Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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volcano about to explode. We could not situate our earlier middle-class dreams in such a dark landscape.
The feeling of living in a nice new apartment was gone too. Typhoon Yoling had blown away the roof of our landlord’s house which, though separate from our apartment building, felt like it was a part of it. There was no escaping the feeling of violation, as when a valuable item you’ve grown to treasure is damaged.
We finally decided to move because of oil price hikes in 1970. The resulting rise in the cost of transportation and consumer goods shocked people. Youth and labor organizations lent their strength to the transport groups that launched strikes. The strikes engendered a feeling of paralysis in the city. Some people felt stranded in their own homes. The neighborhood whose quiet we had previously valued now felt isolated, far from food stores and offices. We needed a place near Ateneo that was also close to a wet market and stores. We were relieved to find an apartment a few blocks from the center of Cubao, from which Ateneo was a short jeepney ride away.
MY MEMORY OF JAN goes back to a family picture taken in Iloilo. He appears as a sweet, well-behaved boy with a charming smile, which was what he was to me. Entering grade school in San Beda College, he was still mild-mannered and kind-hearted and could be the apple of any mother’s eye. But to his brothers and sisters, he also showed another side. Lillian recalls that the Jan she knew in Second Street showed a stubborn and rebellious streak and had his share of fights with his siblings.
Jan graduated from grade school in San Beda College at age 12 (1968).
In 1967, Dad and Mom were very proud parents when Jan was awarded a scholarship to the Philippine Science High School (PSHS). He was just 13 then. PSHS was highly regarded as a school that educated the cream of Philippine youth destined for careers in science and technology. The best part of it was that students got free tuition and board and lodging as well as a stipend. I rode with Dad and Mom in our Ensign sedan when they took Jan’s clothes and bedding to PSHS in the old wooden Philippine Government Employees Association (PGEA) quarters on Elliptical Road, the big rotunda circling the Quezon Monument in Quezon City. The same building housed both the classrooms and the dormitory. It was rare to see Mom so pleased and happy.
Later, my parents and I would learn about the rundown condition of the dorm and the perennial lateness of the students’ monthly stipends. The PSHS scholars may have been held up as the hope of the Motherland in science and technology, but they were subjected to the same bureaucratic foul-ups as other sectors of Philippine society. Jan often complained to Nathan that the students, all state scholars, had to put up with an ill-equipped and vermin-infested school and living quarters.
Earlier generations of students might have shrugged and silently put up with the sordid classrooms and substandard living conditions. Previously, Jan and his friends had looked forward with anticipation to the planned transfer of the school to a new site in the North Triangle area. Over two years, the students signed petitions, marched on Congress, and boycotted classes, all to no avail. Jan mentioned at one point that some students seriously considered burning down the building, which they said was a fire hazard anyway.
Jan (left), with a schoolmate, Joel Navarro, stands in front of Philippine Science High School, which was still in its old building at the Quezon Memorial Circle (1969).
They were primed to be involved in the outbreak of student demonstrations against the Marcos government. In the late 1960s, they joined a majority of Filipino students who, like other youth in Europe and the Americas, found the voice to air broad grievances, from prevailing injustices in world affairs, of which the Vietnam War was the glaring example, to the poor state of the educational system. Students expressed their disgust with the small share of education in the national budget, the mishandling of these limited funds, the high cost of private education, the poor quality of schools, as well as with the situation prevailing in the larger society. The widespread corruption in government and the failing economy directly affected them. They shared the daily struggle of their families to keep up with the rising cost of living and despaired at the dismal prospects for employment after graduation.
The head of PSHS was a well-meaning but essentially powerless government functionary who did not control the funds or have the political support to run what should have been an elite high school. She took the student protests as an attack on her personal leadership and did not see that they were part of an irresistible social movement. Like other school heads at the time, and like many government officials, business leaders, and parents, she did not comprehend that the student protests went beyond the usual teenage restlessness. Very few of the older generation were educationally equipped or temperamentally prepared to view the school strikes within a larger perspective.
When the massive student protests in Metro Manila against the Marcos government reached their peak in 1970, Jan and many other PSHS students were among those who joined the rallies. A number of PSHS student leaders forged alliances with leftist student groups, particularly Kabataang Makabayan (KM) or Patriotic Youth at nearby UP, as the premier state university was also the hotbed of radical student activism.
The author Ceres Alabado used the student activist group that Jan and his schoolmates organized in PSHS, the Malayang Kilusan ng Kabataan (MKK) or Free Youth Movement, as the basis for her novel, I See Red in a Circle. She liked being with these talented science students and acted as a surrogate aunt to them. They used to hang out in her house and talk about recent developments, as well as their hopes and dreams. Alabado’s book reads like fiction, but was, in effect, I think, a journal of the time she spent with them.
Ceres Alabado’s book, “I See Red in a Circle” included this picture of Philippine Science High School activists demonstrating at Malacañang Palace for more government support (1970).
Alabado writes that these young people were not typical high school kids who were just alternating between classes and the usual teenage pursuits of rock music and girls. They were fired up with patriotic ardor, like the members of the Katipunan,1 the underground organization at the turn of the century that nurtured the Philippine Revolution. To her, these students were the new Katipuneros seeking a new revolution.
IN THOSE TIMES, there was little a parent could do to prevent a determined teenager from joining demonstrations or signing up for one of the radical organizations that sprouted like mushrooms after the First Quarter Storm. After all, it was something romantic to be a student activist. Still, there was more keeping the student movement alive than just the exhilaration of being part of those demonstrations. In time, the marches would have lost their novelty, and the excitement of joining them would have faded. However, the youth now saw themselves as the lead echelon of a growing movement that had the power to radically change Philippine society. Youth who showed little interest in their textbooks were fired up by the writings of contemporary Filipino nationalists. They eagerly read through the anticolonial essays of Renato Constantino. Radicalized, they turned to the speeches and writings of Jose Maria Sison, compiled in Struggle for National Democracy.
Sison’s book, affectionately called “SND” by activists, was a thin volume of 10 essays that described Philippine society as an economic and social basket case. He traced the roots of this condition to Spanish and American colonial acts and impositions that lingered, maintained by native elite that benefited from the status quo. He recalled the efforts of Filipino nationalists like Jose Rizal and the leaders of peasant and labor movements to bring about national and social liberation. Sison urged the Filipino youth to continue their work. He called on them to launch a Second Propaganda Movement (after the intellectuals who fought against Spanish rule at the end of the 19th century) or, referring to Mao Tse-tung’s2 contemporaneous efforts, to work toward a “new cultural revolution.”
Sison’s ideas were later fleshed out and carried further in a second book called Philippine Society and Revolution, initially published as “The Philippine Crisis” in three student publications: