AFTER traveling around the world, Pinoy-Russian Geronimo Tagatac carved his own career niche as a management consultant on e-commerce and e-government in the Business and Technology Department, Information Resources and Management Division of State of Oregon. But in the midst of business concerns, Tagatac is also immersed in writing American Asian articles and reaching for his Filipino roots in Batac, Ilocos Norte.

Tagatac was born to an Ilocano father, Tagatac Sr., and a Russian Jew mother, Augusta Finkelstein. He relates that his mother was a Russian refugee from New York and his father was a farmer who pursued the "American Dream." Tagatac Sr. was originally from Batac, Ilocos Norte.

Bitten by the writing bug

Tagatac said that it was only ten years ago that he started writing. His stories had been published in several publications namely, The Writer's Forum, Orion, Mississippi Mud, Northwest Review, River Oak Review, Alternatives Magazine, among others.

In 1997, Tagatac was awarded the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and in the summer 2001 and 2003, he was invited to teach at the Fishtrap Fellowship, a summer writing fellowship that has several different workshops in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, songwriting and publishing. During the summer 2001, Tagatac taught "Magical Realism," and this summer 2003, he will teach "Difficult Characters in Fiction".

Conscious of his Pinoy roots, he said that he wanted to know more about Filipino writers who write in English. He would also like to meet Ilocano writers, too.

Asked about Filipino writers who he has read and admired, he said he likes Carlos Bulosan, whose life story similar to his father's. He was also quick to mention Jose Rizal and Jessica Hagedorn, known for her novel, "The Dog Eaters."

Tagatac's favorites include fiction writers, Ray Carver, Gina Berriault who wrote "Woman in their Beds" collection of short stories, and Gina Ochsner who won the Flannery O'Connor Award for her collection of short stories, "The Necessary Grace to Fall." Currently, Tagatac is planning to get an agent to publish his short story collection called "The Weight of the Sun."

Tough childhood

Tagatac and his younger sister Joan moved from Connecticut, where he was born, to New Orleans. Tagatac recalls how unsettling it was to be the "new boy in the block" but he did not mind it since he was too young to realize the impact of divorce when his parents parted ways when he was five and Joan was only two.

"My father was an independent fisherman and there was a time when we lived on his boat." He also had to adjust at a young age to his father's new family when Tagatac Sr. remarried a Cajun, Laura Lytle, with whom he had three more children, Shirley and the twins , Roland and Roselyn.

At the age of 15, Tagatac recalls that he helped his father in the vegetable farms. "I worked in the fields-weeded onions, thinned the lettuce, picked beans, cabbage, squachs, corn, cauliflower, you name it, we did it!"

It was also during that time that he became fascinated with Physics and took the San Jose State College Entrance Exams, After passing that test, Tagatac supported himself by singing folk songs in the pubs and coffee shops during the early 60s. He also worked as dishwasher, ship cargo worker among others.

War experience

At the age of 22, Tagatac was drafted, but he enlisted as an Airborne infantryman. He passed the special forces exam and was trained to be a demolitions specialist on the Special Forces A Team.

"We were in teams of 12 and we were taught to train the soldiers for insurgency operations. We put up expedient bridges and call for mock explosions to train our forces for ambushes and other guerilla tactics. At Fort Bragg, we set up barbed wires, mine fields, field fortifications and makeshift hamlets during our training operations. We did a lot of parachute jumps." He recalled it was a hectic one-year course. This prepared him to be part of the 7th Special Forces, at Fort Bragg, and the 5th Special Forces, in Vietnam where he served from 1965 to 1966. He was stationed at the Phu Quoc island south of Camau Peninsula in the Gulf of Siam.

After his stint in Vietnam, he went back to San Jose State, California and finished his Bachelors and Masters degrees in History at the San Jose State College. The Ilocano in his blood prevailed as he explored the old civilizations of Europe. He traveled in England, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Czech Republic, Spain and Italy staying in hostels and riding the crest of "joie vivre."

Political concerns

He pursued his doctoral degree in Political Science at the University of California in Davis and during that time, he got a scholarship that enabled him to study Mandarin. "I was in Taiwan for a year from 1975 to 1976." He indicated that during that time he was a leftist. "I was an anti-war activist. Between 1977 and 1978, I lived on the HK Island. It was before the normalization of US-China relations." Due to various distractions, he fell short of a dissertation in finishing his doctoral degree.

During the 80s, he was back in Davis, California where he worked in the California State Legislature's Assembly Office of Research. "I was assigned to draft legislation for the International Trade Commission, write the policies and reports for the legislative assembly."

After seven years in San Francisco and a year in Fremont, California, Tagatac was offered a job in Salem in 1989. "I got this job with the Oregon Public Utility Commission as a management analyst. Later, I was a rotation budget analyst with the Legislature's Ways and Means Committee."

Family

"I am now a single father. Mara, my daughter, who is 14 and is in high school grade 9, stays with her mom and I get her twice a week. I want her to experience and learn about America as well as the world at her own time."

Tagatac is a man who has traveled far and wide but who has remained grounded in his identity. As he fleshes out in one of his stories entitled "The Dance Class" published at the Chapultepec Press, his protagonist Mateo says "I could not have explained why I felt the need to wander among lovers, jobs, and homes. It was just that something eventually drained out of people and places and made them as flat as light on an overcast day. When that happened, I knew that it was time to go where the air was clear...where there was smell of new soil. But I always knew, from the first moment, I arrived, that want and loss would come again to drive me away..."

(Ms Schuld is based in Portland, Oregon, USA. She was a Manila-based business reporter of Business Star News and Hong Kong-based foreign correspondent for Asia Technology Magazine. She graduated from St. Scholastica's College in 1983.)