CHINO AND HIS TIME
By Vergel O. Santos
Anvil Publishing
MANILA, Philippines - In his book, Chino and His Time, Vergel O. Santos displays sharp journalistic skills — an acumen that percolates throughout the work — introducing early on the dramatis personae that played essential parts in the life of Chino Roces.
He does this in mis en scene fashion, which provides almost visual images that, as in a film, locate the reader in the midst of these characters with one notable exception — his jagged dissection of the maze-like Roces family tree. Santos places and blocks his players onstage, defining their functions in context, chronology and place to set the roles each acted in the framework of events that turned Chino into at least a quasi, if not an actual, hero.
No less should be expected of the author, an experienced journalist who has been tested for four decades, a noted lecturer on media themes and an author who has published several books. The most noted of these is The News Writing Formula, a textbook for university journalism students which, quite likely, will quickly be dethroned by Chino.
In truth, the book seems to disdain how this nation, which barely remembers him, assesses Chino as one who is an almost but not-quite-made hero. This is sad because Chino Roces indeed deserves a slot in the national pantheon.
In Chino, Santos merges well the journalist and the creative writer in him. While he goes straight to the point, weaving all the elements of his tale in the customary inverted pyramid mode of importance, he also manages to convey his sense of humanity in a sensitive manner — as he does when he describes Chino’s passing:
“A nominal Roman Catholic all his life, Chino now took communion; he in fact took it twice a week in the fortnight of his final hospital confinement . .
“On September 30, 1988, with Cory’s rosary coiled around his hand, Chino died, and was spared the future.”
Applying common sense to the life and work of Chino Roces, Santos roots his thesis on the line of reasoning that Chino was an explicable figure despite a seemingly self-ordained detachment, as in abstaining from playing his proper role as the publisher of The Manila Times in the choice of editorial content. Santos describes Chino’s quirks, such as mooching cigarettes but making sure that they were locally manufactured and not imported or “blue seal,” “a sort of patriotic particularity he always observed.”
In a sense, the book is as much a biography of Chino Roces as it is a history of the times that tried journalists’ spirits, their lives and their lifestyles — the years of martial law when journalists were silenced by a dictatorship.
Indeed, it is as though writing Chino is Santos’ way of grappling with the meaning of a history in which he played a part. It is also an exhaustive, albeit faltering, recounting of the seldom spoken but never really subdued discord between the two branches of the Roces family, of which one collaborated with the Japanese invaders and the other fought them.
Santos defines the family differences with an appropriate distance, such that the crude realities are expressed without diminishing the dignity of any of the protagonists. Knowing too well that there can be more than just two sides to a story, Santos does take a stand but the journalist in him presents all sides.
While he emphasizes the influence of the large, aristocratic and structurally elaborate family, not only on Chino’s childhood but also during his maturity when, as the youngest son, he took on the responsibility for the redemption of his side of the family, Santos does not engage in what is a tempting speculation about Chino’s relationship with his own family.
Rather, in a matter-of-fact fashion, he simply details this particular as:
“Chino proved himself indeed neither as his father’s son nor his brother’s brother, although he owed them his luck. Because, they, his predecessors, had proved their allegiance to the occupation administration with the sacrifice of their own lives, Chino needed no vouching or watching. But he turned out different.”
Santos does allow himself the luxury of dwelling on the affinity Chino displayed for his anti-Japanese cousins, which was rather odd as his side of the family was a staunch collaborationist with the Japanese enemy.
Santos’s Chino was just average in terms of intellectual ability and emotional temperament whose times led him to thresh the seeds of freedom from the fetid foliage of malignant dictatorship so that his first true and final adventure was a leap from a less than sensational existence to that of a passionate patriot that did accord him a heroic stature. In a sense, Santos appreciates Chino from the same point of view as Charles Lindbergh’s: that “success is not measured by what a person accomplishes, but by the opposition they have encountered, and by the courage with which they have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.”
Chino belonged to the Don Alejandro Roces, Sr.’s limb, which collaborated with the enemy during the occupation. Don Alejandro (Moy), among other acts of betrayal to country and family, had ceded the family daily, The Tribune, to the Japanese military, rousing his brothers’ ire. His son, Alejandro, Jr., nicknamed Andong, followed submissively his father’s ways and became a major in the Manila Police Department, of which he was the deputy chief.
An apparently disgruntled stranger assassinated Andong, emptying his gun on him and his wife. Moy, apparently seeing the ghastly assault, ran to his son’s side and suffered a fatal heart attack. When the medical team arrived on the scene, only the foster child of the younger Roces, whose mother threw her body over the child to shield him from the bullets, was alive, The three bodies were dead where they lay.
Chino, whose full name was Joaquin Roces y Pardo, was the youngest sibling of this branch. The need to redeem his family from the ignominy of collaboration generated a defined role in his life. To many of his relatives, this seemed tragic enough for him not to be maligned or cast out, especially since he was in reality more identified with his guerrilla cousins, whose activities he supported clandestinely, than with his Japanese-collaborating family.
This affinity persisted when Chino became publisher of The Manila Times, during which he had his cousins — Joaquin (Titong) and Alejandro (Andeng) — write columns for the Times.
Were it not for the fact that martial law stopped the Times, another cousin, Alfredo (Ding), also invited by Chino, would have been the third Roces columnist for that respectable paper.
Ding, “favored as he was with a sense of detachment acquired naturally, having been merely in his pre-teens during the war,” would later reveal staunchly the infidelity of Chino’s father and brother in his book, Looking for Liling: A family history of World War II martyr Rafael T. Roces, Jr., which Santos quotes amply in his book.
The “other side” of the Roces family was that of Don Rafael Roces, who infused in his children an opposite attitude towards the Japanese enemy and suggested to his sons with his “sanguine patriotism” that the right thing to do was to drive the invaders out of his homeland. All five boys ended up obeying his command and joined the underground “but only four would return to recall their father’s words to their own children to echo into posterity,” as Santos tells it.
The Japanese captured the eldest child, Rafael, Jr., nicknamed Liling, tortured and beheaded him and made him the authentic martyr and hero of the Roces family.
And there are, despite Santos’s journalistic skills, what I consider hiccups in the book. For one, in dissecting the Roces genealogy, Santos’s narrative becomes fairly intricate. This, however, is an understandable lapse considering that the frequent, repeated use of the same names among Roces family members is, to say the least, confusing. It certainly would have helped had he drawn a graphic family tree to illustrate the roots, trunks and branches of this family.
Then, for his own reasons, Santos has a plethora of footnotes, a number of which, to my mind, could just have been integrated into the story proper and, perhaps, made it more cogent.
Indeed, his best chapters have the least footnotes, as is the case with “Home Again,” in which he tells of the reproving speech Chino directs at President Cory Aquino during ceremonies in which she has just awarded him the Philippine Legion of Honor, degree of chief commander, the highest presidential award. In what should have been his speech of appreciation, Chino gives Cory the worst unsolicited advice she ever received, “accusing Cory of herself falling into the Marcos mold” and calling attention to her failings. In the same chapter, which only has three short footnotes, Santos describes the death of Chino, succinctly but with much tenderness.
These footnotes serve to disturb the flow of the text, as happens almost each time one appears. Where the footnotes may be venial slips, the low resolution printing of what could and should have been endearing, informative and interesting photographs seem to be capital failings. Where pictures are supposed to say a thousand words, these say much less as a result of poor printing, but this is not the author’s fault.
The book is certainly worth the read. Chino is an honest appreciation of a somewhat unclear character. In the process it echoes a part of our history that is slowly being forgiven for all its malignity and forgotten despite its malevolence instead of being kept alive and remembered.