ABOUT THE BOOK

“As might be expected, the Hong Kong Junta did not die out at once. The spirit which had given vitality and strength to the Junta lived on for a few more years among the few who kept right on hoping even after it was no longer reasonable to hope that the United States would leave the Filipinos to themselves to work out their own destiny as a nation. Their fierce pride in being Filipinos led them to the conviction that a sense of dignity was not possible under foreign domination. To them it was simply unthinkable that a Filipino could still be a Filipino and not be free. Rather than submit anew to alien domination, they chose the life of exile in foreign cities where they could at least walk in dignity which freedom alone could make possible. They lived their own lonely lives of exile, often sustained only by their fierce pride in being Filipinos first and last.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S. V. EPISTOLA (A.B., University of the Philippines, A.M., Ph.D., Harvard University), professor of Asian Studies at the Asian Center of the University of the Philippines in Diliman until 1991, currently teaches philosophy and aesthetics at U.P. Diliman’s Department of Philosophy. He is the author of essays, articles, monographs and books (The Home We Remember: Selected Short Fiction of the Fifties and Pieces and the Old Inkstone: Post-EDSA Essays) and recipient of a National Achievement Award for Literature, the 1996 Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas “for literary excellence and lifetime achievement.”