Remarks at the Election and Induction of Officers of the U.P. Alumni Association, Hong Kong Chapter

10 June 2006

Chater Road, Central

Officers and members of the Association, guests, colleagues from the Consulate, friends, ladies and gentlemen:

Thank you for inviting me to address this body tonight.  I am not really a true-blue U.P. alumnus, having gone there only for a graduate fellowship in such an unlikely field as demography, but I must confess I have enjoyed the company of your fellow  alumni, as much as I have that of those from Ateneo and De La Salle, both universities I have also gone to.

The most vivid memories I have of U.P. were of those days at the Vinzons Hall, in the late 60’s when several student government presidents and college editors from all over the country were gathered for a conference.  We were then a very impressionable lot, students barely out of college, all mesmerized by the speakers who were venting venom against bourgeois capitalism.  Later in the day, we were being enjoined to sign up for membership in the Kabataang Makabayan.

That was many years ago, but my cohorts and I remember those tumultuous years of awakening – Dekada Setenta – as the period is often referred to, and which Jose F. Lacaba documented brilliantly in his book, “Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage.”  Our universities then, foremost among them, U.P., were in the vanguard of the protest movement.

Now let us segue to the present.  Among those who witnessed those times and one who has written extensively about them, is Jose “Butch” Dalisay who has since become one of our best contemporary writers.  In 1986, he went on a Fullbright grant to the U.S.  Recently, he spoke before a batch of departing Fullbright grantees in Manila, including Hubert Humphrey and East-West fellows.  He talked about going to America for that life-changing experience, and of having to come home and serving our people.

Listen to how he described his life as a graduate student in the U.S.: “I learned to cook – at first for myself, and then for a living, over five months at minimum wage, as a combination cook-waiter-cashier-busboy-janitor for a Chinese takeout in an underground mall; I learned to take the cheapest though not always the safest routes by Greyhound to faraway places; I learned to reconnoiter sidewalks for throwaway furniture… I learned how to live for almost two weeks on $20, on a diet of turkey backs and rice.”  Yes, he said, even the Filipino rich can derive some important lessons in and from America, for it is there “where they could learn to tie their own shoelaces, cook their own meals and learn something about the fundamental equality of people under the law.”

I share Mr. Dalisay’s view and observations about how we Filipinos spend our lives preparing to go to America.  He said he remembers that as a young boy in a private school, he read about “state fairs” and “heifers” and “mackinaws” and to this day it amazes his American friends that he can tell the capitals of nearly all the 50 states because he had to memorize the map of the U.S. and rattle off those names – in a Filipino elementary school.  Of course at that time, the internet was yet unheard of.

Talk about the seeming incredulity of some at the extent of Filipino exposure to American influence.  I had a similar experience when, as a young cultural officer in our embassy in Washington D.C., I was asked to speak before a rowdy, intractable group of high school seniors in a school in Pennsylvania.  I thought it was going to be an impossible task, but when I began to speak about the Philippines, their heads turned and they listened up and I knew then that we could communicate.  Then, after my presentation, a small group sidled up to me, one of them throwing me that quizzical look, and asked, “Where did you learn English?” I told them, in the public schools in my country.  Well, perhaps that was not the whole truth.  What they didn’t know is that, as a student in a Normal School – a college for teachers in northern Philippines – I had the benefit of studying Oral English under a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who, I realize now, helped me overcome my hard Ilocano accent.

But to go back to Mr. Dalisay’s piece published in his column in The Philippine Star.  It was essentially an exhortation for the grantees to come home and render return service to their home institutions, as a way of paying back.  Sometime later, a Filipino reader wrote to him to argue that a nation’s best and brightest need not be working home to serve their country in the most effective way.  He then cited the experience of India.

The reader said: “The elite graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management are not tied down by commitments to stay in India.  Fifty years later, this was considered very far-sighted and revolutionary by Prime Minister Nehru who was the founding father of these elite institutions.  Today, the best and the brightest of India are in Silicon Valley, teaching in Harvard, or managing billion-dollar funds in the financial centers of London and New York.  These elites laid the foundation for whatever India is becoming now – acknowledged powerhouse in IT and brain-intensive economic ventures.  Investments flow back to the source of these brains… but confidence in Indian capabilities was planted by Indian PhDs working in the giant U.S. pharma, IT, airlines, even the World Bank and IMF….

“But in the Philippines,” the reader continued, “we persist and continue to delude ourselves with limiting our best and brightest to our own soil, to our own stagnation as an insignificant global pushover.  I say limiting our brainpower to local soil is denying the realities of global competition.  I further say that it is ‘false nationalism,’ which should be eliminated and dismantled from our consciousness.”

Brave words, these – aren’t they?

Mr. Dalisay thanked the reader for his perspective, agreeing that indeed, there is no point “in holding hostage highly-trained people who can’t find the labs for world-class research” – in their own country.

However, he explained, it does not seem right to spend millions of pesos of taxpayers money “on a scholar who’ll just teach at Berkeley or work with American Express after graduation, when that knowledge could have been shared with many others here through return service, which isn’t forever” –anyway.  He asks:  “If you’re going to pay to educate people just so they can immediately work with Boeing or General Electric, who’s going to teach our engineers here, and what are those student-engineers going to learn?”

Indeed, as Mr. Dalisay says, we may love America or, I hasten to add, any other place for that matter, but we should never forget where our home is, particularly “those parts of our country which languish in the 20^th and even the 19^th centuries.”  We may venture into foreign lands but our aim should be, as he said, “not just to improve our lives but theirs – those Filipinos who cannot even read, or are too hungry and tired from work to read.  We are their emissaries, their agents, their speaking voices in a world so caught up in wealth and newness, that it can despise and dismiss the ancient pains and plaints of the inarticulate poor.”

My friends, this is the message I would like to leave you with, for you to ponder and to think about.  I am sure you will agree that it doesn’t matter where we are, whether working abroad or in the Philippines, as long as we recognize that we have that bounden duty, to return – even just a small part – in whatever way we can, what we owe to our alma mater and to our country, through service or assistance to our less fortunate countrymen.  I have no doubt that this distinguished group tonight is imbued with the very same mission.

Thus, of both our homeland and our alma mater, we can then truly say, as that school hymn refrain intones, “Dear old shrine, our hearts around thee twine.”

Good evening to one and all.