My Great-Grandfather’s Memoir: From Notebook to Book
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Sketch from the only surviving photo of Sabas Gaerlan.
It was Memorial Day 2005, and I was awakened at 3 a.m. by a strange dream in which Lolo Sabas appeared to me. I never met him--he was born in 1854 in Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, Philippines--but I recognized him from my family’s photos.
Sabas was 11 years old when his mother died. His father, a teacher, sent him away to live with Fr. Geronimo Rubio, a Spanish Augustinian missionary, who was the parish priest of Tagudin.
Three days earlier had been the death anniversary of my father, Juanito Jose Mills Gaerlan. In the custom of the Ilocanos, one of the largest ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines, death anniversaries are occasions for pananglagip, a ritual remembrance that is both complex and simple. In my Northern California home, I had set up an altar in the living room with a generations-old family crucifix at the center. To its right was a framed image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and to the left, a photo of my father in Saigon in the late 1960s. At each end were red, lighted votive candles, the flames flickering as if dancing with the daylight, teasing it.
For the atang, the food offering, I placed three slices of pork adobo with cubed potatoes, a scoop of steamed white rice, julienned fresh ginger root, cut shallots, and sliced tomatoes, on a white dinner plate. On a smaller dish were pieces of tagapulot or pulitipot, molasses solidified in coconut shells to give it a cupped shape. The tagapulot would be my father’s sinam-it, his dessert. Missing was his favorite drink--rum and Coke--as I could not find Tanduay Rum, a popular Philippine alcoholic beverage.
I set down the offering at the altar. Amid the grace and fragility of the candlelight, I prayed the rosary for my father and beloved departed I remembered, as is the custom of my faith.
After the pananglagip, I spent hours reminiscing about my father. Although he has been gone almost two decades, the long hand of his absence still touched me. My recollections took me back to my younger days in Baguio City, Benguet, where I was born and where I first heard my ancestors’ tales. The stories, told and retold by my father, aunts and uncles, fascinated me. I remembered vividly the story of my father’s two brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Ben. Both were soldiers during World War II, and both were in the Bataan Death March. Uncle Mike escaped and survived, whereas Uncle Ben, the younger one, died at the Japanese concentration camp in Capas, Tarlac, and was buried in an unmarked mass grave. He was only 17 years old.
I wondered why my great-grandfather had come to me in my dream soon after my father’s pananglagip. Then I remembered the cuaderno (notebook) and how I became aware of it.
In 1977, during the wake of my paternal grandmother, Adela Mills Gaerlan, I heard my elders talk about the cuaderno, then in the possession of my Aunt Blandina Gaerlan Guerrero-Bayquen. After making me swear to guard it with my life, Aunt Blandina lent me the notebook. It was Lolo Sabas’ unpublished 200-page autobiography handwritten in Ilocano. I photocopied the pages and kept them in a desk drawer. When I immigrated to the U.S. in 1984, I brought the copy with me. But somehow during the next 21 years, I lost the document.
Lolo Sabas’ appearance in my dream was the Ilocano parikna--the way those who have departed make the living know they are still around and not to be forgotten as they are still important in the present.
Two months later, July 2005, I flew to Manila to meet with Aunt Blandina.
During our meeting in Baguio City, where she lived, she narrated family stories. She recalled growing up with Lolo Sabas in Cervantes, Ilocos Sur. She heard that when Lolo Sabas was 18, he went to Manila to study at the Jesuit-run Escuela Normal de Maestros. He stayed at the San Agustin convent in Intramuros as a serviente priviligiado (privileged servant). After graduation, he married his second cousin Rosalia Gaerlan Lorenzana, a common practice to keep wealth within the family, and started his teaching career.
Facade of San Agustin church in Intramuros in Manila.
My aunt asked, "Did you know your Lolo Sabas was one of the early teachers from the lowlands who taught in Cayan and Sagada in the Mountain Province among the Igorot peoples?
Then she related the story of the cuaderno.
Lolo Sabas began writing his autobiography in 1908 following the death of his first wife Lola Rosalia after delivering their 16th child.
The discovery of the manuscript was serendipitous.
The Japanese occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945. When the members of the Japanese Imperial Army, known for their brutality, marched into Cervantes on their way to Bessang Pass, they burned the whole town. The Gaerlans and other families in Cervantes evacuated to the highlands to find refuge. Great-Aunt Margarita Antonia Guerrero, née Gaerlan, and her family gathered what they could and relocated to their homestead in Tue, Tadian, Mountain Province. One of the few items the family hauled during the evacuation was a lakasa or baul, a wooden chest. After the war, when Great-Aunt Margarita opened the chest, she found the cuaderno. After she died in 1970, her daughter Blandina became the custodian of the journal.
Lola Margarita Antonia Gaerlan-Guerrero with her husband Juan Leon Guerrero and their eldest child Primo taken circa 1910. She was the first custodian of the handwritten autobiography of her father.
Aunt Blandina said, “Praise the Lord, the cuaderno survived. It contains the Gaerlan family history dating back to 1789 in Ilocos Sur.”
Toward the end, she explained,“Alvin, I am 82 years old. I have diabetes. My eyesight is beginning to go dim. Then out of the blue, you appear. God has answered my prayer.”
She continued, “Among the descendants of Lolo Sabas, you have shown the greatest interest in his autobiography. Imagine, you flew from America for the document.”
She added, “I am making you the new custodian, but promise you will publish it.”
After a brief pause, she remarked, “I want to see the book before I die.”
A week later, I was back in California with a new photocopy of the cuaderno and an official letter naming me custodian.
It did not take long for my awe to turn to disappointment: Lolo Sabas’ manuscript was written in an older form of the Ilocano language which I do not know.
Two years later, Aunt Blandina passed away. Without a translator, I wondered if I had been impulsive in promising to publish the manuscript. After her death, I frantically reached out to relatives and friends. I also contacted the Hawaii chapter of the Gunglo Dagiti Mannurat Nga Ilokano (GUMIL) or Ilokano Writers Association of the Philippines, as well as Bannawag, the oldest Ilokano weekly magazine in the Philippines that began in 1934.
The few people I found who know Ilokano could not help.
I was on the verge of giving up when in July 2013, I saw a flyer online promoting an international conference sponsored by the National Alliance for Knowledge, Empowerment and Meaning (NAKEM), an advocacy group promoting culture, education, and language. After checking the website, I learned that the University of Hawaii at Manoa has an Ilocano language department that offers a bachelor’s degree in Ilocano language and literature. My heart skipped a beat.
I reached out to the program director Aurelio Agcaoili, Ph.D. I sent him the document, and when he replied, he expressed great interest in its historical and literary values. He also conveyed his desire to explore the project with me.
I participated in the eighth NAKEM International Conference hosted by the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2013 and the ninth NAKEM International Conference in Baguio City hosted by the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte, in 2014.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, it took seven years before I would again have contact with Dr. Agcaoili.
In May 2021, while the pandemic restrictions were still in place, I emailed him. In less than a week, we were on the phone.
"Are you still interested in publishing your Lolo Sabas’ autobiography?” he asked.
Page 8 of his 200-page autobiography handwritten in the orthography of the late 19th, and early 20th century Ilocano.
"Yes,” I replied.
He pointed out, "The manuscript must be published. Remember, it’s no longer just the history of the Gaerlan family. It is also the history of the Ilocanos. It is also the history of the Filipinos.”
During the summer of 2021, we worked like dogs, and in August I was in Honolulu to launch not one but two books from the cuaderno: The Almighty Moves Mountains: From the Handwritten Autobiography of Sabas Manzano Gaerlan and Dungdung-Aw: Lamentations
"The Almighty Moves Mountain"
"Dungdung-Ao"
It had taken 16 years to fulfill my promise to my dearest Aunt Blandina. Now, her soul can rest in perpetual peace.
Alvin B. Gaerlan, Ph.D., writes from Northern California. A licensed psychologist, he was born in the Cordillera mountains in the Philippines to a Bicolana-Chinese mother and an Ilocano-Igorot-Spanish father. He is president of the National Alliance for Knowledge Empowerment and Meaning (NAKEM) California, an advocacy group for linguistic justice, cultural democracy, and emancipatory education.
