An excellent read is how I would describe Just Me by Joy Virata, released only a few weeks ago. Those who have yet to send their Christmas gifts should think of Joy’s autobiography, which allows readers to join her in her trip down memory lane, one filled with family vignettes that happened through various eras and turning points in both Philippine and world histories.
As many would know, Joy’s husband, the eminent Cesar EA Virata, was Prime Minister and Finance Minister of the Philippines in a crucial and, yes, controversial time in our country. Of course, Prime Minister Virata, a brilliant economist, was said to be the saving grace of an administration that its detractors and critics have described as corrupt. Cesar’s wife, Joy, one would see in this narrative, was unassuming and nonchalant about her husband’s role and her own presence in the many significant events of the 20 years the Marcoses were in power. Being the wife of the number one official of the parliament, Joy may have enjoyed certain advantages, but there she was, attending state dinners in Malacañang Palace one day, and the next, attending to her homemaking and mother’s roles in a middle-class subdivision, Philamlife Homes, which was home to many promising young couples but who left and moved on to the Makati villages when they made it big. The Viratas, even if they had achieved eminence, chose to stay for decades in this unpretentious village because, well, they liked the neighborhood and it was closer to the Jose Abad Santos Memorial School that Joy’s mother, the American Doreen (nee Barber) founded, and where the Virata children, Stevie, Gillian Joyce, and Michael Dean studied.
It was also in their early years in Philamhomes, as it was popularly known, when Cesar rose in his career, first becoming Dean of the Univerity of the Philippines College of Business Administration (which would be named after him decades later) and a Principal of the Philippines’ most prestigious accounting firm, Sycip Gorres Velayo or SGV.
Joy’s reminiscences of Cesar’s government tenure as a top official and economic czar are enchanting with their stories about the incidental privileges she enjoyed like being seated in a seat that gave her a vantage point when watching a Pitoy Moreno fashion show or a Bayanihan performance, having her picture taken with Nancy Reagan while attending a reception at the White House, and traveling with her husband to attend World Bank-International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington and other capitals of the world, which she appreciated most for the cultural presentations featuring the famous performers of these countries.
On the downside, she had been pushed out of the way by rude press people and Malacañan guests who wanted to have their photos taken with the first couple, assigned to a table at the farthest end of a reception hall while her Prime Minister husband was seated at the presidential table, and given a seat in a military plane while her husband was in the presidential plane and, upon arrival in their destination, not being met at the airport with several pieces of luggage to take care of. Joy shares, “Luckily, a car passed by with a couple of military officers and they stopped when they realized I was alone…”
As a Business Administration coed at the University of the Philippines, she was active in extra-curricular activities. She first became involved in theater when she auditioned for a play in the UP Dramatic Club under the future National Artist Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero. In the State University too, she joined the Sigma Delta Phi Sorority, and during the initiation rites was protected by some would-be sorority sisters, like Marinela Katigbak (the future Mrs. Armand Fabella), Pat Putong who was the Grand Archon, and Betty Go who would become Mrs. Sonny Belmonte.
Finally, it was at UP where she met this serious and brilliant young professor who taught personnel management. After that class, she would take four more courses under him. Somehow, she felt a physical connection with him, “although he never said a thing.” She graduates and then serves as an Assistant to an American lecturer and halfway through that summer term, the American left and a new lecturer took over his responsibilities. That turned out to be ‘my professor,” Cesar E.A Virata and the rest is a story you will enjoy reading in Joy’s autobiography.
In the early second half of the 1970s, when her children had grown up and were busy in school, she auditioned with Repertory Philippines and was cast in “How the Other Half Lives.” Theater, the one passion that she took seriously even if nervous from day one, occupies several chapters in Joy’s book. Not quite surprisingly since she played no less than 160 roles but, she admits, “None of them was me.”
Finally, she shares her life as a mother to her children, whom she refers to as “God’s greatest gifts.” A successful and proud mother, she would conclude with her days as a grandmother and then, bonus stories on her travels with her family, along with the “little tales” of her great and well-lived life, including the crises and celebrations, and, at the end of the book, switching gears to live the new normal as the pandemic was coming to an end, or almost.
Joy Virata’s Just Me, I must repeat, is an excellent read, because it is the first-person story of a famous woman, the wife of a clean and honest technocrat who walked the corridors of power, who tells simply the truth without the embellishment of figments of one’s imagination and sugar coatings. Joy succeeds because as a woman of note telling her personal story, she plays her best role in life, a woman who is confidently candid and content with destiny’s offerings.
(copies for sale available at the La Solidaridad Bookstore, Padre Faura, Manila)