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Maria S. Gochoco-Bautista
Assistant Professor, UH-Manoa Economics, 1984-1987
Teaching at the University of Hawaii-Manoa (UH-Manoa) was my first job after graduate school at Columbia. I arrived there at a very difficult time for me as my father had just passed away the previous November, right before I graduated. I was about to send out my CV and set up interviews for academic positions at the American Economics Association meetings when I had to drop everything and go home. My classmate was charged with sending my CV to different universities. UH-Manoa was one of only 8 universities that interviewed me (it was a bad year for academic jobs). Professor Andy Mason was very cool during the job interview, and with that enigmatic smile, I couldn't say for sure whether he was terribly enthusiastic about my possibly coming to UH. Right before I left the interview room, however, he briefly murmured something to the effect that Hawaii was definitely interested in having me.
My choices of academic jobs were UH-Manoa, University of Cincinnati, and Queens College. Queens was the first one I decided against after that long subway ride from Manhattan and listening to that weird-sounding Queens accent. The people at Univ. of Cincinnati (Wolfgang Mayer and company) were extremely gracious, and I stayed at a very nice German castle-like hotel. But after getting there by way of the Covington, Kentucky, Airport and almost freezing to death (as well as my friends in New York saying that the only guys I could date out there would be unemployed steel workers), I made up my mind to go to UH-Manoa.
UH-Manoa Department Chair Fred Hung met me at Honolulu International Airport when I first arrived in Honolulu. It still amazes me to this day that I was able to identify him since I had no idea what he looked like. But you know, he is very unique. Fred was very kind to me during my time at UH and really treated me like a daughter. His children were friends of friends of mine, so I guess I was in the same age range as they, and more important (to Fred Hung, at least) was the fact that I am part Chinese.
Calla Wiemer and I were the new hires in 1984. Together with Sumner La Croix, we were the most junior and the youngest members of the faculty. With Calla and I around, there was less attention on Sumner (and if only for that, I think he was relieved that we came), except by Professor Larry Miller who considered him to be a son (and I, a daughter--same case with Professor Walter Miklius). Calla was a neighbor in faculty housing, and one day, she told me that she and her boyfriend Randy had gone before a judge and gotten married, just like that, nothing fancy. They were devotees of the bicycle and regularly invited me to join them at the beach.
Larry Miller always worried about my social life--more precisely, the lack of one. Every Friday afternoon, while passing by his office on the way home, he would ask me what I was going to do for the weekend. My answer was always the same--I would go to mass on Sunday. In any case, I figured that I couldn't really keep hanging around old fogies like him and Walter and expect my social life to improve (although I know that if he could have done something about my social life, he would have). I was about the same age as my graduate students, so I couldn't really get too chummy with them either as I was their teacher, offering graduate macroeconomic theory and graduate monetary theory regularly. It was a difficult social scene. I went out on a blind date with a fireman whose most exciting story was that of collecting the remains of people who had jumped off the Pali Lookout. That pretty much ended that date. After a while, I realized that my dating choices were really limited pretty much to military personnel and hotel workers. I decided to give up on expecting a lively social life.
I published my first paper in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking while I was at UH-Manoa. The funny thing is that it only took 2 weeks to complete that paper. I never realized how good I had it then! The paper was on rational expectations and money neutrality in Japan, and the University of Hawaii had given me a research grant that allowed me to conduct research for a month in Japan. I doubt if anyone else in Hawaii at that time really cared about rational expectations and money neutrality, so I always wondered what I was doing seriously studying these things in Paradise. I can just hear Walter Miklius saying, "Who cares?"
Professor Mac Williams and I also wrote a paper that was eventually published in a Philippine economics journal. Curiously enough, it was about monetary policy in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Mac was a fountain of knowledge. The fact that he was a student of Professor Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and that I was a student at Columbia University of Professor Philip Cagan--who had been Milton's star pupil at Chicago in the 1950s--always made me feel spiritually connected to him. If you could write down Mac's ruminations, youíd likely have a publishable paper.
I learned to drive a car in Hawaii but was disappointed that after two hours on the road, I had circled the entire island. My mom visited me and so I drove her around. She kept telling me to be careful because she could see the water on her side of the car. I told her I couldn't do anything about the water as Hawaii is an island! My classmate from Columbia, Minyoung Kim, came to UH-Manoa Economics for a one-year stint as a Visiting Professor. He gave me the car he bought so that I could practice and pass the driving test. (Minyoung actually learned to make Anne Lee's special baked chicken dish after Anne and her husband, Professor Chung Lee, invited him over for dinner at their home. I remember that shortly thereafter, he invited me over for dinner and made the same dish!).
But my first real driving test came when I had to take a neighbor in faculty housing to the hospital. She was a University of Chicago graduate who was teaching Russian History at UH-Manoa. A scorpion hiding in her kitchen mitt bit her as she tried to take something out of the oven. I really did not know her at all, and she kept saying that she was going to die as I frantically drove her to Kaiser Hospital (then located in Waikiki). I was equally freaked out.
I went to many faculty get-togethers: at Larry Miller and his wife Mary Carole Parrot's condo; several at Sumner's condo (including the last time I saw Professor Dick Pollock who was already ill then); a barbeque at the home of Jim and Alice Mak in Hawaii Kai (I remember that when their son Eric was very young, he loved the song "Beat It" by Michael Jackson); several lunches at Lou and Joan Rose's beautiful home in Lanikai with the big ficus tree covering the area around the deck so far above the street level you could walk around naked and not be seen; (Sumner and I also tried wind surfing in Kailua Bay; I, without much success); at Fred and Hwa Hung's home in Aina Haina for Christmas parties; at Seiji and Jane Naya's home; and at our usual special eating places, like the Maple Garden Restaurant and Keo's (then at Kapahulu and Date Street).
I remember having a discussion at one of these gatherings with Professor Jim Moncur and his wife, Sharon, about Mormon beliefs regarding marriage--how one had a choice between being married for life or for all eternity. I remember thinking that if I were marrying a Mormon, I would feel slighted if he didn't ask to marry me for all eternity! On the other hand, I also thought about the potential moral hazard (on my part) if a guy asked me to marry him for all eternity.
I think that I discombobulated the normally stoic Professor Marcellus Snow when he sent me a Christmas card one year and I remarked that I did not know that Mormons believed in Christmas (From then on, I knew better).
I was always so amazed that Larry and Mary Carol split all their expenses down the middle and wrote checks to each other at the end of the month to even things up. I always thought that it was such a complicated way to live with a spouse. After Larry died, Mary Carol gave me Larry's copy of Milton Friedman's Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, a book which includes Philip Cagan's (my dissertation advisor at Columbia University) classic study on hyperinflation that was drawn from his thesis. I treasure the book (I remember where it was in his bookcase) and more than that, all my fond memories of Larry.
I was always close to Gail Tamaribuchi (UH-Manoa Center for Economic Education) and have kept in touch with her all these years. Department Secretaries Juliet Pila and Pat Nishita were always very kind to me. I always had little run-ins with Professor Ed Fujii (bless his soul) who, I felt, found great joy in annoying and tormenting me.
After three years of teaching in Hawaii, I returned home to the Philippines. I was so disgusted that our deposed dictator [Ferdinand Marcos] had been taken to Hawaii to live in exile there. I felt it was the right time to go home and to do my share, as my country was starting anew after a long period of being under a dictatorship. As I write this reflection in February 2007, I have been a faculty member at the University of the Philippines School of Economics for roughly 20 years, including a stint as Department Chair for the last 5½ years. I am currently on a four-month appointment as a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Bank for International Settlements in Hong Kong.
Maria Gochoco-Bautista
Hong Kong
11 February 2007
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