FW: Of Terrorists and Hollywood

[Fátima Lasay]

The Australian-produced docu on Filipina "terrorist," Doris Nuval, 
"Explosive Devices"
has been chosen as finalist in the 2003 Hollywood Film Festival®
October 15-20, 2003

"Fearless: Stories From Asian Women -- Explosive Devices" - Australia
- U.S. Premiere Growing up, Doris Nuval had a privileged life in the
Philippines. Her father was a friend and advisor to the president,
Ferdinand Marcos. But when Doris eventually discovered that the
government was deeply corrupt, she became passionately involved in
the political underground. At the age of 28, she planted a bomb
designed to bring world attention to the dictatorship. Here, Doris
reflects on her double life as tourism official and terrorist and
describes her transformation from public enemy number one to public
broadcaster. Her motivation, however, remains the same: an unyielding
commitment to justice and equity for the Philippine people, no matter
who is in power.

Directors: Mathew Kelley, Peter DuCane Writer: Mathew Kelley
Producers: Samantha Kelley, Peter DuCane

------
Fearless Female: The Wondrous Journey of
Doris Nuval into Midlife

Tess del Rosario, Ph.D.

She arrived in New York in the late 70s, on a cold January winter
night, heart half-broken, energy still unbounded. She had just
survived a divorce, the pain etched on her forehead as she emerged
from the long intercontinental flight. New York was going to be her
escape route, and I, her fellow sojourner --- both of us taking on
bustling Manhattan where we would sort out our youthful angst. By
then, my friendship with Doris Nuval was going five years strong.

I christened her Julia, after the movie by the same title, starring
Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. We watched it together in 1978 in
New York, where we passed four years at the edge of our dangerous
20s. Her son Robert, an utterly delicious two-year old
Filpino-American, was our collective offspring. He was sired during
an unforgettable midnight moment with a nomadic Peace Corps volunteer
who authored all her heartaches. We parented Robert - - - Doris,
myself, my sister and two cousins --- a hodge-podge family thrown
together overseas. Awash with parent surrogates, her son waves us
away to a Manhattan moviehouse on 57th Street.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Julia, an anti-Nazi activist. Jane Fonda is
the famous Lillian Hellman, an icon among the American literati.
Based on Hellman's book "Pentimento," the movie interpreted the
friendship of two sturdy women amidst Hitler's misadventures in
Europe and America's flirtations with artistic morality.

In the film, Lillian traverses Europe to deliver a hat of money to
Julia. Various strangers and a camouflaged chocolate box bring her
to a dark and charmless restaurant, where she finally sees her
friend, sipping wine against the background of cheap lamplight.
Succinct conversation; no weeping and gnashing of teeth. She has a
child somewhere in Austria, also named Lili after her best friend,
and would she take care of her while her mother took on the Evil
Empire?

Lillian hands over the hat. When Julia gets up from the table, she
reaches for her crutches. She was hobbling along due to some
accident. The money, she said, would be used to purchase a wooden
leg. Lillian's tears break. Brave Julia admonishes her that these
were times when crying was inappropriate. Julia motions, it's time
to go. So soon, Lillian protests. Dutifully she got up, took one
last look at Julia, valiantly pale, hair carelessly scattered.
Thereafter, Julia died and Lillian descended into a world of
nightmares.

We left the theater breathless, quickly headed for a German bar on
87th St. When words found us, it was to comment on the similarity
of their hair --- a wild afro which Doris sported as a badge of
youthful honor and stylish rebellion. So much for trivial
comparisons.

Doris and I came home in 1980 from New York. I settled into
temporary domesticity while she took up with an urban underground
movement which lit up fires around the city and exploded bombs in
public places. The dictator was at his wits' end. He was
embarrassed to have his show spoiled by a bomb attack at the
convention center, just at the moment when he announced the country
was safe for tourism. Right outside the hall, he slapped all his
generals and then walked away with a pretentious march. Deep within,
he raged against the humiliation he had just suffered, and he vowed
that hell would pay.

One partying night when booze flowed and laughter sliced the air,
Doris swaggered towards me.

"I have written my will," she stuttered through her beer-laden breath.
"Wh -a -at?" I inquired, perplexed.
"That explosion?" Her eyes squinted from the garden floodlights.
"That was me."
I looked at her in stunned silence, like Jane Fonda aghast at her
friend navigating her way to the bathroom in crutches. My mouth was
open.
"My son, he is still in New York. Please look after him."
In a mild state of stupor, I remembered Jane Fonda going all over
Vienna in a frenzy, looking for Lili. I recalled her return to New
York, empty-handed, filled with remorse.

The following day, at dawn, my Julia was arrested in her home. The
soldiers dragged her into the prison vehicle while paralyzed parents
stood in the doorway. A "debriefing" period occurred and none of us
could see her. It was all of two weeks before the first visitors
were allowed. By then it was almost Christmas.

I brought my battered guitar and a portable Sony TV to her prison
cell on Christmas Day. Doris' mother wore sunglasses and sat
painfully alone in a prison corner. She couldn't stop crying. I
dared not inquire about her son. The dictator's forces were upon us
all, watching, waiting, ready for the next arrest. I lost my nerve
and stayed home.

As she sat on the prison bench eating her Christmas ham, I noted
Doris' exaggerated hand gestures as she regaled her friends with
stories of the military inquisition, the mental torture, the
sleepless nights, the close call of a prison rape. She had lost her
perm I thought. Imprisonment deprived her of a beauty salon, but
her courage remained unbending like non-corrosive steel.

On a usual visit one weekend, Doris munched into the Chinese pork
dumplings I had brought for her that afternoon. She spoke about
gazing into the walls and the barbed wire, of the increasing boredom
of daily prison life, the tedious routines, the shared bathrooms, the
creeping bitterness which she valiantly fought against, but which
already found incursions into the souls of her fellow inmates.

"I might get ugly," she declared resolutely. "anger does that to you."
I laughed. "You need a perm," I said, looking at her limp hair.
Her eyes perked. "I will get a day pass, and my first stop will be
the beauty parlor at the Peninsula Hotel. Then I will have coffee at
the hotel lobby with my guards standing right behind me." It was her
version of "prison chic."

She braved against the enemy within --- the kind that wears
out your soul faster than tormentors and torturers can. I stood by
helplessly with my gift of siopao, and ate my guilt silently for
having disappeared into the comfortable woodwork of my charmed
bourgeois life.

Four years later, she was released into exile, the only condition for
her to finally leave prison. As if by some miracle, Doris and I
found each other again in Holland where she was to live her new life
as a political refugee, and I was on the verge of marrying a citizen
of the flatlands. When my plane touched down in Amsterdam, there she
was at the airport, ready with a big hug and countless prison
stories. She showed me her scrapbook of mementos, testimonials of
how the strong arm of the state snatched her young adult life. We
sampled the local bars, ate European pizza, took a canal cruise, and
marveled at Rembrandt's Nightwatch. We both permed our hair, hers
another wild afro to launch her into Amsterdam night life, mine, a
respectable wave to match my wedding blouse.

She dug deep into my soul with her questions.
"Are you sure about this?" she asked pointedly over Amstel draft in
a bar facing Amsterdam's gorgeous flower market.
"More than I have ever been." my answer was limp, her instincts,
razor-sharp.
"You're convincing yourself," she licked the foam off her lips. "I
don't want you to fail a second time."

And then she got a migraine and the harshness of prison memories
lingered far longer than the worst hang-over. I blended into the
night and dismissed her questions, while she slept with the phantoms
of her past.

She witnessed my wedding, the only Asian in that all-white crowd.
She wagged her finger at me. "You better make it work this time,"
she said threateningly. And then she was off to Frankfurt for the
holidays, and I was left alone to battle with my mistakes. When I
divorced a second time, she was there again, like a New York replay.

Doris returned home in 1986 when Marcos fell and fled. When she
arrived in Manila, she raised her fist in the midst of a press
conference, and inhaled the first air of freedom in over twenty
years. Hers was a personal triumph at last.

* * *

Over a five-hour lunch just before the millenium, Doris and I updated
each other: our lives made single over and over again by our
accumulated failures with men; our hysterectomies -- that female
rite of passage presaged by a surgeon's scalpel into your ovaries.
She brags about the skylight in her bathroom; I retort that my
roofdeck is large enough to view the entire city's morning smog. Her
son moved out to review for the Engineering Board exams. When the
ordeal was over, he was a topnotcher and a fully licensed
professional. Our collective sibling in New York turned into a
responsible young adult. Not bad, for someone who was parented by
numerous surrogates across several continents and a prison
interlude.

And then we decided to undertake the most challenging midlife project
yet: confront a male harasser who had been chasing us both. He
fancied himself as the Asian incarnation of Casanova, a local
bohemian with a perpetual hard-on.

"How does he do it," curiously inquiring about male maneuvers.
"Well, we're discussing media strategy, and then there's this funny
rumpling on my skirt. I thought it was a wandering moth. He was
stroking my thigh under the table."
I shrieked. " What a cheap shot. He can't even be original."
She kept up the harangue, animated by her irritation and my
curiosity.
"He tried with me once," I was almost breathless from amused
protestation. "He went for my mouth but landed on my earlobe
instead. I summoned all my sarcasm, for which I had become
notorious. "The asshole has such lousy aim."

We are beside ourselves with hysterical laughter. The waiter returns
to pour the fifth glass of iced water. She grits her teeth and I
soothe my aching sides from what I thought was pure male-bashing
delight.
And then we laughed inconsolably until the salad wilted on our plates.
When done with bashing Romeo, we certify he is a prized jerk.

Unlike the movie of 1978, neither of us is in crutches, and the reign
of our localized Evil Empire has ended. We do battle with our
hormones, and stamina on the aerobic bench is the foremost
existential crisis of the week. She is thinking about Law School,
because her talents at public performing, she said, could best be
harnessed in courtroom argumentation. It was a delicious thought,
as she savored my return to graduate school when, Doris remarks, most
people our age were collecting antiques.

And then the time of reckoning arrives and we are, finally, three
decades later when we first decided that our friendship was
irrevocable, fifty years old. Both of us.

Again it is a lengthy lunch of dangerous binagoongang baboy and
callos, the kind that worries my finger joints. She comments on my
silent sorrow, brought on by the death of my father earlier this
year. I bite my lip from breaking into tears and she looks at me
with the poignant eyes of a friend who understands fully well the
pain of a daughter. She moved back to her own parents' home, to give
her mother daily walks and a conversant ear to her father.

On a late evening when she is a caregiver to her mother who fell ill
from the business of life, she hears her father in the softness of
the night.
"How can you be sick and still be so beautiful?" he asks his wife, a
woman he has loved and lived with longer than my friendship with
their daughter. And then it is her tears that threaten to land into
her chilled mug of San Miguel light beer.

Robert is in Alaska with her wandering Peace Corps father, now a
grown adult, gainfully employed as an engineer, armed with dreams of
graduate school in Berkeley. He sports a ponytail, for which
Antonio Banderas would suffer stiff competition if Robert ever made
it Hollywood.

She tells of the Australian documentarist who filmed her for seven
hours, and all the raw emotions that spilled forth from her
recounting of the prison years.

"I will be immortalized," she said proudly.
"Rightfully so," I retorted. "We must go to the premiere together."
"It's in Perth."
"Well, then, we shall have to fly there, won't we?" I told her with
all my midlife resoluteness.

I looked at her face that captured thirty years of my affection. Her
body is strong and steady, perhaps like mine, a little bruised here
and there from the years of sometimes harsh coping. But not her
soul. Her face is a little weary though her eyes still manage to
dance from impish glee. She is like a swift smooth hand in Tai Chi
motion. The Chinese call it "soft strength."

Prison changed her, for sure. But it left her with nary an ounce of
bitterness even if that would have been her rightful inheritance.
Hers is the saga of irrepressible fearlessness which even Crame could
not take away. As the last bit of sago washed down our palate, I
looked at her again as if to search for my perennial thirty-year
question. What was it that kept us together this long, even during
those years apart?

And then I found it --- in the shadow of a street light that had
been turned on to welcome in the early evening. We had sat there for
six hours while I moved in and out of my musings, watching her hand
wave away the cares of living, witnessing this miracle of friendship
that spanned thirty years. What was truly endearing about Doris, I
decided, was her naturally straight, finally un-permed hair.

Happy 50th birthday, my dearest friend.

Fearless Female: The Wondrous Journey of
Doris Nuval into Midlife

Tess del Rosario, Ph.D.






Fátima Lasay http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/