Feeling at home in the US

April 22, 2014, Stockton, California—This is near the end of a very pleasant vacation with my wife Thetis, who took time off from her UN job in Bangkok to rendezvous with me in San Francisco last April 6.  Our last visit to the United States together was for the alumni homecoming of the University of Chicago (UC) in 2011.  Now we are vacationing Filipino-style, from California to Washington, DC to New York City, and back.

We stayed first at the Bay Area home of a first cousin. She and her husband, who moved here in the early 1970s, have a thriving Filipino-food manufacturing business.  With the company capably run by their children, they regularly return to the Philippines, where they maintain family ties, and give generous scholarships to the high school where they first met.

Washington. We did budget fare (i.e., bring your own baon for the five-hour flight) to Washington to visit our daughter Gica, who’s doing a master’s at Georgetown University—in security studies, with military and State Department types for classmates.

She found hotel rooms in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Georgetown, one for us and one for my wife’s two sisters who came from Dallas for a tres hermanas reunion at cherry blossom time.  The weather was sunny when we saw the blossoms, a day before the crowds arrived.  It had been years since the three Abrera sisters last had pictures taken together.

At DC we also met friends from my academic days. We had dinner with two of my former students at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, who went on to work at the World Bank, and are now retired in Virginia.  Considering how young and inexperienced I was, as their teacher, I feel relieved that I didn’t seriously handicap their careers. They have foreign (though non-American) husbands, and children grown and working here, and are permanent residents.

I had begged off, weeks ago, from a conference in Maryland to honor professor Marc Nerlove, one of my UC thesis advisers, on his 80th birthday in May, saying that actually I would be in DC in April, to visit Gica, but had to be elsewhere in May.  I didn’t realize that the e-mail loop included my classmate Bill Butz, as well as Marc himself, who right away wrote that they live nearby, and invited us, including Gica, for dinner in April.

Bill and I had been friends from the start, as we were both committed to taking agricultural economics as a special field in UC, and were eager to have Theodore Schultz (in due time a Nobel winner) as thesis chair.  Later, when he was director of the US Census, and I was already with SWS, we met in Manila.  Now he is retired, but still does NGO work; he cooks a very tender chicken.

Marc, a multiawarded econometrician, is as mischievous as ever.  With Thetis and Gica listening, he asked if I remembered a mistake in my thesis, and that I had sent him a copy of my data so that he could fix it.  But I couldn’t recall something 44 years old. “Well, if I made a mistake, then why did you pass me?” I said. “You had already spent too much time on it, and we wanted to get rid of you,” he said with a twinkle. What he meant was that the econometrics I used (on his recommendation) was not ideal; in a few years, he devised something better.  Anyway, the economic conclusions of the study were unaffected.

New York City. Leaving our bags in DC, we took a bus to NYC, to stay in the condo of a UP classmate of Thetis.  One of Thetis’ nieces came in from Astoria, across the East River, with her US-born son, for a day.  We did nostalgia. Grand Central, where we used to take a train to Thetis’ mother in Peekskill, is much cleaner now.

We gawked at the lions of the New York Public Library, and browsed through new books; went into Saint Patrick’s (under repair) for Mass on Holy Tuesday; walked to the skating rink of Rockefeller Center, to Fifth Avenue and the Empire State, and to Herald Square; took in a Broadway musical, and afterward walked home in rain and snow flurries; saw the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of paintings, woodcuts and sculpture of Gauguin in his final years in Tahiti; and had New York cheesecake.  Then we took a train back to DC, to catch our return flight to SFO.

The Bay Area. This is our regular jump-off point to return home.  Several good friends from St. Theresa’s QC (Thetis’ high school) and UP live around here.  They showed us the rainbow flag of San Francisco, “weirdo capital of the world.”

But our home-away-from-home in the United States is Stockton, where the “Little Manila” neighborhood is a National Historic Site.  Here is where my mother moved, after retiring from the UP College of Music, to help take care of her grandchildren, including driving them to and from school, even in her seventies.

In the Easter Sunday Mass at Stockton’s Cathedral of the Annunciation, the priest jiggled up the aisle to a bouncy rhythm; for his homily he told a child at the front pew a story of naughty seventh-graders hiding Easter eggs in tree branches unreachable to little kids.  In the evening, the Red Orchid restaurant served dinner, plus a show with Rey Kilay and Viborah la Viborah, veterans of Metro Manila comedy bars, who translated into English for those who had never learned Tagalog, and also into sign language understood by all.

On Easter Monday we picnicked with my two brothers and their families at the Marin Headlands, a few miles north of the Golden Gate, facing the Pacific Ocean.  It had been years since the three Mangahas brothers last had pictures taken together.

* * *

Contact [email protected].