I rarely go to reunions, especially school reunions, but this one was not quite a reunion, rather a tribute and retirement send off for the school director – our principal or hao tiu. Ellen Palanca served as director of the Confucius Institute at the Ateneo for 18 years, since its establishment in the Philippines in 2006, first at the Ateneo Loyola Heights campus, later adding one at the Ateneo business school in Salcedo Village, Makati.
Confucius Institutes were set up all over the world – the first one was in Seoul in 2004 and currently there are about 530 such institutes in over a hundred countries on six continents – as part of China’s “soft power” initiative. In the Philippines, there are four Confucius Institutes – at the Ateneo, the Bulacan State University, Angeles University and the University of the Philippines.
CIs are sort of like the cultural initiatives of other countries – Instituto Cervantes of Spain, the UK’s British Council, Goethe House of Germany and our own Sentro Rizal (I think we have about 30 so far). CIs though are all attached to and based in schools rather than stand-alone centers. The Chinese government reportedly spends $10 billion a year to fund these institutes. Aside from a local director – like Dr. Palanca and now Chris Garcia – CIs have a co-director sent over from China (currently it’s Dr. Huang Linjun).
CIs have as their main objective “linguistic training and promotion of Chinese culture.” At the Ateneo centers they offer Chinese language courses (including business Chinese, a very popular class) of various levels, including classes for kids. For the culture aspect they have film showings (we watched the restored version of the 1987 CCP-produced film “Hari sa Hari” about the visit of Sultan Paduka Batara to the Ming Dynasty Emperor Zhu Di, starring Vic Vargas and Rosemarie Sonora, directed by the late National Artist for Film Eddie Romero), painting and calligraphy classes, lessons on the gu zheng (Chinese zither) and even a cooking class or two.
My barkada and I enrolled in the Chinese history class. We learned about Genghis and Kublai Khan, the classic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and other topics which I can no longer recall. We took this class for I think four semesters; I hesitate to use the term “study” because that wasn’t quite what we did – we religiously attended the weekly class but we were less than model students, never did readings assigned to us (our teachers eventually gave up giving assigned readings) and always took a long (really long) recess (our class president Mary even brought a bell just to call recess). While we were invited as a class to the send-off event (I presume more as friends of Dr. Palanca than as alumni), I won’t fault the center if they do not publicly or officially count us as their alumni, as we certainly do not qualify as graduates! We were, I must admit, more confused than Confucius.
But I guess we did absorb a thing or two. I at least greatly increased my admiration for Zhuge Liang, a statesman and strategist and one of the main characters of the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” (others are Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Cao Cao). Aside from his signature feathered fan (my friend Judy even got me one), Zhuge Liang was known as the Sleeping Dragon because of his tranquil lifestyle and supposed propensity for taking naps – certainly my kind of hero!
In fact, some years ago on a visit to Shanghai, I met an artist in the Soong Ching Ling Memorial Residence who claimed to be a 44th generation descendant of Zhuge Liang. So I bought a painting of his of two fish, and he wrote a seven-character couplet including the names of my brothers and me. It hangs in my living room as our “family fish” artwork.
Despite low absorptive capacity of our lessons, we were inspired to take a trip to northwestern China to explore the Silk Road, from Urumqi in Xinjiang to Xi’an in Shaanxi, through Turpan (there’s a winery and vineyard there, where we were introduced to what we assumed was the aptly named horse nipple grape) and Dunhuang (the Mogao caves are amazing) and Jiayuguan, the westernmost end of the Great Wall, and even the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts (a moving reminder of how small we really are in the vast expanse of our world).
Culture can be a potent and constructive – rather than destructive – weapon to bring people together, or at least to bridge whatever differences they may have. From language to dance to food to music to stories to clothes to sports, learning about other people’s lives and lifestyles can smooth the rough edges of relationships. Despite maritime and geopolitical tensions running high – perhaps especially because of it – this is a good time for all of us, Filipinos and Chinese, to learn about and take delight in each other’s culture, over a cup of barako or oolong tea perhaps.