I’m Victor—a Filipino lawyer and diplomat, currently serving at the Philippine Embassy in Beijing. This is my first foreign posting, but this blog is much older than my diplomatic career. For more than twenty-five years, it has followed me through many chapters of my life: as a student activist, a young lawyer, a traveler with a backpack, a graduate student in France, and now as a diplomat in China.
I studied law at the University of Santo Tomas, and before that, I finished a degree in Film and Audio-Visual Communication (cum laude) at the University of the Philippines Diliman, because before diplomacy and law, I thought my calling was to tell stories with a camera or be in front of one. Maybe it still is. In the university, I found myself in the heart of student unions, organizations, and numerous extracurricular activities.
France became a second home for more than two years, where I pursued two Master of Laws degrees at Université Paris 2 – Panthéon-Assas: in European Union Law and in International Arbitration & Dispute Settlement, both finished with high honors (mention bien).
Before the foreign service, I wore many hats: associate in a Manila law firm, management assistant at the government’s communications office, investigator at the corporate and securities regulator, and legislative officer in the House of Representatives for the youth party-list. Each role, in its own way, revealed the different faces of public service.
Restlessness has always been part of me. I’ve crossed northern India by bus and train, wandered through Sri Lanka, backpacked across much of Southeast Asia, and explored France and its neighbors. I still dream of continental journeys through South America and Africa, perhaps not on a motorcycle like Che Guevara, but with a camera, a notebook, and an eye for stories.
Photography grounds me. It feels like curating stories in still frames, like short films or social media reels, ordinary scenes that strung together reveal something about a place and a moment in time. I’ve never thought of myself as chasing the perfect image. Instead, I’m drawn to documenting the rhythm of everyday life in its reality: streets, faces, gatherings, and even the in-between pauses. Over time, these images become a kind of visual diary, complementing the words I write and reminding me that stories are everywhere. Someday, I dream of weaving words, images, and film into larger narratives about people and places, perhaps even a book or a documentary that captures the world and its people, nations and their histories, and the possibilities of their futures. Until then, diplomacy has become another way of seeing the world with purpose: connecting with others, representing something bigger than myself.
Personality tests call me an INFJ, the “Advocate.” Friends and colleagues describe me as idealistic and creative, reserved yet expressive, soft-spoken yet opinionated, sensitive to others, and sometimes guilty of trying too hard to make the world better. They may be right.
I speak Tagalog, English, and French in that order of fluency, and I’m learning Mandarin during my posting in China. I’m also an open-water scuba diver, and once upon a time, I played the violin.
At heart, I’m still the same person who started this blog more than two decades ago, trying to make sense of the world through service, through travel, through words, and through images. And perhaps one day, when the time is right, I’ll gather those fragments into something larger—a book, a film, or simply a record of how the world looked and felt in the moments I was fortunate enough to witness.
Last updated: 28 September 2025
