"Dear Butch,
"I am writing you now because your column today sparked an impulse in me to share my own experience, writing for America.
"As a graduate student in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, I came into the company of 10 other writers, men and women most of whom came from all over the US – Louisiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, California, Vermont, and then, well, there was me – from the Philippines. In a way, living in this flat little windy cornfield industry town south of Toledo (where a tractor-pulling session was a great annual event) this two-year period was the best time in my life for writing. (OK, OK, I admit it, there was a considerable amount of drinking, too. I also faintly recall teaching freshman composition every now and then.)
"But ultimately, I was a writer of fiction. That was what I did everyday for two years straight. Not just done on the side, or after hours, or in my free time. Writing was my main time. I wrote and I read. And I wrote some more. Like all graduate students in creative writing programs across the US, I would ‘send things out’ – as my classmates would, taking advantage of the revolving franking fund that the program kept for this purpose. It was the early ’90s. Amy Tan was flush with the success of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife was soon to emerge. People like Gish Jen, Sandra Cisneros, Christine Garcia and Julia Alvarez were coming on the literary scene. And we at the BGSU Creative Writing Program were young and optimistic and counting on the day that we too would hit it big. Why not?…
"Fiction fellow Barbara Boudon (now a budding playwright in New York), a tiny little thing with a skull cap of blond curls, looked at me and said in that direct way Americans have, ‘You’re so lucky. You’re bound to get published – you’re foreign.’ It was a little off-putting – as though my publications would ultimately be about my being ‘Filipino’ and not about the work itself.
"In class, we’d have discussions about exoticizing the Asian (or the Hispanic or the Eastern European). At workshops, my classmates and professors would voice puzzlement at how un-exotic my stories were. I would look at them, incredulous, thinking: What do you expect? I grew up in Manila.
"It was then that I started working on a story that twisted the whole foreigner as exotic theme. I sent the story, ‘In Her Country,’ out and sold it to Antonya Nelson and Kevin McIlvoy at Puerto del Sol, a literary quarterly out of New Mexico State University for three contributor’s copies (par for the course). My first US publication. With chagrin, I had just confirmed my classmates’ beliefs.
"It’s been over 10 years now since I first set on foot on the BGSU campus. I’m still writing... but with a husband, two kids, and a job in advertising, fiction is regularly relegated to after hours and when I have free time. I tend to explore subjects where the idea of being Filipino is critical but not the only thing the story is about. In fact, it’s never about being Filipino, not solely.
"People have said to me my characters aren’t typically Filipino. Perhaps because I myself am not – typically Filipino. I continue to try to write about real conflicts, characters with real problems. I try not to think about my audience – American, Filipino or Singaporean (not easy to do as someone who writes copy for a living) as much as I think about the story itself – which to my mind is all that should matter.
"Alice Munro is Canadian, but her stories while they are set in rural Canada, transcend Canada. In the same way, John Updike’s ‘Maples’ transcend suburban Massachusetts. Or the way T.C. Boyle’s crazed California characters are more than that, and then some.
"I would have loved to be on hand to listen to you and Jing and Jimmy talk at the Sangandaan 2003. And I’m quite curious as to the takeaway of this session. Is it really that for 21st century Filipino writers, writing for America means writing for Filipinos about Filipinos? (Not that there is anything wrong with that).
"Perhaps only if you decide that your market is the Filipino diaspora in the US as Bert Florentino has. But does it have to be? Or is it that Filipino mentality that constantly seeks to be loved by our own? Another of my Bowling Green stories is a piece, still unpublished, called ‘Cursed.’ It’s about an illegal Pinay living in with her American boyfriend, confronted by her first love suddenly in town. This boyfriend wants her back, and wants them to make a new life here in America because the Philippines is... well, cursed. The problem is she’s working her rear end off because in her mind, she wants to return to the Philippines, or does she really? My husband, then boyfriend, told me, ‘You’ll never get that published in Manila. And if it’s published in the States, all the Pinoys will hate you.’ Yeah well. Yeah well. If I was constantly worried about what people will say and which people will hate me, I wouldn’t write. Isn’t that why writing is a courageous act? That’s why no one should censor themselves or candy coat their work or put a neat little period at the end of it like the proverbial high school science experiment that ends ‘I therefore conclude...’ I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not. I’m admitting it’s a struggle. But it has to be done, doesn’t it – if good work is to emerge.
"The question ‘How Filipino are these stories, really’ is not pertinent and shouldn’t be – not to me anyway. It is only pertinent for the reviewer or columnist who needs to churn out his copy and fill his space. The Filipino-ness of the work is a copy point for discussion, sure, but the real question should be, ‘How compelling are these stories, really?’
"Yes, as writers, we can’t deny or escape who we are. But the stories we tell must be more than who we are as individuals. Much much more.
"I realize that I’m getting into the whole political arena of literature and that’s the last thing I want. I don’t want to be involved in discussions about intentions and the right interpretation of the work and how literature is a political tool (never mind that I understand that it is). Never again. Not since that fateful day in the summer of 1990, when I sat in the UP Writer’s Workshop and my story, ‘Liebchen,’ a tiny tale about a happy Filipina mail-order bride in Germany, was criticized for being, among other things, irresponsible and not being truthful to the experience of Filipino mail-order brides.
"Hell, I just wanted to tell a story. That’s all I still want. And I’ll be honest. I would love it if readers read the stories – wherever they happen to be from. Oversimplication of the argument? Maybe, but for the purposes of writing, isn’t it always best to keep it simple?
"Regards,
"Noelle Q. de Jesus."
Is it an absolute necessity? Of course not. Philippine literature – whether in English, Filipino, or our other languages – emerged and developed all these decades and centuries without our writers having to see the dogwood trees blooming in Washington, DC.
But will it help? It very well could, as long as you know what you’re there for, keep an open mind, and use the time and opportunity to experience what you can’t get here. For me, the best thing a Filipino writer can do for himself or herself in the States isn’t even to write or to go to writing school – truth to tell, you can learn just as much if not more right here, helped by careful and sustained reading and constant practice – but simply to imbibe America in all its marvelous if sometimes terrifying variety, looking at every reflection in a window or every street corner with a writer’s eye, storing details and sensations, and most of all just hanging loose and creating memories you can take home with you for the rest of your life.
Writing is only half a way with words; the other half is sensibility, a way of seeing and feeling things, which can turn a rusty sardine can into material for a story just as well as a purplish sky or a whiff of Chanel No. 5. It doesn’t matter where you are.
It would be stupid and shortsighted, on the other hand, to ignore the opportunities available in the US and other developed countries for getting your work published and read by a wider audience, and I have yet to meet an author – whether reactionary, Marxist, pedestrian, or aesthete – who honestly didn’t want to be read by more people. I’m firmly convinced that there really are no more than about 5,000 people in this country of 82 million whom a reasonably good writer can depend on to buy and read his or her books – and not all at once, either, but over two or three years. In the US, authors turn apologetic when they admit that their books sold "only" 5,000 copies.
I perfectly agree with Noelle and others who believe that we should get out of our insular mode and engage the world out there – and may I add, on our own terms. (That, to me, is what "being Filipino" means – not an attempt to politically homogenize our literature, which would be the death of it, but rather to celebrate the variety of contemporary Filipino experience on this 21st century planet, which we’ve pretty much colonized.) Unless absolutely necessary, I’m going to stop explaining ourselves to the West, providing just enough context for the intelligent reader (the only reader worth writing for, if you care about your writing) to figure out what on earth is going on. You and I, after all, go to inordinate lengths to understand what "galoshes" are and what "antimacassars" do. I don’t think most British or American authors would pause two sentences to give us the time of day (and why should they?) Let’s learn to write and speak to the world with confidence in the integrity of our artistic sensibility, and trust the quality of our experience and its narration to see us through.
It’s a question well worth asking, but which I frankly hadn’t thought too much about beyond the opinion that our literary identities shouldn’t have to depend on our passports.
This was my short answer: I think of Fil-Ams as Filipinos living in a very large and prosperous province – yes, better than us being America’s 51st state, America is our 80th province, the way many of our kababayans act like they never left home.