Year / 2025

by buglaswritersjournal

Justin Jose Bulado’s “We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve”

In the quiet steadiness of Dumaguete historiographer Justin Jose Bulado, we find the unlikely poet of the archives—the kind of scholar who listens for the murmurs beneath the dust. Born on 18 October 1989, in the city that would shape both his sensibility and his vocation, history for him, from the very beginning of his vocation, was never simply the catalog of dates and decrees. It began, as all obsessions must, with a story told by a grandfather—his, a boy in wartime Manila, remembering the Japanese occupation not through the lens of textbooks, but through the sharp scent of fear and the soft ache of hunger. These recollections became the seed of his own historical imagination.

Years later, while most of his generation were seduced by the immediacy of the digital and the disposable, Justin found his own cinema in the sepia. For example, watching HBO’s Band of Brothers did not romanticize war for him—but it made him curious about how ordinary people endure a catastrophe like a devastating war. He followed that curiosity to Silliman University, where he would complete his BA, MA, and PhD—all in history, the university’s corridors becoming both his archive and his crucible. By 2020, he had earned his doctorate in Social Science.

But if there is a word that best defines Justin’s work, it is “local.” In the age of global histories, Bulado’s gaze remains grounded in the soil of Negros Oriental. His scholarly work has revolved around the Japanese occupation of the province—its collaborators and resistors, its hunger and survival, its silences and its hauntings. He writes, as he teaches, from a conviction that the stories of small places illuminate the great movements of history. The world war, filtered through Dumaguete or Siquijor, becomes less abstract and more intimate: a neighbor’s betrayal, a family’s starvation, a child’s lost innocence.

This is what the best local historians do: they remind us that the grand narratives are composed of a thousand small tragedies. Yet Justin is also aware of the danger in this intimacy. “Some people,” he warns, “attempt to write local history by inventing stories or glorifying relatives without basis.” This, he insists, is mythmaking, not scholarship. History demands evidence, not nostalgia. The work of the historian, then, is not to embroider but to excavate—to find, beneath the gossip and legend, the fragile truth that time has tried to erase.

In this sense, his historical essays and journal articles are not mere academic exercises; they are acts of reclamation. His paper “We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve,” published in Philippine Studies in 2023, is emblematic of this. It reconstructs the wartime food crisis in Negros Oriental, showing how hunger became both a weapon and a wound. Another article, a forthcoming one on Japanese atrocities under Colonel Satoshi Oie, has taken him nearly a year of painstaking research to complete—a year spent listening to the ghosts of the past whispering through military reports and faded testimonies. For Justin, writing history is not about being first or being famous. It is, he says, “driven by curiosity and a desire to piece together narratives that have not yet been told.”

To write local history, he believes, is to swim against the current of forgetfulness. It is to labor over scarce sources, to make meaning out of fragments. The difficulty is real: archives are incomplete, memories are frail, and politics often distort the record. Yet this is where the historian’s artistry comes in. The challenge is not only to reconstruct but to interpret, to find the connective tissue between a forgotten town and the larger body of the nation. “Wars have no real victors, nobody wins in wars,” Justin regularly reminds his students. “At the end of the day, it is the civilians who suffer the most.” This moral clarity gives his scholarship both its edge and its empathy.

He amply demonstrates this hardship in his article, “’We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve’: The Food Supply Problem in Negros Oriental during the Japanese Occupation,” published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints in 2023:

Dumaguete’s supply of milk was largely obtained from Cebu, and when Cebu fell to the Japanese forces, the supply was cut off. Fortunately, Bais Sugar Central, the largest producer of sugar in Negros Oriental, helped the people of Dumaguete by providing “one hundred cases of their milk,” most of which were rationed to “sick or very small children.” Soon enough, the stocks of flour would run out, primarily due to hoarding. There was a time before the Japanese occupation when the people of Dumaguete did not have a steady supply of bread. Later, it was found out that around a hundred sacks of flour were kept in a certain storehouse in Dumaguete. It was a case of hoarding—perhaps the flour was going to be sold in the black market in the future for a higher price. Eventually, the owner of the storehouse begrudgingly decided to sell the flour, and it was good enough for a few weeks of bread for the townspeople.

It is easy to see why, in 2023, he was chosen as part of the Emerging Scholars Workshop of the Jenny Craig Institute of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in Louisiana. Among the North Americans, he was the lone Asian voice—a historian from Dumaguete bringing the war in Negros to an international table. It was not just a career highlight; it was a moment of historical symmetry: a scholar from a once-occupied nation reclaiming his place in the world’s remembrance of war.

What, then, does Bulado teach us about writing local history? That it is a moral act as much as an intellectual one. That to write about one’s town is to love it enough to tell its truth, however inconvenient. That documentation is resistance—against amnesia, against myth, against the lazy habit of thinking that the stories of small places do not matter. Local history, in his practice, becomes a form of justice.

He plans, in the long run, to turn his dissertation on wartime collaboration into a book, alongside a collected volume of essays. But his heart, he insists, remains in teaching—at Negros Oriental State University, where he has found his equilibrium between the classroom and the archive. He teaches not just historical method but historical ethics, the discipline of doubt, the humility of evidence. In a world drowning in misinformation, that may be the most radical lesson of all.

And so, perhaps this is how one should end a story about a historian: not with accolades, though he has many, but with the image of a man at his desk at dusk, the computer light falling on yellowed documents, the city outside quieting into night. In that silence, he listens—for the echoes of wartime Negros Oriental, for the footsteps of people history forgot, for the pulse of a local past refusing to die. Because in the end, history is not merely the study of what happened. It is the ongoing act of remembering—and in Justin Bulado’s hands, remembering becomes a form of devotion.

by buglaswritersjournal

Georgette Gonzales’ Of Love and Special Things

Georgette Anna S. Gonzales, who once called Sibulan home before migrating to the United States, never set out to become a romance writer. In 2003, while working in Manila, she was simply looking for extra income when her best friend suggested they try their hand at romance novels in Tagalog. Five thousand pesos per manuscript, she recalls with a laugh: “Less taxes, that was still a big boost for our wallets.”

But what began as a pragmatic hustle quickly turned into a calling. The romance formula—boy meets girl, they fall in love, conflict ensues, and they live happily ever after—became her gateway into storytelling as a deeper, more resonant act.

Gonzales, who grew up in Quezon City surrounded by books, credits her imagination to childhood days spent devouring Nancy Drew mysteries and, later, the double rows of Mills & Boon novels owned by her godmother. “I just loved how two people found ways to love each other,” she says. Those well-thumbed paperbacks shaped her early sense of narrative rhythm and emotional honesty. She was drawn not to the artifice of love stories, but to their insistence on possibility—the idea that affection could flourish even amid life’s cruelties.

Her debut novella, Tulungan Mo Akong Lumimot, was written by hand in a notebook, and fragments of dialogue and scenes then stitched together on an old desktop. When her manuscript was accepted for publication that same year, her alter ego “Edith Joaquin” was born—named not after literary greats Edith Tiempo and Nick Joaquin, as some would assume, but after a nickname and a street in Frisco, Quezon City. That small beginning would lead to an enduring career in romance, where she would craft stories filled with kilig and complexity, and with women who are never mere recipients of affection but architects of their own desires.

For Gonzales, romance is both easy and difficult. The formula may be predictable, she admits, but its success lies in the execution: “How do you draw the same intense emotions in your readers as your characters are experiencing?” She writes her scenes like cliffhangers, each one pulsing with anticipation. Her measure of success is not awards or money, but when readers fight over her characters “as if they were all in The Bachelor.”

She has since built a body of work defined by her unwavering faith in the romance genre—not as escapism, but as a map of emotional truth. One book in particular—her 2016 collection of short stories, Of Love and Special Things—was inspired by the songs of Barry Manilow, and amply demonstrates how love stories can be lushly sentimental yet anchored in the grit of human vulnerability. Across four tales—“When Broken Hearts Find Love,” “No More Goodbyes,” “Memories and Our Song,” and “Undercover”—she turns familiar tropes into windows through which we glimpse the complexities of longing, resilience, and tenderness.

“When Broken Hearts Find Love” begins, as many romances do, with heartbreak and alcohol. A betrayed woman and a jilted man meet at a bar, their conversation a duel of cynicism and wit that slowly transforms into an unexpected intimacy. Gonzales deploys the classic rebound-meets-redeemer setup, but what saves it from cliché is her meticulous pacing and ear for emotional rhythm. The dialogue crackles with wounded humor—“That bad, huh?” he asks, to which she retorts, “Ass is an understatement”—and in those exchanges, Gonzales reveals her deft control of tone, moving effortlessly from bitterness to warmth. When their one-night solace becomes something more lasting, the story reads like a quiet argument for second chances, one that eschews irony for sincerity.

“Memories and Our Song” is perhaps the emotional centerpiece of the collection, a melodrama steeped in music and memory. Here, Gonzales takes the Manilow lyric “Weekend in New England” and spins it into a full-bodied narrative of lost love and miraculous remembrance. Elise, a singer, must rekindle her husband’s memory after an accident robs him of their shared past. The motif of song becomes both narrative engine and emotional metaphor—music as the vessel of memory, melody as the shape of love enduring against amnesia. It’s an unabashedly romantic conceit, but Gonzales writes it with conviction, balancing sentiment with restraint. When the final reunion comes—when the husband remembers her as she sings their song—the catharsis feels earned, not contrived.

In “No More Goodbyes,” the emotional temperature shifts darker. A police officer and his fiancée are caught in a tragic dance between duty and devotion, sacrifice and loss. Gonzales uses the language of action and urgency—a gunshot, a moment of fatal decision—to contrast the quiet ache of love unfulfilled. It’s her most cinematic piece, one that stretches the romance form into something approaching tragedy, reminding readers that love’s purity often survives only in its ruin.

Finally, “Undercover” provides a change of tempo—a smoky, sensual story of two lovers working together in the nightlife scene, navigating desire under the guise of pretense. Here, Gonzales flexes her command of atmosphere, mixing humor, danger, and erotic charge with the playfulness of a writer utterly at home in her genre.

Across these stories, Gonzales’s prose is polished, brisk, and unpretentious. She embraces the conventions of romance—the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the grand gesture—but reshapes them with emotional intelligence and feminine agency. Her women are not damsels but survivors; her men are not saviors but equals. In Of Love and Special Things, Gonzales proves that the romance genre, in the right hands, remains the most sincere chronicle of what it means to be human: to hope, to hurt, and to love again.

She has not written in a while, she tells me. Today, however, even as she juggles office work and editing stints, Gonzales dreams of returning fully to writing. Her stories endure because they speak to something elemental in us: the human need to love, to hope, and to begin again.