It may seem surprising that a small private college in northeastern Wisconsin – one set up by the Norbertine priests in 1898, when our own nation was a-borning – should have a Philippine Studies program. There are very few Filipinos (and, for that matter, other minorities, aside from American Indians) in this neck of the global woods, and aside from the fact that St. Norbert College is a Catholic institution, there’s little to connect us to this pretty but distinctly un-Filipino land, where the aspens grow tall and the ducks glide unmolested on the glassine river. But fortunately, strong personal contacts between some SNC professors and administrators and their counterparts at the University of the Philippines enabled an exchange program that’s entering its 10th year soon.
Sometimes these personal bonds work better and last longer than any kind of academic or logical argument you can advance. Much bigger American universities in places where significant Filipino communities exist have gone without Philippine Studies programs or even permanent courses on Philippine concerns. At SNC, on the other hand, Philippine Culture and Society is listed as PHLP 100 or HUM 282, described thus: "The course has four main areas: Philippine History, Philippine Culture Through Literature and the Arts, Philippine Politics and Economic Development, and Philippine Cultural and Physical Geography. Each of these four areas will be covered in a broad survey of Philippine culture and society, but the course sill be specially designed by each Visiting Exchange Professor from the University of the Philippines to take advantage of his or her area of expertise. Hence one of the four areas will predominate as the focus of each instance of the course. The focus will act as a lens through which to study the other three major areas. The course will commence with the history and physical geography of the Philippines as the background necessary to situate the discussion of the other areas. Fulfills General Education Area 7-Foreign Heritages Requirement."
Well before I left for the US last month, I knew that I was due to teach this four-unit course aside from another one on the American short story, and that I had to prepare for it with both comprehensiveness and specificity, the past and the present, in mind. Inevitably, in the great mad rush of things, I didn’t, thinking foolishly that I knew enough about the country and its people to be able to wing it with the barest sketch of a syllabus.
That didn’t happen, either. I flew into Green Bay – the airport nearest De Pere in time for new faculty orientation, and, despite being a full professor at UP, I felt like an instructor here all over again, learning about "writing across the curriculum," "community and prayer," and, portentously, "syllabus construction," which in these litigious United States means putting together a syllabus precise and detailed enough to be taken as a binding contract between teacher and student.
We also, of course, produce and present syllabi for our classes in UP, but we tend to take them more as general study guides than as ironclad pledges of performance. One business administration professor presented us with a 24-page, single-spaced document that prompted nervous laughter and a half-jesting question about whether it contained his readings as well; it didn’t. I knew I had my work cut out for me.
The weekend before classes, I plunged into the SNC library, desperately matching what I thought I knew with what I was sure I didn’t. And the shorter the weekend got, the clearer it became just what a bind I’d gotten myself into. It wasn’t even just a question of resources, like textbooks and films; the bigger question which I should’ve thought about was: What do I tell these young Americans about the Philippines? How do we want the world to know us?
As a practicing journalist and writer, you’d think the answers should be right there at your fingertips: solid facts and nuanced opinions on every aspect of Philippine society and politics. But academic inquiry demands objective context, and objective context takes time and care to set up – in other words, a broad range of readings in history, culture, economics, and politics. And beyond and beside my immediate academic mission lurked a desire to present our experience as positively as I could without sounding like the Department of Tourism.
At the end of the day – make that the end of the semester – I’d like my students to have learned this: that we Filipinos come from a big country (at 300,000 sq. km., about the same size as Germany) that has for too long thought of itself as being small; we pride ourselves in our love of freedom and in our democratic ways, but it’s hard to enjoy true freedom and democracy where very few families and individuals own and control so much. We are a tremendously gifted and resourceful people, peaceful and fun-loving; we can work and do wonders anywhere; but we need to do more for ourselves as a nation, and not just as individuals. We need leaders who can inspire us and whom we can trust; but so far our history has been one of betrayals and broken promises. We know the world a lot better than the world knows us; but sometimes we don’t know ourselves well enough.
That last thought makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be holding classes like PHLP 100 for our own young pupils – and for older folks as well. Of course we do something like it in Social Studies and half a dozen other assorted subjects, but hardly ever in an integrative fashion – in a way, for example, that can connect (as Pope Paul VI, I think it was, put it) the universal desire for peace to the fundamental need for justice. And I’ve met one too many consuls who knew everything about the nightlife in his privileged posting, but scarcely a fact about Philippine art and culture beyond showbiz gossip. I remember when, during martial law, no government employee could go abroad without taking a crash course on Philippine geography, history, and politics under the much-maligned Presidential Center for Strategic Studies; surely it was part of the propaganda effort, but at least you didn’t leave empty-headed, and you could always use your own intelligence to filter what you heard.
So I began planning for about 50 meetings over 15 weeks, starting with the materials at hand. Despite the absence of an introductory textbook to Philippine history, culture, and society – an omission my colleagues and I should soon address – I was elated to discover a trove of books on the Philippines in the stacks, including the lifesaving, ten-volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (Manila: Asia Publishing, 1998), which I just happened to have been the executive editor of, and quickly secured permission from the publishers to use for my course (just selected essays, the full plain text being 1,700 pages long). Over the semester, my students – all 33 of them, including two Filipino-Americans – will journey with me through our creation myths, our 110 languages, our many revolts and revolutions, our love of rice, adobo, and sinigang, our love-hate relationship with America, our Christmas and Lent, Islam in the Philippines, Pinoy sports and pop entertainment, and the Filipino diaspora. I’ll supplement the essays with stories and poems by Amador Daguio, Angela Manalang Gloria, Juan Gatbonton, Ricardo de Ungria, and Nick Carbo, among others, and films on Filipino architecture, cinema, and indigenous peoples.
It’s a lot to do in one semester, and I just know I won’t even get to touch half of everything I’d like to cover, but it does help to map out a detailed syllabus – just a five-page one, in my case, a kind of difficult love letter to a temporarily distant Inang Bayan.