By Rex Catubig “INTSIK tsonga”, “Tsikwa”– are just two of the monikers they are condescendingly called, implying disdain in the way they are regarded. Which reveals our bias and cultural ignorance. My father was privileged to enjoy a close association with the Chinese in the lumber business. I grew…
By Rex Catubig THE weekday morning couldn’t have been less hackneyed than any other morning the teenager wakes up to. It is the usual run of cliché common in a household. To jumpstart the day which could be hectic depending on what he crams it with, he goes off…
The ballgame is over: Anatomy of suicide
By Rex Catubig IN 2015, to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of my high school class of 65, I wrote a marching song as our gift for the City. When that year’s Hermano Mayor Joeyboy Atty. Tamayo II heard it, he endorsed it to Mayor Belen T. Fernandez who listened…
Recapturing the songs for my city
By Rex Catubig YOU could never catch my mother without makeup. Or at least without a penciled eyebrow and red lipstick. It’s a vanity routine she had to do that made her day complete. But it was something that for a young boy was both penance and punishment. It…
A portrait of my mother (on her nth birthday)
By Rex Catubig YEARS ago, a friend of mine took me to an impromptu whirlwind spiritual tour in the heart of Metro Manila. In what felt like a modern-day ferry across the innards of the city, and after enduring apocalyptic traffic, touring the St Jude church and the Padre…
A ‘Batang Quiapo’ epilogue
By Rex Catubig WHILE the hotly debated issue of where Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed along the Lingayen Gulf’s color-coded beaches may never be resolved, the one incontrovertible fact that we Dagupeños are rightly proud of and no one else can lay claim to, is upon his return, when he…
Mabuhay, Joe! 3rd time’s a charm
By Rex Catubig MY high school class celebrated its Ruby or 40th anniversary in 2005. Our class president Ramon Reyna wanted no less than the best and brightest. And after attending a preliminary meeting, I was prevailed upon to conceptualize the event. I thought of a Western theme to recapture…
A face to face reunion
By Rex Catubig VICTORIO Edades as an illustrious son of Dagupan may be the primus inter pares among the city’s brightest sons. But his memory precariously dangles on the corroding recall of people in the city he lived in, and in the fading fragile minds of those related to…
Who U? Getting to know Edades on his birthday
By Rex Catubig 2,000 years ago, an unlikely birth made the biblical headlines, and subsequently became the matrix of Christianity. We are familiar with the circumstances of Joseph and Mary’s trek to Bethlehem from their home in Nazareth to comply with an edict for villagers to return to their…