What ASEAN means to me
That was the title of the essaywriting contest that I joined in 1979, open to young people 16 years old and below. I knew that ASEAN meant Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and it then had five membercountries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. But beyond that I knew next to nil, so I did my research at Ateneo de Manila University’s Rizal Library.
Young people are luckier now: all they have to do is go to Google and type the subject matter of their research and voila!, the information would come gushing onto the computer screen, pulsing with life. But when I was a college freshman, all I had were pigeonholes containing stacks of catalogues – index cards that were portals to a wonderland of knowledge.
I read the few books we then had on the ASEAN, boned up on Southeast Asian history and culture, riffled through periodicals, and looked for that distinguishing feature that would make my essay stand out. I knew later, when I was already a third-year Business Management major and taking Principles of Marketing, that I was looking for a way to brand ASEAN.
In my essay, I said that the peoples of Southeast Asia have been linked to each other through the centuries. First by the land bridges that connected the Philippine archipelago to the great land-mass of Asia, proof of which were the seashells found on some mountaintops in Palawan. When the land bridges melted and sank back to the sea, the exchange of commerce and culture continued. Bodies of water did not separate Southeast Asia; instead, it connected them. The sea – the glorious and majestic sea – became the expressway, the superhighway, the freeway that linked the countries from point to point.
I won first prize in that ASEAN Essay-Writing Contest for Young People. I received P3,000, part of which I used to buy a pair of contact lenses; five albums of stamps from the five ASEAN countries; and a college scholarship tenable at a school of my choice: I stayed at Ateneo.
I have lived in Malaysia for more than a year, and felt none of the alienation I felt when I studied in the United Kingdom and the United States. When I arrived in London on a gray morning, my jaw fell at the sight of sooty buildings that were almost black, stony and cold at dawn. And when I stayed at the American East Coast, I was shaken by the fact that people avoided each other’s eyes in the subway train, each person wrapped in his or her own sphere of solitude.
But when my Malaysian Airlines plane was landing in the airport, I saw acres of greenery and vast fields beyond. The glass doors slid to the side noiselessly, and it seemed like home – but better, because trees lined the roads and the superhighway was smooth and the trains were clean and they arrived on time. I studied Bahasa Melayu at the YMCA in Brickfields. There were so many similar words between Bahasa and Tagalog, or Bahasa and Capampangan, such that the other Filipina and I were soon tossing the words in our tongue as if they were ping-pong balls.
I also spent a month in Indonesia, visiting a cousin and his family who lived in Jakarta and staying at the Gajah Mada and Sanata Dharma Universities in Yogyakarta to deliver papers at conferences on literature and culture. Indonesia is a big country spread across four time zones. The students were doing their Physical Education classes when I arrived at Gajah Mada, and there were thousands of them doing calisthenics simultaneously in the open field!
In Malaysia and Indonesia, the people thought I was Chinese and spoke to me in the various tongues of the Chinese language. I quickly corrected them by saying,
“Se orang Filipina (I am a person from the Philippines).” I did come to Thailand to attend the final interview for the Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF), funded by Ford Foundation. I arrived in Bangkok and stayed in a plush hotel with almost 100 other scholars from Asia. My proposal was to do research on “Malaysian Literature in English,” and during the interview, a literary scholar from Malaysia said there might not be enough materials to work on.
And like I did my research for my ASEAN essay, I came prepared for the interview. I wrote down the bullet points in the index cards, practiced articulation in front of a mirror, and wore my signature white silk shirt, blue pants, and black shoes for the interview. I showed the scholar my copy of A Bibliography of Malaysian Literature in English, then newly published by Dr. Malachi Edwin Vethamani. The scholar nodded slowly.
When another panelist asked me, “Do you write poems yourself? How can you study poetry if you do not know their inner workings?” I gave him a copy of my two books of poems – Skin Voices Faces and Black
Silk Pajamas – as Exhibits A and B. Finally, one of the panelists reviewed my CV and asked, “You were already teaching at an American university. Why did you return to your country?”
I said, “I came back to take care of my aging parents and a sister with Down’s syndrome.”
“You did not consider your academic career in the US?” “No.” One of the panelists looked away and I thought she would begin to weep. Another hard-boiled panelist looked down and stared at the table. For almost 30 seconds there was silence, which was broken only by Dr. Lourdes Salvador, the peerless Executive Director of the ASF, who cleared her throat and said: “Hrrrmm, if there are no more questions for Professor Remoto, maybe we can let him go?”
They nodded. I thanked them and I stood up to leave but as I was leaving, I could hear their incredulous voices saying “family.”
In my travels in Southeast Asia, the family is a constant entity. It is found in the gay son who is with his boyfriend on weekdays but stays with his mother on weekends, of the sex worker giving alms to the monks and money to his father for his medicine, of the grandchildren walking their grandparents in the park, under the healing light of the sun.