Tita Eggie, right before my eyes

LOS ANGELES — I was visiting my father’s grave on his death anniversary at a cemetery for dead soldiers in this city last Sept. 13 when I learned that my old boss and mentor Eugenia Duran Apostol, founder of the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI), had died in the Philippines at age 100.

Suddenly, I realized it would now be hard for me to forget this motherly figure and icon of press freedom and democracy in my homeland now that she is gone, and as fate would have it—dying on this same date that my father passed this earthly life.

In fact, Tita Eggie—this familiar name of endearment reserved only for a privileged few of Filipino journalists of my generation who grew under her guidance and tutelage—actually became both father and mother to this reporter one historic night 36 years ago.

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READ: Inquirer founding chair Eugenia ‘Eggie’ Apostol; 100

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‘Life about to change’

I was into my third year as a reporter for PDI in 1990. The newsroom of the old Ermita building was abuzz with rumors that I was going to win an award for my reporting about the plight of the people of Samar whom I documented in a five-part investigative report that my editors then called “Samar: Island In Agony.”

Although of petite stature, Tita Eggie commanded attention whenever she strode into the newsroom every afternoon. The click-clacking of her heels was a signal that the boss was in the building. And suddenly there is a general contest for those present to look busy.

“Wear a coat and tie. Bring your parents along. Your life is about to change,” exclaimed Tita Eggie, then chair of the board of the newspaper she founded on Dec. 9, 1985.

But my father, my Tatay Ignas, was sick with colon cancer in my hometown of Palo, Leyte. And my mother, my Nanay Petra, was always by my father’s side, chief comforter of my father as he battled his affliction.

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Tita Eggie was noncommittal when I asked her to represent my parents, who could not travel from the province to Manila to be with their son.

READ: Eugenia Apostol’s legacy endures in every journalist – UP CMC, Plaridel

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But she had something up her sleeve that week.

On the night of Oct. 3 that year, I became the first recipient of the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Investigative Journalism for my searing portrait of the life of the poor in Samar.

In the audience, I saw Tita Eggie, right before my eyes, clapping her hands, wildly cheering for me. I was overcome with emotion and I wept.

Political refugee

Four months later, Tita Eggie was touting my recent achievement in a talk for the Philippine Press Institute before a big crowd of media practitioners in Davao City on Feb. 10, 1991.

For days, I was walking on clouds.

When I decided to flee the Philippines in December that year to seek refuge in the United States because of threats to my life, Tita Eggie was one of few people who knew of my plan. (The late editor in chief Letty Jimenez Magsanoc was also privy to my plan to immigrate to the United States).

When her beloved Peping (her husband Jose, who died on Aug. 14, 2004) was recuperating from an ailment in a San Francisco hospital in January 1992, we would talk on the phone, and she would tease me and relay to me the suspicion of my colleagues in the Inquirer that I was faking persecution so that I could live in America forever.

But the American immigration officers believed otherwise and granted me and my family asylum on July 6, 2002.

A year before the United States gave me my status as a political refugee, Tita Eggie traveled to Washington to receive a lifetime achievement award given by the International Center for Journalists.

Photo with Bradlee

I could not contain my pride when I saw the black and white photograph of Tita Eggie with the legendary editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, on the front page of the Inquirer on Oct. 14, 2001.

America was a wounded nation that year, its people reeling in shock from the 9/11 tragedy. But the American press still found time to welcome and celebrate Tita Eggie as a “queenmaker” for helping topple dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and installing Corazon Aquino as the new president, restoring democracy in the Philippines.

In his biography of Tita Eggie, the late National Artist Resil Mojares described her as an “unlikely crusader in dark times.”

And how a shining beacon she became for Filipinos and the world—in those dark times.

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But the path she lit for me will forever burn bright in my heart. INQ