About What Tied is Tied
(Note: Bataan New Jersey's new title is What Tied is Tied.
Excerpt:
Before Efren removed the bodies from the barracks, he took the pictures from their pockets and buried them in the higher part of the barracks that wouldn’t be flooded by rain.
After they had piled twenty bodies by the grave’s edge, they paused to consider how they might put them inside. Shouldn’t the heaviest go last? Efren wondered as logic dictated the heaviest on top like a paperweight to keep the bodies in place, but asked instead, And how do we get them in? They took the ends of the cloth and A-one A-two A-three swung the bodies into the grave. Efren groaned softly at a body bouncing off the sides and scuffing against the others. Tasio shook his head at him. Don’t stare, Five more! This is not a burial, thought Efren as he wiped his nose with his arm, not even human.
End of Excerpt.
What Tied is Tied, A Brief Synopsis
Bataan Death March survivor Efren’s son Ben cuts Efren’s hair at his father’s deathbed, keeps it in a Ziploc, and asks his father, who are you? Efren had referred to Bataan Day as the Day of Silence, but he died saying, Gus, the name of a fellow soldier, and not his wife Lourdes’ name. After he dies in Jersey City in 2009, Lourdes confronts a secret she has kept for decades, the identity of a man, a political poet known as Anak Laya, who was disappeared during the Martial Law era.
Who is Gus? Who is Anak Laya? Efren’s death opens and splits the novel into two intertwined timelines, following the women of the family as they make the same defiant choices over the paternity of their children for a century. Anchored in 2009, the year Obama approved compensation for WWII Filipino veterans, the novel moves with the Rosas children through history’s Loob and Labas (inside, outside) from 2009 to 2021. Irma moves to and through Latino L.A., becoming a national immigrant activist and a mother of twins by her mentor. Ben travels to Spain with his Ziploc of hair, looking for ways to get out of his Humdrum. Ray stays by Lourdes’ side through her battle with cancer, until they come together to face Lourdes’ own deathbed confession in Jersey City.
As the novel moves backward from 2009 to 1921, we meet Lourdes during the protests in Manila that led to Martial Law in the 1970s. She attends night school for adults and meets Anak Laya and the U.G., the Underground resistance. And further back, we meet women in Old Manila and in a women-led resistance in Muslim Mindanao, women whose defiant paternity choices become the same knots that leave the Rosas children asking: is what tied really tied?
Why a Literary Historical Novel?
I finished my historical novel in 2024, after literally writing in a coffee shop every single day for two years while we were still living in Jackson Heights, Queens. When we moved back to Manhattan, close to the V.A. Hospital where my father passed away in 2003, I also went back to my early-morning coffee-shop writing routine and finally finished a novel iin 2024. Or so I thought.
It wasn't until 2025 that I started looking for a literary agent, and six months into the process, I decided I was most likely doing it all wrong, from the synopsis to the query letter. I did follow a lot of tips I saw online, but I couldn't quite get it right. A query synopsis wasn't the same as the info on the back cover of a book, what I knew so well how to write. Therefore, create a Hook, not describe the book.
Also, 240,000 words were way too long. I took almost a year off from the novel and also dropped the literary-agent search and decided to take a break from the process, a much needed distance that encouraged reflection and self-critique. One big question that hovered after I finished writing the novel was: did I really write a WWII Bataan novel? A part of me was not convinced that I presented the novel correctly. Besides, 100 years couldn't be all about Bataan. If not, what was the novel about?
Hello, Venice
It was a trip to 1,600-year-old Venice that helped me regain the energy that had me writing the novel in the first place. I realized it was hard to put on a business hat without having taken a break from finishing the novel. It was too fresh. And it was hard to edit because I was too close to it.
I also left my job, and being in between jobs gave me the time to refocus my energy and goals for the last stretch of my work life. In the summer of 2026, I went back to Bataan, New Jersey, and spent months making drastic edits. From 700 pages, the novel was cut down to 400. I had a checklist of my mission: focus on moving the story, remove myself from the novel, do intensive line editing the way I would with poetry, and keep the voice that would make it a novel that could only be written, by me (apparently books are no longer being all written by humans.) . Most of all, I wanted to really understand what the novel is about.
And that was the difference. I kept calling it a Bataan novel. And the title was meant to honor Bataan. But did I really write a Bataan novel? And Why was All the Things We Cannot See one of my comp titles. Was there even a relationship other than I loved that novel.
Bataan's Legacy
April 9, 2026, was the 84th anniversary of the Fall of Bataan. It remains the largest military surrender in American history. My late father was a WWII veteran and a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp and the Bataan Death March. While Bataan might already be lost in the historical memory of a new generation, World War II's Fall of Bataan remains well documented as the largest American military surrender in history.
While Bataan is the anchor of the novel, What Tied is Tied deals with the 100 years before and after Bataan. It is also about the legacy and impact of war and migration on the lives of four generations of Filipino women, non-binary people, and Queers, whose experiences we rarely see in literary historical fiction. Members of this multigenerational saga offer alternative perspectives on what shapes history. And their untangling of generational secrets gives meaning to a theme running throughout their lives about the knots of time: What tied is tied.
Making the Struggle Public
I chronicled my writing voyage on my Facebook page. I will be blogging about the process and other related WWII pieces on this newly-updated website.
