Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
aggression against Vietnam was construed as further proof of Marcos’s allegiance to the U.S. In the halls of the Philippine Congress, assemblymen even considered the enactment of “a law sanctioning the participation of Filipino combatants (in the Vietnam War) under the American flag.”
The 1970s was to be a decade of change. A never-before-experienced fury of mass demonstrations led by students engulfed Manila. This outpouring of protesters that confronted the state’s forces, and a number of their countrymen’s long-held beliefs, in a prolonged political upheaval during the first three months of 1970, came to be known as the First Quarter Storm.
I WAS NINE in 1970. Then, my personal angst had to do only with my lack of athletic interests and the subsequent inability to skip rope, ride a bike, and master the more intricate maneuvers of a game of jackstones. My concerns, like those of the rest of my family, were soon to change.
When I was five, my family moved to 1783-H Concepción Aguila Street—a cramped two-bedroom apartment meant for four. We were a burgeoning family of 12! Only when I was 11 or 12, and some of my older siblings had moved out, did I finally get my own bed. “1783-H”—the “H” meant ours was the eighth and last apartment in a row of what today would be considered low-end townhouses. Firewalls blocked us from neighboring apartment complexes; the sole entrance and exit to our row of apartments was a narrow driveway that linked the eight apartments. The driveway was so narrow that anyone who parked his car at the end of it would have to wait until all other parked cars behind him had backed out into the main road to finally maneuver his way out.
As the youngest, I really didn’t mind the cramped quarters. Besides, at that age, my opinions did not matter. I was a mere observer who was quite invisible to everyone’s eyes. I was in awe of my siblings, and at an early age was somehow convinced they were all doing very important work. At the end of each school year, they would come home with little boxes lined with soft velvet that cradled medals for academic excellence. Once, when Mom wasn’t looking, I pulled out the carton of medals she hid atop the clothes cabinet and counted 72 medals for my brother Nathan alone. I garnered no medals in school and was quite content with the few little cards I got that said “honorable mention.” It really didn’t matter. In secret, I was fiercely proud of my siblings, and in my eyes they could do no wrong.
Like the time they literally jazzed up the 11 o’clock Catholic Mass at San Beda Church. The entire community called it the “Jazz Mass” because, instead of the regular repertoire of priestly hymns, my siblings Nathan, Jan, Ryan, and Lillian and some of their high school peers played popular tunes while expertly strumming guitars.
Attendance at the 11 o’clock Mass was at an all-time high, and many attributed this to their singing. My brothers had served as altar boys at this same church, and at its adjoining school for boys, they had stellar academic records. The Benedictine monks of San Beda were proud of the Quimpo boys. Nathan and Jan consistently had high grades, and Ryan almost single-handedly handled the school’s student publications. And as good Catholic boys, they organized the Jazz Mass every Sunday.
I don’t quite remember when things started to change. But even then their selection of songs for the Jazz Mass signaled the coming of the storm. The family would spend Sunday afternoons visiting my eldest brother, Norman, and his wife Bernie, in their apartment on K-10 Street, near Kamias in Quezon City. Norman would play his double record album of songs by Peter, Paul and Mary, and we would all sing along loudly. This was one way to learn of the Vietnam War and the rising protest against wars of imperialism.
Because all men are brothers
Wherever men may be
One union shall unite us
Forever proud and free
No tyrant shall defeat us
No nation strike us down
All men who toil shall free us
The whole wide world around 3
As my siblings began to shift to singing antiwar protest songs at the 11 o’clock Mass in San Beda Church, the streets around Malacañang, including ours, were quickly becoming a battleground. When did the battles for the use of our single bathroom shift to battles over ideology and class struggle? The storm was brewing outside the safe confines of our family life.
As student protesters filled the streets outside Malacañang, various forms of the government’s militia would be used against them. The students, armed only with rocks, soda pop bottles, and homemade bombs fashioned from leftover firecrackers or bits of gun powder, were no match for the government’s militia. The city police, the constabulary, the antiriot squads, the dreaded Metrocom, the presidential guards, the army, the navy, and even the city firefighters were sent to quell dissent.
With increasing frequency, our narrow driveway would be filled with student protesters desperately seeking to escape bashing by police truncheons. Our neighbors would swing open the red gate at the end of our shared driveway to welcome the students, then immediately bar it shut before the cops could follow. My mother, with the other sympathetic mothers from our little apartment complex, would then offer “the poor students” a bit of food and water before they returned to do battle with the police on Concepción Aguila, Mendiola, and J.P. Laurel Streets.
In a couple of years, the narrow driveway of 1783-H and the firewalls that blocked all other exit points would become a great concern. It wasn’t long before we would stare at those walls, wondering if my siblings were strong and swift enough to scale them in the event of a police raid. Our cramped two-bedroom apartment had to be “protected.” Spaces in the ceilings, crevices between windows and walls, even the toilet’s water tank, were inspected as possible hiding places for “subversive materials” and eventually a handgun. Ryan later installed outside our bedroom window a rearview mirror from an old car. The mirror was at an angle to reflect the image of the long, narrow driveway and the old red gate. Ryan said we could use the mirror to see if the police or the military was coming into the compound and to buy a few seconds to scamper for safety.
Modesto Ferrer and Presentacion Evangelista had three daughters named after the virtues: from left, Caridad, Fe, and Esperanza. They also had one son. Presentacion had four other children by her first husband.
1783-H Concepcion Aguila became a garrison, and in it we braced ourselves for the storm.
NOTES
1 A student of an exclusive school for girls.
2 From Jose F. Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, Asphopel Books, 1982.
3 “Because All Men are Brothers,” music from Bach, lyrics from Glazer, was adapted and popularized by the folk singing group Peter, Paul and Mary in the 1960s.
538 Second Street
3
ELIZABETH Q. BULATAO, NORMAN F. QUIMPO, NATHAN GILBERT QUIMPO, LILLIAN F. QUIMPO, AND SUSAN F. QUIMPO
(Susan)
YEARS BEFORE WE moved into the cramped two-bedroom apartment on Concepción Aguila Street, our family life had every semblance of normalcy. The family lived in real homes—houses with vegetable patches in the backyard and room for children and dogs to run with abandon. I was born in 1961 when my parents and siblings lived on 538 Second Street. The “street” was one of the nondescript alleys in what was known as San Beda Subdivision. Nor was the area much of a “subdivision,” for it merely consisted of five dead-end, rather decrepit-looking streets that bordered San Beda College.
On the couch in the rented house on 538 Second Street are (from left) Nathan, Ryan, Jan and Jun, with Caren, Emilie, and Lillian behind. Seated on right are the sons of the house owner