When I scan the pages of my books, my stories, and my hand-written journals, I hear the voices of the girls and women who have been traditionally silent – traditionally silenced. I didn’t mean to choose these girls, these dalagas, these women and lolas to inhabit my stories, but when I look through the pages of the books, there they are.
It is only after I review the stories I have written that I can see this obsession of unleashing the unheard voice in my work. Perhaps I’ve been looking for them in other books, but never finding them, have invited them to come forward in my fiction. Or perhaps it has to do with being born into a community that is constantly speaking and never listening. Who’s going to hear you in all that chaos? As a teen I would write furious passionate heavy-inked pages in diaries, hiding my words, but expressing them nonetheless. Writing it down for no one to read was, at first, almost as good as saying it. And even now, when I am confused or uncomfortable or unable to confront a situation, I turn to the written word. It is in writing that I say what I cannot say in any other way.
In my first book of stories, I began with the experiences of American born Pinay from the Midwest – that was what I knew. And when Her Wild American Self came out in 1996, readers responded in letters, emails, and conversations at conferences around the country. I connected with my community in amazing ways. I began to hear about other women’s stories. I heard their words and the way they arranged those words and the way they used those words to convey a history, a life, a struggle.
I found out that all their lives, they too were looking for their stories in books. Finally, they told me, stories about American born Pinay. It didn’t matter that the girls and women talking to me were in California, or Virginia, or New York. They recognized the families in my stories, they recognized the experiences, they found versions of themselves. As I wrote, I found myself drawn to their stories, imagining what their voices might sound like and what they might do if given the time and space in books.
I spent many years researching and developing and coming to know my characters in One Tribe. In this work, I look at the community and the young women of that community and I ask them how they deal with the pressures of being not only an immigrant’s daughter, but one with familial and societal expectations that are unrealistic, limiting and unwanted by that daughter. I ask them: How do you tell your parents what they do not want to hear?
In my work of creative non-fiction, I have been falling in love with the surviving Filipina comfort women of World War II. As I write and research Lolas' House: Women Living with War, the old women have become my family. I have about forty grandmothers, some living, some dying, some in the spirit world, urging me to write down the stories they were never given a chance to speak out loud. A filmmaker who documented the lives of Korean comfort women said, “Once you hear their stories, the stories sink into your bones and you cannot sit still.” She was right. I cannot sit still. The voices of the Lolas haunt me and hold me responsible to a truth that has yet to be acknowledged.
In fact, the stories of all my characters – ficticious and real – hold me responsible for what I know. I am moved by Maxine Hong Kingston’s version of Fa Mu Lan. That Fa Mu Lan carved the names of villagers on her back as a way to document the atrocities of war, so that people would never forget.
Writing has given me an opportunity to meet the women and the community of my ancestry, to hear their stories, to imagine them, to place them in libraries where it is still hard to find an abundance of stories that explore the Filipino American experience.
For me, the act of writing is like breathing – you take things in, you hold them there and then you let go in one long exhale. And figuring out how a story should be put together, taken apart and pieced back together, choosing the right words and putting them in the right places, making the characters come alive and move off the page is a wild act of passion. This is how I make sense of the world around me, this is how I name the people who mean most to me, how I claim a history that has been refused to me, how I honor a legacy that has been given to me. I write and when I do, I breathe.
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