‘You have to be good at what you are doing. You have to be committed first to your craft and then to your country. Because if you are not committed to the craft, anong ibibigay mo sa bayan mo? (What will you give to your country?)’ When Manong Frankie, F.
Sionil Jose, national artist for literature, died in early 2022, I felt like an orphan all over again, having lost my father early (1989) and then, decades later, my mother (2015) and, between them, my grandmother (1995), to whom I was very close. Just as tragic was that Manong Frankie’s daughter, my friend Brigida Bergkamp, the editor of many of his books, also died just a few weeks before her father, just when we were in the middle of what promised to be a long correspondence. Throughout the pandemic, while social distancing protocols stood between Manong Frankie and me, especially as he was of delicate age (he died at 97 and not of Covid-19) and with co-morbidities, he was writing me letters by hand to remind me that the pandemic, for all its horrors, was a great opportunity for writing.
“In this pandemic,” he wrote in one of his handwritten notes, “I expect you to have written a lot. Go keep at it, record our time faithfully.” It didn’t take long before Brigida, whom we called Jet, gave me a call from San Francisco, where she was based, to say her father asked her to see to it that I would write something of substance, despite—or because of—the extraordinary circumstances we were in.
“I won’t medd.