Dear Mr. President Obama

By: Bob Boyer

 

I wrote the following article in November of 2012. It strikes me as strangely timely.

Mabuhay, congratulations on your re-election. I just came from getting a haircut. My barber said that I should contact you, and I always listen to her. She said , “Tell the president that he doesn’t seem to know much about the Philippines and you (that is me) are going to tell him what he needs to know.” That’s a tall order, but here goes. By the way, I’m not going to get heavy on statistics or polls. My source will be tsismis (pronounced ‘chismus’), what my Filipino friends, both here and back in the motherland, refer to as reliable gossip.

For starters, Cora (not her real name) has a point but might be exaggerating. On the other hand, I have actually never heard or read about you mentioning the Philippines. That’s more than a little surprising, especially recently, because of your “pivoting” (your word) toward Southeast Asia. You say you have a big interest in China. Well, it’s less than an hour’s flight from Manila to Hong Kong. I have Manila friends who get bargain flights for shopping weekends in Hong Kong. It’s a relatively short Super Ferry ride from many ports in the Philippines across the South China Sea to the Chinese mainland. I’m guessing you know all of that and said so to Cora. Cora was skeptical. (BTW, I don’t think she voted for you.)

She says that you need to know (I said you must already) that the Philippines is a democracy and that its constitution is based on the U.S. Constitution. That it is one of maybe two SE Asian countries that are predominantly Christian (overwhelmingly Roman Catholic). That a majority of the 90 million Filipinos are literate in English and that you may have spoken to one of them when you called Dell for help with your computer.

Cora wants me to remind you about some not-so-distant history (I told her you certainly must already know). She mentioned two battles in particular. They occurred in April and May of 1942 on the peninsula of Bataan and on Corregidor Island. US forces, Filipinos and Americans, but mostly Filipinos, fought together, and together paid the enormous price of slowing down the Japanese advance practically to a crawl.

Now, uh, I got to thinking, Mr. President that Cora may have more of a gripe than I thought at first. I certainly don’t want you to be compared with President McKinley, who made the decision to colonize the Philippines in 1898. He said we needed to Christianize the country, when it already had been Christian for a couple of centuries. He didn’t even know that the University of Santo Tomas (1610) in Manila was graduating hundreds of students when your Harvard College was still a room full of books and a handful of students. Sorry about that. McKinley’s geography was not so good either. He thought the Philippines was near Cuba. You, having lived a couple years in Indonesia, would know where that country’s close neighbor, the Philippines, is.

Now, um, I’ll just add a couple other need-to-knows to Cora’s list. Do you know how many Filipinos and Philippine-Americans live in the U.S., and how many of the latter vote? The answer is lots. New York has so many that the Filipino nurses there have their own professional association. California and its Pacific neighbor states have large numbers. And, as your friend Mayor Emanuel would tell you, your home town has a big number. I don’t want to boast, but the magazine that publishes my column every month reaches more than 60,000 readers, mostly Filipinos, in your home town. In fact, one of my colleagues at the magazine, complained in a column recently that years ago you would know, or know about, most Filipino arrivals to Chicago, but those days are long gone because of increased Filipino population and the influx of new arrivals.

Again, uh, I don’t want to boast, but uh, I’ve written a travel memoir about my times in the Philippines (Cora has a copy). I had a nice turnout for a reading (De Pere, Wisconsin), about ninety folks, and a good third of them were Filipinos. Many of them were medical doctors and nurses—they bought most of the books that night. By the way, I’m giving a reading in nearby Green Bay on Nov. 28. You know how to get here. Sincerely, Bob Boyer (feel free to e-mail me at Robert.boyer@snc.edu)