When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  A bit of cloud across the sun we didn’t even recognise was our little experience in Geneva. The three of us girls “decided” we loved Europe so much that we were going to study there, and accordingly, talked to the admissions office at the University of Geneva. The admissions officer was apologetic: she would be very happy to provide our blonde, blue-eyed American classmate with a form, but unfortunately, because of our race, my remaining Filipino classmate and I would not be able to apply at the university. This was my first experience of racism. As I think back I can’t help but be amazed at how official policies on racial discrimination have changed in my lifetime, albeit women were not allowed to vote in at least one of the Swiss cantons until the 1990s.

  Returning to the Philippines, I stopped wanting to be an actress. Instead I wished to be a tourist guide, so that I could travel the world. Failing that, I would be a flight stewardess. I leafed through the papers and saw that the minimum height for flight stewardesses was five-foot-two. I was half an inch too short and wondered whether they would waive that requirement for me.

  New York City 1969–76

  However, it was not until 1969, when I accompanied my paraplegic brother for medical treatment to New York City, and where I was made to understand I would live there with him, that I sleepwalked into America—the land of my dreams. Having spent most of my years in a boarding school, I had until this point led an extremely protected life. My brother’s doctors, however, soon concluded they could not do anything more for him and suggested he return home and get on with his life. By then, I was already enrolled non-matriculated at graduate school in Columbia University, so I stayed behind—an innocent lost in the big city with little money and no friends.

  I was crossing “no-no” areas like Morningside Park in Harlem, not so much because I was bold but simply because I was ignorant. It was not surprising that I later experienced being held up at gun point by five men whilst shopping in broad daylight and was kept in a small, dark store-room for three hours, together with the store manager and the sales girl! This appalling experience stayed with me for a long time. Thereafter, I would cross the street if I thought someone was behind me, would not enter the lift if a lone man was also there, and would jump each time I heard the telephone ring at night, afraid that, as in 1969, it might be bad news about my family.

  Nonetheless, New York City was where I grew up psychologically. More than academic skills, I learned life skills. With a tight budget, I learned to be frugal, to work hard even in jobs which were tedious and which required long hours. I have proud memories of having been a “Kelly’s Girl”. The agency, which specialised in providing temporary clerical help, would notify you when they had an availability for temping work—usually for companies which required a couple of weeks’ extra help. It would be up to you if you wished to accept it. Pay would be between US$2.25—2.75 per hour net, after the agency would have deducted its own fees.

  One summer, I worked for US$2.50 per hour at Chase Manhattan Bank in Wall Street, shunted in a small, window-less room, stamping FOR FOREIGN DEPARTMENT USE ONLY, eight hours a day, five days a week, for several weeks. To get to downtown Wall Street took me well more than an hour by bus from uptown Amsterdam Avenue where I stayed. After that assignment, I accepted a job in a company which sold anniversary medallions. The work entailed typing and licking envelops for a mail shot to be targeted at the listings of the New York City telephone directory.

  Some friends commented that I couldn’t see beyond the tip of my nose, as they thought I could have had better-paying part-time work. But these were the jobs I particularly remember with great pride. I met interesting people I would not have befriended otherwise, including a sad Hungarian refugee who shared with me some of his experiences during the 1956 revolution. I also applied for jobs for which others would think me unqualified. Searching for part-time clerical jobs, I said I could type sixty words a minute when I couldn’t. I naturally flunked the test. But, acting on a tip, I memorised the paragraph I was supposed to copy, practised it, and returned as a new applicant a couple of days later. I was hired! These experiences fostered in me a spirit of “can-do”, a confidence in my “innate abilities”, a willingness to take risks, and resilience in the face of failure. When I was fired from a summer job in a law firm for incompetence, I simply pushed ahead to look for similar work, my self-esteem undented. I reasoned that I could always learn on the job. I am now proud to say I can still type sixty words per minute. Finally, I was awarded a research assistantship at Columbia University in a resource centre for equal educational opportunities for minority groups, with some free tuition and a stipend. These experiences taught me to obsess over self-reliance and to scorn handouts.

  Having earned a Master’s degree from Columbia University, I began searching for more “interesting” programmes, transferring to New York University to register in a newly established PhD course called Media Ecology. I had heard that the department had a tie-up with the Children’s Television Workshop in New York City, and I was hoping that with my psychology and research backgrounds, I could work for the organisation. It produced Sesame Street, and the grapevine had it that with the success of the show, the producers were thinking of coming up with another one called Electric Company. As with Sesame Street, the directors would then be looking not only for artists for their production department but also for educational psychologists for their research department. I was hoping I could work for the research department, perhaps to determine such age-related learning variables as attention span, or retention capabilities of children at identified developmental stages. I am now happy that didn’t actually happen because, firstly, I had always been a messy researcher, and secondly, I don’t think I could have sat on my behind all day doing serious research work.

  Whilst in America, I once visited my sister and brother-in-law, and audited a summer course at Stanford University where he was studying. He took me to a striptease show in nearby Palo Alto to show me Vicky Drake at work. Vicky Drake ran for the presidency of the student union at Stanford in 1968 and almost won: she only lost after a two-person run-off. Posing nude in her campaign posters, her platform was 38-22-36. This was of course at the height of the unpopular Vietnam War when the American youth were also at war with the establishment. Still, I thought back to this experience and asked myself where else would I have found such silly sublimation of rebellion—a lesson that sometimes we should not take ourselves too seriously. This was what I thought I admired about America.

  I didn’t know whether it was the addiction to Hollywood films which predisposed me to largely American values, or whether it was as I once read—it is usually our first foreign encounter, the first foreign culture we experience, which leads us to love that foreign land. No wonder many governments favour scholarships for the young, those first timers leaving their home countries. It was probably a combination of both factors that influenced me. Thus I was not alone in being more American than my American friends, just as I would later meet people who were more English than the English. We seem to strive to be more than the people we try to imitate.

  By the end of 1976, I had been in New York City for more than seven years and had become a fully acculturated stereotypical New Yorker: impatient, direct, assertive, spirited, individualistic. At twenty-nine, I learned to walk even faster than many native New Yorkers, fought and shouted louder, and won most arguments. I met challenges head-on and wasn’t intimidated by anyone. When my parents came to pick me up after I completed my PhD programme, they were surprised at my transformation, from the withdrawn adolescent into a brash and aggressive adult.6

  However, nursing a broken heart after having been rejected by an American boyfriend, and full of the idealism of youth, I decided to go back to Manila right after graduation, to try and become a big frog, albeit in a smaller pond.

  Manila 1977–1988

  Just a few months after my return to the country I had a taste of what it must feel like to be th
at big frog. I was invited to join the Marcos entourage for a state visit to Japan. I witnessed first hand some of the accoutrements of power. In a motorcade riding the tall “Press” van with the police sirens blaring, I stared down at lower vehicles (SUVs were not common then) as they automatically parted to the sides of the road, much as the Red Sea must have parted in order to allow Moses and his people through. It was a heady experience.

  Through my sister and brother-in-law, who had become high ranking officials in the Marcos administration, I was invited to join as head of the Research Division—a new division formed to accommodate me at the communications centre directly reporting to the Office of the President. My first assignment was to negotiate with Sony Corporation the possibility of their putting up a processing centre for Sony Betamax machines in the Philippines. This was supposedly for distribution to the Southeast Asian market. I was working with an equally young Chinese-Filipino mathematician who had, up until that point, taught at Tulane University in the US but was recalled home by his elderly parents to care for them in their old age, and who returned to the Philippines under the Balik-Scientist (return-scientist) government programme. We were both promised responsible positions and high pay relative to local recruits. The idea was to entice Filipino expats with PhDs to return home—prestige badges for our respective government offices. My friend and I found ourselves Ma’am’s people (Mrs. Marcos’s), as opposed to Sir’s people (Mr. Marcos’s).

  As our Tokyo trip was to prove, responsibilities supposedly assigned to us were far beyond the capabilities our experience should have warranted, or rather, our lack of experience. Thus, nothing much of note happened during our visit, although I later wondered how the senior Sony officials in a Japanese corporate environment—all much older men—must have felt upon seeing and “negotiating” with us two kids, and I a woman at that.

  I didn’t last long at the Centre. In the six months or so that I was there, I struggled for paper clips but had no trouble hiring twenty project staff. A big culture shock came when a general meeting was called one Monday morning to inquire about the mysterious disappearance of a gigantic generator during the weekend. It was alright for a backpack camera here and there to go missing, conceded our boss, but an entire generator requiring a six-by-six lorry? I compared this scenario to that of my boyfriend in New York reprimanding me for copying his two-page personal CV at my office machine without having paid for it—my office charged their clients ten cents per page. Where does honesty end and practicality begin? Where do we draw the line if indeed a line must be drawn?

  What caused my departure from government service, however, were two events: the first being when I found out that my staff’s budgeted salaries were allegedly “temporarily” borrowed by Mrs. Marcos for one of her shopping expeditions to Manhattan. I was angry because I remembered a friend from the law firm where I had worked at several years before, coming back from lunch and telling me she had passed by the famous Tiffany jewellery store on 5th Avenue. The store had closed its doors “to accommodate your First Lady shopping inside. I saw a woman walking beside her, carrying a small suitcase…” I was left with having to break the news to my new hires whilst I fought it out with Administration as to who should get a share of the remaining funds.

  One Monday morning soon after that, the second incident occurred. During the preceding weekend, and without my knowledge, my assistant was called to conduct a poll on the popularity of Benigno Aquino, Marcos’s most vocal critic at that time, and to report their so-called “findings” to the Office of the President, compliments of my boss. Obviously, I was not trusted to give the “right” results. Even as I left my job, I remained consultant-at-large to the government for another year or so, but I found it impossible to work on a stable project. Along with my Filipino-Chinese mathematician friend, we two misfits floated and flitted around different government offices. We were asked here and there to start large nationwide projects—everything was writ large then—needed yesterday but forgotten the day after we were assigned to work on them. What we didn’t know until later was that the government had the habit of giving several parties the same tasks as though it were some kind of a bidding process. In the meantime, it was the person who was seen who was heard, and that lucky person would have gotten all the resources they would have needed, that is, until these resources were withdrawn to perhaps fund another completely different activity.

  We were expected to crowd around Mrs. Marcos, perhaps fetching her from the airport when she returned from one of her trips, all the while elbowing each other to stand where she could see us so that she could be reminded of our existence. Likewise, we had to keep our ears firmly to the ground so we too could attend whatever social functions she might have graced with her presence. Again, we would have to struggle our way in to be as close to her side as possible. Anyone who was around became part of her entourage. On one occasion, my mathematician friend almost burst his bladder whilst he sat at the dinner table with Mrs. Marcos as she held court, listening to her many anecdotes and waiting for her to leave for her next engagement before he could dare go to the bathroom.

  It was with a heavy heart that I realised that, all my youthful idealism notwithstanding, I wouldn’t ever be able to help effect change from within the government—even if it was only to simplify the procedures for requisitioning paper clips. I simply didn’t have the requisite temperament and skills.

  I therefore worked briefly at the South and Southeast Asia regional office of Bank of America, at that time located in Manila. However, they soon transferred to Hong Kong, whilst I decided to teach at one of the leading business schools in Manila, where I stayed for the next seven years. I was attracted by the greater autonomy the school promised, and by my love of teaching, but I found the culture of my new place of employment another microcosm of the many ills in Philippine society. It was there where I finally lost the remnants of my idealism.

  On 7th of February 1986, a snap presidential election was held in the Philippines. President Marcos had by then governed the country for more than twenty years, a large part of it under martial law. However, under pressure from his ally, the U.S., and in order to silence his many critics, he confidently thought he could handily “win” another election a full year before his current term was due to expire. It was a political miscalculation on his part.

  He ran against the widow of his rival Benigno Aquino who, it was generally believed, was killed under Marcos’s or his wife’s orders. Because Marcos was known to have rigged past elections, ordinary citizens volunteered to join a watchdog called the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL). Together with other observers, both foreign and local, NAMFREL volunteers watched the polling stations. I was one of those volunteers. We were instructed specifically to be mindful of “goons” and to guard the ballot boxes. Voting in my precinct was uneventful, but I was later instructed by NAMFREL’s district leader to take home two locked ballot boxes and guard them for the night. Naively, I followed her instructions, telling my foreign husband when I got home to be careful not to open the sealed boxes. He went straight into panic mode, running here and there, not knowing where to hide the boxes, muttering all the time that his family had diplomatic immunity.

  On our way to City Hall for canvassing the next morning, my companion and I were mobbed by the crowd, supposedly to protect us and the ballot boxes. It was only when I couldn’t breathe that I started to panic. Thankfully, a couple of more sensible souls spread their arms between us and the crowd, shouting, “Padaanin ninyo, padaanin ninyo!” (Let them pass, let them pass.) The crowd then parted until we reached the Canvassing Room.7

  Events were in a haze the week after. Thirty-five official tabulators walked out of the office of the Commission on Elections in protest. Mostly women, they were all in their twenties. Their mass protest was instigated by their discovery that their figures did not tally with the ones being officially announced. This was the final straw that trigge
red a mass demonstration of more than a million people marching on the streets of Manila chanting, “Basta ya, tama na” (stop now, enough already). Carried by this groundswell, I too played my small part. The marchers were encouraged by the confetti of shredded newspapers thrown down to us from the offices above the streets of Makati, as though we were in a ticker-tape parade.

  Many of my friends remembered the next few days—22nd to 25th of February 1986—as a mixture of fun and fear. In the afternoons, people enjoyed the spirit of camaraderie as volunteers brought the protesters sandwiches and drinks, and families brought their children along. When the nights came, however, and the revelers had gone home, the anxieties would start to build up. You could smell the pungent odour of burnt tyres, and you would hear constant rumours of tanks coming your way. My fellow volunteers and I were instructed to lie down on the streets in front of a television station taken over by the rebels, in order to guard it against these expected tanks. Bravery was never one of my virtues and needless to say, I spent my first and only night catastrophising. Rumours were rife. Our group leader would bark, “Nuns first, women and children next …” Only to be then informed it was a false alarm.

  To be fair to President Marcos, I later heard—I didn’t know whether or not this was true—that he specifically gave the order not to shoot at the protesters. At any rate, many soldiers and pilots brought their equipment with them as they joined the rebels. Ever since, Filipinos have called that week “The Miracle at EDSA”. What was truly a miracle was that no trigger-happy soldier panicked enough to shoot at the crowd—an oft-repeated occurrence in similar events elsewhere. Perhaps it was also partly because the air of festivity, together with the sight of nuns with their rosary beads, provided a non-threatening atmosphere.