New Year’s Day salad

Here’s a salad of a column for New Year’s Day.

With joy and hope, not with fear and trepidation, we must approach the coming year. Doomsday soothsayers have sent people to the edge. We are desperately in search of epiphanies. The crunch has not yet hit in a big, big way, but the way the pessimistic forecasters talk, it’s as if an asteroid is hurtling in the direction of planet Earth.

Hey, it’s New Year’s Day and we must laugh a little, sing a little, hope in a big way. See, despite the so-called economic crunch there was no stopping text messages from crisscrossing space and reaching the farthest corners of the globe. Emailed greetings, animated and with music, funny and serious, one-liners and in so many MBs—they all came as surely as Christmas came all aglow.

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With bold steps we welcome 2009. And because we shouldn’t be too serious and worried on the first day of the year, here is something for the wise and wishful. Write the following on your cell phone:

“Dis s a puzzle sent only 2 wise persons lyk u. After solving it, send the same puzzle to someone who needs to smile. Solve the puzzle on your cell phone: R+CAT+HOSE-RAT+SUN-CHOSE+MOON+I-NOON+GOAL+T-GOAT-U+E.”

Here’s one more to bewilder you. I found this on the Internet. The math wizards among us would know the why of this.

This math test could tell with 100% accuracy who your favorite person is. Please do not look at the list of choices before you’ve done the computation. Here goes:

Pick a favorite number from 1 to 9.
Now multiply that number with 3.
Add 3.
Again multiply with 3.
You will get a two-digit number. Add the two digits. The sum would be the number on the choice list that corresponds to your favorite person.

1. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

2. Osama Bin Laden

3. Oprah Winfrey

4. Joe de Venecia

5. Barak Obama

6. Joma Sison

7. Nelson Mandela

8. Hillary Clinton

9. Me

10. Your parish priest/pastor/guru/teacher

A smiley for you! Yes, you. You should be your own Person of the Year, not in an egoistic way, but because you alone—with the help of those who matter, God among them—can make the most changes in your life and make things happen.

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But there must be more to all that is shaking up the world, there must be more beyond all that—the economic crisis, the wars, the violence, the hunger, the anger. We shouldn’t be swallowed up in despair. So hold on just a little longer to the afterglow of the Christmas season, savor just a little longer the Christmas sweetness that settled in your soul. We need all the peace inside us to see and be convinced that there is more to all that is happening.

It is light versus dark—literally—even as the new year is just beginning.

It had been bad piece of news after another if that is all we want to see. We cannot allow the bad news to erase the dreamy haze of the Christmas season. It shouldn’t snuff out the blaze that ushers in the New Year.

We must conserve the little peace we have inside us, harness whatever energy we have gained (not lost) during the holidays (not that it could be converted into electricity) for what is ahead. The elections are just a year away. Some look forward to it with hope for deliverance from this vale of tears, others with dread. The exercise could lead us further to the edge....

But what the heck. Let us welcome the new year with great expectation. Let us look for manifestations of hope.

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Jobs—this is what is worrying so many people all over the world. Batches of overseas Filipino workers are beginning to come home even before their work contracts have expired because their employers are closing shop. Finding work, earning from work, finding meaning in work are what occupy most minds these days.

I just pulled out Matthew Fox’s autographed book “The Reinvention of Work”. Written in the 1990s, it should address both those who live to work and those who work to live. If this book were printed during the Industrial Revolution, the world might have proceeded differently.

The book asks: “How many of us can really say that our work life is in balance with our personal life—that our values and desires are reflected in our daily vocation, that our personal life and professional life are integrated, or that we find satisfaction, not a crushing defeat of the spirit, in our workday existence? According to most polls and reports, very few of us do.”

Fox discusses work versus job: “Today close to one billion human beings are out of work…At the same time, in the whole industrial world, a large number of persons are overworked, they are, in the words of 13th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart, ‘worked’ instead of working, giving rise to the new addiction of workaholism.”

I cannot help thinking of many Filipinos in America who are holding down several jobs in order to give their families what they think is the best of America, meaning a nice home and consumer goods galore, a good education for their children.

Fox proposes a kind of work spirituality rooted in the interconnectedness of things created. There’s got to be a model other than the post-industrial one. The universe is a great work in itself, a great symphony, and when we find ourselves attuned to it and working in tune with it are we indeed fulfilled.

I wish you all a fulfilling year ahead. May the divine cosmic symphony permeate your soul.

And heaven and nature sing

Who would care to read the papers on Christmas Day? Still, write we must even while the un-Christmas noise out there threatens to drown out the silence in our souls. We hang on to the silent music deep down and refuse to be overwhelmed by the glitter and the excess.

Somewhere there, is Christmas. (I took some time for me to decide where to place that comma.) Those who wrote to say that my column on Christmas last week resonated with them, ay salamat. Here are some random thoughts that might fill those little spaces in your heart, in your memories, in your thoughts.

One of my favorite Christmas sounds is the sound of trumpets blaring to the tune of “and heaven and nature sing” from the carol “Joy to the World”. It just seems to fling heaven’s gates open and send me off to a cosmic Christmas that is inclusive, all-embracing, creation-centered.



Trumpets can suit all moods and moments. The grandness of Handel’s “Messiah”, the languorous final call of “Taps”, the headiness of Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, the soothing jazz sounds at nightfall—they all happen, thanks partly to the trumpets. But the explosion of trumpets with “and heaven and nature sing” always makes me soar in a different way.

It’s not just the sound. It is also the words. How many of us know all the four stanzas of “Joy to the World”? Too bad the Filipino version is not a translation and there is no mention of heaven and nature singing.

I surfed and learned that the lyrics of “Joy to the World” were written in 1719 by Isaac Watts (1674-1948), an Englishman and an ordained pastor. From Wikipedia: “The tune is the piec¬ing to¬ge¬ther of themes in Han¬del’s (1685-1759) Mes¬si¬ah found in the chor¬us and in the in¬stru¬ment¬al int¬er¬ludes in ‘Lift up your heads’ and the in¬tro¬duct¬ion and in¬ter¬ludes of the re¬ci¬ta¬tive ‘Com¬fort ye.’”

But the inspiration for the lyrics came from Psalm 98. This psalm must be familiar among religious because it is part of the Divine Office (daily prayers). It is also among the responsorial psalms recited at Mass. For those who have no time to peruse the Bible, here it is:

Sing a new song to the Lord, who has done marvelous deeds,
Whose right hand and holy arm have won the victory.
The Lord has made his victory known; has revealed his triumph for the nations to see,
Has remembered faithful love toward the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.
Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth; break into song, sing praise.
Sing praise to the Lord with the hard, with the harp and melodious song.
With trumpets and the sound of the horn shout with joy to the King, the Lord.
Let the sea and what fills it resound, the world and those who dwell there.
Let the rivers clap their hands, the mountains shout with them for joy,
Before the Lord who comes, who comes to govern the earth,
To govern the world with justice and the people with fairness.

And heaven and nature sing! And nature could even defy nature as the prophet Isaiah said in his all-time favorite Christmas prophecy and ardent wish for our time and generation (Isaiah 11:6-9):

Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.


There shall be no harm, or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as water covers the sea.

And I cannot help but think of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a canonized Catholic saint, Benedictine abbess, preacher, writer, musician, mystic, scholar, scientist, environmentalist, healer. She was also a communicator of wisdom and knowledge.

For almost 800 years Hildegard was virtually unknown but in the 1980s her writings and songs began to emerge and interest in and awareness of her significance began to grow.

She coined the phrase “greening power (viriditas) and was first to view the universe as a cosmic egg. She offered a scintillating insight into the cosmos and its symphonic beauty.

Hildegard sings to us even today, and these lines from her are definitely a joy to the world as she sings of her vision of heaven and nature singing. How Christmas indeed.

O life-giving greenness of God’s hand,/ with which he has planted an orchard,/ You rise resplendent into the highest heavens,/ like a towering pillar./ You are glorious in God’s work…”


She hears God speaking to her. “I am the breeze that nurtures all things green./ I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits./ I am the rain coming from the dew/ that causes the grasses to laugh/ with the joy of life.”

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May I ask for your prayers for Margie Quimpo-Espino, fellow journalist and friend who edits a business section in the Inquirer. Margie suffered an aneurysm while on a media-related trip in India early this month.
She recently underwent an aneurysm-coiling procedure in a hospital in New Delhi and is recovering. Her husband Chet is there with her, praying day and night. Theirs is a very close-knit family. Prayers from countless friends and colleagues sustain them both during this difficult journey of faith in this season of joy and togetherness.

Please, Lord, bless Margie with the gift of healing.

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May you be joyful and triumphant in you quests this Christmas and the coming year. May heaven and nature sing in your heart.

Christmas-crossing the poverty line

I know people who are trying to have an “alternative Christmas” by doing away with the excessive external trimmings and carousing that daunt those who can’t keep up, by making quiet efforts to really reach out to those who are in pain or are extremely needy, not just during the Christmas season but beyond it.

But why call it “alternative” when that is what Christmas is supposed to be--a giving season? Not a mindless exchange-gifts season but a giving season. Not just among family, friends, colleagues and pesky gift collectors at the gate but with families and individuals who need a real boost in order to cross the poverty line.

What better gift than an opportunity for one family or one person to step over and cross the poverty line? It may come in the form of a little capital, a scholarship (you need not be the one to pay for it, but you could search for it), a new skill, a new road, a new market. Those with some power and influence can easily make things happen. How about that?

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Christmas Day is a week away and I make alive again the memory of a wondrous Christmas. One of the happiest Christmases I experienced as an adult was spent in a special place with very special people, in an atmosphere of simplicity and prayer. I remember the feel of the mountain air, the soft scent of the pine, and the soothing hum of the universe that wafted into my soul.

The December flowers were in full bloom, the hills were green and throbbing with life. The stars were out the night we gathered around the manger to sing hymns, and the sun rose gently from behind the hills on Christmas morning. The quiet and the peace overwhelmed me in a way I could not explain. I was filled with awe and wonderment.

I had experienced community--and communion. This is indeed Christmas, I thought then, as I pondered the beauty of its simplicity, as I gazed at the people I had come to love and cherish until today.

But that was long ago and far away and there would not be another Christmas like that again. That is, in the same place and circumstance and with the same people. But the memory lives on.

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But Christmases are not always pleasant for many.

If I were an extra-terrestrial, I would wonder why many earthlings seem troubled and harassed during the season they call Christmas, the season when millions all over the world commemorate the birth of the Child Jesus-- considered redeemer, messiah, Son of God, founder of Christianity, etcetera. Why do they celebrate the birth of Jesus in so many un-Jesus ways?

As an E.T. I would wonder why many people become suicidal during this season, why the sad feel saddest, the poor feel poorest, the down and out are tempted to find a bloody way out of this world.

Why do many act like fools, scurrying and hurrying until they drop dead because of exhaustion? Why do many people who call themselves Christians collect, extort, solicit and harass strangers for gifts? It is nowhere near the simplicity that surrounded the birth of the man they call Jesus.

And so it has come to pass...that Christmas is now a most cruel season. It excludes more than it includes. This is the time people feel worse than worst when they are at their worst. Meaning, the season aggravates whatever it is they are already suffering from. The poor feel poorest, the hungry feel hungriest, the lonely feel loneliest, the sad feel saddest, the abandoned feel like abandoning the world. Wounds bleed. Ask the rejected, the betrayed, the bereaved.

And I can’t help thinking now of those whose lives have recently been visited by violence and disasters.

This is because the Christmas season is supposed to be a season of joy and peace and plenty (?) and togetherness and sharing and reaching out. You don’t have one or all of the above during Christmas--you’re out, eat the dust. And so in trying to make it all happen so that Christmas would turn out to be “happy”, people pay the price with their health and sanity. Many suffer from the “Christmas syndrome”, which is something like a heart attack but which is not. It should be called the “Christmas rush syndrome” to differentiate it from the Christmas blues of the depressives and those who suffer from the winter-induced seasonal affective disorder in snow countries.

The media help dictate the ingredients of a happy Christmas. They conjure up images of what it should be--tables groaning with food, good looks, well-lit homes, gifts galore, complete families. If that is what it is, a happy Christmas seems to be beyond the reach of many.

It is partly their fault that they feel morose when they can’t have all the ingredients that they believe should be there for a Christmas to be really joyful.

And so you hear people sigh in the wake of the Christmas season, “Hay, nakaraos din.” Like, by the skin of their teeth, they survived. It is a hurdle for those who think they could hardly measure up. Nakaraos means they survived the shopping rush in the malls and tiangges, the traffic, preparing for the guests and the reunions, making both ends meet and most of all, the emptiness. They even survived the horrendous, distracted crowd in church and the priest’s boring homilies.

TV’s “Survivor” should do a season on Christmas.

Where has the real Christmas gone? Time and again I have always wanted to see a “Christmas Movement” that would encourage people to go back to where Christmas all began, to unlock the simplicity that it stood for and the joy that included all. The churches have been overtaken by the malls, they have not succeeded in drawing people back to the spirit of where it all began and inspiring them to live it. You just have to find the real Christmas yourself.

Claimants 1081's prize: So near, so far

Philippine Daily Inquirer/FEATUREs/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

MANILA, Philippines—They have won but where’s the prize? It is a breath away. So near and yet so far.

Despite victory in the courts, some 10,000 victims of human rights violations during the Ferdinand E. Marcos dictatorship remain empty-handed.

Four administrations after Marcos have not helped in dispensing justice to the victims and have instead stood in the way. For the final hurdle, lawmakers have only to sign the Human Rights Compensation Bill, but why the long delay?

“The Republic of the Philippines has succeeded in blocking the Marcos victims from the partial enforcement of a judgment they had won in US courts,” said former party-list Rep. Loretta Ann Rosales.

Rosales is chair of Claimants 1081, an organization of victims of abuses under the dictatorship. The figure referred to Marcos’ martial law proclamation.

Herself a victim-claimant, she was detained twice during the martial law years, tortured and sexually molested.

Tortured and waiting

Dead, dying, aging, sickly, poor. Many had waited for so long until time overcame them. Many of them are now senior citizens.

Hilda Narciso, 63, was mistakenly arrested and detained, tortured and raped repeatedly by soldiers in Davao City in 1983. Her case was nationally and internationally known.

Inday Olayer, 60, was detained in 1981 along with her husband Joseph Olayer. Soldiers put bullets between her fingers and pressed them hard in order to exact information from her. “For two years I could not use my hands and sign my name in front of authorities,” she recalls. “I was so traumatized.”

Her husband also took the blows. His head was dunked in a toilet bowl, he was made to lie on blocks of ice, electrocuted and was hit in the balls.

Peter Villaseñor, 50, a peasant organizer, was arrested in Bataan in 1982. He remembers: “I was tortured for nine days and nine nights. I was stripped naked and given the water torture. I was made to lie down and a wet cloth was placed over my face. They hung a bucket of water above my face and let the water drip on my face whenever I refused to answer. I would gasp for air, like I was drowning.”

Daisy Valerio, 58, and two sons, are among the families under Claimants 1081. Her husband, former priest Nilo Valerio, was killed by the military in Benguet in 1985. His body was never recovered.

Class action suit

Two months after Marcos fled to Hawaii in 1986, victims of human rights violations filed a class action suit against Marcos.

The move was based on a 200-year-old US Alien Tort Law that provides victims of despotic leaders the right to seek redress against these leaders in US courts as long as these leaders reside in US territory and are found guilty by US courts.

The suit was filed in the Hawaii Federal District Court on behalf of 9,539 victims of martial rule. In 1995, the victims won a final judgment from the court and were awarded $1.9 billion comprising $1.2 billion in exemplary damages and $700 million in compensatory damages.

In 1997, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled to transfer $540 million in Marcos Swiss dummy deposits. These were to be placed in an escrow account in the Philippines and released on two conditions:

• That the Philippine government must obtain a final judgment in its own courts entitling it to the money.

• The government should compensate the victims who obtained the US judgment.

P472-M docket fee

To seek enforcement of the judgment in Philippine courts, the claimants filed a case in a Makati district court in 1997. They were shocked when they were asked to pay an exorbitant docket fee of P472 million.

They asked the Supreme Court to rule against this filing fee. Sadly, the tribunal sat on it for six years. The court moved only when the claimants elevated the matter to the United Nations Committee on Civil and Political Rights.

After six years, the court decided on a mere P410 filing fee instead of the P472 million. It was a long, long wait.

The UN Human Rights Committee issued a decision declaring the long wait “unreasonable, resulting in a violation of the authors’ rights.”

In 2007, the claimants’ counsel wrote the Philippine solicitor general attaching the UN decision and asking how the solicitor general could assist the victims in enforcing their judgment in Philippine courts. Again, a long delay.

Arelma case

Meanwhile, after nine appeals, the Hawaii court conducted a trial of a complaint against Merrill Lynch for allegedly holding Marcos assets in the name of Panamanian corporation Arelma Inc. In 2006, the court awarded the Arelma assets of $35 million to the claimants.

The Hawaii court ruled that while the $35-million Arelma assets would scarcely satisfy the $1.9 billion judgment, it had a symbolic significance.

But in 2006, the court granted the Presidential Commission on Good Government’s (PCGG) motion for a stay of the distribution of the $35 million to the victims.

The Supreme Court would later rule that neither the PCGG nor the Philippine republic could have access to the $35 million in Arelma. The Sandiganbayan must first prove that this is part of the forfeiture of a case which was finally ruled by the Supreme Court as ill-gotten.

The Arelma money, Rosales argues, cannot be considered a part of the Swiss deposits. It could go straight to the claimants, but the Philippine government has put so many blocks along the way.

The last hurdle is the passing of Human Rights Compensation Bill. Part of the Marcos ill-gotten wealth, or $1.9 billion, should go to the claimants.

Not all the recovered ill-gotten wealth should go to agrarian reform and therefore the agrarian reform law has to be amended.

The Philippine Senate has passed the bill. The House of Representatives has stalled and is sitting on it. The long wait is far from over.

‘Droits de l'homme’: World’s best kept secret

Yesterday was Human Rights Day, also the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The fervor for HR should not last for only one day. In the coming days, let us act, commemorate, celebrate. The Inquirer is starting a series today.

If, as an Amnesty International official once said, the UDHR is one of the world's best kept secrets, then human rights defenders are indeed an endangered species. “Best kept secret” because despite the 60-year-old declaration, rights are continuously being violated all over the world by those who either are not in on the “secret” or choose to pretend they know nothing about it.

I was at the 50th anniversary celebration in Paris 10 years ago in 1998. Allow me to wax nostalgic.

There we were, at the grand Palais de Chaillot, together with some 500 people from all over the world, attending the Human Rights Defenders Summit. It was there that the UDHR was unanimously adopted on a chilly December day in 1948.

There we were, at the same historic place, near the banks of the River Seine, across from the Eiffel Tower. Same time, same place, same near-zero degrees weather as it was in 1948. But the mood was far from somber. There was our 1998 generation, a generation that did not see the horrors of a world war but saw horrors of a different kind.

The biggies were there. Nobel Peace Prize winners: Tibet's Dalai Lama, Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu, Argentina's Adolfo Esquievel, East Timor's Jose Ramos Horta and Bishop Ximenes Belo. Even Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi came out bigger than life on the video screen to deliver her message.

UN secretary general Kofi Annan and France's president Jacques Chirac delivered messages. Annan later received 10 million pledges for human rights collected by summit main convenor Amnesty International (itself a Nobel winner).

On the fun side there were the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Alanis Morisette, Axelle Red, Peter Gabriel and other groups rocking for droits de l'homme (human rights) at the huge Bercy stadium. The ever smiling Dalai Lama was the concert's curtain raiser and exhorter of the youthful audience who gave him a thunderous applause.

But most of all, there were the 500 or so not-so-famous human rights defenders who had long been deeply and quietly immersed amongst their people, who had suffered and paid the price for raising their voices to defend the voiceless. Mothers and widows, women's rights advocates, so many lawyers, a few journalists, NGO workers, academicians, social workers, grassroots leaders.

The Palais de Chaillot, venue of the Human Rights Defenders Summit was bursting with people of different colors, nationalities, faiths, professions and painful experiences.

(I have kept Air France's in-flight magazine which had, for its cover, the logo of the 50th anniversary and devoted many pages of its December issue to human rights. It's a collector's item that should be among the exhibits in 2048.)

The 50th anniversary gathering was actually a summit called “The Human Rights Defenders Summit” not “The Human Rights Victims Summit.”

But why were the defenders, and not the victims, the ones coming together? But who is victim, who is defender? Defenders end up as victims too. And many victims have risen up to become defenders themselves. I like the word defender because it projects energy and strength. Continuously projecting victimhood is projecting defeat and weakness.

What is a human rights defender? It is “any person, well-known or not, who acts alone, in a group or in an association to promote, implement, apply and conform with all the fundamental rights guaranteed under the UN Declaration of Human Rights.”

One of the aims of the summit then was “to defend the human rights defenders because, despite the efforts of the UN and governments over the last 50 years, the protection and support for defenders is still weak.” Defend the defenders, because their situation has never been as grave as it is today, draw attention to their isolation and the danger they face every day.

Taken up were six urgent topics, human rights in relation to: impunity, armed conflict, extreme poverty, women's rights, racism, protection and promotion of children's rights and racism, xenophobia and religious intolerance.

Ten years later, I ask, where are we now? I think of the scores of Filipino journalists who’ve been murdered in the past few years.

If you read the account by David Pitts on how the UN Declaration was drafted and signed 60 years ago, you'd be amazed that it saw the light of day. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee that included, among others, Charles Malik of Lebanon, P.C. Chang of China, John Humphrey of Canada and Rene Cassin of France. Chang had wanted something that “incorporate(d) the ideas of Confucius as well as Thomas Aquinas.”

UN member states at that time could not easily form a consensus on the rights of women and racial minorities, religious liberty, the point at which human life began, the extent to which freedom of speech should be protected, the right to dissent and economic and social rights. We're still at it, aren't we?

And the most serious disagreements, Pitts wrote, stemmed from the entirely different concepts of the West and the Soviet bloc of such human rights principles as freedom and democracy.

The Declaration, by the way, has no force of law, but it has inspired so many legally binding international covenants and agreements. It has survived. We must celebrate, and we must worker harder. I hope the next 40 years will be much better than the 60 that have passed.

Filipinos in Obama’s America

On the night of Nov. 4 when Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the United States, journalist and book author Benjamin “Boying” Pimentel took his eldest son to downtown Oakland where thousands of people were waiting for the officials results. They found people celebrating with cheers and tears. After more than 200 years, Americans had chosen a person of color to lead them forward.

“Pareng Barack: Filipinos in Obama’s America”, (Anvil) Pimentel’s latest book, is about Obama’s amazing rise to the presidency and, more importantly, about how Filipinos responded to his campaign and victory. “Often with excitement, sometimes with fear and dread,” Pimentel writes.

“Pareng Barack” is also about the Filipino journey in America, “how it has intersected, sometimes collided, with those of other communities, and how it has taken a dramatic turn as America enters a new era of anxiety and hope.”



This book came out a few weeks after Obama was elected but it didn’t take just a few weeks for Pimentel to write it. He had been pounding the streets and watching the groundswell. With or without Obama’s win or defeat this book could still stand alone to show those intersections and collisions that Pimentel describes. But Obama’s win provides Pimentel a starting point, and for Filipinos who chose America to be their home, it also offers landmarks on a cultural and historical landscape, that is, from there to here. Also a timeline from then to now.

This gem of a book is easy to read. It is an engaging journalistic read because there are real human faces, voices, names and places in it as only a seasoned journalist knows the importance of if one is to show proof of one’s point or analysis. This book is not the result of a survey but of a journalist’s walking the streets where stories unfold, where lives are lived.

“For Filipinos in America, it is a time of celebration and pride. For others, of concern, even fear.” This is how Pimentel describes the aftermath of the Nov. 4 elections that saw Democrat Obama win and Republican John McCain lose.

“Nevada had become a battleground state and Fran joined other Filipinos in the ground war to rally support for Obana. This meant going from house to house…It was while knocking on doors on one part of Reno that he came across one Pinoy…A Philippine flag was displayed in his garage…The young man was a registered Republican, and had never voted Democrat. But he said he was voting for Obama. ‘He speaks to everyone, and seems that he can reach across the aisle,’ he told Fran. ‘Obama is different from the rest.’

“But then there was a woman in her 30s whom Fran met on a Philippine Airlines flight during a short visit to the Philippines before the election. She had lived in the United States for about eight years, had been married, and had just become an American citizen…The woman had just mailed in her ballot—she voted for John McCain…Now that her daughters were about to join her in the United States, she wanted a ‘strong leader.’ But eventually she also admitted to Fran, she simply could not vote for a black man. ‘I just don’t trust them. Di ba sila yung laging nanggugulo? Aren’t they troublemakers? They’re so violent.’”

In the chapter “American in Living Color” Pimentel writes about how Nobel Prize winner for literature, Toni Morrison, a black woman, noted that many newcomers readily embraced American society’s long-held prejudices against blacks. He also shares what Asian American civil rights attorney Bill Lee told him: “Immigrant communities generally tend not to know the history and to buy into the biases and prejudices of the dominant group. Unfortunately, becoming American often means buying into the prejudices. They want to identify upward. They don’t want to identify with those at the bottom.”

Something like that fable about the fly that alights on a carabao and suddenly thinks he’s a carabao. (It’s better told in Filipino.)

But it’s not that way all the time. Pimentel digs into the “racial wedge” that Asian Americans occupy, that uncomfortable in-between mezzanine position where they are expected to be loyal to their superiors and demanding on those below.

Pimentel’s book also deals with other racial and ethnic groups as well. He writes, “Obama’s victory is significant for another important reason. With the steady growth of Latino and Asian communities, there will no longer be a racial or ethnic majority in the United States in less than 50 years. A biracial leader with a deep personal experience of life in the Third World, Obama, many hope, could prepare the nation for that coming change.”

“Lessons in Patriotism and Forgiveness” is a poignant chapter. Here Pimentel explores his experience as a Filipino whose father endured suffering during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, and then reflects on his own encounter with Japanese-Americans who suffered ostracism and internment in the U.S.

In “From the I-Hotel to Powell Street” Pimentel revisits the bygone milieu of Carlos Bulosan (“America is in the Heart”) and enters into the world of the aging WW II Filipino veterans. Powell St. in San Francisco is where these veterans spend their winter years. I have been there myself and it’s really a tearjerker.

Toward the end Pimentel writes about his family and waxes sentimental. He muses: “In the end there were more people who were ready to move on, to break ground, to reimagine the United States, to redefine America. It will be Obama’s face and voice that my sons will see and hear on television and on the Internet over the next four years, maybe longer. It will be Pareng Barack who will play a critical role in defining my sons’ future in America.”