Juni Vargas and Fr. Jimmy Belita after her Rizal-Sun Yat-sen win. Taken from an old December 1997 copy of the Adamson Chronicle that I didn’t know I still have.
Former MASP and champion orator Juni Vargas has passed on. Ms Arlene sent me an email some days ago about how Juni figured in a fatal accident in Dubai on Dec. 1.
I remember I wrote a couple of speeches for Juni about 8 years ago, but only one of which got her the grand prize at the Rizal-Sun Yat-sen Oratorical Competition. She used to kid me about how university president Fr. Belita, on behalf of the university, gave her something like $2,000 for that victory. I hated it instantly the moment she said it because a year before that, when an essay I wrote won in an almost similar big-deal competition, Mrs. Diano (English Department Chairperson) practically dragged me to the President’s office to “eke out” something from Fr. Belita. And the latter, out of politeness to my “godmother,” gave me a couple of hundred dollars (most probably because I had been calling him names in the paper for the previous months).
But I was never truly “bitter” about the whole thing. Truth is, I’d usually churn out an oratorical piece in an afternoon, and the rest of the week I’d spend pretending and telling everybody – usually people at the Chronicle and Ms Arlene — how “hard” it was for me to write it. I was merely trying to squeeze out some sense of self-importance for all my work was worth.
That sunny afternoon in 1997, when Juni visited me at the Adamson Chronicle office after her Sun Yat-sen win, I was “busy” trying to trap birds (sparrows) on the SV building’s terrace. I usually skipped classes in the afternoons to sleep or play PC games at the office, and on that day I was supposed to attend Mrs Malig’s world literature class. But on my way out, the birds got my attention; there were so many of them feasting on left-over food, so I just decided to spend the sunny hours in a “very mature” endeavor that consisted of fashioning some crude bird trap out of a long piece of string and an empty box. But for all my “genius,” the birds were smarter; none of them bought it.
So Juni visited me to “express her gratitude” for writing her piece (I had other ideas on how she could have “expressed” it, but I kept them to myself), and also to give me some tokens of her appreciation. When she materialized at the door, I totally forgot about the birds. In those times, we were usually excited when she was around because one of the paper’s editors, Tito Escano, was crazy about her. It amused us no end how Juni’s mere presence could turn someone as “ruthless” as Tito into a listless, very nervous, nice-as-a-puppy person.
Juni was her family’s “breadwinner,” like so many of us Filipinos. Ms Arlene said Juni was working as a telephone operator in Dubai. I wish I could say more, but Juni, frankly, was simply an acquaintance to me; our lives once touched in a brief tangent, but nothing more than that. But maybe the news of her death troubled me in a strange, primal way because a long time ago, when writing that oratorical piece, I had to “inhabit” her thoughts and feelings. That’s the thing when you had to write something to be delivered by other people; you could only make it effective when you have to forget your own misgivings and place yourself in that person’s shoes. I didn’t really care about all the factual crap in that Rizal and Sun Yat-sen speech, but I believed in the emotions I tried to infuse it with. And if you heard how Juni delivered it, you would believe it, too. That’s why she got it.
This is probably a late, useless farewell for Juni, but still. I don’t want to make this sound all so sad, because the truth is, I’m not a huge fan of mourning. I’d still choose to imagine that before Dec. 1, long before that accident, Juni had fully enjoyed her life, that she had a good time. A very good time. And for some of us who believe more in this life than in the next, that’s all the reassurance we’ve got.
Tags: Juni+Vargas, Dubai
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