PEACE-MAKER

Our New York-based daughter Leslie recently took a break from her fast-paced life as writer-editor and journeyed to Manila and our home province, Pangasinan, which offered her a serene and nostalgic retreat into her roots.

Known for its scenic beauty and rich cultural heritage, Pangasinan also holds a special place in the hearts of our family, thus, for Leslie, it was not just a vacation destination but a homecoming. 

Leslie is editorial director for sustainability at Morningstar, a leading US investment research firm that compiles and analyzes fund, stock, and general market data. She conducts seminars and delivers speeches on the subject of sustainability at conferences. 

Previously, she was a long-time columnist and editor at Barron’s Magazine, a premier investing publication providing financial news, in-depth analysis, and commentary on stocks, investments, and how markets are moving across the globe. She managed the magazine’s “must-read” Q&A section, featuring notable investment leaders, CEOs, financiers, and Nobel laureates. She also launched Barron’s sustainable investing coverage. While at Barron’s, she won a SABEW Best in Business award for a series of investigative stories on fraudulent equities, which protected the savings of investors and pensioners by warning about deceptive stocks before they crashed.

Leslie earned her bachelor’s degree major in English at Yale University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She serves on the board of Kundiman, a New York-based national non-profit organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing. She helped start the London bureau of Bloomberg News.   

Our long-time special assistant, Aldwin Requejo, who now serves as chief of staff of our son, Congressman Christopher, would always point out that two of our children followed our footsteps as a journalist – Leslie and Christopher, who was a columnist and editor of the youth section of a national broadsheet and of several magazines before he became the now three-term representative of Pangasinan’s fourth legislative district. 

As some may know, we finished journalism at the Ateneo de Manila, where we became an associate editor of The Guidon, the award-winning student newspaper, and, in our senior year, an editor of The Aegis, the school annual. 

At the age of 19, became a foreign correspondent, then promoted to Manila bureau chief of the first Asian news agency, the Pan-Asia Newspaper Alliance, founded by the late Norman Soong, who was Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “favorite war correspondent” during World War II. 

We also had a Pan-Asia weekly column, printed once a week in the old Philippines Herald, which in the old days was edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carlos P. Romulo, who later became president of the UN General Assembly and then our country’s minister of foreign affairs.