Back to Batanes : In the Aftermath of Revolution, a Filipino-American Journalist Returns to His Homeland After More Than 30 Years

I cannot recall when I first thought of my Pilipino heritage, only that it has rarely left my mind.

I have memories as a small boy on a ship to America, gazing through the porthole, feeling excitement and bewilderment and being soothed by the sea racing below me.

I remember growing up in Southern California as a Filipino immigrant, astonished one day when my polite, soft-spoken mother suddenly rebuked a startled grocery checker for dismissing me with a racial epithet.

I think back to the dreaded afternoons I spent in the attic of a Kansas schoolhouse, crowing like a rooster as part of a speech therapy exercise to “correct” my foreign accent, and later, grappling with classmates who had dubbed me the Kamikaze of Kiowa Street--young racists oblivious to the fact that they had the right sentiment but the wrong country.

I remember one morning standing beside my older sister in the courtroom of a Kentucky military base, dressed in a new suit and fresh haircut, my right hand raised and pledging to defend the U.S. Constitution--the earnest promise of a 12-year-old, newly minted American citizen.

As a college student I recall attending a farm workers’ rally in Los Angeles and being mesmerized not by Cesar Chavez and his union officials but by a stooped Filipino laborer who spoke haltingly about the 30 years he had spent in the fields of Central California, living a lonely and ascetic life, dutifully mailing his meager pay to the islands and knowing he would never see his homeland again.

Years later, I remember sensing some apprehension from the family of the woman I intended to marry. She was from New York and of German-Irish heritage, and only years later did my mother-in-law speak about some of the cautionary words she had been given by well-meaning relatives. You know, one family member had advised her, horses and zebras simply don’t mix.

I also recall my first day at The Times, accepting the congratulations of a new colleague who applauded the fact that my hiring had increased the pool of Latino reporters. When I told him I was Filipino, he quickly replied, “Well, we need more of them, too.”

Today, being a Filipino is no longer an afterthought, although for an ethnic group that is California’s largest Asian contingent--more than 358,000 in the 1980 census--Filipinos have remained largely obscure. That began to change with Benigno Aquino’s assassination in 1983 and the subsequent flash of yellow that became the battle color of his widow, Corazon Aquino. These are heady times.

In a televised revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos’ 20-year regime, the world witnessed ordinary citizens defying a powerful incumbent, protecting ballot boxes with their bodies and facing down tanks in the streets of Manila.

Those images became locked in our memories. Filipinos everywhere began sharing a sense of pride and a common yearning--even expatriates who have been gone for three decades.

“ Oras para umuwi ,” my father told me in the Tagalog I barely know.

It is time to go home.

As the Philippine Airlines flight departs on its 16-hour journey west, I review the inventory of goods that were thrust upon me by family members on my way to the airport: letters and packets of money, photographs, clothing, chocolate and a jar of instant coffee wrapped in a Los Angeles Rams T-shirt for my relatives in the provinces.

I have two textbooks, a Tagalog dictionary, news clips, and my sister Anita’s journal that she kept in 1983 when she saw the Philippines for the first time. I slip through the pages, fascinated by her accounts of a family that is at once so close to us and so much apart.

My own mission is as much personal as journalistic. I often tell my children how I look up the Merina name in every city I visit and am never surprised that it is not there. We are the invisible people, I tease them, yet we are also the distinctive ones. In the beach community where we live, my kids somehow understand that. They are brown-skinned without the summer tan. They must often explain their heritage, while their friends blend in. They ask me questions I try to answer. They grope for their own answers about their ancestry, just as my parents’ children had done before them.

There is indeed a place where there are lots of Merinas, I tell them. And although they are still young, someday they will want to go there. This will be a story for Vanessa and Dorian, Hilary and Kali. And for their grandparents. As I close my sister’s journal, I realize this is the most difficult story I will have to write.

Malacanang Palace had been home to one family for two decades. But after the Marcos clan fled the country last February, it was open house along Manila’s Pasig River. On this Sunday afternoon, nearly two weeks after Cory Aquino has been propelled into the presidency of a nation of 54 million people, the presidential palace is the gathering place for tens of thousands of people and the backdrop of countless family photographs.

Mendiola, a major thoroughfare leading to the palace gates, is lined with street vendors selling Cory buttons, Cory dolls, key chains, visors, umbrellas, lunch bags. Swatches of yellow--Aquino’s campaign color--and her distinctive L-shaped hand salute known as the laban , or fight symbol, can be seen throughout the crowds. Lines of people jockey good-naturedly for position to get their pictures taken in front of a giant Philippine flag draped from the palace’s balcony.

A man on crutches boasts a T-shirt that reads, “I Stood as a Human Barricade.” A few feet away, a family of four walks by with a young boy sporting a Cory Aquino headband and holding a yellow balloon. His grandmother wears a similarly colored T-shirt, and his father carries a Cory placard. On the mother’s head is a yellow visor with the words: “ Kabilang Ako --I’m One of Them.”

As we walk through this human maze, my cousin, Ramon Reyes, is smiling. He, too, is one of them. Along with several of my relatives, he had joined the human barrier that stymied Marcos’ military force.

“People of all walks of life are here,” he says as we thread through the crowd. “They have come from the provinces and from Manila just to be in Malacanang.”

He looks around at the throngs of people. “We can’t finish celebrating in just one week or two weeks,” he says, laughing. “It’s been 20 years of waiting for this.”

A few days earlier, strolling through Malacanang with Ramon and another cousin, Ernesto Tuliao, we had stood on the palace steps in front of the giant flag and below the balcony where Marcos and his wife had often appeared.

As we peeked through the wrought-iron gates protecting the presidential library, we could see evidence of the ransacking by angry crowds after the Marcoses had fled. During our walk, Ernie had been mostly silent. I asked him what all this meant to him and how he felt as he entered the grounds of the palace.

A taciturn man with a wife and four children, Ernie looked at the cousin from America whom he had first met only hours before. “I wanted to kiss the ground of Malacanang,” he finally said. “It may be hard for you to understand, but this means freedom to us. It is what we won.”

Ramon is a 35-year-old certified public accountant and office manager of a firm that makes aluminum window screens. Ernie is a 39-year-old deputy sheriff who, in his small house in Manila’s San Juan Rizal section, proudly shows photographs of himself in uniform as a reserve officer in the Philippine army.

While Ramon’s wife, Erlinda, was in Los Angeles, where she anxiously watched television reports about the escalating events, her sister, Conching, who is married to Ernie, was also part of the anti-Marcos movement.

As I sit in Ching’s modest home in San Juan Rizal, rock music blares in the background, and she gives me a glass of gulaman , a gelatin drink. It is difficult to believe that my cousin--barely five feet tall--had been an anti-Marcos demonstrator during the bloody battles between college students and police that preceded Marcos’ imposition of martial law in 1972. Now, she proudly leafs through her collection of newspapers chronicling the overthrow of Marcos. Her four children are still chanting “Cory, Cory” through the neighborhood.

When I tell them that many Americans had reacted favorably to the massive demonstrations, my cousins express surprise and delight, because that period--with all its heady memories--was also a time of divisiveness in families and among friends.

“I know husbands and wives who separated and friends who walked their separate paths because of this,” Ramon says.

Although the splits had not been as keenly felt, we too had family on both sides of the issue. Even in the United States, Marcos was a lightning rod that could turn a placid family affair into an intense debate.

Now, I saw a country hoping to repair its rifts and savoring its ability to have avoided a civil war.

In Quezon City, my cousins Manuela and Candida had taken part in the demonstrations protecting the military leaders who had turned on Marcos and had holed up at a nearby military base called Camp Crame. They are eager to show me a videotape of the news broadcasts on the sometimes tense confrontation between unarmed civilians and soldiers. As we watch--and swap the usual family gossip--I find myself thinking that this is like watching home movies or viewing vacation slides. It is eerie to think this is a revolution on the tiny screen.

As the revolutionary fervor begins to fade, the government critics multiply. But many Filipinos are convinced that their lot has improved dramatically. In the weeks since the Aquino government has taken over, many people who went into exile during the Marcos administration have returned. For some, the Manila they have come back to has changed as much as the political climate. And for those of us who cling only to memories from our youth, the din of the city can be overwhelming.

It is a city where the crush of traffic is a kaleidoscope of colorful, decorated jeepneys--crammed with a dozen passengers and sporting such names as “Sweetheart,” “Hungry for Your Love” and “Forced Vengeance.” Horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, taxis, cars and motorcycles compete recklessly in a cacophony of bleating horns. Amid the chaos, street vendors ply their trade fearlessly.

The American influence is everywhere--from the Chuck Norris movies and rock music to the fast-food restaurants and Madonna blouses. English is spoken widely, and the United States remains a dream for many. However, the American presence is a sticky issue here, and the phrase Amerikano can be tinged with bitterness. I, too, feel buffeted by the pull of emotions between my native country and my adopted one.

Years ago, when I realized that I had been born at Clark Air Base--because my father had joined the U.S. Army--I remember preferring to mention that I was from Angeles Pampanga, where we lived and where I grew up, rather than the military hospital. As a youth, I somehow knew that my birthplace would set me apart from other Filipinos, even as I was separated by heritage from other Americans.

Those passions still run deep here. Filipinos still smart from the vestiges of colonialism, and they argue about “American imperialism.”

Other Filipinos are concerned more with the poverty. Less than a kilometer from the elegant Manila Hotel, where Douglas MacArthur once resided and where many foreign correspondents stay, sits the Tondo district of Manila with its shanties and dilapidated housing. Shacks with roofs of cardboard and rusting tin are piled against one another.

As we drive by the tiny shelters and grimy streets, Ramon says: “This is the place Imelda Marcos wanted to be known as the ‘City of Man.’ But it is the city of the poor.”

The City of Man was supposed to be Mrs. Marcos’ showcase of renovation, Ramon says. Instead, behind the townhouse facades still lie the slums and squalor of Manila.

In a city where the per capita income is $625 a year, the homeless can be seen on the streets, and beggars--both young and old--can be found on the boulevards. But the poor in Manila are not relegated to the shanty towns and downtrodden areas. In a barrio of Quezon City known as Project 4, I pay a surprise visit to my mother’s sister.

She and her family live in a cluster of wooden structures that line a small, dank canal. One of her daughters, her son-in-law and their four children share a one-room unit above a factory. Her other daughter, Marilyn, lives in a 15-by-15-foot room with her husband and three children. They share the one bed that dominates the tiny living area. The ceiling is so low that I cannot straighten myself, and as I sit on the bed, my knees nearly touch the table on the other side of the room. But the place is immaculate.

My cousin apologizes for her inability to offer me anything, but she explains that her family is living off the 180 pesos--$9 a week--that her husband makes building bird cages. And her youngest child is ill.

The family lives in a barangay , or political district, that had supported Marcos, but now her hopes rest with the new government. And she struggles to sound optimistic.

“I need help from President Aquino,” she says. “After 10 years here, I want a new place to live. And when my children grow up, I want them to go to school, to have a better chance.”

As she speaks, she clutches her 1 1/2-year-old child, and the tears well in her eyes. But she catches herself, and, regaining her composure, asks me about life in America. Her mother, who does not speak English, merely keeps smiling and touching me gently until I ask her to speak into my tape recorder and send a message to my mother. She is intrigued and then excited, and she speaks into my recorder in Tagalog. My cousin later translated her message, in which she told my parents that she was about to wash her clothes when I suddenly appeared--a nephew she hadn’t seen for so many years--and she lamented not being able to speak English. When she finishes, she asks me if my parents “are still strong.”

“I am weak already,” she says. But there is no self-pity in her tone.

As I watch her, I think she is like so many of my Filipino elders who remain stoic, uncomplaining and hard-working. The unexpected sight of friends and relatives moves her immensely. And although she has very little, she offers her hospitality to her visitors. I had heard enough about these traits through my childhood to understand their significance, and to guess their roots.

It is the Ivatan way.

The cluster of islands that make up the province of Batanes sits like a sentry on the northernmost tip of the Philippines. Separated from the main island, Luzon, by 125 miles of ocean, the 10 volcanic islands--of which only a handful are inhabited--are among the 7,100 islands that form the Philippine archipelago.

Batanes is home for a sturdy population that has had to learn to live with destructive anins , or typhoons, and to skillfully navigate the treacherous waters between islands. It is a special place for the 13,600 people who live on the main islands of Batan, Sabtang and Itbayat and who collectively call themselves Ivatans.

More than 70 dialects are spoken in the Philippines in addition to the Pilipino language of Tagalog. The dialect of the natives of Batanes traces back nearly 3,000 years and goes by the same name they call themselves: Ivatan--”from Vatan,” the island that map makers call Batan.

When I was a youngster, I remember how my parents, worried about the problems their children faced in American schools, discouraged us from learning our native language--a decision we all would regret. But they never stopped talking about Batanes, and they passed on the stories of their ancestors.

Circumstances and finances had limited them to only one return visit in the past 30 years. But my father once admonished me: You must never forget. We are Filipinos. And we are Americans. But we are also Ivatans.

Those thoughts tumble through my mind as I board the plane in Manila for the flight north to Batanes. As we circle the island of Batan and its 70 square kilometers, I can see the provincial capital of Basco nestled below. A carabao , or water buffalo, grazes near the runway, and a young boy tends his cattle nearby. As we taxi to a stop, I watch as hundreds of Ivatans line the wooden gate area to welcome visitors, as they have done since the tiny airport was built. Scanning the crowd, I ask about my relatives and in return get curious looks from people wondering about this tall Filipino with the American accent. There are no private telephones on Batanes, and I am convinced that my relatives have not received my cable. Then a slight man in a denim jacket and pants and wearing thongs steps forward. He has black hair, a high forehead and weather-lined features. His face is that of my father’s.

“Victor?” he says hesitantly.

“Uncle Eloy,” I reply to the man I know only from family photographs. In the traditional Filipino show of respect, I take his hand and place it against my forehead as I bow slightly. Then we hug.

Teofilo (Eloy) Merina is my father’s younger brother. While my father went from World War II guerrilla and Philippine scout to a career as a U.S. Army soldier traveling the world, my uncle and his two sisters have spent nearly their entire lives on Batanes.

He had raised his 7 children and 27 grandchildren in Batanes. And at 67, Eloy still works the fields, planting and harvesting his crop of kamote (sweet potato), gabi root and garlic, and tending his herd of cows and carabao. Eloy also is a barangay captain, whose influence extends over nearly a thousand people in Basco.

The barangay is the smallest political unit in the governmental structure. The captains, elected by local voters, often mediate disputes and act as ombudsmen for their neighborhoods. One night, Uncle Eloy apologizes for hastily leaving us after being summoned to confer with a farmer who had accused a neighbor of stealing his chickens.

But one of the real powers of barangay captains is to oversee public works construction such as roads, buildings and irrigation projects--and to choose the laborers who will be paid to work on them. It is a patronage system not unfamiliar to American politics. In return, the political party in charge expects a measure of loyalty from its captains. For most barangay leaders, that meant allegiance to the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan , the party of Ferdinand Marcos.

Eloy is a KBL member, and his job in the election was to turn out votes for the administration. Instead, Marcos narrowly lost in Eloy’s barangay , in Basco and in the entire province.

For my uncle, it was a painful time. His daughters in Manila--Candida and Manuela--were pro-Aquino demonstrators. One son in Batanes was adamantly against Marcos. Another daughter had a Marcos poster on the outside wall of her house.

“There was a little difference,” Eloy says. “Some went for Cory and some for Marcos. But if you were employed by the government, you could not speak against the administration.” Some Filipinos also felt bound by a sense of loyalty--what they called utang na loob-- to repay a debt for their job or education.

When Marcos was swept out of office, the first word in the Merina household was from Eloy’s son, Julian, who had been monitoring the static-ridden radio broadcasts. At 5 o’clock one morning, he turned the radio on full volume to awaken the family with the news of Marcos’ departure.

For Batanes, the new government is expected to mean little immediate change. The remoteness of Batanes ensures that it will remain dependent on the shipments of rice, sugar and other goods from the national government. The farmers will still worry about a market for their cash crops, and the fishermen will decry the intrusion of the Japanese and Taiwanese on their fishing grounds.

Nor will the life style change radically for the Ivatans, who, to most Americans, seem to live a Spartan existence.

There is no hot or running water. Water is drawn from a well that flows from the underground springs of Mt. Iraya. Toilet facilities are stone-and-concrete outhouses. There is no refrigeration, and electricity comes on only 30 minutes in the morning and three hours in the evening. Cooking is done over a wood fire, and people sleep on bamboo mats on a wooden bed or on the hard living room floor. The few movie houses are actually homes with Betamax recorders.

It is a culture in which the Roman Catholic Church is omnipresent but in which fishermen still begin the fishing season by slaughtering a pig to feast on and by performing a ceremonial prayer to Mayo, the supreme being of ancient Ivatans, before taking off in the small boats called tatayas .

Batanes is a place where a new chain saw (which costs 9,000 pesos--more than most Ivatans make in a year) can attract a crowd to watch its owner cut cords of wood. It is a place where the police commander reported only one murder in his eight years in office.

Among Ivatans, the relatives of relatives are considered family, and a compadre’s compadre is also a friend. “We can argue politics. We can disagree Marcos-Aquino. But then we drink together,” my uncle Liano says. “We are the same blood. That is the way of Batanes.”

As he counsels me, Liano grins his single-tooth smile and squats on his haunches. His 62-year-old wife, Vicenta, and her 76-year-old sister, Ursula, my two aunts, puff happily on their Ivatan cigars and talk about the crops they still tend every day. Speaking little English, they keep repeating, “Happy, happy,” as they touch my face.

“I wish you could speak Ivatan,” says my Aunt Sula through an interpreter. “The stories I could tell you about the ways of your father and your people.”

The way of the Ivatan is also the ritual of song and dance and celebration. In the traditional feast for a homecoming, the Merina family gathers at Uncle Eloy’s house in the tayaran-- in the fields outside Basco--to butcher a pig, gather vegetables and prepare a community meal that will be eaten on breadfruit leaves and washed down with coconut milk.

We drink palek (sugar cane wine) as well as the straight gin favored by many men and women in Batanes, who labor all day long and drink equally hard--the one admitted vice of the islands. But it is the fuel that rouses a blend of Tagalog, Ivatan and “crooked English,” as my relatives regale each other and their guests with folklore, traditions and folk songs of the family.

Later, my uncle Eloy stands overlooking his land and talks about the soil and the people it nurtured. His wife, he says, lives in Manila now, in frail health. If she were in Batanes, she would insist on going to the fields as she has always done since childhood, he says.

He shows me his foot, where he had almost sliced his toe off with an ax as he chopped wood. It reminds me of the time my mother, in the fields of Batanes, encountered a dog that bit off the tip of her finger. She carefully wrapped it in a piece of cloth and walked miles for help in a vain effort to save it. To her children, her scarred finger became a badge of courage.

Sitting on top of the bluff facing Mt. Iraya, a dormant volcano 1,008-meters high, I can see the South China Sea on my left and the Pacific Ocean on the right. My mother’s island of Sabtang looms behind me in the distance.

A grazing carabao stands 20 feet away, oblivious to the tapping of my portable computer. Nearby are the entrances to a series of underground tunnels, reminders of the Japanese occupation, during which two of my uncles died. The rocky coastline where the tatayas will be pushed from shore is below me. And the wind is everywhere, flattening the grass and brush as it sweeps across the island.

This is the spot, my father has often told his children, where he will build his final home, overlooking the town of Basco where he was born.

He is 73 now, and with the events in the Philippines, he and my mother had hoped to make the long journey home. Instead, it is their son--who had never seen his ancestral island--who sits in Batanes on a flat rock, cradling an electronic machine. My notebooks are full. My emotions are jumbled.

One day, at my uncle Eloy’s house, I had seen the jarring photographs of my own children--playing Little League baseball, dressed in new-wave fashions, perched on their grandparents’ knees. They were reminders that even my children have been asked what it means to be Filipino, and that my efforts to help them answer the questions have been wanting.

The night before, my two elderly aunts had pressed me about when my father would see them again. They each had given me carefully wrapped cigars, made from island tobacco leaves, to give him. And they asked if they could sing something into my tape recorder.

With only their voices for music, they sang the melancholy folk tale of a loved one who had left the islands and his family behind.

“ Tiban mo ta taytu ako piya. A miruwa mananaya ,” they sang to their brother 13,000 miles away.

“Look at me, to where I am,” sang the Ivatans. “Waiting here again.”