25 Years of The Umbrella Country: A Reflection

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The Umbrella Country is 25 years old.   There is always a story behind a first book.   My first novel was published 14 years after my family immigrated to the U.S.  I didn't grow up thinking I would publish a book.  But when it came out, it felt destined.  Writing and publishing was the easy part.  Understanding the terrain from which it sprung was consuming.

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Our First Years in America

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When I was fifteen, before my family left Manila for good, I wrote a novel called The Maya's Wail.   Shorthand in a three ring binder, like a secret diary.  I was graduating from high school and much uncertainty lingered around my family in Manila.  My father had been in the U.S. almost six years by then.   The country was in political chaos from the assassination of Ninoy Aquino.  Our neighbor bought the house where I grew up and everybody seemed to be expecting that we would leave soon.  My father had petitioned for us, but we really didn't know when we would leave.   We were economically on the cliff.   We had one last chance for a better life: immigration.   Between approval of our petition, withdrawing from school, selling our (over)used furniture, and subjecting ourselves to an absolute submission of  to Fate, I, the youngest in my family of five, was contemplating on a promise—to never look back. 

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Unlike many Filipinos who come to the U.S with their umbilical cords dangling on a thousand mile stretch, our immigration didn’t survive any attempt for connections.  Manila had disappeared in the past.   With it, Art.  Writing.  Our new life demanded objectivity and practicality.  We ended up in Jersey City, where we rented an apartment on the second floor.  I found a FT job on our first year.  And even with my attempts to paint again at the Arts Students League, time would not let it.   Improving our economic situation topped our list of priorities.  Gratefulness was our spirit guide.  We had left Manila.  We had food to eat.  We had running water.

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My first five years in the U.S. meant working, going back to college, studying in South America, and growing up.  A lot of growing up.  I can't put those first five years in one paragraph.  A lot happened during my first five years.  I was basically a boy who lived inside Manila's hungry stomach, and being in America was a chance to walk hand in hand with Hope.  Everything was Hope.   Art would have to be put aside.

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The Asian American Writers Workshop

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It wasn't until I graduated from college that I started exploring/confronting my sexuality.   A co-worker Ching-Ching Ni suggested I attended organizations at the Gay Center.  What was always destined began to show its face once again.   In 1990, I would meet Curtis Chin in GAPIMNY, an all-gay Asian organization in NYC.  He and many others in our group were my first exposure to "Asian-America." Curtis turned out to be a poet.  The year after, we started a "group" with a other Asians who wrote, albeit secretly.   It was the first time I would hear of MFA programs.  A few of them came out of a system that they claimed excluded Asian-Americans.  Most of them were looking for "community."  

In the next couple of years, the winds would shift again.   A series of events in my life would have me leaving my first job, founding a Queer Filipino group, working for the NYC Commission on Human Rights, embracing activism, and writing poetry again.   The 90s was not easy for us young gay men.  AIDS was raging.  People were dying around us.  I was transforming into someone I never imagined as a child--a public political poet.  And America, this savior of a country, had become something else for me, not an absolute marker/maker of dreams, but one that allowed thoughtful choices, many choices.   We, all young and torn, did public events just about anywhere and everywhere.   The trauma in the voices were apparent.  Voice was not personal, but public.  Soon, other Asian-Am groups were giving us space.   A dusty table at the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) became a temporary space.  We met where we could, before we got a more permanent space next to A. Magazine. 

But more than my return to creative writing, it was our gay groups that sustained me.  But not always socially, mostly politically.   I was walking the margins of America, finally understanding why there were so many young people there, gay, Asian, all of us. They were all interrogating the existential, the politics of exclusion, the Whys.   It was them, their grit that taught me how to carve out my space, that America wasn't exactly what we Filipinos immigrants imagined.  That it could be better, that we could make it better. 

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Watch: Arts & Activism: Reflections from Curtis Chin and Bino Realuyo

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Writing an American Novel

In 1996, I organized a workshop with fellow AAWW members who were working on long projects.  We would have a new space in the basement at St. Mark's Place.  I would meet very serious writers with ambition: Curtis Chin, R. Reiko Rizzuto, Barbara Tran, Christina Chiu, Leslie Lum, among others.   For three years, we workshopped our works.   People came and went.  I already had a poetry manuscript by then which I titled In Spite of Open Eyes.  I would travel to other countries and write the novel in Mexico and Spain.   1998 was a big year for my work.  It also saw my publication in the Kenyon Review, my winning a poetry prize from Poetry Society of America, and the first time my works appeared in the Philippines. 

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Around the same time, the editor of the Asian Pacific American journal who was working at Random House, Hanya Y, told an editor about my work.   My publication happened very, very fast.  The agent sent my book out, my first batch of rejections, until I told her that a Random House editor was looking for me.   

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​​​​The 90s World of Mainstream Publishing

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25 years ago before the publishing world completely opened up to writers of color, there was a handful of us getting published, all from the same generation who were trying to break in.   We knew them, because we watched them.   The writers we know now were just coming of age then.  We know about the options--breaking into mainstream publishing or the Indies.  We also knew that there was not much to lose trying to get into the big houses.   We already saw what was possible.  When we started AAWW in 1991, Jessica Hagedorn had already been on the cover of the New York Times Book Review for Dogeaters.  The publishing models had begun to appear, with their own buzzword,  multicultural.   For high lit, Post-colonial.  All fresh out of the academic ovens.  Writers-of-color were the side dish of publishing with The Joy Luck Club as the entree.   Even the literary journals participated in our exotic feast.  We were often the special issues.   When we started the Asian Pacific American (APA) Journal at AAWW, we made every issue a special issue. 

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​In a world full of boxes, I was a hard to categorize.  I wrote The Umbrella Country knowing I was going to write an American novel without setting it here.   And interrogate the East-West box that Asian-American Studies programs have molded for us.  There were obvious differences between U.S.- Philippine relations and American historical relationship with other Asian countries.  With far-reaching consequences that resonate to this day, the Philippines was the first colony of the United States.    My father, during World War II, was an American national.   We spoke English.  Our education was based on an American model, thanks to the missionaries that built schools in the islands since 1901.   We had more in common with Indians in the U.K. than East Asians in America that composed most of the Asian population.

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After reading my manuscript, Random House finally contacted us with hesitation:  they already had a Filipino author in the house.   I knew her.  And she was in Australia.   I had to send them a one-page pitch on why they should take on The Umbrella Country, and explain where I placed in the spectrum of American (not Australian) publishing.   It was at this time that everything I learned at AAWW was put to a test. 

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After a few meetings, they bought the manuscript.   It was going to be published by a new imprint at Random House until Bertelsmann took over the company and shook everything up.   Nothing went as planned.   But instead of being dropped, the novel was acquired by Ballantine Reader's Circle, a paperback reading group imprint at RH.  I could have been disappointed, but I went along for the ride.   No one could school me about what I learned in those two years pre-publication.  I put on so many hats; agent, editor, author and publicist, and influenced every aspect of my publication from book cover to keeping non-English words as they were.   I put to work eight years of lessons from organizing in the Queer community and AAWW.   ​

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Watch at 11:30:  AAWW at 30 on CUNY TV

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East vs. West Reception

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​Being remaindered is the biggest fear of any debut novelist.  There were horror stories about new writers never going to paperback because the hardcover copy didn't sell.  I didn't have to worry about that because I went straight to paperback.   I didn't really know the ground I had to cover to keep the book alive.   I was the first to publish from AAWW.  I had no models to follow.  No friends to ask.  I was on my own. 

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But I was also different from my Asian American peers who published in the U.S.  While the literary world might not have considered The Umbrella Country as an American novel, there is a whole country on the other side of the planet that did. 

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Getting reviews under a very small budget was disheartening.   Random House had its priorities.  I had to convince the publicist team at RH to send my novel to Discover Great New Writers at Barnes and Noble, which at the time involved paying a reading fee.  The conversation about fees and how much would be left if they did that was dismal.  They covered the basics, including the big presses.  Getting reviewed by The New York Times Book Review was nearly impossible, so I was basically told to prepare for the worst.   The acceptance of the novel in the Discover program shifted much of their thinking.  I was learning how resources were used in mainstream houses for new novels, but it had become obvious mine was not that much.   Unfortunately, I did much of the negotiating, and even sold my own novel to Random House (I went to the office with a big smile and convince them to buy it -- after faxing them my pitch).   The agent I had was not an advocate at all.   

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​What would make a difference in the reception of the novel was not where it was published.   The American publishing machinery didn't didn't fully back me up, but there was no time to complain.   I had to get to work and be true to my mission:  to keep the novel alive for the next 25 years. Fortunately, even before my novel came out, there was a lot of noise in the Filipino listserves, with writers making all sort of generous comments about the book immediately after reading it. That shook the earth the literary world of the Philippines stood on.   Before I knew it, the novel had made it on Philippine soil, and out came the seismic reception I was hoping for in the U.S.  All word of mouth from an initial magazine interview I had with Sunday Inquirer Magazine (a Sunday supplement of one of the biggest national newspapers there). 

Three of the Philippine reviews are here.  

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Flavor of the Month

I came of age at the time when the metric for publishing was Joy Luck Club.  Although much has changed since 1999, there will always be this "flavor-of-the-month" trend in mainstream publishing, and to a lesser extent, in indie publishing.   It will not change until authors-of-color are viewed on an equal playing field, and not from some exotic lens or to fill what's hot at the DEI moment.  White authors are not subjected to such trends.  Hearing comments such as "We already have ONE Filipino author in the house" may still be happening now. 

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There is not enough diversity among gatekeepers in the publishing industry to create rippling change at all levels.  I only know of one editor at a big house, whose publishing output has included so many Filipino authored books--which might just be because she is one.  But even the very few Asians in the business are subjected to the pressure of finding the one that sells, and therefore easily falling prey to the dictates of a very white industry.   Diversifying publishing takes time.   Is this industry even appealing a career to young people of color?  Probably not.  

Comparing my reviews from the Philippines and those from the U.S. exemplify what is understandably obvious about the American publishing industry--lack of continuity about publishing "ethnic" authors which result in gaps and  superficial reviews of our work.  In writing my pitch for Bataan New Jersey, I have to think about "comps" in the U.S. so agents could somehow understand where I am coming from.  I have to look at myself within the framework of what has been successful in America.   Aligning my work with Filipino authors who published in the U.S. won't work, as we mostly have nothing in common other than lumpia and pansit.

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The Now: Writing Global Literature 

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Our time, our Now, makes my next journey in publishing purposeful.  I am in between "things have changed" and "not much has changed."  The demographic shift in the U.S. is really Latino, so how does that affect the rest of us? Frame that against a world made smaller by our smart phones.  

Through my community work, I have gained better insights into shifting geopolitics.  Not new, as I majored in International Relations in college.  When the son of the Philippine dictator Marcos was elected President of the Philippines in 2022, I responded by including in Bataan New Jersey the dictatorship of the 1970s and giving it a new pair of eyes.  The faux heroism of Marcos started in Bataan.  He claimed to have been a hero of Bataan.  

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But what happened before Bataan?   1898? 1901?  Filipinos as American nationals?    It's a rope, our history.   We can't leave out Spain.  My interest in Spain runs deep.  My mother was born in Zamboanga and speaks Chavacano, the only Spanish creole in Asia.   How did that happen?  How does it resonate today?  So many questions, so many stories.  That's my Now.