Catalina Lorenzo was born December 24, 1914 in Tondo City, Metro Manila. She was abducted by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942, Davao City, Mindanao. She filed a postwar compensation suit in September 1993, Tokyo District Court.
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Navotas, Metro Manila
June 18, 1999
The dalagas and I sit among a circle of forty lolas in a half-built house of concrete blocks with smooth cement floors, waiting. Eliza and Lizzie sit next to one another, leaning their teen bodies one into the other like vines of sampaguita flowers, sleepy and green on a hot summer afternoon. Tara sits next to me—alert and ready to go with notebook on her lap, pen poised. On the other side of the circle, Neleh has already begun making friends with a few of the lolas and I can see her teasing them and laughing. Meanwhile, Ana Fe has taken out her video camera and begun shooting everything. I am seated and watch everything unfold. I carry with me the posture of the teacher. Eighty-five-year-old Lola Catalina Lorenzo leans back in her plastic chair and smiles at everyone sweetly. Her black eyes are magnified in the lenses of her glasses. She has dyed her hair pitch black and pulled it away from her face so it appears clean and soft and cradled in wrinkles. She seems indifferent to the chatter. She’s perched at the very edge of the circle, and her eyes dart back and forth, following the other women’s words. Each one speaks a little louder than the last.
“Taga saan sila?” one of the women wants to know.
“Taga America sila,” answers Gema, one of the organizers. “Tangkad naman,” another woman remarks. So tall. “Kano?” American?
They’re talking about us like we cannot hear them. Oh, I hear them. And every word I translate in my head from Tagalog to English back to Tagalog. The process slows me down. In a few weeks, I’ll hear them and know. The words will sink into my skin and I will know. But for now, this.
At five feet nine inches, I am the tallest woman in the room, so tall that the Filipinas think one of my parents must be “American,” and by that they mean white. It takes me a moment to translate the phrases back to Tagalog. My blood—dugo ko—is purong Pilipino. Well, Filipino and Chinese, as many Filipinos are. My father is six feet tall, siya ay matangkad. He is the reason I tower over all the women.
The words come faster and I strain to keep up. Soon, each woman leaps into the conversation just as the other finishes. The gaps between their comments dissolve and they begin to speak over each other. Lola Catalina sits forward. She pulls her chair further into the circle. She leans on both elbows. One of the more dramatic ladies pounds on her chest. And without warning, Lola Catalina shoots her small body up out of her seat and shouts, “Filipinos did not fight in the war! The Filipinos were quiet. Tapos, the Americans came and made a playground out of the Philippines!”
Lola Catalina places her hands in prayer position before her heart, then sends them up like rockets. She whirls in circles before a window and the sun blazes behind her, erasing the expressions on her face. The light pushes through her floral skirt and I see her legs, bent and wiry. Her shadow darts about the room, circles fellow survivors, a few organizers, the five dalagas, and me. “It is as if they are slicing the sky,” she says, now separating her long, thin arms as if there are shards of blue falling around her. I see a hand reach up to pull her down; someone attempts to pet her, to calm her, but she cannot stop now. “Ingat, Lola,” calls out a voice, a warning. Everything she ever thought in these fifty years of silence unravels before us. “What do you think? We don’t need their money, we need their sincere apology, we need justice. Americans and Japanese—did you see what they did to our country? To our women? To our families?”
Lola Catalina’s accent reminds me of my elders when they are debating—old aunts and uncles, lolas and lolos, and our parents. I recognize the heat of the voice, understand the movement of the hands. I know once an idea finds its way inside them, like an ember from a hot flame, it ignites and burns at the flesh until tongues of fire lash out and take over the mind, the body, the soul. So when Lola Catalina stands before me in this way, pulsing each word and pointing at the end of each statement, I am taken home; I feel a sense of family and an impulse also to put my hand to the small of her back, to guide her gently to her seat.
Lola Catalina Lorenzo was born in Tondo, a district in Manila. Her father and my father come from Macabebe, Pampanga. She looks at me, shooting those words right at me. “Even if the whole world knows what they did to the Philippines, it will be very hard to make up for it. That’s why, what you’re doing, you’ll never really know. But me, I am old. I know what they did here.”
She says the war was between the Japanese and the Americans. The foreigners came and disrupted their lives, destroyed their city and all the Philippines. “It was their war,” she yells, “and we were the ones who were victimized.” She curls her sticklike fingers into fists, punching at the air. “Ang dugo nila,” says one of the organizers, “Ay purong Pilipino. Ang magulang nila, taga dito.” The organizers try to explain that even though we live in America, our blood is pure Pinay.
Lizzie and Eliza jump, pull away from each other, and sit, tall and big-eyed. Ana Fe has a lens to her eye and she is swish-panning her camera around the circle.
I fear Lola Catalina may collapse, that a heart hot with such passion might give out in a body so small and bones so frail. I want to tell her I, too, am Kapampangan. I can say come here—mekeni—and I can say yes—uwa. My last name means respect in Tagalog. I am the daughter of Miguel Trinidad Galang and the granddaughter of Miguel Galang Sr., who was a soldier in the Filipino army and a dentist who served all of Macabebe. The Galang house in Macabebe is across the street from the elementary school, the place the Japanese soldiers took and made into a garrison. I am the daughter of Gloria Anca Lopez-Tan, whose mother, Clara Anca, was the Filipina child bride of Philemon Green Lopez-Tan Siok Ching, a Chinese businessman who had relocated to Quezon Province. I have grown up in Wisconsin among the descendants of Germans and Poles, but I have been raised with the same values Lola Catalina’s family instilled in her. More than anything, I want her to see me as I am and to trust me. But on this first day, in June 1999, her hands flutter fast like knives slicing the air, her voice begins down at the bottom of her feet and pushes up like a volcano, erupting, her words splattering the air.
At the moment Lola Catalina speaks and dive-bombs the air with her hands, my understanding of Tagalog is tattered and I catch the meaning of one out of every hundred words.
“Panay hearing-hearing.” The words come too fast.
Always hearings.
Too deep.
“Walang katarungan.” Too many.
No justice.
I hear one word I know and I must stop to translate it but by the time I do, she has spewed forth a thousand other words I do not know. “Laging hearing-hearing.” She swings her arms. “Walapang justice.
Matanda na kami!”
She has gathered all her strength, all her years of suffering, of night- mares, of shame, and she is tossing it at us—Always hearings. Nothing but hearings. And no answer. No justice. Only more hearings. We are old. We are dying. Enough hearings. Answer us! A thousand memories, a thousand broken promises, and they are hitting the walls, shattering at our feet. It is too dangerous for us to stand, to walk amid this rubble, to escape.
We have no other choice than to sit very still, to listen, to let her anger fill the room and break into a million pieces.
* * *
Eight weeks later, Lola Catalina volunteers to give me and Ana Fe her testimony, and I am excited and a little nervous. I cannot seem to let go of the image of Lola Catalina’s waiflike shadow darting back and forth, her hands slashing each word with a gush of hot air, with the rise of a voice that cracks loud as thunder.
On the patio of Lolas’ House, surrounded by all the other grannies who are sitting on plastic chairs, gossiping to one another, Lola Cata- lina sits before me. She sniffs my cheek. I lean over and hold her hand. Her skin falls away from her thin bones and warms mine. I watch the way the veins in her hand map little roadways. She speaks to me and not the camera:
My mister was the private of General Paulino Santos. That was his destiny. We were among the 3,000 Filipino settlers sent to Glan, Mindanao. We called the place Dadiangas because there was nothing on that land but rocks and cogongrass.
We were first batchers, my mister and I. By 1942 we built a house made out of mountain trees. We had a seven-month-old son by then and while my mister worked, I stayed home to care for our boy.
We heard the Japanese landed in Manila so I already knew it was only time before they came. Most of the men joined the Filipino guerrillas or went into the mountains to hide. Then one day—yun na—tahimik ang mundo—quiet. Three Japanese carriers sailed into our harbor and shot their fighter pilots from the decks. Naku! The sound was loud—the bullets fell from the bellies of planes like thunder. When I heard the planes, I sent my mister and my son to the mountains. Later that day, some of the women and I were in the fields when the planes flew over- head. The Japanese could see everything from the sky—and there was no place to hide so we women had to run through the tall grass, hiding behind the smoke and fire, dodging bullets—maingay naman! So noisy! Natakot kami!
I ran through the smoke. I dodged flames on the cogongrass.
Fire from the sky missed me. When I looked to the ground I could see the bullets cracking the earth. I ran, even though I was not sure where I was going. The thick smoke made breathing difficult.
After the planes flew off, I joined my mister on the mountainside. He and my son were hiding in an abandoned carabao cart.
Tapos, we placed a mat in the bottom of the cart and blankets of grass over our son. High up in the mountains, we thought we’d be able to see everything before the Japanese could do anything. There were a thousand families hiding in those moun-
tains. When it was quiet again, my mister and my son came back to me.
Then one night, I was cooking when a guard from the bottom of the mountain began to shout. The Japanese were coming, they were coming. So I sent my mister off again. This time he wrapped a kerchief around our son’s mouth to keep him quiet, and they hid in the bark of a rotting tree.
I did my best to remain calm as a Japanese captain and soldier approached. They had brown uniforms, with long flaps that covered their ears. The captain wore a saber that ran all the way down his legs.
“Kura! Kura!” they shouted. “Where is your mister?” “I have no mister.”
“Where is your mister?”
“Nothing. I have none. He already died.” “Where do you live?” they asked me. “Here,” I told them.
“You are lying. You have a mister. You hid him. Show us.
Where is your mister?”
“Oh no. No mister. Only me.”
“Good. If there’s no mister, we’ll take you. Tell us, where is your mister.”
Lola Catalina doesn’t tell me what happens before they put her into a garrison, or after she is locked up, or what they do to her. She goes to the end—the part all the lolas love to tell. And then the Americans came, and MacArthur came back like he said he would. When the Japanese general heard this, they gathered all their things and they escaped, leaving behind a room full of women, a room of Muslim Filipino prisoners, and, in a third room, Lola Catalina Lorenzo. She nods at me and says, “But you know before they left they used me again.” Ginamit nila ako. They used me. The phrase is left open, wide like the doors after the Japanese escaped. They used me. The phrase sounds innocent, clean. When the lolas cannot say rape, or when they cannot talk about being thrown down and pried open, when the words may rekindle old pain, they say ginamit nila ako. They used me. Over and over again, she says, they used me.
As the Japanese soldiers left the house in Dadiangas, the Filipino guerrillas came out of hiding and released the prisoners. The guerrillas came, she tells me, and they opened the doors and let everyone free. They went into the wells and they pulled out the bodies of the dead and buried them properly. They ran after the Japanese, and any they found they killed on their way.
The guerrillas found me in the middle room and they took me to Doctor Patag. Ang sakit ang katawan ko! My body was so weak he kept me in the hospital for a month while the guerrillas went looking for my mister and son.
When they found my mister, they brought him and the boy before me. He looked at me for a long time and I waited for him to embrace me, but he did not.
“I thought you had died,” he told me. I shook my head. I cried.
I waited. Nothing. I explained to him what had happened and when he spoke, his voice was bitter.
It’s as if what happened to me made him lose his love for me. “You are educated,” Dr. Patag told my mister, “You can’t
blame your wife because she saved you from dying. It’s not that she wanted to be used like that. You should be ashamed.”
My mister nodded his head. And then he wept. He held our son out to me so I could hold him. He told the doctor he would take me home and that he didn’t have to worry about me because in our town there were seven doctors. He wanted to know what he owed the doctor, but the doctor told him to never mind. “I did this for Mrs. Lorenzo. Anyway, the government pays me.”
My mister took me home, but he did not forgive me.
“I said to God,” she tells me, pulling a thread out of her blouse, “if he no longer loves me, maybe it’s better I die.”
After a long moment, she grabs my hands and then tosses them aside. I jump at the sudden movement. She turns away from me and looks into the camera. “Peace time, peace time,” she is muttering. “What do you think? Do you think we have forgotten what has hap- pened? Every day we wake up and it’s in our head. Every night we go to sleep, and it is with us again. What do you think, when we sleep, do you think we forget? It is always with us, these memories, this destruction. Even now, it is here.” She points to her head, staring at the camera lens like she is going to shoot herself. Her arm begins swinging back and forth. Her long and bony finger shakes at the camera lens. “Where is our justice? Where is our apology? How long must we wait?” she wants to know. “Panay hearings, always hearings. More hearings. Tell us once and for all, what will you do? Yes or no? So we know what to do!”
I know she’s talking about the Japanese government. I know she means that the women of lila Pilipina have filed countless suits against the Japanese government. But the Japanese government is not the only culprit. Remember? The Filipinos were quiet until the Americans came and made a playground out of their country. And who are the Americans? Does she mean the soldiers who fought in World War II? Does she mean the U.S. soldiers returning in 2001 in the name of terrorism? Does she mean the Dalaga Project—the five young women from America and me?
From the moment the dalagas and I arrive, she challenges us. She wants to know how true our intentions are. She plants a seed in me that will take root and grow amid my own tangled branches as I define to myself who I am—the oldest daughter of Filipino immigrants, a single woman making her own path, a teacher, a writer, a sister, an American-born Filipina—a very tall and crooked-curvy tree with branches turning in every direction. In the years to come I visit the lolas often. I hear the stories told to me once, twice, three times. I go on marches and then return to my life in Miami. It may seem as though I am forgetting. But I cannot. And I am not. Even as I teach my workshops and direct the program here at the university, the politics rise up and often I take to the web and other public venues. Every time the Japanese government refuses the lolas I respond. After all, Lola Catalina Lorenzo is my kababayan. Her father and my father are both from Macabebe. More than anything, I want her to see me as I am and to trust me.
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