Over the Carpathian Mountains

Over the Carpathian Mountains, flying from Cluj to Bucharest in a Tarom propeller plane.

 

Here's a street crossing at the southern end of Bucharest.

2007 Interview published in People Magazine (Philippine edition)

Blast from the past. Here's an interview I did by email with Samantha Echavez, which appeared in the February 2007 issue of People Magazine (Philippine edition). That's Dayanara Torres on the cover. - Lakambini Sitoy

Navigating in Seoul: Manila Times column for 14 Oct 2010

Navigating in Seoul

LETTERS FROM THE OUTLANDS
BY LAKAMBINI A. SITOY


On a long, cramped car ride out of Seoul, I began to have a strange relationship with the GPS.

I had not been long in Korea at all, but noted that every vehicle I had ridden in had been equipped with a global positioning system. They seemed less a novelty than a necessity. And this one could talk. There were seven of us in the car—our driver, four Danes (an illustrator, a writer, a publisher and a graphic designer), myself (the eternal learner) and our guide. The eighth entity was the GPS—a cool yet urgent female voice delivering what seemed to be the same set of syllables every few seconds, as we negotiated the twists and turns from Seoul’s city center to the highway north. In a little while, this invisible woman was driving us crazy.

We were bound for Nami Island, a 4.6 square kilometer resort in a tributary of the Han River. It is hard to define Nami Island in one word: a resort with hotels and lodges, yes, but also a nature park organized around the idea of creativity. Nami recently opened a year-long children’s book festival and the Danes, all playing roles in the creation and publishing books for young readers, were among the guests.

Au pairs in Denmark are now mostly Filipina

Published in The Manila Times, Opinion section, September 30, 2010

http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/opinion/27618-au-pairs-in-denmark-are-now-mostly-filipina-

LETTERS FROM THE OUTLANDS
BY LAKAMBINI A. SITOY


Nowadays when “Filipina” is mentioned in the Danish news, it is often in connection with “au pair.” The newspaper Politiken noted last week that 2773 persons received permission to work as au pairs in Denmark in 2009. Of this number, 78 percent came from the Philippines. You see her more and more in Copenhagen and its suburbs: the small Asian woman and her charges. With steady determination and downcast eyes, she maneuvers a huge pram down the pavement and into a bus: inside is a tow-headed child, sometimes two.

Her apparent alone-ness, the paradox of her nurturing role and yet the obvious non-blood connection between her and her charges, cannot escape notice.

Plurality or assimilation (2nd Manila Times column: Sept 16 2010)

LETTERS FROM THE OUTLANDS
The Manila Times Opinion page column for Sept 16, 2010

Plurality or assimilation

BY LAKAMBINI A. SITOY

THERE was a lady, Rukhsana Khan, who came to speak at the world congress of the International Board of Books for Young People in Copenhagen the other year. Her family migrated from Pakistan to Canada when she was three. Now in her 40s she is a well-known author of young adult literature: writing in a relaxed, idiomatic English she writes books that have, in her words, Muslim and international themes. “When we first arrived in Canada,” Khan said, “it was 1965 and it was automatically assumed that immigrants would assimilate. There was no choice in the matter. The message was, 'Shut up and be grateful for being allowed into this western country club and the way you show that gratitude is by adopting our values . . . If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.'”

It was a pre-US Civil Rights movement response to the question of plurality within a nation’s borders: the effort to extinguish differences between groups in favour of an amalgamated culture. This is the melting pot model of integration, and in the face of increasing immigration and globalization it seems the most obvious, most immediate line of action. It falls to the newcomers to make adjustments. They must learn to blend in.

Immigrants experience the pressures of living at the far end of a hierarchical yardstick, with the goal being to advance by becoming as much like the dominant group as possible, in terms of “values,” and mores of speech, dress and behaviour. Explicitly or tacitly is the idea, stemming from 19th century Darwinian theory, that all societies in the world are at various stages of evolution, with European society being the most advanced, and the “others” being half-formed, uncultivated, in need of improvement.

The problem is that the dominant culture imposes different standards of assimilation upon the newly arrived. Lucky the immigrant to Denmark who comes from Western Europe, North America, Britain or Australia, for he or she comes with unquestionable credentials and the presumption that any cultural differences there may be are negligible. Or at any rate charming. Ways worth imitating perhaps.

The new arrival from Asia, Latin American or Africa lacks the benefit of this respect. We are, on the whole, I think, judged not so much lacking in native intelligence as in education and exposure, in sophistication. We come to Denmark to fulfil ourselves. Denmark completes us, whether in terms of philosophies or musical tastes or learning to work the microwave oven. We come from countries, of course, that, in this era of globalization, offer Western education and churn out the world’s garments, mobile phones and microwave ovens. But so the myth goes.

There is the additional impediment of race: that difference in physical appearance that is hard to ignore. I attended Danish language classes a total of two years. At the start, every foreigner grappled with the embarrassment of new vowel sounds and missing consonants, but by the fourth level it seemed to me the students from Eastern Europe were more fluent and confident than those from China, Turkey or Peru who had spent the same amount of time in the country. Yet they did not have the benefit of having a Germanic language (like English or Dutch) as their native tongue. I conjectured at the time that people from Eastern Europe enjoy a tacit acceptance, because in the country of the blond they are non-exotic.

By contrast, I felt, a darker complexioned immigrant is never really allowed to forget her strangeness. In social situations she is called upon to relate (or embellish) what is unusual about her country. She is teased or made the butt of jokes to ease the strain of difference. Or, conversely, she is judged irrelevant and then ignored.

Race “is” a factor, not necessarily in how well one takes to a (Scandinavian) language, but because it seems the most obvious and plausible explanation for one’s difficulties. But the matter is really not that simple, and I hope to discuss it further in the future.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have some set cultural points to rally round, as has been the case with Khan, whose career direction, habits of dress (headscarf and long dresses) and the milieu in which she raised her daughters (all three eventually and independently made the decision to wear the burqa), reflect an early and long-running resistance to assimilation into the mainstream. Today she enjoys the benefits of living in a Canada that leans towards a different approach to plurality, that recognizes the individuality of groups and accords them legal rights based on their conditions.

“Following the American Civil Rights movement,” she said, “Canada would be multicultural. We would celebrate everyone’s culture. Nobody had to assimilate . . . as long as they followed the laws and paid their taxes they were free to live as they pleased.”

But in this new land I find it difficult to locate what is specifically Filipino myself, much less hook up with other people who agree on those cultural points and would be loath to abandon them. How should a Filipino dress, talk, worship? Should I, a Protestant, get in with the Catholics because they are the majority? Are we traitors because none of us wear the national costume, the long dress with butterfly sleeves so associated with Imelda Marcos? And must we gripe because our choices landed us in reticent Denmark, instead of the sprawling, freewheeling nation on the other side of the Atlantic?

I'm back as an opinion columnist for The Manila Times!

LETTERS FROM THE OUTLANDS

BY LAKAMBINI A. SITOY

So, after a lapse of four years, I find myself writing a column again for The Manila Times. I’m greatly excited to be once more part of the life of this newspaper, with its long history and storied past, for which I anonymously wrote editorials for a span of time, and where my columnist colleagues and I sought to test the limits of free speech in certain ways, back in 2000 to 2001.

I am more cautious today, not just because I am older, but because greater responsibility is required in the internet age. These days, anything can be flashed around the world a second after it is completed: by the writer and, potentially, an army of supporters and detractors. (Though in reality, these would be one’s friends and un-friends with an internet connection and little to do on a weekday morning, half of whom the writer has never personally met). One does not really write commentaries nowadays. In place of “write” are a few new verbs: one links, forwards, “likes”, tweets.

In the past, we wrote to earn the kudos of our friends and relations. It was all we could hope for. Now the potential audience is limitless, a situation that demands greater precision in terms of language, and responsibility in the matter of content. An off-hand jab some columnist might have made in the 90s at some foreign nationality or socio-economic group might today be considered racist and unconscionable, cause for a host of letters demanding his/her removal.

When I started freelancing 15 years ago, I would have to make a run down to the magazine stand to buy as many copies as I could afford before they got sold out. Once an issue was sold, it was gone, just like the movies that came to town, played for three days at the local cinema, and were lost forever. Now nothing you ever write is lost. It stays in a corner of a hard drive somewhere, waiting to be dug up and released years later, for all the world to pick apart.

That is, if anyone cares enough for your humble little opinion. Because cyberspace offers everyone the opportunity of democratic expression, few people care all that much what you think, how you said it, and whether you said it first. Most everyone, it seems, are too concerned with how to present their own thoughts in as clever a way as they can. So there can be a paradoxical safety in today’s ocean of words.

Other things have changed. Due to the immediacy of today’s news, “scoops” are a thing of the past. Moreover, with columns immediately replicated on Facebook, in blogs, in other online newspapers—replicated and derived from—one has to rethink what is meant by ownership of ideas.

However, there has been an upside to this convivial intercourse of thoughts. The arrogance that marked the first voices coming out of the desktop-publishing 90s has largely vanished. As the neutral “link to” and “forward” have come to be the main methods of exposition, so have “rants” and “dissing” become pointless, obscure. Or so I hope.

So now one writes without the cozy sense of self-importance that marked many a journalist in my formative years: the notion that you could be welcomed anywhere as long as you flashed your press card, the knowledge that, in a gathering of strangers, at least one person would have seen your face in the paper and rejoice at having met such a distinguished writerly personage. Bloggers of all persuasions have shown that regular people can be as razor-sharp, witty and filled with inspiration as those who have been vetted by the editorial board of an ink-and-newsprint publication.

As one among the Times’ pool of writers I thought of myself as a faithful workhorse, endeavoring to produce an editorial in time for a deadline and, a day or so later, a column that would be printed beside the blandly smiling photograph that gave no hint of the ordeal of composing it. Thus I strove to put out uniformly high quality stuff not just for the sake of the newspaper but also for my own reputation—to build up a fanbase, so to speak. That goal is tough to reach nowadays. There is so much frenetic commentary out there, not all of it responsible—and in consequence, much of it rather exciting. How can anyone compete?

So here I find myself, essaying a task that in the span of little more than a decade has already become traditional. But I have been invited, and now feel motivated. I bring to my writing some of the insights (or baggage, if you like), acquired from living and studying in northern Europe: an awareness that I cannot really speak for all; a hesitance to judge; a desire to empathize; a habit of self-contradiction; and a dislike of rabble-rousing language. I try, self-consciously, to be broadminded, aware that in the worst case scenario, this could lead to paralysis. I’ll do my best, nonetheless.

___

Lakambini Sitoy is an award-winning Filipino author who currently lives in Denmark.

___

This column originally appeared in The Manila Times, print and internet editions, 14 September 2010.
http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/opinion/25837-beginnings

Blast from the past

 

Grade school graduation 1981

after a year, an update

After nearly a year, an update, if only to say that I am working on a project involving FIlipina au pairs in Denmark with two other women students for the Cultural Encounters Kandidat 1 Modul at Roskilde University.

***

Many people have emailed me asking if I am attending our high school reunion in August, and I've had to tell them no. It was never in my plans, not from the very first morning after graduation. I have been ever so happy to move on.

Free Press celebrates 101st anniversary

From Greg Brillantes and the editors of Free Press comes this announcement --

A Hundred and One

The FREE PRESS celebrates its 101st anniversary in this issue. We also take this occasion to pay tribute to the late President Corazon Aquino. Cory!—the private woman who was thrust out of her domesticity to the arena of politics, the prison cells of the Marcos regime, the parliament of the streets, the leadership of the Philippines and the world stage. Manuel L. Quezon III’s “Filipino of the Century” is an inspired retelling of this now-legendary story—one that resonates even amid the flamboyance and machismo prevailing in our culture, as the late FREE PRESS editor Teodoro M. Locsin pointed out in his eloquent editorial on Mrs. Aquino. The highlight of Mrs. Aquino’s international acclaim is, of course, her triumphant 1986 address to the US Congress, which we reprint here.

A tribute to Mrs. Aquino also serves as a tribute to her martyred husband, Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., whose association with the FREE PRESS is underscored by Locsin being thrown in jail together with Aquino(and nine other critics of the Marcos regime)in 1972. Teodoro L. Locsin Jr.’s interviews with Aquino are fascinating chamber pieces that hint at Marcos’s impending dictatorship. Another cellmate of Aquino and Locsin Sr. is the brilliant political analyst Napoleon G. Rama, whose article on martial law has unfortunately become more relevant in our time.

With the articles by Rama and Locsin Jr., we also reprint the classic political
cartoons of former FREE PRESS art director E. Z. Izon.

Former FREE PRESS executive editor Gregorio C. Brillantes wields his lyrical journalism as he takes a retrospective look at Rolando Galman, the much-overlooked casualty in Aquino’s assassination in 1983. We also look back to the body of work of the FREE PRESS and some of the writers who helped shape it. “The Ruling Money,” by the late associate editor Nick Joaquin (writing as Quijano de Manila), is an exhaustive business story as only he could write it—and a departure from his reporting on politics, history and pop culture. Kerima Polotan’s “The Woman of Fashion” is a quiet critique on the thriving bourgeois scene of the Sixties and its devotees at the time. Then there’s the other side of that milieu, lauded by Jose F. Lacaba’s now immortal “Notes on Bakya,” an inventive variation on Susan Sontag that counsels against elitism in art and culture. Finally, here too is Aquino’s soul-searching poetry, written during his eight years in prison. The themes are familiar to victims of political persecution like Lacaba, Locsin, Rama and this magazine, which was padlocked on the eve of martial law and revived in time for Cory’s historic presidential campaign.

Filipinos in Man Asian 2009 long list

Congratulations to all who made the Man Asian Literary prize 2009 long list, which this year contains five Filipinos -- Eric Gamalinda, R . Zamora Linmark, Mario I. Miclat, Clarissa Militante and Edgar Calabia Samar!

Greg Brillantes moments

In conjunction with a special award to be given to Filipino writer par excellence Gregorio Brillantes, Philippine Graphic put together an article briefly describing his contributions and career. I helped round up some input from colleagues, senior or otherwise, asking them (via Facebook): "Is there something special you remember about Greg, working with him or socializing, or just being touched by something he wrote?"
Here are the responses:

***

In my research on our short story in English - I have covered so far the period 1956 to 1989, and read (honesly) over a thousand stories - I can say without reservation that Greg dominates that period in terms of the artistic quality and depth of his work; he should long ago have been declared a National Artist.

-- Gemino H Abad, poet, critic, fiction writer and professor of literature (UP-Diliman).

*

Recently I reread The Distance to Andromeda and Millennium. I became nostalgic about the future. Then I read one by one Greg's collected essays, especially those about his travels. No one comes close when it comes to the lost art of intelligent journalism and reportage that does not read like disposable literature. Greg Brillantes is one of our diamonds buried under the dross of the sound bite, the lunch time show, and the prevailing culture of inanity on television and the vapid press.

My real Greg Brillantes moment? At one Palanca Awards night where after the ceremonies we usually sung to Greg's piano accompaniment (sometimes made virtuosic because of his vanishing hearing), I had one too many and fell asleep in one of the plush ... Read Morelounge chairs of the Peninsula lobby. I think I came to at about 3 a.m. or later, and guess whom you'd find seated beside me? Greg, of course, and I was so embarrassed but he just smiled that avuncular smile of his and said, I didn't want to leave until you woke up.

-- Marne Kilates, poet, translator and critic

*

Unlike the Tiempos (Edilberto and Edith) and Franz (Arcellana), who all mentored me in the classroom and workshops, Greg has been my unofficial, indirect mentor for the longest time. He taught me the art of fiction through his books. He showed me how to make characters jump off the page, how to make them memorable like13-year-old Ben, how to make even inanimate objects (like empty houses) stick in your mind with the precise metaphor.

And his nonfiction! I wish more of our nonfiction writers would read him and learn that nonfiction doesn't mean self-indulgence.

And as a friend? Super! He lends me his favorite books--and then forgets about them! No, he just allows me as much time to linger over his books, and I do. They are precious. And Greg Brillantes is precious. I agree with Jimmy--he should have been National Artist a long time ago

Oh, my Greg Brillantes moment? Dancing the boogie with him at one Free Press Literary Awards night!

-- Susan Lara, writer, teacher and critic

*

I remember the first time i met him, i cried. not because i was in awe or something but because he sent back proofs of his manuscript with lots of exclamation points--which to my (editorial) greenhorn mind translated to utter disappointment and anger at such amateurish book-production work. i wasn't worthy... (sniff). but ... Read Morewhen we got to talk more (even if it was kind of hard with his hearing aid), we got along quite well.

we exchange old books up to this day. he'll also drop by the office with little pasalubong from his trips. he's one of my favorite literary "lolos" :-)

-- Ani Habulan, book editor and developer, Anvil Publishing

*

i'm still astonished that greg's stories have never been picked up in the radar of the (now) numerous critics of nonwestern anglophone literature. he is doubtless a master of the short fiction form in our part of the postcolonial world, a profound and consummate artist whose command of the imperial medium (of english) is beyond reproach, and whose ... Read Moreworld view is implacably--and necessarily--rooted in a difficult and intensely argued kind of faith... interesting, but it turned out we'd already enjoyed a "nodding acquaintance" even before we were formally introduced sometime in the early 1990s: he was (is) this tall, distinguished- and pious-looking man who, like me, always stood at the back of the lourdes church in retiro, q.c., during the 10 to 11 am sunday mass.

-- J. Neil Garcia, UP – Diliman, poet, essayist, professor, critic

*

Greg is our family's book bugaw (pimp)with catholic tastes. It's such a trip to find bags with a little bit of everything from Armistead Maupin to Dr. Oliver Sacks to Edith Wharton to Jon Stewart, delivered to our doorstep throughout the year. With such great stocking stuffers, it's like having Christmas even in summer. Often the fly page will have a personalized dedication in Greg's angular penmanship. He addresses my mother as Dona Carolina, an elaborate courtesy that only he can pull off without affectation. Often aside from the literary goodies, there are worldlier treats like hazelnut pralines or a delicate fruit tea. We are truly blessed to have him for our friend.

-- Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, author

*

I want to contribute my "favorite Greg moment" anyway to this gathering of friends. I had just returned from our life overseas, and to writing fiction, which was actually tales. I sent one to Greg with much trepidation. He accepted it for publication, but asked me, "don't you want to return to ... Read Morerealist fiction"? I never did figure out whether it meant that he didn't like tales, or whether he was accepting my story even if he didn't really like it.

-- Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, author, professor, critic

*

I was stunned to get a phone call, that first time, from THE Greg Brillantes,

Who? greg brillantes?
yes, this is greg brillantes.
greg brillantes, the greg brillantes?...... Read More

what year did you graduate from the ateneo?
1982, sir. AB Psych. what about you sir, what year were you?
Oh, just a few years after Rizal.

-- Migs Villanueva, author, artist

*

Marne, I was at that Palanca Awards night you were talking about. I recall that you, Charlson and Mike Bigornia were all singing. And Greg Brilliantes was at the piano. I didn't stay around till morning like you did, though :-)

-- Ramil Digal Gulle, poet, journalist