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.
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