Celeste and the Huks

Celeste Yap. We were roommates at Molave Residence Hall, my second year at UP. I moved in one afternoon, and met Cel. She was a batch older. She told me that she grew up and studied in Koronadal, in South Cotabato. She would tell us later on that her dad had died when she was younger, her mom had since re-married, and the family was close and happy. She had a boyfriend, Kee, and they were both majoring in Chem as a pre-med.

Cheng, I had already known from our Kalayaan days but barely. Lala, my friend from Kalayaan and Public Ad, despite living elsewhere at UP BLISS, became a permanent fixture in our room.

Coming back to the dorm was really like coming home. For dinner sometimes, we'd buy lechon manok at Philcoa and picnic at the Sunken Garden nearby or in our room. We'd keep each other company at Wendy's along Quezon Ave, studying for mid-terms and finals until four, five AM. We went to campus concerts, watched movies at the film center, and malled together. We saw Reality Bites with the same sense of self-definition that the rest of Gen X on the cusp of Y did. We went through the anxieties of term paper submissions, boyfriends, breakups, silly crushes and the other items on the menu of typical university fare. As stress management during finals, we would blast My Sharona and The Love Shack at 3am, dancing and jumping on the beds (which was a bad move, in retrospect, as you'll see later).

Too late for the First Quarter Storm of the 70s and too early for the Estrada ouster in the 00s, our time at UP wasn't marked by sweeping societal tension. Instead, we were at UP during a brief interim of economic prosperity, a strong peso, a fairly democratic and stable government. If there were issues for student politics then, they were almost of our own making: fraternity violence, in-fighting within the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the rise of "pluralist" student leaders who were more concerned over the lack of parking space than the need to organize the rural poor or address the national debt burden...

More germane to this picture was the Hukbalakup: we dubbed ourselves this name, invested with rebellion and vengeance, as a half-joking response to the ridiculous battle of the sexes in which we sometimes found ourselves. The name comes from the Hukbo ng Bayan laban sa Hapon--or Hukbalahap--an armed movement in the countryside formed as guerilla resistance against Japanese occupation in World War II. Ours was the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Kupal. "Kupal" is a noun, literally translated as smegma or the stinky crud build-up between the foreskin and penis; colloquially, used to mean men whose behavior resembles the smelliness and cruddiness of kupal. "Jerk" or "asshole" would be too mild, in comparison. Amid the genteel feminism on campus, we were militant sexists with no patience for the braindead, warfreaked, barbaric and probably unshowered variants of the unfairer sex. We loudly cursed and swore at morons who wolf-whistled as we jogged past--until they slunk away, defeated.

We also stood up to menacing fratboys. In the proto-Hukbalakup days of our freshman year, Lala and I had a run-in with a frat. Two guys cornered us at the Kalayaan dorm lobby one night, armed with 10 of their brods, and hassled us for writing a comic lampooning them over an incident that happened the semester before. Basically, they were caught in a voyeuristic attempt at crawling between the roof and ceiling of the girl's wing showers. When confronted, we pretty much told them to fuck off. That would have been the end of the matter, had the experience not left such a sour taste. So we decided to make a career of standing up to bullies, especially those who least expected it.

Episode 1: Sa Pananaw ni Adan (The World According to Adam)

An intercom announcement warns against using the bathrooms, because some boys have climbed into the ceiling. The girls respond with an unalarmed, "REAAAAALLY????!!!!????"

Episode 2: Balitaktakan ng mga Shit (Shitty Argumentation)

The offenders are depicted as a steaming piece of shit (entirely fictional, bearing no resemblance to any persons kinda shit), saying that it wasn't its intention to be a peeping tom [sob], asking for forgiveness [sniff]; and makes a "but I love my mother" defense for its actions.

Episode 3: Pakialamera (Kibitzer)

With a potent expletive, Fictional Sol tells Fictional Lala the that she heard about some boys who tried to peep into the bathrooms in the Girl's wing. Fictional Lala replies with the same expletive, and shares the news with their friend, Fictional Cocoy. A typical guy, Fictional Cocoy's response: what time do we eat?

Anyway, there was a fifth Huk. That would be our room at Molave. After the pristine innocence and totalitarian regulation of the Kalayaan dormitory for freshmen, Molave was as anarchic as Sodom and Gomorrah. There seemed to be no rules, or at least they weren't enforced. There was no curfew either, so people came back any time through the night and wee hours of morning. There weren't any strict checks on residents bringing in outsiders, hence Lala's ability to come and go as she pleased. We never locked our room door--except on one day: Molave's Open House--but nothing was ever stolen. We never cleaned the room until we moved out in March '95; so throughout the year, one had to wade through piles of books, monster dustbunnies and dirty laundry.

Then, at the end of the year, we were told by the Dorm Manager that he was kicking us out.

We didn't see it coming. Unbeknownst to us, even in the ultra-liberal and permissive Molave environment, we had drawn some unfavorable attention to ourselves. As a norm, Management was indifferent to the inebriation, intoxication and impregnation rampant within the house corridors. However, drawing fake sunglasses on our faces in the photos on our dorm ID/mealcards was treated as a felony. And since there were some complaints over loud music in the middle of the night (!), we were deemed to be unfit for the privilege of staying at their crappy dorm, told to pack and ordered not to return for the next semester.

It would have been devastating if it weren't so funny.

Lala, not being a resident, couldn't get kicked out anyway; no matter how much she wanted to be, for laughs. Cel moved to Yakal I think, and Cheng to UP Bliss with her sorority sisters. The ultimate irony, in my case, is that I was kicked out of Molave but got into Ilang Ilang, alias Campus Convent, an all-girls' residence famous for attracting only the most upstanding young ladies on campus. Even more ironic was that, to get in, I had to work as a Resident Assistant therefore an official Guardian of Chastity of the residing vestal virgins: one of my duties was to make a round of bed checks in the evening and report on curfew violators.

Anyway, the four of us stayed friends throughout college, even if more loosely than before. When we graduated, Cel went on to med school and over time, during her residency, lost touch a little. For a couple of years, Cheng and I worked together on the same project although at different government agencies. Lala went to law school but stayed close. Then I moved away to Singapore, and Cel to the States.

It was a shock to learn on Friday night, through Cheng via facebook, that Cel had died of breast cancer in June. I hadn't thought of Cel in a long time, but I wished I had. Looking through her photos online, I now know that she was married and had a bright-eyed little boy, who looks like he's around three or four. My heart aches for him and his loss. Some comfort though: he has her smile.

Cel was one of the most winsome people I've ever known, and I say this without reservation. We all used to call her Winona--and in the mid-90s, that's about the highest compliment anyone could have gotten. But it was her soul that was blindingly, devastatingly beautiful. Her choosing to be a doctor always made perfect sense. She was smart, compassionate, nurturing, emotionally mature (despite letting us drag her into our mischief) and completely trustworthy.

What I'll never forget about Cel: one morning, waking up to see her staring at her reflection in the mirror for a really long pause, before finally lamenting: "Oh my god. I am so imperfect." That really cracked Cheng and me up at the time, and it still makes me laugh now.

Oh, Cel, you were never that imperfect.


Stolen from her facebook page, modified from the original.