Sunday, October 26, 2025
9:00 AM |
I Like Serendipity
Alas, carefully laid plans had changed. I was no longer Baguio-bound after I touched down in Manila from Frankfurt, after attending the Frankfurter Buchmesse. The itinerary had been clear: no rest in the capital after arrival in NAIA, straight on to a bus station in Pasay to take me to the mountains for a book event—my first ever in the City of Pines in more than 15 years.
But, as life often reminds me, certainty is a fragile illusion. The event was canceled at the last minute, leaving me stranded in Manila for three days before my scheduled flight back home to Dumaguete. I could not change the booking, since it was the National Book Development Board who did that for me as part of my grant as a delegate to the Frankfurter Buchmesse. I was also left scrambling to find a hotel, which proved to be a futile exercise: nothing decent within my budget could be had in the days I was set to be in Manila. I was, of course, also disappointed over the fact that my dream of a return to Baguio was suddenly for naught—for I always felt like that city lived inside a poem, and I had been craving its air after the gray, efficient cold of Europe. I also missed writer friends who lived there, and I was eager to see them once more.
But I had also learned, with time and years, that derailment is not always a disaster. Sometimes, it can be the beginning of something else.
When I arrived in Manila on Tuesday, near midnight, “home” was a word that felt more like a placeholder than a destination. I got out of NAIA past midnight, bleary-eyed and body aching after the long anxietry-ridden wait at the luggage carousel. I had thanked the heavens that I had not yet booked a hotel in Baguio. Friends from high school came to the rescue, offering me their place in Bonifacio Global City. I remember standing under the shower, washing away the travel fatigue, feeling grateful to be grounded even in an unplanned stopover. There was some comfort in the unplanned, a quiet relief that the universe, despite its odd sense of humor, still managed to catch me when things fell apart. Plus: did I even think about what I would do lugging my heavy luggage around to Baguio?
So what do I do in this unexpected layover of four days?
The next day unfolded like a gentle surprise. I had been an Anvil Publishing author since 2012, with two books to my name that they have published—Heartbreak and Magic in 2012 and Don’t Tell Anyone in 2017—yet this was the first time I had ever stepped into their offices in Mandaluyong. Finally, I could put faces to the names that had lived for years in my inbox: managing editor R. Jordan P. Santos, marketing maven Page Jose, and senior editor Arianne Velasquez. Page, Arianne, and I had already spent a week together in Frankfurt—“bonded by trauma,” as we liked to joke—and now, back in Manila, we found comfort in the familiarity of shared exhaustion and laughter.
That evening, upon the invitation of Anvil publisher Xandra Ramos, I joined the Anvil team for a special screening of Jerold Tarog’s Quezon at the Metropolitan Theater. Jericho Rosales, with whom I exchanged some pleasantries and shook hands with, played the titular president, and I was struck by the film’s almost farcical tone—fitting, I thought, for a story about the roots of Philippine patronage politics. “We really had no choice to have the kind of government we have,” I told the interviewer who asked us about our reactions after the screening. “From the very beginning, we were already wading in the mud.” Afterward, our publisher treated all us to a late-night dinner at The Aristocrat, joined by fellow Anvil authors Yvette Tan and Danton Remoto. The conversations ran deep into the night—about Frankfurt, about writing, about life. It was one of those rare, luminous evenings when fatigue dissolved into fellowship, and I remembered why I chose this life of words in the first place.
The following day, October 23, should have found me already in Baguio, talking to readers in a book event, but instead I was in Quezon City, meeting with Vibal Publishing’s managing editor, Gelo Lopez, to discuss a book project that had been nearly a year in the making. The meeting brimmed with creative energy, filled with the kind of spirited exchange that made the long delays and rewrites worth it. Had the Baguio event not been canceled, I would have missed this moment of quiet progress—a reminder that detours could be productive, too.
I spent my last day in Manila mostly indoors, catching up on work and correspondence, the city humming faintly beyond the windows of my borrowed apartment. Looking back, I realized that the entire episode—the canceled trip, the scramble for lodging, the chance reunions—had unfolded like an orchestrated accident, each piece falling into place as if by divine mischief.
This year itself had been relentless—a wild pendulum of highs and lows, a roller coaster I could neither predict nor pause. But as I turned fifty last August, I have found myself embracing these unpredictable turns with something like grace. I wanted to be more fearless, more grateful, less anxious about the things beyond control. Serendipity, I realized, often arrived disguised as inconvenience.
What seemed at first like a disruption became an alignment: a canceled bus ride turned into reconnections with friends; a missed mountain event became a reunion with my publishers; an unexpected pause opened space for new beginnings. Perhaps that was the quiet lesson of the week—that the world had its own way of rearranging our plans toward small, necessary miracles. In the end, what I thought was lost time became found time, and the story I had meant to tell in Baguio began to write itself, instead, in Manila.
Labels: books, life, manila, travel
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Sunday, October 04, 2015
7:48 AM |
The Trust of Public Spaces
I was reading this
fascinating article in
The Atlantic Monthly where writer Selena Hoy muses over a cultural observation: that Japanese kids—often as young as six years old—are such a common sight on Japanese mass transit, and posits that “even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves, [and the] reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.”
Hoy continues: “It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight. A popular television show called
Hajimete no Otsukai, or
My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.”
I think this still bears some resemblance to small town life in the Philippines. I can still remember my own childhood in Dumaguete where I was sent to do various errands (mostly having to do with buying stuff from the local sari-sari store) by my parents and a whole barracks full of elder brothers—five of them, in fact. But I think it is a slowly disappearing part of family culture among Filipinos, with our increasing urbanization and the plethora of maids we have around to do our bidding.
I think of the bigger cities we have in the Philippines, something comparable to Tokyo, and I admit to a kind of unease. Because to be honest, I’ve always felt safer in Tokyo in a way I can never feel safe in Manila, for example. I’ve lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and this barest fact about life in that Japanese city has always been apparent to me. Even with the problem of language (and the fact that Tokyo is a megalopolis), I know I can go from point A to point B without too much trouble. In Manila, even when I take a taxi, my guard is up, waaaay up, it is quite stressful—and I can only conclude with this question: Will I ever feel safe navigating around my own country’s capital? The answer seems to be, given the realities. What’s up with that?
Hoy explains why the opposite seems to be the fact of life in Japan: “Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that [Japanese] children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.”
Perhaps that’s what’s lacking with Filipinos
in the Philippines [and I make that as a clear distinction, because we’re totally different creatures abroad]:
we don’t take responsibility for our shared public spaces. And there are many instances of this neglect.
We use our sidewalks as garbage bins. (There are no actual garbage bins, for one thing.) We don’t make it a point to keep to the right in public escalators, to give space for those who may be in a hurry. We barely line up for anything, preferring to cluster around and using
palakasan as key to facilitate things. We leave the tables in the restaurants we frequent with remains of meals that resemble a sty. We snarl our traffic with devil-may-care driving selfishness. And we make excuses for these by justifying to ourselves that others are not following rules—so why should we?
There are even bigger instances of our misuse of public spaces. We build ugly infrastructure and buildings without any thought to whether the immediate community needs it. (That overpass near Silliman High School is a glaring example). Or whether it blends well with the environment. (That strange rectangular contraption cum billboard along the Rizal Boulevard near the
tempurahan which is apparently meant to invite the framing of photos of passing tourists—as if it’s a perfectly good idea for anyone to want to do that). We also consistently elect public officials who sleepwalk over issues of the public good (like public transit).
And lastly, we treat our public parks and monuments like afterthoughts. We have been luckier in this respect in Dumaguete—but elsewhere, it has been a glaring problem. The artist Paulo Alcarazen once posted on Facebook a series of photos of the monument along Roxas Boulevard in Manila dedicated to our OFWs. Each photo in a set of three was taken within a few years of each other. Taken all at once, the series presents a sad study in devolution and heartbreak: the monument over time becomes surrounded by suspicious development, with the greenery that initially surrounded it over time becoming an ugly sea of concrete. And the statues comprising the monument themselves have become compromised. The original monument consisted of five figures in bronze—a mother, an elder daughter, a younger son, and their dog in a gesture of excited welcome to a returning OFW father. But over the years, some of the figures have totally disappeared (perhaps shanghaied by bakal boys), and what has remained of the monument now is just the figures of the mother and the daughter, both sans limbs.
There is a famous explication about public safety that is popularly called the “broken windows theory.” It is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism as markers for crime and anti-social behavior. In that theory, a hypothetical community where the buildings have perpetually neglected broken windows is said to invite a rise in criminality and anti-social behavior in that community.
And we have so many “broken windows” in Dumaguete.
The trash on our streets.
The chaos of our traffic.
The devaluation of our public parks.
The uneven sidewalks running along our city streets.
And we keep complaining why our city is no longer the “city of gentle people” of yore? Why there are unsolved killings in our midst? Why our youths turn to drugs? Why there is a pervasive lack of public love for our local heritage?
Responsibility for public spaces and public safety.
Everything connects.
Labels: art and culture, cleanliness, culture, issues, life, magazines, manila, public safety, sculpture, tokyo, urban planning
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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