My Grandmother By Dexter Penaranda   For my grandmother, Manila was what could be described as a New York of the Orient. As I noted before, there were strong ethnic presences in the city, and she remembers friends of her father being American and Japanese. She fondly recounts that her father was somewhat of a playboy who liked to gamble at an oriental game called "ma-jong." It sounded like a great place to live during her childhood. But times were not always peaceful. During WWII, Japan invaded the Philippines and occupied it for much of the last half of the war until General McArthur kept his famous "I shall return" promise and liberated the country. It was during the occupation that this story occurs. When the Japanese invaded, my grandmother's family, including my mother, were forced to evacuate from Manila to a province called Guagua Pampanga. She remembers a harsh time, with death a bomb away. They traveled by cart slowly, with my grandfather and other men of the family pushing the cart which my grandfather built. She recounts times during which Japanese planes strafed and bombed the cart, but thankfully, none of the family were killed. She particularly remembers one bomb which came too close to the mark, and my mother was almost killed as child. She speaks of the moment in hushed tones and a tear in her eye as she says that my grandfather threw my mother out of the roadway just as the bomb exploded and worrying that she had died as she lay still by the roadside. That moment is indelibly stamped on my mind, just as she tells it. I few seconds late, or the bomb placed more accurately and my mother would have died, and I would never have been born. It made me realize just how delicate the thread of life is and the precarious winds of fate are.