Redemption

I ENTERED St. James Academy in June 1957 as a high-school freshman at the premature age of eleven, and immediately felt overextended, overmatched, absolutely out of my class.

An extension of Maryknoll (now Miriam) College and run by the same order of American nuns, St. James spoke English, and I didn’t—not, at any rate, with any degree of familiarity, let alone skill, such as might afford one the minimum confidence to get by. I’d have gone to another school if it had been up to me, but my father had been sold on St. James, sight unseen, mesmerized by its reputation. He spoke about it as if my very future depended on it; he spoke on faith: James, suddenly, was his patron saint of secondary education.

St. James stood, walled in all around, right in the sociopolitical center of the rich fishing town of Malabon. It had nearly an entire block to itself. A short tunnel connected it to its only neighbor on the block, the Church of St. Bartholomew. Certain Fridays it delivered our hymn class, under the eminent soprano Remedios Bosch-Jimenez, herself a town citizen, into Bartholomew’s south aisle so that our collected voices might be contained from disturbing the rest of St. James, whose own class work at the moment required some quiet. Within an easy walk from the block lay the municipal hall, the town square, the public market, the better shops and restaurants, and the only theater that played American movies exclusively.

Although a mere half-hour jeepney ride from Manila in those sparser days, Malabon felt provincial, except to its families who could afford the fancies of modern living (as my father never failed to point out—“as an established fact”—whenever the issue of wealth and privation arose: “We have more millionaires per square kilometer here in Malabon than in any other town”). And for these families a St. James education was one of the biggest bargains: it gave their children a head start not only for college but possibly for life. Indeed, a high plurality of St. James graduates went to two of the country’s highest-rated private colleges—Maryknoll itself for the girls, the Jesuit-run Ateneo for the boys.

I went to St. James myself by the only means possible—a scholarship for my entire first year. The challenge was maintaining the grade in order to keep the scholarship for the rest of high school, a not-too-hopeful prospect by St. James’s standards. Before St. James, I only had known Tonsuya Elementary, a public school where education was free for children of the barrio for which it was (and remains) named and of three or four neighboring barrios, including my own, Niugan. It had prepared me well, to be sure, for high-school math and science, but not for St. James altogether.

Tonsuya Elementary spoke the vernacular Tagalog. It did teach English, but only superficially, in a course called Language: it didn’t provide a working knowledge of the language; one got one’s idea how English sounds from unsure and affected tongues, and one learned to arrange English-worded thoughts from the scarcest vocabulary and in the simplest forms.

St. James demanded more. Indeed, it seemed to me to demand more than expectedly merciful or even reasonable. Not only was St. James foreign territory, it existed under a rather closed regime: apart from being strictly English-speaking, it was exclusively Roman Catholic and severely sex-segregated. It had its own uncompromising system of crime and punishment: anyone caught mouthing a non-English word was fined. And deficient as I was in both medium and means, I felt doubly disadvantaged in a class composed mostly of graduates of St. James Elementary.

The choice for me was as easy as the alternative was impossible. Unless asked and required by propriety or rule to open it, I kept my mouth shut in the classroom (except, naturally, in the native-language class, Pilipino) and elsewhere within St. James’s confines. I must have appeared an especially woeful case to Sister Miriam Emmanuel, the English teacher. It showed in her soft, sympathetic eyes.

As it happened, Sister Miriam had descended to earth to redeem me. She offered me a tutorial after classes two days of the five-day school week for 40 minutes each session, exactly as long as the regular class period. She walked me through the operating logic of the language to give me a sense of its structure. She read to me with an authentic voice, had me read to her in turn, then sat down with me to talk about what we had read. Every new word provoked an exciting impulse for discovery, and every freshly turned phrase and deftly crafted sentence raised a compelling challenge for emulation. It was in Sister Miriam’s tutorial, no doubt, that I began to develop not only an ear for English prose, but also, in time, a critical appreciation of it and the confidence to try my own hand at stringing English words together with any serious purpose.

My first big test—as well as Sister Miriam’s surely, for her own reputation was inescapably staked on it—came in my second year. She prodded me to enter a contest open to all high-school students at St. James for “the best meaning of success in no more than 25 words.” While, indeed, I may have ingratiated myself into contention by putting my entry in the standard Christian context of triumph of good over evil, I’d like to think the intrinsic merit of the sentence in which that context was deployed, a sentence I had myself constructed, was itself crucially contributory. But again, it was an act of creation that could not have been without Sister Miriam.

The award came in a little hexagonal medal with the word SUCCESS chiseled thus—in capital letters—in its gold-plated face and painted shiny-blue. Sooner had it been pinned on me than I unpinned it and handed it, intending it as a gift, to Sister Miriam, who laid it on her palm and briefly regarded it, all the words to be said said in her silent smile, before handing it back for me to keep—and, as would happen, to misplace (I know I kept it but don’t remember where; as for the winning sentence, it is lost irretrievably from memory; my last bet was the St. James newspaper, The Chimes, which had published it, if I recall right, but no luck all the same).

Thrown into many further battles in life across the years, I had lost touch with Sister Miriam since St. James. But, as providence would have it, to afford me, I’m sure, the opportunity to redeem myself, this time to Sister Miriam herself, two angels from my class—Virgie Borromeo-Cabrera and Nila Barican-Tupaz—have not only traced her for me, but got me a picture of her, lay-clothed, head thrown back in a hearty laugh in obviously happy retirement at the Maryknoll Motherhouse in New York—she must be in her late eighties. At any rate, Sister Miriam will never be lost to me as long as I write.

And, as it happens, I write to live.

The preceding essay is a reprint, with slight changes, from TEACHER TEACHER—a Tribute to Teachers Everywhere, published this year by the Technological Institute of the Philippines in celebration of its 50th year.