AT THIS point in my writing life, I usually go to literary conferences to read a paper or be part of a panel, but on my recent visit to the University of East Anglia in Norwich I joined the “Human : Nature” conference as a listener. I didn’t mind; I was there as a former David TK Wong writing fellow, and we fellows were attending the conference (as we Pinoys would say) as a salimpusa. I liked it that I could relax in a corner and enjoy the conversation—or step outside and enjoy the sunshine if I felt antsy.
But I had another reason to be lurking around Norwich. The South African Nobel Prize and double Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee—whose novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe I’d read in graduate school—was the conference’s star speaker, although (like most real stars, I suppose), he was so simple and soft-spoken that you could have mistaken him for the maintenance man or the postal clerk. He wore the same get-up of a shirt, fleece vest, and jeans to the weeklong conference; he opened doors for people, and queued up in the cafeteria along with everybody else. The only unusual thing about him seemed to be his surname (which, by the way, is pronounced koot-ZAY, more or less); otherwise, people called him “John.”
For those few days I trailed and practically stalked Coetzee, trying to find the right moment to introduce myself and say hello without saying something stupid, and then get him to sign my copy of Disgrace. I remembered how, at the Sydney Writers Festival a few weeks earlier, I got so caught up in things that I forgot to get a book signed by my co-panelist, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. (If you’re one of those grimly snooty “The writer is dead!” lit-crit types, all this ga-ga fascination with writers and their signatures will be so much romantic hogwash, but do you think I care? At one time or another I ran after and got the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Frank McCourt, and Joseph Heller to sign my copies of their books—aside from just about everyone in Philippine literature—and it still gives me a thrill to think that the same fingers that hit the keyboard and wrote those words also held the book I now have.)
To cut to the chase, I did get a book signed by Coetzee, when I joined a long line of people who had attended his reading on the conference’s last evening (in which his introduction actually proved more interesting than the excerpts, because he related how he came to learn the identities of the secret South African government censors who passed judgment on his novels and ultimately let them through, before the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994; much to his surprise, they were fairly familiar members of the academic and literary community, leading double lives). Fellow Wong fellow Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy was also there, and being a braver soul, Bing managed to chat him up and get him to inscribe the book to her personally, which he wasn’t really doing for everyone. As Bing proudly related to the members of our dinner table afterwards, she wangled from him the information that one of the characters in his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, is a Filipino. (Why, I have Filipinos in my latest novel, too, I wanted to say, but I shut up and let Bing enjoy her version of what we were calling our “Coetzee moment.”)
I had nothing so substantial to report from my few seconds with Coetzee at the booksigning table; I had had many lines in mind to tell him, but I forgot them all as he scrawled his name on the title page of my/his book (which, unknown to him, I had found just the day before in a thrift shop in downtown Norwich). “Thank you, Mr. Coetzee!” was all I finally blurted out, careful to pronounce his name correctly.
But come to think of it, I did have my Coetzee moment a day earlier, at lunchtime when we were about to set out for an afternoon field trip to the fens (the peat-covered meadows that East Anglia is famous for). Instead of a regular sit-down lunch, we were getting brown-bag lunches, each one of them prepared to our individual dietary preferences.
This was one of those shoulda-had-a camera moments. There, on a shelf, were two paper bags that bore the lettered names of their owners, and they stood side by side, alphabetically, like natural equals and confederates: “J M COETZEE, VEG” said one bag; “J DALISAY JR, NO CHEESE” said the other.
As a matter of fact, I did have a camera, and instantly realized the historicity of the instant; I was never going to stand beside J.M. Coetzee shoulder-to-shoulder again, even if we were being represented by kraft-paper bags filled with sandwiches and apples. I was unlooping my point-and-shoot from my neck when a hand reached out and lifted Coetzee’s lunch. The hand was attached to the rest of J. M. Coetzee, who sauntered out before I could say something profound like, “Oh, so you’re a vegetarian!”
(PS. A few weeks ago, in a column piece titled “My Favorite Thongs,” I noted how Australians use the word “thongs” to describe rubber slippers or flip-flops. A reader subsequently wondered about my seeming obsession with thongs. Well, dear reader, I am not alone. Here’s an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee’s newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year: “She has black black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word. As for the bright red shift, that is perhaps not the item of attire she would have chosen if she were expecting strange male company in the laundry room at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Red shift and thongs. Thongs of the kind that go on the feet.”)
So there you go, and there I go.
