Local yet Global : A Fun Book on Forgotten Tales from Philippine Colonial History

Summit Books Editor and The Colonial Dept. podcaster Lio Mangubat has written a collection of thirteen essays which were originally broadcast in podcast form during the pandemic. Dalgona coffees and avocado toast lockdown projects are great, but perhaps don’t come close to what Mangubat has done: leave behind a tangible record of esoteric learning that will entice the layman to seek out other stories beneath dust-covered history textbooks.

Upon picking it up, I immediately thought, “Here’s a beautiful book.” Published in Singapore by Faction Press, this paperback is smaller than most and fits comfortably in the back pocket of blue jeans, or in a tiny kikay fashionista’s purse.

I imagine this book to be the equivalent of a tasty snack, following in the footsteps of popular historians like Ambeth Ocampo, Nick Joaquin, and Resil Mojares, but written with a younger and more diverse audience in mind. Readers have thirteen tiny bites as a treat, whetting our appetites for more.

There’s truly something for everyone. Theater fans will be intrigued by the essay “Sultan of Broadway,” about the operetta The Sultan of Sulu, which became a Broadway hit in 1902. It was George Ade’s critique on the American colonization of Sulu with characters inspired by the real-life Hadji Mohammad Jamalul Kiram II and Brigadier-General John C. Bates.

Sports-inclined folks will find “Baseball Country” fascinating, reading about our former considerable local mania for a sport we have all but forgotten in the name of basketball.

Medicine is always of interest in a post-pandemic world, and so “That Strange Disease Called Philippinitis” is a compelling read about the way several white men wilted under our tropical sun, leading to the colonial masters’ physical, mental, and emotional breakdowns if they stayed here too long.

Seven-month long volcanic eruptions, twenty-seven foot long giant crocodiles, Germans massacred by the Japanese in the rape of Manila during World War II, and so much more fill the pages of this enjoyable read.

In what I thought was the most touching of all the essays, Mangubat also pays tribute to his late uncle in “The Professor and the Book,” who taught history at UP Manila for more than three decades.

We are, all of us, made of stories, Mangubat reminds us. Our families’ and individual lives’ tales are irremovable from the tidal wave of local and global stories. No story is too small, no person too inconsequential, as we all have parts to play in the never-ending drama of nation building.