War Everlasting

I am writing this blog a block from where my father passed in 2003. When I go home every day, I walk past the Veteran's Hospital in Manhattan on 23rd Street. I would look up and acknowledge, although I no longer remember which floor was the ICU. I can't go inside anymore, no reason to. Although I have been going to veteran's hospitals both in MetroManila and in New York City since I was nine. I tell people I grew up in the VA, amongst the aging veterans, my father's generation and beyond, at least 40 years older than I. Veterans, on whose faces, a record of history, each one different. My father had his own, "survivor" written all over it. War, to this day and to my future, is everlasting.

When I was born, my father was pushing 50. I didn't watch him age. He was always old, while the rest of us, including my mother, generations behind him. I don't remember seeing him with black hair. It was alway gray, thick and full. Bataan, that memory, was part of our daily breath and bread. It had a life of its own, like a member of our family who only cared to show up whenever it wanted. Our house (a rented apartment) in Manila was full of traces of World War II. He had a baul full of helmets and army paraphernalia. His name written on the side with his title: Arch. Engr. Augusto Roa Realuyo. There was a bolo on the wall. Everyone on our street knew he was a Bataan surivor, a guerilla, and therefore scared of him. My family never really knew what any of it meant, the war, Bataan, Death March. Just history's whispers. We would grow into its legacy, in America of all places.

I was protected by that world. By that Bataan that even in the seventies three decades later, people still remembered and knew. Manila was a violent place. Martial Law made sure of that. Police was enabled, protected. No due process. Authoritarian. Dark clutch. We were raised in a bubble. My mother kept us inside. No politics. No activism. My father made sure of that. He had seen it all. After his release from the Japanese concentration camp in 1942, he would become a guerilla, as if it wasn't enough to survive both the Death March and the camp. He was fact. Marcos' WWII medals were fiction. But both would create the Philippine history I grew up to know.

The first time I wrote an essay about my father was in 1999, published both in the U.S. and in the Philippines. It was the year my first novel came out. In the Philippines, its publication in the Sunday Inquirer magazine, would coincide with an interview about my first novel, adding context to the writer none of them knew existed until then. It was the first time I engaged with war remembrance. When I tackled Manila as memory in my first novel and Philippine history in my first poetry collection, the doors to history would open a bit. I avoided Bataan all my life. It was hard to enter it, too personal. I collected books instead, for the day I was ready to return and brave enough to understand.

My father would be hospitalized many times before he left us in 2003. We got to go back to the Philippines in 2000 for the Roa-Realuyo family reunion, our last. I got to see Manila through his eyes for the first time. I would get to see Oas, Albay, his hometown, from that experience. Very little of it pleasant. The baggage I brought back was heavier than the one I carried to Manila. I would learn that I was never really wrong about the country I grew up in. It was always complex, and I had no reason to regret my feelings about it.

History would revisit in 2022. After the pandemic and after my husband's open heart surgery in 2021. Months of watching k-drama about Korea and Japan during Covid, after reading Pachinko and other historical novels like The Glass Palace. I would take apart my short story collection and take out the two Bataan stories, its emotional bookends. I decided to develop them into a novel. I would receive a grant for it. Every day then, at dawn, I would walk to a coffee shop in Jackson Heights, Queens, while its dark outside and write #BataanNewJersey. For the first time in my life, I was allowed to enter the narrative. I wasn't afraid of it any longer. The characters let me in. Bataan let me stay. And in three years, I finished the novel one block from the VA.

Today, in the morning, the same time when I got a call from the VA doctor that my father had already passed, I sit in a cafe blogging, across from a WWII memorial, a block from where my father was exactly 22 years ago. When my father was my current age, his son, who would become a poet-novelist, was watching his father in the Veteran's Hospital in MetroManila (Diliman, QC). The boy didn't know anything about Bataan or World War II, although he had heard so much about them. He was already marked by a legacy he would one day had to face.

My father survived Bataan to tell. I am alive now to tell. My father, the son of Bataan, and I, its legacy, in America, the other country he fought for. Such is war. Such is war.

In memoriam, Augusto Roa Realuyo, 1921-2003.