Goeff Gowen to discuss family’s life in Philippines at RAAC’s Library program April 11
On Friday April 11 (8 pm) the Rappahannock Association for the Arts and the Community (RAAC) welcomes Flint Hill resident Geoff Gowen as the featured speaker for the Second Friday at the Library Series. He will speak on “One Man’s Journey through History: China, the Philippines and World War II Internment.”
Gowen, who was born in the Philippines and spent almost three years there in a Japanese internment camp with his family during World War II, has just released a memoir written by his father about life as an Episcopal missionary in Asia before and during the war.
Vincent Gowen came into the remote mountains of northern Luzon in 1927 after 14 years in China, when the area could be reached only after days on horseback over precipitous mountain trails. Some of the more remote villages still practiced head-hunting against their traditional enemies in nearby villages.
During 400 years of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the inhabitants of the region, the Igorots, had fiercely resisted Spanish forays into their mountains to “civilize” them. Their culture, though it served them reasonably well, was primitive without a written alphabet or calendar at the time that the first American administrators and missionaries arrived in the early 1900s.
Vincent Gowen was part of the second generation of missionaries who had earlier succeeded in winning Igorot confidence. They had established a few schools and churches and English was widely spoken by educated Igorots.
When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1941, Father Gowen, his wife and two young children (Geoff and his sister Ann) hung on in the mountains for six months, witnessing by radio the fall of Corregidor, the surrender on Bataan, and Japanese conquests almost to Australia. They were finally interned in a former army base near Baguio, a mountain resort city, where they and 500 other foreigners, mostly American, stayed until shipped to Manila in December 1944.
There in the ancient Spanish prison, Bilibid, housed next door to some of the last survivors of Bataan and Corregidor, they were fortunate to survive the Battle of Manila that began just five weeks after their arrival, a battle that left Manila, once known as the “Pearl of the Orient,” in ruins.
Geoff and Ann have worked over several years on the transcription of their father’s wartime diary, which has just been released under the title “Sunrise to Sunrise – One Man’s Journey through History: China, The Philippines and World War II Internment.”
In November of 2007, the entire Gowen clan, including children and grandchildren, returned to the Philippines to see the places where the events described in the book occurred. On April 11, Gowen will share both passages from the memoir and photographs from the family’s 2007 return to the islands.
-- Sallie Morgan
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