How Linda and Her Sisters Survived the War
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These were (from left to right, in the picture above) my mother, Erlinda (“Linda”) and her sisters, Aurora (“Nene”) and Vilma (“Vil”) in the 1950s, piquantly posed in the Dior fashions of the day in front of their Aunt Sarah Tempongko-de la Paz’s home on Banaue Street, Quezon City,
Their parents were Dr. Vivencio Alcantara of Capiz and Professor Esther Tempongko-Alcantara from Manila. They had enjoyed the prosperity of middle-class Filipinos living in Manila before the war. Since their father was a physician practicing at the Philippine General Hospital and their mother was an accomplished homemaker, they belonged to a secure home in Pasay City and had the reassuring presence of their relatives in Ermita and Malate.
Dr. Vivencio Alcantara and Esther Tempongko y Lheritier in 1925.
They schooled at Philippine Women’s University, a nonsectarian alternative to the many Catholic girls’ colleges that dotted the city. The sisters’ education represented the modern trend away from the Catholic Church and towards the liberal democracy and capitalism introduced by the Americans. Along with Tagalog and a sprinkling of Spanish, they also spoke with fresh aplomb the language of the Yankees, which had been bolstered both by school and media. This was the heyday of Hollywood in Manila, when art deco cinema theaters proliferated in the city and its denizens were up-to-date with what was trendy stateside. Manila was along the route of foreign opera companies and symphony orchestras on their way to Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The ‘30s had been heady times for the Philippines, whose Commonwealth was inaugurated in 1935 and which looked forward to Independence in a decade. Though there were political rumblings from the peasantry, President Manuel L. Quezon and his elegant wife, Aurora, and family were proud symbols of the up-and-coming republic and its aspirations.
Manila was one of the finest capitals in the Orient, with its blend of Asian, Latin American, European and American architectures. Conflict seemed to be far away, even when Hitler and Mussolini were making their presence felt on the European continent and the Japanese had begun their stranglehold on the Chinese mainland. Filipinos still felt reassured by the presence of the American Governor-General and General Douglas MacArthur, compadre of President Quezon, who then occupied the penthouse of the Manila Hotel as one of his perks for being the main military consultant of the fledgling Philippine Army. Filipino cadets were doing regular military drills and nighttime blackouts were even practiced by civilians. And yet, shockingly, the highly vulnerable Philippines did not figure in the US master plan of protection. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field in December 1941 caught the Filipino and American leadership off-guard in that “day of infamy.”
What followed was what COVID-19 became in 2020 -- everyone’s nightmare made flesh. The sudden Japanese occupation of Manila and the Philippines in January 1942 brought the Filipinos down to their knees and to a harsh reality, with acute scarcity and restrictions on freedom, movement and expression.
Virgilio Reyes Sr. and Erlinda Alcantara y Tempongko, wed on July 4, 1941.
The Alcantara Sisters
The year 1941 was also a turning point for Linda. Having precociously graduated near the top of her high school class at age 14, she, a virtual child bride at age 15, wed my father Virgilio Reyes, Sr. that year. The advent of the war also prompted other couples to make their vows at that time. The new couple moved in with her parents in a house on Bautista Street in Singalong. Their eldest boy would be the apple of his grandparents’ eye, a small boon in those hard times. My grandparents, who never had a boy, now had a surrogate son and a grandson with them.
After their father’s stroke, their mother, Esther, become the breadwinner of the family. She became a home economics teacher at her grade school alma mater, the Assumption Convent on Herran Street, where the daughters of President Quezon became her students. Once, she brought her grandson to show them how to bathe a baby. As Manila settled into a sort of normalcy, Esther began baking cakes and selling them at her Tempongko aunts’ restaurant. At the end of the war, she had $800 in hard currency, not in “Mickey Mouse money” (the inflationary pesos printed by the Japanese at the time, with which one carried in bayongs or straw bags to shop). Some of Esther’s brothers were busy selling goods to keep body and soul together; others were in the guerrilla movement.
What kept people busy was the new dispensation. Japanese was taught in the schools. One had to bow to sentries or risk being slapped. American movies and books were available, but highly censored, with sections blacked out or removed by the authorities. Tagalog was encouraged as a way of replacing colonial English and names of major streets were replaced with either Japanese or Tagalog names. Theaters were packed as Pugo and Tugo slyly made fun of the Japanese, or as English classics were translated into the vernacular. Schools began to re-open and it became possible to study once more.
As food became scarce in Manila, and with two children by 1944, Linda and Virgilio (or Heyo) decided to evacuate to his home province of Batangas. The decision turned out to be fortuitous for them as the worst was yet to come for the capital city—the rape of Manila, with carpet-bombing by the Americans and the massacre of civilians by the Japanese.
Barely in their teens, the younger sisters Vilma and Aurora were left with their parents and grandparents in Manila’s Paco neighborhood as their main support when the holocaust began. Their father had been disabled by a stroke and their grandfather was no longer the pillar of strength that he had been. Their grandmother, Leocadia L’heritier Tempongko, had prayed that should anything happen to her family, it should be her alone who would suffer. It did happen that way. As the first bombs exploded in Lanuza street in Paco, she was the one hit by a shrapnel, in her upper body. However, she did not expire immediately and was still carried in a carreton or rolling pushcart as the family fled their burning home towards the north shore of the Pasig River, which the Americans and their Filipino allies already controlled. Fortunately, the Japanese in their area were not as cruel or as vicious as they were in Ermita and Malate, where they brought the women of the crème de la crème to be raped in Bayview Hotel.
This small band of refugees, with a dying grandmother and two suffering old men, learned to surrender prize items from their belongings to passing Japanese soldiers, or to look away when menaced by their stares, as a matter of self-preservation. The difference between survival and annihilation would sometimes be a matter of inches as bombs fell around them, or depend on their choice of temporary shelter. Just as in places like Syria or Marawi today, the young girls became adults overnight as their world changed before their eyes. The victims of war would be just as arbitrary as those of a brand-new virus.
“What followed was what COVID-19 became in 2020 — everyone’s nightmare made flesh. The sudden Japanese occupation of Manila and the Philippines in January 1942 brought the Filipinos down to their knees and to a harsh reality.”
Yet, Manila—which had been leveled from end to end and one could see from Pasay to Rizal Park---recovered from this devastation. People would pick up the pieces of their lives and begin again. One would learn not to dwell on the past and speak about the unspeakable horror or of the barbarous practices and bad habits that had been learned during the Occupation. Eventually, Linda would finish her studies, though not with the medical degree that she had hoped to acquire in the footsteps of her father. Her crowning achievements were as the wife of Virgilio Reyes, Sr., Press Secretary; as Speech and Drama professor and department chairman at the University of the Philippines; and as mother to five children.
Her youngest sister, Aurora or Nene, would be the one who would become an M.D. in the same field (Eye-Ear-Nose-Throat) as their father, while the middle daughter, Vilma, would remain unmarried and work as a P.E. teacher at V. Mapa and R. Avancena high schools and at the Far Eastern University, where her mother was also a professor. As fate would have it, she would be her widowed mother’s companion and mainstay for the rest of her life. She would live to be 89 years old, about the same age as her mother was, when she passed away in 2018.
As one gazes at their photo in another era of national challenge and international threat, one sees a portrait of three muses, in fashionable dresses and wearing fresh, innocent smiles. The worst is over and they’re looking ahead to a bright future. Their adult lives have barely just begun, but they have experienced the worst of a lifetime. They have yet to conclude that such is the eternal cycle of life and that one must keep on going. As in the story of Pandora’s box, hope remained in it when all the pestilence had gone away.
The Reyes family in 1953 in Paco, Manila. Virgilio Sr. and Erlinda Reyes with children, Carlos, Cynthia, Georgina, Virgilio Jr. and Valentin. Picture at the door shows them with their grandmother Esther T. Alcantara and aunt Vilma.
Family Picture of the Tempongko-Alcantara clan in1959. Professor Esther Tempongko-Alcantara with daughters Erlinda and Vilma and Alcantara and sons-in-law Virgilio Reyes Sr. and Irineo Diaz. Grandchildren Carlos, Cynthia, Georgina, Virgilio Jr. and Valentin Reyes, Joel and Emil Diaz.
Ambassador Virgilio A. Reyes, Jr.
A career diplomat of 35 years, Ambassador Virgilio A. Reyes, Jr. served as Philippine Ambassador to South Africa (2003-2009) and Italy (2011-2014), his last posting before he retired. He is now engaged in writing, traveling and is dedicated to cultural heritage projects.
More articles by Ambassador Virgilio Reyes, Jr.