children to go places and experience things beyond the place where they were born.

James Soriano wrote a come-back article on August 31, Wika Bilang Gunita. And although I applaud him for his guts to write it, I must admit it took me twice as long to finish reading it. I almost wished it had an English translation. :-)

special things

A man opened his wife’s underwear drawer and found a silk paper-wrapped package. In it was something his wife got 8 or 9 years ago, but has never worn, saving it for a special occasion. He guessed it was a special occasion, so he put them with the clothing he was taking to the funeral home, for his wife had just died.

Maybe you also got that one from a forwarded email, with an inspirational reminder that if it’s worth doing or seeing, to do it now, because tomorrow is promised to no one. It goes on to say that we should live for today, and we should use our crystal glasses every day.

Here’s my take. I grew up in a house where a narra china cabinet occupies one whole wall, and Noritake dinnerware was displayed in matched sets. There were silver spoons, forks and knives, and the water glasses were so old and dainty that they shattered if you so much as tapped one with a spoon. There were teapots and teacups in fine porcelain, but I never tasted tea in that house.

My grandmother kept cans of imported corned beef and bars of imported beauty soap in a cabinet, to give as presents to visiting relatives. (I now wonder if she ever checked expiry dates; we seldom entertained and relatives rarely came.) My sister and I had Rainbow Brite dolls sent by an uncle from the States when we were little, but they stayed in their boxes and put on display for years. I stole mine when I left home to study in Manila when I was thirteen.

When I got married, I promised myself that my house will never have things set aside for special occasions. Well, we were poor to begin with, and that meant we did not have a lot of special things. The plates and glasses we received as wedding gifts were what we used in the house. We only had what we needed, from clothes to food to toys. But later, when things got better for us, we drank red wine for dinner and bought cake when we felt like eating some. We cooked special food on ordinary days, and one time we had plain grilled tilapia for New Year’s Eve, because we’ve used up the ‘holiday food’ menu in the days leading to the New Year.

But even if we could now afford bottles of perfume instead of supermarket-bought cologne, we only got what we needed. We're not yet filthy rich, after all. :-) We don’t have boxes of unopened underwear in our closet. My daughter has very few pretty Sunday clothes to hand down to her cousins, because all her clothes had been used well. We buy imported bath soap when we run out of them. We use wineglasses and water goblets for dinner, and my daughters have never broken one. We have Barbie dolls in the house; their hair is all mangled and they have missing shoes. One of them had already gone topless and had purple eyeshadow drawn with glitter pen before I realized it was a Collector’s Edition Barbie.

It doesn’t mean we’re leading an extravagant life by our standards, or that we’re not teaching our children how to treat valuable things well. I prefer to think that we chose to enjoy the nicer things so that we’ll have as few regrets as possible, so that we can get more out of life, learn more, be more. My daughters know spaghetti and ice cream is something they can have when I’m in the mood to cook and run to the store on a weekend, and not something they only eat at a friend’s birthday party, like when I was growing up. (Well, these days it's drive-thru food.) I wear my pretty dresses on Mondays.

We have special things, but only a few, and we use them well. If you had started a life of simplicity, it’s either you stuck with it by force of habit, or it made you greedy and you started hoarding imported corned beef.

to kill a mockingbird

I finished Lee Harper’s ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ today.

Atticus Finch just became my hero. His children were motherless, and he raised them rather wild, but they grew up reading newspapers and discussing editorials with him. He was a lawyer, and it was said he was the same man inside the house as he was on the streets. He spoke to the children as if they were grown-ups, and he listened to them.

His daughter, Scout, was seven, but he taught her to ‘wear someone else’s skin and walk around in it’ if she wanted to understand people. He taught her how to act with dignity, and how to fight her own battles. He asked an uncle to teach his son Jem to shoot because he said he was too old to bother with guns, but Jem would later discover that in his youth, he was a respected sharpshooter, and he can still shoot, and that sometimes it is wise not to flaunt what you have every chance you got.

Atticus is a work of fiction, but his life, in the eyes of a little girl, teaches you what it means to be a good person. Being good does not mean faultless. It means trying your best to uphold what you value, being brave enough to acknowledge your mistakes and catch the lessons, and standing up for something even in the midst of adversity.

As children, we are raised to never challenge the wisdom of parents. Parents are the absolute authorities, and we believed without question. But as parents, when do you start teaching your children that even parents make mistakes? As parents, how do you acknowledge that you may believe you are acting on the best interests of the child, but in the end, each person, even a little person, has to live his own life? How do you teach your child to stand up for himself without compromising the rules of the world he lives in?

Tough questions. The book does not answer them. The book made me evaluate some of the convictions I held, and some of the practices I do as a parent, simply because I thought it was expected of me. The book made me aware of what my child sees when she looks at me.

Atticus also taught his children that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. You’d have to read it to find out why. It’s beautiful.

rain, rain, go away

I love the sun. I like doing outdoor chores, even if I got hot and sweaty. I would go to the beach in the summer not to frolic in the water but to roll around in the sand. I love the smell of freshly-washed laundry drying in the hot afternoon sun. I even like going out during my lunch break to get away from the constant 22 degrees in the office. I love being slightly baked and browned (and not just because my Western friends envy my color).

Consequently, I'm one of those people who get depressed by rain. And in the past two weeks, it seemed that we've had nothing but rain. Today turned out to be bright and sunny, so I'm celebrating the return of the sun by blogging what I hated about the rainy days.

1. I spend my lunchtime inside the building. Although I mostly eat alone and I often eat in the cafeteria anyway, it somehow makes me feel cheated that I don't have the choice to go outside and look at shoes.

2. I leave my umbrella in the garage to drip at night, and I find out in the morning that the cat has peed on it. Not the Siamese cat, but the stray ones that come at night, and I don't have the heart to kick them out. I feed them food scraps before I go to bed, and that's the thanks I get in return. The maddening thing is that I usually discover it when I start to stink in the van, on account of the umbrella in my office bag.

3. I rush around in the morning, getting my daughter ready for school, and I can't find her frigging rubber shoes on P.E. day. I search high and low, and just as the school service comes beeping, I find them behind the refrigerator, where the nanny has hung them to dry.

4. When it's raining we have clothes hung all over the house. They won't dry right, so the nanny hangs them on door handles and cabinet handles and towel bars and stair railings in the evenings. It's a strange sight when you emerge from the bedroom at 5am and there's a line of underwear hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Clothes that did not dry in the sun just don't smell right, no matter how much fabric conditioner you used and even if you spin them in the dryer for two hours.

5. I can't wear nice shoes when it's raining. I usually wear my five-inch heels on the rides to the office and going home. I feel good in them and (I think) I look good in them. But those shoes are too nice to get ruined in the rain, so I have to wear ordinary wedge sandals (but of course, with three-inch heels).

6. Now this one I don't hate so much. I get to wear little dresses on rainy days (but then I wear little dresses four days a week, so I guess it doesn't matter). It's because I don't like wet clothing. I don't like the feeling of wet pants plastered on my legs in the one hour it takes me to get to the office, and I don't like damp pants in the eight hours I sit on my desk. I must be the only passenger in those vans who wear sleeveless dresses on rainy days. All the rest are wrapped in jackets with hoods, bulky pullovers, and pants. If I wear a dress, I can just wipe off the water from my arms and legs, then wrap myself in a thick pashmina in the office.

Some people like rainy days, because it's cooler and you can putter around the house and get all the sewing done and you can snuggle in bed and download movies to death and read a book or make love the whole afternoon. You can cook champorado at 2pm and eat it in front of the TV.

Well, yes, you can enjoy them when it's raining, but I'll take a sunny day to read a book with the cat in my lap in the garage, and eat champorado too. For me, sunny days make the colors brighter, the people more cheerful. Hot days can make tempers boil faster too, but let's not go there. :-)

It's just as The Carpenters sang: 'Rainy days and Mondays always get me down...'

my daughter's music

When I was a little girl, a 'musically inclined' child was someone who had a piano and a guitar in the house, took music lessons, belonged to the school drum-and-lyre band, and was asked to actually sing in school programs, instead of standing at the back and just mouthing the words to the song.

My grandmother was very determined that me and my siblings would grow up to be cultured (sounds like bacteria to me), socially well-rounded persons, so aside from the summer painting classes, we had tutors for classic ballroom dancing, we recited (and wrote) poems, and we had piano lessons from the pianist in the church choir.

Let's jump to 2011, to my musically-inclined ten-year-old. She has 4GB of MP3s in her desktop computer, another 4GB of MP3s in her mother's laptop (as a back-up), and a little pink MP4 player with earphones featuring the Angry Birds. She downloads music videos on YouTube, watches the Myx countdowns at 6am on weekdays while eating breakfast, and could sing those funky Korean pop music even if she does not understand the words.

We have a videoke in the house. We sing together on weekends, and she has the nerve to laugh at me when I’m off-key. We have about six dozen DVDs of concerts and music videos. We don’t have a single musical instrument in the house.

And occasionally, she would hand me a piece of paper before I leave for work in the morning. It would contain a list of songs that she wants, with a careful little note to include the lyrics.
1. Bituing Walang Ningning
2. Greatest Love of All
3. Grenade
4. Closer You and I
5. Funkhouse
6. Danger
7. Fire
8. Lazy Song

By now I would be familiar with my daughter’s current taste in music that I know Grenade and Lazy Song are by Bruno Mars, but Bituing Walang Ningning and Greatest Love of All were a surprise. I didn’t realize she’d go for Whitney Houston, but then I didn’t know she knew Bonnie Tyler as well until she sang If I Sing You A Love Song on videoke. I agonized over Danger and Fire, until I found out they were K-pop. I pestered my other music-loving friends until they coughed out the MP3s they had. The others I downloaded at night.

I’d hand her the complete list, along with a flash drive and a print-outs of the lyrics. She would transfer the songs to the MP4 player, and sing along. She would mouth off those Korean words that sound like tongue-twisters, and I have a happy ten-year-old for about a week… until she hands me the new list. Sometimes there would be five songs; sometimes fifteen.

I do it because I want to know the kind of songs she likes. I do it because it’s fun when we sing together, when most of my friends don’t know Next To You by Chris Brown. I can smile with officemates who, like me, have little girls, and who, like me, have managed to memorize Justin Bieber factoids. I like knowing that there are two versions of Inside Your Heaven, and Carrie Underwood’s take is better. I like listening to Ordinary People by John Legend, both when Markki Stroem sang it in Pilipinas Got Talent two seasons ago, and when my daughter sings it in the morning. Singing my daughter’s songs, learning her kind of music, gives us a connection.

But sometimes the years between us show.

There was one time that her list contained Take A Bow. I was so pleased. I came home armed with the MP3 and the lyrics, and I started to tell her about how I liked the song too. I told her about the song This Used To Be My Playground, and a movie called ‘A League of Their Own.’ I told her I think it was good that she could appreciate songs from another era.

She listened to my ravings and nodded along, then she played the song. Her face fell.

She meant Take A Bow by Rihanna. Not Madonna.

motherhood 101

This morning my daughter and I got off to a rough start. We were both dressing when she asked if a flash drive would get a virus if it got wet. I was immediately suspicious.

Last month she told me that her Computer teacher required the class to bring flash drives for their computer exercises. The flash drives would be collected in a box, to be kept in the classroom. I bought her one, then told her flash drives are expensive, and if her classmates are not submitting theirs, she should keep hers in her bag. I had visions of the computer teacher greedily collecting 40 flash drives at the end of the school year.

She did not submit, and neither did her classmates. So after using her flash drive in class last week, she put in her skirt pocket, where it lay forgotten, until Ate Malou did the laundry on Friday, and was returned to her, dripping.

I was mad. I got the flash drive and was scolding her about being careless as she went out to her school service. I was also mad at Ate Malou for not checking the pockets of clothing before she started the laundry. I was also mad because I was running late on a Monday morning, and it was starting to rain.

As I was walking out the subdivision gate I saw the school service ahead. My daughter was in one of the windows, looking back at me. Her face was small and serious, and I could see her hesitating to wave goodbye. The van turned the corner and was gone.

And on the ride to the office, I was of course consumed with guilt. Too much of a fuss over a small thing. I could easily have said, ok, let’s check if it’s still working, reminded her to be careful next time, and we could have kissed each other goodbye like we usually do.

Being a kid is not easy, and I say that as I look back at my own childhood. I never got into trouble for losing my things in school, but I also didn’t have anyone to sew a button back in my blouse if I lost one. My daughter is so finicky about her skirts that I get to adjust the hook at the waist almost every week. One day it would be tight; the next time it would be loose, and she would hitch at it till I lose my patience and bring out the sewing kit while she eats her breakfast in her underwear. I remember going to grade school with socks that were held up at my ankles by rubber bands, because my grandmother could not be bothered to buy new ones; I got tired of asking her.

I could say my daughter is luckier than some, because her parents could buy the things she needs for school, and the things she wants as well. But I wonder who of us was luckier: me for being largely overlooked (and so learned to take control of her little life), or her for being so closely watched she sometimes feels the need to ask for permission to take a nap.

There has to be a balance somewhere, between telling children what you think is good for them and teaching them to stand up for their choices, needing to know what your children are up to and knowing enough to give them space, teaching them to fly and letting them test the wind on their own. We grope for the balance every day. Parents, as well as children, are always walking the tightrope, hoping love will be the net to catch them if they slip and fall.

As a child I also don’t remember being apologized to. Adults don’t say sorry, even if they’re wrong. I remember resenting the hell out of the unfairness of it all. Now that I’m an adult, I find it hard to say sorry to a kid, because when you’re a grown-up, it’s humbling to admit you’re wrong to someone half your size.

So now I take a break to send my daughter a text message:

Hi, honey. Your USB is working. Sorry for being mad at you this morning.

Love, Mama.

And if I’m lucky, we’ll get to do crosswords together tonight.