From ‘Monstress’ to Manila

MANILA, Philippines - I was always good in writing… But I wasn’t writing for fun or for myself. But at UC Berkeley, it’s such a big school that even when you take a creative writing class, you have to apply to get in… I got in, and I took the workshop and I realized it was the only class I would really lose sleep over. And so I thought, if I’m losing sleep over this, I must really care about it.

After graduation, I didn’t have a plan. I worked for a while like, at an Internet company, and I thought “I don’t care about any of this,” and then I learned — I didn’t even know what a Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing was — but I learned that you could go to graduate school to write, and I thought, you know what, that sounds like fun — sounds better than working.

This was how new it was. This was like ’95. The company was called World Wide Web Inc. That’s how illegitimate it all seemed!  And I was so dumb, I thought “Oh, this is where the World Wide Web was based.”

I only wrote a story so I could apply to graduate school.  ‘Cause I didn’t really have a body of work, that’s why I thought “Well, I wanna go to grad school, I better write something.” I wrote a story that got me into a couple of places but got me rejected from a couple of places too.

Right now, I teach full-time, so I’m a professor and it’s hard to sorta just wake up and say, ‘I’m gonna write!’ But y’know, when I get the summers off, I’m fully immersed in writing — I usually have a project going on, whether it be like a story or the novel that I’m working on.

Teaching creative writing reminds me of what good writing should be, or what good writing can do. It doesn’t necessarily mean it sends me to my own computer and I start writing these amazing things. But it’s always a good reminder and it forces me, requires me to maybe read stuff that I normally wouldn’t read.

I think what these characters have in common — besides being Filipino or besides being Filipino-American — is they’re all trying to all make their own way in the world but they’re all bearing the responsibility of a familial history or some kind of collective history that they feel obligated to honor or uphold. But they wanna strike out on their own in some way.

I feel like my writing life is very different from my life with my family. And I used to want to meld them more, but I’m actually kind of grateful that they’re separate. This is one life and that’s another life. I think I’ve finally figured out how to deal with it.

I read a review that said my book seemed very generic.  Because they said, “You read these stories, you don’t really understand the Filipino people.” And I thought, but how do you expect to understand the entire Filipino population with just eight stories? To a certain extent, they’re saying that because I’m part of a minority.

I write for readers who appreciate that stories are not all happy and they’re not all sad, and that nothing is purely beautiful or purely ugly. I’m writing for readers who understand that the gray area is the most interesting — not 50 shades of it (Laughs)…  The gray area is the most interesting. I think that’s my ideal reader.

* * *

Monstress and Manila Noir are available at National Book Store.