Movies have been made from less. Much less.
Take one family — Filipino father, American mother, two kids — hiding for years from the Japanese in the Philippine jungle during World War II.
Oh, did we mention the father is a guerrilla fighter?
Befriended by headhunters and missionaries alike, the mother and children are eventually rescued off the coast by a submarine, the USS Nautilus.
Years later, the son returns, this time as a missionary.
"Friends have told me it reads like a novel," says Chuck Alianza, 71, whose book, "Soon Comes Sunrise," recounts those adventures and more.
Even the title drips with drama. When the sub slipped in to deliver guns and ammunition to the guerrillas and rescue the family, it got caught on a reef.
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An hour before dawn, says Alianza, the tide came in, finally freeing the submarine. "A man helping us said, 'Hurry. Soon comes sunrise.' "
His father was Emeterio Alianza, who came to California in the late 1920s. In 1932 he married Olive Burger. Two children were born, a daughter, Ruth, and a son, Carlos, who now goes by Chuck.
In 1933, Emeterio's father, who had owned a sugar plantation on the Philippine island of Panay, died, leaving the plantation to Emeterio.
But not until 1937 would the young family be able to afford passage back to the Philippines. By that time, says Alianza, his father's sister had wrested control of the plantation.
So his father bought some land on the same island and did a little farming and a lot of horse and water buffalo trading.
Life, of course, was turned upside down after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Before long, enemy planes were swooping in.
The family moved into the jungle, sometimes living in abandoned huts. For a time, Alianza's mother kept a journal. "She said we moved 22 places."
But his father made her discard the journal. Too dangerous. For his father had joined the underground, heading up a guerrilla unit.
"Most of the time, Dad was away. We would move, get settled, he would go out on another outing with his troops."
Once, the family took refuge with headhunters, who had been given tacit permission by the government to resume the banned practice — but only against the Japanese.
"It was the safest place to go," says Alianza. "Any Japanese patrol that went near them didn't come back."
The family also made friends with a group of American missionaries hiding in the mountains. "My mother wanted to live with them. My father said, no, there were too many Americans around. We lived a mile away."
Later, they learned that the Japanese had beheaded all the adult missionaries and bayonetted the children.
By 1943, American submarines were making regular guerrilla runs to the Philippines, bringing in supplies and taking out refugees.
In the fall of '44, Emeterio Alianza sent his family, along with one of his men, on a trek to the coast.
"It took us nine days, walking barefoot," says Alianza. They waited another week and a half at the seashore. "Then someone came in a sailboat and sailed us around to the point where the sub would come in."
The submarine delivered them to New Guinea. After a stay there and one in Australia, the family headed home. On Jan. 2, 1945, their ship slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. "My mother got us up to see the lights. She said, 'This is home. We're free.' Tears were streaming down her face."
He never saw his father again. Both parents remarried after letters between them were never received.
After a short stint in the Marines, Alianza worked in the auto industry before undergoing four years of training at Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada.
Through New Tribes Mission, which goes where Christianity may have never gone before, he, his wife, Pauline, and their two children returned to Panay in 1972, this time as missionaries.
There, in a rural setting, they helped build Aklan Baptist Hospital, which today contains about 50 beds.
By the time Alianza returned, his father had died, but he did meet a half-brother, who eventually took over the mission. For in 1982, Alianza had to return to the States after his wife took ill.
They settled in Phoenix and eventually divorced, with Alianza moving to Tucson in 2000.
Only once, in 1984, would he return to the Philippines. But his son, Michael, returns periodically to help out at the hospital.
Did You Know:
According to the latest census data, about 3,300 Filipinos live in Pima County.
