"Living With the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation" by Pacita-Pestano-Jacinto

Welcome to Students from the University of The Philippines-

Living With the Enemy:   A Diary of the Japanese Occupation by Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto (2002, 246 pages-Anvil Publishing-Manila)

Living With the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation deserves to be a world wide best seller with a million copies sold.   Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto was 25 years old when the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1941.   She had recently graduated from college and married a doctor from a very good family.   She had a lovely house in a beautiful part of Manila.    One day she heard on the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.    Then they began to bomb the Philippines and shortly after their troops entered the northern provinces of the Philippines.    The cruelty of the Japanese invading force was beyond the human.    The Philippines was a very peaceful country.   If ever there was unprovoked attack on an innocent country this was it.   The rationale of the Japanese was that they were "liberating" the Philippines from the control of the Americans.  

Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto does a simply marvelous job in detailing the changes that come for the people of Manila as the Japanese take over.    All citizens are required to bow  when they pass in front of a Japanese.   When they fail to bow with the proper attitude of humility, they are slapped in the face.   Soon the Japanese begin to take over the best houses for their troops, then they begin to take all the horses, and as time went on they took even the healthy dogs to be trained as attack animals.   Some of the residents of Manila reacted in heroic ways, some became collaborators.    If you read this book,  you will not be so quick to judge those who cooperated with the Japanese as in many cases it was the only way to keep their families alive.    Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto tells us how the prices of common items, even the staple rice, go way up.    She shows what it is like to live in a climate of fear.   Through out the years (the diary is from December 10, 1942 to Feb. 24, 1945) the thing that keeps the people going is the belief that the Americans will return, the faith in the promise of Douglas MacArthur to return.    The Japanese propaganda ministry works over time to try to get the Filipino people to see themselves as part of a new Asian partnership  run by the Japanese for purely altruistic reasons.   The Filipinos have to act as if they agreed with this or face torture or worse.    Government employees are sent to giant rallies where they scream in joy over the speeches of the Japanese.    Venal politicians emerge to be puppet rulers but there are also great and courageous leaders.

Some of the diary is the day to day life of the family.    Some is a detailing of the activities of the Japanese and their extreme cruelties.    Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto writes in a simple beautiful style of a person who may have never heard when she wrote this a native speaker of English.   Her family is lucky in that the Japanese respect doctors and they also need Filipino doctors to tend their wounded.    We get to see how people try to make the best of their lives.   We see a simple house boy grow into a hero.   The goodness, the faith in God, and the family bonds of the Filipino people comes through wonderfully in this book.    Japanese are depicted as inhuman monsters and one can hardly blame Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto  for that.   I knew how the diary would end, of course, and I knew Pacita Pesttano-Jacinto survives the war but it was still very exciting and somehow even suspenseful to await the return of the Americans.    The sadness parts of the diary are near the end.   As the Americans begin to take back Manila and the Japanese know they will lose they make it their goal to kill all of the 500,000 residents of Manila.   They begin to machine gun people at random, they have snipers throughout the city shooting people for no reason other than blood lust.  

There are many poignant moments in the diary.   I reacted with true sorrow when I read of a 16 year old Filipino girl who was impregnated during a group rape by Japanese soldiers.   Even the counsel of her priests and supportive family cannot stop her from suicide.   I had my wife read the entry from October 15, 1944 (she is from Zambales in northern Luzon one of the most brutalized areas of the Philippines at the time of the invasion ).

The streets are full of starving people who swarm the gates of the houses insistently, desperately begging for rice, for a little soup, for crumbs, for anything.   Even during the air raids, while planes fly overhead and bombs shake the earth, this starving army of beggars patrol the streets dragging themselves and their starved bodies from door to door, unaware of possible death from the skies, aware only of the pain of the hunger gnawing at their entrails.

My wife was so effected by this passage she could not read on in the diary past this one entry.   Here is an entry from Feb 8, 1945 (near the end for the Japanese in Manila):

Americans themselves say nothing will remain of our beloved city.   The Japanese have gone on an orgy of savage burning...The Japanese cornered have turned on 500,000 civilians.  The American soldier says "I am used to deaths and killing but my flesh creeps when I remember what I have seen".  He said the acrid smell of burning flesh rises from high in the winds, that the streets are littered with he dead.

This maybe difficult to read but here is what the mother of a six year old boy experienced as they ran from the fires being set by the Japanese (they forced the citizens to remain in the buildings when  they set them on fire):

Then from the shadows of a fallen wall, they saw a figure detach itself.  The woman must have seen it too.   They heard her scream in terror and run.   But she was too late.   As she fell, they saw the Japanese soldier run forward and with his bayonet, strike the child upwards, lifting him from the ground, implanted like meat on a butcher's knife

.Living With the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation  is a very honest diary and shows great emotional and political intelligence.   Anyone interested in the history of the Philippines in World War II would like this book, I think, and learn from it.  I know I did.   It will be hard for anyone out side of the Philippines to get a copy.  

Everyday there are fewer people  left with living memories of World War II.   I hope anyone who has a family member or a friend with such memories will take the time to hear their stories as they will all be gone soon.   So far I have posted on two other books by Filipino authors on the world war II experience.   I recommend   Living with the Enemy:   A Diary of the Japanese Occupation with no reservations or qualms at all.   I know it will never be on the N Y Times best seller list but it deserves to be.

Mel u

"Songs of Ourselves: Writings by Filipino Women" by Elizabeth Manlapaz

Songs of Ourselves:  Writings by Filipino Women edited and with an introduction by Elizabeth Manlapaz, 1994, Anvil Publishing, 391 pages-

Before I talk about this collection of  writings from various genres by Filipino women I want to quote this poem from the collection (written in the 1930s by woman from Manila, name unknown):

They took away the language of my blood,

                        Giving me one “more widely understood”,

                        Ah, could I speak the language of my blood,

                        I, too, would free the poetry in me,

                       

                        These words I speak are out of pitch with ME!

                        That other voice? . . . Cease longing to be free!

                       

                        Forever shalt thou cry, a muted god:

                        “Could I but speak the language of my blood!”

One of my goals this year is to to spot light some lesser known quality books by Filipino writers.   I have for the last couple of months read several books that have motivated me to reflect on the effects of colonialism on speech and society.    Two notable examples were Indiana by George Sand which is set in the French colony of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean (in the 1830s) and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys set in Jamaica in very nearly the same time frame.   Both detail the massive impact of colonialism.   Some times the effect  is as brutal as slavery and some times it lingers on  in insidious ways that may slip under our conscious radar.

Songs of Ourselves:   Writings by Filipino Women is a wonderful collection of writings of Filipino women, selected by Edna Manlapaz.   It is a mixed collection of poems, essays, memoirs and short stories.   I have been reading it for the last few months a bit at a time.   Edna Manlapaz had a very productive and distinguished career as a professor of English and Filipino Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University (the highest regarded university in the country in terms of academic excellence).   She is considered the first academic in the Philippines to make a serious study of issues related to women of the Philippines.   In this post I want to focus on loss of language as a consequence of colonialism as this is the main topic of this book.

When the Spanish took control of the Philippines in 1865 to 1871 they found 100s of languages spoken by the residents.    They found religions that were completely alien to them.    They found no sense among the people of the islands that they were one people.  Also, they found none of the vast mineral wealth they found in Latin America.   The Spanish could not really directly govern the area as almost none of their people spoke any of the local languages.   They could not really rule the country through the people whose land they had colonized as the people themselves only had limited ability to speak to each other.   The solution was to use the priests to select intelligent (and of course one must say "docile and well behaved") young men to learn Spanish.   This was done throughout the Philippines and these men became the puppet rulers of the people.   Of course they used their positions to enrich themselves and their families.   The Spanish looked upon all local languages with contempt and this attitude became part of the mind set of the Filipinos in power.   The Spanish educated only elite class men in their language, by and large.   (There are many cases of Catholic Priests throughout the Spanish colonial period devoting their whole existence to helping those who came to their churches.)    The Spanish did not migrate to the Philippines to near the extent they did Latin America as the   land did not have, as said earlier, huge mineral resources to draw colonists.    Given that women in Spanish Philippines were not trained in Spanish (some learned it through picking it up and the very wealthy arranged in home tutors) they could not have any part in running the country as the Spanish could not communicate directly with them.    The women  of the colonies were, of course, subject to the same kind of abuses from their colonizers as any other place.   As Prof. Manlapaz explains to us, when the Americans took control of the country in 1898 a very important change took place for Filipino women.   The Americans mandated that all instructions in the schools be in English and they required all girls of school age attend school, not just the boys.    This opened up huge avenues for the women of the time.    A woman could go to law school and become wealthy on her own now.   A woman could learn to speak as an equal in terms of linguistic skills (and in many cases actually better than the Americans sent to the Philippines as most were poorly educated) with the rulers of the country.    There was a price to pay for this.   The people of the Philippines lost respect for their own languages and their culture.    The poems, essays, and stories in this collection explain the profound effect this had on the people of the Philippines.   The Spanish took from them their religion and the Americans took from them their language.

I almost do not want to say this but I think the articles and poems in Prof. Manlapaz's collection help  explain why there are so few really world class novels by Filipino writers since 1900.      Prof. Manlapaz says it is because when the Filipinos lost their languages they lost they lost the deepest part of their consciousness from which great literature emerges.    Now their is an economic disincentive to write in  Tagalog (the dominant language besides English) as any work written in this language will have no market outside the country and most residents of the Philippines want their  children to excel in English as that is a must for success so they will not buy books in Tagalog for their children.

Another very useful and interesting feature of this book is the detailed biographies that Prof. Manlapaz has included for each contributor.   Like in the prior collection of writings I reviewed Pinay Auto-Biographical Narratives all of the contributors are from middle or elite class backgrounds.   A large number of them are academics and a lot   have advanced  degrees from American Universities, one is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and several are extensively published poets.   Normally I only read Great Poets like Yeats, Whitman, and others.   I do not normally read small poems from unknown to me writers.   I am very glad I made an exception for the poems Prof Manlapaz has shared with us.   I will let Luisa Igloria have the last words on this:

I have learned your speech,

fair stranger; for you

………..I have covered

My breasts and hidden,

Among the folds of my surrendered

Inheritance, the beads

I have worn since girlhood.

………………………………

In the night,

When I am alone at last,

I lie uncorseted

Upon the iron bed,

Composing my lost beads

Over my chest, dreaming back

Each flecked and opalescent

Color, crooning their names,

Along with mine: 

Binaay, Binaay.

Luisa Igloria has an excellent web page that details her poems related to colonialism

This book along with Pinay Auto-biographical Narratives will give you a very good look at the thoughts of over 100 Filipino women on a wide range of topics.    Both books also list suggestions for further reading.  

I am including this book with my reading for these challenge

Women Unbound (nonfiction selection)
POC Challenge

I hope others with an interest in the Philippines can find time to join in this project with one book a year-if you know anyone who might be interested please direct them to this post-thanks to all 

"Indiana" by George Sand

Indiana  by George Sand (1832, Translated from French by Sylvia Raphael, 271 pages, Oxford World Classics, with introduction by Naomi Schor)

Indiana was George Sand's (Amandine Aurore Dupin)  first novel written without a collaborator.   Sand is now much more known about than read.    She was the daughter of a countess and was the wife of a Baron.   She dressed largely in the clothing of men of her class, had affairs and relationships with numerous literary, artistic and musical figures.   Her most famous romance was with Frederic Chopin.    In a marvelous coincidence just as I completed Indiana the movie Impromptu based on the romance of Chopin and Sand was show on Sky Cable here in Manila.    The movie is a comedy of sorts but it was a lot of fun to see Sand on screen.    There are unverified to this day rumors of romantic relationships with other women also.

Indiana is set partially in Paris and partially on Reunion Island, a French possession (now legally part of France and in 1832 known as Bourbon Island) in the Indian Ocean about four hundred miles east of Madagascar.    The island was populated by African Slaves, Chinese, Malays, and French Emigrants.   It is a small island under 1000 square miles.    In the 1830s it was important as a stopping off point for ships going from India to Europe.     I was very interested to see the treatment and view of French people born on the island was very much like the view of English people born on Jamaica held by native Englishmen as seen in Wide Sargasso Sea.   They were called creoles and the suggestion throughout Indiana is that creoles were more given to excesses than native Frenchmen and women.   There also is an undercurrent in this book that creole women are  more passionate than European French women and  a  further part of the attraction of island life for the men is the ready access to women of color.

There are six central characters in Indiana.    Indiana is an attractive creole woman married by arrangement to a much older man, Colonel Delmare, a retired army officer.   Indiana's cousin Ralph, close to her age, has been in love with her since they were children.    He was married to Noun, a maid of Indiana who became like a sister to her.   In a smaller role is the mother of Ralph.    Indiana has a lot of themes.   One of the strongest themes is a protest against the marriage laws of France which made a wife a virtual slave of her husband.   Sand in her narrative voice makes some very powerful for the time (and now) statements for the rights of women and the alteration of marriage laws.    Indiana is also about slavery which was practiced on Reunion Island as part of the sugar plantations.   Again there are strong  ties here with the world of Jamaica in the setting of Wide Sargasso Sea.    Sugar plantations needed slaves to be profitable.    There are a lot of dramatic (some  would say over dramatic scenes) in Indiana, lots of passionate speeches and narrative theorizing and social commentary.    

Indiana was my first George Sand.   You can see it is a first novel as it is told  in a self conscious fashion as if Sand were struggling with how to narrate the novel aside from going  into a "dear readers let me tell you what happens next mode".    For about the first half of the novel I was enjoying it  and it was very interesting to me to read about life on the Island and see how Sand was using the novel as a vehicle for her ideas on women, marriage, and slavery.    Then as I passed the mid-point of the novel somehow I did begin to see it as work of real brilliance.    I am not sure if it is because Sand was learning as she was writing or if it was me learning how to read Sand.    There are passages in the second half of the novel that are simply amazing.    George Sand, it appears to me from quick research, never went to Reunion Island but her descriptions of the Island make us feel like we are there.   We can feel the contrast of the tropical island with its at the time very exotic natives to Paris of the 1830s.   The lush beauty and volcanic nature of the islands is dramatically conveyed.   At one point I really felt like I was sitting on the veranda of a big house on a sugar cane plantation drinking what had to have been delicious locally grown coffee feeling the breezes from the high volcanic mountains flow over me while pushing to the back of my mind  what the human cost of this leisure might have been.

George Sand (1804 to 1876) had a very interesting life.   Wikipedia has a good article on her that goes into all her relationships with the famous and does talk about the evidence for her being a GLBT author.   Sand had a huge literary output, writing well over sixty novels.    I am including this book among my readings for the Women Unbound Challenge for its treatment of French Marriage Customs and slavery issues related to women on Reunion Island.

I will read other works by Sand.  I would say be patient and opened minded and Indiana will well repay your reading time.   The introduction to the book spends a lot of time relating the novel to 20th century theories of feminism and colonialism. 

Mel u

"Shanghai Girls" by Lisa See

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (2009, 406 pages).

For months now I have been seeing rave reviews for Shanghai Girls.    Everybody seems to love it.    I have a long established rule of not buying hard bound fiction (there are no public libraries here in Manila.   I only bought one hard bound work of fiction in 2009, Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon and I would advise others to wait for the paperback or skip it if you are not a Pynchon fan)   I was so happy when I saw Shanghai Girls in paperback (regular paperback at that) for sale last week.   It also has a beautiful cover.

There are lots of very good blog posts on this book.   (I think the publisher gave away a lot of copies to USA and UK bloggers.)   I will  for this reason  not do a long post on this book.   I will just try to say how I felt about the book and what I liked and did not like about it.

The novel begins in 1937 in Shanghai.   I loved how Lisa See created the atmosphere of Shanghai in the late 1930s.    I understood why it was such a loved city and it was heartbreaking to see it destroyed by the Japanese in World War II.    I loved how the book depicted the family relationships.   The characters were perfectly done.   I really cared what happened to everyone.    I also enjoyed seeing the lead female characters develop and gain from their experiences.   I learned a lot about the horrific process Chinese often had in their immigration to the USA.    I admit I was not fully aware of the tremendous discrimination Chinese Americans faced, especially during the communist scare period of  the 1950s where every Chinese was seen as a potential Maoist spy.    The books covers twenty years in the history of two deeply bonded sisters.   A lot happens in their lives, some very sad things.   We see how an arranged marriage slowly develops into a real relationship.    The atmosphere of China Town in Los Angeles is as well done as the portrayal of Shanghai.   I really liked the the portrayal of Joy, the daughter of one of the sisters.   There are surprise revelations at every turn.    The action is fast moving and a lot happens.   The prose is well done and easy to read.    The only part of the book I did not really like was the ending.   It seems a bit forced but I read Lisa See is working on a sequel.

Lisa See has written two other historical novels, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love.   The first is set in 17th century China and the second in the 19th century.   I hope to read both of these works in 2010.  When   there is a sequel to Shanghai Girls I might have to violate my no hardbound fiction for it.

I am reading this book for these challenges


China Challenge
POC challenge (Lisa See is an American of Chinese Heritage)
New Author Challenge (this means new to the reader)
Global Challenge (North American book)-going for second level now-

I also think this book is very much related to issues of  the Women Unbound Challenge.    It depicts the the literal binding results of  foot binding.   It shows how daughters were viewed as property to be sold in marriage to the most generous bidders.    The suggestion in the Shanghai section  of the novel is that a woman can either be a dutiful wife and mother or prostitute, those were a woman's options in China in the 1930s.

Suko of Suko's Note Book has done an excellent review of Shanghai Girls.