[Oe List ...] OpEd Tuesday on my Japan-China connection - Happy Holidays

[Jaime R Vergara]

MyNippon-Zhongguo connection
 
Had my first child been a boy, he would have had theunhappy name of Kenichi Zhou Enlai!  Justimagine the ribbing he would have gotten in the schoolyard.  My wife and I were children of the 60s,forgiving as hell.  I "forgave"Japanese daily atrocities they allegedly committed in the Philippines duringWWI.  Kenichimeans first healthy child in Nihonggo.
 
I was also a cheerleader to Mao Zedong's alter ego, ZhouEnlai, the consummate diplomat, and nemesis of Zhongguo's Gang of Four led byMao's actress wife Jiang Qing.  My firstchild was born a year after the historic visit of Richard Nixon to China in1972, set up by the Kissinger-Zhou Enlai tandem.  Ergo, Zhou Enlai would have joined the family'slitany of names since Mao Zedong would have been too hard to handle in mywife's conservative family, and I would have taken exception to a Germanaddition to my lineage.
 
Happily, we had a girl. With her Mom of Welsh-Scot-English-German Midwest US extraction, and ourself,a Sino-Indo-Malay-cum-a-dab-of-Iberian concoction, Manila-born Kristina grew upto furl a school banner that declared: Mongrels of the World, Unite!
 
I grew up in an area that still pronounced Yamashita'sname with blood curdling sound.  Rocksrained on our house roof on New Year '65 when I brought home a Japanese studentfrom a Youth Assembly I attended in Dumaguete City the previous week.  That was a good twenty years after the famedNippon General's march north of Manila through our valley.
 
I would later find out that a Japanese officer warned myDad that he was on the list of those to be apprehended by the Kempetai.  He was suspected of cutting the stencil andrunning a mimeo machine for the underground's news rag.  He was guilty as charged.  Had he been apprehended, I might have beenborn an orphan.  My mother was heavy withchild while "we" were on the run.
 
I am no apologist for Japan.  They have their ample share of the blame gamefrom WWII.  Their atrocities werecharacteristics of every occupying imperial force in the last five centuries,born out of a sense of superiority nurtured and sustained by a heirarchicalsocial structure that ordered humanity from the heavenly mandate to the lowlypeon.
 
One of my Dad's older brothers was a school teacherbefore the Rising Sun's banner was unfurled over the archipelago, a nationalistnoncompliant to the wishes of the American forces who saw it their task tohusband the birth of an independent nation through a Commonwealth heavilytilted to the advantage of US commerce. He ended up being a translator to Nippon's occupying forces, thus, seenas a collaborator to the regime.  American-ledguerrillas quartered him at the public square with four carabaos headingseparately to the four winds, a warning on Filipinos who cooperated withNippon.
 
During the Vietnam War, records of American forces'earlier behavior in the Philippines, particularly in Samar, came to light.  Atrocities did not start in Vietnam bydrug-crazed exceptions.  They were abundantlyon display by the flannel-garbed Indian fighters who came to tropical Philippines,already seasoned in leaving behind veils and vales of tears in their pathsthrough native territories, as real estate hungry easterners of Europeandescent moved westward-ho!
 
Forgiveness came on as a strong virtue in ourupbringing.  As an adult, we came torealize that this was more than just ignoring other's unacceptablebehavior.  It is acknowledging the objectivereality that whatever occurred in the past, is done.  Finis. There is no way of undoing it; one can, however, learn a lesson from it,and decide whether one continues with established patterns, or takes on adifferent course.
 
We now know that humanity is wired to behave according tothe images that informed its growth, and therefore, feels comfortable when itautomatically just follows the easy path of previous behavior.  Education's task is to provide alternativepaths.
 
My Chinese Oral English students introduce themselves atthe beginning of the semester, and as a model, I introduce myself first withsome guidelines that they then use for their own intro.  One of my lines in response to the questionof "what makes me happy" is an echo of Star Trek, which I rephrasedas "going someplace I had not been previously, and doing something I hadnot done before."  
 
There is a new context abroad, surprisingly a germalready implanted from those who devised the remembrances of this season, fromthe progeny of Millat Ibrahim, whetherit be the Hanukkah/Menorah of the Torah story, the manger Christ-child atYuletide, the end of Muharram in Islam, or the secular drumbeats of African matunda ya kwanza, a celebration of thefruits of the harvest, where humanity affirms the path it hath already trod,but proceed to move someplace it had not previously been, and do something ithad not done before.  In my old book,that was labeled "forgiveness", or, if I may be allowed a play onwords, being "given for" the future.
 
My Nippon-Zhongguo connection is grounded in the past,but moves unencumbered and freely into the future.  Happy Holidays!


 j'aime la vie


Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all, Celebrate!

 
 
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