Published in pp. 23-26 of The Philippine American, December, 1945 issue.
Maria Aurora Quezon comes home –with a new maturity and humbleness
Her Father’s Daughter
by Lyd Arguilla
OUTWARDLY and at first glance it’s the same girl we knew in 1941. Thesame fiery flash of eye. The same stubborn, spoiled-brat manner: “Don’t bully me. I won’t be bullied. Do you think they’d feed me better food at that banquet than I’d eat at home? It’s a choice between staying home or going out.’’
The young man smiles and coaxes. She flounces back into her chair. Waves her arm in dismissal. “I can do as I please, now. Nobody will care. I’m no longer the President’s daughter. I can say what I please, do as I please. It feels good to be a common citizen.”
Actually when there is no “audience” (for, like her father, whether she admits it or not, Baby gets dramatic before an audience) in quiet, serious talks with an old friend, she relaxes. Wide eyes get soft and at some recollection give a gentle hint of tears; petulance drops away from the thin, mobile mouth.
Same girl yet different, with a new maturity and humbleness: “Lyd, what can I do? What is there to do Charity here seems so haphazard. I want to help where I can be most useful.”
“Coming home,” says this slender, wide-browed girl, “was something the family looked forward to so much. And yet I felt badly when I first saw Manila.It’s not the ruined buildings. It’s the people. They’re not the same. They don’t look happy. Oh, yes, I know. They’ve had three years of enemy occupation, but I thought now that they are free again, that it would show on their faces. They don’t look happy. And we have not been home long enough to understand why not.”
We sat, locked up in the bedroom because in the sala we were being interrupted by callers coming and going every two minutes.
“We heard you wanted to come back, though you were warned it is a bereaved country you are returning to. That you were insistent. Why?”
“We wanted to come home. We were so homesick. Home meant not just this house, nor this street, nor Manila and Tayabas our home province. It meant friends, our own people. They told us things have changed in the Philippines, that people have suffered and are even now in great need. It is so hard to guess what to do for your people when you are so far away. So we came back, to help in any way we can. I can be useful in charities with my ‘connections’, for instance. I know whom to approach for contributions, money. Ihave friends who can be gotten together easily to sell tickets for charity benefits. But I am bewildered. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had time to size up the situation. We have only been home a few days and most of that time has been spent seeing callers who come here everyday. Many have asked me to help raise money for war widows and orphans. But so many different organizations seem to be doing the same thing. I want to help, but I don’t know what to do. The relief that has come in here seems to get bottlenecked somewhere along the distribution channels. Or they don’t get to the right places.”
WE told her there are a number of women’s civic organizations she may well join or help rehabilitate. There’s the YWCA—an organization like that can do so much more and over a longer period of time than any desultory group of well-meaning individuals. There’s the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. Through its branches she could reach out the provinces, get puericulture centers or some such projects undertaken locally.
“I want to look around,” saidBaby, “not grab anything that’s offered me.”
“Go shopping?”
“Yes. Find out what people really need. Go out among them, not just drive around, but get down and into houses—or barong-barongs. Where I can be most effective there I will serve. I’m thinking of working with the Girl Scouts. Helen Benitez has asked me. Anyhow I started on that work before the war. And it’s the least I can do for Mrs. Josefa Llanes-Escoda who believed in the movement so much.”
A knock at the door. “Come in.” Friend to say goodbye. Friend had brought young coconuts because she thought Mrs. Quezon and the girls and Nonong would want to taste young coconut again after such a long absence from the land of coconuts. The right graciousness and easy friendliness of manner in saying her thanks —Baby Quezon had not been the President’s daughter all those years for nothing. Friend goes out of the room.
“Where were we?”
War widows and orphans—to help rehabilitate their lives rather than merely afford them temporary relief.
Playgrounds for children—to reduce juvenile delinquency and crime, make for a healthier, wholesomer future citizenry.
Puericulture centers —for indigent mothers and their war babies; not to hold silly baby contests and award prizes to already fat babies. A fat baby is prize enough. It is the thin, undernourished unfortunate who can’t use prizes and blue ribbons so well as milk, medicines, clothing.
HOUSING—because people need houses, in many cases even more badly than food. How miserably most people in Manila now live, doubled-up with several families in houses meant for one; or staying in barong-barongs, little better than pig-stys.
“Outside Manila how much damage is there?”
“The situation is practically the same in every important town and city in the Philippines. The heart of the city or town is ruined. Reconstruction will be a long and painful process. Yet the sooner we build permanent, low-cost houses, the less trouble we shall have later if we had to tear down existing houses put up in haste as emergenc jobs. Building should go hand in hand with long-term planning so that our towns and cities do not become more messed-up than before the war. Destruction has at least given us this advantage —that of having a chance to rebuild right. What a great pity if we failed to use that chance.’’
Knock at the door again. Major So-and-So to see you. “Let my sister, Nini, talk to him now. I’ll see him later.”
“What can I do about housing?”
“Get really interested in it as a citizen, and an influential one. There will be agencies to look after the various phases of planning and housing but in the end it is the people who will get things done by prodding the agencies. Just like being actively interested in politics—not necessarily as a politician but as a citizen who will insist that his government gets run right.”
“I know,” she said thoughtfully, “we don’t want to get tangled up with politics—there are those who want to make tools of my mother and us, but we’re not going to let them. At the same time we will be actively interested in how our government is run—just like other citizens.”
Talk veered to other topics.
Sitting up in bed, cupping one knee between her hands, Baby said, “Lyd, tell me, I don’t understand the psychology of it—but how can some girls come and recount to me all about the hardships they went through during the occupation and in the next breath inform me that it cost them ?500 to get the dress they’re wearing?”
“People have short memories…”
“I’m not trying to criticize, I’m trying to understand… people may forget soon about other people’s misfortunes, but not their own experiences, and the lessons they should have learned from their own hardships. We’ve been getting the worst kind of publicity in the States. Time magazine printed a story about a local fashion show where somebody fainted from making so many expensive gowns. Prices of the ternos were quoted too at ?1,000 or so —and you can imagine! There were our representatives in Washington, trying to convince Congress and the American people that the Filipinos need money for rehabilitation and relief!”
“There are many things Idon’t understand,” she continued. “When you have been away for so long you lose touch. Tell me, is it true that the morals of the Filipino girls have become loose since the war? GIs going home to the States have said so. I’ve talked to them in the hospital where I did Red Cross work. It hurts to hear things like that said of one’s country.”
We said morals have become looser everywhere in the world. Returning GIs say the same thing or worse of French, English, German, Australian, Japanese—even American girls. Not everything they say can be discounted. At the same time the situation is not one to twist one’s soul about. That it’s a natural consequence of the war, like increased lawlessness and tendency to crime, inflation, and the black market—and will right itself as normalcy returns even though standards will have definitely changed. What we need is more understanding and compassion for our fellows—less bitterness and desire to condemn.
We told thegirl there are many things to be happy about in our country. The war changed certain values —for the better with some kinds of people. Our newspapers, for instance, have less revolving hacks among them. Some leopards can’t change spots, but most of the local newspapermen can no longer be “bought” or dazzled by “big shots.” They write according to their convictions —not according to which side their bread is buttered.
“By the way, we read in the papers about funds being raised to build a monument for your father.”
“What for? They would put the money to better use if they turned the money over to the Quezon Institute. I understand the Institute needs funds. The Quezon Institute can do a lot more to honor my father’s memory by aiding those who are afflicted with tuberculosis than any monument.”
Thought of her father reminded her of last year’s Christmas. “It was the most miserable we ever knew. We missed father so. I spent Christmas Day doing Red Cross work in a hospital. This will be the first real Christmas we will have in a long time. I don’t know what it will be like. But we’re home among friends, now.”
“When my father died…” hereyes glistened for a while, “no one came to see us at all in Washington. Except our old American friends, and a few, very few Filipinos. We felt badly of course,” she shrugged her shoulders, “but we were prepared for it. Father had told us time and again to expect it.”
“That is why we are quite overcome by our reception here. More friends have come to see us than we expected. I’m glad I’m home. All of us are. Mother wants to recover Dad’s intimate personal belongings, anything at all. She especially wants to have his letters to her—from 1907 when he was a nobody. She had his letters bound in an album and arranged according to dates. For myself I want to recover Dad’s speeches—not the official ones, there are records of those, but the ones he himself wrote into a notebook. I wonder if I’d till find them in Malacañan.”
This is how we found Maria Aurora Quezon, no longer “Daughter of the President,” but as she is now, back after a war exile of four years to her father’s country and people. The same impetuous, outspoken Baby, yet not the same, and always and essentially, her father’s daughter.
