On the occasion of National Hero's birth month this June, let me share with you this interesting article about the great Malayan sexuality: Was Rizal Gay? By Neil C. Garcia Sometime during the Centennial of Rizal’s martyrdom, Isagani R. Cruz, local pop-culture Provocateur and professor of literature and Philippine studies at the De La Salle University, wrote a column for the now-defunct Filmag: Filipino Magazin, shockingly titled “Bakla ba si Rizal?” (1) The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed, is a resounding and categorical “Yes!” And he offers what he calls “biographical evidence” in order to arrive at this question’s confidently affirmative answer. First, Rizal was a bakla because he was afraid of committing himself to the revolutionary cause. Second, Rizal’s kabaklaan made itself apparent in his periodic “failings” in his relationships with the women to whom he was supposed to have been romantically linked. Third, Rizal, unlike his compatriots, didn’t go “wenching” in the brothels of Barcelona and Madrid (at least, not very often). Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of Josephine’s benighted baby boy, since—paraphrasing noted Rizalist historian Ambeth Ocampo’s feelings on the matter of Rizal’s “disputable paternity”—Josephine would seem to have been routinely sexually abused and consequently impregnated by her stepfather. Of course, these four “conjectures” hardly qualify as proof. They are more likely the end-results of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for its underlying assumptions concerning what being a bakla means: one, a bakla cannot ever be a revolutionary because he is essentially spineless and a coward; two, failing in your relationships with women makes you abakla; three, a bakla cannot possibly have sex with women, not even when they are wenches; and four, to be a bakla is to be impotent or at least incapable of getting a woman pregnant. The dubiousness—and utter stupidity—of these assumptions hardly needs to be emphasized: according to them, basically, kabaklaan is the negation of everything good and desirable in masculinity and is hence, devoid of its own inner substance and worth. Indeed, even if I were to champion the cause of the bakla and would like to win someone as “big” and popular as Rizal over to my side, I would nonetheless balk at Cruz’s way of going about such a task. His “biographical evidence” demonstrates nothing, other than the unflattering and sadly naive opinion he holds of who (or what) a bakla is. In saying that I do not find Cruz’s method credible in the very least, I am of course also saying that there is a better way of making the project of ascertaining Rizal’s “gender and sexuality” work. And this method involves, first and foremost, asking if the question itself is sensible, given the historical period in which I would wish it to make sense. Examining the categories one is using in one’s study of such slippery “realities” as sexuality and gender is the necessary first step, then. This is because the categories we use are always culture-bound and historically specific, and as such are never quite neutral and “scientific,” let alone universally reliable and insightful. To ask if Rizal was a bakla, one has, first and foremost, to be clear about what the concept baklameant at the time and in the place that Rizal lived. In other words, the way we understand bakla today most probably was not the way people in these islands a century ago understood it. This alone makes one’s project more difficult than it might have originally appeared, for it requires one to undertake a comprehensive study of the “sex/gender system” of mid-nineteenth-century Philippines—in particular, the sexual and gender categories that operated in the lives of the Tagalog ilustrados, whom Rizal most certainly was. My own tentative findings about the “social semantics” of bakla—in other words, the career this concept has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn’t even connote an identity that is distinguished by its sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering, indecision or uncertainty—something that anyone unlucky enough can suffer from at any point in his or her life. Until early in this century, in fact, bakla wasn’t so much a noun as a verb: one was nababakla if he or she was not sure of his or her choices, or if one was suddenly afraid or confounded by the unexpected turn of events. (2) In contrast, nowadays, a bakla is an effeminate male who wishes to have sex with “real men” or tunay na lalake. Thus, the bakla in our midst is a variety of male homosexual who can easily be recognized because of his swishy ways, and whose sexual desire defines his innermost and most authentic sense of self. Obviously, during Rizal’s time, there was no bakla or effeminate homosexual: there may have been effeminate men (called, among others, binabae/yi, bayoguin, asog and bido), but they were not defined as such by virtue of the desire they possessed, but only by their choice of occupations (feminine ones, like weaving, pottery-making, and the like), and their womanlike appearance and behavior. In fact, the idea that people were different on account of the gender of the object of their sexual desire (in other words, that people were either heterosexual or homosexual) was alien to our turn-of-the-nineteenth-century ancestors, who most probably desired and had sex with whomever they wanted at whatever point in their lives, without thinking of what such desires or acts had to say about their identities, their conceptions of who they essentially were. If we must be accurate about things, even in Europe itself, homosexuality was not a reality until it was officially “invented” in 1869—in Germany, to be exact, by sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny. (3) Thus, even when Rizal had lived there at around the same that the discourse of homosexuality was steadily being “normalized” and propagated, it is quite doubtful that he was influenced at all by the latest sexological revolutions that were being waged inside the psychiatric clinics in Europe’s more technologically advanced countries (Spain most certainly not being one of them.) A passage in El Filibusterismo, from the chapter titled “Manila Characters” illustrates how, to Rizal, the thought—the blatant image—of two men having an intimate relationship was not a particularly upsetting thing: That respectable gentleman who is so elegantly attired is not a physician but a homeopathist on his own, sui generis: he believes totally in the similia similibus, the attraction of likes. That young Cavalry captain with him is his favorite disciple. (4)

The chapter from which this passage comes treats the Fili’s reader to a menagerie of Manila’s “queer” residents. This passage not only confirms the existence of same-sex-loving men in Hispanic Philippines, but the very casualness of its tone tells us that Rizal was not phobically affected by what it represented. In fact, the almost-funny “pun” he must have intended to make when he chose to denominate this doctor a “homeopathist,” (5) reveals he found the subject slightly amusing, or at least amusing enough that he chose not to abominate it, which he could very well have done, as he often did in his writings, including this chapter itself. This would have arguably been the case had he been sufficiently “Europeanized” in the sexological sense—which is to say, had Rizal been sufficiently raised and trained in the newly inducted homophobic regime that had begun to take hold of the European imagination in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As the constructionist historian Arnold Davidson puts it, this regime of “sexuality” was made possible by the emergence, in Europe, of a new, psychiatric style of reasoning, (6) a manner of arguing about sexual personalities, orientations, “paraphilias” and other such “categories of being,” which arose alongside the various neuroses and psychoses that were being discursively produced by the different “biomedical” dispensations of the time. Thus, Rizal could not have been a bakla (the way we currently know this concept), nor a gay/homosexual, simply because these were categories of being that were not available during his time. To call him gay orbakla would be to commit a grave anachronistic mistake, similar perhaps to calling him a “yuppie” or even—pundits in UP would hate me for saying this—a “Filipino.” (7) Obviously, it would have been impossible for someone coming from that era to self-identify with the nuances and complexities of the many dizzyingly new-fangled nomenclatures of our own time. All this doesn’t mean, most certainly, that there were no men who had sex with each other previous to homosexuality’s unfelicitous debut into the world. (One wonders just how accurate is this El Fili passage, coming as it does from the chapter that purports to present and introduce the typical “characters” of Rizal’s Manila). We can only imagine how, from the earliest times, all over the planet, the male and female of the species had manifested both heterosexual and homosexual behaviors. But to repeat that oft-repeated mantra of social constructionism, engaging in homosexual sex is one thing, being a homosexual is another. (8) Previous to the sexological “production” of the homosexual as a “species”—in Michel Foucault’s formulation—of personality, there were men who loved other men, and women who loved other women, but they were not much different from everybody else (in fact, most probably they were everybody else.) The same thing must have been true in the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. If the confession manuals from the early Spanish period were to be believed, it would seem that the newly converted natives of the islands were not much loath to the activity of mutually arousing one another—men with men, women with women, men with women, etc.—within such “harmless” contexts and occasions asel burlarse, or “childish play.” (9) We might wish to recall, in this regard, just how scandalized the properfrayles were, when they first saw rowdy men in the Visayas sporting all sorts of penile implants (penis pins and the like), which they gamely used in order to make their sexual encounters both bloodier and—they themselves gamely admitted, upon being asked—considerably more pleasurable. (10) Needless to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippines enjoyed a kind of sexual “innocence” (or at least unselfconsciousness) that only later on became corrupted when the colonial Church introduced the discourse of sodomy, which it propagated through the confessional. The discourse of sodomy, however, was not the same as that of homosexuality, for it referred to a number of nonprocreative, extra-conjugal and/or sexually “non-missionary” acts that anyone might be weak enough to sometimes commit (with men, women, or animals) but that, because merely a variant of “unnatural sin against the sixth commandment,” didn’t define one’s psychological constitution, or sense of self. (11) Moreover, the concept of sodomy was itself “utterly confused,” for not only were the varieties of acts it encompassed dizzyingly plural and shifting, it also functioned, in Europe’s “pre-sexological regimes,” as a most convenient stigmatizing weapon, a demonizing label with which it was practically impossible to identify, inasmuch as it was, in fact, an “empty category” into which the powerless were thrust by those who dictated the scope and signification of its use. (12) In the case of Hispanic Philippines—as historian John Leddy Phelan concludes—the resident Sangleyes or Chinese were the colonial administrators’ most convenient target for this xenophobia-driven charge, on whom the Spanish settlers in the islands depended for vital economic services. (13) Strangely enough, in his annotations to Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, (14) Rizal himself echoes the Sinophobic accusation of sodomy, unmindful of the obvious bias in Morga’s account, which had obviously been “cribbed” from previous relaciones and cronicas, written by such dubious sources as Marcelo de Ribadeneira and Miguel de Benavidez (15). While Rizal’s intention in his annotations was clearly the unpacking of Spanish colonialist “fantasies” and racist misrepresentations of the Philippines in the available documents and histories, he didn’t himself realize—rather, he didn’t wish to realize—just how fantastic was the claim that the indios of the Philippines had been innocent of the “unnatural sin,” until they were corrupted by the foreigners, particularly the Chinese. Typically, the argument used by the Spanish commentators in the early years of the Conquista was that there wasn’t even a native word for sodomy among the indios of the Philippines, as though by virtue of this linguistic voiding of the “unspeakable crime” (or the nefandam libidinem), the many acts that constituted it could no longer be possible among them. (16) Of course, it is the Hispanic colonial archives themselves that can be shown to contradict this amazingly specious argument. In one “confession manual” or confesionario, written by the friar Gaspar de San Agustin and published in Manila in 1713, a question relating to “sins against the sixth commandment” went: Cun nagpuit, o cun nagpapuit, o cun nagcasala sa hayop. (17) This question, inquiring as it did into the penetrative or receptive position the penitent might have assumed during anal sexual intercourse—as well as into probable acts of bestiality on the side—unequivocally proves that Tagalog words existed, at this stage of Spanish evangelization, to refer to at least these three forms of sodomitic congress. Nonetheless, Rizal’s “denial” of the Filipino native’s “innate capacity” to commit sodomy was, in the end, quite understandable, especially when we recall the fact that his general purpose in putting out and annotating Morga’s Sucesos was that he wished to paint a bright and “noble” picture of his countrymen (and only incidentally, countrywomen)— something that might serve to locate the Philippines in an Enlightenment, “evolutionary” narrative of development to which he subscribed, as well as to rectify the vulgarly unflattering, “Quiaoquiapist” stereotypes that circulated in Spain

and that personally afflicted him and the other reformists during this time. (18) In his study, “Rizal Reading Pigafetta,” Resil Mojares makes a similar observation: in his edition of the Sucesos, we see Rizal effectively writing a “counterhistory,” (19) a marginal though no less arrogant text from someone who fancied himself capable of adjudicating between foreign and native perspectives, between “dubious” and “correct” knowledges about the Philippines. Predictably enough, such an undertaking was characterized by Rizal’s own nativist mystifications and expropriations of European Orientalist imaginings. In any case, by furthering his own uncritical Orientalism, Rizal unwittingly bought into the same “Humanist,” colonialist logic against which he was trying to inveigh, countervailing his own project and contradicting himself now and again. For instance, in regard to Morga’s remark that the native men and women of the islands were sexually “incontinent,” Rizal argues that they simply saw no sin in sex, believing the act of reproduction, “like many other peoples… [as] a natural instinct.” Further, he states that the pagan indiosweren’t so much “loose” as possessing “an excess of naturalism,” and that they were not fettered by “religious or moral prohibition.” (20) Reading his textual “intervention,” we realize that the contradiction is clear: while Rizal sees the unbridled sexual activities between native men and women—which were much remarked about and bewailed in the early Spanish accounts—as constitutive of a kind of natural innocence or “naturalism,” he cannot imagine that such an innocence could have allowed the same people to “wander through [sodomy’s] mistaken paths.” In other words, Rizal criticizes Morga by “denaturalizing” his moralistic account of sexuality, yet stops his argument short when it begins to dangerously wander into the “unnatural” (yes, Rizal unblinkingly accepts this adjective!) terrain of sodomy. This seems stranger since, reading further into the same annotation, we realize that Rizal understood sodomy to chiefly include conjugally “heterosexual” acts, as when he writes that the sodomitic Chinese and foreigners commit it with the “indiowomen, who are their wives.” This well-meaning “defense” by Rizal of his people is, of course, merely one out of so many others in the Sucesos, and we must remember that sodomy, while a social stigma against which Rizal obviously demurred, was, finally, only a matter of misguided or “mistaken” activities, and did not, in the way it was conceived during this pre-sexological period in Philippine history, constitute an intimate or definitive sense of identity. (Suffice it to say that sodomy was simply a discourse of acts, not selves.) ONTINUATION.... WAS RIZAL GAY? By Neil Garcia If Rizal wasn’t—because he couldn’t have been—a bakla or a gay/homosexual, just exactly what was he? Might he have been a binabae/yi, which was a category of gender identity that he most probably understood? Perhaps not, (21) for not only was it highly unlikely that anyone of his class or stature could have voluntarily identified with what in this nineteenth-century masculinist culture was clearly a pejorative term of effeminophobic abuse, there exists no mention of this appellation ever being tacked on him in any of the available—which is to say, approved—accounts of his life. (Of course, it is healthy to stay suspicious regarding such “official” accounts: knowing how blind nationalistic zeal had damaged the objectivity of so many of Rizal’s commentators and chroniclers, we cannot be too sure these accounts have not been sanitized precisely to conform with the nationalist imperative to apotheosize the greatest scion of the Filipino race!) Most probably he was an hombre, an hombre ilustrado to be precise, which, on second thought, tells us nothing new about him at all. What I wish to stress at this point is this: previous to the invention of homosexuality, individuals were not heterosexuals either, for the simple reason that homo and hetero were inverse forms of the same sexual logic that had not existed before the regime of sexuality (of sexuality, as we know it) overtook our modern lives. Indeed, while men and women throughout history married and begot children, they nonetheless were not defined along the lines of sexual object choice until the last quarter of Rizal’s century—and then, only in Europe at first. Thus, for the longest time, men and women were not cloven into the identities of “the homosexual” and “the heterosexual.” Whatever sexual discourse that might have operated as a significant force in their lives didn’t discriminate between those who were attracted to members of their own sex, and those who desired the opposite sex, although it perhaps might have had something to say about the frequency in which they had sex, or the positions they assumed while doing it (these, of course, were the basic issues which the discourse of sodomy busied itself with.) As individuals whose lives were not governed by the homo/hetero distinction, they were relatively free to commit homosexual and heterosexual acts without thinking how these acts affected their selfhoods. By contrast, in our own sexually self-conscious time, one can scarcely think of having sex with another man without at the same tremblingly pleasurable moment becoming at the very least “worried” of what this could mean about who one really is, deep inside.Rizal and the other ilustrados of his time were presumably socialized to think of marriage as the logical social destiny. But this had little to do with what they could actually experience sexually, within the privacy of their own lives. Hence, if we cannot make use of the relatively recent homo/hetero dichotomy with which to describe the sexual and erotic milieu in which Rizal lived, we might perhaps look at the organizing social principles that determined the relations one gender at that time could have with the other, or—and this is extremely important—with itself.Just like in the greater part of Europe, middle-class males and females in the Philippines during the time of Rizal were socialized separately from each other. Boys went to boys’ schools, girls to girls’ schools—a policy that was implemented by the Spanish colonial administration from the smallest parochial schools in the barrios to the biggest collegios and “normal schools” in Manila. (22) And of course, even outside this context, piety and propriety dictated that young men and women meet only under the assiduous supervision of spinster aunts and trusted yayas. Suffice it to say, such “unnecessary meetings” were generally frowned upon and discouraged. Thus, the basic social structure that determined the relations between the male and female genders of theilustrado class in nineteenth-century Philippines, can be called “homosocial”: individuals were expected to develop bonds within each of the two genders, bonds that could be expressed in several ways. Some of the ways, for example, in which men bonded with one another were through exclusive friendships, “discipleships” and cliques, or memberships in fraternities and clubs (La Liga Filipina would be one of the more illustrious examples of an “all-boys club” that existed during the period of the Propaganda movement). Women bonded with one another within the realm of the home, in particular,

the grantedly “feminine space” of the kitchen, where they were seen to become their own naturally gossipy selves, while the men talked endlessly about matters of consequence (such as the affairs of state) in the entresuelo or sala. I am of course not really interested in male bonds per se, except perhaps where these bonds may be seen to express themselves sexually, as they often did in the heavily homosocial past. Rizal and the otherpropagandistas and their European patrons and supporters were all male, and they all bonded. Vicente L. Rafael, examining the records and photographs of the period, notices the overtly “masculine” texture of such bondings: not only did Rizal and his compatriots organize themselves into a mutual-aid association calledIndios Bravos (“Brave Indians”), they also took pains to “masculinize” their bodies by lifting weights and engaging in sports like fencing and the martial arts, if only to offer a more virile alternative to the Orientalist stereotypes circulating in Europe concerning the Philippine indios’ effeteness. (23) Thus, while their common ideological persuasion— their collective wish to enact political reforms back in the Philippine islands—provided a basis for this bonding, their gender was also, in truth, the real common ground on which they confidently stood, embracing one another, in fond solidarity, as it were. Just where does the social end and the sexual begin, as far as these bondings and embracings were concerned? I for one cannot tell. All we might safely say in this regard is this: in the absence of the paranoia-making discourse of homosexuality—a discourse that suddenly rendered suspect one’s desires and hitherto unselfconscious longings to bond with others of one’s own gender—men like Rizal most probably expressed their fellowship and camaraderie with one another in ways that did not, at times, exclude the genital. We also know, especially as regards Rizal and Blumentritt, just how affectionate and loving this epistolary discourse could become, so much so that they would write (jokingly) how they are “desperately in love” with the other, (24) would keep sending photos, bric-a-brac, mementos and flowers (!) to the other, (25) would say that they would “dare everything” for the sake of the other, (26) would profess that they were always thinking of the other, (27) or would suffer disturbing dreams about the other. In one letter, Rizal relates that his strange dream of his “dear brother and friend” ended with him “waking up tired and sweating; it was very hot on the bed.” (28) While it may be a mistake to read anything more into such declarations of intimacy between the younger Rizal and the “fatherly” Blumentritt— whose strongest point of affinity with one another would seem to be, to all intents and purposes, an intellectual one—we must nonetheless remember just how such bonds between men at that time constituted a continuum, and how this continuum conceivably stretched from one form of affection to the other, such as fraternal intimacy to romantic love. How else can we explain the ease with which Rizal and Blumentritt could call each other “dear,” (29) or declare that they “love” each other in their letters, without any sense of shame?

Adolf Rizal (and his Half Brother, Rizal Zedong) Manuel L. Quezon III, Saturday, September 17, 1994 Here is the craziest thing I’ve heard (and I’ve heard it more than once, at parties): Adolf Hitler was really the illegitimate son of Jose Rizal. Here is the second craziest thing I’ve heard: Mao Zedong was actually Rizal’s illegitimate son. Two variations, I suppose, on the idea that "Yes, the Filipino Can!" Sadly, I found the two theories so funny that I never thought of asking the people who told them to me to explain on what grounds they based their claim about Der Fuehrer and the Great Helmsman. A dentistry student friend from UE has also heard these fanciful theories, but it also did not occur to him to ask on what evidence these fanciful claims were based. So I did a little research to find out how people could make up such a story. The claim that Adolf Hitler was Rizal’s progeny must be based on the following facts: · Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 (that means he could have been conceived sometime in August 1888), in the little village of Braunau, near the German- Austrian border. · He was born an Austrian and remained one until the 1930s. · The name of Hitler mother was Klara Polz. · At one time she was a maid in Vienna. · Hitler always considers a town Linz, in Austria, as his hometown (in his Political Testament he referred to " my hometown of Linz on the Danube"). · Hitler's oldest brother, Gustav born on May 17, 1885, and his sister Ida, born in 1886, both died before he was born. · Bavaria was considered the "cradle" of Nazism. · The Nazis made Japan one of the Axis powers. At one point they tried to prove that the Japanese were Aryans, to make the Japanese members of the "master race." Now combine the above information with the following, culled from the life of Rizal: · On February 1, 1886, he left Paris for Germany. He went to Heidelberg, Wilhelmsfeld, Munich (in Bavaria), all somewhat near a German–Austrian border; on August 9, 1886 he left for Leipzig ("visiting various German cities along the way," one book says), arriving

there on August 14. In October he went to Dresden and then to Berlin.

· In Berlin he finished Noli Me Tangere. One of the book’s characters is named Maria Clara. · On May 11, 1887, Rizal began his Grand Tour of Europe. He went to Dresden, Teschen (now Decin in the former Czechoslovakia), Prague, and then Brunn (where he lost a diamond stickpin), and Vienna (where he got back his diamond stickpin, which was found by maid in the hotel he stayed in Brunn) in Austria. · On May 24, 1887, he left Vienna by riverboat to see sights on the Danube River (on the boat he saw paper napkins for the first time). His voyage ended at Linz. · From Linz he went to Munich (where Hitler attempted a putsch in 1923) and Nuremberg (site of the Nazi Party rallies and the War Crimes trials), and other German cities. · Rizal was in the German Empire, sometimes past the German-Austrian border, from February 1886 until he went to Switzerland in early June 1887. · Rizal was again in Europe from May 24, 1888, until October 18, 1891. He was in London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Biarritz, Ghent. He was in Europe during the time Hitler was conceived and when he was born. · Rizal in 1888 had an affair with a Japanese woman, Seiko Usui, when he visited Japan. She had an only daughter, Yuriko, by a foreign husband some years after her encounter with Rizal. Yuriko later married the son of a Japanese politician. Put all these information together and you may be able to conclude the following: Hitler was conceived either in 1887 when Rizal passed through Linz or other towns (such as Brunn - How do you think he lost the diamond stickpin? And who was the "maid" who found it later and gave it to Blumentritt who forwarded it to Vienna?) near the Austrian border. In which case Hitler’s older siblings were fictitious, to cover up his mother’s being pregnant with him. In other words, Hitler was actually born before 1889. Or he was conceived in August 1888, when Rizal was supposedly in London. Or perhaps in September 1888, when Rizal went to Paris for a week (to have a rendezvous with Klara?). Maybe he went to Paris in 1889 so he could communicate more easily with the now-expecting Klara? Klara Polzl’s affair with Rizal may have centered around Linz, which is why the Hitler family moved there later (so Mama Hitler could live where she had An affair to Remember), which would explain Hitler’s fondness for the town. Finally, Seiko Usui’s only daughter was not really fathered by her husband, Alfred Charlton. He was simply a front. Yuriko, you see, was Rizal’s daughter! And Hitler knew she was his half-sister. She used her influence on her brother Adolf to persuade him to enter into an alliance with Japan (making it one of the Axis powers). Which is why Japan invaded the Philippines! Yuriko made it clear to Hirohito that Hitler would appreciate it if his ally were to take over his father’s homeland. And of course the reason why Hitler wanted to become dictator of Germany was because his natural father had spent some of the most interesting years of his life there! That, I think, is the rationale behind such a fantastic claim based on information that can be gathered from any high school textbook on Rizal and any good biography of Adolf Hitler. Naturally, this can only be done through selective use of the evidence, but it does make for an amusing piece of historical fiction. Now, as to the idea that Mao Zedong was also Rizal’s son. Unfortunately this claim cannot be supported by even the most spurious evidence. Mao Zedong was born in 1893, in Hunan Province, which you could say is kind of near Hong Kong. But at that time (1893), Rizal was in exile in Dapitan. Now it would have been possible for Rizal to scamper around Europe and get Klara pregnant without anybody noticing, but he couldn’t possibly have jumped into a boat and rowed to Hongkong without being caught. He did pass through Hong Kong in 1888 and 1891 but he never seems to have visited other parts of China (unless you count Xiamen and Macao). So there are no details that can be manipulated. These exercises in foolishness prove how creative Filipinos can be. What other people would be able to make the bogus claim that one of their heroes fathered the man who almost turned Europe into a "howling wilderness" (to borrow from the instructions for the extermination of Samar by American forces at the turn of the century). That would have been poetic justice, I suppose. The brown man strikes back and all that sort of thing.