It seemed that, as a person, Sylvia Mayuga was perpetually in high spirits.
In a chance encounter at Shakey’s near the Inquirer office a few months before she died Dec. 31 at age 76, the writer, book author and editor told us that she had been happily living in Makati after the Mayuga family sold their big old property in Parañaque, and that she’s been corresponding with a new man in her life.
The hint of romance, whether as a joke or a matter of fact, further lit up her impish eyes and forever smiling face.
But behind such pleasant countenance and disposition was a woman of steely character, whose writings reflected her love of country and unflinching resolve to find truth in a world reeling from deception.
In the early 1980s, Mayuga was part of a group of editors, reporters and columnists that were interrogated by the military for news articles and features deemed offensive to the Marcos dictatorship.
That group was led by Bulletin Today’s Panorama magazine editor Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, who, along with Mayuga (then a columnist at Bulletin Today), would be fired from their jobs, “on Marcos’ orders,” as Mayuga claimed.
In a May 1983 column titled “Remember to Remember” in Bulletin Today that did not see print, but is now in the book “Press Freedom Under Siege: Reportage that Challenged the Marcos Dictatorship” (Ceres Doyo, editor), Mayuga wrote: “Has the hour finally begun for the widespread return of difficult truth to the Philippine news media?
“Over the past few weeks, the fate of Tony Nieva and the three newspaper unions, the sudden retirement of Bulletin Today editor Ben Rodriguez, the interesting letter to the editor offering to funnel one citizen’s taxes to the New People’s Army have been quickening thoughtful readers’ pulses…
“But it seems, with the recent events, that it is simply not in the nature of the beast of burden called media to resign itself to anything. Lives have been lost, careers painfully recycled, countless books confiscated for bearing the word ‘revolution’ and its derivatives in their titles and jackets…”
Humor and sarcasm
Later she’d be reunited with Magsanoc in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI)—she as columnist, and Magsanoc as editor in chief.
Magsanoc’s death in 2015 and the election of President Duterte in 2016 would spur Mayuga to do what she did best: write with humor and sarcasm.
In a June 7, 2016 piece in PDI titled “President Pilandok,” Mayuga wove a fable, Frank Rivera’s “Tales of Pilandok,” with politics: “And so it seems that Duterte would have stayed sultan of Davao had not 16.5 million Filipino voters been gulled. Does his victory run by the greedy on the backs of the gullible not remind you of how Pilandok pulled a fast one on both the sultan and King Croc?
“Welcome to the surreal Republic of Pilandok. Leave your sanity at the door.
“Reclaim in six years—if you’re still alive.”
Reminiscing
A Facebook post said that Mayuga “died of cancer and grief”—the ailment reported by Inquirer columnist Ceres Doyo as a “heart condition and was recently diagnosed with the beginnings of lung cancer,” and the sorrow possibly arising from the death of a grandchild.
But I’d always remember the night she reminisced about her old flame, cartoonist Nonoy Marcelo, after the latter’s cremated remains were brought home to his UP Bliss townhouse in Quezon City.
At the Mayuga compound, I ended up listening to her funny stories while indulging in herbal delights.
We said goodbye at 5 a.m.