As part of CNN, and Time and Newsweek magazines in Beijing, Jaime FlorCruz has told stories using words, photos, and videos. This time, the retired journalist shares his experiences through an exhibit of mementos from the country he has called home for almost five decades. “This captures the spirit of the period when I was in China and what I’ve seen through the 47 years that I’ve been there. I hope that through my eyes, through the prism of the stuff that I have collected, I could show its evolution,” he explains.
His narrative begins with the display of the travel documents he used to enter China on August 21, 1971. He flew there for a three-week study tour along with 14 fellow students. But his stay was unexpectedly extended when they got wind of news of the bombing of Plaza Miranda in Manila. The incident led to then President Ferdinand Marcos’ suspension of the privilege of habeas corpus, allowing him to arrest opposition figures without warrants. Those he couldn’t arrest, he blacklisted—including FlorCruz and four others in the Philippine Youth Delegation invited by the China Friendship Association.
“I was one of the noisy troublemakers-student leaders in my university, the Philippine College of Commerce (now Polytechnic University of the Philippines). I was also the editor-in-chief of our college paper and an active member of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines and the League of Editors for Democratic Society. We were called activists because we were against the Vietnam war, we were for land reform, we were against corruption and official abuse. We exposed some of these,” FlorCruz enumerates.
Getting stranded was traumatic, dealing with the uncertainty was difficult. “I didn’t know it was going to be 12 years. It was one planning after another, one disappointment after another. We thought ‘ah maybe next month,’ or ‘maybe next year.’ I was very homesick. I couldn’t speak the language, I had no friends except my small group. And China was very isolated from the outside world.” Barren, spartan, very simple. That was his first glimpse of the country revealed through a few paintings in the exhibit.
It was also the time when China was enveloped in the revolutionary era. “It was Mao (Zedong), Mao, Mao everywhere I turn. His portrait, his quotations, his slogans, Mao pins.” A glass counter in the exhibit holds all the Mao collectibles he picked up from hotels and bookstores. “I brought them here just to remind people how China had become under Mao. He was a virtual God, whatever he said was followed and everyone showed loyalty to him.”
When FlorCruz’ passport expired two years later, he realized that it was going to be a long wait to get home so he opted to be productive and studied, worked, and traveled extensively. He took a two-year associate degree program in Mandarin and Translation at the Beijing Languages Institute and in 1977, enrolled at Peking University and obtained a B.A. degree in Chinese history.
There is a corner in the exhibit dedicated to souvenirs of his education. His diploma, some books, even scribblings. “There was a time when I wanted to learn from this political dictionary but it was not available in bookstores so I borrowed one from a friend. He lent it to me and I copied it by hand. After I finished about a third of this, he was so moved by my determination so he gave it to me. Copying was probably the equivalent of that movie ‘wax in, wax out.’ I was like Karate Kid learning certain basic skills,” he chuckled.
Learning Mandarin opened the path to his calling. “I was a still a senior in the university in 1982 when I became an accidental journalist,” he says. Newsweek needed bilingual news assistants so he started working for them part-time, doing research, filing and clipping news. Eventually, he was assigned to bigger tasks. Upon graduation, he moved to being a full time reporter in Time.
While he was already able to go back to the Philippines by this time, he opted to stay in China since his career as a journalist was taking off. Also, Marcos was still president so FlorCruz was not entirely safe from being arrested.
He served as Time’s Beijing bureau chief from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, he went to New York as the first non-American Edward R. Morrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. After completing the fellowship in 2001, he was hired by CNN as Beijing bureau chief and correspondent, a post he occupied until he retired in 2015.
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“I’ve been blessed to have had a ringside seat to many important events as a journalist,” he mused. On the exhibit floor is a box containing his tools of the trade as well as souvenirs of milestones such as the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China and the wristwatch giveaway when the first McDonald’s outlet opened in Beijing. “My approach is to take China’s story as a mosaic so piece by piece, story by story. We told our audiences what China was like through small pieces of the mosaic that we form. It’s been very challenging but also very rewarding to be part of that storytelling about China that is still going on and will go on because it is a very complex story to really understand,” he concluded.
“From the Perch of an Accidental China Hand: Peering into a kaleidoscope with the collection of Jaime FlorCruz” will run until February 17, 2019 at Bahay Tsinoy—Kaisa Heritage Center located at 32 Anda St. cor. Cabildo St., Intramuros, Manila. For more information, call (0922) 8901357; 5276083 or email info@bahaytsinoy.org.
Photographs by Romeo Peralta Jr.