Where to find answers

ALTHOUGH I grew up in a house with books and liked reading, my earliest experience of research was in college. I was fortunate to have the late Doreen Fernandez as my freshman English teacher and it was she who guided me through the thrill of research and the agony of writing my first term paper. In those dark days one had to type out papers and it was hell trying to maintain margins on the page and even more difficult to add footnotes into your work. A small mistake sometimes led to repeating the entire page.

Students today breeze through papers and multi-media presentations without realizing how easy life is with word processing, spell/grammar check, cut-and-paste and other functions that are second nature to computers. You can print in color, adjust margins, change typeface and font size with the flick of a finger. Yet when I read my students' papers these days, I realize that form has definitely changed while content is still something they have to grapple with. While it is easy to produce handsome printed or on-screen reports, the basic processes of research and writing remain very much a solitary exercise and haven't changed very much through the centuries.

When Doreen opened the topic of term papers and promised to show us "the joy of research," there was a polite but audible groan from her normally receptive students. We were taught to take notes on 3 x 5 index cards, how to copy and make out complete and correct bibliographic citations, how to use bibliographies, find guides, and make maximum use of library resources. One of her famous questions was, "In which play does Shakespeare use the word love the most often?" The lazy ones presumed that the correct answer was "Romeo and Juliet." Others, seeing how the question looked so easy, sensed a trap and would start scanning Shakespearean texts and try vainly to count "love" before the deadline.

I wouldn't be surprised if some people had a nervous breakdown trying to find the answer to this question, but the solution was simple: just open the "Concordance to Shakespeare" and you would find the answer quickly and simply. Most of our basic research has been done by others who lived and toiled before us. The challenge is in knowing where to find the answers.

A non-conformist even in my freshman year, I did a paper on Nora Aunor and went through years of "komiks" [comic books] and fan magazines to find an angle that was new. Then as now, I was drawn to the bizarre and I found out that Nora Aunor and her screen hubby Tirso Cruz III had a "child" in the form of a plastic, blonde-haired walking doll known as "Maria Leonora Theresa" that fans treated like a real person. During one film festival, this doll had its own float, and on certain days, she was displayed to fans in the Aunor home and she received clothes, jewelry and other gifts befitting a princess, the imaginary daughter of the King and Queen of Philippine cinema at the time. I didn't get a very high grade for this unusual paper, because my work was sloppy and I submitted it late. But this rather uninspired experience started me off on my lifelong affair with Filipiniana research.

I did a paper on Kapampangan folk tales and my undergraduate thesis was on "Food in Pampango Culture," which led me to a rediscovery of my father's language and cultural heritage. My research entailed not only library work but also a lot of field work whose result manifests itself in areas of my body that are in need of liposuction.

Another memorable research paper was on Filipino curse words. It entailed browsing through the Tagalog-Spanish vocabularies compiled by Spanish friars. It was fascinating to find proof that these "bad" words were in use long ago.
What I found amusing was that the anatomical terms listed in the vocabularies in Tagalog were not translated into Spanish, as were other words, but they were translated into Latin. Perhaps this was done to make the base word seem scientific or perhaps it was meant to censor what a Spanish-reading friar or Filipino could understand. The familiar four-letter words in Latin provided me with a better vocabulary and hours of fun.

For Philippine history, I had the most terrifying professor in the roster named Miss Helen Tubangui. She introduced me to the wonders of the 55-volume compilation of documents on Philippine history from 1498-1898 by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson which is known to scholars today simply as "Blair and Robertson." We were asked to look into the two-volume index and find a research paper under the letter of our surnames. There was definitely a lot under "O" but I was frustrated that there were no entries on Ogres, Orgies or Orgasm.

Miss Tubangui also introduced us to the volumes called "Reports of the Philippine Commission" and "Reports of the Governors-General of the Philippines" that covered the Spanish period. When I have a tight deadline and need a topic, these sources are on my first line of defense. They contain a lot of obscure data on Philippine history, engaging in themselves but when brought together can encourage fresh insight and a first-hand view of the Spanish or American past.

Why am I reminiscing? To give credit to these and other teachers in the hope that some of my present students will follow the path I have taken.

Comments are welcome aocampo@ateneo.edu.