Leaving home

Parting indeed, can be such sweet sorrow. Even if you’re bidding goodbye to a building that has become run-down with age and the urban blight in Manila’s Port Area.

On 11/11, I bade goodbye to the building where The Philippine STAR began publication in July 1986. People in our office took group photos and selfies beginning Friday, Nov. 10. On Saturday we had a going-away merienda and more group photos and selfies.

Yesterday was our first day in our own new building in Parañaque. It’s a spiffy building, a leap of improvement from the old one where heavy street floods seeped into the ground floor, where we could hear rats scurrying in the ceiling, and where editors on night duty swore that they felt otherworldly presence.

All the founders of the newspaper as well as many of our editorial staff and other STAR employees have passed away, so no one could be sure who might be making his or her presence felt. We don’t know if they will follow us to our new office building.

I’m one of the handful of the original employees; I’ve spent over half of my life in The STAR. In those early years when I was a reporter, I called in stories from the field by telephone, or sent typewritten stories by fax if the machine was available. Until the early 1990s, we were still using typewriters in the newsroom and manually laying out each page.

On Saturday night as I drove home along Roxas Boulevard, I felt a pang of nostalgia as I realized that for the first time in my life, I was leaving the city of Manila for good. Even after I resettled outside Manila, the city where I was born and bred had always been my place of work, as reporter and later as editor.

I will miss Intramuros, Chinatown and the chaos of Divisoria, all just a drive of five to 10 minutes from our old office. I will miss Roxas Boulevard, even if the sea view and famed sunset are now obstructed by a fence and the seaside turned into an ugly parking lot for construction equipment.

Manila is a microcosm of the Philippines, which in the 1960s was second only to Japan as the most developed country in this part of Asia. In the 1960s, Manila was the Philippines’ center of economic and cultural activities and the national capital. But the city became complacent, happy with the status quo and believing it would always be number one, unable and unwilling either to undertake regular upgrading for sustained competitiveness or to preserve heritage sites.

Urban blight eventually overwhelmed the city, and neighboring cities and municipalities began overtaking Manila in terms of livability and, in some cases, economic output. At around this time I decided to leave the seamy neighborhoods in Tondo and Sta. Cruz where I grew up, to resettle in southern Metro Manila where there are still a lot of trees and the air is safe to breathe.

My residence is now much closer to our new office. I won’t miss the horrid traffic, the long daily drive to and from the office, the pollution and periodic deadly armed violence in Port Area.

But I always considered the city of Manila as home, and later my second home. Wherever I am, a part of me will never leave the city.