Two speeches

PINOY KASI

Two speeches
By Michael Tan

Inquirer
Last updated 02:14am (Mla time) 06/20/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- Two fine speeches by two young Filipinos have been going around the Internet and receiving praise everywhere they are posted, but I thought I’d still feature them for those who might have missed them and to do a bit of boasting about the University of the Philippines (UP), about “Tsinoys” [Chinese-Filipinos] and about our young people in general.

The two speeches are Mikaela Irene Fudolig’s valedictory delivered at commencement exercises at UP Diliman last April and Oscar Franklin Barcelona Tan’s speech at the Harvard Law School commencement exercises last June 7.

I see the speeches as useful reading materials for our schools at high school and college levels, for social studies or history, or even for writing classes. We have a tendency in the Philippines to equate good speeches (and good writing) with the pompous, the flowery, the obscure. Fudolig and Tan’s speeches are brief and to the point, yet rich in their insights.

Trailblazing

Let’s start with Fudolig’s speech, “Take not the road less traveled” (http://www.upd.edu.ph/%7Eupdinfo/Pagtatapos07/mikispch.htm). Fudolig herself is a wonder, graduating with a degree in BS Physics, summa cum laude, at the age of 16. Like a true scientist, she starts out with an observation about how UP Diliman students can’t seem to stay on the pavement when they walk: “From every street corner that bounds an unpaved piece of land, one will espy a narrow trail that cuts the corner, or leads from it. Every lawn around the buildings sports at least one of these paths.”

Fudolig presents several hypotheses: Are UP students trying to cut down on traveling to save on the cost of shoes or slippers? Are UP students so “enamored of mathematics and Phythagoras” and triangles? Are UP students just “naturally countercultural,” always ready to defy the order of things? Or are UP students just a model of Filipino youth today: “They want everything easier, faster, now”?

Fudolig proposes these mysterious trails reflect the UP students’ “pioneering, defiant and brave spirit.” After all, the trails weren’t always “walkable” so there was some risk, even snakes (smile), for those who dared venture into uncharted territory.

All of that was a clever metaphor of the choices for UP graduates. Sent out into the world, will the new graduates choose to migrate, or go for the “immediate monetary benefits in some low-end outsourcing jobs”? Such decisions, she says, are similar to the sidewalks and pavements, the paths that are “easiest to take.”

“Be brave,” she exhorts her fellow graduates. “Defy the pressure to lead a comfortable, but middling life ... Take not the road less traveled.” She admits that “talk is cheap” and offers to place herself in the service of the university, and asks graduates to join her to “trample a new path.”

I couldn’t help thinking about how Fudolig herself is a product too of UP’s trailblazing. I’m referring to the university’s still experimental early college placement program (ECPP) for gifted children. Fudolig began taking courses at the university in the summer of 2002, when she was only 11. She was still studying at the Quezon City Science High School but was allowed to take university-level courses in math, chemistry, English, history and biology, a kind of transition period. The following school year, she entered UP as a freshman. The experimental program provided that safety transitory period, as well as close guidance to gifted students, even while encouraging their independence. They are also sheltered from the media and any kind of publicity, and are treated like any other student.

World citizens

The other speech comes from Oscar Franklin Barcelona Tan, a Tsinoy who has a law degree from UP (Class of 2005) and was working for a master’s degree at Harvard Law School. There are actually two versions circulating in the Internet. One, posted on the Internet site of GMA Network, has the title “The Law of the Good Man as Our Generation’s Law” (http://www.gmanews.tv/story/45413/Young-Filipino-lawyer-addresses-Harvard-law-grads). A shorter one, which was e-mailed to me, is titled, “Like Wine in the River, Like Citizens of the World.”

There are a few differences between the two versions. The longer one has him acknowledging his father, lawyer Edmundo L. Tan, who struggled through a poor childhood in Negros Occidental making it into UP’s law school, and his second father, Raul Pangalangan, former dean of UP’s College of Law (and fellow columnist here in the Inquirer).

The speech begins with a generous dose of humor, of partying and drinking without the debauchery (sample: “Soon, we found that great substance that keeps any law school together: alcohol. On New Year’s Eve, a Belarusian handed me a glass of vodka, but scolded me when I began to sip it. . .”) He describes their quest for common ground, which was complaining about American chocolate, American cheese, American tea, American food.

The quest becomes serious, as he describes meeting people from countries struggling with human rights and democracy. And as he thanks Harvard for their brilliant professors and powerful ideas, he acknowledges that the passion he and his classmates have comes from realizing “that our peers in faraway lands face the same frustrations, the same nation building ordeals, the same sorrows, and ultimately, the same shared joys and triumphs.”

The longer version of the speech talks about how international law can bolster and expand concepts of rights. He asks: “How can rights to biodiversity be asserted given an intellectual property regime that allows Indian basmati rice to be patented in a key export market? How can rights to environment become reality given in developing countries with large populations and meager resources?” He wonders how nations can dialogue when the terms are not equal, citing as an example the case of the American soldier convicted for rape in the Philippines but detained at the US Embassy.

Wine returns, but this time with a vignette from China about the legendary Yue king, Gou Jian. Presented with fine wine, he ordered his troops to stand by a river into which he poured the liquor, his way of sharing the gift with the troops. Tan notes: “A bottle of wine cannot flavor a river, but the gesture so emboldened his army that they won a great victory. We of the Class of 2007 shall flavor this earth, whether we be vodka, wine, champagne ... Irish stout, Ugandan warabi or Philippine lambanog.”

Tan closes with a call on his American classmates “who will soon lead the world’s lone superpower” to “transcend our individual nationalities and affirm that we are citizens of the world.”

Fudolig’s quiet speech speaks of quietly engaging a world that is UP and, hopefully, the country, of educating the next generation. Tan takes on the world with boldness and fervor and talks of how his generation defines the law by the good (i.e. ethical) man (and woman). Both have their messages for young Filipinos who will increasingly find themselves citizens of a nation, and of the world.