I didn’t even want to think about the mortician. I was too scared to set foot in there, and in spite of the fact that it was only a few paces from our house, as far as I can remember, I never did. Now that I think about it, it was probably a good location because right across the street from the mortician’s shop was a beer house. Saturday mornings, especially if the Friday before was payday, I would listen to the housemaids telling their stories of the most recent fights and stabbings among its patrons. Once, it was the husband of my mother’s godchild. Widowed at 25, I heard she went to America. When I met her and her new family many years later, I asked her about her first husband and what had happened to the police investigation. Apparently, there were no investigations related to these stabbings, and families would let matters rest at that. People got drunk and if they were then involved in a drunken brawl, it was simply their fate.
The establishments on the other side of our house were not quite as interesting. We had a neighbour with a number of children, but I was not close to any of them, perhaps because they were a bit older. One was a piano teacher, another grew up to be a “leftist” priest who became very unpopular amongst my family and their friends because he took the side of the labourers against us, the hacienderos. Something rather more interesting was to be found on the ground floor of their wooden house, which was a bakery. With a couple of centavos, one could buy sweetened bread, one of my favourites, so I was often there. Then, there was a hardware store owned by a rich Chinese, situated opposite the gasoline station and the pharmacy—but none of these were enticing enough for frequent visits. The doctor’s clinic was on a side street to the left of the bakery, again only five minutes’ walk from our house.
I was very proud of our Victorias Milling Company, about 10 minutes’ drive from the town proper. The mill was owned by the Ossorios, a Puerto Rican American family who took advantage of the Laurel—Langley Agreement between the United States and the newly formed Philippine Republic. Under the agreement signed in 1955, the Americans were free to exploit Philippine natural resources whilst the Philippines would have preferential terms of trade in the US market for the country’s prime commodities: copra and sugar. The Americans later imposed quotas on sugar coming from the Philippines to protect their trade with other sugar-producing countries. Still, the price was significantly higher than those bound for the domestic market or the world market. Especially after the sugar embargo on Cuba in the early 1960s, it made the hacienderos in Negros extremely rich. A double-edged sword, it was also instrumental in their supposed conspicuous consumption and laziness, so that when hard times came during the Marcos administration, as the government appropriated much of their income from sugar, the hacienderos did not have the wherewithal to either convert or diversify their monoculture, and to adopt other industrial endeavours.
In addition to a big sugar mill, Victorias Milling Company was also the only sugar refinery in the Philippines to produce granulated white sugar. As you crossed the bridge leading to the mill proper, the strong smell of molasses accosted your nostrils. We children would sometimes go and take a ride with my father when he visited the Victorias Sugar Planters Association, the offices of which were located opposite the plant. There, we could buy ice cream not commercially available in town, and whilst he collected documents and chatted with other planters, we would eat our ice cream and hang around, our hands on the grilled fence, as we examined the miniature display of a wartime submarine in military grey docked in a miniature shipyard. In retrospect, it seemed to have nothing to do with the mill but perhaps it was one of the personal interests of the Ossorios. I had heard somewhere that one of them was involved in the war.
Further on, you could see rows and rows of neat well-maintained wooden houses in white and green with screened doors and small front lawns. These were the homes of the officers of the mill. We would pass them on Sundays on our way to church. My family often attended Mass there rather than at Our Lady of Victory in the town proper because it was held later in the day.
I never liked St Joseph’s Chapel. I was scared of the murals covering the expansive walls showing mechanised hands, and the portrait of an outsized Christ projected on the apse, wrapping the columns leading to the ceiling, looking down at me angrily, complete with furrowed brows. Additionally, as the service we attended was for children, I never liked the noise and the chaos that went with it.
Going back to the chapel some years later, I could see that, architecturally, it was in fact quite homely, shaded as it was by the surrounding trees, making full use of the breeze that crossed the gardens. But I still didn’t like the murals. Regardless of an open heart emblazoned on his chest, Christ looked stern and forbidding. I heard the murals were featured in the American Life magazine in the 1950s as a fine example of figurative expressionist art. Famous or not, critically acclaimed or not, it remains a place I would not visit if seeking some peace. I think those artworks belong in a museum rather than a church.
What I did like were the icons—the life-sized one of St Joseph, in particular, with his Malay face. Nordic features were, and still are, considered de rigueur in Philippine-made iconography, perhaps on the odd assumption that the Middle Eastern Jewish family of Jesus and his disciples had northwestern European features, or perhaps simply because many Filipinos consider them beautiful.
As you passed over another bridge, you could look down on numerous bagonetas, open cars on rails, full of freshly harvested sugarcane lined up, waiting for their turn at the mill. This site marked the start of the wide and beautiful rolling terrain, leading to an equally lush and well-designed golf course. The management of Victorias Milling Company lived well indeed!
As a matter of fact, I generally heard only compliments being paid to the enlightened management style of the Ossorios. They paid their workforce well and made company shares part of the regular staff remuneration. When the Ossorios decided to leave the country, their employees were actually able to buy the mill. Unfortunately, there then came a series of mismanaged administrations, until finally the mill filed for bankruptcy and was in turn bought by a rich Chinese. The last time I visited the development, the once gleaming row of houses was in a sorry state of disrepair and badly in need of repainting.
Victorias town, however, has retained its spirit of gaiety. There are the usual celebrations in the plaza, the biggest one being the town fiesta. The day that I particularly remember was the 26th of April, when we had a “Miss Victorias” crowned on the eve of the fiesta amidst an awesome display of fireworks. This was followed by choreographed dance numbers in full costumes, in honour of the new “Miss Victorias”. Nowadays, I hear the town fiesta is celebrated for days! The shows are perhaps no longer as lavish but we still retain the dances, now mostly to the freer beat of pop music, spilling over into the streets as the spirit of carnival takes hold. This is in imitation of the various street festivals the ever foot loose Victoriahanon (hailing from Victorias) have observed in other places.
Such a celebration perfectly fits with the temperament not only of the residents of Victorias, but of the whole province, and, indeed, of the whole country: to capture the spirit of merry making at every opportunity—be it the town fiesta in April, the chartering of the city in February, or the special days of Maskara carnival in October. After years of failure in diversifying its economic base from the old sugar industry, trying at various times prawn culture, orchid growing, or some light manufacturing projects, it has found its economic soul—tourism and entertainment.
Nevertheless, if the province is to develop its tourism industry, however, it still needs to build good hotels offering efficient service. From my experiences, service is charming and friendly, if not altogether efficient, but then to the locals, everything is ok lang (everything fine). I hear that, however, that there is now a professionally run small hotel and a tourism project under construction. Called Magikland, the project aims to provide a unique experience to visitors from the region, with faci
lities including rides, costumed staff themed after personages in Negrense folklores, shops and restaurants—one to be called Cinco de Noviembre, after an event in 1898 that effectively ended Spanish control of the island.4
The Bantug-Palanca Family
The tale goes that in the last years of the 19th century, there were three young brothers who came to the Philippines to escape the famine raging in their province in Fukien, China. Instead of staying together, however, they decided to part ways in search of their fortune: one went to Manila, another to the Visayas, and the third to Mindanao. They never saw each other again, but whenever we meet any Palanca, or so my maternal grandmother said, we should know that they are our relatives.
My historically better-informed husband would later tell me about an allegedly rich and childless Spanish Peninsulare (full-bloodied Spaniard born in Europe) named Palanca who adopted his Chinese servant and bequethed the servant his entire wealth. This encouraged a number of succeeding poor Chinese immigrants to use “Palanca” when they took local names, perhaps hoping that some of the servant’s good fortune would rub off on them. (In order to mitigate widespread discrimination against them, many of these immigrants had agreed to be duly baptised as Catholics, taking Hispanised Filipino Christian names.)
Wherever the truth may lie, it seems that Lucio Palanca (né Chi Lian Chien) went to the Visayas and settled in Victorias, Negros Occidental where in due course he met a local Filipina (Filipino woman) with whom he might—or might not—have fallen in love. She was fifteen years old, the daughter of Alejandro Acuña Yap-Quiña, a landed Filipino-Chinese whose family fortune had been squandered by a gambling uncle. (Alejandro Acuña is immortalised in a bust displayed in the town plaza of Victorias in recognition of his donation of some 20 hectares of land, the current site of the town proper).
Lucio’s practice as a medicine man was financially lucrative, although being a Chinese immigrant, he was not accepted in the community. The marriage was one of convenience: respectability for cold cash. To add insult to injury, Lucio was by then an old man of thirty. My grandmother recounted how her father, with tears in his eyes, knelt and begged his daughter to accept this man twice her age for the sake of the family. She never regretted that arrangement, for Lucio would take care of her for the rest of his life. By the time he died, their grown children would take over Lucio’s job and my grandmother merrily spent much of the rest of her ninety-odd years playing cards and mah-jong (Chinese game of domino-like tiles) until she turned senile. Like a termite queen, her only role was to bear children, and that she managed quite well, churning out a dozen of them. My mother, Remedios, was the fourth eldest.
Remedios would have six children of her own. Unlike her mother, however, she was peripatetic and a natural-born leader. Even as a child she was extremely willful. One of her early recollections was sitting on the steps of their house being repeatedly hit by her older sister for not obeying orders. She had been told to go to market for some errand or other, but no matter the blows she refused to budge. (She and her family strongly believed, as indeed Filipinos at that time did, in Benjamin Franklin’s old adage: spare the rod, spoil the child.) My grandmother, upon seeing the cause of the commotion, sympathised with her, “Neneng, here is one centavo. Go to market now and obey your sister.” With this incentive, Mother happily stood up and skipped along to market.
Putting a high value on education, one of Remedios’ greatest disappointments in life was that she only completed 7th grade. Education, or more precisely, schooling, would always remain an issue in our family. One of the major reasons she was attracted to my father was her perception that he was smart, i.e. schooled. And so, regardless of the fact that he was “extremely dark”, certainly no asset to the fair-skin preference among Filipinos, she married him. On the other hand, when her grown children with advanced degrees contradicted her, she would say it was their schooling that made them crazy: this was apparently especially true of those with PhDs. She meant me, of course, as I was very much like her—independent-minded and rebellious.
On other occasions, she would brag, “If I only had your education, where would I be now? Me, with my bakya (wooden clogs) talking to the bank president!” Truth to tell, my mother was extremely achievement-orientated, possessing an innate sense of self-confidence, never intimidated by anyone, a quintessential career woman ahead of her times.
She admitted she was never interested in housekeeping or child rearing, later bragging that she didn’t know how her children turned out well, as she simply let them be. Nagdalalagko lang naman na sila (they just grew up on their own). I recall that whilst heading some twenty members of her extended household, she never had time to train any of her staff, who mostly came from the farms and were unschooled. Nor was she concerned about our meals. (She only admitted years later that she herself never learned how to cook). Consequently, our employed “cook” who loved fried food, would serve meals at any time she pleased, covering the cooling dishes, and setting the table with upside-down plates. She could serve “lunch” as early as 10am and any of us who passed by after then could flip open the plate and have our cold meal until she removed the dishes in mid or late afternoon when she would prepare to serve “dinner”. We were lucky when we could ask for fried eggs, which we ate with ketchup, or the usual canned food: Spam luncheon meat, Libby’s corned beef, or Vienna sausage. However, these were not always available, so we sometimes had to make do with, for example, condensed milk mixed with rice. We children survived through the tales narrated by our yaya: if you went to bed without supper, your spirit would wake up during the night. Hungry, it would go to the kitchen in search of food. Just as it would be scraping the last of the left over rice from the open pot, the cook who rose early in the morning would notice that the pot was left open, and would hasten to put the lid back. Then, the spirit would not be able to get back to its body when it would be time to wake up—and you would die!
Thus, for the longest time, I could not identify with my husband and son who were more particular about hot meals and gourmet food. I didn’t understand why they would be willing to spend a fortune going to fancy restaurants and ordering fancy meals. They would say I was missing half of my life, and I would answer, “Fortunate are those who have peasants’ palates because they are more easily satisfied.”
My entrepreneurial mother was always thinking of new ventures, either helping my father run his businesses, whether or not he welcomed her interventions, or jumping with both feet into her own half thought-out ideas. For example, when transistor radios first came into vogue, she bought a hundred pieces from Japan for a planned resale in the Philippines. There were also the knitted sweaters and electric-pleated skirts from Hong Kong. However, as she had a rather short attention span, these products were soon shunted aside when they didn’t sell readily.
These took place in the mid-1950s and the start of the 1960s when, according to the historian Angus Madison, the Philippine per capita income was among the top in East Asia. During these key years, the Philippines was also one of the region’s most progressive economies, second only to Japan.
My father, Abelardo, was, in many ways, the mirror image of my mother. She was a risk-taker, had boundless energy, and was impetuous—a bad decision, she would say, was better than no decision. He was idealistic, taciturn, and a bit timid. “Your father thought,” my mother would say, “I did.” She was the first to admit, however, that it was my father’s foresightedness which emboldened them both—she pushing him when he hesitated—to make high-risk decisions which paid off.
As he was a practising sugar technologist with an influential job in the commonwealth government’s Sugar Administration Office, my father’s in-laws trusted in his capabilities. They relied on him to play a major role in helping my mother, and therefore, on my grandfather’s deathbed, he assigned to my parents the management of the still sizeable property supporting twelve siblings and seven orphaned cousins and their families.
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br /> During the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, it was my father’s idea to turn much of his in-laws’ sugarcane plantations into rice fields, and the farm became the rice granary of the area. As soon as the emergency needs for food were assured, and the tides of war started to turn, he correctly anticipated the end of the war years, and the economic imperatives that would rise with it. The sugar mills would start operating again, he thought, but they would need canes to mill. Consequently, to the amusement of some friends, he started planting several hectares of sugarcane. Instead of waiting to harvest the mature canes at the end of twelve months, however, he harvested at the end of six months. He cut back the cane points and replanted them in ever-wider fields, thereby expanding his nursery. With the advent of peace and the re-opening of the mills, those with scarce cane points ready for planting made windfall profits. These profits were ploughed back into the haciendas so that by 1956, when he and my mother turned over their management to one of the brothers, he was fully prepared to start his own businesses.
Abelardo also anticipated two significant events of the early 1960s. One was the decontrol of the Philippine peso which was previously pegged to the US Dollar at 2PHP=1US$. This resulted in the de-facto depreciation of the Philippine currency. The other was the deteriorating relationship between the US and Cuba, culminating in the trade embargo of Cuban goods. My mother fully believed in his forecasts and prodded him to look for big haciendas for sale with large assumable loans and standing crops ready for harvesting. It helped matters that, whilst managing their extended family’s farm, they had developed good relations with the bank. Consequently, when the embargo finally came, Philippine export sugar became much in demand, and with the decontrol of the currency, my parents made PHP3.90 to every dollar earned from export prices whilst paying the local bank only PHP2.00.
When Turtles Come Home Page 3
