Not long ago, the Russian scholar Polina Ilieva and I stumbled into a small but well-stocked bookshop in Tillman's Place, near San Francisco's Union Square. I immediately spotted a book by my favorite Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. I asked Polina to read aloud a page I had opened at random.

Though I did not understand a single word, I could feel the rhythm and the power of the lines. In its English translation, the poem in all its glittering sharpness lanced me:

I am not one of those who left the land
to the mercy of its enemies.
Their flattery leaves me cold,
My songs are not for them to praise.

But I pity the exile's lot.
Like a felon, like a man half dead,
dark is your path, wanderer;
wormwood infects your foreign bread.

But here in the murk of conflagration
when scarcely a friend is left to know,
we, the survivors, do not flinch
from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely, the reckoning will be made
after the passing of this cloud.
We are the people without tears,
straighter than you, more proud.

Akhmatova wrote this in 1922. She stayed in Russia all through the terror of the Stalinist years, survived it, ingested it and drew from its torture the indomitable strength that sustained her and her art.

It brought back to mind Filipinos' own suffering under Ferdinand Marcos, which pales into trite insignificance before what the Russian people endured. I recall what Norman Mailer said at a Solidaridad reception during the Marcos years—that he would easily have conformed if he were in the Soviet Union, for he liked his comforts. So many of our writers not only conformed—they were eager toadies of Marcos.

At the time, I had wanted to join the many who had fled the country. To be sure, some left because they were hounded by Marcos and were in fear for their lives. But many went gracefully into exile, glorifying their flight as an expression of opposition when the truth was they had found a convenient excuse to flourish and appear patriotic as well.

At a meeting of exiles in Chicago which I attended when I was finally allowed to leave the Philippines, one pathetic runt shouted "long live the revolution!" I told the poseur he was a whining coward—as were all the other Filipinos in that gathering. For if they were real Filipinos, then they would all return to Manila and fight Marcos there.

History repeats itself: Consider the Filipino exiles in Spain in the 1880's, among them Dr. José P. Rizal, who told his gallivanting countrymen the fight was not in Spain but in the Philippines—for which reason he returned.

Days before I leave for the United States where my children live, I am filled with eagerness and anxiety. But soon enough, suffused by San Francisco's delicious weather, I realize I don't really want to live in America. My wife asks why I want to return so soon. Is it because I am more comfortable in Manila? Is it because I don't get as many phone calls as I do there, that I am just another small fry in a big lake? Could be, but my status as a writer had never afflicted me with hubris. I am not humble but the truth is I have never really been that ambitious.

Then I think of General Artemio Ricarte pining away for three decades in Yokohama, Jose Garcia Villa living and dying in New York. How could they have stayed away so long?

In 1976, having been finally allowed to travel by the Marcos regime, I hastened to New York and Washington DC to look for a job. In Washington, I met General Edward Lansdale for the first time through his wife, Pat, whom I had known in Manila. Pat and some of the former U.S. Embassy officials living in Washington asked me to speak before them. I said the usual things about our history about Marcos and how we will survive his lash. When I was through, General Lansdale came to me and said, "Frankie, you are not leaving the Philippines."

I tried to rationalize later why I couldn't life in the United States: the pay was not all that much; there was the likelihood I would get bored. I had once worked in Sri Lanka on a three-year contract, but at the end of the first, Manila beckoned again. As General Lansdale correctly said, I really did not want to leave home.

Home—it is the ultimate arbiter, the sweet and compelling and yet so melancholy a word.

Much as I can sympathize with all the artists who go into exile—in fact I often urge them to—I can only agree with Anna Akhmatova, and with Boris Pasternak who said he would die spiritually if he left Russia.

I share the same feeling although I will not dignify it in such heroic and hortatory terms. Let me just say that I will not be emotionally comfortable in America, and not physically comfortable for sure because I cannot identify with the sybaritic life there and all the shiny accoutrements of American suburbia.

This is not to say I shy away from ease. I thoroughly enjoy walking the streets of San Francisco. And the bookshops—Barnes and Noble, Borders, City Lights, Columbus, Tillman's Place and so many others tucked in anonymous streets. And the food—so much variety, abundance and so cheap, particularly those unpretentious roast duck restaurants in Chinatown's Stockton Street.

I keep harking back to Ermita, unwashed, often smelly, but so full of the bustle I am familiar with. I want to see the rice fields of Rosales when they are a brilliant emerald in the planting season and when they turn to gold during harvest time. I like going to Ilokos to listen to a language I don't use much anymore. And much as Philippine politics depresses and enrages me, I miss reading about it in the asinine press in San Francisco.

At a recent dinner I voiced again with some vehemence my desire to immigrate and Patis Tesoro, the successful couturier, advised against it saying that in the United States, I will be a second class citizen. I told her that in my country, I have always been a second class citizen anyway because I am not even a bolt in the power structure.

The millions who have migrated to America are for sure second class citizens, but in America, beneficence and certitude await most of them. For this is what America had always been—a nation of immigrants who brought with them the dreams which cannot be fulfilled in their native lands.

Today, the compulsion to leave the Philippines nags me again; with hindsight and easy extrapolation, I see so little hope in the future, primarily because most of us refuse to be honest with ourselves and refuse to answer this one crucial question: What did you do when Marcos was in power?

In my twilight, I need to be free from the tedium of seeing this nation savaged and ravaged by its own leaders; I should not wallow in self pity knowing that millions of Filipinos lead far more miserable and destitute lives than I.

Speaking at some distance from Stalin's tyranny, in her "Requiem" in 1961 Anna Akhmatova shames me:

No foreign sky protected me.
No stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
Survivor of that time, that place.

F. Sionil Jose, 78, lives in Manila. His five-novel Rosales saga was published recently by Random House. It is now appearing in France (Fayard) and in Spain (Maeva).