TRAVELS (and more) WITH CECILIA BRAINARD: How I Became a Writer - Paulino Lim, Jr

Thursday, November 14, 2024

How I Became a Writer - Paulino Lim, Jr - Filipino FilAm Series #2

Paulino Lim, Jr. Copyright Paulino Lim, Jr.

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. Paulino Lim's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials here.

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DR. PAULINO LIM, JR was born in the Philippines on August 23, 1935. He is an emeritus professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. In 2016 he was the recipient of a Philippine Presidential Award for Outstanding Filipino Individuals Overseas, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from his alma mater University of Santo Tomas, Manila.

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SEÑORA MUÑOZ, daughter of a conquistador, conducted a kindergarten school for the children in the neighborhood, me included. I was five-years-old at the time. She taught us the alphabet, how to combine letters, and speak out the syllables: b, a, ba; l, e, le.
Señora lived with her family in a two-story mansion in Camalig in the province of Albay, Philippines. Across the street was a plaza that fronted a 17th-century church. It was a joy to see in print the syllables and words that you hear. Because the American colonizers had decreed English to be the medium of instruction in public schools, with the indigenous language of the region (Bisaya, Bikol, Ilocano, Tagalog) taught as a subject, the pupils read bilingually.
There were more texts in English than Bicol, my native language. My Catholic high school St. John's Academy had volumes of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Zane Grey, and Tarzan series. It also had copies of the National Geographic, with pictures of naked natives whose breasts were blotted out with black ink.
When you read, you become aware of how words are put together to express an idea. An idea may be an object you perceive and give it a name or a word that you, perhaps, already know, e.g., lily. You name its color “white” and compare its shape to a “trumpet,” that evokes the sound of a cavalry or jazz music. The cavalry and jazz create images in your mind, or imagination.
Imagination is one of the mind’s faculties as perception, memory, speculation, and judgment. Imagination creates mental images in the same way a painter creates visual images, or a jazz musician produces aural images.
Memory recalls past events or persons and awakens feelings and emotions. Speculation looks at a future event and its possible outcomes. Judgment looks at evidence, as in the courtroom, resulting in a certainty of it being true, but subject to revision when new evidence turns up.

The activity of the mind's faculties awakens consciousness of the self. How do you remember a deceased parent? How do you recall fond or unpleasant memories of your childhood? How do you assess or judge your relationship with parents, siblings, or spouse? The judgment may or may not be accurate or true, heightens your self-consciousness, and desire to be a writer. In other words, reading inspired me to write; it activated my mind, and gave me joy.

l -r: Cecilia Brainard, Herminia Menez Coben, Paulino Lim, Helen Brown,
Susan Montepio - circa 1988

In high school, I won first prize in the essay writing contest in English, sponsored by the Bicol Association of Catholic Schools (BACS). I’ve forgotten the topic that was given at the start of the contest and this feat must have been a factor in my being named Valedictorian by St. John’s Academy. My closest rival became a nun, and still is. Señora Muñoz paid for my high school tuition. The honor earned me a scholarship at the Dominican University of Santo Tomas (UST) in Manila, where I enrolled in education, majoring in English.
The education bachelor’s degree introduced me to the vocabulary of teaching methodology. And English opened up the wealth of the English language and literature. Education taught me to adjust the structure and vocabulary to the students’ level of understanding. A useful skill for a writer who must be aware of his intended reader or audience for the piece he’s working on, or the character of a play he is portraying.

At UST, I also learned a new way of thinking—religious and philosophical—and the vocabulary and its practitioners: monks like Thomas Merton, theologians like Thomas Aquinas, and philosophers like Plato.
When l enrolled at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) for the Ph.D., I learned another way of thinking—the historical—the effect of current events on one’s writing. I became aware of Philippine history, which gave me confidence to write on topics related to my country, such as, the Spanish-Philippine war. As you accommodate different ways of thinking, you learn to vary word choice or diction. While reading, you may love certain writers, and emulate their subject and style.
The doctorate landed me a professorship at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), where I became Chair of the English Department, and a Fulbright Lectureship at National Taiwan University. There I began to write my first novel Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon, with an epigraph from Heidegger: “The conflict is not a rift as a cleft that is ripped open; rather it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other.” This underscores the three novels that followed, separated by time but united by the historical backdrop—the Marcos Dictatorship.
I fondly call the four interrelated novels "Philippine Quartet" as a tribute to (an emulation of?) Laurence Durrell whose Alexandria Quartet fascinated me in college. The three novels that complete the quartet are: Sparrows Don’t Sing in the Philippines, Requiem for a Rebel Priest, and Ka Gaby, Nom de Guerre.
Ka Gaby was influenced by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The title and opening sentence echoes Rebecca’s “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Ka gabi in Filipino means last night. The full sentence reads: “Last night I dreamed of eating green mangoes again.” The two protagonists of Ka Gaby come right out of Du Maurier’s novel; their identities merging as the novel moves along.

After I retired from classroom teaching, my teaching and writing education came to a fruition. I volunteered to teach senior citizens enrolled at the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI). I conducted seminars on two of my favorite authors, Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham. We read passages and viewed clips from films made of their works such as The End of the Affair and Of Human Bondage. I also conducted a seminar on “Stage Drunk”; the trope of intoxicated characters experiencing an epiphany as in, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
I have ventured writing in other genres, each piece being shadowed by other writers: Spots of Time: Memoir of a Mind (Wordsworth and Teilhard de Chardin), Death of the English Zen Professor (John le Carré. During the pandemic I began writing a blog, Pandemic Diary. It featured a mystery series: Coastal Village Murder.
In the twilight of my days, as the cliché goes, I am reading books I hadn't read: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Three Musketeers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. I am also re-reading Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain.
To encapsulate, I became a writer because I love to read, and writing has become my way of life.