(Part 1)
A week ago, seven of us members of Ateneo de Manila HS Class ‘68/College ‘72 went to Hong Kong with our wives to visit our classmate, Dr. Eli Remolona, who is retiring this October after serving for six years as Representative for the Asia-Pacific Region of the Bank of International Settlements based in that city.
Who would have thought that Eli, economics major, editor of Heights, the college literary magazine, and part-time activist in the heady days of the First Quarter Storm would represent that agency? He moved on. Not without struggling to keep on track and be relevant.
For those who have not heard of BIS, it is considered the “Bank of Central Banks”—the institution which monitors and ensures the health of the world’s financial system gleaned through the work and performance of each country’s central bank. Representing it in the world’s most dynamic economic zone is a dream, a prized position by any reckoning. That it is held for the first time by a Filipino and our classmate at that made us proud. He really moved on, like those of our generation, to take our places in the world. Some to greater heights like Eli, others to zones unknown. Still others to the great beyond remembered only for their deeds. But that is going ahead of our story.
Eli, like most of us barely out of high school, engaged the times, in those days of the FQS struggle. He dreamed as we all did of changing the world, of building a new nation decades after thedevastation of the Second World War. We dreamed of a country freed from the clutches of an entrenched oligarchy which is wedded to America and its allies at the height of the Cold War. We all yearned to build an independent, democratic, progressive and inclusive country and were in search of the best way to do that. There were discussion groups, immersions and street protests as many students opted to “learn from the masses.” Not dictate their way to a better life. Eli, like all of us, made our choices. And we moved on.
For sometime, the Ateneo, like all exclusive schools, was in a world of its own. Far from the maddening crowd, promoting another learning system. The elite—burgis as the radicals termed it—away from the streets into the classrooms and the usual activity centers. In time, triggered by the excesses of the times and of its own crowd (remember the Lopez anniversary celebrations with champagne flowing from the fountain of the clan’s mansion along Roxas Boulevard?) and egged by the seminal “Down from the Hill” manifesto urging the Jesuits and their students to go down from their ivory tower, the Ateneo introduced its own offering with Lakasdiwa, a movement for change led by then scholastic Ed Garcia. A good number joined the Garcia led movement. Others opted for more radical, faster ways to “change the world.”
Indeed, this trip was like no other. At once nostalgic and hopeful.
We even had a sense of foreboding as we reminisced about our years together. How we have been, how life has treated us and what kind of country we have helped build. We had time to look back, to remember the loss of innocence and the impact of the realities on the ground after stepping out of the Loyola campus. Sadly, we also came to regret the loss of young lives, classmates all, like Ferdie Arceo, Bill Begg, Sonny Hizon and Jun Celestial, among others, who opted early on to take our long-held dream of building a new nation to new, more perilous heights quite apart from those taken by most of us on this trip.
Those were times of great challenges and expectations. It was a time ripe with questions about what we wanted to be and what kind of nation we would like to have. It was a time of hard choices. There were those who took to the streets, the barricades and quite a number, like the heroes of our class, who took up arms to express indignation over the widespread poverty and the growing class divide.
Yes, we looked back and talked about our experiences during that period. It was a time of upheaval, of cries for change, of serious introspection as the country moved through uncertain times. Nobody was exempt from the pulls of contending forces and initiatives. We heaved a sigh of relief for surviving those years, finished school, started careers and families and retired to reminisce and share. We were definitely saddened by the loss of friends and classmates who had opted to take the call for change to the highest levels and paid with their lives. We prayed for them as we now pray for all of us left to pick up the pieces. We moved on, had careers and families, retired and retiring but somehow, through our own ways and in this, the fourth quarter of our lives, still hunger to move forward and help build the nation of our dreams.
Are we cursing the Marcoses and their allies for what we have become? Are we indignant that Governor Imee Marcos has called on their critics and the country as a whole to move on—out of the martial law, Yellow vs Red, them-vs-us syndrome—and into the future and the challenges and opportunities the wider world has to offer? Do we want to be caught in that time trap narrative where the real Filipino nation only came to being in 1986 after the ouster of the Marcos regime and the all too clean, democratic and inclusive Aquino regime came in? No, Sir. All of us on this trip held no such grudges. We did not make our choices based on the personalities of that time. We made our choices based on what we believed then as the way to make ourselves whole and our country a better place to live in. We struggled. We raised our fists against the Marcos regime and the ruling class it represented. We did not hold it against that regime the loss of our classmates’ lives or the detention of quite a number of others. We challenged, we cursed the expulsion of some of us from the Ateneo. We nursed our wounds from the street clashes with security forces. We fought and lost. But we moved on.
In fact, of the seven classmates on this trip, three were deep in the national democratic struggle. Lito Bauza, an Atenean through and through was also with Eli editing the Heights, which they Filipinized no end. He ended up, organizing with now National Artists Bien Lumbera and Virgilio Almario and renowned culturati Nic Tiongson and Badong Bernal, the first ever plays, writings and musicals exposing the povert, squalor and the ruins left by the country’s yawning class divide. Lito is now a dual citizen, a successful entrepreneur living in Canada six months of the year. He moved on and wants to arrange more plays, write more books and arrange exchanges between the younger Fil-Canadians and their counterparts in the Philippines the better to learn the more about the real Philippines and appreciate the struggles and triumphs not just the divisions engendered by the one sided Edsa narrative. (To be continued)