LITMIR.BIZ

      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.