Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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called me aside. To my horror, they said in all sincerity, “We heard about your brother, our condolences.”
“No, no one said he was dead!” I snapped, more upset than angry. I turned away and again retreated.
Martial law forced the open opposition movement underground. When military repression ensued, the call for armed rebellion was justified. Almost overnight, the label “student activist” was no longer apt. The newspapers were quick to christen the members of the underground movement with new names: subversives, communist insurgents, terrorists, guerrillas, rebels. Yet my personal lexicon remained unchanged; in my mind, they were simply family.
Though I was baffled by my siblings’ continued loyalty to the “revolution,” their courage had won my respect. What I could not accept was that this movement, the revolution, had the power to draw its members away from their lives and their families, yet could not care for its own.
Where were the kasama, their comrades-in-arms, when my brothers Jan, Nathan, and Norman were arrested and maltreated by their military captors? Where were the kasama when Jan’s head was repeatedly immersed in a commode filled with urine, when water was injected into his testicles, when his feet were doused, then jabbed with live wire? Our family did not hear from the kasama when Nathan was stripped naked and clubbed until he was nearly unconscious. No assistance was offered when my sister Lillian was missing for weeks and Dad made the rounds of prisons in search of her. Does one cease to be a comrade upon his or her capture? This revolution had stripped my family of any semblance of normalcy. It had promised victory, yet it brought only separation, torture, and now possibly Jun’s death.
“Lulu, I’ll be home in an hour.” It was my nth call to Lulu; she still had not heard from my sisters who had ventured to Nueva Ecija. I refused to worry about their safety; to do so would only add to the day’s futility.
It was nearly 10 o’clock when I arrived home. I was exhausted, though I had spent most of the day idly walking around the UP campus. As usual, Lulu had dinner waiting for me. She said my sisters were not back, nor had they called with news.
“Did anyone bother to call?” I asked in total resignation.
“Ay, Ate, someone did call. I can’t recall his name, but he said your group won first prize at the Lantern Parade.”
Little Brown Brother on the Rise
2
SUSAN F. QUIMPO, NORMAN F. QUIMPO, AND EMILIE MAE Q. WICKETT
Manila, August 16, 1968 – The police fired in the air tonight to disperse about 300 students who stormed a police cordon around the United States Embassy here.
The students were protesting special United States-Philippine relations that they said led to such incidents as the killing of Filipinos on American military bases.
The warning shots were fired when the students threw lighted torches into a police line guarding the Embassy gates. A student charge was then broken up and several demonstrators were arrested.
The New York Times
(Susan)
THE MOOD HAD not always been so embittered. Only a generation ago, the Filipinos held Americans in esteem—as benevolent colonial masters, as mentors of democracy, as allies in a bitter world war. But in 1942, when the Japanese encroachment of the islands was inevitable, the Americans readily abandoned their colony, choosing to defend Europe instead. Left clinging to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s cryptic promise, “I shall return,” the Filipinos continued to resist Japanese military occupation for the next three years.
If World War II had been a final test meant to measure the assimilation of lessons on textbook democracy and patriotism espoused by the Americans, the Filipinos would have painfully garnered the highest scores. America’s “little brown brothers,” as the colonizers had called them, proved their loyalty to the American flag, surpassing all expectations. As proof of their valor, thousands of Filipinos died in the war; many were heavily tortured as they continued to protect American civilians. The stories of many young women raped or kidnapped to fill brothels for the Japanese soldiers echoed through the towns and cities.
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.
Ishmael de los Reyes Quimpo (Dad) went through the public school system, enrolled for mechanical engineering just before the Pacific war and finished his degree shortly after the war.
The horrible experience of Filipinos under the Japanese occupation made Filipinos of all stripes genuinely welcome the return of the Americans. Mom and Dad’s experience with “Liberation” really drew them close to the Americans as a people because they got to know one particular American very well.
One of our “liberators” from the Japanese who landed with the forces in Lingayen and came to Mabini, my mother’s hometown, was a GI