Who would have thought that in the year 2022 A.C (after Covid or more precisely, after Covid vaccine), I would join the big global convulsion of people breaking free from the chains of indoor-boundedness, rushing out everywhere in what has been called revenge travel?
Who would have thought that I would be flying to three continents in a span of four months? Sure, the first one being work-related was more or less a foregone conclusion. The next one was a planned vacation that teetered between being a go and no-go. And the last was a surprise invitation that would allow me to combine work and play. But because of Covid, and the possibility of surges in the places of origin and destination and the consequent health restrictions, I treated all of these trips like hazy visions that might or might not be there, like images in the horizon on an overcast day. All of a sudden the images were high-definition clear and upon me, and now, months later, already behind me.
I wrote this biography of the veteran broadcaster Tina Monzon Palma after she was selected to receive the prestigious Gawad Plaridel Award given to an exemplary media practitioner. This piece was published in the souvenir program for the event produced by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication, and later in the academic publication, the Plaridel Journal. The piece leads off with events that happened exactly 32 years ago today, Dec 1, 1989.In the photo are Tina Monzon Palma with UP executives on the stage as she receives the UP Gawad Plaridel. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News
It was the ringing of the telephone that awakened me at around 1:00 a.m. of Friday, Dec. 1, 1989. My boss, Tina Monzon Palma, was calling.
“Come to work. There’s a coup,” she said and hung up. No hello, no goodbye, no further instructions. I was then a television reporter for GMA-7 and I did as I was told, no questions asked.
Minutes later, I was at the GMA-7 newsroom which was then just a bungalow in the network’s compound on EDSA in Quezon City. A small group had gathered, composed mostly of those who Tina could reach by landline, since mobile phones did not yet exist and some of the staff’s walkie-talkie units were turned off and being charged for the night.
She gave senior reporter Jimmy Gil and myself keys to the news vehicles and asked us to drive them out of the compound to safety, in case the station was attacked. And then we were back at the newsroom, listening to her telling us how we were going to cover the story.
The story was the attempt by rebel solders to seize power in December 1989, the bloodiest challenge to the leadership of Corazon Aquino, the country’s first female president. That coup tested Tina’s capabilities as well. TMP, as she was addressed, was then 39 years old and senior vice president of GMA-7 News, the first female to hold that position and at that time the only woman at the helm of a national TV news division in the Philippines.
Tina’s responsibility was to help secure the broadcast facilities of GMA-7 against a possible attack by rebel soldiers. But she also wanted to make sure the network stayed on the air to broadcast stories about the coup, to the consternation of Malacañang and military officials who chastised her for giving rebel soldiers precious airtime.
Looking back to those days, she said she felt the public deserved to know who the government’s enemy was, although government itself disagreed and its officials kept pestering her to cease broadcast. Tina remembers having the audacity to tell them, “You do your job, and I will do my job.”
“I was reckless and fearless,” she told a group of University of the Philippines professors in June 2017, “not because I was courageous or wanted to make a name for myself, but because nobody could really affect the way you do your job.”
It didn’t seem like it at that time but Tina Monzon Palma was making television history. She proved that a woman could lead a TV news department competently through the most difficult times and that she could engage the powers that be in a battle of wills over what could and could not be broadcast. She eventually backed down as national security concerns prevailed, but she was paving the way for more women to assert themselves in leadership roles in broadcast news in the years to come.
For three days this week, I felt like a traveler again, despite having journeyed no farther than 12 kilometers from my home to a place so achingly familiar to me and some family members.
The purpose of the trip was a face-to-face live-in workshop of the kind that had been part and parcel of my work pre-pandemic. After being cooped up at home for almost two years, seeing no one other than mostly relatives, and learning to regard physical contact with others as unhealthy, taking part in a once-normal workshop seemed like a novelty, a culture surprise (not shock). And because it meant checking into a hotel for two nights, I had to pack my bags and take on the role of traveler.
Long before external hard drives, digital cameras and smartphones, there was the Onoffree album.
Those of us of a certain age, time, and place might remember it– the holder of memorable photographs developed from precious film, pictures neatly arranged on a page covered with plastic and bound together in thick cover. Onoffree albums were conversation pieces brought out when friends and relatives visited.
I mention Onoffree Albums as a reminder of a time before digital when people took photographs very thoughtfully. There were after all only 12 or 24 shots in a roll of film (I believe the 36 shots came later). Subjects were well chosen; they posed and portrayed happy scenes.
I recently purchased the book White Lady Black Christ by Charlson Ong after reading glowing reviews in a local paper. The author is a Filipino-Chinese writer who had penned three other novels, and although I had heard his name before, I had never read him. This time around, the reviews piqued my curiosity and prompted me to put in an order for the book, posthaste, and within days it was in my hands.
Because I finally decided to create the blog, I have unearthed some notes and pictures I collected over the past two years which were meant to be blog content. The writings are few; some found their way to my Facebook page, while others are unfinished and unprocessed thoughts. There are lessons here somewhere, so do read on.
NAIA Terminal 2
July 21, 2019
I am writing this in the middle of sheer and intense self-inflicted exhaustion traveling from Manila to Iligan and then on to Marawi at Terminal 2 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Putting off writing it will make me forget the feeling and I do it now, thankful for the empty charging tables and unoccupied electrical sockets at NAIA.
This isn’t my first trip to anywhere, and certainly not my last, given the back-to-back trips that somehow found their way to my otherwise uneventful social and professional calendar. But I still wonder why I never have seemed to learn my lesson. How to travel light when you need to be mojo (mobile journeyer)? I am bringing laptop and charger, camera and charger, recorder and charger, phones and chargers, documents, a book I thought to put in my carry-on, in case I would have the time or the inclination to read it, plus cosmetic case, and hard drive.
The story I’m about to tell is the reason for this blog. It happened more than two years ago, on the first day of 2019, a good time to be talking about beginnings and journeys. But I’m sharing it now in 2021 as a metaphor for the pandemic times we live in.
B and I like to think of ourselves as road trip veterans, even if our road trips took us only to points around Luzon that our limited time and resources could accommodate, and to places we are familiar with. We love traveling by land—the feel of sitting inside or driving a car and watching the scenery change, passing through towns and cities we had seen many times before, and observing how they changed over time. Trying out new roadside restaurants or returning to old favorites was the highlight of our road trips. We like revisiting places and discovering that a new diversion road had decongested the traffic that seemed to worsen as the years went by, and to see that the main expressway from Manila to the north had grown more miles and therefore bridged the distance in less time.
On the road 