correspondence dwindled. Mom also lost contact with Katz, and the Christmas boxes no longer arrived.
Years later, I borrowed several magazines from the USIS library on Padre Faura Street, which later became the Thomas Jefferson Library, where Mom introduced us to a library for the first time. I was always partial to Life magazine, but I also borrowed copies of Time for Dad every time I visited that library. In this particular instance, about two years after the Christmas boxes stopped arriving, I happened to read Time’s “Milestones” column. It had a small write-up about the death of multimillionaire Jewish businessman and philanthropist Norman Katz. I showed it to Mom and she said, “So that is why we haven’t heard from him for some time.” She added that she never knew he had become a multimillionaire.
I wrote a letter of sympathy to my former pen pal at her old address, but I never got a reply.
(Susan)
AFTER NEARLY HALF a century, America ended its colonization of the Philippine islands. Despite the much-heralded granting of independence in 1946, the reality of freedom was another matter altogether. The capital city was in ruins and the infrastructure set up during the U.S. colonial administration—roads, bridges, railways, ports, land and sea transport—in a shambles. Less visible were the almost mortal blows to the civil service organization and the public educational system. The Filipinos hoped that postwar aid and Japanese reparations would restore the personal wealth many had lost, as well as the modernization introduced by the Americans. There would be compensation, the Filipinos thought, for their suffering and loyalty to the United States. But the actual compensation the United States awarded to its loyal ally amounted to only half the total of the latter’s war damage claims and was grossly inadequate to rebuild the nation. And corrupt politicians stole and frittered away Japanese reparation funds.
Moreover, taking advantage of the fact that the Filipinos were in no position to negotiate, the United States refused to release aid to the newly-installed Philippine government until the latter agreed to a number of unequal trade treaties. These treaties allowed the unlimited importation of American goods free of tariffs, gave American entrepreneurs equal rights in exploiting all Philippine natural resources, and granted any American the right to own and operate public utilities in the former colony. Sen. Millard Tydings of Maryland had aptly described the parity rights to Philippine resources as a philosophy “to keep the Philippines economically even though we lose them politically.” And to safeguard its economic interests in the region, the U.S. government ensured American presence in the islands by installing military bases over which it maintained complete sovereignty.
The Philippine government conceded. The new nation’s first President, typical of the country’s ruling elite, only sang America’s praises. “In the hearts and minds of Filipinos, the stars and stripes flies more triumphantly than ever before,” he said in his inaugural speech. The new republic’s leaders were only too willing to agree to the unequal treaties because they were the first to profit from the trade of agricultural crops harvested from their own haciendas.
If in 1946 the majority of Filipinos regarded the Americans as benevolent masters, yearning for the good old prewar days, and nursed a dream to immigrate to America, many in the next generation had begun to question America’s continued influence. By the mid-1960s, the questionable trade treaties were christened with a new name: American imperialism. The bureaucrats and politicians of the incumbent president, Ferdinand Marcos, eager to serve the interests of the U.S. and cash in on their positions of influence, were later described by the radical writer Jose Maria Sison as “bureaucrat capitalists.” By the 1960s, students at the University of the Philippines (UP) and a few other schools began to examine the work of nationalist leaders, re-read history, and with renewed passion linked the country’s economic woes to the government’s continued subservience to the U.S.
Jose Quimpo and Maria de los Reyes had 13 children. Ishmael, top left, was the eldest son. Jose had four other children by a second wife.
When the U.S. began using its military bases in the Philippines as a springboard in its involvement in the Vietnam War, student radicals from UP and Lyceum of the Philippines began to target the outward symbol of American presence. “Embassy, Embassy!” the students chanted as they repeatedly marched toward the U.S. Embassy on the boulevard along Manila Bay. Soda pop bottles, stones, and Molotov cocktails became the students’ weapons to “reclaim” Philippine sovereignty from within the embassy gates.
Adding fodder to the fires of protest were the reports of an increasing number of “accidental slayings” of Filipino scavengers who frequented the garbage dumps outside the U.S. military base. An eighteen-year-old boy was shot and killed by an American marine who claimed the lad was “stealing a bicycle.” A Filipino laborer was shot and killed in broad daylight after a U.S. Navy officer mistook him for a “wild boar.” In each case, the American servicemen in question were acquitted by a U.S. Navy court-martial and quietly returned to the United States. All told, from 1947 to 1969, there were at least 30 such documented incidents.
From Manila’s maze of city streets, the students carved out their battlefields: the U.S. Embassy, the Congress Building on Arroceros Street, and Malacañang. As the 1960s ended, student demonstrations had become almost a daily occurrence. If classes at the universities were not suspended by President Marcos himself using the most trivial excuses, the boycott of classes by both students and sympathetic faculty members was common. Lessons from the “parliament of the streets” were considered of irreplaceable value.
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” echoed the Filipino activists protesting the state visit of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. “McNamara – Murderer!” read a placard. “Aggression, thy name is Johnson,” read another.2 The young Filipino nationalists were strongly sympathetic to Vietnam, which was viewed as an underdog defending itself from a would-be colonizer. That the Marcos government had willingly recruited Filipinos as technical support staff for America’s aggression against Vietnam was construed as further proof of Marcos’s allegiance to the U.S. In the halls of the Philippine Congress, assemblymen even considered the enactment of “a law sanctioning the participation of Filipino combatants (in the Vietnam War) under the American flag.”
The 1970s was to be a decade of change. A never-before-experienced fury of mass demonstrations led by students engulfed Manila. This outpouring of protesters that confronted the state’s forces, and a number of their countrymen’s long-held beliefs, in a prolonged political upheaval during the first three months of 1970, came to be known as the First Quarter Storm.
I WAS NINE in 1970. Then, my personal angst had to do only with my lack of athletic interests and the subsequent inability to skip rope, ride a bike, and master the more intricate maneuvers of a game of jackstones. My concerns, like those of the rest of my family, were soon to change.
When I was five, my family moved to 1783-H Concepción Aguila Street—a cramped two-bedroom apartment meant for four. We were a burgeoning family of 12! Only when I was 11 or 12, and some of my older siblings had moved out, did I finally get my own bed. “1783-H”—the “H” meant ours was the eighth and last apartment in a row of what today would be considered low-end townhouses. Firewalls blocked us from neighboring apartment complexes; the sole entrance and exit to our row of apartments was a narrow driveway that linked the eight apartments. The driveway was so narrow that anyone who parked his car at the end of it would have to wait until all other parked cars behind him had backed out into the main road to finally maneuver his way out.
As the youngest, I really didn’t mind the cramped quarters. Besides, at that age, my opinions did not matter. I was a mere observer who was quite invisible to everyone’s eyes. I was in awe of my siblings, and at an early age was somehow convinced they were all doing very important work. At the end of each school year,
