Chit Roces-Santos: The late bloomer is no longer ‘not quite there’
Chit Roces-Santos’ launch of her second book, Not Quite There showed that on the contrary, she has arrived. She has gotten there—though she has been described as a “late bloomer.”
Well, she is the youthful mother of my Assumption classmate Gia Suter-Nakpil. Writer Thelma Sioson San Juan recalls that when she first met Chit in one of the writing classes she lectured in at the Asian Institute of Journalism, Chit had a wrapped baguette sticking out of her tote bag.
“A homemaker, I thought, who wanted to learn how to write,” Thelma writes in the foreword of Not Quite There. It was also through her writing classes that Chit happened to meet her husband and the love of her life, journalist Vergel Santos, who was the head of the News Information Bureau during the Cory Aquino administration, and my boss. (We all answered to then Press Secretary Teddy Benigno.)
As for learning how to write, Chit was definitely born with a pen, coming from the Roces clan of writers, historians, and artists.
In fact, the painting on the cover of her book—of a colegiala lost in her own thoughts (or yearnings) is a portrait by her uncle Alfredo.
“The beautiful cover of the book is only one of his paintings of me.
When I emailed him for permission to use the painting as cover for my book, without second thoughts, he said yes. His suggested design for the cover would have shown only half of my face, perhaps to suit the title. But the painting was just too beautiful to be diminished in any way. This painting inspired the late Marne Kilates, a dear friend, to write a poem about the sad-looking young lady imprisoned within convent walls,” Chit shared.
Chit was blooming at book launch at the Leon Gallery, which is also the publisher of her book. It was an SRO crowd. Her personal space (Personal Space was the title of her first book, which I devoured) has gotten bigger.
“This event, if not for you, the quality of you, would have been just another book launch; instead, it has been transformed into a meeting of like-minded and like-hearted people who share common values and aspirations. Are we not perhaps the critical mass needed in order to change things around and by some miracle bring back decency and true love of country inside and outside government?” she said, adding, “Oh, but I drift into my husband’s territory. It’s a habit hard to break, after all, I come from a political family.”
“In this, my second book, I again offer glimpses of life from the vantage point of the circumstances of my birth and my era, the springtime of our 20th century, as my own husband puts it. The country is by no means old, but I am. And it makes me sad that, in spite of a clear head-start, we’ve been left behind by our neighbors. I see it whenever we travel in the region.
“Anyway, wherever we are, the situation is not irreversible; it is quite volatile in fact. In uncertainty, of all places, if one used the imagination of faith (a new phrase I learned from Fr. Jet Villarin), there’s indeed a glimmer of light enough to make us turn to faith.”
Vergel, for his part, started his remarks by saying, “Brats have no place in politics. That’s Chit’s line, not mine.”
“If I had not felt so insecure, and let her commentate on politics as often as she might have wanted, on whatever platforms she might have wanted to do it, she would have taken away from my own business, considerably. She still does it, unsuppressed, on her own online threads and on Facebook, where she takes on all comers; and, the impoverished argumentators that those adversaries of hers are, she easily succeeds in showing them up, riling them up, or altogether shutting them up. There’s in fact quite a bit of that lean and mean side of her in this book.”
Chit writes with unabashed candor, whether on politics or on her own love life. Her writings can sometimes be naughtier than mine, as well as more courageous.
I can’t figure out the title of her book because Chit Roces-Santos is very much here, and the Philippines is better for it.
