Smartypants

for Ligaya

On the occasion of my 50th birthday, a few years ago (yes), my nieces came to Miami to visit me.  Ligaya must have been eight.  And for years, I knew she was looking at me askance, wondering what was wrong with me.  Soon as she learned to speak she was asking me why I wasn't married yet.  Once when she was three, she wanted to know if I had put an old boyfriend into time out.

"Did you tell him to think about it?"

"Yep."

"Did you tell him that even if he thought about it and you disagreed you'd still love him?"

"Yep."

He was on permanent time out.

So when I turned 50, I took Ligaya and her sisters to my office at the University of Miami.  I was now the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing.  I had written several books and had many on the way.  The sisters ran their fingers along the spines of all the books.  Picked up photos and knick knacks given to me by my students, nephews, and nieces.  I thought it was a pretty cool office.

After a long moment, she asked me again.  "So why didn't you get married?"

I'm sure she's not the only person to wonder.  I told her that not every woman wants or needs to get married.  I told her I was having a great time writing books--because I was--and that it took up a lot of my time--which it did--and that I didn't want to get married just to get married--that was a no brainer.

I thought of the book I gave her long ago--it was the story of Princess Smartypants, a feminist take on fairytales, kingdoms and the institution of marriage.

I thought I was Princess Smartypants.  And in the end, yes, I am.  I want it all.  I want to be in a job that I have chosen (check) writing books about the stories I want to tell (check) and if I marry (and I will in 30 days) I will do it because I choose to.

When I began dating my fiance, Ligaya looked at him and she smiled.  When I announced the engagement she said, "Just so you know, the cousins talked about it and we knew it was going to happen."

Mommy ko

for Gloria L.T. Galang

She is the original wild American self.  She was born and raised in the Philippines to a family of two older brothers and three older sisters, a little brother and a mother who had been widowed at a very young age.  She had been born watched over by all who loved her.  Her brother Frankie was the one closest to her age and he was her constant chaperone.  The boys could not get close.  When they courted her--that is to say--when they came to the house to see her, she sat with them, but without interest.  Seems nobody could turn her head.  Until she met my dad and that was in the United States of America--sans chaperone, sans pamiliya.  She was concentrating on her books when she met my dad.  She was organizing a cultural show when he turned up at every corner to be her official escort, her chaperone. 

They thought she might return home with her Kapampangan husband where they could live in Quezon City, perhaps in a house not far away from the rest of the family, where she might employ a yaya for every one of her children, and a cook and maybe even a labandera, to free her up and give her all the comforts of a good life.

But her husband's practice took her back to the U.S., and her mother gave her blessing, said, "Go with your husband," and that meant she would have to learn the housewife duties she'd never have to perform back home.  In her early thirties, she learned to cook, to clean house, to raise six children.

Now my mother, their lola, his wife, is the best cook of healthy Filipino cuisine.  She was the one who designed the house we grew up in, working with the architect and contractor, placing all the dream elements into that perfect house in Wisconsin.  In our Filipino American community, she has been a leader and community organizer--something she might not have had a chance to do "back home." But here, she has taught us all what it means to be Pinay and American at once.  She, along with my dad, have created an immediate family of 22 and counting.

My mother has taught me how to do it my way.  To see what I want and go for it.  Even if it's new territory.  Even if it's unexpected.  Isn't that, after all, the true American way?

In Love and Gratitude For Goran

for LG

 

Lester Goran was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. Growing up in the slums of Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, Goran found solace and comfort with his pen and paper. Upon publication of his first novel, The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue, the New Yorker attributed to Goran “the vitality and true perspective of a born novelist” and said his “first novel gives reason for rejoicing.” Goran published eight novels, and three short story collections, including Tales from the Irish Club, a New York Times Notable Book in 1996. Goran memorialized his ten years teaching with and translating for the Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer in his memoir The Bright Streets of Surfside (1994). 

In 1965, Professor Goran began the first of three creative writing majors at the University of Miami.  He also began the first interdisciplinary major, bringing together Speech, Drama, Communication and English.  Lester was among the first to write UM course descriptions for Women Studies and Black Studies.  He served as a faculty representative and then later as the Board Chairman on the UM Publishing Board and oversaw all publications from literary magazines to the Hurricane, UM’s student paper.  And in 1991, he organized and established the MFA Program and was the first to welcome our graduate students in 1992.

Throughout his career at UM, Goran continued to write books and has a prolific list of novels and short story collections.   In 1960, when his first novel, The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue was published with Houghton Mifflin, Goran said, “Sometimes I think that everything I’ve ever seen or heard has little other purpose than to be shaped into a novel.  I have been around soldiers and politicians, burlesque people and teachers, gamblers, barbers, businessmen, housewives – everywhere the hustle is on for about thirty cents worth of affection and one more dollar.  I have stood on the edges (but sometimes in the middle) listening, dusting dirt from the shoulders of old suits, delivering a pitch, contemplating love, Shakespeare, Henry James, or Sean O’Casey.  I wonder that everyone who has ever learned the alphabet hasn’t decided that the world is a novel.  It is a large incomprehensible, exciting world.  I am glad I write it in.”

This passion for the world as novel was part of Lester Goran's vision everywhere he went, especially into the classroom where he coached, guided, admonished and lectured young writers on the practice of writing literary fiction and nonfiction.  For more than 50 years, he impacted his students in life changing ways.

Chantel Acevedo, author of Love and Ghost Letters, and an MFA graduate of 1999, says she’s a writer today mostly because Lester said she could be.  In her classroom, she finds herself saying something and later realizes she’s echoing Lester.  MFA alum Vanessa Garcia writes, “Studying with Lester has taught me to put my feet on the ground, my heart in the work, and get my head to try and bring the two together. He makes you want to kick the drive factor into fifth gear while remembering that the trick is not to burn the tires but bring it back down and ride through the hard stuff.”  Melissa Cantor, another of Lester’s students who graduated in 2005, says, “His insights have shaped the way I approach any work of fiction (most of all, my own), and his example and teachings are with me even when my own conscience fails: inspiring me, encouraging me, demanding more of me. The greatest lesson of all, however, has been his generosity - with his time, with his honesty, with his wisdom.” 

Perhaps Melissa Matteo captures Lester’s spirit best when she writes, "Lester is from the Old School.  Capital O.  Capital S.  When you walk into his classroom, you know: 1) Cut the bullshit.  2) Start the fight.  As far as I can tell, these are the only two rules Lester abides by.  But they are pretty much the only rules you'll need when you are sitting in the old school...or on a bar stool...or in front of a blank sheet of paper, trying to make it bleed.  Thank You Lester.  Capital T.  Capital Y." 

I have come to know him and to see the breadth and impact of his work.  Lester Goran focused on the writing, always the writing, and he has passed the legacy to those who also see the world as a big messy novel waiting to be written. 

     85 years old and he was writing and teaching like he was 58.  And then, last week he told me, "We are all vanishing into the field."    Early Thursday morning, February 6, 2014, his bright light went out.  All week long, I have been thinking of him.  Farewell, LG.  Thank you for everything. I am missing you.

Vote for Angel! It's the American Way!

Reading Angel at the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC

Thrilled that Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery has been nominated for the Teen Choice Book of the Year Award. 

I was never the popular girl at Brookfield East High School back in 1979, though all my friends were.  Here we go, time to give Angel a little push.  Imagine, moving from Manila to Chicago and in just a few months, nominated!  Can it be?

It's almost like being on THE VOICE!

Help Angel win!  Vote here!  Salamat, peoples! http://bit.ly/1d5QgsZ

Remembering Tacloban

For the lives lost to Yolanda.  For the families who are grieving.  For our kababayn back home who are always keeping an eye out for baha, for typhoon and strong wind.  For the rain that washes everything away.

Lola Cristeta Alcober at the site of her garrison just outside of Tacloban.

Tonight I am launching Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery at the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC.  I look forward to this night not for Angel's sake, but for the company of being with other Filipinos and Filipino Americans. Maybe we can say a silent prayer together.  Maybe light a candle.  Maybe at the reception we'll organize disaster relief.        
          In 2002, Lola Cristeta Alcober, a surviving Filipina Comfort Women of WII, took me to Tacloban. All my that year, all she wanted me to do was bring her home.  I told her, if you get yourself a polkadot bikini, we’ll go swimming off the shores.  "Sige," she said.  "Swimming na tayo."

Excerpt from “Ocean of Umiyak”

Lola Cristeta, LILA Pilipina organizer Sol Rapisura, and I take a little plane from Manila on the island of Luzon to the Visayan island of Leyte.  The plane is small and feels every single current, moves on the shift of a cloud and the breath of our pilot.  Lola Cristeta smiles, looking out the window from behind a pair of movie star sunglasses.  She points like she can see her house, floating in a sea of trees, set in the middle of an island in the vast Pacific Ocean.  She is going to make us taste the local cuisine and drink tuba, a local moonshine of distilled coconut juice. 

When the plane lands, she is the first one standing, wiggling her hips down the aisle of the narrow plane, stepping onto the tarmac.

          

If this were Manila, she would wait for us, but in Tacloban she leads the way down streets like the mayor, calling out to passersby and waving.   Dirt roads, wide and lazy, lead to a smattering of houses, sari sari stores and vegetable stands.  We walk past a church, maybe a school.  Occasionally, a motor trike zooms past us and kicks up the dust.   The trees tower over us.  Green and thick, they shade us, tell us how old they and this town are. 

Lola Cristeta and me standing near the site of her former home.

We are finding our way to the house where she grew up.  We visit distant relations.  “I’m back,” she tells them in Visayan, “I brought my friends.”  Her words float by me like people on the street.  Some of them I recognize. Tagalog words.  Sometimes English.  Some are variations of words from her testimony and others are foreign and awkward to my ear.  We stop at a house and Lola raps on a screen.  A woman swings a door open.  Lola Cristeta greets her, her hands gesturing north and south and her smile widening with each word.   The woman listens and then nods.  She speaks back quickly and calls a name or two, says that one married; that one moved away.  Somebody died.  And after awhile, Lola Cristeta points to the side of a house, at a porch made of bamboo with plastic chairs that line the walls. 

“We go that way,” she tells us.

Her voice rises above the cock’s crow.  She pushes her shades up her flat nose; her gold rings and bracelets catch a hit from the sun.   I trail behind her, the camera lens zooms out and shooting the sleepy barrio.  I focus on her gait, how quick and certain, how fast. 

As we move towards the location of her house, the nipa huts and small structures grow scarce and the grasses spike past her shoulders, and the trees shoot into the blue sky, limbs bowing towards us like angel wings. 

I imagine this was the walk she and her brother Marianito took on the way home from the market that day -- that these old paths existed in some form and the trees not so tall and leafy.  But the grasses must have been this high, I think, the shrubbery this fat.  The crickets singing and leaping to the skies just like this.  The silence of the countryside and the heat of the sun, felt old and familiar to the skin.  It must have been like this, I think, watching her. 

We walk past a front porch and as we turn the corner a little woman with white hair and a long walking stick comes out, calling to us in Waray.   She is ninety-years old.  The two old women have never met, but they stop and talk to each other like long-time neighbors trading tsimis, but its not gossip.  They literally exchange war stories.

The old woman is not surprised by Lola Cristeta’s experience.  She knows.  It was what happened back then, but no one ever talked about it.  She wishes us well and watches us walk away, blessing us as we go. 

Here is the friend Lola Cristeta ran into on the dirt path.

On the path, we run into another woman, small like Lola Cristeta, but dark with a long low ponytail.  Lola Cristeta grabs the lady’s arm, starts talking at her.  The woman doesn’t recognize her at first but then there is a flurry of arms going up and hands waving at me.  They were girlhood friends, I am told.  They knew each other when the war broke out. 

And slowly, I begin to figure out that every person Lola Cristeta meets, whether it is someone from her past or a stranger she has stopped for directions, every person is hearing her testimony.

“I never knew,” says her friend.  “I never heard,” she tells me. 

“And how do you feel now that you know,” I ask. 

“I want to cry,” she tells me in Visayan, “I am sad.”

More than fifty years of silence and suddenly, we float down upon the rural roads leading out of Tacloban and she calls out her truth like a herald from God.

Angel Goes to School

for the Students at UM, at IAIA and SFSU

Allyson Titiangco-Cubales' AAS 525 Class at SFSU and me on Google Hangout

The great thing about Angel being out in the world is that she is connecting and disconnecting with readers on her own.  I have been lucky these early days of publication.  Several classes have already read and responded to Angel de la Luna and the 5^th Glorious Mystery. 

I sat in on an American Immigrant Literatures Class taught by my colleague, Donette Francis, at the University of Miami and witnessed an impressive power point report by two female students.  I learned in that classroom that Angel is not always a sympathetic character – but then again, what teen is?

In Evelina Lucero’s (yes, Evelina Lucero) fiction workshop at the Institute of Indian American Arts, the students created story maps.  Here is Damien Moore’s full of haunting images and beautiful details of the novel.

IAIA Student Damien Moore's Story Map

 

And then yesterday, over Google Hangouts, Dr. Allyson Titianangco-Cubales and her Filipino American Literature students at San Francisco State University produced creative responses and shared them with me.  Some wrote poetry, others did movement, a soundtrack, a children’s story with illustrations, a skit, and dramatic interpretation.  Here is the link to a video poem that Conrad Panganiban and his group produced.  They took lines from the novel and collaged them together, cutting images and sound to the text and created this video poem.

My goal in writing a novel is to write a story for me and my readers.  It is a blessing and a gift to receive these creative responses.  I am grateful.  I am grateful.  I am inspired by these students

Miami Book Launch at Books & Books In Coral Gables

for Angel

Here's a link to my Miami Book Launch.  Full reading and Q & A.  Thanks to all for joining in Angel's journey!