Yesterday, while spending a Saturday at the home of Philip Alpajora, batch 2014, I noticed a Heidelberg Speedmaster, a full-color offset printer. “Is this where it was printed?” I asked. Philip knew immediately what I was referring to. “Yes,” he said. “Lewis Yu and Pok Estrella spent their days here, checking copies as they came off the press.”

The book is often referred to simply as the “IF book,” though its full title is And—Which Is More—You’ll Be a Man, My Son!. It is worth recounting how it came about.

The project was initially called the “Upsilon Virtue Project.” It began with a clear objective: to articulate the values of the Upsilon Sigma Phi grounded in Rudyard Kipling’s poem If. The book is meant to speak directly to young men entering the fraternity. It was conceived as a book that could be returned to at different stages of life, offering the perspective of one who has lived the values of the If. From the outset, the purpose was straightforward: to encourage fraternity members to live disciplined, principled lives and to contribute meaningfully beyond themselves.

Lewis Yu ’86 was central to this effort from the beginning. This book was his. He is its editor, architect, and all around principal proponent. He had the help of Gerard “Pok” Estrella ‘85 and Mitee Dimagiba ‘86. All of them chose the writers and artists for the book.

In his introduction, Lewis presents the book as a collective effort to give life to the virtues in If through the lived experiences of Upsilonians. He rejects easy success as a goal and frames the fraternity’s measure as its ability to form good men without sacrificing happiness.

Milflores Publishing, co-owned by this author and his wife, Andrea Pasion-Flores, supported the project from its early stages. As a National Book Award–winning independent press, it treated the manuscript as a serious literary undertaking rather than a purely internal publication. Andrea worked closely with the proponents to ensure editorial discipline and coherence.

Through Milflores, the project was seriously workshopped with National Artist for Literature Gémino “Jimmy” Abad ‘55, Dr. Zosimo Lee ‘70, and Dr. Marjorie Evasco. The articles were submitted to them and they helped sharpen the context, clarify the language, and situate the essays within broader literary traditions. There were meetings over zoom where each article was critiqued. The involvement of such eminent writers helped ensure that the book could stand on its own, even outside a fraternity context.

The finished volume reflects this evolution. After the foreword, preface, Lewis Yu’s introduction, and the full text of Kipling’s If, the book proceeds through a series of essays and letters written by brods from different generations, each interpreting a line from the If. The table of contents reads less like a syllabus than a progression of concerns that recur over a lifetime. The book is not meant to be read straight through once, but returned to as needed.

Among the contributions is A Letter to My 17-Year-Old Son written as a father speaking directly to his son at the threshold of adulthood. The piece draws from lived experience and reflects on how becoming an Upsilonian is never easy, but all throughout the process, keep your head; it is a storm that you can only brace for.

Interspersed throughout the book are artworks contributed by brods. These images function as pauses rather than embellishments, sitting alongside the essays and reinforcing the book’s reflective character. Together, the writing and the art give the book its texture and restraint.

In its final form, the “IF Book” is not a manual, nor does it pretend to catalogue virtue in full. Instead, it traces how values are taught, tested, and transmitted over time. It is often given as a gift, passed from one brod to another. In that sense, it is a gift twice over: first as a book held in the hand, and more enduringly as a set of lessons entrusted across generations—received, reflected upon, and lived.