'DOWN with US imperialism!' was the cry that seized the best years of my learning youth, formed part of my honing as a practicing journalist, filmmaker and fish vendor all rolled up into one, and, alas but true, even seems to signal my entry into the coda of my life's symphony.

Pardon the nostalgia, but it's unavoidable to stress that a writer can't write what he is not truly is. The first time I got a chance to direct, I did 'Isla Sto. Niño,' a take on the burning of the entire village of Balangiga, Samar, by American occupation soldiers in 1901; earlier in the period of the First Quarter Storm, I shouted that battlecry as the main call for the strike the Kamao (Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero ng Makabayan Publishing Corp.), which I headed, launched against the J. Amado Araneta enterprise in 1971; in my book 'Nation Above Self,' not only do I expose the destruction of Manila as the handiwork not of the Japanese but of Gen. Douglas MacArthur during his touted return but also honestly portray wartime President Dr. Jose P. Laurel as a rabid Filipino nationalist by siding with the Japanese occupation in order to, in his words, 'tide the country over to better times;' in my book 'Mandirigma,' I depict then-Maj. Alexander F. Balutan as actually fighting a secret enemy, US imperialism, in crushing the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's mother stronghold Camp Abubakar; and my latest book 'China the Way, the Truth and the Life' has the ultimate downfall of US imperialism as the underlying theme.