Surgeons do not Cry - Story#1 - The Politics of Survival (The Ingénue)

Because I forgot to greet him on his birthday last June, I decided to pay a tribute to Ting Tiongco. And since he is one person I know who wants to tell stories and share it with different people, I wanted to share part of him to some of my friends here by featuring four stories from his latest book. These are actually four of the my favorite ones. I was planning to feature just three but i can't choose which one to drop, so four, why not! LOL. I could feature the whole book, but since it is the University of the Philippines(UP) Press who owns the rights now as the publisher, I cannot really get away from them by just sweet talking them into forgiving me... if it was the author who published it, that would have been an easier one to deal with. lmao.

Anyways, without further ado, here's the story#1:

(click book to read book reveiw)

THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL (The Ingénue)

Entering the UP medical school for me was mind-boggling. I was a pure unadulterated Ateneo product, from kindergarten to high school in small town Ateneo de Davao, to college in the more sophisticated Ateneo de Manila University. At that time, the Ateneos were strictly for boys, or young men, as the case was in college. I never had any girls or women as classmates so I did not know how to comport myself before one. I took special care to be as well groomed as possible. In the first days of classes I prepared myself for class very carefully, the same way I prepared myself for the rare Saturday night parties in Ateneo, which were the only times we dorm denizens of Bellarmine Hall met girls for the four years we studied in Loyola Heights. I came to class everyday with my Tancho Tique slicked down hair, smelling of Old Spice after shave lotion but wearing my usual thick myopic glasses.

I was afraid to eat lunch at the crowded Little Quiapo restaurant in the UP College of Medicine campus in Herran, Ermita. I dreaded each time some female classmate would want to share my table because I always felt obliged by the manly rules of gallantry to pay for her lunch. And I was operating on a very meager budget. I ate lunch at Little Quiapo only when everybody else had eaten. And I was always late for the first afternoon class at one pm.

All this nonsense mercifully stopped one day when to my mortification, one of my female classmates, the hustle-bustle Marlene A shared my table late in the lunch hour. As I attempted to pay for her lunch, good old Marlene A cussed me. It was the first time that I was ever cussed by a female, and she cussed in earthy UP Diliman Tagalog that was hair-raising indeed to a non Tagalog, wrss-wrss speaking nerd from the hills of Loyola. It was the time of burgeoning campus activism, but not having known too many females in my eighteen year old life, how was I to know Marlene A was a through and through feminist? She cussed me for being a condescending, pompous, male chauvinist pig and for presuming she could not afford to pay her own lunch. (At least that was what I understood.)

But was I ever so happy! I was profuse with my thanks to her. She set me free. From that time on, I refused to use Old Spice and did not comb my hair very often. I became a full blown UP student.

The UPCM first year class in 1966 was a collection of the crème de la crème from the different premed courses in Manila with a sprinkling from the provinces.

During our orientation period, the professors made us understand that each one of us was chosen for his/her individual history of excellence but they predicted that only 50 - 70% of the 120 would survive the five year course. We felt like 120 gladiators let loose in a large arena, each one sizing the other up on his chances of survival.

Almost immediately, alliances and hostilities broke out. For the sake of the survival of the most number, a class organization was imperative. But the election of the class officers was fraught with conflict. For the few non Diliman students, the election of class officers in the first two weeks of classes was at best, an exercise in hazard guessing. But for the Dilimanites who constituted the majority, it was a foregone thing. They had their previous alliances, personalities, prejudices, and politics in UP Diliman. They merely brought them over to the Herran Campus. We were all sucked into Diliman politics.

So for next five years we remained a class divided along fraternity lines.