Arts and Culture

More treasures from Baguio
PENMAN By Butch Dalisay Monday, April 28, 2008

Our recent visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop — an annual pilgrimage, really — turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.

I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.

The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk. Alas — in a tragedy worthy of Poe — this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd (of VIPs) attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister — Helen, born seven years after her death — is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.

The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore — for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road — but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and partygoer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.

And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”

For true Baguio sons and daughters — or even avid visitors — there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”) — but that’s another story.

Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For inquiries, e-mail the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.

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And speaking of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology — a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio — is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.

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Toward the end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”

Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.

The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.

But, yes, after the workshop, what?

I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”

But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

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