When Turtles Come Home

Victoria Hoffarth

Description

When Victoria Hoffarth was at graduate school in the U.S., her lecturer, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, once told her class, "There are so many varied places in the world. It is incumbent upon us to search for one where we most fit." Thus, despite having been born and brought up in the Philippines, Victoria never felt at home there. And so, she became a cultural refugee, searching for where she most fitted.Her engaging and intimate narrative remembers back to the early 50s, when her little town was still recovering from the destruction caused by WorldWar II, through thirty years of discontented wanderings to America and back, then onwards to the UK, Germany, and Canada.Victoria delves intoPhilippine culture, what is unique to their society and what can be learned by the wider world.Likewise, she suggests what Filipinos can learn from thewider world.She further questions what it is to be Filipino, and if she can call herself that? Are you no more than where you are born and raised?Aliberal globalist, two other issues uppermost to her are her being a woman in a setting where feminism is frowned upon, and her beliefs as an "a-la-carte" Roman Catholic, given the mindset of a deeply conservative and traditional society.Much more than a memoir, this is the story of finding yourself and learning to look beyond what you know to find home - even if that is where you firstbegan.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Manila
• Memoir
• Southeast Asia
• Philippines
• Germany
• Manille

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599034
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Victoria Hoffarth

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1838599 034

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To my father who crafted me a pair of wings
and taught me how to fly
To my mother who showed me how to leap with
both feet tied firmly on the ground
To Klaus who provided me with the tools
To Paul who has borne the consequences

Turtles carry their homes on their backs, travelling thousands of miles each year. But eventually, guided by the magnetic fields of the earth, they are programmed to return to the place of their birth.
Contents
Preface
Introduction

Part One
Personal Setting

1. The Child Is Father Of The Man
2. Fly Away Home: Expatriation And Repatriation
Photo Captions

Part Two
Philippine Cultural Values and Norms

3. Power And Patronage
4. Philippine Business And Politics
Photo Captions

Part Three
Choices and Identity

5. Who Am I? Nationality, Gender, And Identity
6. Where Is Heaven? A Spiritual Quest
7. Happiness Is Not Just A Feeling
Photo Captions

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Glossary Of Tagalog And Ilonggo Terms
Bibliography
Notes
Preface
My interest in writing started when I was quite young. At that time, I thought I could write about my personal experiences. Those were what I knew, after all. I remember asking for advice from my teacher and was told, “How could you write a memoir? What will you write about? Who would be interested in ordinary lives such as ours? Only people who have been in the public eye or who have had unusual experiences write memoirs.” In fact, this truism was repeated only recently by a literary agent who gave me his opinion when I mentioned that I was writing my memoir. He advised me to put my draft inside the drawer and go write a novel.
Nonetheless, when I went to a major bookstore in London to ask if they had any how-tos on memoir writing, the salesman commented, “Memoirs are so self-indulgent. . .” and, in a back-handed insult to women, “every housewife wants to write her memoir”. I now understand what he meant as I have indulged myself in a couple of anecdotes that I had decided did not exactly fit my narrative framework, yet which, I sincerely hope, will be of interest to the readers. I am assuming that, in a memoir, this would be permissible.
From those who considered writing memoirs absolutely fine, came various dictums: you have to arouse the reader’s curiosity. Your opening lines are some of the most important in your book so be very careful about them. They should make your reader want to keep on reading. I was instructed about craftsmanship and structure—chronological sequencing is so boring, think about flashbacks and flash-forwards. Build up your story with unforgettable settings and interesting characters, and most important of all: show, don’t tell—no expositories please, only stories!
As a consequence, all these comments froze me in my tracks, and for years I kept toying with the idea but never really made a serious attempt at starting. How could you sit down and compose your first lines knowing they would be some of the most important in your book? It didn’t heIp that I was also busy with my family and career. However, I continued to keep notes, attend writing classes and writers’ events, including the Hay-on-Wye writers’ festival in Wales, UK where authors spoke about their own experiences. I have to admit, I felt totally discouraged. How do you respond to someone who says, “I can’t help but write”. All these years I couldn’t help but NOT write!
At one of these events, I had a brief encounter with the writer John Forsythe. I asked him how he started. “Dump all those writing classes,” he said bluntly. When he was a teenager, he decided he wanted to write. So he just sat down and wrote. He started copying and imitating the manner in which his favourite authors expressed themselves, and only developed his own personal style much later.
Teenager indeed! I was by then decades older than a teenager, and no longer had the time to develop my craft. How about the folk artist Grandma Moses, I reminded myself. She only started painting when she was seventy-eight! Battles raged in my mind. Instead of a memoir, how about writing a personal narrative or a personal essay, I asked myself. They sounded less ambitious and perhaps more acceptable for “nobodies” like me. In short, I was stuck!
Then, I happened to chat with a lawyer-friend who told me he was just finishing writing his memoir. This, he said, would be the legacy he wanted to leave his children. I told myself— Why not? Why did I have to write for publication? Why not leave something behind in the attic, perhaps never to be read. But then again, possibly, in the future my reflections might be of use to someone? It would be a means of addressing my thoughts on friends and family, my community, country, indeed the whole state of the world! Why not leave something for my son Paul? Most people, Filipinos included, think of inheritance in terms of material wealth. But there is an even more important legacy: the wealth of documentation about a world gone by. I realised I wanted to leave Paul and his children descriptions of events that might give them some awareness of how their lives can be influenced by the context of the past. I wanted to pass on the wisdom I had accumulated over the years, not just through the narration of my life story, but more importantly, by including my observations of the world around me and how my evaluations of these environmental forces have shaped the philosophies by which I live.
My legacy should be there for the taking. I hope that, in the event that a member of some future generation glances at it, they could have just a bit of an idea of what my world was like—way back in the 1950s in Negros and in Manila in the 1960s; in New York of the 1970s; then trying to make my way back to the Philippines in the1980s, working hard but not quite working smart at the business school where I taught. London came in the 1990s, spending some time in Germany; and back to Manila again in 2004, trying to fit in: the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
In a sense, this book is also therapy for me as the process is just as important. I once read a novel called Zeno’s Conscience . Zeno started by wanting to give up smoking. He was asked by his psychoanalyst to write down his life’s story as a form of therapy, in order to make sense of his own history. I believe I have a bit of that motivation as well. As a true introvert in the Jungian sense of the word, I live inside my head. Thoughts jumble and tumble, inside and out, up and down. Experiences of years ago can suddenly resurface in early morning flashes and—Eureka!—I realise what they mean to me! The process of writing this memoir has given me the opportunity to explore them.
Now that I am over seventy, this is as good a time as any to make sense out of my life, to carefully draw its contours, so to speak, before it is finally done. These contours have been quite uneven, sometimes very thin and narrow as I withdrew into myself; other times lined with bold strokes of productivity and growth; or fat and pregnant, breaching its confines as I reached out to others. One day, l will leave it to the stars to finally paint the shape of my life: a speck of dust in the vast universe of time.

Manila
15th September 2018
Introduction
Each of us has our own stories to tell.
Our stories are what make us immortal.
Beowulf
I once heard of a housewife who, whenever she cooked a steak, always cut it into two parts. Pressed for the reason, she replied, “That’s how my mother did it.” When her mother next came for a visit, the housewife was prodded to ask why she (the mother) had cooked the steak that way. Her mother’s reply was, “Oh that? The pan I used was too small.”
Like the mother, I don’t want to have to come back in order to tell my story. Instead, after I have departed, I want to live on through the stories that I tell. It is said that our stories are the footprints we leave behind as we try to reach out to immortality. These footprints are the memories imbedded in our minds: tales of experiences, some sad, others happy, some meaningful, others quite insignificant. Most importantly, these are our thoughts and ideas as we respond to life’s situations. As for me, I do not want to leave these footprints on the sand, to be washed away when high tide comes. I do not want to go to my grave without having played the music in my heart.
In the eyes of history, most of us are nobodies. We will not be written about after we have passed. We mostly lead ordinary lives. Yet, most of us wouldn’t consider our lives to be failures. We survive in the hearts of our loved ones, in the little acts of kindness for which others rem