I was one of those who claimed he had never heard of Bad Bunny's songs. Or if I had, for sheer luck, I couldn't connect it to a human. I did know him, the way knew Taylor Swift's works, as both possessed a fierce sense of self on social media, except Bad Bunny had the MET Gala outfits. I was also never a fan of Reggaeton, and would not be convinced that it could evolve into something that didn't conjure sexist images of gyrating women. I always thought of the videos offensive. I even saw an African music video spawn in an Ethiopian restaurant, with the same rapping masochistic men ogling over women's shaking nalgas. Not really calling for admiration and fandom. But then I am an aging Generation Xer from the era of post-Boomer activism (the women-equal-righters taught me well!). I have also been to Puerto Rico, and I understood the sifting political elements there. There was always something bigger and deeper than what artists provoke on the surface level. To wit: a pro-Queer Bad Bunny and his Reggaeton updates. In one of his videos, he was the woman. Queerness and Reggaeton didn't seem to be the love team plunged in my mind. Then 2025 came and immigration moved back to the forefront of American ascerbic politics, except this time, a public spectacle of violence. And the brave Bad Bunny took his space, in the front, making one public statement in our Republic of Memes. No doubt, post-Minnesota public murders, I was one of the millions who awaited his 2026's Superbowl's Half-time Show, with hopes for more public statements with Bad Bunny sticking his middle finger at a country that was beginning to look more and more like 1933 Germany at the outset of authoritarianism. Thirty Years Ago The 90s was my decade of activism.    Reclaiming both ethnic and Queer identities in pages of poetry and street protests against anti-Asian activism and AIDS consumed much of those turbulent years.  It would culminate at the end of the decade in the publication of one novel, one anthology and one literary journal special edition.  All in one year.   Asian America would claim me as one of its own.  So did the Philippines after my publication. But this Latiniz ado, what my Latino friends referred to me then, was always missing something.  I studied partly in South America after all. Having a Chavacano mother only added to the mystery. Also, Filipinos never quite cleanly fit in Asian American spaces, being both a product of Spanish and American colonizations. No-Speak-English didn't apply to us. Hispanidad, as tragic as the messages of the anti-colonialism academics, always called my name. There was always much to uncover there, especially for me, who was always in love with world history, and whose ancestry, again, was Chavacano. Interestingly enough, the next phase of my literary works would be written in San Juan.    My rented apartment in Condado overlooked the ocean.  From the open balcony, the night wind and rolling waves were music.  Being surrounded by the most beautiful humans didn’t hurt either.  History called. Old San Juan could very well be Old Manila or Intramuros, except it was not bombed to dust. Filipinos always claimed Hispanidad through its evangelization, perhaps because they had not lived in former Spanish colonies where the architecture had not changed for 500 years. If you went to Manila, you would never know it was once Spain's capital in Asia. The Brown Years Being an immigrant from the Philippines doesn’t mean we know our Hispanidad.  When I came to this country in my teens and people asked me if I were Portorican, I kept mum from incomprehension.  It would take many more years for a better context of microagression in the shape of ethnic categorization. It was always easy to bully someone if they could box you in as either Kung Fu Chink or Spic .  Some of us simply didn't match the stereotypes in their minds. Even when I studied in Argentina, I didn’t know about the Caribbean.   My first trip to Puerto Rico would happen in ther early 90s, after a disappointing trip to Europe and a complete rejection of everything Euro. It was also the era when my political mind would take shape, my Brown Years. Everything I had missed in my childhood I found in San Juan.  The air, the sand, the food were an ecosystem of familiarity. The mestizos looked like my mother.   I would finally begin to understand why Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish and Filipinos didn’t if we were under Spain the same number of centuries, and why Puerto Rico took another route from independence and became a territory.    Post colonialism never had a clear path out of darkness.   In New York City, I would meet Puerto Ricans who become very dear friends.   Our lives as immigrants intersected from the same bosom of history, and there was much to learn from each other.   They had a longer history in NYC.  They had Alphabet City.   We had tiny Jersey City.   They inspired the West Side Story , the biggest clue that we Filipinos always knew who the Puerto Ricans were . My very first tattoo--the one on my chest, a flying serpent--was done in Puerto Rico. El Encanto I penned the beginnings of two of my three manuscripts in San Juan, Puerto Rico. #TheRebelSonnets still has poems written from the time when I traveled there for a month every year for ten years, and then finally moved there in 2003 after the death of my father. Writing in Condado in San Juan was natural. It was my tropical Philippines, only three hours away, without the stretches of Philippine politics. I saved all my vacation days for a month of writing on the island. I used to tell people that I had lived in one of the 7,500 or so Philippine Islands but never saw water growing up in Manila. The memory of the Belly of Beast was salty nonetheless. San Juan was my way of making up for loss, but it was also an opportunity to connect to 1898, when Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. for a $20 million payment for the Philippines. I thought then, in my 20s, when my mind was young yet politicizing, that Puerto Rico held the answers to mysteries of Philippine history. A decade was a long time to dedicate to one place. I had been to Puerto Rico more than any other country in the world. I only took a break and went to the Philippines in 2000 for a family reunion and book tour for my first novel. I went back to Puerto Rico immediately after. My decade-long relationship with the island would see its end. The circumstances in 2003 around the death of my father, a Bataan Death March survivor, were a tragedy I had written about many times. From the lawsuit against the U.S. Army to his body being put in the freezer while we awaited results. After the burial, months later, in the summer of 2003, I decided to quit my full-time job and move to Puerto Rico to find peace. My mother knew I was grieving. She wasn't convinced that Puerto Rico was for me. She and my brother came to San Juan to bring me back to New York City. In 2003, Puerto Rico was having some Evangelical shift. Fridays saw regular religious processions in Condado of people proselytizing anyone who looked lost. With that, homophobia. My island of free thought. I was also slowly healing. My mother, brother Albert, and Paul would fly from Jersey City to visit. My mother came to convince me to return. She would neatly fit in the island's Hispanidad, and her presence in San Juan created even more curiosity about the nature of Filipino mestizaje. She became one with the island. In the Philippines, she always stood out, the privilege mestizaje we never fully understood. In Latin America, where the mestizaje was in full bloom, it was easier to see my mother's Hispanidad. It was perhaps el punto in very long sentence. What I waited for. What brought me to Puerto Rico. A few months after they left, I went back to Manhattan. I would never go back again. I am grateful to Bad Bunny. For the stage of memories. For the political reminder. For the music and Art. I did confirm that I did not know his top five songs, but I was one of those who didn't have to learn Spanish to enjoy his performance. My good memories of the island was all there in 15 minutes, even the Apagon. It was never easy to understand exploding electric posts that could plunge a whole city into darkness, and trap residents in high rises. The elevator stops and the water no longer runs. New York was on stage: bodegas were originally Boricua after all. These days, there are only a million Nuyoricans left and many have moved elsewhere in America. Bad Bunny reminds me of the years when every latino I met was Boricua. And how each of them quietly convinced me to go to La Isla del Encanto and find my Philippines there. Last year, the mystery surrounding my mother's ancestry would also resolve itself via DNA. I am of the mestizaje and the Hispanided. Long long ago there was a Spanish soldier who went to Zamboanga and started a lineage of Chavacanos that eventually brought me here. * Related Blog: https://www.binoarealuyo.com/post/mysterious-ancestry Related Readings: The World of 1898 https://guides.loc.gov/world-of-1898 Bad Bunny's Movement: https://www.thecut.com/article/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-puerto-rico-meaning-references.html ; https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/08/bad-bunny-super-bowl-immigration-00770475 ; https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/69572/1/bad-bunny-became-political-icon-super-bowl-lx-ice-puerto-rico-trump-us

It's been months since my last blog. Months of playing spectator sport to toxic world politics had put me in a space of silent observation. As an immigration advocate, it's hard not to get triggered by daily posts about how immigrants are treated in this country. A lot of comparisons to the rounding up of Jews in Nazi Germany, and in fact, they're undeniably parallel. The images, static and moving, are stark, invasive, and personal. Only this time we are watching in full play from both safe and unsafe spaces, the differences thinning, from all sides, all POV, with people and their handheld devices recording every angle of violence and powerplay, depending on the algorithms of our social media accounts. Yes, algorithms. A complete mindfuck if you ask. We see the same, and we don't see the same. A case of what do you really want to believe, and therefore, what you will believe to be true. I have collected WWII and war books for the past thirty years. My writing of #BataanNewJersey was made easier by the bank of images I have had inside my head for decades, on top of the reality that my father experienced pre-during-and-post WWII. I have seen many documentaries about World War I and what caused it, and the 30-year gap of political maneuvering that led to WWII. I never questioned once that my entire birth and existence were brought about my father's war experiences. My family lives through its aftermath. The shadow of war was omnipresent when I was growing up in Manila, and still is to this day, 23 years after his passing. I can only imagine what would have been like for other war families. My father would have been 105 today. The same story echoes elsewhere that WWII has touched, especially in Taos, New Mexico , a county that sent 1,800 of its young men to the pacific theater. Also 105, Valdemar deHerrera, the last known American survivor of the Battle of Bataan passed last year. DeHerrera was two years older than my father, who was recruited into United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) at the age of 19 from ROTC, and was in the The Death March and Japanese Concentration Camp at 20. Augusto Roa Realuyo (center) a year before the infamous Fall of Bataan in 1941. My father was brought to New York by my doctor Aunt in the late seventies for a last resort medical confinement in the VA Hospital in Manhattan. The hospitals in Manila couldn't correctly diagnose his failing health, but I am sure, one thing they never failed to recognize was the fact that whatever it was that caused him to lose half his weight was connected to WWII. My father would survive and bring the rest of his family here. He would live to witness, for two decades more, the very American democracy that put him in the Death March and a Concentration Camp. He was an American "national" during WWII, and now, we are all American "citizens." The similarity between the two terms is colonial history at work. He was not without his opinions. War veterans have much to say about the countries they fight for. My taste for justice came from him. Perhaps fate itself intervened to make sure I became the chronicler of our family history, including WWII, so we can share with the world what really happened from our POV. In my case, mostly my own father's take on world history. It was of no coincidence that I grew up with a deep fascination for world history, pages of which I devoured as a child in Manila. It was all his quiet maneuvering, buying a whole book care of encyclopedia instead of a TV set. Because then, in the seventies, due to the fascist silencing of Marcos' Martial Law, most of us couldn't speak -- not about the current state of affairs, or the wars that got us there. Today, families of immigrants in American immigration detention centers are speaking up in ways that families were not able to in previous wars. U.S. citizens are being detained for being--brown and immigrant. We are all suspects. This country is divided, they say. Social media misinformation has deluded so many into realizing a version of truth that serves their bigoted lens. We are all pawns. And we are all blind. We are all seeing. American bigotry has put all of us in some petri dish growing viral hate, not knowing what to do. My father would call these detention camps exactly what they were -- concentration camps, similar to the one he survived during WWII. We know they exist, because we are all witness to their unprecedented expansion, but we don't know what's really happening inside. My father saw all forms of abuses against humanity --- what prompted him to become a guerilla after his release and become part of covert operations against the Japanese. The war produced all forms of humans, from those who betrayed their own to those who quietly and publicly fought against oppression. My father made a choice and lived to tell. There was no need to blur injustice in his mind and heart. He experienced it himself. He would know, if he were alive today, that democracy and freedom were worth fighting for, even if that means having to live with disorders the inflicted on his soul and weakening body for the rest of his life. The soul after all gathers strength over time. For him, the Fall of Bataan was not the end of it all. It was the beginning of a growing understanding that while so many lost their conscience during the worst of times, many stood up to make sure that history could survive long enough to tell the truth. In memoriam, Augusto Roa Realuyo, born January 19, 2021. Happy birthday and Thank you!

This week while writing a literary agent query letter, something dawned on me about the content of both my query letter and my synopsis for Bataan New Jersey . It was the Nth iteration of both, but I continue to not be completely happy with them. The synopsis looked too general, too prescribed. Probably because I had read way too many publication promotional copies of historical novels -- that one paragraph that could light one's eyes and appealed to readers to buy and read. While I always mentioned I wrote about strong women, the masculated war description of the novel still blanketed my pitches. While the heart of Bataan New Jersey IS Bataan, or my reimagination of it, the rest of the 700-page novel isn't about the war at all. It's about four generation of women and Queers. Does that show in my description, book pitch, synopsis? Thanks, J Gatsby Yesterday I saw the Broadway version of The Great Gatsby. While the production failed on so many levels, it still brought back the memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived not to see the success of his novel. When it came out, he was quoted saying, " of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was abou t". Do authors really expect to be totally understood? Twenty-four years after the publication of my first novel The Umbrella Country , I have only seen very few readings of the book that "got" what I was trying to do. It was labeled and categorized to follow the marketing whims of the time--gay and immigrant. Although I consciously never mentioned the word "bakla" in the novel, although I could have. Eventually, I would start seeing "Gendered Reading" of my novel. And finally, a scholarly aper would be sent to my email about the novel's feminist lens, an examination of women characters that seamlessly flowed through the narratives. When I published my first collection of poetry The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, I took on the female voice again. I always felt comfortable writing from that perspective, reading the world from a woman's lips, how I was taught, albeit male. While that would be problematic today in the battleground of contentious sense of truth and authenticity, we cannot ignore the existence of those of us, born male but/and raised Feminist. In his 2011 article 6 Male Poets Who Are Not Afraid to Write about Feminism in Guernica, poet Matt Petronzio highlighted the lack of attention given to male feminist poets. Suddenly there I was--acknowledged. Although I wouldn't call my feminism an example of "not being afraid." I have never really given it much thought. I was always a feminist. Raised by Feminists My father left to come to New York when I was only ten. Even in my first ten years, he was always absent. He, the only male figure in our household. When he left, that male figure all but disappeared. I never knew what it meant to be male. My mother and sister undressed in front of me, and their female bodies were always natural sight I didn't know mine was different. Since I was always gay and attracted to the male gender, I also felt alliance with the women around me. My mother, to survive and raise three kids without my father, turned our Manila "apartment" into a women-only boarding house. My fascination with being surrounded by women has appeared in my first novel, and now in Bataan New Jersey . What does it mean for a male to be raised by women? Do we become less male? Do we become more sensitive to the plight of women? I am not sure, but I know, we do not become gay. I don't walk the grounds of gender thinking I'm feminist. The Philippines is full of women politicians that I don't like. The U.S. has yet to see a female president, and I know that will not make a difference in politics in the short term. There are toxic females as there are males. Our models for leadership have a penis. Male toxicity being too prevalent in our time. It would take a revolution for us to erase the male obsession with war and violence. To remove the traces of misogyny. There are so many ISMs with strings attached. I don't think I will see that in my time. Meanwhile, my job is to plant the seeds. I don't know how many poets and novelists, who are born male, were raised by women. But I do know that a lot of the literary agents I query are women. And I need them to know where I am coming from. War equals Men. And I don't want my writings about War to be lost in that limited equation. Bataan New Jersey will see the light, hopefully not the posthumous way The Great Gatsby did. I would hope to be there to blow birthday candles. And so today, the first paragraph of my query letter screams with feminist clues. The way it should. I make no excuses for the way I was raised. I am proud of everything and everyone who made me who I am today. Bataan New Jersey is a sweeping, multigenerational family saga spanning a century, from 1921 to 2021, across four generations, multiple countries, and languages. This episodic novel connects the roots of the Filipino American diaspora to three consecutive colonial invasions in the Philippines, as experienced by a matrilineal line of resilient Filipino women and Queers, each making impossible choices through 100 years of global turmoil and generational secrets. Inspired by my father, a survivor of the Fall of Bataan, the largest military surrender in U.S. history, I reimagine the story of Bataan itself, bringing the overlooked Filipino and feminist voice into sharp focus. Read More: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210209-the-worlds-most-misunderstood-novel https://www.guernicamag.com/matt_petronzio_6_male_poets_wh/ (Thanks, Mattt!) Ceremony of circles a gendered reading of Bino Realuyo's The Umbrella Country (Please ask the author Pia Arboleda . Thanks, Pia! )

A lot of Independence Day reflections happening in America. Mine will always be more complicated. But I reflect nonetheless. The Philippines was a former American colony and July 4th was when the islands became independent from the U.S. It is one of three Philippine independence days. During WWII my father fought for both the Philippine and American flags. Filipinos, whether they knew or not were American "nationals." July 4th ushered in the long-promised independence that finally arrived in 1946, albeit with political strings. The Americanization of the Philippines that began in 1898 continues to this day. I am a part of the Filipino diaspora in the U.S. that my medical paternal family started in the fifties, and we, our generation, continue. I don't see myself as simply an "immigrant." I am not just a naturalized U.S. citizen. Our voyage to America began a long time ago. I am a byproduct of 1898. When the U.S. Congress rescinded war benefits for war veterans like my father, our consciousness was born. The string attached to the independence of the Philippines became more complex. July 4th: a complicated history that one must think about as America bears witness to both tyranny in mass scale and the return of "internment camps" for targeted ethnic groups. They are not familiar with this America. Most never saw this coming. Democracy, they say, is fragile. 250 years end here. But many immigrants voted for what is happening today as well. 36% of eligible voters also didn't vote, not that it would have mattered. We are where we are because we have created a system that we never saw failing. Blame capitalism. Blame billionaires. Blame left-wing socialists. Blame all. We are probably here because we all need to be reminded of the fickleness of history, and not just the fragility of democracy. The way I see it: as a generation X, I feel that this is not my history as much as it used to be. There are three younger generations behind me. I have done my activism, wrote the books and continue to do so, but the climate of the world must fall on those whose futures it would affect most. That's not mine. But it doesn't mean I mustn't act. We have choices to make in darkness, some of which we might not be able to live with. Heard of "alligator alcatraz"? Sounds like a joke from a stand-up comic. But it's a chicken-wire reality that a heavily funded and empowered system will duplicate throughout the country. Some of us will stop at nothing to make sure we protect our loved ones. Some will stand by the fringes also to protect our loved ones. The complexity of survival. All will be for the same reason, and justice will be confused by our intentions for the moment. In Bataan New Jersey, I wrote about this tale. My father told me over and over again when I was growing up—how Filipinos only watched them during the Death March. That was 65 miles of spectator sport. They watched . I never really understood what he meant. I would grow up to learn that for the most part, in darkness, I have chosen not to watch. But to act. But to walk the talk. I do still wonder, if my father were alive today, what would he be thinking about all of this, he who survived a concentration camp, he who fought for the American flag that now stares at his survivors as a reminder that history is fickle?

José Rizal, like many men of his time, is complicated.  A wealthy elitist from a politically troubled family traveling the world, learning from the long shadow of a changing era.  He represents the ideal, not so much the reality of a national identity.  A man who was not as populist as what his image eventually became. For a group of islands and their islanders, there was really no national thread to bring the patchwork together. Then the Americans brought Jose Rizal back in the early 19th century. Luneta became Rizal Park. And he a national hero, a poet-novelist as a hero. An ideal, an unreachable one, became a consciousness. Rizal’s work Noli is all over Bataan New Jersey — our generation discussed his books, but maybe not as critically as we should have   I still remember the very deep "Pilipino" it was translated to. Time was spent trying to decipher language, when it should have been spent trying to dissect an idea. For me, writing a historical novel was an opportunity to think outside of the myth and subvert the man and his narrative.  Maria Clara herself was worth investigating because we don’t really know what became of her after being seen as an apparition in a famed convent in Intramuros.  Returning to Intramuros in a narrative was as exciting as imagining a world that now only exists in fiction , Rizal's Old Manila. I grew up in the Manila that Rizal himself could not have foreseen, a city full of streets named after characters from his life and his books: Blumentritt, Dapitan, Maria Clara Street. All so fascinating.   A poet novelist as a national hero for a country that is not necessarily friendly to intellectualism and to reading in general.  Recent memory tells us that former Vice President Leni Robredo lost the presidential election after being accused of "elitism." The Philippines is still very much the masses depicted in Rizal's books. Rizal and his elitist friends still exist, in a different shape, as the rising English-speaking middle class who could care less that the country is still poor. And no surprise that Marcos Jr. won. The Pink Revolu forgot that the masses couldn't afford Pink. It looked good on socmed, however. (Just to be clear, I used my socmed to help the Robredo campaign, because I believed in her, although I couldn't vote there.) An opportunity lost. A return to the Marcos past. In the 1970s, Martial Law season, Rizal's Noli was a required reading for us.  Translated to "Pilipino" (with a P) by the populist Marcos Sr. Sisa was our heroine. She lost her mind in a country that was always losing it. Her sons, Crispín and Basilio, were all of us boys of a deteriorating Manila.  Years later, my novels would follow his tradition of fallen brothers.  Of cities and countries that teeters between losing and gaining a soul. Although I write women from a feminist pen.  Unlike Rizal, I never saw women as victims.   Bataan New Jersey subverts the elemental machismo in his books.   I find much satisfaction that he has allowed me to do that.  I am of my generation after all.  Not a traveling elitist, but an immigrant. I belong to a diaspora. We were moved by time and economy. No monuments for us. I have spent most of my life in New York City. But like Rizal, I have traveled the world. I am a polyglot. I understand international inspiration. But I have no desire to save a country or its people. I find self-righteousness toxic. I prefer to write about people. And by doing so, I carry his tradition. I will continue to complicate Rizal. Perhaps because I respect him much. I understand elitism as well. I am a Harvard graduate. You are infected with elitism once you attend one of these schools. I choose to embrace the levels of representation in my works. And I have many heroes, and Rizal is one of them. Happy 164th birthday, Jose Rizal.  No matter what we think of you, we must always be grateful that your story, your own and the one you made up, lives to share your truths and the truths of your time.  A gift from every page that will continue giving those of us who love to read and time travel.   History repeats itself, true, but I prefer to look back to the past not because I want to reach a destination, but moreso, because I want to understand how that destination creates its own shape. I may not always agree with your ways, but I am glad that you are my forefather. (For Jose P. Rizal, June 19, 1861-June 19, 2025, 164 years of truthtelling.) Resource: Noli Me Tangere in Project Gutenberg

Because I have spent every year of my adult life traveling abroad, I don't really feel the need to apply to writing residencies. But decades ago, I actually tried, and went to a couple of them. There are plenty of these residencies, where artists go to produce work while building their credentials. Whatever was good for their academic CVs. They are competitive, and hardest to be accepted if in the summer when MFA programs are on break. I wanted to a repeat of my graceful 2004 artist colony experience in Spain's Valparaiso, but instead, the last time I would be in an artist colony was in 2010 at Yaddo in Saratoga, NY. The worst. Bullying. Ego-systems. Insecurity. High School cafeteria behavior. Name it. It was there. Yaddo turned out to be the worst mixture of humans locked in one place--literally, as we were in the middle of a tick-infested forest in Saratoga, New York. I would hear more horrible stories from writers who had been there, especially after I finally decided to walk out and put that hell of an unadulterated earth behind me. And now 15 years later, as I look back, I still have a hard time recalling fond memories of Yaddo, except perhaps of the workers who kept the mansion running and the old walls and their echoes whose "conversations" I enjoyed more than the actual mortal artists who lingered the dining rooms at the end of each day, ready to tear down unsuspecting targets. Interestingly enough, other writers had seen worse. But what could be worse than a bunch of artists creating an illusion of hierarchy and subjecting residents to it? Wrong place, wrong people, wrong time. Twenty-one years ago, in 2004, a year after my father passed, I would find myself in Spain for a whole month. Not new to international travel, I flew to Mojacar/ Almeria , apparently on the Mediterranean, to just get out of the country once again. I had just returned from living in Puerto Rico and was not ready to go back to work. I had never been to a writer's colony and never found them appealing. But why not? It was another country, and I needed a respite. My Caribbean experience turned out to be well spent for mourning, and not for generative writing. I had been to Spain twice before then. In fact, I finished my first novel The Umbrella Country in Madrid. An Andalucian mountain was never my idea of Spain, much less live on one for a month. As it turned out, Fundacion Valparaiso was in the middle of such a mountain, where the urban-ish center was a climb up the mountain, and the coast, a descent. To see locals, to find a Church, climb up. 2004 for writers on-line was the world of blogs. It was before the smart phone, and we needed a computer to access our blogs or the internet in general. I had published a novel five years prior, and already had my own Wikipedia page . Google was at a nascent stage, and Yahoo as a search engine was all the rage. A healthy google footprint was still not in the conversation. It was still a world of books on paper, and conversations without cellphones. However, many of us were already blogging then, and Blogspot was the place. I knew from the Filipino writers "listserves" that I was preceded by many Filipino writers before I went to Fundacion Valparaiso, and most had already many good things to say about it. Spain after all was an old Auntie. Perhaps innocence and ignorance came into play. I was younger. Zero expectations. And totally escapist. A bunch of us would arrive at the airport at the same time. I wasn't sure whether Hanya Yanagihara came on the same day, but I do remember a couple of visual artists with the biggest luggage imaginable. All of us not realizing that our destination was uphill, away from the Mediterranean coast. The place was what we Filipinos would call an "hacienda" or Americans a "villa." Orange trees dotted the whole mountain. There were people living there, none I would see during the month I was there. We had our own rooms, a few had their own balconies. The mornings were glorious, waking up to sounds of roosters and the most beautiful dawn skies. It reminded me of Mexico's San Miguel de Allende, except Mexican pueblos were teeming with people who loved to be outside. Pilar Parra , the most hospitable human, was our host. Lunch and breakfast were left in the kitchen, and dinner was served with her at the head of the table. We had visual artists (I remember the cheerful Grieg), a Korean architect (the generous and kind Choi Wook ), and at least three writers. Except for a Mexican artist who loved knives, I was the only other person who could speak Spanish. Wook spoke Italian. Valparaiso would change my idea of artist colonies. No forced sense to build community. Much respect for independence. It was stress-free. The environment was inviting and inspiring. The villa was visually beautiful, with enough space around for us to have our own privacy if desired. I don't remember what works I did there. to be honest. It could be for a novel that I never finished-- The Ashen Parts --the same one that gave me my first New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. I know I didn't go there to write poetry, because at the time, I was still trying to publish my first book of poems. What I remember most about this place wasn't what I did there, but the people I spent my time with. Our group was easy to like. There was much humility amongst the people who traveled from other countries, and perhaps that was what made the residency special--there weren't annoying and self-serving American artists. There was a gym near the water that a few of us went to. I don't remember if the residence had internet, but I knew when I went down the mountain a lot. There was a Church atop the mountain that I visited. Seeing a sea of white hair during mass wasn't surprising after I learned that many of the young people had left. At the end of the residence, Hanya and I went to Granada and Barcelona. I believe she returned to New York before I did. After meeting once in Manhattan, I would never see her again. I would only hear about her after her return as an extraordinary writer. Well, I knew her back when. I should really be thanking her -- I was told that she was the one who talked me up at Random House in 1997/1998 that a senior editor started looking for me. I probably learned about that after Valparaiso. I never got a chance to thank her. So wherever you are Hanya, thank you very much. More about Hanya Yanagihara: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/hanya-yanagiharas-audience-of-one https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-subversive-brilliance-of-a-little-life https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/394050118/a-little-life-an-unforgettable-novel-about-the-grace-of-friendship

Many things to be grateful about in a difficult world. I am grateful for my research in the past three weeks on literary agents. I have queried around 15 agents so far. I can’t imagine how many queries they get but I do believe in the cosmic system of right time, right place. The literary agent who will represent my work will have to go through a journey with me with my works. A 700-page literary historical novel about WW II’s Bataan is very timely, but the added contemporary touch of most recent sociopolitical events will make it controversial. War after all is a recurring human event, and most of us don’t connect them with each other. As if unrelated events. Human ecology is much about threads of time. I do miss the characters. Three years of writing and editing, truly every day in the early morning, was so fulfilling. Walking to the coffee shop while it’s dark outside and listening to my playlist so I would be in that world but the time I sat down to write their stories. Something I had not done before. What dreams are made of. I didn’t know I could write about Bataan. It has been a terrifying legacy of my family. For years, I collected books about war and Bataan. But writing about it was different act of commitment. Suddenly I felt the urgency to write it now. It finally called me. Asked me to sit down and listen. I understood Bataan better when I finally dove into the narrative. As it turned out, Bataan was not a singular event. The ripples began decades before. In my novel, I mentioned a theory about WWII—that Japan started it, not Germany. That’s one aspect of the novel I would like to explore more in Book 2. For now, the mission is to get Bataan New Jersey represented and published. For today and the gift this manuscript has brought me, I am grateful. 🙏🙏🙏

Augusto Roa Realuyo was 21 years old when Bataan Fell in 1942. World War II is a horrifying memory. That a 20 year old Filipino who was pursuing Engineering at the University of the Philippines would be recruited into the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) in 1941 to prepare the Philippines for war is unconscionable. World War II was not the first war inflicted on Philippine soil by a global power. Spain was already there for 333 years when the U.S. took over in 1898. And in 1941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and occupied the Philippines. In 1942, my father, Augusto Roa Realuyo found himself in the Fall of Bataan, the Bataan Death March and eventually, a Japanese Concentration Camp in Capas Tarlac. He had just turned 21. He survived. In human history, survivors held the testimonies. But my father kept them all, having to face the shame of being attached to a historical fact: the Fall of Bataan was the biggest military surrender in American history. To make it worse, the American Congress denied them wartime benefits by passing the Rescission Act of 1946 . Where would you go from there? While the world slowly moved forward, leaving the shameful past behind, my father and his peers suffered in fading shadow of war. When I was born, my father was pushing 50s. Just like many men of war in the Philippines, he married late for reasons only novels could untangle. Even with Engineering and Architecture degrees, he would struggle all his life running from war nightmares and trying to keep a family of five together. The world I grew up in was what anyone would expect in the belly of Manila. All of us characters in the aftermath of World War II. Bringing his family to America was his last act of forgiveness. He was after all brought here a last resort to reverse chronic and worsened war illnesses that piled on him in his twilight years. That was how our family found ourselves in the fabric of New York and New Jersey. America was his gift to us. It's the other country he fought for. He, just like all Filipinos, was an American national during the war. A history as complicated as our relationship to America. "I Shall Return" was a Filipino mantra during the torments of war, a song of hope. It was only three years ago that I became brave enough to tackle our legacy of war. While I collected World War II and Bataan books, I couldn't find myself in that trench. I asked my father's spirit to be there with me, every day, at 6am, in coffee shops, writing Bataan New Jersey, before I went to my FT management job. I asked myself what happened before, during, and after 1941. His story had grown much, much bigger. 100 years from 1921-2021: the history of the Philippines against the superpowers that destroyed its young heart makes more sense once human stories are thrown into the fray. And I began to understand my father and his generation more. In the same vein, I also understood the complexity of wars. It's always easy to protest against it, but what happens when it's brought to our doorstep? My father, at 20, knew what he had to do, whether he thought it a calling or a mission. Our family has sacred months. January because of my father's birth, and April because of the Fall of Bataan and his death on April 26, 2003. I lost him early in life. My first novel came out in 1999, and he would not see my second book. I never told him I was ever interested in writing about Bataan, although I knew that in the genre of WWII, the Filipino voice of Bataan was always missing. Majority of the people who died in the 65 miles of the Bataan Death March were Filipinos. Bataan was always in my blood. I will always be a son of a survivor. It's a legacy I understood when I wrote and published my first novel. Social justice is rea l for me. It has always been. Not a trope. Not social media virtue signaling. Not armchair activism. History is as complex as the people it railroads. But some of them survive to tell. Today is his 104th birthday. I thank and honor him. The burden of legacy of telling is Light.

It's Veteran's Appreciation Month. I can't think of a better time to create a new website. Since I started writing Bataan New Jersey three years ago, I have reconnected with all things-VETS. I knew my late father guided me through the writing of a 700-page book and will be there through its publication. As someone who collects Bataan books, I can safely say that there is almost a non-existent Filipino voice in the WWII and Bataan genre. A couple of books I have are both from the Philippines, and not even Filipinos have heard of them. My shelf is full of Bataan books written by Americans, mostly white Americans. I am grateful for being able to add to this volume of literature. Bataan, after all, is in the Philippines. World War II came to the islands, where most had never seen a war of this magnitude. As I search for a literary agent (Wish me luck!!!), I have also decided to create a new website. I wrote Bataan New Jersey in the early mornings at a coffee shop every day (!!!) for three years. I finished it early this year, and I spent the following months re-reading and editing, and layering it with poetic language. I can only be grateful to the books that inspired it: Pachinko and Cutting for Stone. These big books gave me permission to see what was possible in darkness. Thank you, Min Jin Lee and Abraham Verghese. I would like to take a different approach to blogging, less pressure, short and quick. I don't want this to be some literary task. More stream of consciousness, like the rest of this website. Some aspiring writers might visit, and I'd like them to see the human behind the work. I do work outside the MFA system. I designed this website myself (based on a template of course). I have been developing websites going back to the Geocities days. Thanks to Wix, it has become incredibly easy. Thank you for visiting. Please know that if you encounter an unfinished page, it's because I am still working on this website.

This month, on the 19th, my late father turns 103 years old.   In 1941 when he found himself stuck in Bataan, he was only 20 years old.  That was 84 years ago.   We have not seen another world war, and there have been many international organizations that made sure it didn’t happen again.   WWII is the most documented of all wars. There are many missing stories, like Filipino-told Bataan, but the internet still brims with what most would be looking for.   For #BataanNewJersey, it’s important that I collect as much information for marketing purposes.   I have just started looking for a #LiteraryAgent, the first gatekeeper toward a gated community we would need to blast open.   That in itself is a gargantuan task, almost like looking for a dream FT job.   One of the reasons why I waited this long to send my work out again for publication was because of this—the business of publishing is time-consuming and personal.  And I have a FT job.   Writing books is my religion.  My DNA.  I just do it, with a lot of effort that I actually enjoy and cherish.  But the publication process takes the joy out of Art for many of us artists.  And so we look for a champion who will take the burden off our shoulders.  The first one would be a Literary Agent.   For The Umbrella Country, I was represented by Harold Ober, the oldest and storied agency that has ceased operations.   Even then, I knew that my job as a novelist wasn’t over once I handed over the book and signed contracts. 25 years since, I have become more experienced in managing what I cannot literally control.   84 years: the memory of my father lives on while the war and interest in WWII fade through time.  WWII professors are aging and retiring.  We have a new generation whose connection to WWII was a distant relative, a great-grandfather, possibly dead.  The question for me complicates through time:  where are these organizations that might be interested to hear from a son of a Bataan Death March and Japanese Concentration Camp survivor?  What would be the best way to approach this research without pigeonholing myself into a topic that might not even exist anymore?   For the past weeks,  I have returned to the coffeeshop.   Where I write this blog.  With my excel, I put together an organized lists of war-related organizations.  At first, my entry point was "WWII" until my chances thinned out.  I am now approaching it from a “War and Society” perspective, and this has given me access to universities and war-related organizations that I otherwise would not know had I stayed on a limited “WWII track.”  The research landscape has changed.  A lot of interest in Wars, an expansion from WWII.   But #BataanNewJersey is not only about WWII—the majority of the book is the impact successive wars on a family of four generations.     Last weekend, I ran into Zooniverse, a “people-powered” research hub, and found The American Soldier, launched in 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by thousands of “archivists.”   While it’s not an organization per se, it shows that there is still much interest in WWII in our time.  The modern lenses haven’t completely faded.  They are simply focused on other things never examined before:  War and Women, for instance.  Widening my research means capturing more organizations that might in part cover WWII.  An eclectic example of my growing list is below, not a deadend but in fact a tiny door to wider space of thinking. The first link seems suspect but once inside, you would see a deep common interest.   https://www.cyndislist.com/ww2/societies/ https://www.smh-hq.org/index.html https://www.docsteach.org/topics/wwii https://www.historians.org And this one moved me. My father used to receive a physical copy when he was alive. Glad to see its last issue as it turns into another legacy organization: http://www.axpow.org/bulletins/bullcur.pdf   #BataanNewJersey has an audience. Historical novels enthusiasts. War genre followers. Asian American historians. Historians in general. And those who love and enjoy a good story in the most unknown and vivid landscapes. At the heart of every novel is a human story, one that transcends time. Time-traveling is yet to happen, but we can already do it in our literature. For now, the dream is to add #BataanNewJersey to my own collection of World War II books. The honor is to see the spine next to these gifts I could only be grateful to have held and kept.

Every year since I was 19, I have spent time in another country to find a piece of Life I could grow old with. Wisdom is the seed of so many cultures, old and contemporary.   My inner core has been made from those seeds.  At my best and worst, what sprang from those seeds kept me going. And I continued traveling. And learning from complete strangers and wisdom givers. Our family spent the past two weeks immersing ourselves in the lights of Christmas in Europe, as we have done in the past few years. My best Christmases were in Manila, even if we didn't have much. I have never experienced that again since we immigrated to NY. But I thought the spirit, cultural not religious, is still out there somewhere, and so we started a tradition of following Christmas markets. The world has always been troubled, and no matter how rare and fleeting, Joy still exists. Finding and experiencing it, even for a short-term, is a Life of wisdom-sharing. 2025 marks my family's 40th year in America. Four decades of absorbing culture and wisdom brought me here. 2024 was and will always be a special year, the year I finished writing #BataanNewJersey — pulled from two stories from a short story collection I couldn’t get published.   While Bataan is known for its historical surrender, its legacy in Bataan families is to never ever give up.  I move to 2025 with the same spirit and grit to carve a space I never had.  Finding a literary agent is one step toward publication, a true challenge, but now I have three completed manuscripts.   Big enough a reason to go against the wave again.   Life has no clear paths.  As Machado said, we make it by walking. 2025 is the year I walk and clear a path made by and for me.   I can only be thankful to those who taught me how to live, love, fight. For the seeds, for the wisdom that grew from them. And grateful to be able to share the same with the next generation of artists and world travelers. On a full-time management job, I find time to do Art. I write. I enter the temple where I become an artist in his fullness. The artist's life is more tangled. But I also think it has always been like this. #BataanNewJersey was born of such entangled truths. I can only be grateful I finished it. All 700 pages of it. And now, with all the grit I have, I go forward to get it represented, printed, and read. And so the wisdom-giving continues. (Photo taken at Maison de Victor Hugo ) Why drinking coffee? Adding this photo to my cache of "drinking coffee" author pics. Taken at Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. I have grown tired of the "pretentious" author portraits, so I thought what could be more pretentious than pictures of myself drinking coffee in different cities in Europe. :-) My images on my Google imprint has been Me and my Coffee cup for the past five years. All taken by my husband.

The late literary critic and professor Leonard Casper was from my father’s time.  He was two years older than my father, born 1921.  Both served during World War II.  Theirs was a generation of men that I understood from having “grown up” in Veterans Hospitals in Manila and New York City.  I was surrounded by them as a child, one thing I never really questioned as I was born when my father was pushing fifty.  They were all just wise, old men.  And one by one, they left.   But Leonard Casper would leave me a gift, an article he wrote in Philippine Studies that I have bravely included here so his spirit could join my voyage as I publish #BataanNewJersey and tell the story of the men and women of his generation.   It was never easy to explain to readers or critics, especially in America, why I wrote The Umbrella Country. We writers are not really here to explain our work. Some get it, some don't. Some use the "American ethnic studies" lens to read it, some use the "Filipino" lens. It is no surprise that my reviews in the Philippines were far more complex and nuanced than those in the U.S. Hovering over the surface, reviewers in the U.S. assumed that I wrote a novel about the Philippines. Period. About Gayness. Exclamation point. The need to box us in was always there. Asian American Studies, much of Chinese and Japanese ingredients, never questioned why Filipino first gen authors cooked books in English. There was always a key there. In the English. By an author raised by women. Perhaps feminist, too. But one, Leonard Casper, a white American, understood. But then, he was a reader of Philippine literature in English, and he knew its history and scope. I never had the opportunity to meet Leonard Casper in person, but I knew of his circle of writers and artists from the Philippine literary world.  I met a few after I published my first novel and went to the Philippines to promote it.  My publication early in life catapulted me into a world that I didn’t really understand nor ever really expected.  My first novel is already 25 years old and still in print, thanks largely to people like Leonard Casper who at some point in the book’s early voyage wrote about it with praise.    The wonderful writer Cecilia Manguerra Brainard wrote very fondly of him and his book Will You Happen, Past the Silence, Through the Dark?   in her tribute in Positively Filipino :   The book starts with family information, including his military service during World War II. It moves on to show his early literary success: letters from editors, including those from the prestigious Southwest Review who asked him to send stories from the European front during World War II. There are numerous exchanges between Leonard Casper and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren on whom Casper wrote his dissertation for his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In fact, Casper wrote two critical books about Robert Penn Warren (the first book was the “first” written about Warren).   Syracuse University houses his letters. Below is the entry in his biography.   L eonard R. Casper (1923-2018) was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and emeritus professor of English from Boston College where he taught for 45 years. He was the author or editor of numerous books on Philippine literature, as well as several pieces of fiction and two volumes on the works of Robert Penn Warren. Casper taught in the Philippines on five separate occasions, twice as senior Fulbright lecturer, and was contributing editor to Solidarity (Manila) and Pilipinas (Kansas; Arizona State). His wife Linda Ty Casper is a noted Filipino novelist.   From Philippine Studies vol. 49, no. 1 (2001): 123–129 The Filipino Writer in the United States Leonard Casper   Early in the sixties, having served on the Voice of America's staff in New York, Celso Carunungan published there his novel, Like a Big Brave Man, whose protagonist Crispin comes of age by reconciling the contending cultural pulls of Philippine and American life. Neverthe­less, back in Manila, Carunungan joined his countrymen in complaining of the limited attention being paid Philippine literature by U.S. publishers.1 That collective compliant did not fall on deaf ears. In 1960, my special Philippine issue of the Literary Review had already ap­peared. So also, in 1962, had my edition of Modern Philippine Short Stories;  and in 1966, my New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology.2 A special Philippine issue of Literature East and West (1965) was followed by a vernacular issue in 1969.   The number and caliber of such "advertisement," calling attention to a cross Pacific literary phenomenon, hardly  signified complete indifference on the world's part, although two Filipino writers not yet included in these earliest collections angrily responded with "crablike" disparagement far too common among  kababayan critics. Perhaps that negative attitude was born of the frustrating competition for print space in their homeland. Bino Realuyo says, "Literature is a luxury for most Filipinos, whether it is reading or writing."3   It is precisely such annoyance with alleged cultural cronyism-the perceived requirement that one's labors be "sponsored" by someone powerful (and sometimes insensitive to the most intangible literary values) within the Establishment-that has led so many novelists and poets to write in English and to find self-assurance through publica­ tion in a sometimes friendly, though foreign, land. The search for greater appreciation abroad is reinforced by the elevated image of colorful Emigrant #1, Jose Garcia Villa, that first Philippine National Artist who nevertheless often acted as if he had broken not just national but even cosmic boundaries: Have Come, Am Here . Must Go Find My Wings. Whatever their motives, writers in English have persisted; and the degree of their still evolving success has been measurable, particularly during the nineties. Though some of their creative energy may have been influenced by resistance to the repressive, censorious regime of the Marcoses, and have been re-inspirited by centennial reconsidera­tion of wars against Spain and the United States for national recogni­tion, surely the maturing talent of many individuals seeking to express the very selves they were in the process of forming and discovering has been creating, in a variety of harmonics, the voice of the nation itself. The reconnaissance is over; the renaissance in well underway.   One cannot but be impressed by the literary record of Filipinos-in­-America for the last decade:4   Cecilia Manguerra Brainard,  When the Rainbow Goddess Wept. Nick Carbo, Secret Asian Man; El Grupo McDonald; ed. Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry; ed. (with Eileen Tabios) Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers. Luis H. Francia, ed. Brown River, White Ocean; ed. (with Eric Gamalinda)  Flippin': Filipinos in America. M. Evelina Galang,  Her Wild American Self Eugene Gloria,  Drivers at the Short-Time Motel. Jessica Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty; Dogeaters; The Gangster of Love; ed. Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. F. Sionil Jose, Three Filipino Women; Sins; Dusk; Don Vicente. Bino A. Realuyo, The Umbrella Country; ed. The NuyorAsian Anthol­ogy: Asian American Writing about New York City; ed. "Am Here": Con­temporary Filipino Writing in English. Ninotchka Rosca,  Twice Blessed. Michelle Cruz Skinner,  Mango Season. Lara Stapleton,  The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing. Linda Ty-Casper,  DreamEden. Marianne Villanueva,  Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila. Bert Florentino requires separate attention: famed playwright and founder of the Peso Book and Storymasters series, in New York under the rubric  Ilustrado  he has now begun cyberspace productions, includ­ing Rizaliana, selected texts from  Balintataw,  interviews with Filipino/ Filipino American writers.   On a different scale it is Realuyo's first novel, The Umbrella Country, which has attracted rare admiration. The Umbrella Country   Among Filipino producers of the printed word in America, Sionil Jose leads with his entire Rosales epic gradually appearing under the Random House/Modem Library imprint. On a different scale it is Realuyo's first novel, The Umbrella Country, which has attracted rare admiration. Both Jose and Realuyo are writers with a strong, broad (non-ideological) social conscience. Jose can present the action and motives of both rich and poor; Realuyo so far has provided access only to the latter, but his sensitivity to language (he has also published in America, a book of poetry entitled In Spite of Open Eyes) provides in­ timate nuances which prevent his principal characters from seeming pitiable stereotypes. His language serves rather than competes with the authenticity of his characters. They are as they are, but their starkness comes in multiple shades of chiaroscuro. (It should be pointed out that, when Realuyo became guest editor of the second special Philip­ pine issue of Fairleigh Dickinson University's Literary Review,  Spring 2000, he entitled that issue "Am Here." Admittedly he was proudly imitating Villa's proclamatory  Have Come, Am Here. Yet "here" becomes not America or the New York metropolis of the  arriviste, but "Wher­ ever I am." The title therefore could just as well have been simply "I am," which is really the theme of that issue and of many other Phil­ ippine American writers. "Here" is "Anywhere; everywhere. See me seeing you!"). The Umbrella Country occurs during the endangered days of martial law; but with only slight variations its human environment could just as well depict the country's malaise under each of the three presidents who have succeeded Marcos: Aquino, Ramos, Estrada. Although the San Juan family of critics might prefer to interpret the "Philippine condition" in this novel as the result of class warfare (Epifanio San Juan, Jr.) or, less inappropriately, of gender imbalance (Delia San Juan), any such narrow agitprop emphasis would wrench the novel's alignment away from the original author's purpose and constitute an abuse as severe as those dramatized in the novel itself.   Characters in The Umbrella Country undeniably come from Manila's underclass ("casual" construction workers, often drunkenly inflicting their failures on blameless wives and children). But in the midst of all that evil flickers a heartening bond beyond bondage: between mother and children, between adult sisters, between young brothers-between blame and mea culpa. The same umbrellas that provide protection against the typhoon's torrents keep off the biting sunlight as well. They are the shield against excess; they are the balancing device safeguarding the tightrope walker. Whatever compassion, whatever human communion defends the staggering self against despair: that is the umbrella image secretly lodged in Realuyo's imagination and released with a subtlety that, yes, is vulnerable to manipulation by the hasty Uncritic but that, yes, ultimately is inviolable.   Picture the monocular Director in his weatherproof office in the States, which he "heroically" chooses to call "the belly of the beast"; and though himself an empowered, sometimes hegemonic expatriate: consider how he will mock Daddy Groovie's dream of escape-to­ America. Yet Realuyo, who is anything but naive, can admit that America "saved me and my family from poverty"; can be appreciative of opportunities, without feeling himself the object of condescension or special treatment; can say that he has been born again, like many an other Filipino abroad, unashamed of having two navels, two homes. He is determined to find his own voice, so that he can also speak for his silent countrymen wherever in the world they may be. It is this sense of shared suffering which, in his novel, offers the best way to alleviate/mitigate that suffering. The desperate sociopolitical situation in The Umbrella Country is soul-wracking: in the name of manliness Daddy Groovie regularly beats his wife Estrella. Through the same unrestrained violence he nearly emasculates his elder son Pipo, by refusing him the shelter of "Miss Unibers" fantasies, because they remind Daddy Groovie of his own delusion of manliness, his over-dependence on his sister abroad in America. Pipo, in search of comfort, becomes the rape victim of the bakla beautician, Boy Manicure, who may be addicted to mixed-gender fantasies of his own. In the "cave scene" (the tall grass along the old railroad tracks) Pipo becomes the center of a milling crowd of home­ less boys anxious to touch one another, starving for companionship. Finally Pipo decides to follow Daddy Groovie to New York: what propels him? Masochism? Uncontrollable fate? An undeniable desire to be accepted by his father, whatever the cost, as male-enough, as elder son? An intuition that both he and his father share some terrible in­ completeness but that (as in so many of Tennessee Williams' plays, where the helpless are one another's best help) they must try to be each other's cure?   The Umbrella Country is as open-ended as a wound-but it may be novel's nearly overwhelming pathos, its miseries and agonies ready for the Uncritic's reflexive search for someone, some habit native or im­ ported, to blame (then why not just Adam? Or Satan?); at the core of that cascade of evil glimmers the flame of good. Good in the refusal of Gringo, the younger brother, to hate Pipo when the latter tries to tum their father's bamboo yantok onto his back. Good in the self-pro­tective, yet sacrificial decision of Mommy not  to accompany her sons to America. Good in the abandonment of the family by Ninang Rola, followed by her return ("People who run away," she says, "always end up in the same place") and by her offer of companionship to Estrella who may never again see the rest of her family. Neither son was originally wanted because of the timing of their birthing. Yet now Estrella knows how much she does love them; and it is with love that she sets them free. That is not abandonment so much as Mommy's releasing them to their potentials, as Felipe and Gregory. It is consis­tent with her acceptance of both their unplanned births. Each time, she says, she gave life to them--her life. Pipo's preserved umbilical cord is nearly fossilized, and in her long suffering she may seem like a Stonewoman: but each of these is a true icon.   The fact is that however seriously dysfunctional this family is, The Umbrella Country celebrates life as an ideal, in the form of family, ex­ tended to barrio community and democratic nation, and even to one's once and future blood-brothers (at Bataan). Is the Philippines dysfunc­tional? Yes. Is  the relationship between the United States and the Philippines dysfunctional? Yes.   Is the solution to these mismatched relationships despair, a with­drawal into narcissism and hedonism? Realuyo seems to think not. After all, selfish greed is itself one of the prime causes of dysfunction. Some dreams disable, some enable: discerning the difference is often difficult. But not to dream, at all, ever-not to have faith in the pos­sibility of grace and the redemption of man is to risk dooming oneself irretrievably. Not to have forbearance, not to try to understand (forgiv­ing is always easier than understanding, and meaningless without it), not to be willing to concede, to sacrifice something in every human ne­gotiation--not to  love, despite everything: then life  is  futile. "Listen!" Realuyo seems to say: the man with the bamboo stick may be crying out; the rapist may be expressing a need that even he wishes didn't exist. "So, listen well!" Who heard Boy Manicure's scream during his mutilation? In this novel hate is as strong as lightning and thunder under the shawdowless pine trees of the Cordillera. Yet the answer to violence is not more violence. The answer to the two-handed sword is the shield-the umbrella.   Much of what prevents  The Umbrella Country  from being disheartening, or disgusting, is the author's decision to have Gringo be the principal narrator. His innocence is constantly under attack, yet sur­vives; experience puts an edge on his voice, but he will not remain mute. Not only is this text essentially bilingual/ multicultural: in italicized sections, the interior voice of several others-- Daddy Groovie, Ninang Rola-- is brought to the reader's empathetic attention. And there are minor characters such as Titay, Boy Spit, Sergio Putita who may be immature or behave bizarrely but are not permanently de­formed. Each within his or her limited capacity reaches out, blindly perhaps, often with surprising tenderness, toward human contact; a hand, not a fist: be my umbrella; save my better self from my worst; I was not born to be this depraved, or even this deprived; help, help me--so I can help you. What will happen to Pipo, once he is beyond shame, being anonymous in America? To Gringo? To Daddy Groovie? What will happen to America, with such immigrants as these? Will they ever see Mommy again? Can they possibly forget her? God knows, but is as silent as Sergio's wooden statues--unless one listens.   Is Realuyo someone who remembers hard times as material simply to be exploited for an assumed hardened "American market"? Not likely. His memorial to his father, survivor of the Death March and Camp O'Donnell Concentration Camp/ testifies to his ability to honor the worth of those who endured great suffering with no loss of dignity. The father is depicted as "Quick to anger, hard to approach, with­drawn," only to reveal that he suffered post traumatic stress disorder--"while all the time I simply thought that my father didn't know how to love." That love was secretly expressed when Augusto R. Realuyo applied for U.S citizenship and, having been sent to the VA hospital in Manhattan, successfully  petitioned for his family to follow. As the author did with italicized portions in his novel, so the feature article writer lets his father's personal record speak in its own voice, that of a peaceful man, and therefore a "tortured man of war." After the example of such a "hero," Realuyo could hardly fail to real­ize that some traumas go on and on, and disordered life goes on then too; yet that triumph later, "souls intact," is possible. For all its description of misery, The Umbrella Country is at heart a courageous offer of hope, based on faith in incorruptibility and the power to recover innocence after the fall. As Ninang says, Filipinos are like grass and can grow anywhere.   Many Filipinos have the adaptability and tenacity of grass; and beyond these qualities some have fidelity, loyalty, love.   In their veins will always be their parents' presence. So far apart; and yet so connected.     Notes 1.            See the author's "Dominion over the Horizon," Solidarity (Oct.-Dec. 1966), pp. 129-33. 2.           A checklist of Philippine fiction and poetry appearing in American sources before 1965 showed over 300 items. 3.            In the Reader's Guide to  The Umbrella Country  (NY: Ballantine, 1999). 4.            Their place within the centenary achievements should be more apparent when Bert Florentino completes updating his 1963  Midcentury Guide to Philippine Literature in English. Florentino and Linda Nietes have in progress a definitive summary of such literature to the present. 5.            As Luis Francia has said, "if you're writing literature, you're not writing propaganda. Because they think that because you have the'right politics therefore you must be good." "Confessions of a Born-Again Filipino: An interview with Poet Luis Francia," The Dispatch (Spring 1986): 11. 6.            "A Conversation with Bino Realuyo," appended to  The Umbrella Country. 7.           "When Heroes Are Not Dead: An Easy in Two Voices," Filipinas (Aug. 2000): 43- 45, 71.      Thank you, Leonard Casper.