MY SOCIALIZATION BLOG: WRITING 30

Hi everyone, welcome to my Socialization Blog! If you happen to call me Ms. Belle, then most likely you are connected to my life as a student from the Green and White Animo Universe. :-) If you happen to call me Yellowbelle, then you are a new acquaintance or co-worker. If you happen to call me YB, then most likely you are part of my UP undergrad life. If you happen to know me as hiraya_mariposa, then you are an Instagram follower or a follower on wordpress or blogger. And if you happen to call me Yen Yen, you must be part of my childhood -- you are either a family member, a childhood friend, or a neighbor. Anyhow, whether you call me with these different names, I am still the same person -- half-human and half-flower (just joking). I am wondering if my students reading this now also have different names to different people in their lives (an intimate nickname, a formal name for the larger public, and a code name of some sort). Indeed, different agents of socialization have shaped my life into what it is now. These socialization agents (family, peer group, workplace, community, church, mass media, the Internet, etc)have left imprints in my personality since infancy up to my present self. Let me start with my family. Basically, when you talk about family, you think of a mother, a father, and sibling/s -- a nuclear Filipino family. But mine is a bit different from traditional families because it is composed of a grandmother, a mother, and a younger brother. Officially, my family is composed of four members who stuck together through thick and thin. It is with my grandma that I am closest and most intimate with. I grew up with her, and she gave me the most love and warmth in this world. Perhaps, Harry Harlow's experiment is right. Like the "artificial monkeys" he experimented with, humans gravitate towards people who do not necessarily put food on your mouth, but they give off care and warmth. No surprise then if I tell you that my Lola Alice is my favorite person on Earth!

My mother, meanwhile, is a strong woman who is capable of playing the fatherly role in addition to her role as a mother in the household. As a Business major and perhaps being partly Chinese, she is good at breadwinning and financial management. She is so good at employing various techniques of "social control" that we learned from class in shaping my behavior as her daughter. Hehehe! And this one's my younger brother, two years younger than me, he is into hospitality and restaurant management. He is an important part of my childhood, as a frenemy and playmate.:)

I believed my younger brother was my "significant other" in the Play Stage of child life based on Jean Piaget's stages of development of the self, because it is with him that I often play bahay-bahayan and luto-lutoan with. Although I occasionally played outdoor games as a child like "patintero", "piko", Chinese garter, "10-20" or hide and seek, I preferred to stay indoors watching Disney movies or playing with a neighbor named Inday in our home. In Grade 1, I was already playing patintero, a grouo-based game, so I guess it was during this time I entered the "game stage" based on Piaget's paradigm. I also loved reading as a child. My mother bought a colorful Children's Encyclopedia collection and the bullet trains, snow, and other foreign stuff in those volumes surely fired up my imagination and inspired me to travel the world someday. Most importantly, these foreign ideas from the children's encyclopedia have become abstract symbols to which my young mind toyed with, and the photos from those precious books are still vivid in my mind to this day. My favorite reading places in the house are my grandma's rocking chair and the reading chair placed in the sari-sari store that my family owned. My favorite toy is a doll named Maria Joanie. She was as tall as me, at 3 years old. By the way, this picture shows me at four years old. I just graduated from pre-school.

When I was in elementary, I was studious but like any other student, I also loved to play and join team sports, particularly volleyball. I remembered once when I was playing volleyball, it was my turn to serve. The ball, however, landed on top of our school's wall, which was lined up with shards of broken glass. The ball went poof! I have probably told the class this, that I am not much of an athlete.:-) Really. I was more into writing and theatre. In elementary, we staged the Sound of Music play, and I played the role of Reverend Grandmother. Btw, this was how I looked like when I was in elementary. You can find me at the lower right portion of the photo.

In high school, I continued to study seriously because I had to maintain a scholarship, but it was also the time to discover my talents and preferences. Again again again, my high school experience bolstered that I am more of the writer type. Although I did played softball for my P.E. classes and I remembered my teacher, Ma'am Villasor, told me that I could play softball, I decided to simply focus on clubs like the English Club, Book Lovers Club, Peer Counselors Club and the Health Brigade Club/Red Cross Youth. I was also highly engaged in Church activities as a Catechist, a Sodalist of Mary, a Lector on Sundays, and an acolyte during school-sponsored masses (studied in an all-girls' Catholic high school ran by Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena). During this time, believe it or not, I wanted to be a nun! I even joined a play for Vocation Month where I played the role of a nun, which allowed me to don a nun's habit!:)

Most importantly, in high school, I was able to develop my leadership skills. Not that I truly wanted to lead, but the rest of my classmates and batchmates wanted me to serve them. This picture shows the Student Government Organization of which I was President, from 1998 to 1999. Our core projects were the Campus Girl, a Freedom Wall, among others.

This was me in High School!:)

And because I was quite thin at that time, I wasn't much of a pretty girl, but I had to represent the freshmen batch for the Lakambini ng Wika beauty pageant because the prettiest girl in our batch refused to do so. I had to as a last resort because I was the First Year representative. This was me in Balintawak dress.

Basically, it was during high school that I found my peer group! We called ourselves the MAVERICKS. The Mavericks is my high school barkada composed of me, Rosette, Chloe, Claire, Rowena, Sheryl, Kristine Marie, Kristene Joy and Lady Hannah. This photo shows the Mavericks (albeit incomplete).

In the photo, from L-R, that's me, Rosette, Rowena and Chloe. We kept the fire burning to this day. Here's our present photo, taken in a dinner date we had in Yakimix Trinoma.

From L-R: me, Chloe, Sheryl and Rosette. I found out that the most intimate friendships that you can possibly develop are rooted from childhood, because these friends know you since you were young. My heart is open to new friendships, but there have been many heartbreaks along the way, because there were new friends who chose the path of competition rather than the path of true friendship.But despite tragedies on friendship, I am still open to new friends in my life. After all, each friend that comes into one's life is a gift from God. In college, I went to UP, and that made a huge turning point in my life. Life at the State U has built my nationalism as a Filipino. This photo best depicts who I was in college, which is the "UP Tunay Palaban Makabayan" phase of my life.

This photo was taken by a school paper colleague while we were aboard a ferry bound for Calapan, Mindoro. In UP, I met the most brilliant minds who all made an impact in my life. In UP, I was a student who went beyond my academics. After all, I realized at this point, that I am not only a self bound to my family and peer group, I am also a self bound to my nation, the Filipino nation. I wrote for the student paper, the Philippine Collegian (or "Kule"), official student weekly publication of UP Diliman because I wanted to use my writing skills to serve the country. I started in Kule as a newbie writer with high schoolish writing skills and I left the paper as its Managing Editor. I owe my former editors in the Features Section and at the E.B. level (Danno, Cyrus, Seymour, Gappi, Duke, Kenneth and Mayo) whatever improvements my writing skills had gained after four years of working in Kule. This photo shows the entire Kule staff in a planning activity in Nasugbu, Batangas.

In UP, I also joined the Gabriela-Youth because I was passionate for women's issues and there I met young women who were not only brainy, but feisty and nationalistic as well. I was also a founding member of the UP Praxis, a socio-civic and academic organization based in the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy in UP Diliman.

There I met Sociology students who were serious about studying Philippine society and culture and who longed for true emancipation. Many of the Praxians became lawyers, while some like me embraced academic and research life. Many of them also pursued corporate careers. My college thesis was about the life stories of Filipino writers in popular culture. Because of this thesis, I was able to interview THE Lualhati Bautista (author of the award-winning novels Gapo, Dekada 70 and Bata, Bata, Paano ka Ginawa?) in person!:) After graduating from college, the world of work naturally became my socialization agent. Foremost of which is my stint as a Sociology Instructor in the University of the Philippines Los Banos, where I met bright students who studied Sociology with passion. Then I won a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education that allowed me to pursue a graduate degree in Global Studies (defined simply as "the sociology of globalization) in Sophia University, a Jesuit University based in Tokyo, Japan. I recommend this link if you want to know more about my Japan experience: http://www.jasso.go.jp/exchange/enews_42_e.html It is through this foreign exposure that I did not only think about globalization at an idea level, but experienced it myself. AS Tokyo is a global city, I was exposed to a multicultural setting which allowed me to meet people coming from various nationalities. In Sophia classes I attended, I was able to exchange ideas with Japanese, American, African, German and Hungarian students. This photo shows our Graduation dinner after obtaining our master's degree from the Global Studies program in Sophia University.

The next photo shows graduation day itself!

If you wish to study in Japan in the future,please feel free to consult me on that. I would love to help my students go to Japan to experience the good things I have experienced there myself. :-) Btw, this is my best loved photo from my japanese "ryuugaku" (study abroad).

That's me and the Laputa robot in Studio Ghibli, the museum built by world-reknowned Japanese manga artist and film maker Hayao Miyazaki. It was my dream to go to Studio Ghibli - a dream that came true, thanks to the generous scholarship Japan gave me. I will be thankful to Japan forever for changing my life, and for raising me up in countless ways I didn't imagine. Japan opened my eyes that the self -- as a "social construct"-- is not only an individual thing that you develop by yourself or something you build with your peer group, community, school, workplace, and the Filipino nation; it also made me realize that I am Southeast Asian, and an Asian in general. As I studied Japanese language, my world had expanded and enabled me to enlarge my horizon. This photo shows my classmates in Nihonggo class at the Japanese Language Center in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Global forces also work on that self, thanks to the advent of the Internet, advances in travel, and multiculturalism. And I shared this "global self" at that time to Japanese kids.

Upon returning to the Philippines, I taught at an international school outside Metro Manila. This photo shows me with the high school students I taught during their testimonial dinner.

And integrating with the Filipino migrant community in Japan did not only give me a topic for my master's degree graduation project, but it also made me realize that the Philippine nation is a global nation due to the existence of the Filipino diaspora. This photo shows me with the Purple Heart's Society, one of the Filipino migrant groups in Japan.

Right now, I am very happy to be in DLSU, with the perfect career, perfect people, perfect environment. Now, I often sigh and tell myself, "What more can I ask for?" My mission in life at this point is to help my La Sallian students become good students and achieve success in life to the best that I can with the thirty years of knowledge and experience I had so far accumulated in this world. Come join me in my skysailing adventures in the green and white Animo universe! :)