By Andre Punzalan
On October 8, 2025, the UA&P Literature Department, in cooperation with the UA&P History Department and UA&P Kallos, presented “Pop Pa Rin Ba? Exploring Nick Joaquin’s Pop Stories for Groovy Kids.” In the last of a trilogy of lectures about Nick Joaquin’s timeless works, Ms. Juliana Odoño dissected his excellent, albeit lesser-known, children’s stories, complete with a captivating reading of one of his stories.
“We might think that children’s stories are just children’s stories, but they aren’t just for children,” Ms. Odoño said. For many today, it is perhaps easy to overlook children’s stories in favor of more “serious” works for literary analysis, but Ms. Odoño explained that Nick Joaquin’s brilliant stories demand more than just a surface-level appraisal. Ms. Odoño highlighted how, in an interview with Robert J. Bresnahan, Nick Joaquin said that even in his children’s stories, he “wasn’t writing down to children.” From an introduction by Cyan Abad-Jugo, she then pointed out a certain duality that represents the heart of Nick Joaquin’s children’s stories: depth and amusement. She explained that Nick Joaquin’s children’s stories strike a balance: while providing endless exhilaration for the young audiences they were written for, they are also brimming with immutable truths and insights that even the most discerning of readers can appreciate.
To demonstrate, Ms. Odoño called on Mr. Jaime Benitez, Mr. Gino Pinga, and a member of the audience to act out a dramatic reading of Nick Joaquin’s Sarimanok vs. Ibong Adarna. The story began with a series of young children requesting that their parents get them increasingly ridiculous pets in competition with one another, from bears to tigers, to gain popularity among their peers. This culminates in two girls, Elsie and Nanette, lying about having the Ibong Adarna and Sarimanok as their pets. Challenged by a jealous girl, Marita, the fake Ibong Adarna and Sarimanok turn real in a mystical twist, leading to their powers hurting people and forcing Elsie and Nanette into a scramble to undo the damage. Through the animated readings of the narrators (especially Mr. Pinga’s falsetto impression of the children in the story), the audience was swept away by the exhilarating tale and even laughed loudly due its absurd comedy. Despite its many fantastical elements, however, Sarimanok vs. Ibong Adarna also presented as oddly grounded and even shockingly grim compared to typical children’s tales at certain points, such as the girls’ initial cynical skepticism of the Ibong Adarna or Elsie and Nanette hurting themselves to stay awake. Half a century after it was published, Nick Joaquin’s exceptional writing still managed to enrapture a room filled with college students and professors, both delighting and rattling its audience.
While going through Sarimanok vs. Ibong Adarna, Ms. Odoño made many insightful comments and analyses of the text. During the start of the story, she mentioned that this rat race of children attempting to one-up each other embodies Tolkien’s idea of primordial desires, where Tolkien believes that there are certain fundamental longings that fairy tales speak to and represent. She also sharply pointed out that, although these are the children’s desires, it is their adult parents who enable the situation to escalate. Ms. Odoño told the audience that this closely mirrors a behavior that even adult Filipinos can fall into: for lack of better words, pataasan ng ihi, or the desire to outshine one another. In this environment of competition, however, Elsie and Nanette manage to rise above the judgment of their peers and tell the truth in the end, centering their worth on themselves and not their belongings or external approval. After this conclusion, Ms. Odoño introduced the idea of the eucatastrophe: the sudden, joyous turn of events that happen in a miraculous grace in fairy tales. She also posited, however, that “When we get to what we achieve, we think about the hardships we went through.” These sudden happy endings can also be tempered by the suffering or pain that preceded them, she explained, as in Elsie and Nanette’s struggles against ostracization and the mythical birds, before they were able to be at peace with telling the truth. Ms. Odoño then characterized Nick Joaquin’s children’s stories as a marriage between Tolkien’s eucatastrophe and his own “Tropical Gothic-ness” in the form of the Tropical Gothic eucatastrophe, a happy ending tempered by pain.
During the Q&A session, Ms. Odoño neatly wrapped up her thoughts in response to a question about what made Nick Joaquin who he was as a writer: the depth and amusement in his stories, the presence of his Filipino identity, the many influences he drew from, and the mix of comedy and irony he employed. In relation to that, she also noted that there is a Catholic and Hispanic ethos that seeps into his children’s stories, such as how holy water from Rome is the counter to the Ibong Adarna and how Nick Joaquin is very hopeful toward the endings he writes, even if there is suffering along the way. As she answered another question, she also argued that children can still enjoy Nick Joaquin’s stories through their parents reading to them, even if they are not necessarily able to appreciate the full depth of his works due to the complexity of the words and themes used. Ms. Odoño concluded her presentation by noting that while the heart of a child contains humility and innocence, it does not necessarily imply that children are completely naive or that we should treat them as such. Going back to the title of her lecture, “Pop Pa Rin Ba?”, she champions Nick Joaquin’s stories and the unchangeable truths they contain about the human experience, saying it is about time we make these wonderful children’s stories popular again.
Photo by Ramon Borlongan
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