Leonard’s passion

Pinoy Kasi
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:12:00 12/03/2010

SOME TIME last year I was at the Sidcor Sunday market looking at household items from Japan. One tea cup caught my eye because it showed several plants arranged in a row. I looked closely and could tell from the Kanji (Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese) that they were medicinal plants.

By some strange coincidence, I spotted Leonard Co as he walked past the stall. I knew immediately I had to get the cup for him because of the medicinal plants. I quickly paid for it and caught up with Leonard. “Here,” I told him, “a surprise.”
Leonard looked at the mug, and his face glowed, apparently recognizing they were medicinal plants. Then he looked closely at each plant, and began to give me the Latin scientific name of each of the plants!

That was the last time I saw Leonard alive. Three weeks ago, I got a text saying he had been killed in an encounter in Leyte. Later, the military claimed that he had been killed in the crossfire between government troops and the communist New People’s Army, but other witnesses are now saying the gunfire came only from the military side. Leonard and two other companions were working for Energy Development Corp. on a reforestation project.

I began to share some memories about Leonard last Wednesday, mainly around his work on medicinal plants. He went on to make his name in environmental conservation, his work recognized here and abroad. I shared that story of the Japanese tea cup to show the passion he had for botany, a passion he carried literally to the day he died, still gathering plants for environmental conservation.

He was always in a hurry, arguing that we were running out of time. It seemed like he wanted to catalogue every known plant in the Philippines, especially the ones that were endangered.

He knew he was beginning to make an impact on the mainstream, with the universities and with the private sector, and was always coming up with new ideas for projects. One time at the Sunday market, he told me he wanted to revive a small project I had started back in the 1980s, computerizing information on medicinal plants. I was surprised when he told me he still had the computer print-outs from that project. He had a way of keeping things going, networking people and places.

We tend to think of scientists in white gowns, working in laboratories. Leonard exemplified the field scientist, ever inquisitive, ready to climb mountains, ford rivers, court malaria. He was an adventurer, willing to take risks in search of something new, but he was not an adventurist, meaning someone who takes risks for the thrill alone. Leonard loved life, and had developed the intuition to stay alive.

He survived the Marcos dictatorship, working with community-based health programs that were (and still are) constantly being harassed by the military. There is irony that he died in a time when democratic rights have supposedly been restored.

But the area where he died is controlled by the 19th Infantry Battalion, notorious for what the American military would call “collateral damage,” civilians dying in “crossfire.” With so many claims of accidents from that battalion, questions have emerged as to whether there is a kind of Lost Command implementing a “shoot now, ask questions later” policy that characterized some elements of the military under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

The death of Leonard under these circumstances casts a long shadow on our claims to being a free society. How can we be free when soldiers shoot down scientists—accidentally or not—who are willing to go out to remote rural areas?
Leonard’s death is ominous when you think, too, of the Morong 43, doctors and nurses and health workers, also committed to serving in rural impoverished communities, arrested and imprisoned on the basis of a defective search and arrest warrant earlier this year, and still languishing in detention under a new government. Arrest now, ask questions later?

Leonard, Tsinoy
I have to write about Leonard as a fellow Tsinoy or Chinese-Filipino. In the turbulent 1970s, our elders were always warning us against becoming involved in anything political, simply because we were of Chinese ethnicity and were vulnerable to being called “Maoists.”

A few of us did become politically active against the dictatorship, and yes, Leonard and I were fascinated with China and the Chinese experiences around science and health care, but our identities were rooted in the Philippines. The passion Leonard had for science was surpassed only by the passion he had for the Philippines.

In retrospect, I cannot remember ever having conversations with Leonard in Chinese. He would show me Chinese books on medicinal plants, or his notes, which would be partly written in Chinese (mainly plant names and their characteristics, as described in Chinese medicine) but we exchanged ideas not in Chinese, not in English, but in Filipino. Moreover, while Leonard looked much more Chinese than I did, and went to a Chinese school all the way through high school, his Filipino was far better than mine; I would say he spoke Filipino perfectly and being Leonard, that included punning and joking in Filipino.

I thought about all this during his wake in Funeraria Paz, surrounded by white cloth banners that had been put up, with Chinese characters expressing sorrow. The banners reminded me once again of the Chinese side of Leonard.

As I grieved for Leonard, I thought of two Chinese words used to describe one of the most painful kinds of sorrow: xang xin (pronounced sang sin), a wounded heart. I thought of my wounded heart, then, too, and of how his murder has inflicted a deep wound on the nation.

Leonard did run out of time, in this the International Year of Biodiversity, a cause to which he was so totally dedicated. He leaves many friends, colleagues, comrades behind who will continue his work and with his passion, but until we find justice, we will work with heavy, wounded hearts.

A correction to my Wednesday column: Dr. Perry Ong, director of the Institute of Biology at UP Diliman, e-mailed me to say that Leonard did get a degree in BS Botany, not BS Biology as I wrote. Leonard was the last to be awarded a botany degree in UP, giving new meaning to the expression, “last but not least.”