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Vo l . 2 N o . 2 too late. And he is left with only what he can remember. Now he yearns to tell his children so much more than what he knows about this strong, complex, courageous woman, but he can’t and their loss is as great as his own. *** They met in Hong Kong in the summer of 1926, an improbable couple in those primly proper British Colonial times. He, Cornelius Stanley Fisher, Sr., 28, an Englishman born and raised in London, a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy; she, Mercedes de Ocampo, a 27-year-old schoolteacher from a prominent Manila family, alone on her first two-month holiday abroad. He was in Hong Kong because his ship, the H.M.S. Kent, was in port for several months. She had treated herself to a vacation on the Isle of Victoria after two years of teaching English composition at a Women’s college in Manila. In this romantic setting, they met, fell in love and were married on May 2, 1929, two days before he resigned his Royal Navy commission to begin a new life and a business career in the Orient. She would bear him three sons and a daughter in Hong Kong: Arthur, Lionel, Elinor, Robert and a fourth son, Stanley, in Manila, where they had moved in the fall of 1938. The youngest boy was born on September 26, 1941, nine weeks before another fateful event. On the Monday morning of December 8 -- Sunday, December 7, in Honolulu -- Japanese planes struck at targets throughout the Philippines, as they did simultaneously at Pearl Harbor. In the ensuing weeks, the air raids over Manila intensified until, on December 15, General Douglas MacArthur transferred his headquarters to the island fortress of Corregidor. A month later, Japanese troops engulfed the defenseless city, stranding thousands of British, American, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Mexican, Nicaraguan, Cuban, Russian, Belgian, Swedish, Danish, Chinese and Burmese civilians, our family among them. The Japanese cannily selected the University of Santo Tómas as an internment camp for the large population of enemy civilians trapped in the cordon of the invading army. Occupying sixty acres in the dense heart of the city, the venerable institution founded by Spanish Dominican priests in 1619 was surrounded by high masonry walls with an ornate iron palisade guarding its imposing
entrance. The rectangular campus with its massive buildings and spacious dormitories was ideally suited for its grim new purpose. The first 300 internees entered Santo Tómas on January 4, 1942. When the camp was liberated on the night of February 3, 1945, it held 3,700 men, women and children. During the three-year Japanese occupation of Manila, a total of 6,874 civilians of countries at war with Japan were interned at Santo Tómas and a second civilian internment camp built in 1943 at Los Baños, 35 kilometers away. A total of 362 internees died in the two camps, most of them from starvation, almost all at Santo Tómas. “The rescue at Santo Tómas came on the eve of the 1,126th day of imprisonment,” reported The New York Times on the front page of its February 6, 1945 edition. “It came in time to prevent further deaths from malnutrition, principally among veterans of the Spanish-American war, old men whose diminishing stamina could not withstand the ravages of beriberi, pellagra and other diseases.” Marooned in Manila at the outbreak of hostilities, my mother, father, sister, two of my three brothers and I spent the war inside Santo Tómas. I was seven years old when we walked through those tall, ornamental gates in January of 1942, ten when we were liberated and expatriated to the United States in March of 1945. We returned to the Philippines in May of 1946. The New York firm that had employed my father before the war had asked him to reopen its Far East branch in Manila, a city once called the Pearl of the Oriented, devastated by the war but resolutely rising from its ashes. And so we went “home” again. Four months later, I watched my father die. He was 46 years old. I was 12. *** Here at the beach a half-century after what happened in those early morning hours of September 17, 1946 in Manila, I finally allowed myself to remember, to grieve at long last, to make peace with the shattering events of my childhood, with my resolute denial of them and the lifelong disavowal of myself. After my mother died of cancer in a New York City hospital in the winter of 1981, I took the scrapbook she had given me back to Oregon, along with the 13 single-spaced