300 students who stormed a police cordon around the United States Embassy here.
The students were protesting special United States-Philippine relations that they said led to such incidents as the killing of Filipinos on American military bases.
The warning shots were fired when the students threw lighted torches into a police line guarding the Embassy gates. A student charge was then broken up and several demonstrators were arrested.
The New York Times
(Susan)
THE MOOD HAD not always been so embittered. Only a generation ago, the Filipinos held Americans in esteem—as benevolent colonial masters, as mentors of democracy, as allies in a bitter world war. But in 1942, when the Japanese encroachment of the islands was inevitable, the Americans readily abandoned their colony, choosing to defend Europe instead. Left clinging to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s cryptic promise, “I shall return,” the Filipinos continued to resist Japanese military occupation for the next three years.
If World War II had been a final test meant to measure the assimilation of lessons on textbook democracy and patriotism espoused by the Americans, the Filipinos would have painfully garnered the highest scores. America’s “little brown brothers,” as the colonizers had called them, proved their loyalty to the American flag, surpassing all expectations. As proof of their valor, thousands of Filipinos died in the war; many were heavily tortured as they continued to protect American civilians. The stories of many young women raped or kidnapped to fill brothels for the Japanese soldiers echoed through the towns and cities.
In the late 1960s, most of the family still lived in Manila. Esperanza Ferrer Quimpo (Mom) and Ishmael (Dad) are seated. In the front row are (from left) Ryan, Susan, Jun, and Caren. In the back row are Jan, Emilie, Nathan, Lillian, and Norman and his wife Bernie. Lys and her husband had already left for the U.S.
And MacArthur did return, to hold true to his messianic promise to the Filipino people and to rescue an ego bruised by the Japanese who had defeated him on the battlefield. The poor Filipinos welcomed his return, not realizing that if the alternate American strategy, which was to take the shorter route to Japan, had prevailed over MacArthur’s bypass operation in the Philippines, the Japanese forces in the country would have withered on the vine as in other islands in the Pacific left alone by the Americans, and the country would have been spared the horrors of 1945. As it was, the Americans drove straight to Manila to save their kin held in an internment camp in the heart of the capital, directly confronting the Japanese naval forces assigned to defend the city. The resulting battle gave Manila the distinction of being the only other captive city besides Warsaw that was fought over and completely devastated at the war’s end. Manila, the Pearl of the Orient of prewar days, with an old-world charm but displaying the best of American modern urban planning, became the worst-looking city of the postwar period. All the stately edifices of the Americans were wrecked together with the quaint Spanish city at the heart of the capital. Truly, what the Americans had given, the Americans had taken away by that act called “Liberation.”
(Norman)
MY PARENTS PROBABLY never understood why activists, and we brothers in the revolutionary movement, were so hard on the Americans. We didn’t have the direct experience of living under American rule. They did, and what they saw they admired. They must have winced every time they heard the Americans blamed for the ills of the country. Their experience was the opposite. Ever since “independence,” the Filipino politicians who had taken over running the government had made a mess of the country. Mom and Dad longed for a return to the prewar days.
Both our parents enjoyed “Peacetime,” that is, the colonial rule of the Americans in the pacified Philippines. Having grown up after the period of the Philippine-American War, they had limited awareness of the various peasant rebellions against continued landlord and American rule. Never mind that the new colonizers systematized the exploitation of the country’s natural resources and took over control of Philippine business. The natives enjoyed universal public education and American ways, and Filipinos with initiative and/or talent saw that they had a chance to advance their status through education and hard work.
Dad studied in the well-established public school system and was enrolled in the American-founded University of the Philippines (UP) just before the war broke out. Mom, who came from a well-to-do family, did formal studies in music as a colegiala1 in St. Scholastica’s College which was established in the first decade of American rule. She would spend her summers in the resort city of Baguio, at the Zigzag Hotel which was owned by her uncle, a colonel of the Philippine Scouts.
Ishmael de los Reyes Quimpo (Dad) went through the public school system, enrolled for mechanical engineering just before the Pacific war and finished his degree shortly after the war.
The horrible experience of Filipinos under the Japanese occupation made Filipinos of all stripes genuinely welcome the return of the Americans. Mom and Dad’s experience with “Liberation” really drew them close to the Americans as a people because they got to know one particular American very well.
One of our “liberators” from the Japanese who landed with the forces in Lingayen and came to Mabini, my mother’s hometown, was a GI named Norman Katz. Katz was not your typical working-class or farm-bred GI. He was the scion of a Texas oil family. One of the things I remember Dad telling us kids was that on Katz’s birthday, a plane flew over Mabini and dropped a birthday cake by parachute.
There is a picture of a smiling Norman Katz in a squatting pose with my father and other cockfighting aficionados, fighting cock in hand.
When I was born in December 1945, guess what name my parents chose for me?
They gave me the impression that Katz spent some time in Mabini and became close to them. When the American forces suddenly got orders to leave Lingayen and move inland, Katz sent a note to Dad to get the stuff he would leave behind on Lingayen beach. Dad got the message late and had to be satisfied with the few hand tools and bric-a-brac others who had come earlier had not managed to drag away. I remember that as late as 1964, we still had Katz’s giant toolbox, open wrenches, and other massive tools that he had bequeathed to Dad in Lingayen.
Katz was to the family just a pleasant memory of the war until one day Dad received a package from his old friend. The family was happy to get a box of PX goodies from Katz, who had changed his name to Cass which, my father explained, sounded less Germanic.
(Emilie)
FOR ABOUT THREE or four years in a row, at Christmas time, we would get a box of American goodies—toys, long-playing records of popular children’s songs finished off in vinyl plastic, cookies, and candies. I think I was about six or eight years old at the time.
I asked Mom where they came from and she said they were from Norman Katz, an American friend who used to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces in Mabini. She told me that a group of American GIs used to call her “Hope” (the English translation of her name, Esperanza), and would direct admiring wolf whistles at her. She told them she already was committed (to Dad) and they didn’t have a chance.
I asked Mom if Katz’s daughter could be my pen friend, and she encouraged me to send my first letter. I distinctly remember being very excited when I got a reply (pity I can’t remember the daughter’s name now) in an envelope with American stamps on it. In her letter, Katz’s daughter told me about her pet hamster and how she cared for it. I did not know what a hamster
