Musings

PEACE-MAKER

In Dagupan, before we turned 10, we faced the best and the worst in our young life. We survived the grim life of World War II and lost our dear, loving mother Casimira to tuberculosis at 45, a few months after Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landed in our town.
Dagupan has a history that is uniquely older. In pre-Hispanic times, the place, blessed by its geography, had been a trading center for Pangasinenses and the Chinese and an occasional target by pirates from Formosa (Taiwan) and East Asia. The Chinese also traded for gold brought down from the Cordilleras to the northeast.
When the Spanish conquistadores claimed the islands and expanded their hegemony over Luzon, they made Dagupan and nearby Lingayen, in our province of Pangasinan, the centers of Spanish governance and culture in northern Luzon. Tobacco from Pangasinan and the Cagayan Valley was shipped to Manila via Dagupan, Lingayen and Urdaneta, allowing the three towns suddenly to enjoy prosperity and social status. A provincial gentry enriched by trade emerged; and some scions of wealthy families pursued liberal studies in Europe, returning home intellectually stimulated.
Moreover, the town enjoyed a startling new status when a British company built the Manila-Dagupan Railway in 1892. News and goods from Manila reached the town much faster than in the most areas of the country. The railway made Dagupan a boom town, and ironically for the Spanish colonial government, it played a significant role in the success of the 1896 Philippine Revolution.
Our family owned fish farms in Bonuan just off the Dagupan River, on the eastern outskirts of town. We cultured milkfish or bangus, a brackish-water fish our family harvested in large quantity. The fish farms had been there for decades, inherited from our forefathers. We studied in college on the income we raised from the farms. That is how our life-long romance with fish farming evolved.
Some months we would spend on the family farm in Santa Barbara, a town about 30 kilometers from Dagupan. Life was Spartan in Santa Barbara, having little of Dagupan’s big-town comfort. We would rise from bed at daybreak, herd the family goats to pasture, then we would hurry home for breakfast before sunrise.
On the farm we felt a sensation of being so small in a place so vast. We adored the open spaces, a sun that burned our back, face and arms. We would gaze at the skies of deep blue from which flocks of birds would drop noiselessly in tight formation, like squadrons of American and Japanese warplanes in bombing runs or dogfights that we later saw in wartime.
Back in Dagupan, before the summer rains came, we and some of our cousins would catch crabs and shrimps in the fishponds. We all had a sense of adventure, of freedom, of independence. And we were the most business-minded of all. We would sell our catch in the market and made good money.
On the ground-floor corner of our two-story house, we would also set up a wooden pool table which we rented out by the hour; on the side we had comic books and magazines that curious visitors paid to read. Money was hard to come by, but our humble flair for entrepreneurship earned us a modest profit each day.
Life often works in ways mysterious and unfathomable. Dream and early sorrow left the deepest imprints in our heart. We grabbed hold of a cold hand of death as a new postwar life was emerging. A month after Japan surrendered to the United States, mercifully ending the carnage of World War II in the Pacific, our beloved mother, Casimira, died in September 1945. She was forty-five. Our dear mother’s death left us with vast emptiness for a long time. The sorrow still cuts deep as we recall the events even today. Mother had been in fragile health for as long as we could recall. Her lungs had been weak, and she caught colds during the family’s war-time retreat and her condition deteriorated into untreatable tuberculosis because of the wartime lack of medicine. She was bedridden for four years.
We never could grasp that she might die. We all gathered at her deathbed – Father and our older siblings and a few relatives. Her hands were frail and clammy; we clutched them tightly, like we did not want to let her go, as her strength ebbed away. She struggled faintly to talk for a final time. Since we were the youngest, she asked everyone to take special care of us. She was grief-stricken to go, but we thought she died a happy death, clasping her rosary to the end. She had been a caring, loving, and thoughtful mother equally to all. On her grave we swore to do our best to honor her memory. (An excerpt from our biography, Global Filipino, written by Brett M. Decker, which we featured in this column last May 17, 2020)