First and Last

DESPITE ITS proximity to the Philippines, I never had the opportunity to visit Hong Kong until a couple of weeks ago when I went with Ninang and some friends. The former British colony had always evoked images of a shopper’s paradise brought about mainly by stories my mother told me about the trips she made there as a viajera in the early Eighties. It was a week after Hong Kong marked the 10th year of its handover to China when I took the late morning Philippine Airlines flight to the special autonomous region.

I went there to unwind. I wanted to put myself in an environment different from the Holiday Inn Clark where I had been under virtual house arrest for almost two weeks while helping run a United Nations peacekeeping course there. Since it was my first time in Hong Kong, Ninang insisted that we go to Disneyland or take a tour of the city. But seeing Mickey Mouse and the other tourist attractions was not really the kind of unwinding I had in mind.

By unwinding, I meant shopping and by shopping I meant the bargain stores my mother told me about, most particularly the plethora of shops that made Hong Kong a byword among photo and airsoft enthusiasts. Unwinding, of course, also meant going on a food trip and renewing ties with old friends who are now based there.

In addition to Peking duck, I wanted to see Meyo Abada, my kumpadre and neighbor at Lippo Karawaci in Jakarta, who is now a top insurance executive in Hong Kong. There is also Consul Vicvic Dimagiba, my Foreign Service batchmate, who is assigned to the Philippine Consulate General. While I did enjoy my fill of luscious Hong Kong duck during my three-day holiday of sorts there, I was, unfortunately, not able enjoy the company of my two old friends.

We checked in at the Park Lane shortly after arrival and began hitting the malls a couple of hours later, starting with Pacific Place in the Admiralty area. This giant mall was so impressive. It is a virtual cornucopia of retail shops offering the same name brands you can find here in New York. But, to my dismay, the price tags are simply just out of reach for a government functionary like me.

Well of course, I was in a high-end shopping mall but I just would not be paying hundreds, even a few thousand pesos more for the same item that is available for a much lower price in Manila or New York. I told Ninang I would rather while my time away in Macy’s or the outlets in Woodbury or Riverside where I would get more value for my money.

It was such a disappointment that Hong Kong turned out to be not the shopper’s paradise I pictured it to be. It was just so expensive Manila ended up being much cheaper. As such, most of my time was simply spent window shopping. While I ended up getting nothing I took comfort in the fact that we will cross into Kowloon the next day and hopefully find some real bargains there.

After breakfast at the Conrad, we took the Mass Transit Railway and found ourselves exploring some shops at the Jordan area of Kowloon. We eventually ended up in Tsim Sha Tsui where I got sales-talked into getting a set of replica samurai swords similar to those my brother-in-law brought with him from Tokyo. I always wanted to gift myself with some samurai swords since I took on the airsoft nom de guerre Shogun three years ago. I imagined the sword to blend well with the rest of my weekend wargear.

The saleslady immediately sensed my interest and initially priced the three swords—long, medium and short—at HK$500. She tried to go for the kill by lowering the price to HK$400 and then HK$300. I was fortunate to have sharpened my haggling skills at Greenhills just a week earlier so I offered to buy the three swords for HK$200. She shook her head in seeming disbelief. I then walked away only to find her running after me, saying she will take my two hundred. That’s how I got the three swords which eventually ended up on display at my in-law’s receiving room on Embassy Road.

So there I was lugging a box of swords and trying to wriggle our way past a sea of humanity to the harbor for the Star ferry ride across the bay. It was at that point that I found myself stepping into a camera store eager to seek out some items for my Canon 30D digital SLR that I have checked online while in New York. I was hoping for a repeat performance of my victory over the samurai lady just a few minutes earlier. I asked the middle-aged salesman if he had a hand-strap for the 30D. After going through one shelf of assorted straps, he said he did not have the item.

I then asked if he had the protective hood cover for the camera’s sensitive LCD screen. He said he has it and showed me the same item I was checking out on eBay just a few weeks earlier. How much is it I asked him. He quoted a little over HK$700. Wow! That’s roughly US$100 or four times the amount I will pay for the same item if I purchased it at my favorite Circuit City store here in Queens. I can get this for only US$25 in New York I told the salesman. He looked at the other salesman, said something in Chinese, got his calculator and punched some keys. “Oke,” he told me, “I will give it to you for $25.” Fine, I said. I will get the item.

I then asked for a shutter release cable. He has it. Realizing he could not get away with his earlier pricing, he offered it to me at the equivalent of US$55 which is more or less the same amount I would get it for online. All right, I will also get the item I told him.

I took out my wallet and was getting ready to pay when I decided to ask if he had some China-made shutter release cables that are being sold like hotcakes online. I was hoping to see how the Chinese clones would fare in comparison to the original Canon piece. I don’t know what I did or said but the salesman just went ballistic.

He angrily muttered something in Chinese which I have no intention of finding out. All I know was that it was not nice to hear. “Whoa! We not sell China. We sell only original Canon. You wasting my time,” he told me. He punctuated it with a yell of “Get out! Get out!” with the accompanying saliva barely missing my face.

Having been used to the way shoppers are pampered here in the States, I was naturally taken aback with this kind of treatment. Here I was being treated rudely by a salesman who only minutes earlier tried to make a fast buck at my expense.

I must confess that at that instant I was feeling a bit murderous. I imagined myself as the swordsman portrayed by Jet Li in Hero and making full use of the samurai blades I had in the box. Instead, I simply smiled at the salesman, muttered something unprintable in Kapampangan and stepped out of the camera store.

As I hit the street, I shook my head and swore that this visit would be my first and last.

Toy Soldiers

IT WAS Vegetius who once wrote: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. As a diplomat, I am a peacemaker. While I remain true to this responsibility, I believe that this should not prevent me from learning the art of war. Somehow, war and peace go together. How can one appreciate peace if he has no idea about war?

And so almost every other weekend for the past three years, I take on a different persona, replacing coat and tie with camouflage uniforms; my laptop with a replica M4 assault rifle; the skyscrapers of Manhattan with the hills of Connecticut or New Jersey and become Shogun, overlord of Filforce, one of the biggest groups of so-called airsoft warriors here in the United States.

Airsoft warriors what? For those encountering it for the first time, airsoft is basically a sport or recreational pastime in which players don military uniforms to participate in the simulation of military or law-enforcement-style combat using replica weapons that shoot plastic pellets. It is very much like playing hide and seek or baril-barilan using gas-powered or battery-operated, realistic looking toy guns. As a sport for the big boys, airsoft provides a different kind of rush for those who play it—something that first-timers would look forward to doing again and again.

Airsoft traces its roots to Asia where the sport has been played since the late Seventies but it is also past becoming popular in Europe and the United States. In the Philippines alone, airsoft players number in the thousands. The United States is no exception with a growing number of players, including Filipinos, getting hooked into the sport.

I organized Filforce three years ago primarily to share the Philippine airsoft experience with other teams here in the United States, particularly the East Coast. Having played the sport in the Philippines as part of the Angeles-based Semper Fidelis, I started seeking out other Filipino airsoft enthusiasts in the tri-state area shortly after I was assigned in New York in 2004. From an original group of seven, Filforce has grown by leaps and bounds with as many as 80 members in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia.

Our membership base is predominantly Filipino and Filipino-American but we also have members who are of Chinese, Guyanese, Nigerian, Korean, Thai and Laotian descent. They include diplomats, former military and police personnel and health, information technology and art professionals as well as students.

Filforce draws its inspiration from the secret society Katipunan that led the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896. Like the katipuneros of old, Filforce is made up of men and women who are bound by a creed that requires members to exhibit a strong sense of kinship or Kapatiran; great courage or Katapangan; loyalty or Katapatan; and dignity and honor or Karangalan.

Filforce's Katipunan roots are evident in its team logo, which was derived from the personal red and white standard of Katipunan founder Andres Bonifacio. The Filforce flag features an enhanced version of Bonifacio's sun symbol to represent the East—Asia where most Filforce members trace their ethnic roots and the East Coast where team members are now based—that shines over a black background to symbolize the threatening unknown.

Filforce had its baptism of fire on 29 January 2005 when we played against a local squad in Long Island and had since seen action in New York; Connecticut; New Jersey; Pennsylvania and Maryland. The team has also been making a name for itself and is now being supported by airsoft retailers such as Evike, Airsoftone and Krukspec.

Last year, Filforce helped win Operation Independent Will in New Jersey to end the four-part series with a final score of three wins against one loss. It ended 2006 by defeating the top two teams in the Northeast during the Tolcom Team Challenge.

Just this May, Filforce successfully mounted Balikatan 2007-01: Operation Sulu Storm—its first major event that was participated in by more than 100 players. In the coming weeks, we will stage Balikatan 2007-02: Operation Basilan Fury. More events are also being lined up to address the growing clamor for airsoft action among us big boys.

All I could say is that airsoft will continue to attract not only us big boys but men and even women of all ages because it brings out the warrior in each and every one of us.

Resurrected

IT WAS an invitation I could not refuse. The email actually went unopened in my inbox for several days as I thought it was just another e-vite to one of the usual parties that take place here in New York when the year approaches its end. I was just about to consign the email to the recycle bin when for one reason or another I decided to give the sender the perfunctory courtesy.

As it turned out, the email came from a very dear friend—the poet-novelist-artist-journalist Titus Toledo. It was actually a follow up email reminding me of his invitation for me to write for eK, which he explained in a way only he could as a web-exclusive journal of Kapampangan ideas, a logbook of sorts of mental transactions open to everyone and anyone who cares to inquire into the Kapampangan state of mind.

The invitation came with a deadline I knew I could not meet. I have never been good with deadlines. Worse, I have not written anything of late that Kapampangan readers may find worth their while reading. It has been almost eight years since I left journalism to embark on a new career in the Foreign Service and I must confess that the words no longer flow out of me like they used to.

Titus and I, of course, go a long way back. We went to the same school, grew up in the same Angeles neighborhood, and even came to fight the same causes together. Along with me, Jay Sangil and Francis Sison, Titus was a member of our so-called Gang of Four, who in the halcyon days of our youth attempted to redefine Pampanga journalism with the experiment called The Angeles Sun.

Titus and I were also together for quite a while in K, the Kapampangan Magazine, which I published sometime after my return from a year-long sojourn in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1998 until I left the country again in 2003 for my first diplomatic assignment as a member of the Philippine Delegation to the United Nations here in New York.

Since joining the Department of Foreign Affairs, I have written very little of public interest and the few journalistic pieces that I came out with were published in K some years back. Most of what I have been writing about in the past several years is pure bureaucratese—a bottomless sea of official reports and memoranda that we government factotums always find ourselves drowning in.

But in all the years that I have been out of circulation, I always carried this desire to return to journalism in one form or another. I envy my contemporaries—Bong Lacson, Ding Cervantes, Tonette Orejas and even the more senior Ram Mercado—who are just so prolific their works are more than enough to fill the pages of several books about our province and our people.

Before Titus’s invite, I was seriously considering coming up with a blog about my experiences past and present, in the Philippines and elsewhere. I also entertained the idea of writing several books of my own, including an account of my adventures and misadventures as a journalist during those days of disquiet and discontent and one or two coffee-table books festooned with the photographs I captured of that bygone era.

All these ideas, unfortunately, remain on the drawing board of my mind as I somehow could not compel myself to start the process of putting my thoughts on paper. I am some sort of a writer lost in New York, suffering from the effects of a jetlag that I have been trying to shake off for the past three years.

I keep telling myself that if I were to find my way out of this literary imbroglio and start writing again, it would not only have to be at the right place and the right time but also with the right hardware. I have actually lost count of the number of occasions I ascribed my failure to write to the lack of time supposedly due to the need to balance the demands of diplomatic work with those of the family.

And when I finally find the time, the onus would now be on finding a nice, quiet spot in our lilliputian apartment here in Queens where I could work. Yet, when I have both the time and the space, I think of some other reason to put off the writing. My last pretext was the need to replace the six-pound tablet PC I got last year precisely to get me to start writing simply because I now want a smaller, lightweight notebook that I could lug around.

I just never seem to run out of excuses. When I came across the electronic invitation from my kumpadre, the immediate reaction was to wriggle myself out of it in a diplomatic sort of way. My reply was an admixture of yes and no—something like “Of course, I would love to contribute to eK and will submit my piece when I find the time to sit down and write.” Titus is not someone who would take that for an answer.

Having the same December birth-sign as mine, Titus never had the makings of a diplomat but carries the traits of the persistent man that I am. He extended the deadline and told me in no uncertain terms that he wants to see my piece in eK or else. I guess I finally have run out of excuses.

Titus left me with no choice but to find myself a nice cozy corner at home, start to figure out what to write about and make full use of this tablet PC that up to now I am still planning to get rid of for something lighter.

Getting started is, of course, the most difficult part but I am convinced that once I do, the words will flow like they used to and there would be no turning back. There are just so many stories to tell, so many experiences to share. This is one opportunity to resurrect the writer I once was. So here I am with the introductory piece to what I hope would be the first of many that would eventually fill my blog and the pages of a book.


The ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu once said the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I finally have taken that initial step. I now start a much-anticipated journey.