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This story was originally the content of a letter written April 25, 1994, for Lordson’s twin nieces Karen and Kelly in Los Angeles.

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By now it is no longer news that I am stuck at home with a heavy cast on my left leg from top to toes and moving around slowly with a pair of crutches. Today as I look back to the accident, I guess I do not mind so much the pain and the surgery I went through; what kills me now is that I must put in the time, a minimum of six weeks, before I become freely mobile again.

Francisca says that I often seem to think of myself as indestructible and invulnerable, that now I’ve challenged my fate to its limit; so perhaps this had to happen to me at some point in my life.

Another friend jokingly said that it almost seems as if I did this to myself just so that I would have another story to tell of my life!

Whatever the reason, our trip to Banaue, a town nestled in 2000-year-old rice terraces was a total disaster.

It was supposed to be the annual company outing for Francisca’s office, and as usual I tagged along to keep her company. Her eight staff members plus the two of us all packed into a hired mini-van with a driver. It was to be a 10-hour drive to cover only 360 km, but the roads were really bad.

Two hours before reaching our destination, as we were climbing up into the rice terrace hills at about 4:30 pm, a large jeepney with over 30 passengers racing downhill overtook a big bus on a blind curve and hit us head-on.

Everyone in our van was injured to some degree; lots of strains, cuts, bruises. Our driver was most seriously hurt with multiple bone fractures, chest injury and internal bleeding. I was the second worst — with several broken bones in my leg.

When it happened, Francisca was sitting behind the driver and I next to her behind the engine. The two guys up front were thrown out of the van and the rest of the staff sitting behind us got battered about.

The impact was so great that the engine caved in and a piece of metal cut into my left leg. I briefly blacked out, but when I came back to, I saw the engine smoking and blood all over me. I got hold of my leg, saw the broken bones sticking out, then turned to Francisca and said, “look, dear, I am hurt pretty bad!”

By this time many people had gathered around the wrecked van and I asked someone to carry me out to a jeep. Francisca and a couple of her staff also made it into the back of the jeep and we were driven to the local clinic in the village about ten minutes away. The entire way I was holding my leg with a towel which didn’t take long to turn bloody red.

When we got to the clinic someone finally laid me down on a wooden bench. Francisca was laid down next to me on another bench. We were holding hands, asking each other the same question, “are you okay?”

I said, “my leg hurts; other than that I’m okay.”

But when she then kept repeating the same questions, “what happened?” “’where are we?” and “is everybody okay?” over and over and over, I realized she had lost her short-term memory and I began to worry that she might have amnesia or a concussion. I took it that she had taken one look at the awful cut on my leg, then, instead of passing out, she mentally blocked it out: she went into shock. While she still appeared conscious, she was not really there.

There were lots of people around waiting to be treated in the clinic and there was only one doctor. After about half an hour, this doctor finally came to look at my leg. She apologized for the lack of medical facilities and equipment in her clinic and said she needed to sew up my wound to stop the bleeding. Then she did it while I was lying on the bench, without painkiller or anesthesia. Not even a shot of local rum! At this point, the pain from the cut and the broken bones was so powerful that my whole leg became more or less numb. I could feel the doctor doing the stitches on me, but it did not add to the existing pain.

Sometime later they decided to move us to a provincial hospital in the nearest town about 25 minutes by car. People carried us on our benches up into the back of a pick-up truck, which then started to drive off. Francisca and I, still holding hands, looking up at the blue sky with white clouds, saw tree tops passing by on both sides of the truck. She said the whole scenario was a déjà vu for her, meaning she felt that somehow we had been through this before.

In a crisis situation like this, nothing was more important than realizing that we were still alive and we still had each other.

The provincial hospital was not much better than the village clinic. We were put into beds with no bedsheets. Despite the earlier stitching, my wound kept on bleeding slowly and soon I was lying in a big puddle of blood on top of the vinyl covered mattress. Later they took some X-rays of my leg to see how the bones had been fractured.

Francisca’s staff eventually all gathered in the hospital and decided to hire a car to return to Manila that night. But before leaving, they arranged with nearby American missionaries to use their small plane to fly Francisca and me back to Manila the next morning.

After lying in bed for two and a half hours, the doctor finally took me into the operating room to clean up my wound and put a temporary cast on for the flight the next morning. When this was done, I was sent back to the room to stay with Francisca for the night.

Up to this point, I’d still been given no anesthesia nor a single pain killer!

I sometimes had felt that the scene of someone lying in a hospital bed, with an intravenous bag hanging and the doctors and nurses pushing the bed across the hall into the operating room was something that only happened in the movies.

Certainly I never imagined that it would happen to me one day! And I probably believed that if it did, I would mentally break down before any physical damage was done.

But now when it finally did happen to me I have discovered that I am much stronger than I ever thought. I may even have surprised everyone by maintaining very high spirits all the way through, with not one word of complaint, nor a single sound of moaning or whining.

I guess in a real situation of life and death, my survival instincts surface and take command.

By the middle of the night all the staff had left except a young one, Jeanette, who had decided to stay behind to keep us company. Francisca had fallen asleep. The night was cool and quiet. And we didn’t have any idea where we were! I was lying next to a window, smoking my last few cigarettes. The pain slowly subsided as I did not move my leg.

Jeanette limped around the room, having strained a knee, and refused to lie down to sleep. She said she felt she might never wake up again. I knew what she meant. The bruises, the pain, the shock and the fear finally crushed her as the night got cooler and quieter. She came and sat down by my side. I held her, trying to comfort her, and there was still a long night ahead.

The next morning we were flown to Manila in the small missionary’s plane; that took a little over an hour. After a night’s sleep it seemed Francisca recovered her memory. But she still could not remember what happened at the accident site.

I was then sent into a proper hospital and began to receive proper medical treatment. Because of the delay in treating my wound the day before, my leg was operated on three times before a cast was put on me. I lay in the hospital for two more weeks before Francisca and my brother Simon from L.A. came to pick me up to drive me home. It was nice of Simon to make a detour on his trip and come down from Hong Kong to visit me for a week.

So that was the story of our accident. By now the novelty has worn out, and I am living a routine life, spending my days in the study room of our house where the air-conditioning keeps my leg with the cast from getting too hot and swollen. By the time you receive this letter it will be sometime in June, and I hope it won’t be too long before the doctor removes my cast and I am free once more.

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Postscript: the two week hospital confinement had the positive effect of motivating Lordson to quit smoking. He went from a two-pack a day smokeaholic to clear and free, and up to today, in 2007, he has not touched a single cigarette.

These days you can rarely traverse the length of a town block without seeing a person walking with a cell phone plastered to his or her ear. Everyone in China – from CEO to driver – is busy. On the phone.

Face-to-face meetings are blithely interrupted when a cell phone rings, with not the slightest trace of apology. Your life is in your driver’s hands; all the while his hands are glued to his phone instead of the steering wheel. Even drifting down the little Yulong River on a bamboo raft, our boatman’s burly voice on his phone blasted our peace away.

It wasn’t always like this.

One morning about 20 years ago, in my early Gates to China (trade consultancy) days, Kees and I took the earliest train from Shanghai to Hangzhou to visit a dial caliper factory on behalf of our British client. It was customary in those days for the translator of the factory to greet us at the train station (or airport, as the case would be), but this particular morning, scanning the hustling crowd of bodies in blue Mao suits and black heads all cropped short, we found no familiar face waiting for us.

There must have been puzzled or searching looks on our faces, because it wasn’t long when a pretty young woman I’d guess to be in her early 20s dressed in the same Mao outfit and blunt hair cut as the rest approached us and asked in hesitant English: “Can I help you?”

Kees briefly explained the situation and then said, “Perhaps you can help us find a telephone and call the factory?”

“Of course, I will do my best.”

Luck had it that there was a public phone not too far across the street from the station. Don’t imagine anything like a telephone booth. In those days this meant an old-style black telephone placed on a tiny wood table outside some commercial establishment, in this case a small filthy private eatery, the kind even I think twice to eat in.

She dialed, found the right person to talk to, spoke a few lines, hung up and turned to us to say, “The factory is only a few minutes from here. Someone is coming to pick you up. Please just wait a while.”

We thanked her, with our big western smiles, and then were stunned to hear her reply.

“Please don’t thank me. Today is a very special day for me. You see, today is the first time I ever used a telephone. So I must thank you.”

Whew.

Another time, another reality. But just twenty years ago.

I sometimes still wonder what she is doing today. But whatever it is, I’d bet my last yuan she is carrying a cell phone.

To this day, almost everyone I meet, after I tell him or her that I was born and raised in China, asks me the same question: “How did you get out?”

Sometimes I say, “Easy!” and other times I say, “It’s a long story.”

Some would know to ask, since it was long after the border between China and Hong Kong had been closed, “Did you get out legally or did you swim out?”

I reply, “Yes, legally. I got a visa to go to Hong Kong, but my brother was not so lucky, he had to swim out.”

It was “easy” because I had the process figured out before I applied for my visa. My application was submitted at the right time to the right place, and so there was a bit of luck involved as well. At another time or place, to obtain a visa to Hong Kong from China could seem like the most difficult thing under the sun.

It was in 1962, shortly before graduating from high school, I was 16 and I was worrying about my future. My desire to get higher education was overpowering. But because my family background was not passable under the prevailing system, I knew I could not get into any university in China.

My father was a businessman in Hong Kong who had left the mainland because he was a mayor of our home town under the pre-communist regime. That classified our family as petty bourgeois. Living in a society that literally dictated a person’s future – about going to school or where to work – having the wrong family background could be a debilitating handicap.

The school I attended, the Canton Overseas Chinese High School, was one of the most prestigious high schools in Canton (now Guangzhou), and I was one of its top students. For the last three years of senior high from Grade 10 to 12 I earned straight As in all my subjects. But that still did not guarantee me a seat in any university. The communist government promoted education for the proletariat, that is, sons and daughters of peasants and blue-collar workers.

To complicate things further for me, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) had started to recruit for new soldiers in the cities instead of the countryside. A few years before my graduation, they had started to set their sights on top high school students. Because the army needed soldiers with education who were smart enough to learn to handle modern weaponry, the traditional way of recruiting sons of farmers in the countryside was no longer working. And since I was a top student, physically fit, but not suitable for university, I was a prime target.

Therefore I made up my mind that if I could not go to university in China, I would go to university somewhere else.

In those earlier days before the Cultural Revolution started, there was still some sense of decency under the communist government. The policy stated very clearly that if the parents of a student did not want their child to join the army, the army would not accept him because of his “family baggage.”

However, among the high schools, there was a kind of unofficial competition each year to produce the most qualified students for the army. The winning class was honored and the school was honored. In the case of unwilling parents, the school sent a “lobbying team” to the house to try to convince them it was a ‘glorious’ thing to let their kid join the army. The “lobbying team’ would absolutely not stop their offensive until the parents gave in. So theoretically there were no “unwilling parents”.

Having observed these events and after talking to some adults and senior classmates, I had the whole process figured out and set into action a plan to get myself out.

Three months before school ended, I wrote a letter to my father in Hong Kong, asking him to send me a telegram each week until I told him to stop. The telegram was to repeat the same message over and over: “Don’t join the army, come to Hong Kong.” The telegrams were sent to the school so that the school would have a record of them. At the same time, he sent me letters explaining why I should go to Hong Kong instead of joining the army.

Sure enough, shortly before graduation, a representative from the army came to our class and gave a recruitment speech, emphasizing the great prospects, the benefits and the pride of becoming a PLA soldier. The whole class was hyped up and many students signed the application. At the time when all jobs were assigned by the government and there was a high possibility that you could be sent to the remote countryside to work as a farmer, joining the army was really a positive alternative for high school graduates. But I did not sign.

After the initial screening, only two students in our class were academically qualified because the grades of the rest were below the required standard. However, these two top students in our class went on to fail their physical test and so our class did not produce even one qualified student to join the army.

My class teacher sent for me. He knew, if I applied, I would be accepted. He asked me why I did not sign the application and why I did not want to join the army. I told him that I was torn between the army and my family. I really wanted to join the army, but my father did not allow me. Not only that I could not join the army, I must apply for a visa to go to Hong Kong. Then I produced all the telegrams and letters from my father to show him.

My story appeared authentic because the letters and the telegrams were sent long before the army came to the school to recruit. After reading the 10 telegrams and few letters, he sighed, “What a pity! You can do well in the army and the army can really use someone like you!” Modesty aside, he was probably right, but I wasn’t going to elaborate on that. I had to hit the iron while it was hot.

So I said, “Now that you have read my telegrams and my father’s letters, I would like to have a report from you, indicating my situation and my intention of going to Hong Kong are authentic, so that I can take your report to the principal’s office for endorsement.”

He thought for a few minutes and replied, “I would like to talk to your mother first.”

I said I would arrange it. I went home and told my mother what happened at school and asked her to say exactly the same things my father said in his letters.

The meeting between my mother and my teacher went well, from my perspective. My teacher wrote the report for me and I took it to the principal’s office. From there I took it to the local police station. Six weeks later I got my visa to Hong Kong.

During those six weeks, school had ended and I had written my university entrance examination knowing that I would not be able to get into any.

I knew my plan would work because I had understood the process – all I had to do was to convince one person in the whole wide world: my class teacher.

The process went like this: the visa to Hong Kong was issued by the Provincial Public Security Bureau (PSB). But the PSB did not know me, so it based its decision on the report from the local police station in our neighborhood. The police station did not know me either, so it based its report on the report from my high school principal. Our high school was big and there was no way the principal would personally know me, so he in turn based his report on the report of my class teacher. Once I convinced my class teacher, the rest of the steps would follow.

That’s what I meant by “easy” at the beginning of this long story.

In retrospect, I always felt that I had a good time in school in China and there were times later I regretted coming out to Hong Kong, especially over the next few years when I fought to survive and to obtain a higher education under totally adverse conditions. But my struggle in Hong Kong and how I managed to go to Canada is another long story.

Instead of the start of the rainy season headlined in our newspaper last May 31, it became a season of drought for the Philippines.

The farmers weren’t made happy after all.

A bad situation became worse last week when President GMA started to hint at declaring her need for emergency powers. That touches a collective nerve-ending for Filipinos who still remember the Marcos era. Emergency powers have seldom, if ever, been used benevolently in this country.

Maybe for a change the gods were on the side of the people.

We’ve had two tropical storms pass through the archipelago this week, and a third one has been forecasted. The dams are starting to fill, albeit still not enough. More rain is needed. Emergency powers are not.

Yet good news for the dams is not all good news for us urbanites.

The flash floods are back. With a vengeance. Even some farmers are cying, “too much, already!”

Creeks, rivers and other waterways have overflowed; sewers have backed up. Some 400 flood control personnel have been “tasked to de-clog the inlets and the drainage system in Metro Manila to let flash floods subside much faster…” Good luck!

Malabon, a city within Metro Manila, was declared 90% submerged. In too many areas of Manila the floodwaters are knee-deep to waist-deep. Commuters are stranded; schools are closed.

Look at this superb front page shot on the left taken close to our home here – pedestrians being carried across the road by heavy equipment. What a scream!

Our house-angel (aka house help) of a dozen years or so, Edward, left early today to deal with the 6”-deep water in his kitchen. He needs to build a water retaining wall that will cost him nearly a month of his income (of course we spring for it).

Unfortunately Edward’s case is not at all unique; he’s but one of thousands in the metropolis who suffer a deluge in their homes each rainy season. So far, some 12,000+ families have been displaced or evacuated from their submerged homes, most of which, not surprisingly, are shanties built on riversides. The papers also list flood-related deaths by electrocution and drowning in mudslides. The UN warns that millions in South Asia now face risks to their health from lack of clean water after the unusually severe monsoon flooding.

Maybe the gods are not so kind after all. Or more likely we have brought this on ourselves… these erratic weather patterns look to me like signs of global warming.

It’s abysmal enough that the perennial floods occur and people suffer.

Insult is added to injury when the incompetent politicians point their hysterical fingers of blame at anything or anyone but the real problem: the over-extraction of groundwater and land use mismanagement (see my story).

Instead, culpability is being hurled at squatters and their garbage – a classic case of blaming the victim – or at other government departments for not completing flood control projects, or , or…

“Operation Potholes” begins… motley crews of road workers wearing t-shirts and rubber flip-flops fill holes in roads and highways that were built with sub-standard materials to start with. The photo on the right shows garbage collectors in Manila Bay with no safety clothing; these are employed city workers, not scavengers, declares the paper!

Feeble damage control, this.

And so the emergency just changes its form. Yet with or without a declaration of an emergency, GMA and the rest of the bickering elected politicians appear to remain powerless to stop this world of hurt.

As so many in this country like to say, “The Filipino deserves better.”