I have this ongoing conversation with lifelong friends about my plan to move back to the Philippines in 2013, when my 12-year-old son graduates from grade school and starts his high school career.
I've been planning my Philippine retirement since 1992, the year I finally took a trip back home after a 25-year absence. Finally in a position to move back to the Philippines in 2007 - after my wife and I had sold our house in South Orange, New Jersey and converting most of our assets to cash and marketable securities - we decided instead to move to Las Vegas, close to where our daughter, Natasha, was going to college in Los Angeles. We felt that the 6000 miles that would separate us from Natasha would be problematical because Natasha needed us to be around during her critical college years.
I recently broadcast my intentions to my friends, who are concerned that I may be making the wrong move, that I should do some serious homework before I implement my plan.
Here's the email letter from Fritz Reith, a friend I grew up with at La Salle College, the school run by the Christian Brothers, the same Christian Brothers who operate a winery in Napa Valley, California and many schools and universities in the U.S. and all over the world.
HI Chay,
In my feeble mind I was composing a short letter to you about ...'going back home'.....we all who were born there & lived & went to school there, have an undeniable attachment in our hearts & minds...to that country....a self evident fact.
My note to you was simply going to say, if you feel so strongly about going back, simply reverse your mind set ,ie go back (dip your toe in the water) before jumping in....go to all the places, experience all the things you didn't, take your time to say hello again (maybe at least three months) to mother country. This is instead of asking yourself & loved ones...shall I pull the trigger? A safer
alternative....No? The time you have invested in your "new" country has been, I would imagine, a source of personal pride in your achivements & a good feeling...not to mention having a certain sense
of security....medically,politically,personal safety...etc...I could go on...
However, I did not know you had a 12 year old son.....this changes things obviously. I need hardly say that it comes down to the fundamentals within yourselves....do you want him to experience the
Pinoy experience? This will take some years....maybe all of the time you have left? Then what? Dissatisfied? Going back?
I shall stop now, realising that maybe I may have stepped over the personal privacy bar.
All the best, Fritz
This was my reply to Fritz:
Hi Fritzi,
My son is potentially the biggest stumbling block. I have often broached the subject of him doing his high school in the Philippines and each time he adamantly refuses to even entertain the thought.
I am going on the theory that we parents know best. Let me give you an example. While still living in South Orange, New Jersey, our neighbors across the street told us about their son blaming them for not insisting that the son continued with his piano lessons. The son - who had reached the age of 25 - told them: "You should have forced me to study piano. I was a child, what did I know? Now, I'm trying to play the piano but it's too late for me. I just can't focus anymore."
My own experience with my daughter, who is now 23, is similar. When she was 14 my wife and I enrolled her in Mount St. Mary High School, an all-girls school that had an excellent reputation. She had already been in that new school for three weeks but she was still miserable. She judged her classmates to be stuck up and spoiled, her phone message on her cell phone cried for help because she felt she was a prisoner in a school run by nuns.
Seeing how miserable she was, we transferred her back to the public high school where most of the students she had grown up with in South Orange were going. She liked school again and flourished socially. But, the public high school, being co-educational, was mass distraction. She quickly became interested in boys, started entertaining thoughts of boyfriends, her grades suffered a bit, and her discipline went kaput.
I am now convinced that she would have been much better off if she had stayed in Mount St. Mary High School. My daughter is not blaming me for her grades going to pot, but I'm blaming myself.
Kids really don't know what is best for them. They know what they like at the moment, but they have no perception of what is best for them long run.
Las Vegas public high schools are just like most high schools in America in one sense. There are serious students - mostly Asians - and slack-offs everywhere. All of them spend countless hours playing video games. They dress funny, go around with shoe laces untied, and disrespect their elders.
If we remain in Las Vegas through Paul's high school years, he will surely go to the public high school near our house - a long city block away from the main entrance of Rhodes Ranch, the guard-gated community where we live. In a more urgent sense, Las Vegas high schools are different from most American high schools. Las Vegas public high schools are some of the worst in the nation. There's an excellent Catholic high school within three miles of where we live - Bishop Gorman High School - but Paul has already told us he is not going there, even if he is admitted. My sense is that this is something Paul would take a strong principled stand on.
And so I'm faced with this dilemma: do I enroll him in a Las Vegas public high school which I already know has lower standards than the average American high school, or do I take him to the Philippines, where La Salle, Ateneo, Xavier, U.P. High (which is called differently now) can offer him an education that in my experience is perhaps equal to the best in the world? And at the same time would teach him about his heritage, his Filipino-ness, and perhaps give him a Christian education that he hasn't had since he's a product of public schools in New Jersey and Las Vegas? To me it's a no-brainer.
The only possible hitch is whether he can adapt to the Philippines weather-wise, or whether he can recover quickly enough from the all-but-certain initial culture-shock.
We have enrolled him in Kumon, which is an international tutoring service for math and English. Paul's math, which was only average, is now above average. His English has always been exceptional, so we feel we don't need him to do the second part - English tutoring. By the time he graduates from grade school (in 2013) he will be way above average in math. He will be ready for La Salle - or Xavier, or U.P. High.
As for me, I'd be a happy sonofagun in the Philippines. I've been taking vacations in the Philippines and each time it's for either one month or three weeks. I know I'm going to like it there. My wife too would enjoy living there since she still has so many friends and ex-schoolmates in the Philippines.
And, if we live in the Philippines she will no longer have to work. Here in the U.S. she has to work because we have become so used to an above-average lifestyle and such a lifestyle is very expensive here. She doesn't have to work in the Philippines, but if she decides to, she's a CPA, an alumnus of both La Salle and SGV (Sycip, Gorres and Velayo) and has great connections. She may be able to set up an accounting practice, specializing in due diligence reports for companies that are contemplating going public. She has experience in that area and other accounting areas as well.
But, like I told her, she will work only if she wants to, not because she needs to, and only if an offer that she cannot refuse comes along. She is 51, at her prime, and all her friends are at their prime and in high leadership positions in Philippine industry and commerce.
With her not working, we will be able to take frequent trips together. Right now, I often travel alone because she works and cannot go on trips with me. That would change immediately once we reach the Philippines.
I know I can afford to maintain two houses - one in Las Vegas and one in metro Manila. Heck, if Michel Lhuillier can afford to maintain 37 houses - all large, modern and new houses - I think I can afford to maintain two.
Going back to my 25-year-old daughter, Natasha. My hope is that she will move with us to the Philippines. She is a fashion designer, went to the same school that Michel Lhuillier's world famous daughter went to - Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising - and I am convinced that Natasha will do very well in Manila. And, who knows, maybe in all of Asia?
She is on her way to New York to become the Creative Director and fashion designer of a store in New York's world-famous Soho district. The store, called Playing Mantiss, is owned by her aunt, my wife's sister. It will be her stepping stone to the big fashion design houses in New York. My daughter has of course no intention of moving to the Philippines, but what she thinks is best for her is not necessarily what we her parents think is best.
Thanks for your concern, Fritzi.
Chay
PS We're still two years away from this Philippine retirement. A lot can happen between now and then.
