at the public schools when the United States colonized the Philippines. The Joaquin family lived in a two-story residential and commercial building, greatly uncommon at that time, on Herran Street (now Pedro Gil Street) in Paco, Manila. Joaquin was said to have had an extremely happy childhood. The Joaquin children were tutored in Spanish & piano, and the children were encouraged to have an interest in the arts. The Joaquin household communicated in Spanish and heard mass regularly. Joaquin is a notably devout Christian and continued being so his whole life. The Joaquins had lived a handsome life until Don Leocadio lost the family fortune in a failed investment on an oil exploration project in the late 1920s. The family moved out of their Herran home and into a rented house in Pasay. Don Leocadio passed not long after. The young Joaquin was only twelve years old and this signalled a big change in their family. Education Nick Joaquin attended Paco Elementary School and went to Mapa High School for secondary education. However, in his third year informed his mother that he wanted to drop out because he felt that the classroom was too confined for him and that he learned more outside of it. His mother Salomé, a former teacher, was devastated by the news, but still allowed him to do so. After leaving school, Joaquin worked as an apprentice in a bakery in Pasay and later on in the publishing company TVT (Tribune-Vanguardia-Taliba.) This allowed him a small taste of an industry he would spend most of his life in. An avid reader, Joaquin, used this time to pursue his passion for it. He was described as having a “rabid and insane love for books” by his sister-in-law Sarah K. Joaquin. His parents had encouraged his interest in books early on. He already had a borrower's card at the National Library when he was ten. He purveyed his father's personal library and loved the bookstores in downtown Manila. He read voraciously and intently, he read everything that had caught his eye. He enjoyed the “poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Vachel Lindsay to the stories of Anton Chekhov, to the novels of Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather. He read American magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Magazine) and discovered the fiction of Booth Tarkington, Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.” Career beginnings Very