Beyond reportage

It was probably fitting that I finished reading Patricia Evangelista’s highly acclaimed account of “murder in my country,” Some People Need Killing (Random House, 2023), over a holiday devoted to remembering the souls of the departed. I had received a pre-publication review copy from the publisher months ago under a strict embargo not to talk about it until its formal launch. As it happened, it lay under a pile of other books to be read until a flurry of posts and reviews reminded me that it was out in the open, and that the secret – not just the book, but also what it contained – could now be shared.

I can still recall the day – May 15, 2004 – while we were celebrating Pahiyas in Lucban when I got the news on my phone that our representative to the English Speaking Union’s annual public speaking competition in London – a bright and pretty wisp of a teenager named Patricia Evangelista – had won the top prize. We were new to the ESU – subsequently we would produce two more global champions – and it was a grand way to announce to the world that we Filipinos could produce more than boxing heroes and beauty queens. Here was 18-year-old Patricia who could think on her feet and speak to issues of international importance, the poster child of Filipino intelligence and audacity, whose command of the English language led her to meeting no less than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in what amounted to a mini-coronation in recognition of her talent.

As magical as that moment was, I can only imagine how, in the months and years following, it must have begun to grate on the young Patricia to be asked to deliver her prizewinning speech in public forums over and over again, like a wind-up doll, and suffer the fate of prodigies who peak too soon. Surely that was just a beginning; surely there was more she could do – had to do – to outlive her Cinderella-like debut in London.

I would see some of that when she enrolled in my undergraduate Fiction Writing class in UP. I knew who she was and made sure to give her no special treatment – indeed to lean even a little harder on her, knowing she had what it took – but she got a “1.0” all the same, one of the few I ever gave. I