Umbrella – A Personal Take

A Personal Take on the Publication of The Umbrella Country

The Umbrella Country was written in Jersey City, Manhattan and finalized in Spain. It took about four years of my life in my early twenties. At the time, I was a fervent social activist, working in communities in New York City as an advocate for human rights. It was a novel penned with much inspiration and ambition. I was primarily a poet at the time and very much on the trenches of American literature. Much of my experience then was recorded in interviews in now defunct magazines, which I hope to resurrect on this website. I wish to furnish you with a complete picture of the publication of The Umbrella Country to benefit those who are currently studying this novel, to bring light to the successes and struggles of being a Filipino-American writer in American publishing, and to provide an inspiration to those of you who face the same obstacles that we are all too familiar with.

My first novel was published in 1999, a year that proved to be most fruitful for Asian American publishing. Many works—post-Amy Tan, we refer to ourselves—of young Asian Americans came out that year, new voices and faces of Americana. I belonged to a small but intimate and dedicated writing group at the Asian American Writers Workshop when I got a call from an editor at Random House who was interested in my work. Apparently, a friend of a friend in the group has talked about it with much interest that it generated an early buzz. My agent at the time negotiated the publication of the novel to headline a new literary imprint within Ballantine Books. Unfortunately, the press was taken over by a larger company and the imprint stymied. The editor-at-large at Random House fought for the life of my manuscript until it was taken by a book club imprint, Ballantine Reader’s Circle, as its first original paperback. Given the chances of getting published as a Filipino immigrant in the U.S., I never fail to count my blessings.

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